By: Randall Bonser
Hopefully, many of you have read Mexican White Boy (MWB) by Matt de la Peña. If you don’t read it for instruction or pleasure, at least read it so you can suck up to the new professor, de la Peña. Just kidding. I read this before I found out he was going to be on staff, partly because it is one of the few books I know of that deals with being biracial. |
My two kids are biracial, with an African American mom and a Euro-American dad. What I most appreciate about the protagonist in MWB is that he struggles with his identity. I don’t mean that I enjoy when people have to struggle with their identity, I just mean that the protag struggles with it in front of us, so we can see and experience it. I gave the book to my son, who is 13, and maybe a little young for the story, but I wanted him to see someone else struggling.
For a long time, my kids had a relative lack of struggle with their racial identity, much like Gratuity – or Tip, as her friends call her – in Adam Rex’s The True Meaning of Smekday. Tip acknowledges that she is biracial, but her identity doesn’t matter much to the story – it’s sort of incidental. At several points, her life becomes complicated because people assume her mom must be black, but it doesn’t ever lead to soul searching about who she is as a mixed-race girl. |
But as biracial people get older – especially if they live in a diverse community – they will inevitably face decisions about whom they will sit with at lunch, what kind of dialect they will speak, what box to check on standardized tests, and so on. Like Tip, my kids didn’t much wrestle with their racial identity until they reached their teens. Then, like Danny in MWB , they began to ask questions and were required by their peers to make some hard choices.
Because I don’t know if you know this or not, but even though this generation of teens is the most inclusive in history, they are still very clannish. And their clan is often based on skin color and cultural background. Danny laments that to the white kids at his suburban school, he is and always will be a Mexican. But to the Mexican kids in his aunt’s neighborhood, where he spends the summer, he is treated like a white boy. That’s a gut-twisting realization, one that my son especially can relate to. He is darker than his sister, who has been labeled “white” by her peers-of-color at school. She’s not especially happy with that, but seems at peace with her lot for now. My son will never be labeled white by nobody; we’ve had several madcap adventures of our own involving people not believing he could be my son. I believe that as he reads MWB , Danny’s struggle will help him navigate his own path.
Who has a Right to Write? | Now, I want to turn to myself (and by extension, many of you) as a majority culture author for a moment. Do I have permission by the Writing Deity to include a biracial person in my work, even though I’m not biracial? One of the bloggers on this site implied that, no, a white person should not presume to tell someone else’s story. I disagree with that vigorously, not least because even when I write a white teenager’s story, I am writing about a world and a culture that is quite different than my own. I answered this question more fully in my critical thesis, if you want a more complete argument. |
So if a white writer writes about a biracial character, should she include the racial identity struggle, like de la Peña did, or leave it out, as Rex has done? My answer – whatever is best for the story, because they are both true to the world in which biracial kids live. The easier answer – and the less controversial choice – will be the character whose (mixed) race is only an incidental part of the story, as in Smekday. |