Are you familiar with the Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People written by Maria P. P. Root? I haven't looked at the manifesto (first published in 1996) in years. I remember thinking then how polly-annish it was. Then it seemed futile to think of my mixed-race heritage as anything that I could define. Instead, it was an unspoken secret, and sometimes my shame. Now, I find that I am living by the tenents of the Bill of Rights whether or not others accept those rights as mine. I share the Maria P. P. Root's Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People here:
"I have the right
- not to justify my existence in this world
- not to keep the races separate within me
- not to be responsible for people's discomfort with my physical ambiguity
- not to justify my ethnic legitimacy
- to identify myself differently than strangers expect me to identify
- to identity myself differently than how my parents identity me
- to identify myself differently than my brothers and sisters
- to identify myself differently in different situations
- to create a vocabulary to communicate about being multiracial
- to change my identity over my lifetime--and more than once
- to have loyalties and identify with more than one group of people
- to freely chooose whom I befriend and love"
