When Barack Obama was first elected in 2008, he was hailed as the nation’s “first black president.” Two years later, as he filled out his census, Obama checked off the “Black, African Am., or Negro” box, confirming his historic label.
The catch? Barack Obama is the product of a white mother and a Kenyan father. He spent most of his high school years living with his white grandparents, after spending several years in Indonesia. Technically, Barack Obama is biracial, and touts a phenomenally international upbringing. But even so, he chose to check off only the one box, despite the fact that, since 2000, it has been possible to check off multiple.
Actress Meghan Markle, who has a black mother and a white father, has approached her biracial heritage with a different attitude. In a 2015 essay for Elle Magazine, she tells a story about her seventh grade self, who was so paralyzed by the choice between the black box and the white box on a census that she put down her pen. Ever since Markle began dating Prince Henry of Wales, media coverage of her race has been similarly indecisive. The BBC recently ran a story referring to her “African-American and white heritage,” featuring interviews with interracial couples. The Daily Star adopted a different tone, excitedly comparing the number of crimes in her childhood home in Crenshaw, Los Angeles to in Harry’s Highgrove “hood.” The article even speculated as to whether the Prince would be marrying into gangster royalty. That being said, not all of news coverage of Markle indulges in such thinly veiled, racially charged subtext, instead simply referring to her as “the first black princess.”
What accounts for the different ways that two biracial Americans identify and are identified by the public? The inconsistencies between Markle and Obama’s stories originate from the history of the social construct of race.
Frederick Douglass, son of a black mother and a white father, wrote that many slaves were the children of white masters and black female slaves. Since these children inherited the status of their mothers, they remained enslaved, and many fathers did not acknowledge their own children. The “one drop rule,” first appearing in the Jim Crow South, labelled a person with any known African ancestry as black. The way this rule played out, however, was that multiracial people who “looked white” were able to “pass” as white, which is still true today. Despite the fact that approximately 6.9 percent of the US adult population is multiracial, and the rate of interracial marriage has increased from 3 percent to 17 percent between 1967 and 2015, our collective understanding of race remains woefully rigid and underdeveloped. Since race is not a biologically rigorous social construct, we feel comfortable calling Obama, who “looks black,” black, but Markle’s more “ethnically ambiguous” appearance places her in an ill-defined middle ground,
There are certainly advantages and drawbacks for any path. Markle wrote that her light skin tone and racial ambiguity allowed her to audition for Latina, black, and white roles alike, but that same ambiguity also prevented her from actually landing any of those roles. For less racially ambiguous biracial Americans like Obama, the way people interpret their race may simply ignore the complexities of their heritage; Obama himself has said that “if you look African-American in this society, you’re treated as an African-American.” There is truth to Obama’s statement about how an individual’s physical appearance affects how society treats them: a 2015 study by the Pew Research Center showed that white-black biracial adults and black adults experience racial discrimination at a similar rate. Some have also argued, though, that Obama needed to emphasize his blackness order to win the votes of black Americans; if so, it worked—the black community has readily embraced Obama. He received 93 percent of the African-American vote in 2012, and Ta-Nehisi Coates once wrote that, “this particular black family, the Obamas, represented the best of black people, the ultimate credit to the race, incomparable in elegance and bearing.”
A 2014 National Geographic cover claimed that, by 2050, the average American would have tan skin, hazel eyes, and curly dirty blonde hair. This increase in multiracial Americans has prompted the sentiment that the solution to racism is a multitude of ethnically ambiguous babies.How could racism sustain itself when the country was full of beige children?
Being multiracial, though, does not shield an individual from racism, nor does an increase in multiracial births somehow undermine the structural racism built into American society. The nonsensical insistence that biracial individuals “pick a side” or the morbid fascination with their “neither-nor” status simply reveals how deeply embedded ideas of racial sorting and division are in the United States.