Mocha Girls and a Changing World View

The first thing they noticed when they entered the stadium in Virginia was the sea of black skin--the dark faces, arms and legs of a thousand young athletes from across the country, competing with them in track and field at the National Junior Olympics.

They must have been the only white kids in the place ... at least that’s what it felt like to my daughter’s teammates, part of a local track squad as racially mixed as Southern California itself.

It’s not that it bothered them, the boys told me later. But they did feel a little out of place in a venue with so few white faces. “As if everybody was looking at me,” Ian explained, “wondering, ‘What’s that white boy doing here?”’

They were sharing stories from the meet last week around my kitchen table. The competition was the first time in their lives they’d ever been so distinctly in the minority, and I could not help but chuckle at their naivete. “So you felt on display?” I asked. “Welcome to the club.” Since I moved to the suburbs 15 years ago, I’ve come to know that feeling well.

I uncorked a string of stories of my own: tales of party guests who lapse into Ebonics the minute I join their social circle, and hostesses who take pains to seat me next to the only other black person in the room. I imagine their gestures are well intended, meant to make me feel comfortable among folks not my own. Instead, they only let me know that I must stick out like a sore thumb. “Now,” I told my daughter’s friends, “you see what we feel all the time.”

But my daughter’s rejoinder pulled me up short: “Not we , Mommy. That’s how you feel. That’s not how I feel .... I felt comfortable there, and I feel comfortable here, with my friends. I don’t think people always look at me and say, ‘Oh, she’s black.’ It’s not about race all the time.”

It disappoints me some that after all the struggles my generation waged to craft a cultural identity built on dignity and pride, our children sometimes seem determined to shuck it off and pitch it aside.

But they are growing up with a measure of freedom and a sort of ambiguity I could not have imagined at that age. In the ‘60s in Ohio, where I was raised, the world was viewed through the paradigm of race, and you were either black or white.

Today, one of my white friends has a mixed-race son who belongs to his school’s Multicultural Club. She stopped in at a meeting last spring, “and I couldn’t tell what any of the kids were,” she said. There was a black girl jabbering away in Spanish. The swarthy fellow running the meeting looked to be Latino but was Armenian. And she gave rides home to two friends of her son--a brown-skinned girl with blue eyes and blond hair, and a tall Asian-looking boy named Juan.

My friend grew up in Southern California, “and we always had a mix of kids here,” she said. “But you could always tell what ethnic group they were by the way they dressed or who they hung out with.”

Now, they defy our categorization. There are black kids slinging Spanish slang, Asian girls with their hair in cornrowed braids, white boys bumping rap CDs on the radios in low-rider pickup trucks.

For us, it may be bewildering. For them, it must be liberating. They have forged a youth culture that borrows from every ethnicity and transcends boundaries of race that have been honored through the ages.

Not just in California, but across the country, rates of interracial dating and friendship are soaring. “This is no fringe phenomenon,” writes race scholar Tamar Jacoby, in the June issue of the magazine Commentary. “According to a recent survey, more than 60% of American teenagers have dated someone of another color or ethnic group.”

And forget that old canard against interracial marriage: The children will be shunned by society and mired in racial confusion. Today’s teenagers are more likely to consider their mixed heritage a blessing, one that puts them outside convention and allows them to cross any cultural divide. Still, they recognize that their parents have not yet come around.

When researchers from the University of Michigan visited schools and surveyed teenagers about race, twice as many identified themselves as multiracial as did when they were interviewed later at home with their parents present.

Whether we approve or not, they are intent on creating a future that, if not colorblind, is so colorful, I often feel I should shade my eyes.

“For some people,” Jacoby writes in her essay, “race remains the most important aspect of their identity.” That could be me, and many others of my generation, saddled with the label “minority.”

“But for others,” she says, “it is more like a hobby, what sociologists call ‘symbolic ethnicity.’ ... A matter not of essence but of choices--about belonging, loyalty, cultural affinity and the relative weight they assign to ethnic identity.”

I never imagined that we might “assign” its weight, or that we could ever slip free from the bindings of racial identity. And I’m not sure our children can--or even should. But they are not asking our permission; they are simply growing up in Southern California, amid a cultural panoply that allows--encourages, even--them to pick and choose.

“Where you from?” my daughter was asked in Virginia as she warmed up for her race. “California,” she told the young brother. He and his Texas teammates smiled. “It figures,” he said. “One of those mocha girls.”

And I wonder if they understood all that that implied. And that no matter who won the races that day, mocha girls are leading the way.

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Sandy Banks’ column runs on Sundays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com