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Praise God for today!  Despite having a boatload of assignments due in a short time combined with an extremely tight schedule that was packed full, I managed to get quite a bit done today.  Shows how much God really works in your life and pulls you through even the stickiest of situations. 

Anyways, over in Louisiana recently, an African American man and a Caucasian woman fell in love and decided to get married.  Shockingly, the justice of peace who was asked to help make the marriage official refused to let them marry.  When asked why, the justice claimed that he was concerned for their potential children.  Their potential biracial children would apparently suffer socially so claims the justice and that’s why he refused to grant marriage to the couple. 

Now of course, this is an unacceptable act regardless of the justice’s feelings.  Fortunately in the meantime, the couple can still get married as long as they find a different justice.  But this story really stood out to me, particularly because I have a mixed ethnical background myself (Japanese, Caucasian).  And I had a chance to read an article by Patrik Jonsson from the Christian Science Monitor titled “La. [Louisiana] interracial marriage: Is life tougher for biracial kids?” relating to this story.  Jonsson made some interesting points, and since he’s basically talking about people like myself, I thought I’d share a little of my own two cents. 

Jonsson starts off by referring to the mythical “tragic mulatto” by saying: 

Research on mixed-race children once focused on the social and psychological problems that can arise from not feeling like a full member of any racial group. That notion permeated early 20th century American literature through the figure of the “tragic mulatto,” who did not fit in with either the black or white world. 

So now you’re probably asking, was I myself ever a “tragic mulatto?”  Actually, when I was kid, I was at times.  I wouldn’t call it “tragic” or anything, and it didn’t really impact me to point of having psychological problems.  But I guess you can say that I did have a little issue with “my ethnic identity” and also how it related to other kids.  Most of the kids I went to school with were either full Asian, full white, or full something else.  There weren’t that many mixed kids if any, at least to my knowledge.  Myself, I think I understood who I was in terms of my background.  But often times, when asked about my ethnic background, I would usually reply “Asian” or “Japanese” as that was the one group I closely related myself to.  I guess I was trying to fit in with most of the other kids I knew at the time.  I would also check the box “Asian/Pacific Islander” when taking standardized tests (nowadays I check “Other”, like most mixed Asians do, haha). 

But at the same time, I knew that I wasn’t full Asian.  I mean come on, does my name look like an Asian name to you?  Haha, even though I would call myself an “Asian”, the fact that I knew I was only part Asian did make me feel a little uncomfortable when talking about my background. 

Despite all that though, it was never really a critical issue.  I still made friends and hung out with many different kids at school.  That’s the nice thing about California is the diversity.  So, even though I may have had a “tragic mulatto” status at times in my life, it never affected me to the point where it got serious.  Furthermore, just as my own “tragic mulatto” story is now a thing of the past, so is the “tragic mulatto” myth in general.  As Jonsson further continues in his article:

But loosening of marriage laws and more-accepting social mores have transformed perceptions of multiracial families. For one thing, there are now 7 million mixed-race kids in the US, up from 500,000 in the 1970s.  

A 2008 study of 182 mixed-race high school kids in California found that these kids didn’t focus on exclusionary features like skin color or hair texture when thinking about themselves, but instead, they appeared to feel that their heritage made them “unique.” 

The kids are able to “place one foot in the majority and one in the minority group, and in this way might be buffered against the negative consequences of feeling tokenized,” the study authors wrote in the Journal of Social Issues. The students surveyed included those with mixed Asian, Hispanic heritage. 

Heehee, now THAT’s more like it.  Indeed, this definitely nails how I feel about my background now.  The uniqueness that comes with being a descendant of two different kinds of people and being able to associate with two or more different cultures is a true blessing from God, of which I am very thankful for ^^.  And especially with the diverse world that we live in today, we don’t even have to be ethnically mixed to enjoy and associate with many different cultures.  Yale student Phoebe Hinton adds on with a pretty nifty quote from her own blog stating: 

I am lucky enough to have an excuse flowing in my veins to do whatever … I want: there are some things white people do and … I’ll do them. There are some things black people do, and … I’ll do them. 

Haha, pretty nifty.  But anyways, the whole point is this.  Whether you’re a descendant of one ethnicity or several, and if you yourself may be feeling like a “tragic mulatto” out of not feeling a sense of belonging, be assured that there’s no need to feel that way.  As Romans 12:4-5 states: 

Just as our bodies have many parts and each part has a special function, so it is with Christ’s body.  We are many parts of one body, and we all belong to each other.  (New Living Translation) 

God made each and every one of us unique and blessed us in many different ways.  And He did it this way so that we could all bring glory to His name and spread the love of Jesus in a vast and endless amount of ways.  And God blessed you as well with special gifts, because you are one of many different and unique people who belong to the body of Christ.

Let us wish the very best as well as a good marriage to the happy couple in Louisiana.  And may they be fruitful and multiply just as Genesis 1:28 states.

Best wishes and God bless ^^.

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