I don't normally like the daily mail, but...

An interesting and revealing article on an English mother's perspective of having a mixed race child. (The guardian version of the article is below, as well as another).

'I love my mixed race baby - but why does she feel so alien?'by LOWRI TURNER
Last updated at 16:46 13 July 2007

"She's getting very dark, isn't she?" This is what one of my friends recently said about my much adored - 12-week-old daughter.
She didn't mean to be rude. But it was a comment that struck me with the force of a jab to the stomach.
Immediately, I was overwhelmed by a confusion of emotions. I felt protective, insulted, worried, ashamed, guilty, all at once. The reason? My lovely, wriggly, smiley baby is mixed race.
Now, I think of myself as pretty 'right on'. My home is on the border of the London Republic of Hackney. I've been to the Notting Hill Carnival, even if I found the music a bit loud. Yet now I realise what a 'white' world I inhabit.
I am white and I have two sons from my first marriage who are both milky complexioned and golden haired. My twin sister, who I spend a lot of time with, has a Danish partner. As a consequence, she has two boys who are also pale skinned and flaxen haired.
Into this positively Scandinavian next generation, I have now injected a tiny, dark-skinned, dark-haired girl. To say she stands out is an understatement.
My colouring and that of my children has never really been an issue before. However, three years ago I met the man who became my second husband and who is the father of my daughter.
Although born in the UK, his parents came from India in the Sixties. This makes him British-Asian and our daughter mixed race.
There is another more PC term for the plump little bundle I strap to my front. She is 'dual heritage'. It's a bit trendy, but I quite like it. It implies a pride in coming from two cultures, rather than the less attractive connotations of 'mixed race'.
The usual time something is labelled 'mixed' is when it's a packet of nuts and they've bulked out the luxury cashews with cheaper peanuts. I'm not sure I want my daughter to be regarded as an adulterated version of some pure original. Still, it is the most accepted description.
The truth is, whatever the label, the fact there is a label proves that my daughter's conflicting parentage matters.
At the more frothy end of the scale, mixed-race children are regarded as pretty dolls ? white kids with a nice tan.
When I was pregnant and people asked me about the child I was having, and I explained her father was Indian, they would often coo something along the lines of: "Ooh, she's going to be beautiful!" as if I was discussing a new rose, made from an exotic cross-breeding programme.
On a less benevolent level, mixed-race children can receive a hostile welcome from both white and black communities. Being neither one thing nor another may get you on the cover of Vogue, but it isn't an easy way to make friends

But this is 2007, surely things are more enlightened than that? I hope so, but I fear not.
One reason for my fear is my own mixed reactions to my daughter. Don't get me wrong, I love her. She is the child I didn't think I'd have after my first marriage broke up. She is the only granddaughter in our family and we all dote on her.
But when I turn to the mirror in my bedroom to admire us together, I am shocked. She seems so alien. With her long, dark eyelashes and shiny, dark brown hair, she doesn't look anything like me.
I know that concentrating on how my daughter looks is shallow. She is a person in her own right, not an accessory to me. But still, I can't shake off the feeling of unease.
I didn't realise how much her looking different would matter and, on a rational level, I know it shouldn't. But it does.
Evolution demands that we have children to pass on our genes, hence the sense of pride and validation we get when we see our features reappearing in the next generation.
With my daughter, I don't have that. Do black fathers who marry white women and then have paler-skinned children feel my sense of loss? Or maybe Chinese mothers or Middle-Eastern grandparents grieve when they see a child they know to be their own, but whose features don't reflect that?
I worry that, as my daughter doesn't look like me, people will assume she is adopted. After all, it's all the rage in showbiz circles.
Madonna famously scooped up a black child when she wanted to be a mother again and Angelina Jolie appears to be assembling a 'pick 'n' mix' of kids from different countries. It's all very United Colours of Benetton, isn't it?
In the real world, I fear for my daughter's sense of self. She has a tiny foot in two cultures. How will she negotiate a path between the two? I worry that my sons will feel less of a kinship with their sister because she is different, although there is no sign of that.
As for myself, there is an inescapable status issue to address. White women who have non-white children are stigmatised as 'Tracy Towerblocks' living on benefits, most of which they spend on lager and fags.
Even if I don't fit this profile, my daughter's difference definitely points out the fact that my children come from two different fathers.
If I wanted to pass us off as a nice, neat nuclear family, she would blow my cover at once.
But it is more than that. I am frightened, frightened of others' reactions to her, as well as my own. I didn't think of myself as racist and yet my daughter has shown me a side of myself about which I feel deeply uncomfortable.
Even admitting to having mixed feelings about her not being blonde and blue eyed, I feel disloyal and incredibly guilty.
I know the obvious comment is that I must have known how a child of our union would look when I married an Indian man, but it is a wise woman who thinks that far ahead when she falls in love.
I didn't think about any of this before I got pregnant. I wanted to have a baby. Her colour and culture were immaterial then.
But self-flagellation is not useful. I have more pressing concerns. I am now the mother of a 'black' child, even if she is more the hue of weak tea than espresso.
This is a role for which I am utterly unprepared. Part of me thinks I should be playing sitar music to her in her cot, mastering pakoras and serving them dressed in a sari, but that would be fantastically fake coming from me.
When she was born, pale but with lots of dark hair, I asked the midwife if her eyes would stay blue. 'Asian genes are very strong,' she said in what I took to be an ominous tone.
No more Brady Bunch kids for me. The midwife has been proved right and every day my baby's eyes get a little darker.
Even so, when she looks up at me as I feed her, my heart melts. My love may not be colour blind, but hers is, and that is truly humbling.


daily mail

guardian version

My mixed emotionsLowri Turner had a liberal upbringing and married an Asian man, but it wasn't until she had a mixed race baby that she began to confront her own prejudices

The Guardian, Saturday 7 July 2007
We all know the theory: love is colour blind. It is a somewhat simplistic and sugary ethos, but one that many of us were brought up on. My parents - my mother was a magistrate, my father a prison reformer - were hand-wringing liberals, who fervently held to this notion. When I went to the local primary school, my class was a boisterous melee of white British, West Indian, Greek Cypriot, Irish and Ugandan Asian kids. It wasn't all happy, smiley multi-culturalism, but all we rubbed along pretty well.

There was one mixed-race couple who had children at the school who were then quite unblushingly referred to as "half-caste". As a kid myself, I was fascinated. Did the mum and dad know, I wondered, whether their next baby was going to be black, white or brown, or if their hair would be straight or curly? I used to try to stand behind one of the girls from this family in assembly, so I could study the cornrows in her blond afro hair close-up.

I went on to mostly date white boys, but not always. When I was in my late 20s, I remember telling my mother that I had a new boyfriend who was black. "I don't care what colour he is, is he nice to you?" she said forcefully. "Blimey!" I thought, "it's like having Nelson Mandela for a mum."

It was this same attitude she showed when I married my second husband 18 months ago. When I met him, I didn't know his parents were Indian. He didn't look Indian. He didn't sound Indian. He was born in Glasgow. His skin was paler than you might expect. In the new multi-ethnic Britain, it is often difficult to tell what anyone is. And does it matter anyway? Certainly, back then, it didn't to me.

Anyone who dates someone of a different colour and claims that their hue is immaterial is lying, either to themselves or to everyone else. When a black man and a white woman date, they are both are making personal and political statements, even if they are subliminal. However, the colour of a person's skin is just one of many factors about them that add up to the person you fall in love with. I have a Greek Cypriot girlfriend who is married to a man whose parents are from Jamaica. She says she no longer "sees" him as black and I believe her. However, things get a whole lot more complicated when you have a child.

Ten weeks ago, I gave birth to a daughter. She is undeniably beautiful, but she is also alien to me. I was a blonde child and these days, admittedly helped along more than a bit, I am still blonde, as are my other two children, whose father was white. But my tiny daughter has dark brown hair, dark eyelashes and eyebrows and even a dusting of downy dark brown hair touching the edges of her ears. While my eyes and those of my sons are hazel and my skin and that of my sons is white and slightly motley, hers is an even tone, like very weak tea. She is a black child or is she?

I am not sure yet of the etiquette. Do I call her black or Asian or mixed race, or dual heritage? Is it necessary to call her anything at all? I didn't have any such considerations when I had my sons. They were just mine. They didn't need classification. When I registered my daughter at the local GP, I had to put a tick in a quite unfamiliar box - the one marked "mixed race, white/Asian" - on the "racial monitoring" form. It felt weird and oddly public. She was being labelled at seven weeks old.

What I now realise is that, having had my daughter, I have taken my first steps on the incredibly fragile terrain of mixed-race modern Britain and, as I begin to pick my way across, I am acutely aware of my clumsiness. I am not alone. Look around, there seem to be mixed-race couples everywhere. We are raising a new generation of children who span different races, cultures and religions. Yet, how many of the parents, like me, find themselves unprepared for the challenges ahead?

In my head, I knew that my daughter was unlikely to have the milky complexion and blond hair of my sons. And I don't love her less because she's darker. However, I wasn't prepared for the confusion of emotions I would feel when I look at her.

When I was pregnant and people said things like "Ooh another little blonde one, then?" I would explain that her father was Indian and they would then execute a swift conversational handbrake turn and coo about how pretty she would look, usually mentioning some friend who had a white/Asian child and finishing with: "They are beautiful, aren't they?". This treating of mixed-race babies like dolls who come in a range of attractive hues like options on a Dulux colour chart shocked me. My daughter should not be defined by her colour. She is an individual with unique talents and qualities - now, there is my mother talking. And in an ideal world, the way she looks shouldn't be an issue.

But we don't live in an ideal world and the way we all look matters. My daughter's appearance is an issue to others as well as myself. A (white) friend visited yesterday and having examined the baby, she announced: "She's getting quite dark, isn't she?" And I am ashamed to admit that in a reversal of what happens on holiday when you study your skin in the mirror every day hoping for a deepening tan, I too now find myself examining my daughter for signs that her skin is becoming a deeper shade of brown and being perturbed if I find them.

As I read that, I am horrified. But, then, having a mixed race baby forces you to face uncomfortable truths about yourself and the outside world that it is possible to be entirely unaware of if you stay within an easy, uncontroversial all-white sphere.

All parents have fears for their children. We worry they will be knocked over by a car, or snatched like little Madeleine McCann. I now look at my daughter and wonder whether her future will be in some way proscribed by the colour of her skin? And, if I, her own mother, am already so acutely aware of it, am I not already narrowing her horizons for her?

I console myself that my swirling emotions are part of a process. I am coming to terms with my daughter's existence in exactly the same way I had to process the reality of having first one son, then another, when I had always imagined myself the mother of girls. I am now quite good at building Bionicles, but I had to get over my grief at the loss of the pink, girly fantasy first.

Part of the grief I am going through with my daughter is the loss of the possibility that she will look like me. Both mothers and fathers, not to mention grandmothers and grandfathers, routinely bend over the crib, examining a newborn's face for some sign of their own genetic heritage. People say my daughter has my eyes or my mouth, but I know they are just trying to be kind. She looks as similar to me as I do to Naomi Campbell. I didn't expect this to matter to me, but it does. I look at my baby and wonder if people will look at her and assume I am not her mother?

I realise that this is a deeply shallow and vain thing to say.

There is also an inescapable issue of status. Judgments are made about a white woman who gives birth to a black child. She is stereotyped as a Vicky Pollard figure, eking out her days pushing a buggy through a supermarket car park, wearing saggy leggings and fagging it. This image has been captured on screen by Kathy Burke as Waynetta Slob, who memorably declared that she wanted her very own "little brown baby" just like all the other mums she knew on the estate. Am I one of these women now? Apparently, yes - particularly since I am now a single parent, having split up from my daughter's father.

Similar judgments are made about white women who go out with black men. When I was dating the man who my mother wanted to hear was "nice", he helped me carry some luggage into a taxi and then got in. The driver asked me incredulously: "Is he coming with you?" as if he was some sort of porter. Black women had a habit of looking daggers at me in the street. But it's not until you have a baby with someone of a different colour that you feel the full weight of the judgment of strangers.

While I genuinely don't think that my not being Indian was a factor that counted against me with my husband or his family, I did underestimate the difference between our cultural backgrounds when we were first together. Our daughter will have to cope with being the product of two very different cultures. She will have to negotiate her own cultural identity, and I know too little to really help her.

I am intending to leave the Indian side of my daughter's upbringing to my in-laws. This may seem a cop out, but, frankly, I'm too knackered to do otherwise. If I had adopted her, social services would probably whip her away. However, working and bringing up three children, I haven't the energy to learn Hindi or make my own lassi.

So, what is the future for my multi-coloured family? We may look a bit peculiar, but we love each other. I parked the car at the petrol station the other day and, when I returned from paying, I saw my four-year-old asleep, with his head slumped sideways so that it rested, face down, at his sister's feet in her car seat. His seven-year-old brother was lying on the other side of my daughter, the thumb of one hand in his mouth, the other hand holding a bottle, feeding her. I thought how natural it all looked.

When I had my sons, I knew it was my job, as a parent, to help them learn about the world. With my daughter, it is she who is teaching me fundamental lessons about myself, even if not all of them are comfortable.


and an article on the race/mixed-race issue in the new york times

Editorial Observer: Contemplations on Being of Mixed Race in America

By EDUARDO PORTER
Published: August 10, 2008

As a multiracial and somewhat foreign person I have on occasion found myself on the receiving end of the same kind of unease that many Americans seem to have about Barack Obama’s ambiguous identity. He is either not black enough or too black. His name sounds odd. He had a weird childhood with kids who didn’t speak English.

Mr. Obama is not just politically atypical. He is unusual demographically. A recent paper by economists from Harvard, Yale and the University of Chicago said that in 2000 only one in 70 births in the United States came from mixed, black-white parents. In the 1980s it was one in 200. In the 1960s, when Mr. Obama was born, there were virtually none.

Black-white teens are so rare today, the researchers argued, that they feel they have to engage in more risky behavior to be accepted by others: drink more, fight more, steal more, do illegal drugs more than either blacks or whites — a pattern of behavior known to social scientists as the “marginal man.”

Perhaps this is true. Yet I would suggest that these outcomes say more about the context in which American multiracial kids grow up than about the kids themselves. The United States practices cleanly defined racial slotting.

I’m not an avid TV watcher, but when I watch, the black man gets the black woman and whites date whites. I have yet to see an ad with a mixed-race family. Whites marry blacks, but rarely. Over all, 5.7 percent of married couples in 2000 crossed racial boundaries.

The American approach to race is unique, in a way. In Brazil, with a history of slavery and racism as brutal as America’s, some 39 percent of the people define themselves as mixed race or “pardos.” By contrast, when the United States census in 2000 first allowed respondents to tick as many racial boxes as they wanted, only 2.4 percent ticked more than one. Never mind that genetic testing suggests a great deal of intermixing between Americans of African and European decent.

The son of a tallish, white father from Chicago and a short, brown Mexican mother of European and Indian blood, I’m not the same mix as Obama. As a colleague recently told me, I “read white.” Growing up in Mexico City, where power and skin color correlate at least as well as in the United States, I led a privileged existence. Still, being a mix was never an issue; most of my peers were too.

This is not to suggest Mexico has dealt with race any better. Racism just took different forms. European colonizers of modern-day Latin America encouraged the whitening of Indians and blacks. In the century after independence, ethnic loyalties were subsumed under a mixed Mexican identity as a way to merge Europeans and pre-Columbian indigenous nations into a modern Mexican state.

Today the Mexican census doesn’t even ask about race, and it only started asking about indigenous ethnicity in 2000. José Vasconcelos, a politician and philosopher, wrote in the 1920s that Mexicans were of the “cosmic race” — that which included all others. Yet Mexico’s state-sanctioned mestizo identity allowed its rulers to ignore its beleaguered indigenous populations — virtually defining them out of existence.

In the United States by contrast, racially inspired policies, whether they resulted in Jim Crow laws or affirmative action, fueled an urge to define and redefine hard racial boundaries. Close attention to race has forced uncomfortable issues of racial inequity into public debate, but has also gotten in the way of embracing a blended racial identity.

Fortunately, Americans seem to be slowly becoming more comfortable with racial intermingling. Newer immigrant groups with different experiences of race are already chipping away at the racial divide. About 10 percent of Asian Americans ticked two or more race boxes in the 2000 census. More than 15 percent of Hispanics marry non-Hispanics. And Hispanics are so confused about American racial categories that half of them can’t find an appropriate race box on the census form and tick “other race” instead.

For all the mistrust of Mr. Obama’s ancestry and ethnicity, he might even help this trend along, allowing blacks and whites to take a fresh look at each other. Then maybe people like me won’t need to engage in extreme behaviors to fit in.

Poem: Where Broccoli Comes From

Where Broccoli Comes From

Not many people know
that broccoli grows in the armpits
of very big green men
who live in the forest
and brave broccoli cutters
go deep into the forests
and they creep up on the
very big green men.
They wait for the
very big green men
to fall asleep
and the broccoli cutters
get out their
great big broccoli razors
and they shave the
armpits
of the very big green men.
And that’s where broccoli
comes from.
Not many people know that.

Just thought I’d let you know.


Michael Rosen