Love in Black and White: The Triumph of Love Over Prejudice and Taboo (31 page)

Black women, I realized, would have to make an effort to try to understand my position, too; I can’t spend my life apologizing to black women who are upset with me.

When Mark spoke at North Carolina A&T University in Greens boro in late November 1990, where controversial black MuslIm minister Louis Farrakhan had spoken a couple weeks earlier, I stayed home despite my strong desire to hear my husband’s lecture. I knew that someone in the crowd would ask Mark the inevitable question: “How could you have married a white woman after all you’ve suffered at the hands of whites?”

As soon as Mark returned I said, “Did anyone ask it?”

“Yes,” he replied. “I get that question everywhere I go.”

He sounded relaxed and surprisingly carefree about the matter, as if the question no longer bothered hIm. But it was not until the following week, when I read about the lecture in a newspaper article by Greensboro News & Record columnist Bill Morris, that I realized that Mark was at last completely at ease with my being white, even before a crowd that included bitter and militant black students. Part of the column ran as follows: It was astonishing that such a small, solt-spoken, elegantly dressed man could deliver such an overpowering message. But as I sat in an auditorium at N.C. A-State University recently and listened to Mark Mathabane address an audience of 600 soul-blacks and whites, students and teachers, even a few blue-haired matron-I was, quite simply, astonished. I was also Iilled with joy and with something that can only be described as awe.

Though he grew up with the horror and brutality of apartheid, the message he brought to ACT was one of compassion, understanding and love. He told the story of how his mother struggled against an array of “Kafkaesque” laws to get him enrolled in school when he was a boy.

But it was only when a white nun intervened that Mathabane’s mother was able to secure the coveted birth certificate that enabled him to enter school.

“You see, child,” his mother told him at the time, “not all white peo(I pie are bad.”

The lesson of that nun’s act is with him to this day. “It made me realize that the most Important thing you must judge people by Is their character-the color of their heart,” he said.

That remark Inspired a question from a black woman in the audIence at ACT She wanted to know how Mathabane, who grew up under codilIed white racism, could possibly have married a white woman.

“In judging,” he said In a calm voice, “I look not look at skin color, but at who people are. One of the things I lInd disturbing, having grown up in South Africa and then coming to this country, are its contradictions. We blacks say to white South Africa, you are monstrous and evil’ for denying the humanity of black people. Yet simply in the name of black soIldarity, we begin to enforce the same criteria. If you are black you cannot marry or befrlend a white person. It’s the same thing I experienced in South Africa-in reverse.”

Then he looked the questioner in the eye and said, “I am proud to have Gail as a friend and as a wife.”

When he said that, I understood the source of my awe. Here was a man who has every reason to be full of rage toward whites but who has transcended those feelings and now works toward bringing people of all races together.

“Of all the places I’ve been,” he told his audience at A- “Alnerica is one of the few places where people always talk about each other.

That’s how stereotypes persistbecause people don’t talk to each other.

It Is Incumbent on us In a democratic society to try to understand each other, including our differences.”

Wesley and Brenda Root-he’s white and she’s black-unintentionally made national headlines when they tried enrolling their fourteen-year-old daughter, Mahin, at Page High School in Greensboro in August 1989. The Roots ran into problems because they refused to identify Mahin’s race on the registration form.

“Our daughter is mixed,” Brenda said of Mahin. “To pick one race over the other would misrepresent her heritage. Whatever I would pick is likely to follow her into high school and for the rest of her life.”

Brenda’s beliefs challenged the Greensboro school system, the federal bureaucracy, computer technology, and society’s obsession with classifying people, as in South Africa, by skin color.

It was the first time a parent had refused to identify a child’s race, and the school did not know how to handle the situation. The computer would not process Mahin’s registration form unless she completed the block that asked her to select from one of five options-Native American, Asian, Hispanic, black, or white. Brenda Root marked through the question.

“They did not have a space for other,’ ” Brenda said. “But even if it had been there, I would have reacted the same way. I don’t believe anyone should ever have to identify their race. We are all human beings. What does race have to do with who we are?”

Brenda was told Mahin would not be registered for school until she identified her race. Mahin had spent the previous four years at Greensboro Day School, a private school where the issue of race was never brought up. like her parents, Mahin said she never thought of herself as black or white.

“I’m both black and white,” she said. “I can’t pick one without denying the other.”

Greensboro school officials said they needed to report the race of all their students to the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), which has collected racial information since 1967-1968 to deterntine if schools are complying with the Civil Rights Act of

1964.

The principal at Page referred the matter to the superintendent, who handed it over to the school board’s attorney, who called the Office of Civil Rights in Washington, D.C for advice. John Woods, a public altairs officer in the OCR suggested the school “do the eyeball check” to determine her race.

flme magazine picked up the story, and National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” twice broadcast interviews with Mahin. We saw the article in the Greensboro News & Record and wrote a letter to Brenda Root congratulating her on her courage. This began an exchange of letters between us, and before long she arrived at our home for dinner with her daughter Mahin and a white friend named Chris Tifiany.

The Brenda we finally met surprised us. We had Imagined her as a militant crusader against racism. After all, this brave woman had challenged the state of North Carolina to abandon its practice of requiring race identification on driver’s licenses, marriage licenses, and birth certificates. When she discovered that a local supermarket was using shorthand to indicate black or white on the back of checks, she made sure the store’s management in Charlotte knew she disapproved.

When Mahin was classified as a black female after a thumb operation, Brenda wrote letters to the doctor who operated on her, the Guilford County Medical Association, and the American Medical Association, demanding that black be removed from Mahin’s medical records. It was done.

In place of the outspoken radical we had Imagined, we met a petite, reserved, soft-spoken woman with hints of gray in her hair.

She was dressed in red knit pants and a casual sweater. Her daughter Mahin was unusually tall for fourteen. She wore a short skirt, hose, and a pullover, and her jet black hair was in a long jerry curl.

She sat down and scarcely said a word all evening. Her large eyes took in everything. She glanced from one object to the next, as if painfully shy and uncomfortable. She was not with us long before she left the room to be with Linah and Diana.

“She won’t stay in here because we’re talking about race,” Brenda told us. “She gets terribly upset when she hears the words black, white, and race. We didn’t raise her to think in those terms. We lived in Nigeria for six years, until 1985, and it was never a problem there.

It’s only since we returned to America that she’s been forced to think in terms of race.”

Brenda was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, in a musical household.

Though she is black and grew up during the reign of JIm Crow, her parents, she says, were never obsessed by race. They taught her not to limit her aspirations simply because of her skin color. “Racism,” her father told her, “is their problem, not yours.” As an undergraduate at Oberlin College, Brenda majored in music and went on to the University of Illinois to pursue a graduate degree in music education. In her quiet, determined manner, she makes it clear to everyone that she is a human being first, not a woman, or a black, but a whole person.

Sheena Williams, the teenage daughter of a black American and white Iranian in Teaneck, New Jersey, encountered a situation sImilar to Mahin’s when she signed up to take the California Achievement Test.

Under ethnic background, she checked both black and white.

The proctor returned the test to her saying, “You can only check one.”

“What are you supposed to do if you’re a biracial child?” Sheena asked.

“Put down what you look most like,” the proctor said.

“Wait a minute,” retorted Sheena, who has long wary black hair and skin the color of cafe all lait. “A lot of people think I’m Hispanic.

You’re saying that if I look Hispanic, I should check Hispanic, right?

But I’m not Hispanic. I’m black and white. Children of interracial marriages should either be able to check both or have our own separate category. And I’m not going to check other’ because I don’t want to be a nonentity. What is an other’?”

The proctor became so exasperated that Sheena finally relented and checked black.

Sheena’s black friends tell her, “You have black blood in you, so you’re black,” to which Sheena replies, “But my mother gave birth to me, and she’s white.”

One day in her African-American history class at Teaneck High School, the discussion turned to interracial dating and marriage.

Some of the students disapproved of such relationships. Sheena asked the class, “Then what do you think of me?”

“Oh, your mother’s not white,” the students said.

“Then what is she?” Sheena asked.

“I thought you said she’s Iranian.”

“Yes, but she’s still white.”

“No she’s not.”

Sheena made a photocopy of a page in her brother’s world history book that stated that Iranians are Caucasians.

“It’s not that I’m bragging that my mother’s white,” Sheena told them.

“I’m just trying to prove a point: that my parents’ marriage is just the same as anybody else’s. There’s nothing wrong with it.”

Despite society’s hang-ups, children of mixed couples, contrary to popular belief, grow up with a healthy sense of who they are, a fact which, interestingly, the combatants in America’s race war find hard to accept.

“I was taught to be proud of who I am, and who I am is mixed,” said Trevor Nightingale. “I don’t try to avoid the fact that I’m mixed and say,‘Yo, I’m black,’ or “I’m white.” I tell people with pride, “I’m mixed.” I don’t really care how other people see me because I have a strong personal identity from having been raised in different parts of the country by strong individuals.

“I think I’ve had the best of both worlds with my mother being black and my father being white,” Trevor continued. “I have black grandparents and white grandparents, so I’ve gotten to know both cultures. I was raised to believe that obstacles become problems only if you let them. My parents gave me a lot of their strength and pre pared me to confront prejudice. They were nonconformists, pioneers.

They empowered me.”

Sheena’s father, Alton Williams, Jr is a coach for a baseball league in Teaneck, a New Jersey community that integrated voluntarily in the early 1960s and, because of its reputation for racial diversity and tolerance, has attracted many interracial couples. Several of the young players are the biracial children of these couples.

Most opponents of interracial marriage make the same arguments over and over again: “The children will suffer. They’ll be caught between two worlds. They won’t fit in anywhere. They’ll be lonely and isolated.”

But speak to any biracial child or their parent, and you’Il most likely hear a different story.

“When I read articles about the problems biracial kids supposedly have, I have to laugh,” Williams said. “I look at my own children and the biracial kids I coach. I mean, these kids are ready to take on the whole world. They feel so sure of themselves. They hold their heads up. They’ve learned to be strong from their parents.”

“I have white friends, black friends, mixed friends,” Trevor said.

“Having white relatives, I don’t feel uncomfortable or out of place around whites. I’m not acting when I’m around them, like some blacks do. But sometimes my white friends will ask me why I hang out with blacks. That really bugs me. But it also provides me with the opportunity to explain to them who blacks truly are.”

“You really have to look inside yourself and find your own inner strength, and say, “I’m proud of what I am and who I am, and I’m just going to be myself,’” said singer Mariah Carey, whose father is a black Venezuelan and whose mother is Irish. Carey, who was named Best New Artist of the Year and Best Female Pop Vocalist for her song “Vision of Love” at the Grammys in February 1991, proudly asserts that she is not just “another white girl trying to sing black.”

“Some people look at me and they see my light skin and my hair,” she told a reporter, running her fingers through her long, wavy, honey-brown tresses. “I can’t help the way I look, because it’s me. I don’t try to look a certain way or sing a certain way. I’m just trying to be me. And if people enjoy my music, then they shouldn’t care what I am, so it shouldn’t be an issue.”

Her parents divorced when Mariah was three, and she grew up ii’ in New York with her mother, a vocal coach and former singer with the New York City Opera. Because she and her mother moved often, she didn’t have many close friends or get involved in high-school music programs.

“It’s been difficult for me, moving around so much, having to grow up’ by myself, basically on my own, my parents divorced. And I always felt kind of different from everyone else in my neighborhoods. I was a different person, ethnically. And sometimes that can be a problem. If you look a certain way everybody goes, white girl,’ and I’d go, No, that’s not what I am.”” Children of mixed marriages are often accused, mostly by blacks, of trying to deny their black roots and “pass” for white. Critics say they do so for economic, social, or career gain. A biracial adult who refuses to choose between the white and black within her and prefers to be called “mixed” is unfairly accused of denying her “true race,” that is, the black race.