Blurring the lines Blurring the lines Blurring the lines

For most of her young life, Maria Root couldn't escape a certain question. Teachers, friends, their parents, and strangers asked the same thing.

“Where are you from?”

She gladly rattled off her street, city, or some landmark near her home. Some of the time, though, that didn’t seem to sate the inquirer’s curiosity. So she would mention her birth country, the Philippines, a place she couldn’t remember. That usually did the trick. Then other questions would follow: “Is your dad in the military?” or “Are your parents married?”

Root couldn’t help feeling put on the spot because of her “physical ambiguity” of being the offspring of a Filippina mom and a Caucasian dad. “That stings,” she says. “It was always being pointed out that I was different and didn’t fit in anywhere.”

With millions of Americans coming from mixed racial backgrounds, those feelings resonate throughout the land. Long a country that has perceived itself as white, the U.S. is facing a change of stunning magnitude as the number of interracial marriages and children multiplies exponentially.

“Who are we as a people?” Root asks. “The face of America has changed forever.”

Anyone who lives in a large U.S. city probably knows someone who is racially mixed, thanks to the biracial baby boom that began in the 1960s. The presence of racially mixed people is unmatched in our country’s history. Only society hasn’t quite caught up with this fact.

Now an associate professor of American ethnic studies at the University of Washington, Root is asking the questions and seeking answers in her latest book, The Multiracial Experience.

The thrust of her work (this is her second book on the subject) is to recognize people of mixed racial heritage and point out the injustices they’ve faced their entire lives.

This hot-button topic is especially timely as the 2000 census approaches. Currently, biracial and multiracial people do not have a box to check on forms. Being forced to choose only one race “forces us to deny one of our parents,” says Susan Graham, president of Project Race, a Roswell, Ga.-based non-profit organization leading the movement for a multiracial classification. “Multiracial people should have the option of recognizing all of their heritage. Multiracial is important so children have an identity; having to check ‘other’ on a form means they are different, and that is a label no person should have to bear.”

To date, five states (Ohio, Illinois, Georgia, Indiana and Michigan) have passed legislation for multiracial classification. Two other states (North Carolina and Florida) are using the classification as well, and in 1995, the ACT college entrance test added a multiracial category.

The UW does not have a specific box for multiethnic (among its 15 race categories and four Hispanic categories) but students are free to check several boxes. “We prefer to know what ethnic categories if they are multiracial, since telling us only multiracial doesn’t really tell us enough if we are trying to consider diversity in admissions,” explains W.W. “Tim” Washburn, executive director of admissions and records at the UW.

The decision whether to include such a category on the 2000 census will be made by the federal Office of Management and Budget. The 1990 census, by the way, listed 24 race classifications.

“Multiracial individuals no longer can be ignored, nor be alone among Americans in being denied the right of self-identification,” argues Root.

But there is an equally strong argument against such a multiracial listing from some minority groups.

“A multiracial listing would be just like apartheid,” argues Gary Flowers, director of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law, an African-American organization based in Washington, D.C. “If someone checks multiracial, then he is taking away numbers from his own community. That would weaken the African-American community and all it has fought for.” The Hispanic group La Rasa also agrees. The NAACP has not come out against the multiracial listing, though some members individually have expressed opposition.

In any event, there is no getting around the fact that the number of multiracial people is growing.

For instance, a recent survey of the Seattle Public Schools revealed that 20 percent of its students identified themselves as coming from multiracial families—yet there is no checkoff for multiracial children. In 1992, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that for the first time in history, the number of biracial babies is increasing at a faster rate than the number of single-race babies. The number of black/white biracial babies grew nearly 500 percent. Huge increases were also recorded in biracial births of babies to Japanese and white parents, and to Native American and non-Native American parents.

A 1967 Supreme Court decision overturning the remaining state laws against interracial marriage was a symbol of changes in cultural standards. Mildred Jeter, a black/Native American woman, married Perry Loving, a white man, in Virginia in 1958. They were sentenced to one year in prison in 1959 for their interracial marriage.

Over the past 25 years, attitudes towards interracial marriage have changed dramatically. Millions of interracial marriages were noted by the census bureau in 1990. A 1989 Seventeen magazine survey found that 40 percent of the young (and primarily white) women asked indicated that they would date interracially.

Acceptance seems to be creeping in. But that doesn’t mean life is easy for children of mixed parents.

“Growing up in a family where your parents are from two cultures is difficult,” Root explains from personal experience. “You don’t feel like you fit in.” She recalls as a teen-ager, wanting to shave her legs. But her Filippina mother told her she couldn’t because in her native land, only prostitutes shaved their legs. “So I had hairy legs in a place where that wasn’t very acceptable,” Root says.

She recounts being made fun of by other classmates, being showered with the same racial epithets as members of other races (“I was called a nigger, as were other minorities,” she recalls) of having dates broken because boys’ parents couldn’t accept her. Ironically, her father experienced an even worse fate when he decided to marry outside of his race (he is of German, Irish and Scottish descent). He was “cut off” by his father for marrying a non-white person. To this day, Root has never met her grandfather.

“Hatred and bad feelings come out in the most insidious ways,” she says. “They don’t have to be blatant, such as what happened to my father. It could be the questions you get asked, the way you are looked at. As a multiracial person, you have to battle not to internalize stereotypes. My mother worked very hard to teach me to protect myself as a mixed color kid. She never felt embarrassed by how she looked or who we were. And she fought to instill that sense of pride in us.”

Root has taken that lesson a step further, creating a “Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People.” “It puts down on paper what people have been talking about when it comes to race issues,” she says. “It is a tool for discussion.”

Her bill of rights is posted on the Internet, put up on the walls of other organizations, and has been circulated among other groups, such as the International Interracial Association.

“Multiracial people blur the boundaries between the races and don’t fit neatly into a box,” she says. “Questions such as ‘What are you?’ or ‘How did your parents meet?’ or ‘Are your parents married?’ indicate stereotypes that other people use to make meaning out of a multiracial person’s life.

“When we refuse to fragment ourselves or others, then we become capable of embracing the humanity in ourselves and in others. We become less fearful, less judgmental and less subject to defining ourselves by others’ opinions of us.”

The census issue is so critical because federal funding for schools, Medicaid and social services is determined by the numbers generated by the census. If a certain category of people or city, for instance, is undercounted—as is often the case with minorities—then vital support won’t be provided.

But the value of having multiracial people identify themselves goes even further. For example, without accurate racial designations, multiracial children are at risk for improper medical screening for diseases that affect certain racial groups.

Another area of concern is bone marrow transplantation for patients with leukemia and other blood diseases, where the best chance of a match is within the same genetic pool of potential donors. Project Race recently held the first bone marrow drive for multiracial children. Of the huge number of people who were screened, 39 qualified as potential donors. “It was a great response,” says Joy Demas, donor resources coordinator for the National Institutes of Health. “We learned of ancestries we had never heard about before.”

Born in the Philippines to a Filippina schoolteacher mom and white engineer dad, Root encountered many new experiences growing up with her family (she has two brothers)—even in as diverse a place as Los Angeles. She earned degrees at the University of California, Riverside, and Claremont College before coming to the UW in 1979 to work on a doctorate in clinical psychology. She worked at community mental health centers and in private practice, specializing in working with ethnic minorities and diagnosing the damage caused by hostile work environments. She also is a specialist in treating women and addictive disorders.

It was last year, in Hawaii as a visiting professor at the University of Hawaii, where she had a great awakening. “People there are proud of their heritage,” she says. “And they saw there was no value in keeping their ethnic heritage pure. Many Hawaiians are mixed racially but it didn’t matter. Everyone was accepted. In that context, the feeling of being multiracial was so different than what I was used to.” Yet at the University of Hawaii, the culture was entirely different, since almost all the faculty were white and from the mainland, and the vast majority of students were Asian American.

Last year she returned to Seattle and started her new appointment in the Department of American Ethnic Studies. Now, she is working to educate her students—who come from all walks of life—to understand about the changing face of America. “My hope is to sort out and normalize the experience of multiracial people,” she says. “Figure out that they fit in and understand that people don’t want to accept them.

“There is so much to do, and I am not seeking a consensus,” she says. “But I do want people talking about it. It is time for everyone to be aware.”

‘Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People’

Maria Root’s “Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People” is the first time some of these thoughts have been put on paper. “Children of mixed marriages never had anything like this,” she says. “We have had feelings all along but not put into any kind of structure. It gives people something to talk about and feel recognized.”

The Bill of Rights:

I have the right:
-not to justify my existence in this world
-not to keep the races separate within me
-not to be responsible for people’s discomfort with my physical ambiguity
-not to justify my ethnic legitimacy

I have the right:
-to identify myself differently than strangers expect me to identify
-to identify myself differently than how my parents identify me
-to identify myself differently than my brothers and sisters
-to identify myself different in different situations

I have the right:
-to create a vocabulary to communicate about being multiracial
-to change my identity over my lifetime – and more than once
-to have loyalties and identify with more than one group of people
-to freely choose whom I befriend and love

“This is a wonderful statement because it says so much,” says Susan Graham, president of Project Race, a Georgia-based organization leading the movement for a multiracial classification on the 2000 census. As the Caucasian mother of two mixed-race children, it has special meaning to her. “My children have read this bill of rights and they agree with it,” she adds. “Maria Root did something that has been needed for a long time.”

Jon Marmor is associate editor of Columns.