{"id":23149,"date":"2012-05-16T22:07:31","date_gmt":"2012-05-16T22:07:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=23149"},"modified":"2012-05-16T22:17:07","modified_gmt":"2012-05-16T22:17:07","slug":"multiracial-americans-ready-to-claim-their-own-identity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=23149","title":{"rendered":"Multiracial Americans Ready To Claim Their Own Identity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Multiracial Americans Ready To Claim Their Own Identity<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n1996-07-20
\n
\nMichel Marriott<\/strong><\/p>\n

For Alison Perry, being multiracial has meant moving through life as if she had a giant question mark drawn on her forehead. Strangers frequently approach and begin a vexing guessing game: “Are you Israeli?” “Are you a Latina?” “Where are you from?”<\/p>\n

Yet for this slender, almond-colored woman with delicate features drawn from both her black-American father and her Italian-American mother, race is not what defines her.<\/p>\n

“I definitely say that I’m interracial,”<\/strong> Ms. Perry said. “I do not identify myself as a black woman. I definitely don’t identify myself as a white woman, either.”<\/p>\n

The very existence of multiracial people like Ms. Perry challenges this nation’s traditionally rigid notions of race…<\/p>\n

…”People of mixed race in this country haven’t belonged anywhere,”<\/strong> said Charles Byrd, editor and publisher of Interracial Voice<\/em>, an Internet news journal based in Queens that has backed the march. “The march will, in effect, allow people to come out and be themselves\u2014not just be black, not just be white, but just be a human being.”…<\/strong><\/p>\n

…Forced Choices And No Choices<\/strong><\/p>\n

Increasingly, multiracial people are arguing\u2014and many scientists agree\u2014that race is a social construct, not a biological absolute. Many historians and social scientists, said Steven Gregory<\/a>, a professor of anthropology and Africana studies at New York University, believe that the notion of race was largely invented as a way to assign social status and privilege.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Unlike sex, which is determined by the X or Y chromosome, there is no genetic marker for race. Indeed, a 1972 study by a Harvard University geneticist, Richard Lewontin<\/a>, found that most genetic differences were within racial groups, not between them. He could trace only 6 percent of such differences to race.<\/p>\n

Yet in the closing years of the 20th century, race remains a stubbornly resistant feature of this nation’s culture. Other societies, like those of some islands of the Caribbean and some South American countries, have a more fluid sense of racial identity. In Jamaica, for example, when people speak of color, they are referring to skin tone, not inalterable racial categories, said Cecile Ann Lawrence, a lawyer who was a government administrator in Jamaica.<\/p>\n

But in the United States, race even divides multiracial people themselves. While some proudly claim their multiracial identity, others believe it is a sham, an effort to identify with the dominant, and privileged, white culture at the expense of a stigmatized minority.<\/strong><\/p>\n

“There is a tremendous amount of denial,” said Scott Minerbrook, whose father is black and whose mother white, but who considers himself black. Mr. Minerbrook, who is on the staff of Time<\/em> magazine and lives in Islip, N.Y., says that many people “fall into the trap that they don’t want to be identified with failure; they think blackness equals failure.” But there is no escape, he argues; that is how the rest of the world labels multiracial children.
\n<\/strong>
\nSome multiracial Americans believe, as Anthony Robert Hale, a graduate student in American literature at the University of California at Berkeley, said, that “in most cases, ‘mixed race’ means no race.”…
\n
\n…Some Are Forging A Different Path<\/strong><\/p>\n

Regardless of society’s labels, many multiracial people are determined to set their own courses. Ms. Perry, who was an anthropology major at Wesleyan University, has learned to regard the American obsession with race with a degree of detachment, even tolerance. But she herself still defies categorization.<\/p>\n

At Wesleyan, she was drawn to other interracial students, a well-organized and relatively large group on campus. She said she never felt part of the black community there.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, she joined a West African dance troupe at Wesleyan and traveled with it to Ghana. In Africa, she recalled with a chuckle, she was considered white. She also began dating one of the dance troupe’s drummers, who is white and Jewish….<\/p>\n

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

Multiracial Americans Ready To Claim Their Own Identity The New York Times 1996-07-20 Michel Marriott For Alison Perry, being multiracial has meant moving through life as if she had a giant question mark drawn on her forehead. Strangers frequently approach and begin a vexing guessing game: “Are you Israeli?” “Are you a Latina?” “Where are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,33,125,8,394,20],"tags":[10758,10759,5630,10757,2640,2470,10755,10756,2327],"class_list":["post-23149","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-census","category-identitydevelopment","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-alison-perry","tag-anthony-robert-hale","tag-charles-byrd","tag-michel-marriott","tag-new-york-times","tag-richard-lewontin","tag-scott-minerbrook","tag-steven-gregory","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23149","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=23149"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23149\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}