Great bi-“racial” movie characters and stories

People are talking about Oscar buzz and the Golden Globes.  “The New York Times'” Anthony Scott and “The Chicago Tribune’s” Michael Phillips have breezed through a list of 2009’s worst movies on “At The Movies.” But as usual this coverage ignores whole other communities and some big uncomfortable questions.

People probably still ask themselves why the separate Black Oscars event was cancelled as a part of the exaltation that came with Denzel Washington and Halle Berry each earning Oscars in 2002 – 8-years-ago.  Troubling questions and concerns about minorities’ progress and power positions in the film history remain.  But other, subtler, even harder questions are out there.

Denzel Washington, Halle Berry earn Academy Awards at a "triumphant" moment

How often do you think about how multiethnic people of color or multi-“racial” people’s images in movies?  It’s hard to think about the presence or overall representation of people of color in movies and then the proportion of constructive ones to those that are the absolute opposite?

There are relatively meager numbers of inter-“racial” families in the United States.  According to the U.S. Census, 2004, less than 3% of all marriages in the U.S. are inter-“racial.”  And so few people consciously call themselves multi ethnic, or multi-“racial,” or mixed, or something.  Still most North Americans are mixed with at least two different ethnicities, even if it’s not obvious or alarming.  Audiences rarely have to consider what it’s like to call at least two different ethnicities home.

Benjamin Bratt in NBC's "E-Ring"

The last or most indelible and implicitly mixed character may have been Benjamin Bratt on NBC’s “E-Ring” in 2005.  He played Maj. Jim Tisnewski who was Polish, among other things.  It was an interesting program, but not a film.  Also during the heyday of that same network’s juggernaut, “ER,” Gloria Reuben starred in “Deep in My Heart.”  The story’s core dealt with a mixed woman coming to terms with having had three different and vital women whom she could call “mom” as she came of age.  But as special and compelling as that story was, it relied on the tragic mulatto theme.

None of these stories played at cinémas.  So you might want to ask yourself how important it is to see perspectives on that experience at the movie theaters.  How about some great stories where the mixed experience wasn’t the heart of the film, but simply and subtly provided the context?

Obama was no boon for America’s bi-“racial” or mixed people

If you call yourself mixed, biracial, multiethnic, or a mutt, or what, there was less to applaud than what you might anticipate.  Many people saw 2009 as year of great change – some seeing it as grave because of Pres. Barack Obama’s inauguration and his choice of Sonia Sotomayor for the U.S. Supreme Court.

A young Barack Obama sits with some of his family

We want progress.  I suspect that young bi-“racial” people want more.  Mr. Obama could have been more than “simply” the first African-American president.  If Pres. Barack Obama hadn’t chosen a group, but had more consistently emphasized that was not “simply” African-American…we don’t know what.  But at least he would not have conspicuously, if subtly, omitted part of himself.

The first sign lays in how Pres. Obama describes himself – African-American ­– and the mass political and cultural realities that informed or dictated that choice.  Barack Obama being black was an historical and epochal challenge for his ambition and his presidential candidacy.  Had he been more emphatic about not just being African-American ­that would have opened up a whole nother aspect to the conversation…and more political peril.

Some multiethnic or bi-"racial" people probably come of like this

In a documentary some 15-years-ago, Harvard’s Prof. Henry Louis Gates, Jr made an observation about a pop cultural phenomenon – “The Cosby Show’s” cultural imprint on America – he said that you can’t expect any one phenomenon, no matter how dramatic or charismatic, to up-end and K.O. North America’s bigotry.

That is a historic pattern of engrained attitudes and behaviors.  Just as that show couldn’t be expected to accomplish this feat, nor must we expect that from the Obama phenomenon.  That’s too much of an effect to expect or demand.

At some point, many people want for the time when color and features do not mark against you.  Ethnically ambiguous people want to be accepted as a blur without questions, confusions, and accusations.

It is interesting that the Milwaukee Journal Sentinal is also curious about this. Two-years-ago NPR’s defunct “Day to Day” show asked about this, acknowledging the varied and inherent complications.

In that Pres. Barack Obama is a harbinger, you might ask whether he is enough for the myriad Americans who seek a highly individual symbol in him or from him.

Of course the fact that few people probably note his features and confuse them for something foreign is a valid counterpoint.  He isn’t ethnically or physically ambiguous; most people would just “know” that he’s Black.  His features stoke no questions.  Just like with Anglo (North American “whites”) people whose features are obviously “white.”

Still, that “said,” many young, ethnically ambiguous people are probably hungry for the president, for a U.S. President to stand in as an explicit bi-“racial” or multi-“ethnic” role model.  Some people rely him as an icon and inspiration about how little bi-racial identity matters.

Lou Jing is how you say multi-“racial” in China

But Ms. Jing doesn’t go for that; she says she’s “completely Chinese.”

Lou Jing – "completely Chinese"

You can expect a bumpy, bizarre road if you don’t look “white” in the U.S. and you say that you are; confusions, misunderstandings, and even hostility will come.  If you look brown or even darker, if you have a broader nose, lips, or ears (or if it’s the opposite) and call yourself “white…”

But 20-year-old Lou Jing a recent contestant in China’s “Go Oriental Angel” (their version of American Idol) has left the country with questions about how it sees itself – particularly what or who is “completely Chinese.” You see while Ms. Jing’s mother is Chinese, her father is African-American.

Ms. Jing recently declared herself “completely Chinese.”  While this seems bizarre to many people, most particularly if you’re “white,” this isn’t so very new.  Paul Seriodio is the “white” South African who chose to call himself African-American when pressed about a form.

Of course the U.S. must contend, and make clumsy peace, with the remnants of the African Holocaust (the Atlantic slave trade).  China doesn’t have that history, that experience.  It and Japan discovered their own biases against each other centuries ago, but that was very different.

Lou Jing as she poses for "Go Oriental Angel" – China's "American Idol"

Ms. Jing’s decision reminds me of when I chose to stop – or at least stem the flow of – my anger at Anglos.  While people routinely break the inter”racial” down to a binary of Black and white, which just doesn’t carry much water anymore – to put it politely), I rebel against that.  But that’s a whole nother story; a digression for a later time.

My heritage, as with most other peoples’, no matter whom they are and where they’re from, is more varied and complex than that.  If I were angry at Anglos, and their heritages were a part of mine, then doesn’t that come back to me?

In my own multicultural or multiethnic experience, I’ve wondered, and mentioned in this journal, how surprised I am to be embraced as African-American.  So I understand Ms. Jing’s choice, even if I can’t actually relate to it.

Here Anglos and people of color alike might call Ms. Jing nuts or deluded.  But you have to ask how “race” operates in China.  There are some scholars perspectives on Chinese biases or bigotry. While it only represents on, point of view and there is probably some bias, it might shed some light on a barely and rarely comfortable question.

What happened when she went to school?  “She used to wonder why she had black skin,” said one classmate. “We thought about this question together and decided to tell her it’s because she likes dark chocolate. So her skin turned darker gradually.”  Another classmate weighed in, “We said it’s because she used to drink too much soy sauce,” according to Cnn.com

Why did she not ask about her color or her father, who she’d never met, until she was 16-years-old?  These are natural questions in the United States; they are a part of a coming-of-age.

The notoriety that Ms. Jing has received makes the way she describes herself so much more important.  As with questions about what makes someone Black, or how they chose to describe themselves so, if they don’t look it, the same must be asked about being Chinese.  These are questions that must be answered about how color biases work in China where there are very few people of color.

Apparently coming-of-age stories may be as foreign to China as the idea of a pretty, brown, Shanghainese woman calling herself “completely Chinese.”

How Black Must One Be to Be Black or Not Care?

“Hey, you’re black, right?!”

No matter whether it’s Minneapolis or Chi-town, when I walk in the neighborhood, brothers’ll greet me with a nod or something – a signal that says, “Yeah, you’re one of us.”

After a few years of accepting that social reflex with bemused misgiving, I find myself asking “why?” Why accept that? It isn’t bad.

Still other people from other countries, or who are older and better-travelled, no matter their color or features, ask if I’m from the Middle East or from somewhere like Morocco, or India. They don’t assume anything. They make me smile even grin and then chuckle. They are cosmopolitan. They understand life outside of the United States’ typical prism of color obsession.

At the heart of this is that I do not look Black. What is it about these disparate and myopic worldviews? Of course, that begs another question that is simple and opaque at once: what does Black look like?

Will Wright

That may be the more important and illuminating question or concern; how Black must black be to be…Black vs simply straddling the colors, the boundaries by one’s own whim and wit? How typical or conventional must one look? How fully must one conform to Anglos’ (white people’s) image of Black in order to be either Black or to pass away from it?

It may be that each of those competing questions is as important as the other.  I simply have yet to understand why North Americans of African descent do not question that someone as ethnically ambiguous as I do, may not call himself Black or half any of African in his heritage or experience.

I suspect that these questions may have sprouted while reading Henry Louis Gates, Jr’s The Passing of Anatole Broyard, a chapter and essay from his book Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man.

Anatole Broyard

Many years ago, I decided to discard that “one-drop-rule” chip from my shoulder – I was going to ignore North America’s demands; I was going to be multicultural and colored or “of color.”

As with far too many phenomena, Anglo America appoints itself to define and encode that. As bizarre, hard, and contradictory as it might be, I chose to occupy that fluid multiethnic crevasse during the turn of the century.  It coincided with the 2000 U.S. Census.