also from s. florida sentinel...

Mixed-race families finding acceptance in the U.S.By Victor Greto Sun-Sentinel
(Very positive!)

What a difference a decade makes. No longer culturally ridiculed, mixed-race children find themselves in demand as models because of their increasing numbers and because they look more exotic, more multicultural — more, well, American, 21st-century style.

They are the children of almost 3 million intergroup couples in the country, or one of every 20 married couples.They also have been officially accepted by government agencies as measured by the Census Bureau when in 2000 it allowed people to identify themselves as members of more than one race.Though we don’t know how quickly their numbers have grown because they were not previously counted, their parents’ numbers have increased by more than 800 percent over the past four decades.Some of today’s celebrities deliberately identify themselves as mixed race, including Tiger Woods, Paula Abdul, Lenny Kravitz and Mariah Carey.What had been radically disorienting as recent as a decade ago now seems almost trendy, fueled by dozens of Web sites, magazines and personalities.Many interethnic and interracial couples will tell you the looks they get are nothing compared to the looks their children receive.“Most of the looks I get are when I’m with my kid,” says Lydia Andrews, 30, who is Greek and migrated from England to the United States as a child.She’s married to Bruce Tucker, 38, whose ethnicities include Asian, Jewish and Jamaican, and together they have a 41/2 year-old boy, Preston.“The people who ask me about my child in any depth also are in mixed relationships,” Andrews says. “I get those looks from a lot of people. But I haven’t personally encountered anything rude.”Growing up in Plantation during the 1970s, Tucker says his childhood was radically different from what his son’s will be.“Everything was lily-white,” Tucker says. “Then, I was the darkest for 10 miles around.”In middle school, he got into fights almost every day. “Blacks didn’t like me and whites didn’t know what to make of me.”Because of that, Tucker says he can relate to Woods, who chose to identify himself as multicultural.“I don’t want to talk about saying I’m one or the other. I can’t be divided up into a category. I want to be Bruce. I don’t want anyone to put me anywhere.”Finding a placeLike most of the interracial parents interviewed, Tucker and Andrews do not plan to speak to their child directly about his racial heritage until he asks.“We’re not going to have him choose or identify,” Tucker says. “My parents left me to figure it out, so we’ll do the same for him. I’ll be there for him.”Philip and Mary Meckling’s child, Hannah, 8, is a mix of Irish, Italian, American Indian, German and African.She has modeled for magazines and companies such as Burdines and Toys “R” Us.“That’s the look they wanted,” Mary says. “They always put her with a light-skinned black couple.”Loren and Floyd Walker’s child, Cheyenne, 7, posed for the cover of South Florida Parenting’s August 2000 issue.David and Jonell Weidman say people always comment about their two children.“We get looks when we go out,” Jonell says, “but nothing bad. We get remarks about how beautiful our kids are, how gorgeous their complexions are.”Jennifer and Lloyd Richards’ three children have the burnished olive skin of many mixed-race children.The oldest, Evan, 11, recently entered sixth grade at Palm Cove Elementary School in Pembroke Pines.“It’s not a big deal,” he says about being mixed. “It’s the same as being black or white or Chinese. I don’t see what’s the big problem.”Evan tells anyone who asks that he’s “mixed. I can’t consider myself either/or. It’s better than being black or white because you have two cultures in you.”Neither he nor his 9-year-old brother, Andre, say they’ve been teased for being mixed.Dawn Davies, 34, a divorced mother of three biracial children, Savannah, 8, Athena, 5, and Gavin, 3, says, like any mother, she worries how her children will fit in.“There are always little things,” she says. “Is it going to be a white classroom? Is my kid going to feel different?”Before they had children, she and her ex-husband deliberately read books about mixed-race children.The books, and deliberately seeking out “open-minded, big-hearted people,” helped, she says.“My daughters have never been teased,” Davies says. “The oldest one is conscious of it, and my middle daughter doesn’t like being identified as black.” Instead, she says, they’re “brown.”Barry Pohlman, 36, and his wife, Teisha, 36, a native of the Bahamas, say they’ve deliberately refused to raise their three children, Autumn 9, Audric, 6, and Aukeem, 1, as either black or white.“They understand they’re black and white,” Teisha says, “but so far, there have been no questions.”You can guarantee, however, the questions will come.Coming to termsIt took LaTesha Humphries years to accept herself as biracial, in part because there was no parent to whom she could direct her questions.Born in Tacoma, Wash., to a black father and white mother, her parents quickly split up when she was young. LaTesha was taken by her father to Georgia, then to Florida.Both her parents had done drugs, she says, and her father was soon arrested in Fort Lauderdale.She was eventually adopted by a black couple in Pompano Beach, where she grew up.It wasn’t easy, LaTesha says.She grew up being called “oreo,” “red” and “old yeller” in a neighborhood she characterizes as a ghetto.Dillard High School and its performing arts program changed her life. It was there she met other biracial children and people who expressed themselves by deliberately being different.“I started to understand who I was, and it was OK,” she says. “When I grew up I didn’t want to be white-skinned. I wanted to be black.”But by the time she turned 15, “I started not to shun white people. I don’t fit in with them today, but I can still feel comfortable and hold a conversation with them.”

Victor Greto can be reached at vgreto@sun-sentinel.com or 954-385-7912.


Copyright © 2004, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

small article from south florida paper...

nothing earthshattering or groundbreaking, but interesting all the same...

Interracial couples fight family oppositionBy Victor Greto Sun-Sentinel

You have to know who you are when you’re in an interracial relationship. Because just about everyone else acts as if they don’t.They stare, make comments. Some are even bold enough to make threats.

But most of those in interracial relationships will tell you that the stares, comments — even the threats — often drip from them like water off a duck’s back.“Fifteen years on, I don’t notice any looks,” says Jennifer Richards, 31, who is white and married to Lloyd, 38, a black Jamaican reggae musician. “And then there are the kids to watch.”So who has time for looks?But it’s harder when stares and comments come from members of your family.Ask Derek Briggs, 31, who is white, how his mother reacted when he brought his black wife, Alicia, and her biracial child to his sister’s wedding in Atlanta. He had to threaten his mother he wouldn’t go to the wedding at all if he weren’t allowed to bring them.“Mom did her best to avoid us all,” Derek says of the June wedding. Only when the guests had gone, Alicia says, did her mother-in-law talk to her.“I was polite but disgusted,” Alicia says.“She’s embarrassed,” Derek says of his mother, “but I felt embarrassed for her because it was so obvious to everyone how she was acting.”When Derek first told his mother he had married a black woman, almost a year before the wedding, she “collapsed on the floor, screaming and crying,” Derek says. “We raised you to be open-minded,’” Derek says she told him, “ ‘but if we knew it would lead to this. ...’”Family frictionThere are many, mostly unspoken, if onlies for the parents of children in interracial relationships.But they get over it eventually, some couples say.Mary Meckling, 38, grew up in Wilbraham, Mass., as Mary Roccanti, daughter of an Italian Catholic father and Irish mother.When she announced to them that she was marrying Philip, whose ancestry includes Native American, African-American and German, they went ballistic.“I told my parents over dinner,” Mary says. She was 24 at the time, on her own, and had been living in Boston. She met Philip at a nightclub where he worked as a musician in a rock band.“My mom looked like she was going to die,” she says. “My father called me names. They had put me on a pedestal, and how could I do this to them, they said. I got a slap. I was told to leave. I didn’t see them for a year after that.”When Mary and Philip married, only two of her five siblings came to the wedding. The rest were afraid to go because of their father.Philip says he understands Mary’s parents’ initial reaction. Especially that of her father.“I know what that flash in the head must have been for them,” Philip, 37, says. “But it all snapped into place over a period of time. [Mary’s father] realized I had a head on my shoulders.”Cycle of harassmentBased on interviews, the interracial relationships that receive the most attention are the black male-white woman couples.“Black girls have a problem with us,” says Delores Graham, 47, who has been married to Don, 40, for eight years.They notice it most, they say, while standing in line or eating at restaurants.“Both races are racist when it comes to this,” Don says. And both say the number of comments has remained steady during the time they’ve been married.“We blow it off now,” Don says. “For every one jerk, there are two good-hearted people.”Rocky Edison, 63, who is black, and his white wife, LindaLee LaIacona, 46, say the harassment they receive has been cyclical.“When we first started going out [in the mid-1970s, dating interracially] was the thing to do,” LindaLee says. “Then we had a revisiting of the prejudice. I had a lot of black women say stuff to me.”They’ve experienced the looks and comments for so long that LindaLee says she won’t let them go by without a response.“I will confront them,” she says. “Is there something I can help you with?” she says she’ll tell the black women who make comments.Or, she’ll ask them dead-on: “Do you really think you’d be with him if I wasn’t?”Both say there was only one violent episode, in the 1970s, when Rocky and his friend fought two white men who had insulted the couple.But that was the exception.“We counteract any attitude by talking to them,” Rocky says of those who are openly hostile. “You have a conversation and before they realize it, they’re talking to us when they thought they shouldn’t be.”Negative reactionsIf the couple includes a white man and a black woman, stares tend to come from elderly white women, says Zachery Anderson, 25.A native of Minnesota, he lives with Cathy, 25, and their infant child, Tatyana, in Coconut Creek.His family reacted negatively when he told them he was living with a black woman.“My sister, grandmother and mother were distant” when they met Cathy, Zachery says. “My brother and his family were not.”“Since the baby was born, my grandmother and sister haven’t called. Mother called only once.”Cathy’s mother, Mattie York, recently visited the couple at their apartment.Asked if she cared whether the father of her granddaughter was white, she looks almost puzzled.“So far, he seems to be a pretty good guy,” she says.But the question seemed as irrelevant as her pat answer. She was too busy caressing Tatyana, who lay gurgling in her lap.


Copyright © 2004, South Florida Sun-Sentinel