Bianca Mathabane, a lively 3-year-old, is learning her colors. She just got to the color brown. A beautiful little girl with bright eyes and chocolate skin, she caught on quickly.
When asked what color her own face is, she promptly said ”Brown.” The same adjective, Bianca correctly decided, described her 1-year-old brother, Nathan, and her father.
When asked the color of her mother`s face, she looked and also pronounced it, ”brown.”
The answer, in this case, was wrong, but the sentiment was somehow sweetly right. At her age, skin color doesn`t mean much to Bianca. She simply sees her mother, a tall, blue-eyed, blond woman with ivory skin, as she sees herself.
If only life stayed that simple.
But there is nothing simple about interracial marriage, as Bianca`s parents, Gail and Mark Mathabane, keep discovering. In this society, on the 25th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision striking down state laws against interracial marriage, the lives of mixed couples still are painfully complicated by the strong, negative, visceral emotions their union evokes among blacks and whites.
With the Mathabanes, the situation becomes more complicated: One half of the couple is the Nordic-featured, Midwestern-bred daughter of a Presbyterian minister, who has degrees from Brown University and Columbia University`s Graduate School of Journalism. Her husband is the ghetto-born, best-selling author of ”Kaffir Boy,” which detailed the horrors of his life under apartheid in South Africa and catapulted him to celebrity and respect as a voice for oppressed blacks.
Gail and Mark Mathabane try to explain and dispel some of the myths and stereotypes that continue to cloak interracial marriage in ”Love in Black and White” (HarperCollins, $20), a portrait of their relationship from the moment they met in 1984 in New York as graduate students at Columbia, through their courtship, marriage in 1987, the births of their two children and their current life in rural North Carolina.
Gail Ernsberger Mathabane, a free-lance journalist, attributes much of the rancor directed at mixed couples to the enduring stereotypical
explanations often given for interracial marriage. Ranging from psychological problems to revenge and rebellion, most of these theories spin off the assumption, once expressed to Gail by her father, that ”there are always hidden motives behind interracial relationships.”
”It`s very persistent,” she says, sitting in the Manhattan office of her publisher on the first leg of a promotion tour. She seems, at 30, a quietly intense woman with a reserved manner and a lot on her mind.
”I don`t know if you`re aware of all the different stereotypes,” she says, with a briskness edged in anger. ”The white woman in such a
relationship is seen by the black community as a Circe, who is out to snare black men and to ruin black family life. Her feelings are never taken into consideration. She is seen as the proverbial `white woman.` ” Such marriages, however, compose about 75 percent of black-white unions, she says.
”On the other side, they look at the black man and say he`s a traitor to his race. They say he hates his mother and he hates black womanhood. He`s denying his skin color, he`s trying to be white. He`s just confused about his identity.
”Then, with the black woman-white man combination, the black woman gets criticized by the black community for not having enough patience to stick with her race, to find a good man. (They say) `There are plenty of good men, they may not be rich, they may not be successful, but they`re good men, so why do you abandon your race and prostitute yourself to a slave-master?`
”Among whites, I think they look at the white man who`s married to the black woman and say either it`s his prerogative or they just think that he`s sort of a failure who couldn`t get a white woman,” she says, resignedly ticking off variations on racial stereotypes.
”Mark was the first black person I ever dated and I didn`t fall in love with him because he was black or because I thought there was something special about black men. It was because of who he is as an individual.”
They met in a dorm at Columbia. Having escaped South Africa in 1978 through an American college tennis scholarship arranged by the tennis star Stan Smith, Mark was 24 and starting to write ”Kaffir Boy,” published in 1986. Gail was 22 and planning to parlay her background in East European studies into a career as a foreign correspondent.
”We had so many common interests, especially literature,” Gail recalls. ”Just the way he respected me as a woman and was interested in my thoughts, my ideas, my experiences. You know, he had just so many of the qualities I sought in my ideal man-and I had no idea he`d be black.”
Neither did her family back home in Minneapolis. Much of the ambivalence Gail struggled with in trying to decide whether to continue her relationship with Mark, she says, came from the fear of losing her family. ”In my nervous despair, I believed my parents might disown me for being in love with a black,” she writes.
When she finally told them, her stunned mother gamely responded by checking out a stack of South African writer Nadine Gordimer`s books from the library, explaining she`d read them in preparation for meeting Mark. Her father, a minister and a psychologist, reacted by mailing Gail books such as
”Women Who Love Too Much” and ”Women Who Love Men Who Hate Women,”
while trying to psychoanalyze Mark and his motives by reading ”Kaffir Boy.” Gail and Mark responded by secretly marrying at New York`s city hall in February 1987. Six months later, they married publicly in the presence of both their families. Mark`s family, whom he hadn`t seen for almost 10 years, had been flown to a New York reunion with him by talk show host Oprah Winfrey. In contrast to Gail`s family, the Mathabanes rejoiced in the union.
Their acceptance, which never waned, became ironic in light of the American black community`s reaction, Gail says. Its opposition, which the Mathabanes feared might destroy Mark`s early career, led the couple to keep their marriage out of the public eye for two years.
”I think Mark and I are facing more vocal opposition and more impassioned opposition from the black community than from the white,” Gail says.
”In our situation, the reason we`re not accepted is basically the same reason: the hostility of black women toward me because I`m a threat, I symbolize the white woman who can take those few (black) men away from them.” In that respect, Gail would have been seen as having taken one of the black community`s best and brightest. By 1989, when the Mathabanes finally decided to make the interracial nature of their marriage widely public through photos included in Mark`s second book, ”Kaffir Boy in America,” Mark had become a best-selling author, a friend of Winfrey and a man considered by many to be a spokesman for his race-a celebrity.
”But, at the time (we fell in love), he wasn`t,” points out Gail. ”At that time, he was a foreign student and he was trying to date black women. But since he didn`t have a car and he didn`t have any prospects and he talked honestly about growing up in a ghetto, they stayed away from him.
”Whereas I was raised as the daughter of a Presbyterian minister who told me that wealth and riches don`t mean anything. In fact, they make it harder for you to get into the kingdom of heaven,” she says, with a wry grin. But that doesn`t redeem Gail, particularly in the eyes of black women, she says.
”It`s very painful for me. One black woman who reviewed our book painted me as a racist bimbo. And I wonder how can I, the wife of a black man, the mother of two biracial children-basically two black children to society`s eye- how can I be racist?”
In the book, Gail speaks frankly about her early misconceptions about blacks and her fear and envy of them as a young girl during the family`s period in Austin, Texas. There, in a school that was 55 percent black, 25 percent Mexican and 20 percent white, she was the outsider, the ostracized minority.
”The thing is, I dealt as honestly as I could with my prejudices. Mark is not ashamed to say that he hated whites when he was growing up. And I`m not ashamed to say that I was afraid of or awed by blacks, who I felt were foreign and different from me.”
That ”foreign” perception led even her ostensibly liberal father to oppose Gail`s relationship with Mark, on the grounds that their differences could lead only to pain and ultimately divorce.
She castigates him for this in the book, but they have reconciled, she says.
Although her father may have been overprotective, Gail admits she may have been overly idealistic about the potential difficulties of an interracial union. When she and Mark decided to marry, they also decided to write this book ”to encourage mixed couples to choose love and disregard the world around them.”
Since then, she says, she has learned that ”You can`t disregard the world when you have children.” Nonetheless, she disputes the idea that interracial children are destined to have problems with society and their identities.
She concedes that biracial children may still appear exotic to many people. According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, although marriages between blacks and whites have tripled since 1970, fewer than 1 percent of all U.S. marriages are interracial.
Thus comments, well-meaning and not-so-well-meaning, are almost inevitable, particularly when the children are dark-skinned and accompanied by a blond, blue-eyed woman. When Bianca was an infant, Mathabane found herself getting advice from an elderly, well-meaning Southern man who cautioned her that the baby looked like she was getting too much sun.
”It`s not bigotry that makes them say these things. They simply can`t imagine that I`m the biological mother of this dark child with long, kinky hair.”
And when Gail identifies herself as Bianca`s mother, she says, ”It`s almost like they got me to reveal some dirty secret.”
To counter that, she says, ”We`re basically going to teach our kids that they`re both (races) and they should be proud of both.”
With bias crimes on the rise and racial tensions running high in many parts of the country, Gail admits, ”It`s a scary time for me to be on a lecture tour.”
But scarier still, she says, is her sense that the races are growing more, not less, alienated. ”The polarization makes the most personal decision you could ever make-whom to love-into a big political decision, as if you`re marrying a race or as if you have to have politically and racially arranged marriages in this country, just as they have tribally arranged or religiously arranged marriages elsewhere,” she says.
Although in the book and in person she comes across as extremely idealistic in a way that seems to betray the problems she has endured, Mathabane also has grit.
The idea that Mark, for loving her, is accused of being a ”traitor to his race,” she says, ”makes me want to crawl in a hole sometimes or send all the books to the publisher and go home to bed.
”But I know that we`re out here for a reason and that I have to keep fighting. Because I`m fighting not just for my marriage, to have people understand and accept it, but I`m also fighting for all the mixed couples and all the biracial adults in this country and also, for my own children and their future.”
