I think the issue of acceptance can only be overcome when an individual is comfortable accepting that it is unlikely that an entire ethnic group will accept you, regardless of what you do. Unless, of course, you offer some additional benefit to the said ethnic group.

This is a pretty interesting video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OlQo-LZ78Y&mode=related&search=

I don’t think most people conflate ethnicity and race - though ethnic discrimination certainly exists. And I believe this is the reason why your US discourse on racism seems so different.

My cousin, who hasn’t had any contact from her very black Ethiopian father since she was four, is together with lots of adopted people and other “interracial” children an ethnic Swede. I don’t think anyone questions her swedishness or have specific assumptions on her place in society based on her skin tone.

If you are an immigrant however, speaking broken swedish and/or having a dificult name, maybe wearing a veil - then you will face discrimination. I believe discrimination here is much more based on perceived cultural differences and class than ideas of racial characteristics. Still there - just another context.

Those are the highlights. All these strange attitudes taught me very early on that “nationality” “culture” and, by extension, “race” are more often labels people apply to others, and that it’s all very constructed. I never felt particularly confused or conflicted by having different cultural influences from the kids I grew up with. It confused them though!

All of which lead me to realise that if I, a middle class white woman, have experienced a fair bit of cultural prejudice and even some full on contempt just for having a pretty common dual nationality, and the attending differences in family culture…how much worse must it be for bi-racial people. Not that simply being biracial is bad, but the way ignorant jackasses choose to treat those who do not conveniently fit into prearranged categories.

I agree with you that people try to justify their social Darwinist racist attitudes with more socially acceptable statements about ‘culture’. E.g. if what they actually think is ‘Many Black people are poor because they make bad choices, since they’re lazy and less intelligent’ they will say something like ‘Black people don’t have good careers because Black culture is anti-intellectual’.

She was from Russia (still the Soviet Union when she left), and I don’t think she’d ever actually met a Black person there.

(Also, bean - I make the same jokes as your best friend. biracial, bisexual, and pagan. I didn’t have the decency to stick to a monotheistic religion. *chuckle*)

this woman had immigrated from Europe in her early 20s and had not absorbed PC language and thought patterns

Maybe she was from a particularly bigoted corner of Europe, or perhaps she was just an ignorant or prejudiced person, but racism isn’t a European thing any more than it is an American or Australian thing. I’m sure you didn’t intend it as a blanket statement against Europeans, but as a European person from a mixed community, I found it a little hurtful.

TJ, not to go all European on you or anything, but … N***o? I consider that an offensive term.

What I find interesting here is the assumption that a bi-racial person is half white.

Actually, from what I’ve seen it doesn’t matter what the other half is (acceptability wise), as long as one half is identified as not black. There is no assumption that the other half is white (or less than half, like with Woods).

Mind you, I am fairly old, so among younger people the dynamics might be very different.

The problems a bi-racial couple might face themselves are not (always) the problems the children will face, at least among black people for the most part. I do know a woman whose daughter married a black man and they have children. I’m sure she loves the children and would proclaim to the heavens that she wasn’t in the least bit racist, but she was absolutely enraged when the other set of grandparents told the children that they were black. She did not feel there was any reason for them to be black, and that they didn’t have to be black, and as far as she was concerned they were going to go to school, go to college, get good jobs, and they would never be black.

I have a feeling that to her, “black” means drug users and thugs and so on, as someone posted above. Anyway, it’s quite possible those children will grow up with issues, identity and otherwise, depending on how much influence she actually has with them, and contact they have with her. I don’t know how prevalent that sort of feeling is though.

I also think that sometimes a problem arises with people who self identify as bi or multi racial when it seems they are attempting to “escape” the black category, as mentioned above, but that has to do with all sorts of issues, including acceptability to white people, especially if you are a high achiever in some way (I mention that Tiger Woods is black in a group of white people and the almost immediate reply is that he is not, he is Calabasian (or whatever he calls himself).

A person who identifies as bi-racial is often more acceptable to white cultures than a person with identical heritage who identifies as black. Why, I am not sure, but there is so much not even that long ago history with ‘passing’ and all that, that it all just adds yet another layer to an already sort of complex way of viewing things.

I do want to point out that culture is a synonym for society not only from the perspective of one of my majors - which happens to be anthropology, specifically concentrating on cultural, or as it is sometimes called social anthropology ,- but from the standpoint of the thesaurus.

The problem with using the term culture and race synonymously is that it is not at all synonymous.

One must choose a basic culture or society to belong to or be overwhelmed, but culture is a large concept, often broken down into small elements which are taken individually and called culture, when indeed they are not.

I have no idea about mixed race children being at greater risk for problems but I do know that the mixed race adults I know, and I know quite a few,( not all but I’d say seventy percent) do have “issues” which they deal with in regard to their acceptance into their family, their acceptance into a particular peer group at college, and several worry about of their future mate will have to be biracial in order for there not to be any tension between them in the future.

So, I’m not sure theory bears out reality. I’ve lived in a few different places in my life mainly here but Australia and Venezuela as well and it seems to me that that being of mixed race in any country has it’s issues based on that particular society and any sub culture within that society. Education may change that but it seems to be taking a particularly long time.

This is an interesting story I read which may or may not have anything to do with what you are trying to say but the way the author speaks of her mixed racial heritage is very similar to the way my friends also speak; friends from both the US, Europe, South America and Australia.

Black White and Jewish

Its the people like me who are ehh-whatever about many racial categorizations who really get yelled at :).

I think it is important to make a distinction between accepted and celebration. Traditionally, biracial or multiracial people were considered black and were accepted into African American communities. Now there have a been a few places like New Orleans where mixed race people created their own subcultures, but in the vast majority of places here is the US mixed race people were raised within African American communities. This was not the case for whites, who never viewed multiracial people as part of the Euro-American community.

Now, I’m not saying that the light skin vs. dark skin problem has not existed for an extended period of time in African American communities. The tension between African Americans and multiracial activists is really very recent, and it has emerged because many African American leaders view the creation of a biracial category as a way to decrease the number Blacks and reject Blackness altogether. This view were not exist if the tradition of counting black/white multiracial people as black. People wouldn’t be making such arguments if biracial people were not viewed as part of the African American community.

While I think Stu was reaching in his analysis I think you’re reaching in the opposite direction in yours. This sounds way more intellectual theory than reality based.

This is an important point because mixed race people have traditionally been accepted in the African American community.

Is that actually the case in your experience? Mine (as a school teacher) was that skin-color-related taunts and boasting were one of my biggest discipline problems.

Do you/did you teach children /young teens? I wouldn’t use them as the best barometer of acceptance, if so. Nor would I, in general, assume that the things they say to each other, and the teasing, insults and so on regarding skin color were things that they would necessarily repeat at home. And certainly not at a family reunion or something, where (for any number of black families) skin tones range from white to purple black, with everything else in between, and facial features span African, European, Asian, Native American and so on.

I’m sure not every black person/family is accepting of multiracial (black-something else) children, although I have never personally met one who was not.

The other thing that fascinates me is that in his ‘3 solutions’, he labels the option that involves people accepting each other as “highly unlikely”, but makes no such mention of likelihood for option 1, which is the fuzzy notion of “one world/large regional race”. I know he says that it wouldn’t be a good idea, but the fact that he seems to automatically think the complete dissolution of race (How exactly would this occur? Which race would be adopted as the standard? What would we do with people who don’t fit?) is more likely than people accepting eachother. That’s some lack of faith in humanity, right there. And people think feminists and anti-racists hate on everyone?