A Mulatto perspective on the U.S election
Denise van Esche
As Barack Obama's presidential campaign has shown, being mixed race in America means balancing black and white identities
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. Photograph: Alex Brandon/AP
My boyfriend, Victor, and I flew into Kingston the day after Barack Obama clinched the Democratic party nomination. We were giddy. A trip to Jamaica and a potential black president. We were discussing Obama's campaign on the flight down when Victor suddenly asked: "How would you feel if our baby came out looking white?"
"Negro, puhleez," I said, polishing off my airline peanuts. "I am not pregnant."
"Answer the question," he pushed.
Victor and I, like Obama, are mixed: half black, half white. If we have a baby, he won't have a black parent and a white parent. He'll have two mulatto parents.
My black father has always disliked the term mulatto. Taboo as it is, I've come to embrace the word. "Mulatto" describes a unique outsider perspective, even with its insider privileges. Plus, it's so much more specific than "bi-racial," which applies to any old miscegenation combination.
I like to believe that Victor and I share the same perspective, though we don't exactly. For one thing, he's darker than I am. For another, his mother is Ugandan, which makes him a "Halfrican" as well as a mulatto, and the child of an immigrant, something I know nothing about.
Once, on a walk through Central Park, a homeless man growled at us, "Yeah, she'll go with niggers, but she won't go with whites." The guy was wearing newspapers for pants, but still. It hurt. Not so much that he called Victor the n-word or that he mistook me for white, but that he couldn't see how we were alike. And now Victor was suggesting our child might look more like me than like a combination of us. I was ashamed to admit it, but the idea depressed me.
As I dodged my boyfriend's question, our plane began its descent. I peered down at Jamaica where I was going to conduct field research on the Rastafarian longing for Africa as home. (Victor was going with me because I feared on my own I'd be mistaken for a sex tourist.) This research was for a larger book I'm writing on exodus movements throughout the African diaspora. Black folks who strike out from "home" to find the promised land fascinate me. Why? I don't want to get too tragic about it, but because of my blackness, in spite of my whiteness and as a result of being neither, I've never exactly felt at home in the US. People always ask us mulattos where we're from, assuming we come from somewhere else.
So my study is also a personal quest for racial identity. It's not unlike the quest that has many Rastas trying to get "home" to Africa and it's quite like the quest that drove our Democratic candidate to write Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. Barack Obama's first memoir charts his return to Kenya on the heels of the death of his absentee father. It finds Obama longing for, choosing and constructing his blackness even as he examines his mixed heritage. His white mother, the parent who raised him, is virtually absent from the text. In my own work, I'm guilty of similar omissions.
While Victor nodded off in the seat next to me, I gazed down at the first black nation I would ever visit, and wondered: What do you even call the product of two mulattoes? (Mulatto2?) And why should that name matter? How would I relate to a whiteish-looking baby? Why, in both my professional and personal life am I drawn toward my black side? Did I make that choice or was it foisted upon me – a vestige of the "one drop rule"? Unlike Obama and Victor, I'm white enough to "pass," but by a racial logic peculiar to our nation, in most circles I'm considered a light-skinned black woman.
That logic eluded my friend, the late Irish writer, Nuala O'Faolain. When I confessed to Nuala that my mother was Irish but that I'd never been to Ireland, she exclaimed, "Never? But why have ye never gone home? Have ye had a look at yerself of late, luv? How in Jaysus' name can ye call yerself black?"
Yet here I was, flying into Kingston rather than Dublin. One thing became clear when we arrived: in Jamaica I was a white woman. It didn't matter what I said to the contrary because in Jamaica, race is more purely a construct of skin tone. I stood out in Trench Town, Coronation Market, and Emancipation Park like a sore thumb, whereas Victor turned darker by the minute in the Caribbean sun. He might have passed for a local if he hadn't been by my side. "Hey, white lady," jeered a man selling brooms on Orange Street. "How yuh like me country?" The last time I was this much in the minority was when I was a black person in Vermont.
At the Twelve Tribes Headquarters on Hope Road, a Rasta named Reuben Savage explained that I (a Caucasian) descend from the line of Japeth, while Victor (a brown man) descends from the line of Shem, and he (a Black) descends from the line of Ham. Later on at the home of Dr Carolyn Cooper, the University of the West Indies professor with whom we were staying, Victor and I looked up the scripture in Genesis referred to by Mr Savage. We were baffled by his analysis. Then again, the Rasta was baffled by my claim that I too was black and that Victor was more African than he.
"What's the sentiment about Obama here in Jamaica?" I asked Dr Cooper. "Are you excited about the possibility of the US electing its first black president?" I added, "Do you even think of him as black?"
"Well I think of him as black in the American sense," she answered, "and really only because of Michele. I waited to see who the man was married to before I made up my mind about what he was. That's how he showed his allegiance."
Dr Cooper wasn't really saying anything new. Many a black woman in the states would consider Obama a race traitor if he had a white wife. And plenty of African American old guard politicians and pundits (Jesse Jackson included) have publicly debunked his blackness, just as Dr Cooper questioned its legitimacy. "I'm just so glad he ain't a white-looking mulatto like you," my outspoken poet friend, Thomas Sayers Ellis, the self-titled "genuine negro hero," recently declared. He meant, quite simply, that Obama would be less black if he looked more white.
These expressions of anxiety about Obama's racial status are familiar to me. I'm the regular target of similar scrutiny from both sides of the divide. This is part of the mulatto experience (as is the light skinned privilege that's helped Obama get as far as he's gotten): Whose side are you on? What are you? Where are you from? And: Prove it. In America, to be mulatto is to be (kind of) black, unless you are "passing" for white. Historically, it's not been possible to be both.
The trappings of Obama's life certainly do look black – the wife, the church, the gestures, etc. These were calculated choices on his part, just as mine have been. I live in Harlem, write about race, date Victor and teach black literature at a predominantly black college. I have turned my face from my white side in an effort to appear black. As the Rasta and the bum pointed out, it hasn't exactly worked for me. But as Obama's star has risen his self-identification has become more nuanced. This is something I aspire to. Rather than whining about being a consummate outsider (Where, oh where, do I belong?), Obama claims to be the ultimate insider. And boy is it working for him.
Recall the speech he gave in Philadelphia responding to the Jeremiah Wright scandal. By emphasizing his mixed ancestry, Obama exalted himself as more American than America, positioning himself firmly at our nation's heart. He's a mongrel and he's Everyman. This is what impresses me about Obama – his firm insistence that he's right at home. "I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas… I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins of every race and every hue… and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible." Of course it's politically shrewd and expedient to the pursuit of the presidency that Obama claim his white lineage. But from my perspective, it's also refreshingly honest.
Many of us mulattoes who grew up in the wake of the civil rights movement were raised to believe we were symbols of hope. "Emily," my parents told me, "you are a product of America's most optimistic moment." That's an unusual burden for any child to carry, especially in a nation that remains largely segregated. Imagine, for a moment that your body is a metaphor for change. How would you handle it? Obama is milking the metaphor for all its worth, but I've always found it a challenging condition. I was supposed to transcend race, (whatever that meant). My unwillingness to answer Victor's question is the hard proof that I did not.
So here, at last, is my answer:
Should we be so blessed, I will love our baby no matter what. Yes, even if she looks white like me. I may be mixed but I'm not that mixed-up. I just don't want her quest to look like mine, or for her to be treated like a symbol. Our kid's not going to be half anything. She's going to be whole. I hope she'll be at ease in her skin. I hope she'll feel at home in her country
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/14/barackobama.uselections2008
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