Multiracial Americans surge in number, voice

One thing in common: marginalization
Such statistical exercises bring a warning from Gong.

“One of the most important things to understand is that the multiracial population is not a racial or ethnic group,” he said. ”What we are really is a long thread that runs through the spectrum of race.

“The only thing that bonds us together as a group is the common ways that we’re marginalized,” said Gong, who himself “had a very dynamic experience with race” while growing up. Reared on tribal lands by his paternal Chinese grandfather and Nooksack grandmother, his home life was steeped in Native American culture and tradition. At school, “I was poked and prodded” into a more Asian identity because of his last name.

As mixed-race Americans, “although we don’t represent a consistent experience, the way society has tended to respond to us has been consistent,” Gong said. “Those are the issues that we rally around.”

Despite their growing numbers, multiracial Americans and their family members say society’s response to them often remains a mixture of ignorance, judgment and downright rudeness.

Dr. Maria P.P. Root, a psychologist and researcher on multiracial families who has worked with the Mavin Foundation, has catalogued “50 Experiences of Racially Mixed People” as “a launching point for sharing, discussing, laughing, debriefing, and educating.” The list covers everything from the ubiquitous, insensitive “what are you?” question asked of multiracial people to them being told, “You have the best of both worlds.”

“Gut Check America” readers shared hundreds of observations and anecdotes via e-mail and interviews with msnbc.com to illustrate their own experiences.

Confusion over racial identity a common issue
For many, the confusion of others over their racial identity is the biggest, and thorniest, issue.

Take Sara Dale, a 33-year-old daughter of a black mom from Jamaica and a white dad from Pennsylvania. Caucasian in appearance, Dale said she has often been the recipient of racist comments about African-Americans from white co-workers and classmates. “People just assume that I’m white when they see me, so they talk freely around me,” said Dale, a resident of Boynton Beach, Fla. “As soon as the conversation turns a certain way, I start getting really nervous. I’m not a confrontational person but I feel like I have to say something.”

INTERACTIVE History: Race in the U.S.A. American Anthropological Association timeline looks at pivotal points in race relations from colonial times to the present

Or Evelyn Marie Lewis-Keene, 42, a health-care worker from Huntington, W.Va., whose father is an African-American and whose Hispanic mother was born in Puerto Rico. “When they ask what race I am, I don’t check black or white,” she said in an interview. “I can’t deny my mother and I can’t deny my father.” But others can and do, often elderly white residents at the care home where she works who plug her neatly into their racist stereotypes. “When a patient gives me the N-word, you know what I say? I say, ‘Wait a minute, if you’re going to say it, get it right, because you can’t deny my mom.’” And she insists they add “Rican” to the slur.

It comes from all sides. Lewis-Keene says her mother was disowned for a time by her Puerto Rican parents because she married a black man. And Lewis-Keene believes some members of her father’s family treat her mother disrespectfully because her English is hard for them to understand. “You can’t choose your family,” she said with a sigh.

‘You have a choice to be white or not’
Non-mixed members of multiracial families face their own special struggles. “When you’re in a biracial family, you have a choice to be white or not,” said Mary Semela, a white mom of two biracial sons who is married to a black immigrant from South Africa. Semela, who lives in Ellicott City, Md., said some members of multiracial families can grow so weary of stares and questions when they are with their relatives of different colors that they’ll intentionally go to public places alone at times. “You have that choice just to walk away from your family,” she said, adding that she would not do so herself.

While her husband and sons have faced the all-too-familiar trappings of white racism against blacks, Semela, 51, said her sons also are seen by some African-Americans as less than full members of that community because, with their father a recent immigrant, “they don’t have slave heritage.”

Despite that, her older son, 20, a scholarship student at Colgate, “feels very anchored as an African-American,” which is in keeping with the view of Semela and many other American parents of biracial black and white children that “as soon as your kids are old enough, they are black people in America, they are not half of anything.”

But that view is changing, said anthropologist Marion Kilson, who wrote “Claiming Place: Biracial Young Adults of the Post-Civil Rights Era.” Kilson, who is white, is also the mother of two biracial daughters and a son. She has been married for nearly 50 years to Martin Kilson Jr., the first black professor to receive full tenure at Harvard.

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