By Victor Greto
What a difference a decade makes.
No longer culturally ridiculed, multiracial children find themselves in demand as models because they look more exotic, more multicultural — more, well, American
They also have been officially accepted by government agencies as measured as the Census Bureau when in 2000 it allowed children to identify themselves as members of more than one race.
Some of today’s celebrities self-consciously identify themselves as mixed race, including Tiger Woods, Paula Abdul, Lenny Kravitz and Mariah Carey.
What had been radically disorienting as recent as a decade ago, now seems almost trendy, fueled by dozens of web sites, magazines and personalities.
Many interethnic and interracial couples will tell you the looks they get are nothing compared to the looks their children receive.
“Most of the looks I get are when I’m with my kid,” says Lydia Andrews, 30, who is Greek and migrated from England to the U.S. as a child.
She’s married to Bruce Tucker, 38, whose ethnicities include Asian, Jewish and Jamaican, and together they have a 4-1/2-year-old boy, Preston.
“The people who ask me about my child in any depth also are in mixed relationships,” Andrews says. “I get those looks from a lot of people. But I haven’t personally encountered anything rude.”
Growing up in Plantation during the 1970s, Tucker says his childhood was radically different than what his son’s will be.
“Everything was lily-white,” Tucker says. “Then, I was the darkest for 10 miles around.”
In middle school, he got into fights almost every day. “Blacks didn’t like me and whites didn’t know what to make of me.”
Because of that, Tucker says he can relate to Tiger Woods, who chose to state to the media he was multicultural.
“I don’t want to talk about saying I’m one or the other. I can’t be divided up into a category. I want to be Bruce. I don’t want anyone to put me anywhere.”
Like most of the interracial parents interviewed, Tucker and Andrews do not plan to speak to their child directly about their racial heritage until they ask.
“We’re not going to have him choose or identify,” Tucker says. “My parents left me to figure it out, so we’ll do the same for him. I’ll be there for him.”
Philip and Mary Meckling’s child, Hannah, 8, is a mix of Irish, Italian, American Indian, German and African.
She has modeled for magazines and companies such as Burdines and Toys-R-Us.
“That’s the look they wanted,” Mary says. “They always put her with a light-skinned black couple.”
Loren and Floyd Walker’s child, Cheyenne, 6, posed for the cover of South Florida Parenting’s August, 2000 issue.
David and Jonell Weidman say people always comment about their two children.
“We get looks when we go out,” Jonell says, “but nothing bad. We get remarks about how beautiful our kids are, how gorgeous their complexions are.”
Jennifer and Lloyd Richards’ three children have the burnished olive skin of many mixed-race children.
The oldest, Evan, 11, has just entered sixth grade at Palm Cove elementary school.
“It’s not a big deal,” he says about being mixed. “It’s the same as being black or white or Chinese. I don’t see what’s the big problem.”
Evan says he tells anyone who asks that he’s “mixed. I can’t consider myself either-or. It’s better than being black or white because you have two cultures in you.”
Neither he nor his 8-year-old brother Evan say they’ve been teased for being mixed.
Dawn Davies, 34, a divorced mother of three biracial children, Savannah, 7, Athena, 5, and Gavin, 3, says, like any mother, she worries how her children will fit in.
“There are always little things,” she says. “Is it going to be a white classroom? Is my kid going to feel different?”
Before they had children, she and her ex-husband deliberately read books about mixed race children, including Black, White, Other: Biracial Americans Talk about Race and Ethnicity, by Lisa Funderburg.
The books, and deliberately seeking out “open-minded, big-hearted people,” helped, she says.
“My daughters have never been teased,” Davies says. “The oldest one is conscious of it, and my middle daughter doesn’t like being identified as black.” Instead, she says, they’re “brown.”
Barry Pohlman, 36, and his wife, Teisha, 35, a native of the Bahamas, say they’ve deliberately refused to raise their three children, Autumn 8, Audric, 6, Aukeem, 1, as either black or white.
“They understand they’re black and white,” Teisha says, “but so far, there have been no questions.”
You can guarantee, however, the questions will come.
It took LaTesha Humphries years to accept herself as biracial, in part because there was no parent to whom she could direct her questions.
Born in Tacoma, Wash., to a black father and white mother, her parents quickly split up when she was young. LaTesha was taken by her father to Georgia, and then to Florida.
Both her parents had done drugs, she says, and her father was soon arrested in Fort Lauderdale.
She was eventually adopted by a black couple in Pompano Beach, and that’s where she grew up.
It wasn’t easy, LaTesha says.
She grew up being called “oreo,” “red” and “old yeller” in a neighborhood she characterizes as a ghetto.
Dillard high school and its performing arts program changed her life. It was there she met other biracial children, and people who expressed themselves by deliberately being different.
“I started to understand who I was and it was okay,” she says. “When I grew up I didn’t want to be white-skinned, I wanted to be black.”
But by the time she turned 15, “I started not to shun white people. I don’t fit in with them today, but I can still feel comfortable and hold a conversation with them.”