INTERRACIAL VOICE (IV): What can you tell us about Lise Funderburg?

LISE FUNDERBURG (LF): I'm a journalist living in New York. I was born and raised in Philadelphia.

IV: You're of mixed ancestry?

LF: Yes. My father is an African American man who has Native American ancestry, but that's less familiar in terms of family identity, although it wasn't very far back that we had a great-grandmother from a reservation. My mother is Caucasian, a mix of British Isles ancestry. He's from Georgia; she's from Chicago.

IV: What is the derivation of the name Funderburg?

LF: It's Austrian. We used to think it was German, but it's Austrian actually.

IV: That's your father's surname?

LF: Yes. The theory is that it was the plantation owner's name, and the slaves kept it along with the child.

IV: Is "Lise" pronounced with one syllable or two?

LF: Well, it depends on what country you live in. My mother, who chose it, pronounces it "Li-se," and it doesn't have anything to do with our family lineage. It has to do with a close friend of hers who's Danish who has that name.

IV: Concerning your first book, "Black, White, Other: Biracial Americans Talk About Race and Identity," what compelled you to write that, and had you written anything prior?

LF: I had been working in publishing for six or seven years, and I'd really been writing for several years before that.

IV: In what capacity were you working in publishing?

LF: I had worked in a book publishing company and at some trade journals in Boston before I moved to NY. I started out on the graphics side, then I moved over to the words. So, I'd been writing for a few years, but I decided to go back to journalism school at Columbia in 1990. I had been out of school for ten years -- maybe I went back because I'd forgotten what it was like. Actually, it was that I kept getting jobs that were a combination of journalism and managing. I was a managing editor for a small magazine called "Avenue" in NY for a couple of years before I went back to school. I tended to fall into management positions because I was willing to take on responsibility, which wasn't really a good thing because I didn't like being a manager. I wanted to focus on editing and writing, however, and I thought the best way to do that would be to go back to school, to pick my feet up and turn them in another direction. I looked at getting a Masters degree as kind of a self-imposed sabbatical where I would also get a chance to think about journalism and the ethics of journalism -- what it was all about intellectually.

IV: The ethics of journalism?

LF: Yes. What my goals were as a journalist. It was important for me to step outside the world of commercial journalism so that I didn't have to make decisions or think through things with those commercial pressures which, unless you're completely free of advertising or a publisher or an owner who has an agenda, you're always going to have to deal with. So, I went through this whirlwind program at Columbia which was two semesters long, and part of the program was you had to do a Masters thesis. In that kind of school it meant a long format journalistic piece. I had been interested in exploring radio so I had to come up with a topic that would support a half-hour radio documentary. It had to be compelling to listen to. There had to be a quality of the subject matter that made it important to hear people's voices: Audio leaves the visualization to you, but it also delivers more of the person's emotions than on a page. Not to say that writers can't transmit emotions well on a page, but you get closer to firsthand if you're listening to audio.

So, I'm digging around for topics and I'm talking to one of my sisters, and we -- of course, by virtue of our mixed-race background -- have always been interested in things we've seen or heard that relate to this topic. My sister asked if I'd heard about the groups that were starting up where people got together because they were mixed-race and they were asserting a mixed-race identity, not choosing black or white. I had actually heard of them before, and I thought "Yeah, that could hold my attention for the hundreds of hours I'm going to be putting into this project." I chose this topic for the Masters thesis, and I interviewed some interracial couples who had kids as well as mixed-race people who had different backgrounds than my own, different from predominantly black/white. First, what I found was there was a lot of material that I couldn't fit into a half-hour documentary -- material that literally ended up as tape on the cutting-room floor. Second, once I listened to all these people's voices collectively -- which included only about four mixed-race people talking about identity as opposed to the book, which has forty-six people -- I heard something different from what I had expected. I was surprised by the cumulative effect of hearing different people's experiences.

IV: You heard something other than what you expected to hear?

LF: Yes. I thought it would be interesting to hear them tell their personal stories of how they had come to view race, personally and abstractly. I didn't anticipate, however, the gestalt of what happened. It really made me recognize that for a variety of reasons people were talking about race in a way that seemed refreshing to me... refreshing in comparison to how I usually see it referred to or talked about as a subject in the media. Part of that was because people were blunt and talked about difficult feelings they had, talked about conflicts and tensions they felt as well as areas in which they were comfortable in a way that was much more frank than people often are. In general, I think people are often so concerned with being polite or only talking about what they're allowed to talk about, what they have the "credentials" to talk about because of whatever racial group they identify with, that they hold back from fully explaining their feelings.

IV: Were the thoughts these people expressed ones that you've had yourself?

LF: Sure. It's hard for me to talk to a mixed-race person and not find some piece of his or her experience that I identify with that specifically has to do with being mixed. We can disagree about many other things, but there are usually certain qualities and certain experiences, at least one or two significant ones, that I find we have in common. So, just having these voices together was something new and something you just didn't see anywhere else. Much has happened since I started that project. A lot of books have come out, although I still find that most of them -- Naomi Zack's, Maureen Reddy's , Lisa Jones', Judy Scales Trent's, Gregory Howard Williams', etc. --

IV: Maureen Reddy is a white mother of biracial children who is adamant about identifying her mixed kids as black.

LF: Correct, and there are other books, too, but they're all essentially one person's perspective. Lots of people respond to those books and identify with them, but to me there was something significant about hearing from a group of people who didn't all have the same view. So anyway, the chronology is that I finished the Masters project and was just really lucky to end up at a book publishing house. I bumped into a casual acquaintance, told her what I had been working on, and she was excited about it. She was also a book editor, and she introduced me to another book editor and that led to a book deal. I was lucky because of that chance encounter; I was lucky because, for good and bad reasons, race was becoming a trendier and trendier topic at the time in 1991. I was also lucky in that the Masters thesis served as a ready-made book proposal in my case. It demonstrated that I had developed some expertise about the material, and that I could complete a project. So, for the next two years I set out to do this book, and I decided that I needed to try to get as wide a range as possible of experiences and attitudes about having a mixed-race identity, specifically from people who had a black-identifying and a white-identifying biological parent. Part of it was my desire to confront the myth of the "tragic mulatto" and to show that you couldn't make presumptions about what a mixed-race person would experience, although many people do -- including mixed-race people. We're not safe from having our own prejudices or presumptions.

IV: We are human after all!

LF: That's right. In fact, one of the chapters in my book is "Prejudice," where I ask people about their own. An interesting thing I found was that a lot of people really answered quickly; they copped to their prejudices quickly. It could have been anything: It could have been prejudice against fat people, or Southern whites or -- in San Francisco where there are more Asian-Americans than in other parts of the country -- Chinese drivers. Some others said they felt so bad that they had prejudices that they didn't want to talk about them, that the question made them very uncomfortable.

IV: What are you working on currently?

LF: I'm doing my regular freelance, which means I'm writing and editing for different people. I've also started in on a new, big project where I'm profiling integrated communities around the country. That stemmed from "Black, White, Other," because my interviews for that book made it clear that so many people's world views are largely influenced by their geography -- where they had grown up and what their community's message had been to them about acceptance or rejection or about race in general. I then found alarming statistics about how separate our country still is in terms of residential segregation. See, I grew up in a mixed neighborhood, and it, in fact, gave me a perverse view of the world. There were so many mixed families in my particular neighborhood in Philadelphia -- and I lived there my whole childhood; I never moved and had to be the new kid on the block -- that I thought my family's experience was completely normal. I took that completely for granted. Only when I moved on to an out-of-state college and started to be out in the world did I realize that
A-) that was a completely perverse representation of the world and
B-) you have to really look hard to find communities like that.
So, I lived in several communities that were virtually all- white. I always felt really uncomfortable in them, and I wondered why. Over time, I realized that it didn't feel comfortable, like home, and I really had to look hard for a better place to live.

IV: Even though you're very light complexioned?

LF: Yes, Charles, even though I look white! :-)

IV: Have you ever been accused of passing?

LF: People ask me that a lot, or they point out in an accusatory way that I COULD pass -- and that's white and black people both.

IV: Sometimes those of us who are very light do pass, though it's not a conscious decision on our parts. People just assume that we're white.

LF: I pass every day of my life. The biggest way in which race is acted on in our country is in passing by people, passing strangers on the street. All those stereotypical decisions about race -- who clutches their purse, who locks who out of the stores, who the police harass -- is not based on anything but melanin count and phenotype. If you look at me that way, you're going to think that I'm white. So, yeah, that kind of passing I have no choice about. I would say that having this complexion, this sort of camouflage -- has made me very aware of the possibilities of trying to express my identity differently in a very outward way. So, do I perm my hair and wear kente cloth all the time? No, but people do this. A light-skinned black woman I know, who had two black parents but who "looked" white, in high school put on a "black power" button and just did not take it off. That would at least cause people to ask a question.

IV: Did you go through that stage yourself?

LF: Sure. I'm so aware of this kind of judgment about race that happens every day when I walk down the street.

IV: At what point did you say "I don't need to do that anymore?" Or am I incorrect in assuming that you identify as multiracial?

LF: In some ways you're incorrect. When people identify me as black -- and it's usually black people who do -- I see them building a bridge to me. So I don't reject that. Part of my response comes from knowing the history of what "saying no to blackness" has meant; I act with that history in mind. I don't have a problem with people calling me black. On a form, however, I would choose to check everything that applies, and I would choose "other" before I would choose black or white. If I HAD to choose one -- for all sorts of political reasons or ideologies that have nothing to do with my internal, private identity -- I would choose black before I would choose white.

IV: You would, then, subordinate your own personal identity for a greater political cause?

LF: Yes, and that brings us, of course, to the big Census question. I really don't know what the solution is for Census forms. It seems to me that we're caught between the past and the future and the present in trying to solve the inaccuracies of forms that don't allow mixed-race people to identify accurately, whatever way that might be for each of them. I think everyone should have a right to identify whatever way they want, but that's a simple answer to the complicated question about what to do with the Census form...because of how Census forms are used. You can't just ask people to weigh in on the Census -- yes to multiracial, no to multiracial -- because it's such a bigger question than that. The issue is not simply the issue of people's right to self-identify. The issue, because these forms are used programmatically, is how the forms are used.

IV: Speaking of programs, wouldn't you agree that affirmative action, for instance, should eventually shift away from being based on race and gender to being based on economics and class, and so a multiracial category would have no bearing on it? That way, poor blacks, poor whites, poor multiracials would all benefit.

LF: That's partly accurate in that class and race are competing for how the lines are drawn in our society. There are lots of ways in which your economic status will predict your opportunities in life, but race is still the trump card in many instances. Sure, Bill Cosby's kids might, at this moment in time, benefit from affirmative action in terms of diversifying a college campus or getting a job when they graduate. That would seem inappropriate to their economic standing, right?

IV: Affirmative action does seem to have benefited upper-class blacks more than lower income blacks.

LF: This is the argument I've heard from a lot of people, but an interesting counter-argument is that, in terms of benefiting upper-income blacks, yes, affirmative action has benefited them but it hasn't removed the glass ceiling. It's really only brought people something of a relative gain. It hasn't made middle- to upper-income blacks wildly successful, and they don't now hold more wealth proportionately than whites do. We still have a tremendous imbalance, and my work in residential segregation points out that there's a hyper-segregation of blacks in this country: No matter how much money you make, you are still more likely to be segregated by race and denied opportunity to purchase or to be treated fairly or equally by lending institutions. Other groups, however, like Latinos and Asians, live less segregated lives and have fewer obstacles to integrated residential situations as their incomes increase. So, in that case, class is irrelevant. And that's a fundamental part of life -- your options for where you want to buy a house or live.

IV: Do you then support or not the initiative to compel OMB to establish a multiracial category on the 2000 Census?

LF: I think you have to be more specific in what you're asking me about, because the fine-tuning of these initiatives is critical to answering. I'm afraid that to really be able to definitively say what I would say in terms of forms -- ideologically I support the right to self-identify, which would indicate that I support a multiracial box -- but realistically I don't clearly understand what would happen and how the numbers would be used if a multiracial box were fixed. I don't ideologically and personally support "multiracial" as a new racial category that would, for example, unite a half-Korean/half-Mexican person under the same ethnic or racial grouping as someone with your background or mine.

IV: Why?

LF: Even though there will be some shared experiences between myself and that person, to me it doesn't constitute a racial or ethnic category, and secondly, I'm looking for a way to move away from racial categories altogether. So that doesn't work for me. I'm specifically saying that it doesn't work for ME, because I'm not going to say that other people can't feel that it is a bonafide, viable ethnic or racial category.

IV: What would it take for this country to move away from all considerations of race? How long would it take? I don't think it will be in our lifetime.

LF: I think you're right. We're too invested as a country. We've been invested in this our entire life from colonization on. I don't know what could turn it around quickly.

IV: Might the topic of multiracialism itself hasten the demise of race as a social construct or, on the other hand, strengthen it conceptually?

LF: I think the complex reality is that it does both, and my hope is that the former -- provoking thought and provoking people to really examine what their investment is in racial categories and what reality is -- will carry more weight than the latter part.

IV: Your book certainly provokes thought on the matter.

LF: I've been really happy with the response I've gotten to "Black, White, Other"... Many mixed-race people, or whatever they called themselves.....

IV: Do you not like that term "mixed?"

LF: You know what, I'm not precious about terms. I'm not a fan of mulatto, but beyond that I don't feel heavily invested in what term is appropriate for me. Biracial is inaccurate for most of us.

IV: None of the terms are completely accurate. Perhaps, you just choose one that fits you the closest. Multiracial is actually a bland term but this publication supports the concept of giving people the opportunity to legally self-identify, notwithstanding the ramifications for other groups' numbers, especially black numbers.

LF: To me, if you're going to talk about the ramifications, the lines between groups definitely begin to blur. I am part of those other groups. The ramifications are important to me because all those other affected groups are my community. I like to think I make choices not just in the vacuum of my own personal identity -- which will just do fine on its own, and it doesn't need validation from a form, and it doesn't need to fit into anybody else's box. You know, that's what we learn as mixed-race people. Probably the best gift we get is to learn that your identity has to stand on its own and work for you. You and I and others might have a different point of view in that I don't see my sort of holistic sense of identity as one that excludes blackness or whiteness. With racial identification, for many of us who are mixed, another thing is that line which forms between our personal identity and the identity that the public confers upon us -- not by our personal choice but by the reality of the world. This is one reason why browner-skinned mixed people, as we've discussed previously, might be more likely to identify as black than mixed, because they're constantly getting that message in both positive and negative ways from the outside world. I want to just emphasize that: it's in positive ways, not just negative.

IV: Is that why Maureen Reddy is so determined to have her kids identify as black?

LF: Recognition of that message is why many parents, black and white, tell their mixed kids to identify as black. There was one person in my book whose parents -- black father and white mother -- told her that she was both and nothing was going to change that, but that she should claim the blackness first because that was the identity that, in this society, needed more protecting.

IV: Needed more protecting?

LF: Yes. Isn't that interesting?

IV: Doesn't that philosophy buy into society's obsession with enforcing the one-drop rule?

LF: To the extent that they can for their children, parents devise strategies about the race issue in order to protect their kids, and to keep them healthy and safe -- though how the kids end up might be a different story. The line you're walking is the line between living your ideology, living your personal identity and relating to the real world. The real world, yes, is still deeply anchored in the one-drop rule. So there are the elemental safety tips that parents offer: For example, this white father I spoke with had teenage sons who were really brown- skinned kids, and they lived up in Boston, a really segregated metropolitan area. He realized that his kids couldn't drive home the same way he did, through white South Boston neighborhoods, because it would be dangerous for them. That's a message about race. But it's also not so much about reiterating or supporting the one-drop rule as it is about keeping your kids safe. That's a realistic concern that someone's dealing with.

IV: Just based on the child's physical appearance.

LF: Yeah. Driving in a car, not talking to anybody, not doing anything but looking the way that they do. Also, what do parents with sons, particularly, who are brown-skinned have to teach their boys about coping with the police?

IV: Without getting into the O.J. Simpson case per se, how do you think his kids will handle being biracial, having a father with a cloud over his head, etc.?

LF: I tend to respect the individuality of their experience. So how they're going to grow up has to do with many things that, in my mind, have nothing to do with race. Their mother was murdered; it doesn't matter what color she was. Their father was accused of her murder; it doesn't matter in a big way what color he is. He was accused of her murder.
You know I saw the cover of one of the newsweekly magazines at the supermarket check-out with that old, stupid refrain: "What about the children?" I could not believe it! :)

IV: After the trial or before?

LF: Right about when the trial was over. Unbelievable. In terms of how they're going to grow up as biracial kids, it has everything to do with everything in their lives. Identity is over-determined. In other words, you can't explain someone's racial identification by one thing alone -- ever. It's everything. It's who you grew up with, what their messages about race were, what their feelings about race were, the religion you grew up in, the geography of where you grew up, how you were accepted or rejected, but it's also your generation. Kids who are the age of O.J. Simpson's kids are going to be exposed to a consciousness about mixed-raceness so much earlier than you or I ever saw it dealt with a public way.

I spoke at Westchester University in Pennsylvania recently and there was a twenty-year-old biracial woman whose father was black and whose mother was white. She looked Sicilian, in other words had sort of an olive colored skin, but many people would think she was white -- especially white people. She was really excited to meet me, she said, because she had never met a biracial woman before. She grew up in a completely white county, not town but COUNTY west of Harrisburg. As she said to me -- it was very sweet -- "You know, I told my roommates who are Irish-American and Italian-American that I was so excited to come to this tonight", and they couldn't really understand why. So I said to them, "Imagine how you would feel if you were meeting the first Catholic person in your life. Ever."

So she was being exposed at the age of twenty, much later than Sydney and Justin Simpson will be -- but still, there certainly wouldn't have been any talk like the one I was giving that night when I was twenty. There weren't the publications, there wasn't your web site, there weren't all the other things that are out there. Whether you agree with them or not or like what they contain, that kind of publicness wasn't around, and that visibility does do what proponents of the multiracial category do -- which is to give you a public validation.

Now, it sounds like I'm contradicting myself, because before I said I don't need validation, and I have come to be thirty-six-years-old and feel fine about the grounding of my personal identity. That's not to say that I wouldn't like a public recognition that there are people like me out there, and I'd just as much like to see it on forms as in advertising or in the plots of tv shows where people are mixed-race, but it's not the focus of the tragedy of the show, it's just the way things are. That's also starting to happen, but slowly.

IV: With black nationalism on the rise, do you think that separatist leaders like Louis Farrakhan will use the O.J. affair as a metaphor for all the "inherent evils" of interracial marriages, including the mixed-race kids?

LF: Sure, and if he doesn't, which I think he might have already at his march in Washington, then somebody else will. White separatists will use it, too. I don't know about your claim that black nationalism is on the rise, incidentally. You know, Farrakhan gets a lot of press for being a black separatist, but I would consider Newt Gingrich a white separatist, though maybe not in the David Duke tradition. But in terms of not being directed towards bringing people together, people like Gingrich certainly fall under that category.

IV: On that note, Lise Funderburg, I'll say that unfortunately our time is up. Thank you for your time.

LF: Thank you, Charles.

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