{"id":44806,"date":"2015-12-26T16:53:40","date_gmt":"2015-12-26T16:53:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=44806"},"modified":"2017-07-09T22:13:58","modified_gmt":"2017-07-09T22:13:58","slug":"multiracial-in-america-who-gets-to-be-white","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=44806","title":{"rendered":"Multiracial in America: Who gets to be “white”?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Multiracial in America: Who gets to be “white”?<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Hopes&Fears<\/a>
\n2015-12-15<\/p>\n

Jeremy Gordon<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\nThe author with his parents, Mary and Dennis Gordon.<\/small><\/p>\n

Jeremy Gordon on growing up multiracial, assimilation and “whiteness” in post-Obama<\/a> America.<\/em><\/p>\n

Every Christmas, when the dishes have been cleaned, when the presents are exchanged and the photos snapped, my cousins and I book it out of my aunt\u2019s house in the suburbs for the comfort of the city, where we spend the rest of the night in each other\u2019s company\u2014playing video games, getting drunker, eating a second meal to close the holiday. Last year, we drove to a dim sum<\/a> restaurant in Chicago\u2019s<\/a> Argyle neighborhood, which my Chinese family has patronized for my entire life.<\/p>\n

Times had changed, though. We assumed we\u2019d be seated right away, but the restaurant was full. As far as I could remember, it was the first time we\u2019d ever had to wait for a table\u2014and this time, we noticed that most of the diners were white. As we waited for our names to be called, my cousin couldn\u2019t help but gripe. \u201cI can\u2019t believe we\u2019re stuck behind all these white people!\u201d she said. \u201cCan\u2019t they go somewhere else?\u201d<\/p>\n

My cousin is not a facetious woman, so the comment didn\u2019t register as a joke. Nevertheless, her brother and I managed a laugh. It was true\u2014the restaurant was filled with white people, whose grannies had never used Mandarin to order from the sullen teenagers pushing the dim sum carts around. But the complaint was a little awkward because of an incontrovertible fact: My cousins and I are half-white, each of us the offspring of a Chinese woman and a Jewish man…<\/p>\n

We look about half-and-half\u2014not quite white, not quite yellow, definitely a little something. White people might see us as Chinese\u2014or, failing their ability to pinpoint our race, an ever-ambiguous \u201cperson of color\u201d\u2014but there are plenty of Chinese who might insist we were white. Joking about \u201cwhite people\u201d when that might be us\u2014it\u2019s an easy laugh, but ultimately disingenuous. Wondering what to identify as\u2014white, Chinese, or something else\u2014is something I, my cousins, and many multiracial people have struggled with for our whole lives, to no definite conclusion…<\/p>\n

…Multiraciality is a young identity, one that didn\u2019t formally come into existence until the 1980s. G. Reginald Daniel<\/a> is a sociology professor who\u2019s taught a class on multiracial identity at the University of California, Santa Barbara for nearly three decades, and even he can\u2019t identify its first usage. He points to television shows like Oprah<\/a><\/em> and Sally Jessy Raphael<\/em><\/a>, where panels on multiracial experiences featuring multiracial people were hastily conceived. \u201cThe first time I heard the word multiracial used was on The Phil Donahue Show<\/a><\/em> in 1988,\u201d he tells me. \u201cI was pretty shocked because I’d never heard that word before. Prior to that, nobody was talking about this, surely not in public.\u201d..<\/p>\n

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

Jeremy Gordon on growing up multiracial, assimilation and “whiteness” in post-Obama America.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,16,395,63,33,3601,8,26,820,20],"tags":[142,22425,215,22424],"class_list":["post-44806","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-asia","category-autobiography","category-barack-obama","category-census","category-judaism","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-religion","category-usa","tag-g-reginald-daniel","tag-hopesfears","tag-jenifer-bratter","tag-jeremy-gordon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44806","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=44806"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44806\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54428,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44806\/revisions\/54428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}