Michelle Hughes has brown, curly hair that’s fine in texture. Depending on the season, her skin color ranges from a light olive brown to a creamier hue. When she meets someone new, that person often finds a way to ask: “What are you?” (which sounds rude, right?) or “Where are you from?” (which is sort of the same).
She admits she can be a bit of a chameleon, capable of “blending” into several racial or ethnic groups, depending on the neighborhood.
When she’s on Chicago’s South Side, she said, people assume she’s a fair-skinned African-American. In Little Village or Pilsen, she might be considered a Latina. In Little Italy, she could pull off Italian.
Hughes’ mother is white. Her father is African-American. Though her gene combination skews toward her mom’s features, there’s just enough of her dad’s to confuse people. But that confusion has to do with others, not her.
“I have two parents,” said Hughes, 41, an adoption attorney who lives in Wicker Park. “Part of who I am is my mom; part of who I am is my dad.”
Beginning Thursday, Chicago will host a four-day conference titled, “Loving Decision Conference 2007: The Next 40 Years of Multiracial Communities.” Though the event will commemorate the 40th anniversary of Loving vs. Virginia — the U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down miscegenation laws in several states, legalizing interracial marriage — it will focus more on the issues affecting the offspring of interracial couples.
Though Hughes is not a proponent of the “tragic mulatto” mythology, she believes issues surrounding identity remain real and complex. Biracial people often are still expected to define themselves singularly, by choosing one part of their ancestry over the other. Interracial parents, though incredibly sensitive to racial matters, may not know how to help their biracial children navigate the best and the worst of both of their worlds.
The conference is designed to address many issues, including transracial adoptions. But it’s also designed to celebrate multiculturalism.
Years ago, the furor over interracial unions and marriages was indeed about the fear of miscegenation. But it also was about what would happen to the offspring of these couples. Some believed biracial children would live a life of isolation, confusion and depression. They would crumble.
Hughes has not crumbled. But some of her experiences have been unique to being biracial. Growing up, she remembers walking into restaurants with her parents and the patrons, black and white, glaring at them.
Her mother didn’t always know how to deal with her hair. Her father often was making sure his children had a deep understanding of black history.
She said that over the years she has been in white crowds and defended blacks if something disparaging was said. The same is true of her having been in black crowds and defending whites if the need arose.
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“You’re forced into educating a lot,” said Hughes, a member of the Chicago-based Biracial Family Network, a conference organizer. “Being white is the norm in this country. If you’re anything else, you have to deal with race.”
Hughes said dating presents its own challenges. “I find that men of color are more comfortable moving between both the Caucasian world and the ‘of color’ world. White men aren’t always as comfortable doing that.”
With interracial unions on the rise, more biracial people are defining themselves rather than accepting society’s hand-me-down definitions.
The 2000 census was the first time Americans could check several race categories to describe their backgrounds. About 7 million Americans did so. And it’s not uncommon to hear a teen who’s the product of a black parent and Mexican parent call himself a “Blaxican;” or one who has a white parent and an Asian or Pacific Islander parent call herself a “Hapa.” The word comes from the Hawaiian term “hapa haole,” which means “half white.” Even with folk claiming their own identities, we still have a long way to go in all matters racial. But we have come a long way since the night Richard and Mildred Loving, a white man and a black woman, were arrested in their Virginia home. Their infraction? Simply loving one another.
To find out more about the conference, check out www.lovingconference.com.
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