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When my daughter Alex was much younger, my family took a quick weekend vacation to Tobago, the neighbouring island to Trinidad, where we lived at the time. While we were there, we met a young British couple who were also vacationing from England and whose daughters close to Alex's age. The girls played together in the sand, while we grown-ups sipped fruity drinks with umbrellas in them, and watched them play.
"She's lovely," said the wife to me about Alex. "And you realize, of course, that she's very cool."
"I'm sorry?" I responded, confused.
"Oh, it's very cool to be mixed-race," she said, blithely. "It's true. Back in England all the kids want to be friends with mixed-race kids."
"Seriously?" I asked, shocked.
"Absolutely," she responded seriously. "I hear the kids talking."
I didn't know how to respond. My daughter is biracial, yes, but the labeling of her as "cool" just by virtue of her ethnicity, no matter how complimentary the comment was intended, just seemed wrong. What ever happened to, as Martin Luther King Jr. had hoped, the idea of being judged not by the colour of one's skin, but the content of one's character?
Nonetheless, a recent post I was reading at Anti-Racist Parent seems to point to a reason that mixed-race children might be considered "cool." The post referred to a TIME magazine article, which, in turn, discussed a new Journal of Social Issues paper. The article reads:
"kids who identified with multiple racial groups reported significantly less psychological stress than those who identified with a single group." The authors of the paper continue by explaining that multiracial kids are able to "place one foot in the majority and one in the minority group, and in this way might be buffered against the negative consequences of feeling tokenized." (Read the rest of the article here.)
Hm. Interesting reading, and perhaps this would help to explain the perceptions of my British acquaintance back on that beach in Trinidad, but it's hard to reconcile with some of the other opinions being expressed on the web. For example, Renee from Womanist Musings, allowed a reader, Mercedes Martinez, to guest post on her blog back in early January of this year. Ms. Martinez spoke of what it has been like to grow up biracial:
"To be bi-racial is to have all people at all times policing your identity and how you should construct it, just ask President-Elect Obama. To this day, it is hard for me to talk about my racial identity openly and honestly, I am very clear with people that I am Chicana, but then the questions and ignorant statements come, as if random individuals have any right to question my identity. In everyday conversation there just seem to be too many assumptions. I "talk like a White person," read: educated. Or, I "look White" when the person speaking has no understanding of the diversity of skin color in those whose ancestry is one involving colonization."
On her blog Fierce and Nerdy, Ernessa shares her concerns as a soon-to-be mom about raising her biracial child:
"I’ve had the feeling lately that more is expected out of bi-racial kids than one-race children. My father was thrilled when I told him I was pregnant. “Maybe you’ll have the next Obama.” He’s not the only one that has said this. If she’s athletic, will she be expected to be the next Tiger Woods. If she becomes an actress, will she be expected to be the next Halle Berry? I spent a lot of my 20s, feeling like I didn’t measure up to all of the expectations put on me, because I was an intelligent child. I don’t want Betty to feel the same way."
So many interesting perspectives. What do you think? Are multi-racial children better adjusted?
Karen Walrond is a writer and a photographer in Houston, Texas. You can see more of her work at Chookooloonks.
