ASHLAND — When he brings up the fact that he is biracial, Elliott Lewis most often hears platitudes.
Some of them are flattering, others not so much. The one that drives him nuts is the question, “What are you?”
It’s one of the things he has to cope with in a generation that is redefining what it is to be biracial.
Lewis, a former television reporter now in law school at the University of Akron, spoke Thursday at Ashland Community and Technical College during the annual Teaching-Learning Conference.
Diversity is the focus of the conference, and Lewis embodies the theme. As a young biracial American, Lewis sees a divide between two generations that have two ways of viewing racial identity.
Had he been of his parents’ generation, grown to maturity before and during the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, he would have been biracial by birth and black by experience. “There were no biracial water fountains in the south,” he said.
Biracial people then were more likely to live in segregated neighborhoods, deal with overt racism, have their black identity reinforced by their parents, and be fatalistic about unequal racial roles.
Lewis, however, and others of his generation, are more integrated, don’t accept hidebound race-based roles and see themselves as fully multiracial. In fact, since 2000 they have been able to identify that way with the U.S. Census.
The divide is exacerbated because new generations are coming up that don’t have the same fresh memory of the civil rights struggle. “One group is back in the past and one group is clueless about American racial history,” he said.
Multiracial Americans all face similar experiences, he said, like criticism for being “not black enough” and undergoing interrogation by often well-meaning people who quiz them on their ancestry.
Multiracial Americans are a growing segment of the population and thus a group educators need to be informed about, said conference chairman Dan Mahan. “He (Lewis) is on the cutting edge of the subject.”
Even in northeast Kentucky, student populations at the community college level are diverse and becoming more so, he said.
It’s imperative for educators to become more sensitive to diversity in order to be better educators, he said.
The conference continues today at ACTC.
Planning already is under way for next year’s conference, ACTC President Greg Adkins said. The theme will be “Read for College, Read for Life,” he said.
MIKE JAMES can be reached at mjames@dailyindependent.com or at (606) 326-2652.
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