Still newsworthy
Clearly my barometer for what does and does not constitute news is way off. Not only did I assume that reactions to an early eighties documentary might have been hyperbolically described, but I was also taken aback when I read an insert in an early August Parade magazine. From Cassandra Franklin-Barbajosa’s “Walking a fine line: Being biracial is sometimes a delicate balancing act” (bolding mine):
“Most people can see that I’m mixed, but they think I look Polynesian,” she ["Miki Meek, an online travel producer for The New York Times" ... "born to a Japanese mother and a white American father"] says. “I grew up in places that were largely Caucasian. I thought we were the only mixed family in the world. It was hard to deal with because when you’re little, you don’t think about race or what you look like. Your mom is your mom, and your dad is your dad.”
Things got harder for Meek once she entered school. “I was called Chink and gook and Jap,” she says, “and I didn’t really know what those things meant. I just knew that they meant I was different, but I wanted to be the same as everyone else.“
The article continues with Jolanda Williams, a 35 year old woman and daughter of a white German mother and black American father, expanding on what she calls an “internal loneliness”:
“It is a sense that I don’t belong,” she says, “and that I will forever have a separate experience from others because the world in which we live is unable to understand that existence is not based on white or black or any race, for that matter. But rather, existence is made up of many different important experiences. At the end of the day, I am who I am not because of race but because of the experiences I’ve had.”
The piece closes with some thoughts by “bestselling New York author and jazz musician James McBride … the son of a Jewish mother from Poland and an African-American father”:
“[Being biracial has] helped me understand that once you get to the humanity of a person, you discover that we’re all essentially the same. I’ve been given a lot from two different worlds. I choose to accept that as a real gift.”
I forget, sometimes, that many folks still don’t appreciate the nuances of being mixed race.
I forget, sometimes, that many folks still don’t appreciate the nuances of being human.
