Crossing the Demographic Divide
By Lise Funderburg
American Demographics
October 1998
Desperate situations lead to desperate acts. Or so I tell myself when I dare
to admit the following: I loved The Jeffersons. Yes, those Jeffersons, the finally-got-a-piece-of-the-pie
Jeffersons, that 1970s sitcom about a black dry-cleaning magnate who buys his
way into the lap of New York's Upper East Side luxury.
It wasn't the prat-falling, eye-rolling humor of this Archie Bunker spin-off
that appealed to me. I waded through the supercilious plot lines, watching
and waiting for a glimpse of one minor character, a young man who appeared
only occasionally and whose real or fictional name I can't recall. What mesmerized
me so about him was that, gender aside, he was me. His parents, like mine,
were a black-white interracial couple. His household, like mine, grappled
with mundane issues of family life that had nothing to do with race or racism.
But most important, like me he looked white.
The rarity of this, the intersection of my private reality and such public
affirmation, may seem dated in the P.M. (post-Mariah) world. But I was born
in the late 1950s, on the tail end of the baby boom, and throughout my childhood
my particular brand of multiracial exotica was nowhere else to be seen. Even
the more recognizable half-n-halfers-the tawny-skinned, blond-Afroed mixies-were
absent from the cultural lexicon.
Certainly I exaggerate. There had to be more of us out there, spanning the
melanin spectrum, tiptoeing and lurching across the color line. (No one really
knows how many--how can you count accurately what doesn't actually exist?--but
one indicator is the National Center for Health Statistics' tabulation of
births by race. The NCHS only started to keep count in 1968, but the total
tally of births to black-white couples from then to now is more than 700,000.
This number, of course, includes no one over the age of 30.) But whatever
our number was then, we weren't visible in popular culture, neither acknowledged
for having heterogeneous roots nor seen in the context of our rainbow families.
Not in textbooks, not in newspapers, not in advertisements, not, generally,
on TV or in the movies. Not anywhere.
Our responses to this dearth of imagery varied. Many of us folded back into
the black community, ignoring or downplaying the white sides of our families,
conceding and sometimes even relishing the power of blackness to trump all
else in this country. It was often easier to keep family photos in the wallet
rather than on top of the desk. Fewer questions, less confusion.
Some of us retreated into a raceless world, neither black nor white. We
surrounded ourselves with carefully chosen comrades in humanism, a hermetic
group that often, by no coincidence, included others from the margins--those
who'd lived abroad or been raised as the minority among some other race or
ethnicity, those who were any kind of mix at all. And some of us, especially
those as flat-haired and pale as I am, passed into whiteness, by intention
or default or both.
Validation for a separate reality
George Jefferson mocked his interracial neighbors mercilessly. He viewed
them as freakish, an assault on the world's natural order. Inverting the
conventional prejudice, he objected to his son dating their daughter. Their
response to all of his bluster, which I found both instructive and familiar,
was to ignore him. For my, part, I filtered out the hatefulness of his position
and basked in the recognition, the prime-time acknowledgment that people
like me existed. I was so starved for the validation that it was welcome
even in such imperfect form.
To be sure, my family suffered no material damage from being invisible to
the public eye. In fact, we were in a sense liberated from pat expectations
by this oversight. Given no road map--no stereotype-based prescription for
what to wear, drive, laugh at, eat--we could choose based on actual likes
and dislikes. Everyone should have such freedom.
On the other hand, there was no vocabulary to describe us and so most people,
confronted with our racial constellation, were baffled, speechless, even
disbelieving. Invisibility can be tiresome; having people respond to your
family story with, "You're kidding!" can be irksome; the occasional
response of people reaching out to touch your hair, a vain attempt to gather
evidence, can be loathsome. I have, at times, experienced my racial mixture
only as bone-deep weariness.
UCLA lecturer Reginald Daniel has taught a course called "Betwixt and
Between", that looks at historic and emerging multiracial identities
around the world. We typically think of betwixt and between as nowhere--not
this, not that. But people like me often experience something more alchemical
as a result of our configurations. The interstice, the place between two
recognized points, actually turns out to be somewhere in and of itself. That
interstitial world recombines separate pasts into a distinct, mutated reality,
one that transcends even as it borrows from its ancestry.
What exactly is this brave new would we inhabit? For me, the essence of
it is otherness, a sense and comfort with being outside of a mainstream,
the paradoxical notion that difference is something we all can have in common.
At best, I use this experience to see past surfaces, to see beyond wrapping
and into core humanity and emotion and motivation. At worst, I feel ostracized,
not a participant, not an insider, not one who belongs.
Subculture of a subculture
Desperate situations lead to desperate alliances. And so, politics aside,
I was thrilled once by Clarence Thomas. A photograph of Thomas during his
turbulent Supreme Court confirmation hearings ran on the front page of The
New York Times. In it, he and his white wife are kissing, square on the lips.
The moment I saw it I realized the many ways in which my family, its intimacies
and bonds, remain invisible. My melanin-challenged experience places me into
a subculture of the multiracial subculture, but it doesn't exclude me. I
feel a bond with others who cross lines, lines of race, ethnicity, religion,
geography, who know and at least partially own more than one perspective
on the world.
Maybe as we continue to construct a global village, this will be an increasingly common perspective. As crude a show as The Jeffersons was, it held something of value for me, something I couldn't find elsewhere. More and more, I see pictures of the world I know, the one in which race, and particularly mixed race, is present but not singularly determinative. These messages of a mixed world are delivered in all formats, media and the arts. As society and the marketplace fill in these outlines, perhaps my anchor of otherness will drift away. I don't quite know what will take its place, but I wouldn't mind finding out.