You Must Check One

Patricia Phillips
EVWP Summer 2009


Sitting in the human resources office to complete my paperwork, I am armed with all the information they could need: birth certificate, driver’s license, social security card, and teaching license. I am filling out each form, one by one. The tedious task is necessary to gain employment, so I continue on until I come to the background check form. Stop. I’m not sure what I should put. You must check one, it says: African American/Black, Asian, Caucasian/White, Hispanic, Native American, Pacific Islander. This looms at the top of almost every survey, government form, or standardized assessment. I tell the secretary that I don’t know what to put. None of these choices are sufficient. I explain to her my predicament. I normally check “other,” but that is not one of the choices. “Well,” she says, “just pick whatever your father is.”
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People looked at us funny when we would go to a store or gas station, especially the further south we went. You could just feel when you weren’t welcome in a place, the narrowed eyes and downcast glances. It wasn’t so much the darker skin color, it was our family that wasn’t wanted. It was the light and the dark mix, a dichotomy unthinkable. “Don’t worry about what other people think,” my parents would always say. “We know there is nothing wrong with our family. They are the ones that have the problem.” It really didn’t happen that often, but when it did you knew exactly why. A black man and a white woman was just not acceptable.

Sometimes the look would just be sheer confusion, not so much judgment. When my sister was born one woman asked my mother how she got her baby to have such a good tan! When we would go to the store and the cashier would realize that she was, indeed, our mother, rather than babysitter, the cashier would get a small, albeit often attempted to hide, narrowing of the eyebrows with “oh!” written all over her face and eyes. The cashier wasn’t trying to be rude, and we knew it. I never saw the rudeness or hatred returned towards either—the confused, nor the ignorant.
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My grandparents on my mother’s side were always welcoming. The first time my grandmother met my father she gave him a big hug, saying, “Welcome to the family!” Whenever we would go to visit we would have so much fun together: tea parties at great grandmother’s apartment, serving in my grandparents’ restaurant, and golfing on the golf course with my grandmother. You would never know the skin color difference in their northern Wisconsin town. We could have been pink and purple spotted, and I don’t think I would have known the difference. Grandma and Grandpa loved us for who we were; to the point that I often felt we were even their favorites.

Not so with the other side.

There was always some unspoken internal strife. Whenever we would visit, we were outsiders to that home. Others, with uniracial families were welcome to come and go, and although we were never turned away, it was never with open arms that we were received. My uncle never acted that way, but the woman ruled that house so it was often that we found ourselves alone in the living room of their house trying to keep ourselves occupied. Most have come to accept it more throughout the years, but the racial tension will sometimes feel as if it is slowly simmering beneath the surface.
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Going through college I could never decide which group I belonged with, because sadly the choice had to be made for one or the other. I didn’t fit into any group but grew up in a home that was more consistent with the “white group.” I constantly stayed confused; although never feeling rejected I felt caught in a great divide not knowing who I was racially. And then I continued to get the same message over and over again: an invitation to join a picnic, party, or cookout hosted by the African American club on campus. I must be one of them; I looked like them. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t white. I wasn’t black. But I was grouped with them.
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“You know, if you marry her you will really be hindered in your preaching,” Dr. Canopy told Ben. “People won’t hire a mixed couple.” My now husband and I were in college and seriously dating. This Christian professor’s words sear. The realization, though, that he like the rest was suffering from a world riddled with ignorance and perpetuated beliefs saddened but made the resolve even stronger. Yes, one place did ask for a picture of us and then, upon receiving the picture, informed us that we were not what they were looking for; my father encountered the same thing. “Don’t send another man back like that” was the message to his instructor the Monday after my father had visited to preach. Supportive of our family, “I hope I don’t stand next to you on Judgment day,” this instructor responded. As so many throughout time, they were wrong. We work at a place now bursting with other couples like us. Filled with children just like I was and a knowledge that our outside will never matter there.

One step at a time though. “This world is going to become more brown,” my mother would always say. Not that everyone should, or even would, look like us, but that at some point it would be such a common thing it wouldn’t even matter anymore. Ben’s grandparents, a very nice country southern couple, were aghast at the thought of our marriage. How could he even think of marrying a girl whose complexion did not even closely resemble his? But little by little people do change. Six years later, they hug me now.
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Still sitting in the office I pick what my father is, but I am offended by the necessity to do so. I’m not my father, I shouldn’t have to put his race as mine. I want to ask the question “Why was I made to put myself in a box that I didn’t belong in?” but I know the answer: I don’t fit in that little box and neither does anyone else.