________________________________________ August 11, 2008 EDITORIAL OBSERVER Contemplations on Being of Mixed Race in America By EDUARDO PORTER As a multiracial and somewhat foreign person I have on occasion found myself on the receiving end of the same kind of unease that many Americans seem to have about Barack Obama’s ambiguous identity. He is either not black enough or too black. His name sounds odd. He had a weird childhood with kids who didn’t speak English. Mr. Obama is not just politically atypical. He is unusual demographically. A recent paper by economists from Harvard, Yale and the University of Chicago said that in 2000 only one in 70 births in the United States came from mixed, black-white parents. In the 1980s it was one in 200. In the 1960s, when Mr. Obama was born, there were virtually none. Black-white teens are so rare today, the researchers argued, that they feel they have to engage in more risky behavior to be accepted by others: drink more, fight more, steal more, do illegal drugs more than either blacks or whites — a pattern of behavior known to social scientists as the “marginal man.” Perhaps this is true. Yet I would suggest that these outcomes say more about the context in which American multiracial kids grow up than about the kids themselves. The United States practices cleanly defined racial slotting. I’m not an avid TV watcher, but when I watch, the black man gets the black woman and whites date whites. I have yet to see an ad with a mixed-race family. Whites marry blacks, but rarely. Over all, 5.7 percent of married couples in 2000 crossed racial boundaries. The American approach to race is unique, in a way. In Brazil, with a history of slavery and racism as brutal as America’s, some 39 percent of the people define themselves as mixed race or “pardos.” By contrast, when the United States census in 2000 first allowed respondents to tick as many racial boxes as they wanted, only 2.4 percent ticked more than one. Never mind that genetic testing suggests a great deal of intermixing between Americans of African and European decent. The son of a tallish, white father from Chicago and a short, brown Mexican mother of European and Indian blood, I’m not the same mix as Obama. As a colleague recently told me, I “read white.” Growing up in Mexico City, where power and skin color correlate at least as well as in the United States, I led a privileged existence. Still, being a mix was never an issue; most of my peers were too. This is not to suggest Mexico has dealt with race any better. Racism just took different forms. European colonizers of modern-day Latin America encouraged the whitening of Indians and blacks. In the century after independence, ethnic loyalties were subsumed under a mixed Mexican identity as a way to merge Europeans and pre-Columbian indigenous nations into a modern Mexican state. Today the Mexican census doesn’t even ask about race, and it only started asking about indigenous ethnicity in 2000. José Vasconcelos, a politician and philosopher, wrote in the 1920s that Mexicans were of the “cosmic race” — that which included all others. Yet Mexico’s state-sanctioned mestizo identity allowed its rulers to ignore its beleaguered indigenous populations — virtually defining them out of existence. In the United States by contrast, racially inspired policies, whether they resulted in Jim Crow laws or affirmative action, fueled an urge to define and redefine hard racial boundaries. Close attention to race has forced uncomfortable issues of racial inequity into public debate, but has also gotten in the way of embracing a blended racial identity. Fortunately, Americans seem to be slowly becoming more comfortable with racial intermingling. Newer immigrant groups with different experiences of race are already chipping away at the racial divide. About 10 percent of Asian Americans ticked two or more race boxes in the 2000 census. More than 15 percent of Hispanics marry non-Hispanics. And Hispanics are so confused about American racial categories that half of them can’t find an appropriate race box on the census form and tick “other race” instead. For all the mistrust of Mr. Obama’s ancestry and ethnicity, he might even help this trend along, allowing blacks and whites to take a fresh look at each other. Then maybe people like me won’t need to engage in extreme behaviors to fit in.