I have a Biracial Daughter

I’m sorry you feel that way about your father, and I hope you haven’t had any truly negative experiences along the way. In the article, you only mention tiny slights, and racially-coded remarks or mistakes others have made. I know those can wear you down over time, but they’re not deadly.

Thankfully, my daughter hasn’t had any violent encounters based on race. We were refused service once at a diner in Utah—we refuse to travel in Utah again because of it—but no one has burned a cross on our lawn or vandalized our property (yet), or worse. She has several biracial friends, as well as many monoracial friends, and she doesn’t make much of a distinction among them, and as far as I can tell, neither do they. Perhaps the southwest is an easier place to be biracial.

I don’t know your father, so I don’t know if he deserves your criticism. But I hope I’ve been as supportive as my daughter needs me to be… without stigmatizing her over who she is. Who is she? She is smart and beautiful, shy and polite. Everyone in her high school knows who she is, not because of her race, but because she is smart and beautiful.

Her mother and I love her very much, as do her many cousins from both sides of the family, and we have raised her to be a good student, a self-disciplined person, and above all, cheerful, confident and generous. I hope that is enough to get her through life, because we don’t have anything else to give her.

I don’t know if my response is helpful to you, but I hope it is, and that you take some comfort from it. The only effective response to the racial categories that divide us is to expose them as the fictions that they are. You and my daughter, and so many others, are the living proof of this.