“This is amazing, you’re the first black president. I’m proud to be able to say. But that’s unless you screw up. And then it’s going to be, “What’s up with that half-white guy? Who voted for the mulatto,” quipped Wanda Sykes, at a White House Dinner.
The joke made me laugh. Yet underneath the humor was the reality of how we perceive race. We are what we look like to others because it is easier than incorporating the more complex issue of what being multiracial means. In his new book, The Bridge, David Remnick writes that Obama, as president, believed it was best to “internalize” race talk believing there was “no winnable percentage” in a national dialogue on his road to the White House. I have often wondered how Obama’s mother would have felt continually hearing that her son is the first black President. I want her to fit into the equation.
That’s probably because I am the Manhattan mother of two children who are biracial. Their father is Indonesian and I am white. When our daughter was born in 1983, a relative on my husband’s side insisted that she was one hundred percent Indonesian. It was a prescient comment, echoed for years afterwards. But then Ariane was just a tiny little girl, that I nursed and cradled, and the thought that anyone would question whether she was mine was not something I even considered. I grew up in Maplewood, New Jersey, 18 miles from Manhattan. In the 1960’s our family was not the norm because my parents came from different religious backgrounds. The community was divided by what church you attended. To find a synagogue you would have to travel to the next town over. We attended neither. My father, a non-practicing Jew, deferred to my Protestant mother. We celebrated Christmas and Easter by having a tree and baskets, eliminating the religious aspect of both holidays. My friends who were Christian questioned why we didn’t go to church. My Jewish friends questioned how we could have a decorated evergreen in our house. I didn’t have the answers for them, or at least, not the ones they were looking for. They wanted us to be something they understood. My parents were oblivious to the complicated life they had given to my two brothers and me.
When my father died, in 1974, my mother and I moved into the city to be close to my brother and his wife. I was twenty-two. Six months later I met my future husband, Jon, at a publishing company where we worked a few desks away from each other. His father came to the U.S. to sit on the Human Rights Commission at the United Nations. He was a brilliant man who, in an ironic twist, was open-minded about everything except his children marrying non-Indonesians. To be fair, my own mother reached beyond the grave to have my deceased father weigh in on the marriage. According to her, the message she received, was that he would not have approved.
That experience, and my own childhood, should have prepared me for the possibility that if an interracial marriage was not readily accepted, mixed children might raise the same issues. When my daughter grew from the swaddled infant stage to the, on display for all to see, stroller years, I found out how unprepared I was for the cross examination about her ethnicity. Ariane was a rosy-hued, brown skinned child with dark, crazy curls shooting out all over her head. She was the kind of baby people couldn’t resist picking up. We got a lot of attention, and so many questions. They came in every form imaginable, ranging from the polite to the outrageous. There were the people who solicited enough information to assess on their own whether she was my child. Lisa, a woman who later became my friend, told me that when she first met us in a Gymboree class, she just assumed my daughter was adopted. Even after she saw me nursing Ari the possibility that she was biracial did not enter into her thinking but the ability to spontaneously breastfeed, did.
