Blowing up the racial boxes

People often ask me what race I am and what I "call myself." When I asked my mother what I should call myself, she said, "You're biracial."

My mother fought for this on behalf of my younger brother and me in 1990, the final Census that failed to allow people to identify with more than one racial group. When the census taker rejected our status as mixed-race children, she first suggested we go by the race of my mother.

My mother wouldn't have any of it, as neither one of us can be truly considered "white." The Census taker then offered a compromise, proposing one of us be listed as "white" while the other could be called "black."

I have identified myself as black for years, only to wonder what being "black" really meant. If how I lived my life were directly attributable to my race, then watching "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" and listening to Led Zeppelin could be considered "black."

Black people aren't more prone than others to eating fried chicken, just as whites aren't more prone to listening to Garth Brooks -- with a shout-out to "The Thunder Rolls."

I have been called hateful, racist things by both white and black people. Ironically, racism knows no creed. (As a side note, there's no such thing as "reverse racism." White people didn't trademark racism, though they may have provided the most blatant historical example.)

When the landmark 1967 Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia overturned the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 -- which defined a white person as having no trace of black blood and criminalizing marriages between whites and non-whites -- people had trouble trying to eliminate the line separating distinctions that make relating to the world familiar.

The "either-or" mentality eliminated by interracial marriages discomfited those used to having the world fit into preconceived notions about people -- also known as stereotypes....