May 20, 2009 7:53 pm US/Pacific
Multiracial in America: Changes in the Obama Age
(CBS 5)
Note: When Dana King began this discussion on mixed race heritage, she started by sharing her own story of self-discovery. You can hear that on Part 1 of the videos posted here. The discussion continues on Parts 2-6.
Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6
Everyone of the four people we invited to our studio is often asked, "What are you?"
"Politically, I'm black," says Betty Soskin.
"I lived as as my mother and grandparents did, as African Americans, as negroes," adds John Martin.
Jilchristina Vest explains, "I've been asked it so many times throughout my life. And my sisters and I would come up with games and trickery to answer it: 'I'm human, I'm a girl, five-nine,' anything to to try and force the person to really (say) what exactly do you want to know?"
But thanks to this country's 44th president, Vest has a new answer.
"I just say I'm Barack and I use it as a synonym for saying I'm black and white," she says.
Black and white: the offspring of an interracial couple. The telling of their story during his run for the presidency was a watershed moment for many.
"When he accepted the nomination, I was watching this man show photographs of his white mother and this little brown baby, and I had never seen that before," Vest remembers. "And I was so moved and so 'seen' in that moment. It was beautiful. He is a black man and identifies as such. He is a black man of mixed heritage and that identifies as that as well."
President Obama was only six years old when marriages like that of his parents became legal in 1967. That's when Mildred Loving and husband Richard Perry Loving challenged anti-miscegenation laws in the U.S. Supreme Court.
"I am and will always be a product of the times that I grew up in," Soskin says.
Now in her 80's, Soskin is our oldest guest, so she has understandably seen the most change. She was already 46 years old when the marriage bans were ruled unconstitutional.
"I had finally recognized at the age of 87, and even before that, that whether one has or has not lived the black experience determines whether one is black," Soskin says. "I came up under the 'one-drop rule' and therefore I am black."
One drop of black blood in your lineage and your birth certificate read "black" or "negro," supporting segregation.
"You kids are coming up as polyracial or biracial and that a whole other category," Soskin tells the younger guests.
Kent Keys is one of those "kids." He's 40 now, but his world was rocked at 17 when his mom told him he was mixed -- until then he thought he was 100% black.
"I dealt with it, you know, even though I was right in the middle of my black revolutionary phase," he laughs. "I had the fist raised and the afro and dreadlocks. In college, I changed my name to "Kente." My name is Kent. And I changed it to Kente to sort of ethnicize it and it wasn't until a few years ago I realized I didn't need to be Kente anymore, I can just be myself."
That type of racial dissonance is fairly common for people who bridge more than one culture. Author John Martin says it's something that cuts both ways.
"The reality is that we are all black and white cousins under the skin," Martin says. "That's hyperbole to a large extent, but to large extent it's true. And this is what been hidden -- and not just by whites, but by blacks as well who have felt that, 'I'm going to be denigrating my blackness by admitting I have white ancestry.'"
Vest adds, "I had to learn that I shouldn't be ashamed of the fact that my mom is white. I look exactly like her and wouldn't have it any other way."
The civil rights movement of the 60's asked, in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King: "My four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
It seems that while adults have the need to continue to analyze the issue of race in America, it's is the children, who in their innocence, take the lead and guide us to the answers we seek.
"I look at my daughter," proud father Keys says. "She describes people as having red hair or having green eyes. They're not 'white,' they're not 'black.' I like the fact that she see people not as color, she sees people as the content of their character."
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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