Biracial Identity in America

              While we have had blog posts already about the reception and portrayal of biracial couples and families, I wanted to look a little closer at small part of what it is like to be biracial in America. While I quite liked my topic about race and social media (and may do my last post about it) I felt like I should switch it up. Also, at this point I will not being addressing the specific issues of lighter-skin or "white-passing" privilege or the experience of people who are mixed race without a white parent for this particular post since it is already fairly long. 

             The article Getting Under my Skin by Don Terry is where I started, since I remembered reading it as one of the possible choices for class all those weeks ago. In his article he talks about his experience growing up as a biracial child with a white mother and black father within our countries “obsessed with determining who is white and who is black.”  

(Photo)

He describes a childhood growing up with many other biracial children and families. He was free to identify as half black and half white, even being told by his mother that he had “the best of both worlds.” However, he talks about how as he got older, he faced more and more adversity. The biggest contributor to this seemed to be that while he understood his identity, very few others seemed to as well.He talks about his experiences with people outside of his community and the confusion people seemed to have when he told them about his race. When he went on a trip with his brother (who was fully white), his brother introduced him to a man as simply "his brother" and the other person could not wrap their head around the biological relation. Both black and white people questioned his identity and he found that at times he felt neither "white enough" or "black enough" until getting to college. 

(Getting Under my Skin) 


The issue of being placed into one group or another seems to be a common problem among individuals who are biracial or identify as mixed-race or with multiple ethnic identities. I talked to one of my friends who is half white and half South Asian about it and her thoughts were that "It’s very hard to identify with a culture when people within that culture are often critical of you for ‘not being enough.’ There’s the entire issue of also identifying with more than one culture or being pressured into identifying with only one and that’s a whole different story." 

This feeling is also touched upon by Dr. Philip Brown who states in his work that "Despite the persistent cultural stereotypes depicting the United States as a cultural melting pot, rigid divisions between economic, class, racial, and ethnic groups endure... However, what happens to those individuals whose racial and cultural heritage  is rooted in both White and non-White groups?.. This "dual reality" constitutes the essence of the social and psychological dilemma confronting biracial persons. Moreover, this social paradox creates a lifelong social purgatory in which biracial persons are forced to reside."(1) While he goes on to talk about the special insight that biracial people can acquire through their exposure to more than one culture, there are still many people who wish to question or dismiss the identities of these individuals. 

(photo)

In the case of the biracial twins Kian and Remee, they are referred  to as "the black twin and the white twin" despite that fact that they both have the same parents (both of whom are biracial as well). While both of the girls do not see any issues with their skin color or understanding the  concept of being biracial, there is still a big fuss people make over "the black twin and white twin" and not the individuals of a biracial background that they are.



Sources: 
Terry, Don. "Getting Under My Skin." Nytimes.com. The New York Times, 16 July 2000. Web. 2 Nov. 2014
Anonymous Student 
"Biracial Identity and Social Marginality - Springer." Biracial Identity and Social Marginality - Springer. N.p., 01 Aug. 1990. Web. 02 Nov. 2014.
Rockquemore, Kerry, and David Brunsma. "Beyond Black." Google Books. N.p., n.d. Web. 03 Nov. 2014.

A