{"id":26361,"date":"2012-11-15T01:47:53","date_gmt":"2012-11-15T01:47:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=26361"},"modified":"2018-07-03T00:47:35","modified_gmt":"2018-07-03T00:47:35","slug":"they-talked-about-the-richness-of-their-multicultural-heritage-and-it-sounded-real-good-until-you-noticed-that-they-avoided-black-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=26361","title":{"rendered":"They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people."},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cI\u2019m not black,\u201d Joyce said. \u201cI\u2019m multiracial.\u201d Then she started telling me about her father, who happened<\/em> to be Italian and was the sweetest man in the world; and her mother who happened<\/em> to be part African and part French and part Native American and part something else. \u201cWhy should I have to choose between them?\u201d she asked me. Her voice cracked, and I thought she was going to cry.\u00a0 \u201cIt\u2019s not white people who are making me choose. Maybe it used to be that way, but now they\u2019re willing to treat me like a person. No\u2014it\u2019s black people<\/em> who always have to make everything racial. They\u2019re<\/em> the ones making me choose.\u00a0 They\u2019re<\/em> the ones who are telling me I can\u2019t be who I am\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThey, they, they.\u00a0 That was the problem with people like Joyce.\u00a0 They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people.<\/strong>\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t a matter of conscious choice, necessarily, just a matter of gravitational pull, the way integration always worked, a one-way street.\u00a0 The minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around.\u00a0 Only white culture could be neutral and objective.\u00a0 Only white culture could be nonracial, willing to adopt the occasion exotic into its ranks.\u00a0 Only white culture had individuals.\u00a0 And, we the half-breeds and college-degreed, take a survey of the situation and think to ourselves, Why should we get lumped in with the losers if we don\u2019t have to?\u00a0 We become only so grateful to lose ourselves in the crowd, America\u2019s happy, faceless marketplace; and we\u2019re never so outraged as when a cabbie drives past us or the woman in the elevator clutches her purse, not so much because we\u2019re bothered by the fact that such indignities are what less fortunate coloreds have to put up with every single day of their lives\u2014although that\u2019s what we tell ourselves\u2014but because we\u2019re wearing a Brooks Brothers<\/a> suite and speak impeccable English and yet somehow have somehow been mistaken for an ordinary nigger.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance<\/a><\/em>, (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1995), 99-100.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cI\u2019m not black,\u201d Joyce said. \u201cI\u2019m multiracial.\u201d Then she started telling me about her father, who happened to be Italian and was the sweetest man in the world; and her mother who happened to be part African and part French and part Native American and part something else. \u201cWhy should I have to choose between […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[25883],"class_list":["post-26361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-excerpts","tag-three-rivers-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26361","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=26361"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26361\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56638,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26361\/revisions\/56638"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}