A social media post got a response that triggered me. The poster was looking for qualified hair care for a granddaughter that she identified as having both African American and white heritage. A respondent claimed that she was also, “mixed.” I remembered hearing that term when I showed the server at a bar that I frequent, a picture of my youngest granddaughter. The server looked at the picture and immediately asked, “Is she mixed?”
The server has seen me as an attendee at her workplace for some time, and I struggled for a moment with the term, then told her that Myah’s mother is bi-racial, her grandmother is white, her father is white, and her grandfather is me. (See my picture at the top of this column.) Myah, who is pale and blue-eyed, emerged from that soup. When I asked her mother if she has heard the term applied to her daughter, she snorted: Indeed, she has.
On page 1806 of my Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Sixth Edition, the 4th definition of “mixed” is this: “Containing people from various backgrounds; unrestricted.” On page 805 of The American Heritage Dictionary, Second College Edition, definition number 3 of “mixed” is noted as “Made up of people of different sex, race, or social class.” But for me, the idea of people being “mixed” makes me think of mixed-breed animals, especially dogs.
Two of my best friends were elementary school teachers and I can remember when they started to use the term “African American” to describe some of their students. Even in casual conversations with me, when I would refer to a black person, they would refer to that person as African American. I remember telling one of them that I was black when I met them, and I am still black. But I appreciated their sensitivity toward the categorization of people from racial groups and cultures different from their own. (This was long before the term “cancel culture” was coined.)
There is a legend in my family of the Irishman who raped my great-grandmother; my grandmother was the child of that encounter. When I did my DNA search, I expected that my ancestry would reflect that Irish encounter, but my report showed that only 1% of my blood is of Irish origin. The greatest contribution to my ancestry came from Nigeria, with Mali, England and Northwestern Europe edging out Cameroon, Congo, and Western Bantu peoples. When I was newly married to my first bride, we visited her grandmother in New York City. It was years later that I asked my bride why she had never said that her maternal grandmother was white. “It wasn’t important,” she replied.
When I moved to Indiana from California, my company put me up in temporary housing in New Albany. One morning, I found a business-sized card under the windshield wiper of the car I was driving. The card was printed to support the Ku Klux Klan, and said, “Racial Purity is America’s Security.” This was in 1978, and I walked the apartment complex and found one other card beneath a windshield wiper; the car belonged to another black family. Notwithstanding that some would argue that “race” is a social construct, “purity” would be difficult to achieve, considering all the mixing and mingling that people have done through the centuries.
So, yes: My granddaughter is “mixed.” I do not like the way the term is applied to her, but she is a healthy mixture of love and happiness, and when she slips her hand into mine, it is often colored with the paints that we mixed while creating some art.
cjon3acd@att.net