A friend of mine once said that mixed breed children are the harbingers of world peace, or something like that. Especially children like ours, who are not merely bi-racial but multi-racial, really a little bit of this and a little bit of that. To them, being mixed isn't anything exotic; it's completely normal. They carry two, three passports, feel at home in different countries without necessarily pledging allegiance to any one flag. Heritage Day always presents a multiple choice option at school: Should I talk about being Filipino today, or Spanish or British or Greek or a toenail German and Scottish?
So while my children are rather blasé about the multi-racial parts that make them whole, the novelist Hari Kunzru, author of The Impressionist - to my mind it could have been titled I'm Not There - as well as the more recent My Revolutions, says in an interview with Nerve, that people are still grappling with the implications of bi-racialism, even if there's a certain trendiness to being bi-racial these days in certain quarters:
People are authenticity freaks, and if you're mixed you're not 100% anything. And I agree with you, there's been a real shift where people now celebrate the mixed-upness — everyone's a different color and holding hands and everyone's sort of funky and cool and you'd like to sleep with them. That's very prominent in a certain urban metropolitan mindset, but if you go out of the cities there's a lot of fear and resentment toward this mixed-up globalized thing. People are nostalgic for a time that may not have actually existed, when a community was fixed and stable and everyone came from the same place.
But the real reason for people's discomfort doesn't stem so much from wondering whether Tiger Woods, for instance, considers himself more Thai or African-American, or whether Halle Berry considers herself more white or black. According to Kunzru, himself born of a white mother and an Indian father, it's a bit more prurient than that: it's the notion that interracial copulation once took place, and the bi-racial child is the curious fruit of those mixed loins.
And that's what it really comes down to. If someone sees a mixed race person, in their mind is: who had sex to make you? When people ask me, where are you from? They don't care where I grew up. What they really want to know is, cards on the table, what combination of fucking produced someone who looks like you?It's all about sex at the end of the day.
Forget world peace. My kids are in for years of therapy.
The all important question lurking beneath bi-racial coupling is the color of the male.
In terms of stereotypes in America, it breaks down like this:
Black man marries white woman - trophy
White woman marries black man - loser
(Black here meaning someone who is not causacsian so it can be African, Indian, Asian, Latino etc.)
White man marries black woman - nuts
Black woman marries white man - also nuts
(Black here refers more to african and afro american blacks.)
Have you observed this in other cultures or is this peculiar to america?
Posted by: manuelbuencamino | January 27, 2008 at 12:16 AM
Manuel, not sure about other cultures but I somehow get the feeling that a white woman is the ultimate trophy wife for a black man and a white man marrying a black woman is the fulfillment of some primal desire.
But the Chinese and Indians can still be quite rigid about interracial marriages. In Mauritius, despite the much-touted multicultural society people lived in, crossing racial lines so to speak is still rare. I know Franco-Mauritians for instance whose families/clans have remained white for several generations, with no one descendant ever marrying a nonwhite, be they Indian or Creole.
Posted by: bambinawrites | January 27, 2008 at 02:03 AM
Also, bi-racial couplings have become quite prevalent in contemporary (mostly English) fiction. In both White Teeth and On Beauty, Zadie Smith had white male characters married to black women; so did Helen Oyeyemi in The Icarus Girl and Diana Evans in 26a - British males married to Nigerian women. In Small Island by Andrea Levy, a white woman has an affair with a black Jamaican soldier...
Makes me wonder if it's more mainstream in England, or at least London. In America, I only see such couples on Jerry Springer! Of course Obama is the new poster boy for bi-racialism at its best...
Posted by: bambinawrites | January 27, 2008 at 03:57 AM