A New Perspective from Interracial Voices
A Book Review on a Critical Issue by Mildred Espree
The Philosophy Of Multiracial Identity and Self Realization: Thoughts from an Ofay-Mulatto, Essayist and Spiritual Seeker by Charles Michael Byrd.
My February 2025 take on this realistic nonfiction text is that it is both timely and needed now and should become required reading for all journalists, educators at all levels, and social scientists.
Published last fall, 2024, Byrd’s cogent essays, collected here, represent his role as a working journalist and founder of Interracial Voices, and his experiences as a young boy and man born into a society built on race-consciousness. I'm guessing his experiences were a bit like existing in an explosive game of emotional minefields or it was like a football game with a quarterback who never knew whether he was playing offensively or benched (it all felt like defense) in a zero-sum game.
After all, those were the rules and duality of race consciousness, made more poignant and sentient because Byrd has transcended this socially imposed condition with an evolved sense of self on an issue where many experience a sobering, existentialist trauma that no one, not even psychiatrists, is equipped to discuss, much less treat—hopefully, we’re evolving on this issue.
As someone born in 1954, I too, began my schooling at an all-black, segregated, elementary school. Therefore I know what it feels like to be subjected to a literal culling down, using ritual. Byrd details this.
In “Formative Old Dominion Years, Byrd notes his love for his grandmother and the bond they had, her kindness and love despite the hardships at home and in her community. It describes a mutually protective bond. Despite these issues, Byrd describes his grandfather as a strong, father figure and reliable provider. These first two chapters contain great origin stories.
Later, his comments on the NAACP’s raison d’etre for resisting a multiracial category are obvious, however, they are not the best parts of the book.
For me, Byrd’s 2017 essay, The Philosophy of Multiracialism” vs The Cult of Antiracism,” asserts itself as the first description of his conscious decision to resist identity politics.
Using the idea of transcendent existence, Byrd says that the soul’s human goal is to help us embrace the eternal truths of birth, death, and a return to eternity, and not to live a life of “ internalized victimhood.”
His commentary near the final chapter, is about “Abandonment” which addresses the life of writer Jean Toomer, and his journey spent fearing his racially charged life, where the myth of the one-drop rule for black blood’ dominated American culture. Toomer wanted a humane and whole race existence—internal unity.
In closing, Byrd returns to current politics and comments on how both “race and ethnicity” are social constructs per Project Race 2025. He comments on our post-racial future society which many refute as unrealistic. Once it sounded good to me, but experience has changed my mind on this. Having made a similar observation about the sources of the constructed idea, it could be intended to obfuscate what has become apparent.
This is a resonating collection of essays and a great reference for those who lived these past seven decades or inherited their problems. There’s history here. A collective history, a thread that reaches far and wide.
* Byrd’s essays and stories on religion are progressing. I look forward to reading them soon. /millie