The number of marriages between people of different races has quadrupled since the 1960's. It keeps going up. It is not turning back. Perhaps it was inevitable then that a new generation of mixed race Americans now want a new mixed race category to be added. They no longer want to be forced to deny part of their parentage.
Tiger realizes it.
He can t help but realize it. When racial questionnaires don t offer a multi-racial box, he checks either black or Asian. If people cannot call themselves what they want to call themselves, they cannot call themselves truly free, which raises a host of new questions. Most black Americans can claim some white or Indian blood somewhere in our background. And for that matter, an estimated 10 to 15 percent of white Americans have some black blood in them, whether they realize it or not, all of which underscores the paradox and absurdity of race, how it is not a biological construct, so much as it is a social, political, and emotional construct.