Gentlemen: pardon me but - my question ain’t about you.
It isn’t about you genetic makeup, it’ isn’t about how you treat people who are different from you. It isn’t about you at all.
It’s about the phrases “woman of color†and “man of mixed race,†whether they are equal or different, and if they are different, why or how.
It ain’t about you. It’s about th3 Veep and the President and what they are called.
With respect, that is what I was responding to. It's why I said "What is good
about "mixed" descriptor is that it is ambiguous. I like that ambiguity. I think it presages the obsolescence of the concept of "race" altogether."
But you are not alone in this dilemma:
The Kamala Harris identity debate shows how America still struggles to talk about multiracial people Identity is complicated, and she shouldn’t have to choose just one. (Vox) "For multiracial people, defining their racial identity in America can be a complex and fraught issue because of other people’s assumptions and expectations. And what the energy expended on debating Harris’s identity tells us is that we still have a long way to go when it comes to talking about multiracial people in America."
I would never insult anyone for their heritage. Indeed, I'm quite sensitive to others' preferences about themselves. I usually ask what they prefer, whether it is a racial, gender, heritage or any other preference (as an advocate for the LGBTQ+ community, it is an absolute necessity). It is a particularly salient topic in the Latinx/Hispanic
community as well. In this case, the particular descriptors
Doug used in his commentary were also explicitly used by those two individuals in their descriptions
of themselves, so I personally wouldn't sweat it.
Although I prefer the "bi- or multi-racial" approach, as less pejorative in connotation, this is a fairly new issue "The 2000 Census was the first time the government provided mixed-race Americans the opportunity to claim all aspects of their heritage. That year, only 2.4 percent of the population checked multiple boxes, but in California (true to its bell-weather status), 4.7 percent of the total population embraced their mixed racial heritage. More remarkable in that data was the finding that among children under age five in California, 8.4 percent were multi-racial."
Mixed Like Me: Obama’s Speech Hits Mixed-Race ChordMixed (American Progress)
In our not-so-distant history (my lifetime),
literal segregation by arbitrary racial designation was still legal, so I'd be particularly mindful of which aspects of an individual's heritage they prefer to accentuate.
