The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette did an article today on "Racial identities spawn new terminology." James Landrith, a blogger I met back in 2004, showed up among the first names in the piece.
As someone who's 1/8th African, I decided to check out the P-G article. I've pretty much decided that my race is "human" or "Terran." Maybe I decided that because I'm too much of a science fiction fan, or maybe it's because I have no real idea yet where that 1/8th comes from.1 My other 7/8ths is "urban legend" than anything, although the Kerr family was built castles with staircases that wound the wrong way because they were so strongly left-handed — as am I! So really, I don't know what to call myself. Octaroon is considered offensive and reminds me of cookies: not a good thing for a diabetic! I read the article, interested in how others approach the question.
Who should I see mentioned but James Landrith? I shouldn't be surprised: He's got a web site titled multiracial.com and he's associated with the Swirl, Inc. Yahoo group (as am I). But that's not where I met Mr. Landrith.
The original UnSpace blog lasted a couple months in 2002-2003. When I started it back up in October of 2004, I decided to move from Blogger to a blog I hosted. I chose WordPress and immediately ran into a problem. I had no clue as to how to fill out the data for the WordPress Config file. There was a peculiarity I needed to know about for where I was being hosted at the time, and no one in the WordPress Support could give me an answer that worked.
I googled around and found that there was a blog titled "Taking the Gloves Off" that was hosted by the same folks. I wrote a desperate e-mail to the blog owner, asking for some help.
James Landrith wrote back with a copy of the file attached, an explanation of some things I needed to know (including how leading and trailing spaces in a .php file can cause problems) and his phone number. UnSpace has been up and running and "Taking the Gloves Off" a daily read ever since.
Only later did I find out I was multi-racial. As someone put it, "Most people find out they're black before they're in their forties!" James introduced me to the Swirl, Inc.. group and to the multiracial.com to help me learn from others.
James Landrith is a good guy. I'm glad to see him get some recognition in "One of America's Great Newsapers."
- After I got the results back, I realized that I was lucky they found something: had I gotten a report back saying I was 100% Indo-European, I'd have been majorly bummed. The genetics test cost me over $100! For that kind of money, I want to find something unexpected. [back]
Whenever I encounter the race question on a form, including the census, I just don’t fill anything out. Occasionally I will create a write-in option of “human” and “individual”. One time I was particularly irked by the politically correct penchant for collecting everybody into groups and I wrote “rugged individual, unaffiliated with any group”.
Now that you have found out that you’re 1/8 black, does that change the way you operate in life? Do people treat you differently in such a way that can be compared to how black men and women of today are treated? (I would assume people would not treat you any differently than an average white guy because they wouldn’t even know you have black in your genetic makeup. Unless of course you go around saying you’re 1/8th black!)
[…] Finding Out I’m Multiracial By Rob Over in the post about my friend James Landrith getting mentioned in the P-G, Nic asks a question I’d like to tackle in a post rather than in the comments: Now that you have found out that you’re 1/8 black, does that change the way you operate in life? Do people treat you differently in such a way that can be compared to how black men and women of today are treated? (I would assume people would not treat you any differently than an average white guy because they wouldn’t even know you have black in your genetic makeup. Unless of course you go around saying you’re 1/8th black!) […]
Nic,
I’ve written a post answering your questions here.