My Blur Moment: Barack Like Me

It was the fall of ’88; another day of smog-shrouded sunshine in Los Angeles. A warm breeze stirred just outside the door. Leslie, my Jamaican roommate, was not yet home. Her friend, Clarisse, a tall African American woman with dread-locks down her back, had come over to wait for her.

“Yumi,” Clarisse said as she pushed her back against the beige wall in our living room, “can I ask you a question?”

I looked at Clarisse, whose sly smile suggested that she was about to ask me something quite personal, something to catch me off guard.

“Sh-urr.”

“Is it hard … being you?”

“What do you mean?” I said, raising my voice a few octaves to reflect my irritation with her.

“You know … being mixed and all?”

Flipping my long curly hair behind my shoulder, I tilted my head to study Clarisse’s cinnamon-brown skin, a few shades darker than mine.

Was she trying to poke fun at my inability to act and behave like my soft-spoken Japanese mother? To order in my mother’s tongue when we ate sushi in Little Tokyo?
Or, was she ridiculing me for my lack of rhythm, my inability to dance soulfully, the way my African American father danced when he played the sounds of Motown?

“What do you mean?” I asked again.

Clarisse’s body peeled away from the beige wall. “Well … since you’re not really black … and you’re not really Japanese, it must be hard for you to … you know, fit in.”
I sat back in my chair. For me, being mixed, biracial, multiracial, or any other name people gave us, the children of interracial unions, had not been a choice. It had been a way of life, my way of life; I knew no other.

Was I more Japanese as some of my friends had suggested because of my almond eyes and coarse, black hair, which my mother said was as strong as it was because I had listened to her and eaten all my seaweed? Or was I more African American because of my love for hominy grits with butter, or the way my nostrils rounded just like my father’s did? Or was I neither, as Clarisse suggested?

I was born in ’67, the year that the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the last of the country’s anti-miscegenation laws. As the child of an Army soldier and Japanese-born mother, I had grown up on military bases, where it seemed all the neighbors’ kids had parents who had come together from different sides of the world. Tony and Harry’s mom was from Finland; their dad was African American. Rumi’s father was Caucasian; her mother was Japanese. Junko’s dad was white; her mom was from Okinawa.

I also remembered from my international relations course that there were a whole category of mixed-race people referred to as mestizo, mulatto or colored all over the world.
For me, I could not imagine an existence in which I would be anything but Japanese and black. Everything about me, my long hair that could get real frizzy in the rain, my long torso offset by my short, thick legs and my tan skin that darkened in the sun, my love of black-eyed peas and rice, represented the alchemy of my parents, the combining of their two races, the bond that formed their three children, their three lovely, mop-headed children, my sister, brother and me.

Who was Clarisse to ask me where I fit in? Who was she to tell me where I belonged? A part of me wanted to laugh her out of my existence, telling her there was no such room for such small-minded people. But a part of me couldn’t help but consider the question.

Was I more Japanese as some of my friends had suggested because of my almond eyes and coarse, black hair, which my mother said was as strong as it was because I had listened to her and eaten all my seaweed? Or was I more African American because of my love for hominy grits with butter, or the way my nostrils rounded just like my father’s did? Or was I neither, as Clarisse suggested?

“Not at all,” I said. “Being mixed is so great! I mean, I can live in all worlds. I can get along with lots of different people; they get along with me. I’m so lucky to be me.”

Clarisse leaned back against the wall. I was sure she was going to get up and leave, which would have been perfectly fine with me.

“Wow. That’s great.”

“Yeah, it is great.”

It has been nearly 20 years since Clarisse asked me whether it was tough being me; mostly, I have tried not to think about her or that exchange on a sunny afternoon in Los Angeles. I have moved on; so have many others: In 2000, nearly seven million people rejected the old, one-box- only definition of race and checked off two or more categories to define themselves in the U.S. Census Survey.

Even some celebrities have jettisoned old racial and ethnic categories to claim a new identity. Take Tiger Woods. Shortly after winning his first Masters, Tiger announced to the world he was Cablinasian, which encompasses his Caucasian, black, Indian and Asian identities.

The news should make any multiracial or biracial American shout with joy. But the reality is I am still unsure about how to define myself. That’s because no matter what I decide to call myself, decisions about racial identity are often not up to me at all. Case in point is Barack Hussein Obama.

Obama, a positively charismatic fellow who swept his Senate race, prompted a standing ovation at the 2004 Democratic Convention, and has been touted as the first viable African American candidate for president since Jesse Jackson, is the son of a Kenyan father and a white mother from Kansas. For most of his adult life, Obama has embraced his African American culture; one would think Obama’s insistence on claiming his black identity would be enough to convince critics and people within the African American community that Obama is in fact African American. But not so.

His father is from Kenya, the critics shout. He isn’t really black. His mother is a white woman from Kansas whose family may have owned slaves! He isn’t really black. He went to law school at Harvard! He isn’t really black. He grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, places that have no or very little “authentic” African American experience. He isn’t really black.

The criticism over Obama’s racial identity brings to mind something that poet Clarence Major said in his book about his mother, a black woman who could pass for white. “I was like one of those chameleon lizards I saw on the rocks around our house when I was growing up. Except my color didn’t change — people’s perception of me changed, depending on the situation.”

Indeed, the challenge facing Obama, I believe, has everything to do with how others view him. His skin color has not changed, but people’s perception has. Certainly, I could stomp and kick my feet, demanding that the man be left alone, telling these pundits to allow him to decide who and what he is. But to be honest, I’m not sure what the solution ought to be.

I do know, however, what some of the questions ought to be:

Why should the most important political race in our country break down along the traditional color lines?

Why not let Obama decide what he is?

Why not go a step further? Why not embrace the concept of biracial and multiracial Americans, so people like Clarisse will stop asking, “Is it hard being you?”

What do you say when people ask you about your mixed-race heritage? Join the discussion below.