In 2007, A first grade class quietly sat on stools in the school art room, waiting for the teacher to tell them what craft they would be making that day. “Good morning, my lovely students,” she finally said. “Today we will be making our family members out of construction paper. All the skin colored papers are in different bins on this front table and since family members usually have the same skin color, you should only need to go to one bin. Are there any questions?” A little girl with skin the color of toffee, evidently biracial, raised her hand. Proudly, she announced that her family was a lot of different colors, so she would be going to many bins to get the appropriate colors. The elderly art teacher was slightly taken aback, but the remark passed smoothly. However, only two or three decades ago, the …show more content…
Technically, the first biracial children in America were created when white plantation owners raped slave girls. The illegitimate child then born would typically be shunned by the white slave-owner, who could not bear to see their own physical features on someone of color. Thus, as Malcolm X established in his autobiography, biracial children born a century later served as a painful reminder to both blacks and whites of the previous horrific crimes. Rather than learn to bear the past inhumane deeds and work for a better future in which the atrocities would not be repeated, many individuals found it hard to put the past events out their minds and accept mixed families. Evidently, this led to the exclusion of many mixed families and biracial children from community