The material in this article is interesting. The kids will save us yet. Prudy In a message dated 02/29/2000 1:12:56 PM Eastern Standard Time [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: << From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] A rich sense of self Many in new generation of biracial people reject narrow categorizations By Vanessa E. Jones, Globe Staff, 2/29/2000 ody Jones will patiently explain to friends that he's the son of a white mother and black father. But with all the world-weariness a 15-year-old can muster, he'll sigh, ''You are what people think you are,'' a fact that makes him identify more with his father. Now meet his sister Julia Jones, who is less constrained by age-old racial classifications that once compelled people with even one drop of black blood to claim African-American status. When inquiring minds want to know her racial background, she tells them she's black, white, and Native American. ''I don't feel as strong a need to see myself as strictly black,'' explains the 19-year-old Columbia University freshman. Neither does Mikiko Thelwell, the daughter of a Japanese-American mother and Jamaican father who proudly calls herself Afro-Asian. ''How can I consider myself either/or?'' asks Thelwell, 15, a student at Amherst Regional High School. ''Because I don't look either/or and I'm not.'' A new generation of biracial people is refusing to be categorized within the slim confines of black, white, Hispanic, Native American, or Asian/Pacific Islander. Call it the Tiger Woods syndrome, after the golfer who invented the word ''Cablinasian'' to describe his Caucasian, black, Indian, and Asian roots. He's part of an increasing number of cultural role models, from Mariah Carey to Lenny Kravitz, who proudly acknowledge their multifaceted heritages. The force of the change is so strong that when Census 2000 forms hit mailboxes in March, people will for the first time be able to check more than one box for racial identification. But Census officials believe that less than 2 percent of the population will actually do it. ''There still are biracial people who prefer to identify themselves as one race or the other,'' says Pearl Gaskins, who interviewed multiracial youths for her book ''What Are You?: Voices of Mixed-Race Young People,'' published last year. ''But I think there is a growing number of people who feel that that's not adequate for them. They want to define themselves as mixed-race, multiracial, which recognizes the different ethnic and racial backgrounds that they have.'' Among specialists in the field, there is palpable excitement about the effects of widening racial categories in a nation that has long resisted racial and cultural blending. ''It's going to be harder and harder to define people in easily definable ways,'' says G. Reginald Daniel, a sociology professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who has written extensively on the subject. ''It will force us to think twice before we jump to any conclusions about people.'' Powering the change is a rise in interracial marriages as racial boundaries soften and pop culture offers up diverse icons such as Michael Jordan and Jennifer Lopez. In 1960, only 149,000 such unions were reported, according to Census Bureau statistics. By 1998, 1.3 million interracial marriages took place, a ninefold increase. These new families are creating a rapidly expanding biracial and mixed-race community. Information culled from the Census Bureau indicates that 7 percent of the population could have claimed mixed ancestry in 1995, say demographers Barry Edmonston, director of Portland State University's Population Research Center, and Jeff Passell, of the Urban Institute, in Washington, D.C. By 2050, they believe, that number may climb to 21 percent. Lise Funderburg, an author who specializes in issues of integration, credits the 1967 Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia for changing attitudes. The decision shattered bans on interracial marriage across the country. Couples started uniting under more positive circumstances, says Funderburg, which affected how their children viewed them. ''The original black-white unions were at best illegal and at worst forcible conditions,'' explains Funderburg, herself the product of an interracial marriage that began in 1955. ''More recently, these are families where the parents love each other, are married, and stay married. ... Why wouldn't you want to identify with both of them?'' That love and mutual respect make new parents more reluctant to define their children within existing rigid racial categories, Funderburg adds. Consider how Penny Wells and Frank Jones, Julia and Cody's parents, guided their children on issues of identity. ''Frank and I both agree,'' explains Wells, 48, seated in her Jamaica Plain dining room as her children look on, ''that she should be Julia Jones and he should be Cody Jones. They shouldn't have labels attached to them, either white or black.'' Parental intervention plays a strong role in helping biracial children develop their sense of self. These informal life lessons teach them how to navigate in a society where strangers strive to fit them into preconceived racial categories and greet their biracial status with such questions as ''What's it like?'' Ashley White-Stern, 17, a junior at Phillips Academy, Andover, was raised in the Jewish faith of her mother. But her black father exposed White-Stern to African-American culture as well. So she had a bat mitzvah at 13 and a year later participated in a rites-of-passage ceremony inspired by African traditions. Last December, she participated in a Kwanzaa celebration at Phillips Academy, then visited old friends taking Hebrew school classes at Temple Israel in Boston. For her, race has never been an issue. ''My parents always told me I was both,'' says White-Stern, who wears her hair in skinny braids that snake past her shoulders. Julia and Cody Jones speak fondly of how their father's guiding hand helped them develop their identities. By the time Cody was 5, Frank Jones, a lawyer, had started talking to him about the struggles he had growing up as a black person in the Mississippi Delta. ''He told me, `People are going to look at you differently''' because of skin color, says Cody, who has the same parchment-paper coloring as his sister. ''That's the best thing he could have done. It helped me deal with the situation when it came up.'' And there were situations, like the time Cody walked into a Charlestown store with three other friends, two black and one white. The clerk asked Cody's white friend, ''What are you doing with these car thieves?'' ''When people look at me they think of me as a black male,'' notes Cody, who defuses such situations with jokes. But he feels more comfortable with blacks, he says, because ''it's reassuring to be with people who have experienced the same thing.'' Last summer, Frank Jones took his family on an ancestral journey that weaved from Memphis to Clarksdale, Miss., where he was raised. They visited the family grave site where years ago Frank Jones buried his father in the rain. ''We had to find them in a swamp,'' says Julia Jones with a roll of her eyes. It was not at all like an earlier trip to England, where the family visited the manicured graves of their mother's ancestors. Such varied experiences give Julia Jones a point of view that mono-racial people don't have, she says. They're the reason why she felt uncomfortable being the only person of color taking ballet and why she didn't identify with the black culture shown on film until she set eyes on ''Waiting to Exhale.'' So for Julia, ''black, white, and Native American'' is a more accurate racial description than black, white, or even ''other.'' ''My views have a twist to them,'' she says. ''They're coming from somewhere totally different than both black people and white people. ''It's a little bit of both.'' >>
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] A rich sense of self Many in new generation of biracial people reject narrow categorizations By Vanessa E. Jones, Globe Staff, 2/29/2000 ody Jones will patiently explain to friends that he's the son of a white mother and black father. But with all the world-weariness a 15-year-old can muster, he'll sigh, ''You are what people think you are,'' a fact that makes him identify more with his father. Now meet his sister Julia Jones, who is less constrained by age-old racial classifications that once compelled people with even one drop of black blood to claim African-American status. When inquiring minds want to know her racial background, she tells them she's black, white, and Native American. ''I don't feel as strong a need to see myself as strictly black,'' explains the 19-year-old Columbia University freshman. Neither does Mikiko Thelwell, the daughter of a Japanese-American mother and Jamaican father who proudly calls herself Afro-Asian. ''How can I consider myself either/or?'' asks Thelwell, 15, a student at Amherst Regional High School. ''Because I don't look either/or and I'm not.'' A new generation of biracial people is refusing to be categorized within the slim confines of black, white, Hispanic, Native American, or Asian/Pacific Islander. Call it the Tiger Woods syndrome, after the golfer who invented the word ''Cablinasian'' to describe his Caucasian, black, Indian, and Asian roots. He's part of an increasing number of cultural role models, from Mariah Carey to Lenny Kravitz, who proudly acknowledge their multifaceted heritages. The force of the change is so strong that when Census 2000 forms hit mailboxes in March, people will for the first time be able to check more than one box for racial identification. But Census officials believe that less than 2 percent of the population will actually do it. ''There still are biracial people who prefer to identify themselves as one race or the other,'' says Pearl Gaskins, who interviewed multiracial youths for her book ''What Are You?: Voices of Mixed-Race Young People,'' published last year. ''But I think there is a growing number of people who feel that that's not adequate for them. They want to define themselves as mixed-race, multiracial, which recognizes the different ethnic and racial backgrounds that they have.'' Among specialists in the field, there is palpable excitement about the effects of widening racial categories in a nation that has long resisted racial and cultural blending. ''It's going to be harder and harder to define people in easily definable ways,'' says G. Reginald Daniel, a sociology professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who has written extensively on the subject. ''It will force us to think twice before we jump to any conclusions about people.'' Powering the change is a rise in interracial marriages as racial boundaries soften and pop culture offers up diverse icons such as Michael Jordan and Jennifer Lopez. In 1960, only 149,000 such unions were reported, according to Census Bureau statistics. By 1998, 1.3 million interracial marriages took place, a ninefold increase. These new families are creating a rapidly expanding biracial and mixed-race community. Information culled from the Census Bureau indicates that 7 percent of the population could have claimed mixed ancestry in 1995, say demographers Barry Edmonston, director of Portland State University's Population Research Center, and Jeff Passell, of the Urban Institute, in Washington, D.C. By 2050, they believe, that number may climb to 21 percent. Lise Funderburg, an author who specializes in issues of integration, credits the 1967 Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia for changing attitudes. The decision shattered bans on interracial marriage across the country. Couples started uniting under more positive circumstances, says Funderburg, which affected how their children viewed them. ''The original black-white unions were at best illegal and at worst forcible conditions,'' explains Funderburg, herself the product of an interracial marriage that began in 1955. ''More recently, these are families where the parents love each other, are married, and stay married. ... Why wouldn't you want to identify with both of them?'' That love and mutual respect make new parents more reluctant to define their children within existing rigid racial categories, Funderburg adds. Consider how Penny Wells and Frank Jones, Julia and Cody's parents, guided their children on issues of identity. ''Frank and I both agree,'' explains Wells, 48, seated in her Jamaica Plain dining room as her children look on, ''that she should be Julia Jones and he should be Cody Jones. They shouldn't have labels attached to them, either white or black.'' Parental intervention plays a strong role in helping biracial children develop their sense of self. These informal life lessons teach them how to navigate in a society where strangers strive to fit them into preconceived racial categories and greet their biracial status with such questions as ''What's it like?'' Ashley White-Stern, 17, a junior at Phillips Academy, Andover, was raised in the Jewish faith of her mother. But her black father exposed White-Stern to African-American culture as well. So she had a bat mitzvah at 13 and a year later participated in a rites-of-passage ceremony inspired by African traditions. Last December, she participated in a Kwanzaa celebration at Phillips Academy, then visited old friends taking Hebrew school classes at Temple Israel in Boston. For her, race has never been an issue. ''My parents always told me I was both,'' says White-Stern, who wears her hair in skinny braids that snake past her shoulders. Julia and Cody Jones speak fondly of how their father's guiding hand helped them develop their identities. By the time Cody was 5, Frank Jones, a lawyer, had started talking to him about the struggles he had growing up as a black person in the Mississippi Delta. ''He told me, `People are going to look at you differently''' because of skin color, says Cody, who has the same parchment-paper coloring as his sister. ''That's the best thing he could have done. It helped me deal with the situation when it came up.'' And there were situations, like the time Cody walked into a Charlestown store with three other friends, two black and one white. The clerk asked Cody's white friend, ''What are you doing with these car thieves?'' ''When people look at me they think of me as a black male,'' notes Cody, who defuses such situations with jokes. But he feels more comfortable with blacks, he says, because ''it's reassuring to be with people who have experienced the same thing.'' Last summer, Frank Jones took his family on an ancestral journey that weaved from Memphis to Clarksdale, Miss., where he was raised. They visited the family grave site where years ago Frank Jones buried his father in the rain. ''We had to find them in a swamp,'' says Julia Jones with a roll of her eyes. It was not at all like an earlier trip to England, where the family visited the manicured graves of their mother's ancestors. Such varied experiences give Julia Jones a point of view that mono-racial people don't have, she says. They're the reason why she felt uncomfortable being the only person of color taking ballet and why she didn't identify with the black culture shown on film until she set eyes on ''Waiting to Exhale.'' So for Julia, ''black, white, and Native American'' is a more accurate racial description than black, white, or even ''other.'' ''My views have a twist to them,'' she says. ''They're coming from somewhere totally different than both black people and white people. ''It's a little bit of both.'' ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Tired of missing calls while online? Now you can surf the Internet without worrying about missing important calls! CallWave's FREE Internet Answering Machine lets you hear who's calling while online. http://click.egroups.com/1/1927/4/_/665758/_/951847729/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Moderator: Jimmy Boy Dial http://www.thespike.com Community email addresses: Post message: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] List owner: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Shortcut URL to this page: http://www.onelist.com/community/The_Spike
