http://www.newswise.com/articles/biracial-and-passing-as-black
This kind of dark, dense human symbology( in which social scientists use the examples of a few to make broad, sweeping statements on many) not only does absolutely nothing constructive for race relations, it's spits in the face of people who's experiences might have been different; as well as ignore the whites who love or have loved another person of another race, and have paid dearly for it.
When you deny someone their reality-when you tell them " your experiences didn't happen. your life isn't real because this other person lived their life this way"- you are going to get a visceral reaction. I can tell you many things about my experience with a " white" mother and a "black" father, but most of all I can tell you that my opinion about the subject and how other biracial people should/shouldn't handle it STOPS AT MY NOSE. Not everyone had my family dynamics, and I cant make judgments on anyone experience, because I haven't been in their shoes.
What I resent about the study is that, like every other dammed article written by someone about being mixed in America, it's written by someone who wants to make judgments about mine. Just as that I haven't walked in the shoes of the subjects Khanna has studied, Khanna damm sure hasn't walked in my 11 1/2 wingtips(And Damm sure hadn't walked in my mothers shoes, or the shoes of any "white" person who has actually, truly loved a "black" person and found out that a great deal of the population doesn't treat them with smiles and sunshine; who actually get abused by people who consider them to be "race traitors" or "nigger lovers"; who are disowned by their families simply for the fact they they love who they want to love.)
Again, my experience is my own, and my mothers experience is her own. Others may not have had the support system that my mother had with my fathers' family, and the community in hilltop. Others might have had the "white" side of their family be open to them, and experienced constructive familial relationships. Others might not have experienced the racism I got being bused to and living in university place. I also had other experiences: I went back to college in Bellingham and met some of the most wonderful people I have ever met; people who just happened to be "white". I also got called an uncle tom by "professional" Afrocentric student militants more times in my first two years back in school, than I ever did in my first 23 years in an entire neighborhood in Tacoma. But I repeat, those experiences are mine, and for me to project them every "biracial" person would just adding mote in the disgusting rolling dirt ball in race relations in America.
What I am sick of, however, is having the same batch of stereotyped projections being projected on myself-of me being benighted by my genealogy, all "whites" being beacons of liberal tolerance, all "blacks" ready and willin to throw me out the tribe and cook my momma in a pot, and the only thing for me to do is embrace my benightedness and prove that I am tolerant and post racial by...disowning and being intolerant of my "black" ancestry, ignoring the fluidity of human experience, and putting myself in a "black" free box that says "biracial". Forgive me if that box, like all boxes, seems like a prison.
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