Salon Mothers Who Think | Mulatto millennium

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R E C E N T L Y

Second Thoughts
By Sallie Tisdale
Forget quality -- it's quantity time that matters
(07/23/98)

The face of Zorro
By Luis Valdez
For 80 years, Zorro has been the shining star of a mythical California, set in a time and place that never existed. In "The Mask of Zorro," he still is
(07/22/98)

Zorro vs. Tarzana
By Stephen Talbot
How the masked avenger taught a white kid from the suburbs that California's past -- and its present -- was older, darker and more soulful than he had ever dreamed
(07/22/98)

Drama Queens
Bad trips: The road to hell is paved with good intentions, pickle-flecked vomit and the MLA convention
(07/21/98)

Censorship and sensibility
By Inda Schaenen
Should kids be able to read anything they want?
(07/17/98)

BROWSE THE MOTHERS WHO THINK FEATURE ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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MULATTO MILLENNIUM | PAGE 1, 2
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My sister and I grew up with a disdain for those who identified as mulatto rather than black. Not all mulattos bothered me back then. It was a very particular breed that got under my skin: the kind who answered, meekly, "Everything," to that incessant question "What are you?" Populist author Jim Hightower wrote a book called "There's Nothing in the Middle of the Road but Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos." That's what mulattos represented to me back then: yellow stripes and dead armadillos. Something to be avoided. I veered away from groups of them -- children, like myself, who had been born in interracial minglings after dark. Instead, I surrounded myself with bodies darker than myself, hoping the color might rub off on me.

I used to spy on white people, blend into their crowd, let them think I was one of them, and then listen as they talked in smug disdain about black folks. It wasn't something I had to search out. And most white people, I found, no matter how much they preach MLK's dream, are just as obsessed with color and difference as the rest of us. They just talk about it in more coded terms. Around white folks, I never had to bring up race. They brought it up for me, and I listened, my skin tingling slightly, my stomach twisting in anger, as they revealed their true feelings about colored folks. Then I would spring it on them, tell them who I really was, and watch, in a kind of pained glee, as their faces went from eggshell white, to rose pink, to hot mama crimson, to The Color Purple. Afterward, I would report back to headquarters, where my friends would laugh and holler about how I was an undercover Negro.

There had been moments in my life when I had not asserted my black identity. I hadn't "passed" in the traditional sense of the word, but in a more subtle way, by simply mumbling that I was mixed. Then the white people in my midst seemed to forget whom they were talking to, and countless times I was a silent witness to candid racism. When I would remind them that my father was black, they would laugh and say, "But you're different." That was somewhere I never wanted to return. There was danger in this muddy middle stance. A danger of disappearing. Of being swallowed whole by the great white whale. I had seen the arctic belly of the beast and didn't plan on returning.

I'm no longer a black girl. At least according to my new driver's license and birth certificate. The "black" has been smudged out and the word "quadroon" scribbled in. I told the woman at the DMV -- auburn cornrows, vaguely Asiatic features -- that I wasn't comfortable with that term "quadroon." I told her, as politely as I could, that it reminded me of slave days, when they used to separate the slaves by caste. She just laughed and told me to be happy I got "quadroon." "You don't know how lucky you are, babe," she said, puffing on a Marlboro and flipping through her latest issue of Vibe magazine. "They're being picky who they let use that term. Everybody's trying to claim something special in their background -- a Scottish grandfather, a Native American grandmother. But the M.N. is trying to keep it to first-generation mixtures, you know. Otherwise things would get far too confusing." Then she had me sign some form, which I barely read, still reeling from my night before the video monitor. It said something about allowing my image to be used to promote racial harmony. I left the DMV in a daze.

These days, there are M.N. folks in Congress and the White House. They've got their own category on the census. It says, "Multiracial." But even that is inadequate for the more extremist wing of the Mulatto Nation. They want to take it a step further. I guess they have a point. I mean, why lump us all together as multiracial? Eskimos, they say, have 40 different words for snow. In South Africa, during apartheid, they had 14 different types of coloreds. But we've decided on this one word, "multiracial," to describe, in effect, a whole nation of diverse people who have absolutely no relation, cultural or otherwise, to one another.

I've learned to flaunt my mixedness at dinner parties, where the guests (most of them white) ooh and aaah about my flavorful background. I've found it's not so bad being a fetishized object, an exotic bird soaring above the racial landscape. And when they start talking about black people, pure breeds, in that way that used to make me squirm before the millennium, I let them know that I'm neutral, nothing to be afraid of. Sometimes I feel it, that remnant of my old self (the angry black girl with the big mouth) creeping out, but most of the time I don't feel anything at all. Most of the time, I just serve up the asparagus, chimichangas, and fried chicken with a bright, white smile.
SALON | July 24, 1998