By TaRessa Stovall

“What are you?” is a common question when you’re biracial. Sometimes people ask because they can’t tell your race simply by looking at you; sometimes they ask because they know you have mixed parentage, and they’re curious about how you’ve chosen to self-identify.

Then there are those people who take it upon themselves to tell you what you are. And if the label they slap you with doesn’t match the way you self-identify, there can be tension. Misunderstandings. And a whole lot of frustration.

While biracial isn’t confined by definition to half black and half white, that seems to be a common point of reference in this country. When it comes to the quest for identity and the struggle for labels that answer more questions than they raise, what does the sum of black and white equal in America today? When do two halves blend into one or the other, and when do they stand on their own? And do all biracial people want to be viewed the same way?

There’s a video trailer heating up the internet, titled I’m Biracial … Not Black Damn It! that brings these questions for us to consider at a time like no other in our nation’s tense, tangled racial history. We have a self-described “African American of mixed heritage” leading our country. And while interracial romance and marriage are still considered, if not “taboo,” then controversial enough to pretty much guarantee radio and TV ratings, Census reports suggest that race-mixing is on the rise and here to stay.

Enter Carolyn Battle Cochrane, a biracial woman on a mission to help her people construct a publicly-affirmed identity that stands on its own. I’m Biracial … Not Black Damn It! “started as therapy, a small project where I got in touch with myself and a few of my [biracial] girlfriends. It was my personal story, but then I started interviewing people and found that, oh my God, there’s this common story that nobody’s ever talked about publicly,” Cochrane said. “It was this private conversation.” Cochrane penned a memoir, Private Conversations, about her experience.

“I had been living my life as a black woman for 30-some years, and I didn’t like how I felt inside,” Cochrane said. Growing up in Queens, N.Y., with a white mother and black father, “I hated the fact that my mother was white, so I didn’t like my mother.” But hearing black people talk about whites “made me sick. I would throw up almost every day of my life, from hearing black people talk about white people,” she said.

“Then I finally decided I didn’t want to participate. I realized my mother loved me and I’d always pushed her away.” Talking with others, she saw the bigger picture. “There is something way more than my story. This is a group of other people who have my same story,” she explained.

The I’m Biracial … Not Black Damn It! trailer, part of a four-part series on biracial identity today, concentrates on black/white mixed persons, first-generation sons and daughters of black/white couples, expressing their frustration at being labeled “black” rather than feeling recognized, accepted and affirmed for all that they are. Some complain that a parent told them they’re black, and they’re not comfortable with that designation. Some share negative experiences with black people as a result of their mixed heritage. Overall, the message is clear: we want to be seen and dealt with in our entirety, on our own terms, in a way that reflects our truths, not the assumptions, presumptions and prejudices of others who are not like us and therefore don’t understand.

The documentary, which Cochrane designed to be viewed as a four-part television series, includes mixed people of racial combinations other than black and white in I’m Biracial … Not White, Damn It!

“My goal is to give voice to those that have felt like they’ve never had one. I got an e-mail from a 17 year-old girl who was crying, who said she’d always felt like the people in the trailer, but she’d never heard anybody else say it, so she kept quiet. I’m getting these messages constantly.”

It’s about deciding to identify with all of who you are,” Cochrane says, “and to me, it’s becoming whole. I was never whole until I decided to identify with my white side as well, because that makes all of me.”

She made the series as a “wake-up call. I want the end result to be, when they see parents and children of different colors, it’s a non-issue. I want the concept of ‘You’re a n****r, you’ll always be a n****r, to be a non-issue.” What she most wants people to understand is that “I’m not trying to exclude anybody. I’m trying to include all of me.”

Biracial people of various ages share their feelings in the trailer, with such comments as “We don’t belong to one or the other;” “We somehow need to be acknowledged more;” and “Nobody wants to touch the subject of biracial people…”

Watching the I’m Biracial, Not Black, Damn It! trailer and interviewing Cochrane, I felt a strong sense of déjà vu. In the late 1970s, I was at the forefront of the movement that lobbied for a separate Census category for bi-and-multi-racial persons. I was featured on local television shows and in Jet, the national weekly magazine from Johnson Publishing Company, saying many of the things that Cochrane and the people in the trailer are saying.

“Is it hard being biracial?” I was asked recently by a black high school student, a young Haitian-American woman in northern New Jersey.

The question surprised me. “No,” I assured her, “not for me. Maybe because I grew up in Seattle, Washington, which, as far back as the 1950s, had so many black/white couples with children that, until I went to a nearly all-white pre-school, I literally thought that those of us with white moms and black dads were in the majority. Maybe it’s because neither group rejected me; on the contrary, I was often pressured by both sides to join their team, so to speak.

My biggest struggle as a biracial person, I told the young woman, was craving my own designation, one that embraced and honored my ancestral lineage, from Russia to Africa to Native America, without chopping it into pieces. My quest, I explained, was for a word, a term, that told my whole story in one fell swoop. And my harshest battles were with those who told me I couldn’t be what I am.

In college, I tried to do what Cochrane has done. I gathered a dozen or so biracial people in a room, to talk on camera about all aspects of their backgrounds, identity, frustrations and challenges. They all stared at me blankly and remained absolutely mute. I couldn’t believe that I was the only one thinking and feeling and wanting to talk about biracial identity.

Today, I’m thrilled and delighted that, where I failed, Cochrane has succeeded in sharing a perspective that doesn’t often receive air time. On a recent episode of the Tyra show about biracial people, Cochrane lent wisdom and clarity to a dynamic but scattered conversation. I am concerned, though, that in her zeal to prove her point, she isn’t showing the full spectrum of how biracial people choose to self-identify.

After decades of research, soul-searching, long, intense discussions, heated debates and a healthy dose of world travel, I came to embrace black/African American as the designation and the term that enables me to live fully in the diversity of my being, honoring my Jewish mother as well as my African-American/Native-American father, and anyone else whose DNA is manifest in my being.

I shared this perspective with Cochrane, who seemed disappointed at my choice. I mentioned that our President, Barack Obama, and a few celebrities—including actress/director Jasmine Guy; author Walter Mosley; and the late playwright August Wilson—seem comfortable self-identifying as biracial black people.

I explained that I don’t feel any sense of conflict or contradiction in being biracial AND black. And I shared that the dozens of biracial people with whom I grew up—including my brother—have chosen to self-identify in many different ways. As a biracial person, that is the real truth I want the world to see: that there is no one correct or superior way in which we should define ourselves or choose to live.

Somehow, I feel more rejected by the fact that Cochrane doesn’t seem accepting or affirming of my choice than I ever have by any black or white people for being biracial. While I can empathize and identify with the people in her video trailer, and I support her quest to raise awareness and hopefully get a new box to check, I wonder if the project could benefit from including those of us who represent a different conclusion to the questions of ancestry, allegiance and identity that are an inherent part of being born to people of two different races.

In the trailer, and in an e-mail correspondence following our interview, Cochrane describes herself as “a half Sista and half a white girl.” I explained that I view her, simply as a Sista, as my Sista, and that I am unable to define or relate to people as fractions. In respectfully agreeing to disagree, Carolyn Battle Cochrane and I represent two of the ways in which biracial people choose to identify in an increasingly diverse and multicultural world. I’d like everyone to realize that one option does not devalue or cancel out the other, but rather, in our variety, we reflect the array of possibilities that our existence signify, and the power of each and every human having the right to self-identify.

TaRessa Stovall is Managing Editor of TheDefendersOnline and Web Content Manager for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.