SHADES OF BLACK : As U.S. Blacks Embrace a Crazy Quilt of Backgrounds, Their Deepest Roots lie in Culture, Not Color

THE SECOND SUNDAY IN AUGUST IS HOMECOMING AT ST. VAUGHNVILLE Baptist Church in the tiny town of Chappells, S.C. The heat-baked lawn in front of the church overflows with cars, and trails of distant dust announce still more cars making their way down Vaughnville Road. Families wait patiently on the church’s neo-Greek revival porch, as ushers calmly seat newcomers at proper intervals. When the double doors open, music swells through them, and those outside the church are offered a temporary but tantalizing peek at beribboned little girls, women in fabulous hats the colors of sherbet, and erectly postured men in dark suits.

On this day, several empty pews were reserved at the front of the church; they had been held for my family, my mother’s people, who had returned en masse in homage to Fred Grigsby, one of the church’s founders and my great-grandfather. With his wives--Miss Kitty and, after her death, Miss Theresa--he had been one of the rocks upon which Vaughnville had been built.

As we filed behind 82-year-old Howard Grigsby, Fred’s oldest remaining child, the small church’s packed congregation turned in a body and politely looked. Not only were we conspicuous because we were not from these parts, but we also stood out because of our sheer mass (more than three-dozen people had come from our own family reunion, timed to coincide with Vaughnville’s homecoming) and our physical differences. We ranged in hue from dark chocolate to alabaster; some of us had clear tracings of our American Indian ancestors; others looked almost Asian.

A local cousin, newly met, leaned over and whispered to my sister: “Pat, are all these Grigsbys?”

“Yes,” Pat laughed. “Every one of them.”

Contrary to so many stereotypes, the African-American community is the true melting pot of American society, the real version of the mythical one we all were taught about in elementary school. Because of the vagaries of slavery and this country’s ancient insistence that even one drop of black blood defines a person as black, African-Americans have for decades looked like one of Jesse Jackson’s favorite analogies: We are this country’s “Coat of Many Colors.” Or, in my own fond but less reverent metaphor, we are a crazy quilt of ethnicities, features and colors.

Our traditional ability to embrace such a divergent populace is part of our strength. My mother’s people are a perfect example. There is cousin Yvette, who has creamy skin, blue eyes and reddish-blond hair. Born of a black father and a white mother who could not acknowledge her, she was adopted as a baby by my cousin, Portia. Portia’s mother was a descendant of Fred and his first wife, Kitty, and her father came from the union of an American Indian and an African-American. Yvette’s first cousin, Christopher, looks like a Pacific Islander; his younger brother, Sammy, resembles a bronze samurai. Their mom, Hariko, was Japanese; their dad, Sam Sr., is Portia’s baby brother. My sister and I have American Indian and white great-great grandparents on both sides of the family. We confetti-gened descendants of Fred live all over the globe. Virtually all of us define ourselves as African-Americans.

“Why do we only call ourselves black?” I asked my mother, semi-seriously, during the reunion. “If you look at it logically, we’re not just black; not only are there white folks and Native Americans in our family, we know who they are.”

Mother, who has little patience with my “what-if” devil’s advocacies, gave me an exasperated look. “We were raised black, we see ourselves as black and society sees us as black,” she said, with the slow enunciation one uses when explaining fundamental things to small children.

Double-checking, I called Uncle Howard. Howard is so pale that he has not infrequently been mistaken for white--and not just by white folks. His wife, Lucy, once glimpsed his reflection in a mirror and, to her vast amusement, made the same mistake. Despite his pallor (or maybe because of it), Uncle Howard is a definite Race Man, which is why he has always identified with the descendants of Africa. And when I called him to ask him the question I’d posed to my mother, I got essentially the same answer: “Why, we’re black because we are, that’s all.” Blackness, as Howard defines it, isn’t merely a matter of skin color.

Even though his mother, Kitty, had a white father, she considered herself, in the parlance of the times, “colored,” and reared her 11 children the same way. Certainly they were seen as black by larger society: Each of them went to boarding school after third grade, because after that, the state of South Carolina considered the public education of colored children superfluous--especially in rural areas, where black hands could always be used to bring in the crops.

So there was no question in Howard’s mind that, whatever other elements we family members possess, we are black. “And anyway,” he asked affably, “what do you think we are called by white folks when we’re out of the room?”

What we call ourselves, and how larger society defines us, is a the center of an escalating debate within the black community. A new generation of mixed-race children, born of the mid-’60s Summer of Love, when interracial dating and marriage began to increase sharply, is coming of age. In addition, more black people who had considered themselves monoracial are taking a long look at the varied fruit of their family trees and are deciding that multiracial is a more accurate description of them, as well. These trends, coupled with the growing interest in genealogical exploration spurred on by Alex Haley’s “Roots,” has prompted a new push for an official census category for biracial and multiracial people.

Much of the traditional black community looks upon this movement with little patience. Like my mother and Uncle Howard, many feel that if you look black, you are, for practical purposes, black. (It has been estimated that as many as 80% of African-Americans are mixed with something else, usually American Indian.) Your phenotype, a set of physical characteristics based on race or ethnicity, makes you part of the club. And if you have black blood but don’t look black, like Howard, your black ancestors and identification with the black community also make you black.

It sounds complicated, but it’s consistent, according to Itabari Njeri, a contributing editor of this magazine who has written and lectured on multiracial issues for nearly a decade. “Black is not a color; it’s a culture,” Njeri says sharply. “The reality of the New World black experience is this: We are a Creolized culture.” So, Njeri argues, black Americans need to do what Caribbean blacks have done for centuries: acknowledge all the ethnic strains we possess, not merely the ones that are visible to the naked eye.

Not everyone agrees, of course. Elvis Mitchell, a film critic for National Public Radio, scoffs at the idea. He, too, has ancestors who come from places other than Africa--and, he says, so what? “Look, most black people in America, when you get down to it, are some kind of multiracial. But the ones who insist on identifying as that are doing it to move further away from the African part; they’re seeking status as ‘exotique.’ ”

Me? I’m torn. Not about being black--Mother is right: It is indeed how we were raised and how we identify ourselves culturally. But I also see the multiracial proponents’ point: Why should society have the right to define one, simply because of one’s looks? I’m beginning to accept part of their argument. It makes sense to me, for example, that the children of interracial marriages define themselves as multiracial. For them, such a category is a psychological comfort that allows them to officially embrace both parents, both sides of a well-defined family tree. But I’m still grappling with extending the concept to those adults who, like me and many others, may have some blood other than African running through our veins.

THE AFRICAN PART OF OUR HERITAGE IS, FOR MANY OF US, THE MOST VISIBLE, the bedrock. It’s what influences all the rest, and it determines, to a large degree, where we stand in American society. “Black” and “second class” are not yet viewed as oxymorons to most Americans, and because of that, our community has struggled--often against tremendous resistance--to level a decidedly uneven playing field. So when the notion of a multiracial New World Order is broached to politically attuned African-Americans, the atavistic bogyman of caste comes screaming out of the past. Angry, hurtful memories of brown-bag parties (where, if one was darker than the bag tacked at the door, one would be denied entry) and blue-vein clubs (only those pale enough for their veins to show would be candidates for admission) raise immediate anxieties. And resentments.

However, while many African-Americans agree--in theory--that there is no reason to let white society define who and what we are, we worry about the practical application of such a revision, and the dangers of slipping into a caste system based on color. “I have seen Haiti, and I know how the class of mixed-race people there behave toward black Haitians,” declared a man at a conference of mixed-race individuals. “I would hate to see that happen here.”

Perhaps he should have said he’d hate for this to happen here again , since the United States has always had at least one highly visible community of mixed-race individuals. Anyone familiar with Creole history knows that Southern Louisiana is full of families who claim French, Spanish and American Indian blood along with their African ancestry. As a French colony, Louisiana established assiduously fine gradations--quadroons, octaroons--that determined exactly how black one was. Eventually, that led to a system of special privileges that were accorded lighter-skinned people. That kind of pigmentocracy is a part of our history that most of us would not like to repeat.

It will take a lot of effort to construct a new and more just paradigm. Given the traditional global order, says Halford Fairchild, a social psychologist who will be teaching psychology and black studies at Pitzer College this fall, “with Africans and African-Americans, you’re dealing with people who have been placed at the bottom of the hierarchical order. The racialization of this country took at least 300 years; it may take that long to undo.”

The multiracial movement, Fairchild says, “is people reacting to the myth of racial classification and attempting to redefine themselves in much less rigid terms.” Black anxiety over “Creolization” is legitimate--if the new order is a vertical, rather than a horizontal one. “In the traditional racial hierarchy,” he explains, “a mixed-race person might be viewed as superior to a black person, because (white) society tacitly implies that the more white blood you have, the better.”

Fairchild has more than an academic interest in the subject; his parents are African-American and Asian-American, and it took him a while to find a label that made him comfortable. “I was in my 20s, in grad school, when I decided to define myself as an African-Asian-American. Before that,” he admits, “I was just searching.” Fairchild, who is editor of Psych Discourse, the journal of the Assn. of Black Psychologists, learned long ago to winnow the multiple questions of the curious (Where were you born? Where were your parents born?) down to the question people really wanted answered: “What are you, anyway--Chicano, black, Eskimo, Polynesian--what?” Childhood playmates, he says quietly, “gave me a much harsher introduction to the imperative of racial classification. When you’re a kid, just to be different is a reason to be castigated--and ostracized.”

That, says G. Reginald Daniel, who lectures in African-American and Latin American studies at UCLA and in sociology at UC Santa Barbara, is exactly why racial categories should be expunged. Daniel, who lived in Brazil while on a Fulbright scholarship, teaches a class on how the evolution of that country’s race relations compares with our own. While Brazil is frequently touted as a race-neutral utopia, Daniel knows better. There, as in other Latino cultures, questions of how groups will be categorized (and treated) have frequently, if sometimes tacitly, arisen. “You have a pervasive African ancestry in Brazil, but there is nonetheless a stigma attached to visible African appearance,” he explains. Rarely does one see African-appearing salespeople in the tony shops in the Copacabana district or dark office managers. “ ‘The Cosby Show’ would have been an anomaly. There are no Baldwin Hills, Windsor Hills or Ladera Heights in Brazil,” he says.

He notes that “every country has its way of dealing with diversity, but we are the only country that uses that ‘one-drop’ rule.” The mandate’s original definition was oppressive: White slaveholders decided that even one drop of black blood made a person black, and that children of the unions with black women usually went unacknowledged by mainstream society, which preferred to lose them in a convenient social oblivion.

Eventually though, Daniel says, the rule served to galvanize the consciousness of the black community and was used as a way of embracing all the arms of the African diaspora: “The ‘one drop’ rule is now based on a commonality, a sense of community.”

But to some people, that argument just doesn’t make sense, and Susan Graham, executive director of Project Race, an advocacy program started in Atlanta, is one of them. “It’s important for children to be able to say they belong,” she says, “and biracial and multiracial children need that, too. That’s why our project is pushing to have a multiracial category added to the public school system. I’m white and my husband is black, and my son and daughter are both; that should be recognized.” Graham will testify this summer before a House subcommittee that is studying adding a multiracial category to the U.S. Census.

Candy Mills is publisher of Interrace, a Beverly Hills-based monthly magazine that focuses on interracial and mixed-race concerns. She describes herself as “black Indian” and, like Graham, is part of an interracial marriage. “My children are black and white and Indian,” she says, and adamantly refuses to have them categorized as any one thing. Except, perhaps, multiracial, which acknowledges all things.

To many blacks, Mills sounds like someone who has fallen for Mitchell’s “exotique” theory, and thus has separated herself from the larger black community. Mills doesn’t care. “I cannot be bothered with other people’s ignorance,” she says. “This isn’t about not wanting to be black. This is about not letting anybody--including black people--tell me who or what I am.”

But defining people as multiracial, says Charles B. Stewart, chief deputy to state Sen. Diane Watson, would almost certainly dilute whatever numbers-based gains the black community has made to date. “Today there are few affirmatives in being designated black,” he says, “but we’ve paid the historical price for that designation, and we have a right and the need to claim those numbers.” (How those numbers are gathered varies widely. The modern census is largely self-defining, requiring one to identify oneself by age, ethnicity and several other factors for purposes of charting America’s demographic profile. California agencies differ in how they effect racial identification. Some maintain no race counts at all.)

Since society imposes racial designations upon us, Stewart argues, it is not illogical to assume that people with features bearing obvious traces of African ancestry who refuse to acknowledge any African heritage are trying to escape that part of their ethnicity. Some psychologists concur: Sandra Cox, a therapist in Los Angeles, sees such denials as “pathological.” Even people who are not mental-health professionals consider such self-identification, at best, naive. “They can call themselves multiracial if they want,” one friend sniffed, “but when the LAPD pulls you over, they don’t treat you different because you say you’re multiracial. To most of them, we’re all niggers.”

THE VERY CONCEPT OF multiracialism with an African strain makes many people jumpy, for if there are individuals who are black -looking and multiracial, then, obviously, they have to be mixed with black and something else. Frequently, that something else is white, which means that there are a lot of multiracial white -looking Americans, too, who aren’t aware of it--or who choose not to acknowledge it.

San Francisco psychiatrist Katrina Peters, an African-American who specializes in cross-cultural psychiatry, believes that America’s preoccupation with race stems from its inability to admit that slavery’s legacy extends well beyond the black community. We will not, Peters says, deconstruct our thorny race relations until we “deal with and acknowledge the past. Just like people who have had an alcoholic or an abusive parent, facing up to the truth is the first step.”

But some things are hard to face--like the probability that Thomas Jefferson had several children with his black slave, Sally Hemings--children who, by laws he helped draft, were considered black. And chattel.

When I visited Monticello in the early ‘80s, the tour guides politely pretended not to hear questions about Hemings, just as it took decades for the august Mount Vernon Ladies’ Historical Society to acknowledge that George Washington’s estate did, indeed, contain slave quarters. (Washington’s slaves were freed after his death; Jefferson’s weren’t, except for five, of whom two--strange coincidence, this--were Sally Hemings’ children.) History books tell us that Alexander Hamilton was born on the small Caribbean island of Nevis, to a half-white mother. “What they conveniently forget to mention,” laughs a friend with family on the island, “is that her other half was black. It’s accepted fact in the islands, but not here.” It is the inability of many white Americans to admit that such unions occurred (obviously they did; many black photo albums, including mine, attest to it) that has many of us happy to identify as black, not multiracial.

An editor at a Western newspaper laughs when I ask if she considers herself multiracial. “No, child!” she says emphatically. “That white didn’t get there by choice.” That many of us are descendants of unions imbued with distinct power inequities has made acknowledging the white component much less compelling. Itabari Njeri agrees that much of our diversity “was raped into us.” But when blacks refuse to admit that we have white blood in us, that’s “like blaming the victim. We didn’t do the raping. It’s not our fault white blood is there. And it’s part of us. We should say so.”

But it’s common for African-Americans to ignore their white ancestry, says Los Angeles author Bebe Moore Campbell, whose recent novel, “Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine,” explores how racism affects two families, one black, one white, through several generations. That, she says, seconding Njeri, is because such unions were not always mutually desired--and often went unacknowledged by the white parent. “We hear a lot about black fathers who shirk their responsibilities to their families, but the first deadbeat dads in this country were white slave owners, most of whom didn’t honor or care for their children.”

The dilemma of the Tragic Mulatto--the light-skinned, keen-featured black person who longs to be recognized as white by mainstream society--has a hallowed place in America cinema. Black actress Fredi Washington, as the tortured Peola in “Imitation of Life,” and Jeanne Crain, as a white passing as a black passing as white in “Pinky,” are two prominent examples. “I hate the tragic mulatto stereotype,” Moore Campbell says. Which is why her biracial heroine, Ida, eventually discovers the identity of her white father. “I wanted a strong biracial character who got what she fought for”--in this case, her share of a considerable patrimony.

Moore Campbell feels that “people should be whatever they want to be, if that makes them happy” but acknowledges a thin line between claiming your complete ancestry and hating being black.

And because society insists that black-looking multiracial people identify as black, those who don’t are exposed to charges of self-hatred. Most, like Santa Monica playwright Velina Hasu Houston, whose mother is Japanese and whose father is African-American and American Indian, retort that this is not so. They cite instances in which they have felt discriminated against by African-Americans simply because they demand that all, not merely a part, of their ancestry be acknowledged. “I live in a no-passing zone,” Houston says. “I’m African, Asian and Native American, and I refuse to be categorized as just one; I’m all three.” Houston says she has been assailed by both African-Americans and Asian-Americans for declining to count herself solely among their numbers. She doesn’t give in to such pressure “because they’re not coming to me out of a feeling of fraternal or sororal love; they’re doing it because they want me as a number, and I will not be a number. For anybody.”

Like Hal Fairchild, Houston has painful memories of being tormented by black peers who were uncomfortable with how different she looked from them. Once, while walking down a street with Amerasian junior high school classmates, she had her ponytail summarily chopped off by a group of black girls who may have taken offense at the swing of her long, straightish hair.

IT WILL BE NO SMALL CHALLENGE to bridge the African-American and multiracial communities; the foundation for such bridgework will have to be based on empathy, or at least sympathy. The reaching-out will have to be mutual, careful and probably simultaneous. We must “learn from the lessons of history,” says Charles Stewart, “and not revisit upon these people the injustices that society has already visited upon us. We need to acknowledge a new identity for mixed-race persons at a cultural level but continue to insist upon the political designation of African-American.”

Times are changing. Some African-Americans are cautiously starting to explore the other components of their ancestry while remaining politically tied to the black community. One is Linda Villarosa, a senior editor at Essence magazine. Villarosa--whose father is Latino, African-American and American Indian and whose mother is African-American--says she and her sister for many years did not use the Spanish pronunciation of their last name. “For a long time when people asked what I was, I would say, ‘Black, period!’ But eventually I realized that not acknowledging the other things in me would almost be a backlash against those parts, and I’m not ashamed of them either. Now when people ask, I tell them I’m black and Hispanic and Native American. The deepest part of me identifies as black, but by pronouncing our surname the Spanish way, my sister and I can pay homage to those ancestors, too.”

I suspect that when--if--we ever reach a point where race is a neutral factor in how we are seen as individuals, when one’s color is no more potent than one’s choice of perfume, then the need for a multiracial category will probably be met with less suspicion. Until then, given this country’s history, I will have a hard time using the label multiracial to describe people with two black parents but varied ancestry. Race is still too salient a part of our national being, and it doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

More than likely, years will pass before the potency of race is mitigated to the point that it no longer affects how we all interact. The national deficit, says Katrina Peters, “is not the only thing this country is in denial about. Racism is, to borrow Ross Perot’s analogy, the other crazy aunt locked in the attic.” As W. E. B. DuBois pointed out in 1903, “the problem of the 20th Century is the problem of the color line.” Unless we begin the serious, ineluctable work of untying the Gordian knot of race, it may be the problem of the 21st Century, as well.

The movement for multiracial pride will become valid for me when the admission of our multiracial history cuts both ways. When, as Elvis Mitchell believes, the white guy who runs the hardware store in Muncie, Ind., can casually admit to having a little African in him, we will have arrived at a significant social moment. Until then, all is merely dialogue (which may have its own value). Too many African-Americans sacrificed too much so I could evolve as I have for me to wish to be anything but black. It is the culture that has nurtured, supported and protected me. It is my heart’s home.