John
I am forty-something, of mixed parentage (a "WASP" father and a light-brown-skinned African-American mother with a lot of American Indian blood), both of whom have southern U.S. roots going back a long, long time. Blacks, whites and "others" commonly assume that I am Latin American, Iranian/middle Eastern or (somewhat less often) southern European. In many cases, that assumption is manifested in the form of total strangers initiating a conversation with me in Spanish, Arabic, Farsi or some other language typically spoken by people that look like they live in those regions..
Although I have lived most of my life in the Washington, DC area, I spent my first eight years in Michigan and I have a very "American" mid-western/mid-Atlantic accent -- which confuses people even more. They expect a foreign accent and they get pure "American".
All of my siblings are similarly non-descript in racial terms; yet we all look different from each other. How many times has it been that my parents were asked whether we were adopted!?
I attended a "high-achieving", integrated high school in the late-60s and early-70s; nearly 90 percent of graduates went to college. The black students in this high school district were almost as likely as white students to come from middle- to upper-middle-class backgrounds. Yet a large share of the students (I estimate about 20 percent) came from other countries and were of "other" racial groups - "yellow" and "brown" Asians and "red" and "brown" Latins. At the same time -- and this was truer of blacks than of whites -- there was constant pressure to "choose" which race you "belonged" to, and to reject or ostracize those of the race you didn't choose. But being a somewhat contrary person to begin with, if someone--anyone --wants to force me to make a choice I don't need to make, I tend to make the choice that is least attractive to that person, just to make the point.
But as I have gotten older, I have concluded that, with all of the challenges we face, there are also many advantages in being able to travel in so many different circles and serve as a "bridge" to different, otherwise separate groups, as only persons of multiracial backgrounds can. Maybe, in practice, such opportunities don't often present themselves. But there is strength in love, and we must love ourselves if we hope to love others.