Walking A Fine Line ... When Racial Identity Is A Delicate Balancing Act

When Jolanda Williams looks in a mirror, she sees a warm peach complexion framed in dark silky hair, high cheekbones beneath almond eyes, and full lips that slip into an easy, radiant smile. It is a face that could belong almost anywhere: Mexico, India, Indonesia. Yet Williams, daughter of a white German mother and a black American father, has spent the better part of her 35 years coming to terms with where she fits in.

“In America, it’s all about physical characteristics,” says Williams, a resident of Brooklyn, N.Y., who, for as long as she can remember, has identified herself on paper as African-American. “If I were to put ‘white’ on a job application and walk into an interview, whoever was interviewing me would assume they had the wrong person. It’s unrealistic for me to think I can actually walk through the world identifying as white, considering the way I look.”

However, how is it that Williams, who looks mixed-race and – because of her parents’ divorce when she was a child – and raised by a white mother, leans more toward being African-American? “As a child, the question of race was really hard for me,” says Williams, who grew up in San Antonio, Texas, in a predominately black neighborhood and went to schools with a largely minority demographic. “When I was little, I didn’t understand. However, when I got to elementary school, people began to respond to me with questions: Can I touch your hair? Is your mother white? When they found out she was German, they would snap their heels and do the ‘Heil, Hitler!’ thing. And although my mother taught me that people who did such things were ignorant, I still had to deal with the internal struggle of determining where I was most comfortable.”

Williams’ journey has taken her from distancing herself from the sometimes harsh social realities of her mixed-race heritage to developing a solid confidence in who she is: a self-described African-American who is biracial. “There was a time in middle school that I didn’t want anyone to know that I had a white mother,” she says. “I thought it would keep me from being popular or would bring about questions I wanted to avoid.” Nevertheless, years of life experiences have resulted in Williams seeing things more clearly, even if she still struggles with society’s tendency to put people into boxes. “If I tell someone I’m African-American,” she says, “and that my mother is white, and my father is black, the response is, OK, she’s black. Even though I grew up with my white mother, it does not matter in this country. It is really about the way you look. I learned that the best box for me is the one that is more accepting of me. And that is an African-American box.”

Bestselling New York author and jazz musician James McBride spends little time focusing on being mixed-race. “I don’t really use that term because I don’t think it’s relevant,” says McBride, the son of a Jewish mother from Poland and an African-American father. “I don’t wake up in the morning wondering if I should eat gefilte fish or watermelon. However, there is no question, as a child I had issues with being biracial. Back then, it was clear to me that there was a pecking order in society and that in a world of cowboys and Indians, I was closer to the Indian.”

In his critically acclaimed autobiography, The Color of Water, McBride – who identifies himself as black – describes growing up biracial under the fierce determination of his Jewish mother. “My mother’s defense mechanism was it’s us against the world,” he says. “The world didn’t understand us and didn’t necessarily like us. And it wasn’t going to necessarily be kind to us because of who we are.”

Dr. Melissa Herman, assistant professor of sociology at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, understands the reasoning behind the choices made by the more than six million multiracial people in the United States. “A lot of our choices about identity have to do with phenotype, our physical characteristics,” she says, “because that determines how other people perceive and treat us. If you look even slightly black, there is great social pressure in American society to be black. That is certainly a vestige of the system of hypo-descent, or the one-drop rule. Even though it is no longer legally enforced, it is very much socially enforced. It’s ingrained in children from a very early age; not necessarily by their parents, who may want them to have the freedom to choose, but by our society.”

The way she looks also factors in with how Miki Meek, an online travel producer for The New York Times, determines her racial identity. Born to a Japanese mother and a white American father, she – like Williams and McBride – admits to struggling from an early age with being biracial. “Most people can see that I’m mixed, but they think I look Polynesian,” she says. “I grew up in places that were largely Caucasian. I thought we were the only mixed family in the world. It is hard to deal with as a child because you do not think about what you look like or race. You mom is your mom, and your dad is your dad.”

Things got harder for Meek once she entered school. “I was called Chink and gook and Jap,” she says, “and I didn’t really know what those things meant. I just knew that they meant I was different, but I wanted to be the same as everyone else.”

When she was in her early teens, Meek’s family moved to Japan, where she attended an international school. “That year was great for my self-esteem,” she says. “The majority of the kids at school were mixed. They did not look white, but they did not look Japanese either. In addition, they had a lot of pride in being mixed-race. I learned to take pride in and be comfortable with being biracial. When I got into college, the mixed-race students actually sought each other out. We had some of the same experiences growing up and knew what it was like being raised in biracial families.”

Williams describes a different experience along the way. While in college, she found it challenging to find understanding among her largely African-American friends. “One day at our table in the cafeteria,” she says, “the conversation turned to slavery. When I spoke up, one girl said, ‘Jolanda, you shouldn’t say anything at all because your point is not valid here. Your ancestors were the ones doing the whipping, and they were also the ones getting whipped.’ At the time, I did not know what to say, so I shut up. It was one of the worst experiences I’d ever had.”

Born in Heidelberg, Germany, Williams continued her quest for ethnic kinship by seeking out Germany’s Afro-German community. “They saw me as American and couldn’t understand why I wasn’t totally comfortable just being African-American,” she says. “For them, the notion of having any culture to belong to was good enough.”

Such reactions fed what Williams describes as an “internal loneliness,” a feeling she still wrestles with occasionally. However, years of education, communication, and therapy has helped. “It is a sense that I don’t belong,” she says, “and that I will forever have a separate experience from others because the world in which we live is unable to understand that existence is not based on white or black or any race, for that matter. Rather, existence consists of many different important experiences. At the end of the day, I am who I am not because of race but because of the experiences I’ve had.”

For Williams and Meek, their parents’ effort to expose them to both sides of their heritage enriches those experiences. Both women speak their mothers’ native languages, have learned about and visited their mothers’ countries throughout their lives, and maintain close and loving relationships with their families on both sides. Meek, who identifies as a good balance of both of her racial heritages, recently changed her name from Miriam to the Japanese “Miki.” “My mother always called me Miki, and it’s definitely more me,” she says. “It gives a nod to my Japanese side.”

Although McBride has never explored either side of his heritage to a great degree, he acknowledges that being biracial has been a benefit. “It has helped me tremendously,” he says. “It’s helped me understand that once you get to the humanity of a person, you discover that we’re all essentially the same. I received a lot from two different worlds. I choose to accept that as a real gift.”

People like Williams, McBride, and Meek give Dr. Melissa Herman hope that “eventually, the propensity for Americans to focus on grouping people into races may change as more mixed-race children are born,” she says.

“But I’m adamant about discussing race,” Williams continues. “It has profoundly impacted my life. Understanding it can help me to better understand who I am.” In addition, with the passage of time, years of experience, and the courage of her convictions, Williams has finally found her voice and has an answer for her college cafeteria friend: “If you really think about it, someone with my background has more to say about race than most. We have the unique perspective of seeing from both sides."