As a partner in a racially blended family, I have given a lot of thought to the issues of race, culture, and identity. Through personal experience, the shared stories of other racially blended families, and reading in history and sociology, my wife and I have spent a great deal of time exploring the dynamics involved in tearing down one of the great lies that cripples and separates humanity. Not surprisingly, we have some strong feelings on the subject.

We have also encountered some strong feelings on the part of others. Some deeply rooted prejudices, which lead people to discount our family and our children thoughtlessly.

Let me share a few vignettes, representative of my experiences as a father:

1985. A group of formally dressed men and women from the Nation of Islam attempted to separate me from my three-year-old daughter in the mall while other members of their group searched for her parents.

1988. I shared a job fair table with a local leader of the black community. He explained to me with a missionary's intensity that I needed to find a black man to become involved with my two-year-old son because I was not qualified to be an appropriate role model. [He also explained that there was no such thing as racial prejudice on the part of blacks.]

1990. My four-year-old son, too young to understand the insult, telling me he was not dirty because he'd only been playing for a little while. I asked him what he meant and discovered my neighbors' children had been taunting him, telling him he was dirty because his mother went with a white man (nine years of marriage being beyond their ken). When I spoke to the parents, they asked me what had I expected.

1993. A fifth-grade teacher, aware of our daughter's heritage, called my wife expressing concern because our daughter seemed interested in "going with" a white boy. (We're talking pre-adolescent note-passing & giggling, here.)

1994. My son, now eight, was cursed and pelted with rocks by some older neighborhood children (new neighbors). His offense was insisting that he was not black, he was biracial. When I consulted these parents, I was told that it was my fault for teaching my son to say that he was "better" than he was.

1995. My son and I were feeding Canada geese at Greenfield Lake when a policeman got out of his car to come ask me what I was doing alone in the park "with a boy who is obviously not your son."

All of the people in the above examples were black.

What has surprised me, but not my wife, has been the fact that the greatest resistance to our marriage and to our children's biracial identity has come from the black community. Please understand, I do not by any means claim that our interactions with whites have been devoid of racism, but it has been black racists who have insulted my wife on the street, vandalized our house, and assaulted our children.

In conversation with racially blended couples in which the husband is black and the wife white we have learned that their most frightening and hurtful experiences have involved white people. This is also true in the case of an Asian/white husband/wife couple we know. As a general rule, it seems the greatest resistance to interracial marriages and biracial children seems to come from the racial group to which the wife belongs. Sort of a combination of racism and sexism: "that's our woman he's messing with!"

I have heard black men and women speak angrily of racially blended people in the black community who, as Kimberly McLaughlin wrote in the Wilmington Journal in 1995: "can tell you to the ounce how much American Indian blood they have but are at a loss to recount their African American heritage." I am saddened that these people are so separated from half of who they are. Their solution is for the racially blended to deny the half they are so proud of and identify solely with the other; while I feel the answer is for them to develop a thorough knowledge of and equal pride in both.

Having said all that, I want to add that when people of blended heritage say "I don't care if my grandma was Irish, I am black," I can understand that. They've made a conscious decision to identify with that cultural group. My wife chooses to identify with her mother's family and not her father's. I identify closely with my father's east-European immigrant roots, though I acknowledge that my mother's Quaker heritage is rich and valuable.