I have a cousin who was born in Swaziland (parents were peace corps types with PhDs). He's white, German/Eastern European, Jewish--and African, though that's not his ethnicity, just where he was born. Throws people off, though.
TSQ's comment made me think of something we discussed in graduate school yesterday. Almost all Deaf individuals who are black or Hispanic almost always have been labelled as mental retarded (I know ID is better but that's how it's documented- I don't like the former but..) at one point in their formative years. It has do with cultural and socioeconomic differences that are not accounted for in evalutations I wonder if we removed any documentations of ethnicities like job or school applications or especially Census forms, would it affect education. It may be harder to see issues. I don't know
Whitey McWhitebread here, though I do have a very, very, very tiny amount of Cherokee and possibly Melungeon in my ancestry. I'd have to have a DNA test to find out for sure. But it wouldn't surprise me.
While I will concede that on an individual level, people of mixed heritage may have some unique issues, the larger issue is usually that the mixed individual is seeking to identify with the half of their identity that they do not physically resemble. My whole point about the mixed identity being meaningless is that it ignores the reality that on a very basic level our ethnic identity is determined by how society sees us and less by our genetic makeup. I think of this as the APB test. If one was to commit a crime, how would the witnesses describe you, what would the APB say. One may want to be mixed race, but when the chips are down, you are what you look like. The police don't pull over or hunt down mixed race folk...when they come looking they are looking for a black person or asian or latino. When go for a job interview, what does the person see when you walk in the room? It sort of like the people that get in all a tizzy because President Obama calls himself black instead of mixed. I guarantee that Obama, a man who lived through the 60s and 70s , knew what people saw when he walked in the room. He was a black man, and anything after that was purely academic.
This has not been my experience. I think this is true of some mixed people, but I don't think you really have much understanding of what it is like to be mixed race. I agree, for many there is a personal struggle for identity, but this is hardly the only or primary issue a mixed race individual has to deal with. Another major issue is acceptance, because often mixed people are not accepted by either racial group to which they belong: too white to be brown, too brown to be white is a pretty common and long-documented problem (for simplicity's sake I'm thinking of someone who is primarily a mix of two ethnicities). And since when do all mixed people only resemble one ethnicity? This is partly true, and partly false, and for a lot of mixed people it is much more complicated than that. To use myself as an example, my skin is very, very fair. Cosmic latte, to borrow from Locutus' list of brilliant adjective phrases. My features, on the other hand, are not stereotypically caucasian. Many people see me as white, and my experience in life has been very different to that of my brother, who was much darker than me, and many of my other family members because of this. However, it has still not been a Typical White American Experience. As many people see me as mixed as see me as white. Other American Indians generally seem to know what I am. Actually, most people assume I'm foreign, bizarrely enough. I'm sorry, but this is an ignorant and nasty thing to say. Really fucking disgusting. I don't want anything, I am mixed. And I have known people who wished they weren't mixed because for them it was really hard, it meant exclusion from both their heritages, and active racism from both fronts. I am not going to pretend to any experience I've not had, and I'd never try to downplay the experiences of racism or suppression that other minorities face, but growing up in a mixed race family comes with its own huge set of problems that you are either completely ignorant of or completely discounting. Firstly, not all mixed people are black and white. Each mix comes with its own set of issues. We do tend to follow a rule in this country of perceiving mixed black people as just black, but that rule doesn't follow with most other racial mixes, and so shouldn't be generalized to all mixed people. Secondly, as I touched upon before, when one is mixed one doesn't necessarily look like either of one's heritages. Like I said, people often assume I'm foreign because they don't know what to make of me. Some people just see me as white. Most Indians seem to recognize me as half. When you don't fit neatly into a box you can't base your race on a neat little box. Finally, assuming that the impact of being of mixed heritage is 'purely academic' is pretty damned insulting.
White for me, though I'm a melange of different ethnicities on both sides of my family. Native American (Monacan tribe of Virginia), Italian, German, English, Scotch-Irish. Some of my immediate paternal ancestors looked Native American and took some pretty bigoted flak for it. It's been very fascinating and enjoyable to look into and read about my ancestry.
I am of Northern European descent. 1/2 Swedish, 7/16 Irish and 1/16 Bavarian (there was no Germany when the old boy emigrated).
White. I have pretty much only white in me, a lot of European decent. I am related to Henry 1(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_I_of_England) actually.
That reminds me. You still owe me two pitchers of goat milk. Don't try to pass off any of that Pasteurized cow stuff. I'm hip to your tricks.
Even when someone jokes about it, my head still wants to explode from the Stupid of the raw milk people.
I hear you. I definitely hear you. Ugh....don't get us started! If it's not vaccines it's dairy products. The gullibility never ends.