{"id":11551,"date":"2011-01-18T05:11:44","date_gmt":"2011-01-18T05:11:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=11551"},"modified":"2011-10-27T19:35:56","modified_gmt":"2011-10-27T19:35:56","slug":"who-are-we-new-dialogue-on-mixed-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=11551","title":{"rendered":"Who Are We? New Dialogue on Mixed Race"},"content":{"rendered":"

Who Are We? New Dialogue on Mixed Race<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The New York TImes
\n<\/a>2008-03-31<\/p>\n

Mireya Navarro<\/strong><\/p>\n

Jenifer Bratter<\/a> once wore a T-shirt in college that read \u201c100 percent black woman.\u201d Her African-American friends would not have it.<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember getting a lot of flak because of the fact I wasn\u2019t 100 percent black,\u201d said Ms. Bratter, 34, recalling her years at Penn State.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was very hurt by that,\u201d said Ms. Bratter, whose mother is black and whose father is white. \u201cI remember feeling like, Isn\u2019t this what everybody expects me to think?\u201d<\/p>\n

Being accepted. Proving loyalty. Navigating the tight space between racial divides. Americans of mixed race say these are issues they have long confronted, and when Senator Barack Obama<\/a> recently delivered a speech about race in Philadelphia<\/a>, it rang with a special significance in their ears. They saw parallels between the path trod by Mr. Obama and their own.<\/p>\n

They recalled the friends, as in Ms. Bratter\u2019s case, who thought they were not black enough. Or the people who challenged them to label themselves by innocently asking, \u201cWhat are you?\u201d Or the relatives of different races who can sometimes be insensitive to one another.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think Barack Obama is going to bring these deeply American stories to the forefront,\u201d said Esther John, 56, an administrator at Northwest Indian College<\/a> in Washington, who identifies herself as African-American, American Indian and white.<\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe we\u2019ll get a little bit further in the dialogue on race,\u201d Ms. John said. \u201cThe guilt factor may be lowered a little bit because Obama made it right to be white and still love your black relatives, and to be black and still love your white relatives: to love despite another person\u2019s racial appearance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Americans of mixed race say that questions about whether Mr. Obama, with a white mother from Kansas<\/a> and a black father from Kenya<\/a>, is \u201ctoo black\u201d or \u201cnot black enough,\u201d as the candidate himself brought up in his speech on March 18, show the extent to which the nation is still fixated on old categories.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s this notion that there\u2019s an authentic race and you must fit it,\u201d said Ms. Bratter, an assistant professor of sociology at Rice University in Houston who researches interracial families. \u201cWe\u2019re confronted with the lack of fit.\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Who Are We? New Dialogue on Mixed Race The New York TImes 2008-03-31 Mireya Navarro Jenifer Bratter once wore a T-shirt in college that read \u201c100 percent black woman.\u201d Her African-American friends would not have it. \u201cI remember getting a lot of flak because of the fact I wasn\u2019t 100 percent black,\u201d said Ms. Bratter, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,63,125,8,26,394,20],"tags":[215,344,5219,2327],"class_list":["post-11551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-barack-obama","category-identitydevelopment","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-jenifer-bratter","tag-jenifer-l-bratter","tag-mireya-navarro","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11551"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11551\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}