© MixedFolks.com
Site layout completed with help from
Arus Threepersons

Logo Design
By
Weldon Arts

by Erin Bannister

My mother is white. My father is black. But I have never known what I am. I used to define myself as multiracial, an eleven-letter, four-syllable, politically correct, trendy word. But this changed when I entered ninth grade and my French teacher asked: Who isn't multiracial? So when eleventh grade rolled around with the SATs, I became "Other"-a less-than-romantic, slightly mysterious, but definitely unsatisfying word. However, when I told this to my father, he reprimanded me for not marking black on the test questionnaire. He insisted I call the SAT headquarters to change what I had put. For reasons I have never understood, he firmly believed that the right answer was black.

When I look in the mirror, I see a person who looks like she has a tan even in the winter, and whose hair may be dark, but not always curly. I have no prominent African American features (assuming that such features exist on anyone). And, although I am sometimes mistaken for being Spanish, people generally see me as white.

My seemingly invisible African American heritage has left me ignorant of what it means to be "black" in this country. I am horrified when others casually use racial slurs in front of me to describe African Americans. It is always then that I realize how pale my skin is.

$100 reward will be given for the apprehension and delivery of my Servant Girl HARRIET. She is a light mulatto, 21 years of age, about 5 feet 4 inches high, of a thick and corpulent habit having on her head a thick covering of black hair that curls naturally, but which can be easily combed straight.

Advertisement for the capture of Harriet Jacobs, American Beacon, Norfolk, Virginia, July 4, 1835

I read this description and compare myself to the woman, a mulatto slave. I tell myself that her skin was definitely darker than mine even when I do spend hours in the sun. I tell myself that her hair must have made tighter curls than mine; anyone can straighten their hair with a certain degree of effort. And I wonder what "light mulatto" means. Were light mulattos darker during the 1800s? Were slave owners looking for any excuse to augment their slave populations? Did the southern sun and humidity make most mulattos darker with curlier hair when they otherwise would have looked more like me?

By the end of twelfth grade, I had adopted the word mulatto, a term that originated from the Spanish word for mule, the ungainly, stubborn, and sterile offspring of a donkey and a horse. Which one of my parents, I wonder, is the donkey? They had disparate reactions when I first chose the term to describe myself: My mother objected on the grounds that the term had slavery connotations, and she hoped I could find a more positive word to describe my racial identity. But, stubbornly, I insisted that mulatto was correct. After all, how many words in the English language can be traced back to some type of negative, even pejorative, association?

My father had a different reaction to my new racial identity: He laughed at the word mulatto. In fact, he has still not accepted my decision to choose this term and believes that I am using it to minimize my African American heritage-in other words, that I prefer to be white rather than black. And maybe he is right. Maybe I am the worst kind of racist, one who would deny parts of her own heritage to climb the American social ladder.

I am not the only one in my father's family who has had problems with racial identity. My paternal grandfather had very light, and seemingly white, skin, even though he was African American. I am told that he used to encounter problems when people would mistake him as white and then discover he was black when he introduced them to his family. Perhaps this is why it's so distressing for my father to have me identify myself as mulatto. He's baffled when people consider me white and embarrassed when people don't realize-because we have such different coloring-that we're related.

I can't escape my whiteness. White is what I am 95 percent of the time. People see me as white, treat me as white, think, even after they know my background, that I am nevertheless white. I have lived a white life, free from the oppression that blacks still experience. The other 5 percent of the time, I become mulatto in an effort not to abandon my heritage and to ease my conscience. But its practical outcomes amount to zero. My using the term has not changed the way people see me. When they look at me, no one sees mulatto, and they certainly never see black. They see white. And when I look in the mirror, I see white as well.

Searching for a description of my racial identity has been an interesting, if not rewarding, task. The words used to describe children of mixed heritage range from the offensive to the absurd, the most humorous being "zebra child" and the most objectionable, "mutt." I don't want to offend anyone by using the term mulatto. I realize that some people see it as a degrading description for children of biracial couples. But I defy critics to come up with a better term-one that is not an obvious comparison to animals, as well as one that is not hopelessly ambiguous, like "multiracial."

Others may ask why I feel the need to find any term that describes my background and my appearance. And to those people I would say: Isn't it obvious? We live in a world where race is an integral part of one's identity. I just want to know who I am.

Erin Bannister '98, a government concentrator, is editor of Lighthouse Magazine and the Quarterly's undergraduate correspondent.