Years ago, US comedian Sandra Bernhard used a routine in her live show where she loudly, wailingly lamented: "I wish I were mixed race and beautiful and had everything happening for me." You didn't have to be a white liberal wuss to find the sentiment both funny and true. Most of us would have noticed, some of us might even have been brave enough to comment upon, the fact that there suddenly seemed to be an awful lot of people around, men, women and children, who simply looked, well, how can I put this, a hell of a lot better than most of the rest of us. And a startling number of them were obviously mixed race.
Not, I hasten to add, those annoying hyperactive berks dancing about in yoof horror shows like the Gap adverts. I'm sure the boys from marketing genuinely believed they were delivering all-singing, all-dancing mini-operas of multiculturalism, but for some of us they came across as witless testaments to McRacism. As in: "Yes, these people look different but the good news is that they're young, pretty and chirpy." The central message being: difference can be tolerated so long as it's cute enough.
ILLUSTRATION: YU SHA
However, times change, and sometimes for the better. I read this week that San Jose is at the forefront of a social revolution whereupon middle-class families are describing themselves as "multiracial" as opposed to "monoracial." They are calling it Generation M, Donna Jackson Nakazawa's study Does Anybody Else Look Like Me? pointing out that the end of US segregation in the 1960s led to all manner of races (Mexican, African-American, Arab, Caucasian, Latin American, Asian and the rest) working together, having babies together, finally standing together in one long angry line to announce that they have a right not to have to choose one culture over another, that race itself has become a non-issue.
Finally, it seems that America has come to terms with the fact that its varied ethnicity is a triumph rather than an embarrassment.
And now everybody can just forget about it, right? Well, yeah, as soon as the burning crosses on the lawns of the South are replaced with barbecues where everyone's invited. But it's a start.
Certainly in the West, the complex issues of discrimination seem to have been further smogged up by Mr and Mrs Liberal Whitey's squeamish refusal to accept that it's not about (cough, cough) "people hailing from different cultures" as much as it's always, always, always been about skin colour. You couldn't get further away from Britain than Australia, but no one complains about all the Aussie nannies coming over and taking "our" jobs. Similarly, nothing's ever going to convince me that the child of an Irish mother and Danish father is going to get any extra attention in the average provincial Anglo-Saxon playground. Nor presumably do children from mixed unions spend a lot of time musing over their white heritage.
After countless documentaries where mixed-race public figures have been sent "home" to search out their black roots, there doesn't seem to have been an awful lot of traffic in the opposite direction. And that's because the vast majority of mixed-race children look black, so they're considered black wherever they live and however white or Asian or Latin American one of their parents happens to be.
As Halle Berry, whose mother was a white nurse from Liverpool, pointed out, she always felt forced to hide behind a black skin that was never the full story. The poor girl couldn't even win an Oscar without it all being about her predominant skin color rather than her talent. Which was as nonsensical and lopsided as a bunch of headlines screaming: "Daughter of white nurse wins Oscar!"
Into all this screwed-up, coplicated nonsense storms Generation M, the social revolution that promises to kiss America all better again, and the best of luck to them. However, trust Americans to make something that could turn into The Beginning Of The End Of Racism look so formal and mind-numbingly boring, with all that droning on about "multiracial" versus "monoracial." It's clear that the real hope lies with a future generation who hopefully will be so "mixed" up together by then it will all be too much of a fag to work out. Or maybe it's already happening.
The children in my 11-year-old's class call each other all sorts of things -- some nice, some not so nice -- but as yet skin color doesn't seem to be striking anyone as being interesting enough to notice or mention. As with all things that are beautiful about the human race, true multiracialism will come from within.
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