Chris Butler
I'm a 34-year-old biracial man, living in San Francisco but originally from New York City. I'm the product of an Irish father and a Black mother. I've been mistaken for almost everything, but on the east coast they usually think I'm Puerto Rican, on the west coast they think I'm Hawaiian or Samoan. Growing up, I experienced a lot of racism...almost all of it from blacks. From day one, they kept telling me: "You're black, you're black, you're black!" And when I refused to live a lie just to make them happy, they proceeded to make my life a living hell all through school (assaults on a daily basis, that kind of thing. I learned how to fight really good thanks to them) Whites, on the other hand, didn't seem to care what color I was, they just thought of me as Chris. They never demanded I call myself white. As I got older, white girls thought of me as "the best of both worlds," so that's who I dated. To this day, my mother is the only black person who accepted me as "Mixed" (her word). But my father was the classic self-hating white liberal, and he always resented me for refusing to be the black son he always wanted.
Like a lot of you, I went through that whole "what am I?" phase, but I got over it in a way most of you haven't figured out yet. I'll give you a hint: Question: Hispanics didn't exist before about 500 years ago, so where did they come from? Answer: They're the result of cross-breeding between Spaniards, who were white, and south americans, who were indians. Think about it, two different races...interbreeding...and creating a third...entirely...new...race. Get it now? We're not black, we're not white, WE'RE A WHOLE NEW RACE!! Now, I always hated terms like "biracial" or "mixed-race," makes me sound like a goddamn mutt. So I call our race..."Gray." (what do you get when you mix black & white paint...think about it.) "Grays" have been around for over 400 years, but you wouldn't know it 'cause over half of us were raised in black neighborhoods and were brainwashed into thinking of themselves as black. Worse, white liberals and black racists got together at some point and proceeded to erase all mention of us from the history books. Famous "Grays" like the writer Alexander Pushkin were presented as famous blacks. I don't know what you call covering up an entire people's existence...but the word "genocide" comes to mind. (Yeah, the Jews had the holocaust, but at least they were allowed to KNOW they were Jews, we weren't even given that much!)
I know a lot of you would like to pretend there's no such thing as race, but everyone else has had thousands of years to be proud of "thier own kind," why shouldn't we? Bsaically, I want to get together with all of you, and I'd like to see us officially recognized as a separate race--having a "mixed-race" box on the census form just don't cut it. (I'd also like to hook up with a good "Gray" woman, but that's another story.) Please e-mail me and tell me what you think, pro or con. Thanks for listening to my rant, and if I wasn't an athiest, I'd say "God Bless."