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New York: All Mixed Up

In a segregated city, multiracial people face challenges

By Deepti Hajela/AP

Michael Paul feels more comfortable in New York than anywhere else. He likes how the diversity of the city reflects his own background — the son of an Irish-African-Indian-Chinese-Caribbean father and black-English mother.

Jennifer Chau is Chinese and Eastern European Jewish. For her, the city has been a difficult place at times, one where she doesn’t fit in with either of her cultures, where she has felt pressured to choose between them.

Chau and Paul are among the hundreds of thousands of multiracial people living in New York City. According to the 2000 census, about 5 percent of the city’s 8 million people identified themselves as belonging to more than one racial group.

That’s more than twice the national rate; about 2.4 percent of the country’s population consider themselves to be of mixed race. The 2000 census is the first in which people could choose to identify themselves as multiracial.

Yet for all its diversity, New York is one of the most segregated cities in the nation, according to a report by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University. Whites, Hispanics and Asians are more likely to live separately in New York than in other cities, the study found.

Individual experiences vary widely, of course, but New Yorkers with multiracial backgrounds face unique challenges.

A city with such great diversity — and such extreme ethnic segregation — “can be a nightmare” for multiracial people, said Reginald Daniel, assistant professor of sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. The emphasis on ethnicity, which creates the enclaves for which New York is famous, makes it much harder for people who come from more than one culture to be fully accepted, he said.

“The individual has to negotiate these boundaries ... There can be a problem in being perceived as a legitimate member of any group,” he said.

Chau knows how that feels. She remembers being teased by classmates as a child at Hebrew school.

During her senior year of college, in Chinatown for a photography assignment, she left the neighborhood after taking only two and a half rolls of film instead of the six or seven she had planned. She was uncomfortable with the way people were looking at her and the comments they were making, the way they obviously considered her an outsider.

“They didn’t realize I consider myself an insider,” she said.

Her experiences led her to create Swirl, a support organization for multiracial people.

Colin Fredericson knows the feeling of alienation, too. The Jewish and black Brooklynite says he rarely gets recognized as a member of either community, and is often met with disbelief when talking about his heritage.

In fact, since he is so often taken to be Latino, the 20-year-old Fredericson has found himself being drawn increasingly to that group. He learned Spanish, dates mostly Latino women, and finds many of his friends among Hispanic people.

“It’s just been an easier group for me to deal with,” Fredericson said.

Still, other people of multiracial background say they have found a comfortable home in New York.

Recently married, Paul and his wife have decided that they will raise children in the city, to make sure they are exposed to all different kinds of cultures.

Paul said he and other young multiracial people aren’t limited by the ethnic enclaves, but benefit from them because they are places where people can learn more about their heritage.

“Whether you pay more attention to the Irish side or the Indian side, there’s the affinity of finding out who you are,” he said. “It’s easier to have these feelings because it’s literally outside your doorstep.”

And being in a place where there are so many different kinds of people can be liberating, said Elinor Tatum, the black and Jewish publisher/editor in chief of The New York Amsterdam News, a black-owned newspaper.

In a country that is obsessed with race and identity, “being in New York may make it easier,” she said.

“If you can’t find the place you feel comfortable, you have to create it,” Tatum said. “You can do that here.”