RACING AGAINST RACE

As a mixed race person, I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of miscegenation. Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines miscegenation as, “a mixture of races; especially marriage, cohabitation, or sexual intercourse between a white person and a member of another race.”
In the past, the nabobs of religious dogma presumed that since they believed God had created the different races, mixing them was sacrilege and therefore a crime against God; and into the 20th century it was illegal in most places. My own parents, to use the vernacular of the time, an “Anglo” father and an “American Indian” mother, were denied an Arizona marriage license, in 1940, and had to travel to a more enlightened New Mexico to marry.
I’ve always wondered why the religious world didn’t stand up against changing any of their God’s handy work. At the grocery store, you will not find any of nature’s bananas, apples, oranges, grapes, potatoes, lettuce, cabbage, tomatoes or gains, such as rice, wheat or barley. Except for the natural wilds, there is not a breed of dog, cat, cow, sheep, chicken, turkey, horse or any other domesticated animal that hasn’t been hybridized by the hand of man. I know that those believers steeped in the Word will say it’s different with mankind for he was created in God’s image. Every time I hear that I think of Michelangelo’s painted ceiling where Adam receives the spark of life from the end of God’s index finger. I’ve looked at a print of that painting a thousand times and it always seems to me that God’s finger is hyper extended at the first joint and I’m reminded of the old saying that: “If camels had a god he’d have a hump, except of course if they were two hump camels”.
Mankind, attempting to improve the species has spent centuries breeding animals and plants for like traits; faster race horses, stronger draft stallions, cows with giant udders for more milk and more muscular beeves for their meat, and such ungodly creations as black roses, tangerines and seedless grapes. There were no more rigid bible thumpers than the slave holders of the antebellum south, and yet they used to impregnate their slave girls with their own seed in order to create slaves that would draw a higher price at the market. Or maybe they just found a way to profit from their sport. Either way it begs the question: Can the mixing of human races create better, stronger, more talented people?
The answer of course is only if you breed for like traits and not randomly as people usually do, for love and lust. Whether miscegenation from romance or passion is a plus for the human race is just now approaching an answer. While the races have been mixed many times by the rape of conquest and slavery, we are, in this country, only into our second and third modern generations of wide spread mixing of the four races of man; Mongoloid, Caucasoid, Negroid and Australoid.
As a mixed person (American Indians are Mongoloids) who easily passes for white, I’ve witnessed many conversations on race among white people, when they thought they were with just their own kind. As such, I’m acutely aware of the ingrained racism inherent in our country, especially toward blacks. We are at a time where some people actually brag about a part American Indian ancestry and at the same time denigrate anyone with the slightest dab of an African “taint”. I don’t know if that’s because of their previous condition of servitude or their more difficult to assimilate pigmentation, but the fact of it remains.
Consider for a moment the most dominate professional golfer of our day, Tiger Woods. Woods has a half-black, one-quarter American Indian, one-quarter white father and a half-Thai, half-Chinese mother. That makes him 5/8 Mongoloid, 1/4 Negroid and 1/8 Caucasoid. And yet he’s considered by most to be a black man. Remember Fuzzy Zeller’s crude joke when Woods’ won his first Masters Tournament that they’d have to change the victory banquet menu to include fried chicken, greens and chitlins.
Woods calls himself a “Cablinasian”, his word for his mix. "I'm just who I am," Woods told Oprah Winfrey, "whoever you see in front of you." But just "who I am" remains contested ground. According to Time Magazine, “Woods' coming out as a “Cablinasian” caused a mini-racial firestorm. Woods' remarks infuriated many African Americans who see him as a traitor. Some blacks see Woods' assertion of a multiracial identity as a sellout that could touch off an epidemic of 'passing.' Light-skinned Colin Powell, responding to Woods' comments, said, ‘In America, which I love from the depths of my heart and soul, when you look like me, you're black.’"

Now the very possible nomination of Barack Obama as the Democratic Party’s candidate for President of the United States of America brings us to a watershed point. It’s an indication of how far we’ve come and yet, that he is almost universally referred to as the black candidate, despite the fact his mother is as white as Strom Thurmond, is an indication of how far we have to go.

After all, who’s to say that Obama’s not a better man and Woods is not a better golfer, or even that Colin Powell was not a better warrior, for their “African taint”, than they would have been without it. In truth Woods put it best when he said, “I’m just who I am, whoever you see in front of you”.

I believe there is a very large segment of our population that is not just ethnically mixed but race mixed in hundreds of different combinations. These peoples, of whom I’m just one, need to be heard on the subject of race; for to remain silent is to except what has been, in place of what can be.

The question before the country is, are we going to live down to our race tortured, religion twisted past or are we going to finally live up to the promise our founders made two hundred thirty-two years ago, when they elevated individual liberty above the stale dogmas of their day and reached out for a better tomorrow? Are we, now in the first decade of the 21st century, to timid, to comfortable, to stale, or to frightened to reach out for a better future? I hope not.