The sudden rise of Tiger Woods–at 21, perhaps the second most popular athlete in the world–has illuminated some of the fault lines in the ways we think about race: old wounds we’d like to forget, new truths we’ve been too busy to recognize. Last week, as Tiger talked with Oprah Winfrey about being a child of mixed race, he was also graciously accepting the apology of golfer Fuzzy Zoeller, who’d admonished the “boy” not to order fried chicken and collard greens at next year’s Masters dinner. Ring in the new, ring in the old. Woods told Winfrey that he objected to being called African-American; he said he was “Cablinasian,” a neologism he’d made up as a boy to combine Caucasian, black, Indian and Asian. He emphasized that he embraced both sides of his family, without compromise. But to be called any one of them, he said, was to deny a part of him.
In the popular marketplace, the timing could not have been better. Stars of ambiguous or mixed ethnicity–Keanu Reeves (Hawaiian, Chinese, white), Mariah Carey (black Venezuelan, white), Johnny Depp (Cherokee, white), Dean Cain (Japanese, white)–are altering the lines of racial phenotype. Companies like Nike, Calvin Klein and Benetton are working ethnicity as an idiom of commerce; it adds value to a pair of sneakers or a cotton T shirt. “MTV and the Internet have broken down boundaries in a way that no other generation has been able to take advantage of,” says Robert Triefus, a spokesman for Calvin Klein. At a time when young people are buying corporate conceptions of “alternative,” ethnic ambiguity confers both individuality and a sense of shared values. Tiger Woods, says Triefus, “represents the most exciting facet of this matrix.”
Global identity: In the increasingly global youth culture, the notion of identity itself is up for grabs. When you can go to a Korean hip-hop club in Los Angeles and dance to the all-black Wu-Tang Clan rapping about being Shaolin fighters, in a crowd sporting Tommy Hilfiger WASP-wear, who’s to say where racial boundaries lie? James Williams, a sophomore at Wesleyan College, shakes his head over the changing parameters. James’s mother is white, German. His father is black, with a mix of Cherokee and Choctaw. The other day, he says, “this white kid came up to me and said, “What up, nigga?’ " This was, he says with a laugh, the kid’s idea of a friendly greeting.
This cultural tumult reflects the changing face of the nation. Immigration and integration have made America a more colorful place. As recently as 1967, more than a dozen states still banned miscegenation. Since then, interracial marriage has risen dramatically (chart), producing a hyphen-happy generation for whom old racial and ethnic categories–black, white, Asian, Hispanic–no longer work. By census count, 2.2 percent of all marriages are interracial, double the rate from 1980; more than 6 percent of blacks who marry do so outside the race. One in five married Asian Pacific Islanders has a non-Asian spouse. All these marriages have produced nearly 2 million children under 18 who are of mixed race. Congress is now debating whether to add a “mixed race” category to the census in 2000. At stake is the very definition of race in America, and the movement of millions of federal dollars.
At the Women of Color house at Wesleyan, James Williams tries to map the new ethnic terrain. He identifies himself as mixed; one of his siblings calls herself black, the other mixed. He is often told that he looks like Tiger Woods, though the two bear little resemblance. This is a source of some irritation. Williams flies a German flag in his room; the CDs currently on his changer include Mozart, Tupac and Tracy Chapman. When he was growing up, he says, his father’s parents would not allow his mother in their house; to his black relatives, “we’re seen as the snobby white kids.” All of his life, he has heard taunts that his parents should not have married, “that my existence is my fault.” He rejects such purist notions of race and color. But when he considers his own future, nagging questions slip in. His girlfriend is Korean. “At times I think, “I don’t want to have kids lighter than me.’ I have Native American in me, but I don’t recognize that, because it’s not pushed on me. If my kids were lighter and had the chance to “pass,’ maybe they would do that with my black half, [and] lose the culture.”
Seated around the room are peers who are as hyphenated as Williams, members of the school’s Interracial Students Organization. It is one of many such groups that have sprung up on campuses in the last decade–Harvard has two, one for students with one black parent, another for students who are part Asian–and which are pushing students toward a racial cognizance their elders never had. Sean Brecker tells the story of his first weeks on campus. His father is white, Jewish. His mother identifies herself as African-Indian; Sean was born in Pakistan, raised in Tanzania and London. He has piercing blue eyes, and says he has to go out of his way to tell people he is “not, contrary to popular belief, the [group’s] token white.” When he got to Wesleyan, he says, he was first recruited by the African-American students organization, then the Latino, Asian, and interracial groups. “I came to Wesleyan and realized I was out of touch,” he says. “I got to thinking about what I was.”
Kimchi burritos: At the University of California, Berkeley, Sheila Chung joined a similar group when she saw a flier for “kimchi burritos.” It just felt right. Chung, 20, calls herself “Korgentinian,” for Korean and Argentinian. Some of her friends identify themselves as “China-Latina” or “Blackanese.” Her group is called Hapa, from a Hawaiian word for “half”: once derogatory, now, in parts of Asia and America, hip. For her generation, mixed heritage no longer automatically evokes an ugly history–the subjugation of Asian war brides to white GIs, the rape of African slaves.
But being multiracial can still be problematic. Most constructions of race in America revolve around a peculiar institution known as the “one-drop rule”: anyone who acknowledges a single black ancestor is considered black. The rule is a warped legacy of slavery, devised to ensure that the offspring of slaves and masters would remain enslaved. Yet it retains a powerful sway even today. An estimated 70 to 90 percent of all people who call themselves African-Americans are of mixed lineage (some “whites” are, too). The one-drop conceit shapes both racism–creating an arbitrary “caste”–and the collective response against it. To identify as multiracial is to challenge this logic, and consequently, to fall outside both camps.
In strictly mathematical terms, Tiger Woods’s heritage is one-quarter Thai, one-quarter Chinese, one-quarter white, an eighth Native American and an eighth black. But by the confluence of marketing and ideology, he became golf’s great black hope. “A lot of young Asian-Americans feel resentful that the media neglects his Asian heritage,” says Angelo Ragaza, editor of the Asian-American magazine A. The first ad in his $40 million Nike campaign called out the golf courses that would not let him play. His race immediately became part of the marketing formula. “Woods was perfect for a company that’s made a lot of money off people that look like him,” said a source involved in the campaign. “So of course they pushed the envelope as far as they could with the race card.” Robin Carr, a Nike spokesperson, maintains that all ads have come from “[getting] to know Tiger and [realizing] that race and minority issues are very important to him.” But the company is now faced with a different racial identity, a narrative that does not neatly resolve. As the supermodel Veronica Webb says, “It’s a lot easier marketing the next Jackie Robinson than it is to market a Cablinasian. A Cablinasian sounds like something Will Smith would be fighting in “ID4’.”
Not mixed: Over lunch at a local bookstore, several of the Wesleyan women swoon over magazine ads featuring the model Tyson Beckford. Beckford is dark-skinned, with eyes that evoke a Chinese-Jamaican grandparent; he identifies himself as African-American, not mixed. This is a quandary that remains unresolved. For all their support and visibility, the students hold firm that race, unlike sexual orientation, remains as unyielding for their generation as any. Even they admit they’re obsessed with race. All experience racism–sometimes within their own families. By asserting their multiracial identities, they can throw light on the nation’s racial irrationality, even pressure it. But this alone does not ease it, any more than Tiger Woods is the happy ending to our unhappy racial saga. He is merely the next chapter, and they, along with him, 2 million strong, and counting. And all of them, incidentally, in need of a good, hip pair of athletic shoes.
