Essay 1653

From The Chicago Tribune…

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There’s more to race than meets the eye

By Dawn Turner Trice

One of my best friends is a white man named Ken. He’s married to an African-American woman named Denise. They’ve been married for 16 years and have two beautiful children, a son, 14, and a daughter, 9.

These children, despite having parents who are of different races, look absolutely white. I tease Ken about this because it’s been my experience that the offspring from interracial unions are endowed with a hint of color.

Even if the skin is rather fair, the hair may have an extra kink; the nose an extra curve; the lips more than a little pout. It’s a beautiful thing. But looking at Ken and Denise’s children, the mother (her medium brown latte-ish complexion and African-ish facial features) is barely visible.

The children, for now, identify themselves as biracial. But society will look at them and check the “white” box.

In recent months I’ve received lots of e-mail from readers who complain about Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) calling himself African-American when he is the offspring of a white mom from Kansas and a black dad from Kenya.

One testy reader wrote to me: I read Barack Obama’s autobiography and this is what I got from it. His mother was white, carried him for 9 months, supported him financially and emotionally … and is basically responsible for everything he turned into. His father left right after Barack was born, went back to Africa and was absent emotionally and financially from Barack’s life. Now Barack Obama is being called African-American? Well, isn’t that special? It’s such a slap in the face to his mother.--M.D., Chicago.

If I may, here’s why I believe Obama identifies as an African-American: It comes down to the way he looks, and he looks like a black man. I can’t imagine he’s ever denied being biracial.

It’s just, unfortunately, we as Americans tend not to be a society so given to nuance that upon meeting someone we wait to find out a person's racial lineage.

What we tend to do is assign race based on what we see. Even though DNA tests can reveal racial complexities far beyond what the eye can discern, we still think we know a boatload about a person (enough to make us feel safe or unsafe, comfortable or uncomfortable) based on how much melanin is in his or her skin.

That’s why if Obama were standing on a corner in Chicago, or any other town or hamlet, trying to hail a cab, he’d be seen as a black man, not as a Harvard Law School grad, husband, father, senator or son of a white mother.

I understand why Obama’s decision to call himself a black man is upsetting to some people, mostly non-black people. He’s a credit to the white race, and some white people simply want to claim him.

It reminds me of how wounded some blacks felt when Tiger Woods described his racial background as “Cablinasian,” for his Caucasian, black, American-Indian and Asian ancestry. Folks were even ticked off because within his word, the black part took a back seat to the Caucasian part.

But if the golfer were walking down a street at dusk in a white neighborhood and the police were called, he, too, would be described as a black man--albeit one with funny spiked shoes.

Racial identity can be such a silly albatross. Oddly, no matter how Obama defines himself, some blacks still won’t see him as being a candidate who’s black enough. The litmus test for being black enough simply eludes me. (What white candidate has been black enough?) Some non-black people might say he’s exceptional because he’s not all-black. OK, they won’t say it, but they sure as heck will think it.

My friends Ken and Denise say they knew that when they fell in love and married, their children would have some uniquely tough decisions to make regarding race. Of course, they couldn’t have predicted that his little white genes would overwhelm her little black ones and the children would look far more like him than her.

Still, when it comes time for their children to check one of those race boxes, they want their kids to define themselves--even though a lot of people (of many different races) will want desperately to do it for them.