Stubborn Stains

There's a hidden message in the media's hailing of Barack Obama as the "First Black President of the United States" (FBPOTUS). Most people wouldn't catch it so I don't blame you if you haven't spotted it yet. If he is elected, he will most certainly not be the "First Black President of the United States".

If he's elected, he should be known as the first mixed race (though isn't that a terrible and problematic set of words) President of the United States (FMRPOTUS). Obama's mother is a white American and his father is from Kenya. He's not black, in fact he looks quite brown to me. Blackness means that as far back as you can tell, you're family was descended from Africans (slaves, mind you, not Kenyans--there was no such thing as Kenya until relatively recently). The same thing for whiteness (though what does that mean? There are white people from western Europe to the Caucasus and now beyond).

Though I admit few personal details on these pages, I'm the child of a mixed race (ugh again!) couple. My dad is Indian (no, not First Nations) and my mother is white. But much like Obama's blackness, I'll never be more than an Indian. Very few people would ever consider the complexity of my background in defining me. The only thing they see is the stain of my birth: colour.

Here's an example of the usual, everyday conversations I have to endure:

(Suspicious) "You're not Canadian. Where are you really from?"
(Suppressing rage) "Well my mum is from England and my father is from India and--"
(Interrupts smiling) "Oh you're Indian. I love curries."

Whiteness is sacred. It doesn't matter if your parents came from Russia and the Orkney Islands or Finland and Croatia. You're not a complex person, you're white, you're special, you're at the top of the pile.

But the second a white person has a child with a person of colour, the child is forever stained, quite literally, with that terrible act. Even if you never spend a second with your coloured parent and have only white kids as friends and listen to country music, you're coloured. You're not a kid with brown skin who plays hockey with his white friends, eats burgers and fries and listens to country music.

So I encourage you, dear reader, to avoid falling into the trap of referring to people of mixed backgrounds by their stain alone. In fact perhaps you should disengage from believing in the rarely discussed concept of stain altogether; though that's hard since we all believe it utterly and completely like the fact that the sun will rise in the morning.

Despite all this people of mixed backgrounds are just as complex as any other human being or any other living being on this planet.