Maria P. P. Root, psychologist and editor of the landmark publication Racially Mixed People in America, the first collection of studies on racially mixed persons since the repeal of antimiscegenation laws, points out that there has been little research attention given to mixing between communities of color (e.g., American Indians and Blacks, Filipinos and Native Americans, Latinxs and Blacks), since these cross-group relationships do not threaten the sanctity of Whiteness.4 Historically, the racial mixes on which there was the most research focus were those between groups that were the most socially distant: Blacks and Whites, Japanese and Blacks, and Japanese and Whites.5 However, in the context of the United States, the most vigilant attention to so-called racial purity has been given to the boundary between Whites and Blacks.6
Paul Spickard, a scholar who has studied the history of racial categories, writes:
The most important thing about races was the boundaries between them. If races were pure (or had once been), and if one were a member of the race at the top, then it was essential to maintain the boundaries that defined one’s superiority, to keep people from the lower categories from slipping surreptitiously upward. Hence U.S. law took pains to define just who was in which racial category. Most of the boundary drawing came on the border between White and Black.7
Physical appearance was an unreliable criterion for maintaining this boundary, because the light-skinned children of White slave masters and enslaved Black women sometimes resembled their fathers more than their mothers. Ancestry, rather than appearance, became the important criterion. In both legal and social practice, anyone with any known African ancestry (no matter how far back in the family lineage) was considered Black, while only those without any trace of known African ancestry were called Whites. Known as the “one-drop rule,” this practice solidified the boundary between Black and White.
The use of the one-drop rule was institutionalized by the US Census Bureau in the early twentieth century. Prior to 1920, “pure Negroes” were distinguished from “mulattoes” in the census count, but in 1920 the mulatto category was dropped and “Black” was defined as any person with known Black ancestry. In 1960, the practice of self-definition began, with heads of household indicating the race of household members. However, the numbers of Black families remained essentially the same, suggesting that the heads of household were using the same one-drop criteria that the census takers had been using. Though it is estimated that 75–90 percent of Black Americans have White ancestors and about 25 percent have Native American ancestry, the widespread use of the one-drop rule meant that people with known Black ancestry, regardless of appearance, were classified by society and self-classified as Black.8 During that time period, the choice of a biracial or multiracial identity was not a viable option. The one-drop rule essentially meant that a “multiracial identity was equivalent to black identity.”9
For example, Carol Calhoun, a biracial woman born in the late 1930s, in an interview by journalist Lise Funderburg, explained why she identified herself as Black, even though others often assumed she was White based on her physical appearance. Raised by her White mother until she was eight, then adopted by a Black family, Carol stated, “This is the way I was brought up, and this is where I’m comfortable. Had I stayed with my biological mother I might not have, except that in those times, a bastard child, or an illegitimate child of a mixed union, wouldn’t have stood a snowball’s chance in hell of being white. Not at all.”10
F. James Davis, author of Who Is Black? One Nation’s Definition, highlights the fact that no other ethnic population in the United States is defined and counted according to the one-drop rule.
For example, individuals whose ancestry is one-fourth or less American Indian are not generally defined as Indian unless they want to be.… The same implicit rule appears to apply to Japanese Americans, Filipinos, or other peoples from East Asian nations and also to Mexican Americans who have Central American Indian ancestry, as a large majority do. For instance, a person whose ancestry is one-eighth Chinese is not defined as just Chinese, or East Asian, or a member of the mongoloid race.… Americans do not insist that an American with a small fraction of Polish ancestry be classified as a Pole, or that someone with a single remote Greek ancestor be designated Greek, or that someone with any trace of Jewish lineage is a Jew and nothing else.11
According to Davis, the one-drop rule applies only to Blacks in the United States, and to no other racial group in any other nation in the world.
In 1983 the one-drop rule was challenged in the Louisiana courts by Susie Guillory Phipps, a woman who had been denied a passport because she had given her race as White on the passport application although her birth certificate designated her race as “colored.” The designation had been made by the midwife, presumably based on her knowledge of the family’s status in the community; however, the information came as a shock to Phipps, who had always considered herself White. She asked the Louisiana courts to change the classification on her deceased parents’ birth certificates to White so that she and her siblings could be legally designated as White. They all appeared to be White, and some were blue-eyed blonds. At the time, Louisiana law indicated that anyone whose ancestry was more than one-thirty-second Black was categorized as Black. In this case, the lawyers for the state claimed to have proof that Phipps was three-thirty-seconds Black, which was more than enough African ancestry to justify her parents’ classification as “colored.” Consequently, she and her siblings were legally Black. The case was decided in May 1983, and in June 1983 the state legislature gave parents the right to designate the race of newborns themselves rather than relying on the doctor or midwife’s assessment. In the case of previous misclassification, parents were given the right to change their children’s racial designation to White if they could prove the children’s Whiteness by a “preponderance of the evidence.” But the 1983 statute did not abolish the one-drop rule. In fact, when Phipps appealed her case, the state’s Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the lower court’s decision, concluding that the preponderance of the evidence was that her parents were indeed “colored.” In 1986, when the case was appealed to the Louisiana Supreme Court and then to the US Supreme Court, both courts refused to review the decision, in effect leaving the one-drop rule untouched.12
It is this historical backdrop that provides the context for the contemporary question of multiracial identity. While it is clear that many people of color (and some Whites) have a multiracial heritage, the terms mixed-race and biracial are usually used to refer to the offspring of parents who are labeled as being from two differing racial groups. Though these terms can apply to racial combinations such as White-Asian or Black–Native American, they most often conjure up images of Black-White pairings. The history of racial categorization suggests that the Black-White combination has been the most controversial. Social scientists Rockquemore and Brunsma note that “in the United States, blacks and whites continue to be the two groups with the greatest social distance, the most spatial separation, and the strongest historically rooted taboos against interracial marriage.”13
Though the number of interracial marriages across all groups has grown significantly since 1967, up from less than 1 percent of all marriages in 1970 to 6.3 percent in 2013, Black-White marriages are among the least common. Although they have increased from 167,000 in 1980 to 558,000 in 2010, Black-White unions still represent less than 1 percent of all married couples.14
Researchers report that biracial Asian-White and White-Latinx children appear to have more acceptance in White communities than biracial Black-White children do. For example, researchers report that multiracial adults with a Black background who are perceived by others as Black based on appearance are much more likely to experience various forms of discrimination (e.g., being subject to racial slurs or jokes, receiving unfair treatment in employment situations, being unfairly stopped by police) than multiracial adults who do not have a Black background (e.g., White and Asian, White and Native American).
15 Given the unique historical and contemporary context, it is the biracial identity development of children of Black and White parents that I will focus on here.
“But Don’t the Children Suffer?”
American attitudes toward interracial marriage have grown dramatically more favorable in the last half century. In 2013 87 percent of Americans polled said they approve of marriage between Blacks and Whites, compared to only 4 percent in 1958.16 Yet it is still common to hear Black and White adults alike express ambivalence toward or, in some cases, disapproval of interracial relationships because of stated concerns about the hardship the children of these relationships are assumed to suffer.17 The stereotype of the “tragic mulatto”—as portrayed in the classic film Imitation of Life, for example—is one of marginality and maladjustment.18 This stereotype has been reinforced to some degree by clinical reports of biracial individuals receiving mental health services. For example, in a 1980s survey of social service, mental health, special education, and probation agencies located in the San Francisco area, 60 percent of the responding agencies reported that referrals of biracial adolescents had increased during the previous ten years and that this group was overrepresented among their adolescent client population.19
Such reports were countered in the 1990s by a carefully designed comparison study of the social adjustment of biracial adolescents conducted by Ana Mari Cauce and her colleagues at the University of Washington.20 They compared a group of both Black-White and Asian-White adolescents with a control group of monoracial adolescents who were matched in terms of their gender, age, year in school, family income, family composition, and race of the parent of color. In other words, biracial adolescents with one White parent and one Black parent were matched with adolescents with two Black parents, and Asian-White teens were matched with monoracial Asian Americans. While the researchers could have matched the biracial participants with White adolescents (matching the White parents), they concluded that choosing a control group made up of adolescents of color would also control, in part, for the effects of racial discrimination related to growing up as a person of color in this society. Consequently, any differences found between the two groups would be more likely due to the unique circumstances associated with being biracial than to the more pervasive difficulties facing all people of color.
Forty-four adolescents (half biracial, half control group) participated in interviews of one to two hours and completed a series of standardized questionnaires designed to assess family relations, peer relations, self-esteem, life stress, and overall psychological adjustment. The results of the comparisons did not suggest significant differences on any of the measures examined. Cauce and her colleagues concluded that the biracial adolescents were indistinguishable from adolescents of color who were similar to themselves. They wrote:
Biracial early adolescents appear to be remarkably similar to other children of color matched on basic demographic variables. This does not mean that the adolescents were not experiencing difficulties, either as individuals or as a group. It does imply that to the degree that such difficulties were experienced they were no greater in our sample of biracial adolescents than they were in similar adolescents of color.21
For both groups, all measures of psychological adjustment were in the normal range, suggesting that biracial adolescents can be as reasonably healthy and happy as other young people are. The findings of this study are supported by other studies of biracial teens, which have also found most of these adolescents to be well adjusted with high levels of self-esteem.22
While it is clear that biracial children can grow up happy and healthy, it is also clear that particular challenges associated with a biracial identity must be negotiated. One such challenge is embodied in the frequently asked question, “What are you?” While the question may be prompted by the individual’s sometimes racially ambiguous appearance, the insistence with which the question is often asked represents society’s need to classify its members racially. The existence of the biracial person challenges the rigid boundaries between Black and White, and the questioner may really be asking, “Which side are you on? Where do you stand?” Choosing a standpoint and an identity (or identities) is a lifelong process that can manifest itself in different ways at different times.
Since the US Census provided survey respondents the option to choose more than one racial category in the year 2000, social science research on the identity choices of mixed-race individuals has proliferated. In their book Beyond Black: Biracial Identity in America, Kerry Ann Rockquemore and David Brunsma describe one of the largest such studies exploring what it means to be mixed-race with one Black parent and one White parent in post–civil rights era America. Unlike previous studies of multiracial youth, all of which had small sample sizes (forty subjects or fewer), Rockquemore and Brunsma identified more than two hundred participants from the Midwest, South, and East to participate in surveys and, for a subset, semistructured, in-depth interviews as well. The researchers assembled a sample population that was 39 percent male and 61 percent female and had an average age of twenty-four, and that represented a range of socioeconomic backgrounds and a diversity of physical characteristics. Their core question was, “How do mixed-race people racially self-identify? In other words, what does it mean to be mixed-race according to members of this population? Is there just one way that people with one black and one white parent understand their racial identity or does being mixed-race lead to different racial self-understandings for different people?”23
The answer to their question was clear and significant. “What is historically unique and theoretically important is that among a group of 230 people who all have one white and one black parent, individuals understand who they are in dramatically different ways.”24 Rockquemore and Brunsma categorized these diverse understandings into four types of racial identification:
1. the singular identity (either exclusively Black or exclusively White),
2. the border identity (defining oneself as biracial),
3. the protean identity (shifting back and forth between Black, White, and biracial), and
4. the transcendent identity (rejecting all racial categories).
The “exclusively Black” singular identity has been the historical and cultural norm in the United States, consistent with the one-drop rule. If the mixed-race person has a combination of skin color, hair texture, and facial features associated with people of African descent, others will assume based on appearance that the individual is Black and treat him or her accordingly. Aisha, one of the young women in the study, grew up in a racially diverse neighborhood in New York City and self-identified as “mixed” throughout childhood and adolescence while living at home with her Black (of Haitian descent) father and White (German American) mother. When she went off to college, however, her self-definition changed to “Black.”
When asked to explain why she made this identity change, she said that in this mostly white environment, others assumed she was black (based on her physical appearance) and treated her as a black person. Nobody ever asked her “What are you?” Because she was both assumed black by others and had experienced repeated painful incidents of racism, she came to strongly identify exclusively as black. Aisha never denies the existence of her white parent if anyone asks, but the fact that nobody [at college] ever asks only reinforces her black identity. Aisha’s parents support her evolving self-definition as black because it reflects her appearance and the way she experiences the social world.25
Aisha is an example of what psychologist Maria Root calls “accepting the identity that society assigns,”26 and this is perhaps what would be expected most of the time given US history, but Rockquemore and Brunsma found that only 13 percent of their participants defined themselves as “exclusively Black.”27
What might not be expected is that 3 percent of the participants defined themselves as “exclusively White.” Michelle attends the same northeastern college as Aisha, but her experience is very different. She grew up in
an affluent Boston suburb with her Black father and White mother, both of whom are doctors. With the exception of her own family, her neighborhood was entirely White and her schools were almost entirely White. Her friendship networks were almost entirely White, and all of her boyfriends have been White. On those few occasions where she was in majority-Black environments, she felt uncomfortable. Michelle looks more like her White mother than her Black father, and she is perceived by others as White. Hence, that is the identity she claims. “Her logic for determining her racial identification is that she looks white, she is identified by others as white, she was raised in a white community, she is culturally white, and therefore she is white. In her mind, and in her social world, having a black parent does not preclude her from claiming a white identity.”28 Her internal sense of being White is externally accepted and validated by others, suggesting that the one-drop rule may be losing its cultural authority.
Rockquemore and Brunsma make clear that Michelle is not “passing” for White in the way that some light-skinned people of African descent did during the Jim Crow era to escape its relentless oppression. Back then, those claiming a White identity had to hide their Black heritage and cut themselves off from anything and anyone that might give their secret away. These twenty-first-century respondents who have identified as “exclusively White” in the way Michelle has are not hiding their family history. Michelle openly acknowledges her Black father, but she doesn’t believe the fact of a Black parent keeps her from a White identity. Michelle does make use of her mixed-race status when it is convenient, however.
Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? Page 34
