Name: Heather M. Dalmage
Background: In “Tripping on the Color Line: Black-White Multiracial Families in a Racially Divided World” (Rutgers University Press, $20), Heather M. Dalmage looks at the challenges multiracial families face in a society that can’t agree on what–if anything–race means. Dalmage is an assistant professor of sociology at the School of Policy Studies at Roosevelt University in Chicago.
Q. What do you think of how the race question was phrased on the 2000 census?
A. That we can break people down into these minute categories speaks to how we all still think about race in the U.S. It reflects the broader mess that’s been created. But given where race dialogue is going in this country, it made sense to ask people to “check one or more” racial designations–as many as applied. If there had been a general multiracial category, we would not have been able to track what needs to be tracked in order to maintain civil rights legislation.
Q. You talk about two fundamentally different ways of looking at race: essentialism and social constructionism. Can you put those in more familiar terms?
A. Essentialism is the idea that race genetically programs not just our physical features but also how we act, our intelligence, our athletic ability, that sort of thing. As if our appearance somehow coincides with other genetic traits, with superiority and inferiority. Whereas social constructionism looks at how the idea of race developed in the U.S., acknowledging the history of the one-drop rule [that a person with “one drop of black blood” is considered black] and understanding why there are light-skinned black people in the country. The idea of race has been constructed in particular ways to protect resources in the hands of those who have them.
Q. The second view takes into account family life, traditions in your home, what you encounter in the larger world?
A. Yes. Someone who might be considered black in the U.S. could go to the Caribbean or Latin America and not be considered black. We don’t define race the same way other countries do.
Q. Do people in multiracial families think about race more often than other people?
A. Yes. Though I think race is a crisis for everybody in the U.S., most people walk around not thinking consciously about it.
Q. Who’s who in your multiracial family?
A. My uncle Steve was adopted during the Korean War; he’s Korean. He married my aunt, who’s Filipina, so my cousins are mixed Korean and Filipino.
My brother married a woman from Indonesia, so my nieces are mixed Indonesian and white.
My husband is black and my in-laws are from Jamaica, so my daughter is mixed black and white.
Q. Do you think there’s more acceptance of multiracialism these days?
A. I don’t know about more; I think it’s different. It’s not the same as in the ’60s and ’70s, when we were just coming out of Jim Crow laws and civil rights legislation was being instituted. Now people want to claim they’re color-blind. People will say, “I don’t even see race,” but what they do clearly indicates that they see it.
Q. Does that come up often for you?
A. All the time, with my daughter. People will ask, “Is she your daughter?” Not quite being able to make the connection. Other women have told me they hear “Is your child adopted?” I haven’t gotten that one. Some people will come right out and say, “Is she mixed?”
Generally it’s people of color who say that. Whites won’t say it because whites more often don’t want to discuss race at all. They might see it, but they won’t say it. Whereas people of color are more used to talking about these things, and they’ll ask it.
Q. Do you get into a discussion then?
A. Sometimes. It depends on how they ask. Generally the people who probably need to discuss it are afraid to bring it up, whereas the people who do bring it up are more comfortable with it–unless it’s the hostile people, and then I’m not going to engage them anyway.
Q. How often do you encounter outright trouble?
A. It’s hard to say. Less and less. Though at least once a week there’s an incident where I wonder, “Was that a race incident?”
So constant questioning, but I can’t remember the last time there was a big incident, clear hostility.
Q. Do you live in the city?
A. Yes, and acceptance is related to where you live. We’re in the process of moving to Hyde Park because of the large number of multiracial families there.
Q. Acceptance depends a lot on your specific location?
A. Mixed families know where they can be comfortable. If it were just my husband and I, we could go anywhere, but I want to be careful what position I put my children in.
Q. How old is your daughter? Have you talked to her about race?
A. She’s 2 1/2, and no. She hasn’t brought it up. I think 3 is when they start to notice skin color.
Q. Are you going to prepare her for a hard time?
A. I think we need to deal with whatever comes up. I don’t want to give her a formula. But I do know I’m very specific about, say, how I do her hair, because hair is such a marker in our society, especially between white and black. I braid it or twist it and make sure she has all the hair toys. Hair is so political.
Q. Do you wish people talked about race more? Or less?
A. More. I don’t think ignoring a problem ever helps it go away. I think we should discuss not just people of color but also the privileges of whiteness and a system that continues to reproduce power and privilege for white people and disadvantage for people of color. I would like to see much more discussion about the history of our understanding of race in this country and also how it plays out in the political system, in housing and education. There’s an assumption that the civil rights movement somehow leveled the playing field, but it didn’t.
