By ANNA HOLMES FEB. 10, 2018, New York Times (Original article contains additional illustrations, and links).
Image from article
When I was in my early 30s, I started making a list of every child I could think of
who had a black parent and a white parent and was born between 1960 and the mid- to
late 1980s. It was a collection of people like me, who grew up and came of age
after the Supreme Court decision in 1967 that overturned the laws in more than a
dozen states that outlawed interracial marriage.
I was thinking of people I knew or had heard of, so of course the list included
actors like Tracee Ellis Ross (born 1972) and Rashida Jones (1976); athletes like
Derek Jeter (1974) and Jason Kidd (1973); singers like Mariah Carey (1969) and
Alicia Keys (1981); and, eventually, politicians and public servants like Adrian Fenty
(1970) and Ben Jealous (1973).
It occurred to me, looking at the names I’d gathered, that what I was making
was not just a snapshot of a particular generation but an accounting of some of the
most notable, successful, widely recognized black people in American public life —
cultural, political, intellectual, academic, athletic.
It made sense: The people I could think of were the people who were the most
publicly visible. But what did it mean about race and opportunity in the United
States that many of the most celebrated black people in American cultural life in the
late 20th and early 21st centuries happened to have been born to one white parent?
What if my and my cohort’s achievements as African-Americans, especially in fields
to which we historically had little access, were more about how we benefited from
having one white parent in a racist society than our hard work?
My parents were married on Valentine’s Day in 1969. I was born in 1973, six
years after the Supreme Court’s decision in Loving v. Virginia. That history — the
Virginia couple, Richard and Mildred Loving, were arrested in 1958 and put in jail
for the crime of miscegenation — wasn’t something I learned about in school, even in
my highly educated, middle-class California college town, the one with the great
public schools and the proudly liberal politics. I don’t think my parents ever
mentioned it either, though if they did, I probably tuned it out. I found their
discussions of American and world history as dry and boring as the news programs
they watched on PBS in the evening, which is to say: I was too busy being a kid to
think too much about how I had become one in the first place.
But my sister and I are a direct result of what came in the two decades after
Loving: an increase in the number of interracial marriages and a spike in the number
of births of American children born to one black parent and one white parent, an
entire generation of kids whose very existence symbolized racial progress for some,
cultural impurity for others.
According to Nicholas Jones, director of race and ethnic research and outreach in
the population division of the Census Bureau, in the 1970s there were about 65,000
black-white couples in the United States. By the 1980s, a little over a decade after
Loving, that number had doubled, to 120,000.
Mr. Jones points out that it’s difficult to measure the exact number of children
born to these couples, because the census does not ask for the race or races of one’s
parents. But it’s reasonable to assume that post-Loving, there was an uptick in births
of kids like me — with one black parent and one white — people some call the
“Loving Generation.” Mr. Jones should know this generation. In addition to
analyzing data about racial reporting patterns and demographic trends at the Census
Bureau for the past 18 years, Nicholas Jones, born in the early 1970s to an Irish-German
woman and an African-American man, is in my cohort.
There’s an adage that to succeed, black people have to be “twice as good”: twice
as gifted and smart, twice as hard-working, twice as … everything.
How does having one white parent change that “twice as good” calculation?
Data on biracial people is tricky because it relies on self-reported identity. But my
early inquiries into the Loving Generation showed that people with one black-identified
and one white-identified parent seem to be disproportionately represented
among black leaders and luminaries. Are our achievements impossible to separate
from the benefits that, in this country, have always come with whiteness?
Of course, to be a black American is to be, by definition, mixed: According to a
study released in 2014, 24 percent of the genetic makeup of self-identified African-Americans
is of European origin. Colorism, which places black people in an
uncodified but nevertheless very real hierarchy, with the lighter-skinned among us at
the top, was a fact of American life long before Loving v. Virginia. Light-skinned
black Americans, even those with two black parents, have, for centuries, been
considered to be closer to white people, closer to white ideals about, well, most
everything.
Sometimes, when I looked at the list I had made, it seemed entirely possible that
our direct connection to whiteness — through immediate and extended family — had
contributed to a certain familiarity with, and therefore accessibility to, the white
norms, traditions and power structures that so many of us depend on for
opportunity and success. The common denominator in the Loving Generation wasn’t
necessarily so much white proximity as white acceptance and, in many cases, familial
love and close connection to white people. It seemed as if this could indeed have
created real opportunities for us. It’s likely, for example, that Barack Obama was able
to imagine himself as president not just because he saw himself reflected in the white
people around him, but because they saw themselves reflected in him.
About President Obama. Though I made that first “Loving” list before I’d ever
heard of him, if you had told me back in 2003 that the United States would soon
have a black president and that president would be the son of a white woman, I
wouldn’t have batted an eyelash. Mr. Obama, born in 1961, is at the leading edge of
the “generation” I was looking to define, and the journey that led to his becoming the
first black president was impossible to separate from his adjacency to whiteness. Ta-Nehisi
Coates probably put it best in his January 2017 Atlantic magazine article “My
President Was Black.” He explained how Mr. Obama’s direct connection to, and
intimate familiarity with, white people — his mother, Ann Dunham, and her parents
— helped fuel his sense of possibility, of not only who and what he could be but also
what he could mean to others.
“The first white people he ever knew, the ones who raised him, were decent in a
way that few black people of that era experienced,” Mr. Coates wrote.“Obama’s early
positive interactions with his white family members gave him a fundamentally
different outlook toward the wider world than most blacks of the 1960s had.” He also
noted that Mr. Obama’s lens, “born of literally relating to whites, allowed Obama to
imagine that he could be the country’s first black president.”
There are other firsts within the Loving generation. Like Halle Berry (1966), the
first black woman to win a best actress Oscar. And Amy DuBois Barnett (1974), the
first black woman to run a major mainstream consumer magazine. And Jordan Peele
(1979), the first black writer-director to make a movie that earned more than $100
million at the box office on its debut weekend. And let’s not forget Meghan Markle
(1981), who is about to become the first black British royal (of the 21st century, that
is).
I used to wonder whether people like Ms. Berry, or others in my particular and
uniquely American generation, had ever made this specific observation, and been
disturbed by it. It was a lot to come to terms with. I knew, even as a young adult, that
I moved among and around white people with relative ease, in a way that my
blackness — and my own perception and self-consciousness of it — wasn’t at the
foreground. What I didn’t know is whether that had something, or everything, to do
with what I’d accomplished.
Turns out, I was not alone. Erin Cloud, a public defender in the South Bronx,
has similar concerns. “At my job, there’s actually a lot of biracial people that are in
more leadership opportunities, and I think about that. I’m like, ‘Well, is that because
there’s something about their whiteness and our whiteness that is giving us space to
communicate and that’s why we’re getting promotions and why we’re moving
forward?” she said. “I am a black woman. I see myself as a black woman, but I also
have to be honest. I love my mother. I can’t say for many of my black friends that
they deeply, intimately, without any bounds love a white person.”
Ms. Cloud was born to a black man and a white woman who met in the late
1970s while the latter was attending Morgan State University, a historically black
college. Erin came along in 1983. She is one of more than a dozen participants in a
new documentary series called “The Loving Generation,” which I executive produced
for the website Topic with Ezra Edelman (1974). It’s directed by Lacey Schwartz
(1977), a filmmaker who explored her own black and biracial identity in the 2014
documentary feature “Little White Lie,” and Mehret Mandefro.
Mat Johnson, who wrote the 2015 novel “Loving Day” and is the son of a black
mother and a white father, was also interviewed for the documentary. Though he is
quick to acknowledge that members of our generation enjoy access to elements of
white privilege — what he calls “off-white adjacency” — he explains it’s important to
take other factors into consideration when considering the successes of the Loving
generation, namely economic class and the outsider-overachiever dynamic.
“Particularly with those of us who are black-identified, we get into the mode of trying
to overcompensate to fit in and be accepted,” he told me.
But after you’re accepted, then what? What does it mean that many prominent
self-identified black people in America today were born to a white parent? Did Halle
Berry pave the way for another black woman to win a best actress Oscar, or for
another black woman who also happens to have a white parent? Beyond the
continued question of colorism, what does this all mean for the next generation, the
next crop of American power brokers, black or mixed or otherwise?
The writer and activist Rebecca Walker (1969) told “The Loving Generation”
director Lacey Schwartz last month that she believes biracial and mixed-race fluidity
has led to significant cultural and political contributions. “Our ability to see things
from so many different perspectives has really been a boon for this culture,” she said.
She wonders, however, what the return is — that is, where do we go from here?
I wonder this too, and how — or if — “off-white adjacency” can be talked about
in a way that acknowledges the experiences of those in my generation without
seeming to mythologize or aggrandize them. I want to be able to celebrate the fact
that the interracial marriages in which we were created represent a blow to legalized
racism, and still grapple with the ways in which anti-black bias may have benefited
us.
“Even having this discussion opens up all these other questions about our
responsibility,” Mat Johnson told me. “If we are a segment of the African-American
population that has access to power and privilege, what does it mean ethically to live
that life?” For his part, Mr. Johnson said, it means making a sustained effort not just
to acknowledge his privileges but to use them to help those not similarly situated. He
paused, then added, “I think it’s valid to point this out even if it’s uncomfortable.”
Believe me, it is.
Anna Holmes is the editorial director of Topic.com, which is part of Topic Studios, and
the founder of Jezebel.
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