Pregnant with my firstborn, I felt the universal fears described in childbirth books: Would I feel immediate love for the baby? Would the baby be healthy? I harbored another fear, too, more unique to our marriage, about whether it was safe to bring a biracial child into our imperfect world. This was 1992, the year of the Rodney King trial and the L.A. race riots, and I was aware of the tensions between blacks and whites in this country--a rumbling, potentially explosive dynamic that felt at times like it was playing itself out within my own body.
Just last month, Keith Bardwell, former Louisiana justice of the peace, resigned after refusing to marry an interracial couple. Unapologetic about his stance, he said, "I think those children suffer, and I won't help put them through it" (AP). Bardwell's discriminatory action is now illegal. But he leaves us to wonder whether biracial people--a group that includes our president--are ostracized or suffer emotionally.
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When they placed newborn Colette on my chest, seventeen years ago, she was so perfect, my beautiful biracial baby. I had not imagined her flesh-and-blood beauty--skin light at first, like a pistachio shell, hair silvery and soft, mouth wide, lips red.
At her one-week checkup, the pediatrician remarked while examining her, "She'll darken up," a straightforward, objective pronouncement that nonetheless surprised me. I guess I expected him to note the thing that was truly remarkable, that there was a new human being among us--a small, perfect infant on the threshold of an unimagined life, right there in his office. Instead, he thought to advise me, "When one parent is white and the other is black, they tend to darken up."
Just how dark? I did wonder. Would she look like my child at all? How out of place would she feel at my white family's reunions? To my mind, dark skin is lustrous and attractive. But I was unsure of my own act of creation. I had lived through a drawn-out emotional battle with my parents over my interracial relationship; I'd listened to countless cautionary tales and odd insinuations from acquaintances; and, together with Steve, I'd experienced things I had not experienced before: glares, disrespect and the pointed unfriendliness of strangers, not to mention several racially-tinged and otherwise inexplicable incidents with police.
How would my own child adjust, and would her adjustment depend on her coloration? I relied mostly on one data point--Steve--whose complex identity I had fallen in love with and whose own complicated inner life was at once cause for concern and reassurance.
Our daughter Colette is growing into a lovely and intelligent young woman. She's been raised in a world of good, Sesame-Street-inspired values, a world largely of our own choosing and creation, in which her multi-ethnic background is celebrated. She has the benefit of attending one of the most progressive and diverse schools in town--another intentional choice--and of having one parent who shares her experience of being biracial. She loves people of all kinds, and they genuinely seem to love her back. I'm not afraid for her anymore.
In 1997, her younger sister joined her as one of the approximately seven million multiracial Americans counted on the 2000 census. It's a new, growing population that barely existed when my husband Steve was a little biracial boy, moving with his military family between Europe and the United States in the early 1960s.
These days, I'm happy and grateful--grateful especially that our family continues to thrive and that our community and extended families embrace us. I'm delighted by the changes I witness in the world around me, and at the same time I carry within me old strains and emotions from a complicated journey, as well as a sense of mission to know and support this new generation of multiracial Americans.
