Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon News

Aerial ambulance chasing
A lawsuit claims the Alaska Air pilots should have landed instead of trying to figure out what was wrong -- but the doomed men did the right thing.
By Phaedra Hise
[02/18/00]

It ain't gospel
The decision by the country's most prestigious religious publisher to produce John and Patsy Ramsey's book is an insult to people of faith.
By Dave Shiflett
[02/17/00]

"The stakes are a bit higher for us"
The NAACP's Washington bureau chief takes the Census Bureau to task for its new multiracial categories.
By Daryl Lindsey
[02/16/00]

More Columbine carnage
Drugs are suspected in the latest round of killings in Littleton -- this time at a sandwich shop.
By Dave Cullen
[02/15/00]

Do the multiracial count?
This year the Census Bureau will finally let mixed-race Americans tell the truth about their backgrounds. So why are civil rights groups upset?
By Gregory Rodriguez
[02/15/00]

Complete archives for News

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

All mixed up A Salon special report on multiracial America The last taboo Why won't Hollywood let Denzel and Julia do what comes naturally? By Charles Taylor Do the multiracial count? This year the Census Bureau will finally let mixed-race Americans tell the truth about their backgrounds. So why are civil rights groups upset? By Gregory Rodriguez "The stakes are a bit higher for us" The NAACP's Washington bureau chief takes the Census Bureau to task for its new multiracial categories. By Daryl Lindsey Love strands A white mom on the powerful bonding ritual of braiding her mixed-race daughters' hair. By Susan Straight He loves me, loves me not Race was never an issue in my life -- until I fell in love. By Eleanor Stacy Parker

I grew up adoring black people, even though I didn't know any, except from TV. Mine was one of those 1960s middle-class families brought to social conscience by television. We watched in horror as white sheriffs fire-hosed black protesters in the South; in awe, even reverence, as Martin Luther King Jr. and his followers made nonviolence a spiritual and political practice.

To a devout Catholic girl -- I grew up reading the lives of the saints, wanting to be a nun or a missionary -- the civil rights movement was the struggle of good and evil written quite literally in black and white, a story from the pages of my saints books come to life. Wanting so desperately to be good, choosing sides was easy. I was good; I was black Irish; I was not white, not really.

It would take me 30 years, two careers, motherhood and a broken heart to accept the obvious: I am white, sort of. (Though the new census, which allows people to mark more than one box, intrigues me, because it might make for a more complicated racial reckoning.) But I became white just in time to become a minority in California, so strangely, little has changed for me: I'm still watching a mulatto country trying to eradicate some racial boundaries and hierarchies while enforcing certain others. Even more confusing, today I find that the vocal racial purists are as likely to be black, Latino or Asian as white. Each group has at least one thing in common, though: Our rhetoric about race can't even come close to capturing our mixed-up reality.

What's most amazing is how much our black and white racial paradigm -- victim vs. victimizer, the patron and the patronized -- still prevails. And yet it's an outdated script, reducing Asians, Latinos and the growing number of multiracial Americans either to bit players in our national drama or a vast army of victims (an identity most non-white Americans viscerally reject). But many of us cling to the paradigm, because we have no other way of envisioning racial relationships. I know that I myself clung way too long to a black-white, good-evil motif, obsessed with the possibility of racial retribution and redemption more than justice.

I was a type, a stereotype even, and a walking paradox: a civil rights do-gooder motivated by racial animus against my group -- in short, a self-hating white person. Not all Caucasians in the struggle are the same, but over the years I ran across a lot of me. And the fact that mixed-up white folk are the most likely to get involved with civil rights work results in a deformed political culture, one in which there is little white participation in our national conversation about race beyond the right-wing scapegoating of a Pat Buchanan and the masochistic piety of guilty Mumia cultists on the left. Meanwhile, the coming white minority is getting little help in developing a language for its changing and legitimate concerns.

It took me a long time to come to terms with this, but after an adulthood spent believing I was part of the solution to racial strife, I finally came to admit I was part of the problem.

Next page | Damaged white person finds redemption through warmer, darker folk