On blogs and around kitchen tables across the country, mixed-race Americans are celebrating the fact that, for the first time, a biracial person, Barack Obama, will be a major party's nominee for president of the United States.Obama identifies as African-American, and much has been made of the historic nature of his candidacy, which could make him the country's first black president. But the Democratic senator from Illinois also frequently evokes his mixed heritage: his white mother from Kansas and his black father from Kenya. His presence on the national political stage is being embraced by multiracial Americans as an opportunity to focus attention on the growing population of multiracial people and deepen the debate about racial identity."There's a huge level of excitement," said Jilchristina Vest, co-director of iPride, a Berkeley, Calif., nonprofit that runs a summer camp for multiracial kids and trains teachers on honoring ethnic diversity. "He really represents the multiplicity of mixed Americans."Vest and colleague Tarah Fleming encourage children to create their own language to describe their identity, just as golf sensation Tiger Woods termed himself "Cablinasian" to capture his Caucasian, black, American Indian and Asian heritage.When Fleming's biracial son, Loyl, was 3, he came home from a day of blending paint colors at preschool and said, "Mommy, you're white, Daddy's black -- and I'm silver," she reported."Now we spend a lot of time pointing out people who are silver: Bob Marley is silver, Barack Obama is silver," Fleming said. "What does that say to my son? 'I can be the president of the United States.' For the first time, black children can say that but mixed children can also say that."Vest, who was born in 1966 to a white mother of Norwegian and German ancestry and an African-American father who was part Seminole Indian, pointed out that both her parents and Obama's fell in love at a time when, in some states, interracial marriages were banned. It was not until the 1967 Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia that anti-miscegenation laws were finally struck down.The anniversary of that decision, June 12, is now celebrated as "Loving Day" by a growing group of mixed-race Americans and people in interracial relationships.Americans could identify themselves as more than one race on the U.S. census for the first time in the 2000 survey. That year, 6.8 million people checked multiple race boxes.Census experts estimate that the mixed-race population grew by about 25 percent from 2000 to 2006, while the total population grew about 7 percent during the same period. And that trend is likely to continue."The multiracial population is much younger than the total population," said Nicholas Jones of the Census Bureau, noting that 70 percent of black/white people are under 17. "Interracial marriages are increasing in the last several decades."Louie Gong, vice president of Mavin, a multiracial group in Seattle, checked the Asian, white and American Indian boxes on the census to reflect his Chinese, Scottish, French and Nooksack ancestry. "There's no uniform multiracial experience," Gong said. "We exist between the boundaries of traditional racial groups, and people usually react with confusion. The stress that elicits on a day-to-day basis is something we all have in common."Gong recently began a grass-roots video project posted on the Internet called "What Are You Tube" to get multiracial people to answer in their own terms the ubiquitous question, "What are you?"It's one of numerous Web sites, blogs and chat rooms that, combined with a proliferation of nonprofits like Mavin, iPride, Swirl and the Association of MultiEthnic Americans, provide an extended community for mixed-race people across the country.Los Angeles writer Heidi Durrow forms half of a podcasting duo dubbed Mixed Chicks Chat. She and other biracial friends have been thrilled to watch Obama lead Americans into a conversation about the complexity of racial identity."We're proud," she said. "We give each other the 'mocha baby' nod, the acknowledgement that you're multiracial and so am I and we're excited about this. ... I grew up being inexplicable because I insisted on being both African-American and Danish."A strenuous debate has raged on the Web and in the media over whether Obama should be considered black or multiracial and even whether he's "black enough."Leaders in the mixed-race community say the debate points to a long-standing American conundrum. Historically, the "one-drop rule" held that a person with even a single black African ancestor was considered black for purposes of slavery and, later, segregation. Millions of people with some black ancestry embrace their African-American identity even though they may have a mixed heritage, in part because society still defines them as black.San Francisco State University professor Wei Ming Dariotis, who describes herself as a mixed Asian-American, emphasizes that there's a difference between identity and heritage. People like Obama and herself, who have mixed ancestry, are still free to choose their racial identity.(E-mail Tyche Hendricks at thendricks(at)sfchronicle.com.)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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