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Between the Lines

My jaw dropped. I'd been outed.
The Sunday package on mixed-race people that appeared in the Jackson (Mich.) Citizen Patriot the summer of 1987 was a labor of love. The daughter of a Black man and a white woman, I'd hardly ever seen reference to people like me and our perceptions of the world in books, newspapers or television. Almost anything that referenced interracial families dealt almost exclusively with the issues of the mixed-race couple rather than their offspring.

I saw my college internship as an opportunity to educate the public. I'd covered boring public meetings, rewritten my share of news releases and localized plenty of national and international news. This was my chance to contribute to the dialogue on race by sharing the social, political and historical views of mixed-race Americans, especially those of Black and white descent.
I was disappointed enough to see that a teen-age intern who'd gotten a summer job at the paper because her parents were friends with one of the editors wrote a column on being biracial to accompany the package I'd created. I had no knowledge of that column until I opened the paper. But it was the unauthorized trailer at the end of the article telling readers I was a mulatto that appalled me.
The editors were afraid. They feared a backlash to the article at a time when people still tried to impose the "one-drop rule" one drop of Black blood makes you Black - on mixed-race people. The trailer was their culturally insensitive way of shifting all "blame" for the articles onto me.
Again, I was never asked whether I was willing to reveal that much about myself to the readers. The way I saw it, anyone who covered the abortion debate, a hot topic at the time, didn't have to declare on which side of the debate he fell. Police reporters didn't have to reveal whether they'd ever had a felony. Education reporters didn't have to share their GPAs. The expectation, the way I understood it, was that we operate objectively no matter what.
That was the first of several incidents in my 20-year journalistic career in which my co-workers felt at liberty to insult my minority status.
My shift at the Elmira (N.Y.) Star-Gazette began the same as every other. I came to work at 5 p.m. and set up pagination for the stock tables while I nursed my five-month-old son, Raphael. It was a Friday night, my last working the 5 p.m. to 1 a.m. shift before I returned to my native Indianapolis to assume my new position at the now-defunct Indianapolis

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