The Brown Girl World

About Yayoi

Yayoi Lena Winfrey is a freelance writer, filmmaker and visual artist. Besides her weekly blog, Yayoi designs t-shirts to support her film.

Half and Half: The New Race Politics

By Yayoi Lena Winfrey

Recently, I was made aware of a growing conflict between two groups of multiracial people. One is the FGM, or first generation multi-racials - people who can point to one parent being white and the other, black. Pitted against them are MGM's, or multigenerational multi-racials.

Actress Halle Berry is considered to be FGM because we can see that her mother is Caucasian, and her father - even though I've never viewed his photo - is African American. On the other hand, actress Vanessa L. Williams is considered MGM. Both of her parents are deemed black, although Ms. Williams' light skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes would indicate that race mixing with Europeans lurks in her background.

So, why can't we all get along? Because while FGM's are considered biracial in the new race politics that acknowledges multiracial people, MGM's are still labeled as "high yellow blacks". If you're familiar with the slavery of Africans in America for the past 500 years, you know that various skin shades determined whether a slave was assigned to hard field labor, had a chance to buy his or her freedom, was allowed to keep a child fathered by a white slave-master, become educated, or even pass for white at the expense of shunning his or her black brothers and sisters. In short, it all came down to how much black blood flowed through a black person's veins. In so many ways, we are still dismantling that abhorrent practice of the One Drop Rule.

These days, there are various multiracial organizations supporting those who want to claim a dual racial identity. A lot of those groups exist on college campuses to help students who claim a biracial heritage. But what about those who don't fit neatly into one mixed-race category or another? Or, like MGM's, not allowed to claim that they are multiracial?

Even among mixed-race folks, there's preferential treatment. When people call someone biracial, they almost always mean that person is half black and half white. Every article I've read points to President Obama with a white mother and Kenyan father as an example of a biracial person; that is, whenever they aren't busy calling him the first black president.

Meanwhile, the term hapa seems to be applied to only those who are half Asian and half white. In actuality, hapa is the Hawai'ian mispronunciation of the English word half. The first race mixing in Hawai'i occurred between Native Hawai'ians (Polynesians) and Europeans. Those offspring were called hapa haole. Haole simply means "no ha, or no sacred breath." Ole means nothing. The first Europeans, unaware of the local custom of showing respect by bowing before the Hawai'ian king and expelling their last breath, were called ha-ole. Today, haole has devolved into a derogatory term reserved for whites, but it started out being just a description.

Not long ago, a Japanese and African American woman (like me) reported that a white friend informed her that she wasn't really mixed. His rationale was that those who are of two minority races add up to being just one minority. About ten years ago, when I first began writing extensively about biracial issues, a young Filipina and black woman told me that those with no bloodlines tied to whites will never have a voice in the new politics of dual racial identity. According to her, whites as the dominant majority are only interested in those who are part of their tribe, while we double minorities are relegated to the back of the biracial bus.

So far, we've had only one Census (in 2000) that allowed biracial people to choose more than one race. Up until then, all my life in fact, I have been allowed to pick only one side of myself even though I feel both equally. In 2010, we'll have a chance to express both our racial heritages again. It will be interesting to see where the new race politics will lead: hopefully, to a greater understanding of humankind.