WE ARE FAMILY: Growing Up in an Interracial Family BY CHELSEA BORROR-MASTANDREA
I was born in 1991, 27 years after the Civil Rights Act was passed in the United States. Being born into a family with two black grandfathers, a black uncle, and numerous black cousins, I never considered them different than me (a very pale white woman). We are family. It wasn’t until I took a course on American Ethnic Literature that I ever really thought, especially when thinking of my maternal grandfather, that he could have been treated in a way similar to Richard Henry in Blues for Mister Charlie having lived before, during, and after the Civil Rights Movement. Living within an interracial family, much of the tensions of race relations were irrelevant and moot because we were family. In Blues for Mister Charlie, while the focus is on the killing of Richard, there are hints of the tensions and the taboo nature of interracial relationships. In Act II, the antagonist, Lyle, his wife, Jo, and a family friend, Parnell, are discussing the acceptability of ‘race-mixing,’ as a minor character expresses it: Two distinct attitudes emerge because of this. Parnell: Ladies and gentlemen, do you think anybody gives a good goddamn who you sleep with? You can go down to the swamps and couple with the snakes, for all I care, or for all anybody else cares. You may find that the snakes don’t want you, but that’s a problem for you and the snakes to work out, and it might prove astonishingly simple - the working out of the problem, I mean. I’ve never said a word about race-mixing. I’ve talked about social justice. Lilliam: That sounds Communistic to me! (Baldwin 54) These two attitudes - who cares who sleeps with who and how could anyone even suggest white and blacks sleep together - were prevalent throughout the United States well into my own lifetime, with nearly 2/3 of the non-black adult population stating in 1990 that they would be upset if a family member engaged in a relationship with a black person (Livingston 14). Such attitudes are distinctly American in that other nations were much quicker to accept the reality of interracial relationships, which Baldwin again uses Parnell to point out when speaking about his time at college when he mentions an African prince and how he had “Swiss women, Danish women, English women, Finns, Russians, even a couple of Americans” (Baldwin 59). The women of the story are appalled that any self-respecting woman would sleep with a black man. Likewise, Jo is later disgusted at the allegation that her husband had an affair with a young black woman, and possibly slept with many other black women, before they were married. Yet it is not only that he had an affair, but that he could have loved a black woman in a way that he has never loved her. The acceptance (or lack thereof ) of interracial relationships has often been seen as a status exchange of a Marxist nature. “Highly educated blacks would trade their educational status in order to reap the benefits associated with the racial status of a potential white spouse. Similarly, whites with low levels of education would trade their racial status for the educational status of a potential black spouse” (Gullickson 3). While another theory asserts that higher education levels lead to a greater acceptance of interracial relationships due to a greater support and understanding of racial equality. Colloquially, it is thought that white people are often more against interracial relationships, stemming from such tropes as seen in Blues for Mister Charlie in which Jo claims she was being raped by Richard (the black man raping the helpless Southern woman) and stereotypes and stigmas perpetuated by historical facts such as “whites anxiously defended the segregation of neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, and other social settings” (Doering 561). The statistics have shown, though, that overall the opposition of interracial marriage had dropped to 14% by 2016 (Livingston 14), it is still generally disapproved of by the black community, with “black women still regard[ing] intermarriage as tantamount to betraying the race” (Doering 559). The betrayal is ancestral and a reminder of white aggression towards the black community and the oppression of the black race. An interracial relationship is an affront to black nationalism and standing African-Amer-
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