Of course, my child’s not “white”, he just looks like it, nor is he a child, but a grown man now, and I’m not the mother of just one child but I have two sons and several step-kids.
Now that I have clarified my dramatic, tabloid opening, here’s is the story:
Alice Walker, the author of the Color Purple and other books, has a daughter, a writer, who is bi-racial. Rebecca Walker has written “Black, White and Jewish, Autobiography of a Shifting Self”, a book about being the child of two races. She believes that the period of the civil rights movement marked a turning point in which interracial union was clearly no longer a result of slavery and it’s vestiges, other coercions or less than loving encounters, but was an expression of the freedom - for the first time in centuries - to openly cross racial boundaries, during the post segregation/post colonial 60’s.
She was among those born of the physical unions sparked during the days of the exhilaration of racial equality, of the post segregation days of the last century. She calls herself, a “movement child”. I think that a lot of mixed children were created in this new era, not only black and white but also Eurasians and others here and abroad. In other words, these are children not of degradation or oppression, but of the freedom to choose in love.
I am the mother of one of these children.
When my son was born, he was of a remarkably lighter color than me – make that white – due obviously, to his father, who is Irish American, but also apparently, some colorful mix of genetics in previous generations of my own family. His father and I both were rather amazed for we had envisioned one of those caramel-colored babies who clearly mark the melding of two races - and here we had a child who looked much like the Gerber baby.
Since I am an unmistakably Black woman, this was often the cause of crazy situations of which slapstick comedies or headlines are made. From the start, nurses would not believe he was my child and for securities sake requested armband checks at nursing time. Later, puzzled faux pas and mix-ups were routine, as people accustomed to “matching” families tried to fathom what on earth our relationship was, especially if we were not with his father, wondering if perhaps I were the child’s nursemaid - in the mammy sense of the term; this I’d bitterly surmise from the gaping stares of passersby. More than once someone would ask if I were “babysitting” – my own child.
Detroit is on the Canadian border, and once, on our way to a dinner there, border officials detained my car for they suspected that I was kidnapping my child who sat next to me! They would not believe I was his mother, and only a frantically produced birth certificate convinced them otherwise. Only those perceptive enough to look at people behind their colors, could see he looked “just like” me – but just a different hue.
As he grew older his Saxon looks darkened to a Semitic beige but his baby curls turned straight and sandy – no closer at all to being a “Black” child by any social definition. I began to worry over this – in a society in which racial identity is paramount, what would happen if he could not clearly identify himself as one race or the other – preferably mine.
I had visions of the old move tearjerker “Imitation of life”, where the beautiful, “mixed” young woman rejects her Black mother and “passes for white” to better blend into white society – until the death of her mother brings her crying to the funeral hearse, too late to claim her mother’s love. A morality play if there ever was one.
When he became a teenager, I began to gingerly ask him about “passing”, but he had no idea of what the term even meant! He said in complete puzzlement “now why would I want to do that?”, so different is our society now in some respects. He felt no need at all to disappear somehow into a permanent White life. I felt a little foolish; this is not the days of Sally Hemmings, watching her children with Thomas Jefferson escape into caucasion existence forever, nor even the times of segregation’s hide and seek – my son simply lives his life without any demand for racial identification under most normal circumstances.
He says “I don’t walk around with a sign on saying “Hi, my name is Joe and my mom is Black!” It doesn’t occurs to him I guess, to purposefully, permanently, give up being one or the other – or give up loving one parent or the other – as was my real fear. I also wanted to protect him from the slings and arrows of racial hurts, in which he would be compelled to be "Black" by society whether he likes it or not. But as all parents try to shield their children from all number of hurts and harms, I can neither predict, nor protect him from life itself.
This is not to say that he has not had his travails, on the contrary, a life in racial ambiguousness is not easy. I remember, after his father and I separated, that it was decided that my son would live with him for a while. There was only one problem – he lived in a suburb so affluent and white that this could only give rise to conflicts that I wasn’t sure my preteen son could handle.
Sure enough, I had my Imitation of Life moments; once, when I drove by to visit and he – standing in the driveway in the midst of some earnest, pubescent conversation with a young (white) schoolmate – looked right through me as I pulled up, as if he had no idea of who I was, his blank look a clear signal that this was a moment of please-don’t-blow-this-for-me, in his fervent, desperate need to fit into his new, insular neighborhood.
Contrary to any notion I might have had to knock him on his ass and show him – and his little pale friend - just who in the hell Momma is, well, I suppose I was stricken with what can only be described as mother-love. I drove on and let him not have a Black mother for just one day; Solomon himself would have been proud. Only when I got around the block did I shed my tears in pain – though I admit, I later gave him a piece of my boy-this-ain’t-no-damn-Imitation-of-Life-don’t-you-ever-deny-me-again mind.
Over time he grew out of this phase when he found out that peers can be assholes no matter what color your mom is, and real friends are friends regardless, and he learned that he could drift with ease between the races, living I suppose on the content of his character, rather than the color of his skin as one famous man once said. He regales me with stories of his life as a white black person: the open and ugly prejudice that is expressed right to his face from those not knowing his origins; the curious phenomenon that whites can never “guess what he is” naming a hilarious litany of ethnicities - Italian? Jewish? Indian? even on occasion – Chinese!
Rarely if ever do they venture to say “Black”, for perhaps the very thought of this is discomfiting, the idea that a Black person could be so firmly blended in their midsts, that there are “Black” people who look, well, so much like them – this is perhaps too much to fathom for any number of reasons.
There are many arguments made against the mixing of the races, including the fact that “the children are the ones who will suffer”. I guess he has had times when he has suffered, though all children do in one way or another, there is pain in life. He surely lives a different, more complex life than I will ever experience; but it is a richer one too at times, betwixt and between races, enjoying the best of both.
I have long since given up debating with him on a current hot issue, of whether or not mixed folks should maintain identity/designation with Black people, on forms or census and such; for I do not live in his reality and accept that I cannot know the vagaries of race when experienced at his level.
I don’t often use the old term “mulatto” which I know to mean “little mule” (the mix between a horse and a donkey), a part of the racial designation system of the old days, in favor of the term “bi-racial” which perhaps more accurately reflects their existence- though I’d argue that many people are of mixed race, whether in the previous generation or not. Certainly the very fact of his “whiteness” is a reflection of my own “mixed” heritage and whatever white ancestors lurked back in my gene pool too.
There is a current spate of bi-racial “relationships” such as seen on Jerry Springer and other talk shows, in all their dysfunctional, poverty stricken, fighting glory, which both exposes the sheer numbers of mixed unions while at the same time defames such relationships as underclass bi-racial insanity, which is of course not indicative of many bi-racial relationships. Regardless of such talk show ugliness – awful behavior that transcends their races IMO – society is perhaps ever more tolerant of the union of human beings across the “color line”. Halle Berry is not a star despite her heritage, but because of it.
My son has had some poignant moments – he is the namesake of my father, who was a pre-Motown record producer in the 50’s, and I guess I can say my son has assumed the mantle of carrying on our families place in the music business. While working backstage with Aretha Franklin - my father produced her very first record - my son, not knowing of this family connection with her, was introduced to the Queen of Soul.
She mused aloud, “I used to know a man with the same name as you, many years ago” yet her unspoken statement hung in the air “but he was Black”. How stunned and delighted she was to discover that this young “white” kid was the grandson of the first man to record her voice, a peculiar irony indeed. And in another of his life’s amusing episodes: as he got older he experienced the shock of realizing his Gap pants no longer fit on his more Fubu sized behind.
My son looks like me I think, a sort of white male version of Marsha. It’s both unnerving and exhilarating to think that one has had emerge from one’s loins a human being not of your race, so to speak, in a society when race really matters. There are moments when I feel I have contributed to the eventual caramelizing of the world, a blending of we racially separated humans into one color, though in truth, even now in our divisions of colors and physical forms, I believe we are already one human race. I’m glad I’m his mother nevertheless, and helped to create this beautiful, racially undefinable human being.
My son is not “white” yet I accede that he’s not “black” either, and he is both; he is smart as a horsewhip (as I like to say) and funny, works incessantly, treats airplanes like taxi’s - thinking nothing of bopping across the country or the world, unlike his aerophobic mother; he falls in love hard and has very good manners (from a good prep school and good families on both sides) - all the things a mother wants a son to be - well, except for wanting to ride motorcycles.
He works in both the white and black music worlds depending on his assignment (he manages tours at the moment) and dependant upon his environment he just blends in. He’s currently in the hip-hop world, and his speech and walk have shifted an almost imperceptible shade of towards “Blackness”, but in general he moves confidently between the worlds of black and white at will.
Perhaps he got that naturally, for after all, he’s my kid - I too have always had a comfort with “humanity”, and perhaps I passed this gift on in his heart, not through his skin.
He just called me from the airport and announced he was back in town, it is the best present I could have for Mother’s Day. I do have another son and step-children, but for this Mother’s day, I wanted to tell you about Joe. One day, he promises he’ll get rich and buy his mother not a new house like everyone else in the music biz – but a new watch that costs like one. He’s a wonderful son for sure. .
Watch or no watch, I love him with all my heart – no, way, way more.
What would I tell a Black mother of White child on Mother's Day....Happy Mother's Day. That is what I would say.
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She is Black American and her child is White American. And so....
My point ...people make too much of these cases as if it is something new. It is so old. Such old news. I just do not get biracial, or whatever they want to call themselves. Some of them have hangups because they and their parents give them hang ups. They are just plain ole people . Nothing special or original. For parents like this person, if you do not want a child who may look all Black ,all White , or a little of both, then just do not have a baby with someone of another ethnic group. You cannot push and should not push your lifestlye on others. I think people who are in multi-cultural, or multi-ethical relationships go places where their kids can be accepted. I could never understand Mariah Carey's claim that she was treated so differently like the odd ball out ....my god, she grew up poor in NYC ! There were the Puerto Rican, the Hindus, the Muslims , the Jamacans, the Italian,s etc. Every ethnic group from the world is there.
Clearly this woman's son is White adnthe world will take him as such. He is what he is ,but he is what he looks like and that is what the world will take him as. He could wear a sign around his neck. That would help.
You accept yourself and let others deal with whatever.
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