Not as simple as black and white
Sunday, November 21, 2004
By ELIZABETH LLORENTE
STAFF WRITER
Jonathan Jungblut might be standing in a bodega checkout line. Or waiting to use an ATM. Or chatting at a dinner party. Then it happens again. Some stranger sidles up to him and asks, “What are you?”
Many guess that Jungblut, who has black curly hair, dark brown eyes and café-au-lait skin, is Hispanic. Others assume he’s African-American.
He is neither. He is black and white, his mother an immigrant from Jamaica, his father an American of German ancestry.
Jungblut is one of 7 million Americans who said they are of mixed race, a swelling wave of relatively recent homogenization that manifests itself in fusions of physical features – such as the dark brown skin and arched eyes of golf star Tiger Woods, whose father is African-American and mother is Thai – and in the chaotic blend of language, food and music in a Japanese-Italian home in Ridgefield.
The reporter here continues the myth that Hispanics are a separate “race” and not themselves multiracial. Hispanics are just multiracials with political power.