By the end of the 1989–90 school year, a group of mixed-race students at Stanford had created a new student group, called Spectrum, owing perhaps to the consciousness raised at RA Training that prior fall. I heard from a friend at Harvard that students there had done the same thing, calling their group “Prism.” The terms “multiracial” and “biracial” are starting to appear in the media. Nationally, policy makers begin to debate whether the U.S. census could allow people to check multiple race boxes to reflect a heritage of more than one race.
When I hear about these developments in racial classification, I know I’ve been waiting my whole life for a term like “biracial” or “multiracial” to define the otherwise out-of-bounds nature of my existence. I begin using the terms interchangeably to describe myself, and it feels nourishing, invigorating, like I’ve received a transplant to replace a diseased organ and have a new lease on life. Finally, checking a box doesn’t mean ignoring my mother. Finally, I have a term to explain why I look and sound different from so many other Blacks without that term being derogatory, like “Oreo.”
But at the start these new labels draw criticism from Black professors, policy makers, and intellectuals. I hear a Black pundit discuss this on a television news show one day. Blacks are the result of intermixture either in recent times or historically, he reminds his audience, and if mixed-race people identify as multiracial on government forms, the official count of Black people could diminish enough to pull governmental resources away from the Black community where they are much needed. Between the lines of his argument—conveyed with his facial expression, not his words—is the critique that mixed people are just using these labels to distance ourselves from the Black community, maybe to try to be “better” than Black.
Am I?
I don’t care about the critique. I’m not thinking about government programs or the extent to which my personal decision might impact a bigger number of people or a more macro set of outcomes. I am desperate for belonging, and I find it with “biracial” and “multiracial.”
It is a truth and it is a relief and it is A Chosen Exile, as Allyson Hobbs would title her book on the historical practice of passing. And as with those who passed out of Blackness into whiteness over the centuries prior, I would find that standing on the edge of Blackness where it bleeds lighter and lighter and ultimately starts to look like white came with both privilege and pain.