Crossing Black: Mixed-Race Identity in Modern American Fiction and Culture

5. B(l)ack to Last Drop? Mariah Carey, Halle Berry, and the Complexities of Racial Identity in Popular Culture

Chapter Five B(l)ack to Last Drop? Mariah Carey, Halle Berry, and the Complexities of Racial Identity in Popular Culture Current media offers biracial girls few positive examples of biracial people. Many successful models, actresses, and sports figures are biracial, but their multicultural heritage is not often highlighted. . . . Biracial children need to be taught about both/ all their ethnic heritages and be exposed to multiracial heroines like Joan Baez, Halle Berry, Mariah Carey, and Frida Kahlo. —Wanda M. L. Lee, “Therapeutic Considerations in Work with Biracial Girls” (212) Celebrities such as Cameron Diaz, Keanu Reeves, and Benjamin Bratt are all multiracial but are read as white and have access to white privilege, while other figures and high-profile multiracials, such as Halle Berry, Paula Abdul, Mariah Carey, and Barack Obama, are continually read as black. The difference is physical. —Meredith McCarroll, “‘Claiming’: White Ambition, Multiracial Identity, and the New American Racial Passing” (219) In December 2009, comedian and talk-show host George Lopez posed the question “What color are you?” to Mariah Carey when she appeared on Lopez Tonight.1 Her response—“In this country, black”—connects Carey to another mixed-race star, Halle Berry, who has also identified herself by evoking the historical one-drop system of racial classification in United States. After B(l)ack to Last Drop? 106 explaining, “No, for real. It’s the law since slavery . . . any amount of black in you, you are black,” Carey went on to clarify that her mother is of Irish descent and that her father, an African American, had a Venezuelan paternal grandmother . Lopez joked that he was pleased with her Latino ancestry, saying, “We gotta have a little piece for us!”—a statement that speaks to America’s desire to racially “claim” public figures and celebrities (Lopez Tonight).2 Comedian Dave Chappelle exposes this tendency in his skit “The Racial Draft” (2004). He begins, “You know what’s cool about being an American? We all mixed up. I’m talking about genetically. . . . My wife is Asian and I’m black and we argue about which half of Tiger Woods is hitting the ball so good. Derek Jeter is another guy like that. Halle Berry is somebody else. We’ve all got to start arguing about who is what” (“The Racial Draft”).3 Chappelle’s reference to Halle Berry demonstrates the extent to which people are invested in her race, despite her self-described identity. In the March 2011 issue of Ebony magazine, Berry revealed that she sees herself and her mixed-race daughter (with white model Gabriel Aubry) as black:4 I had to decide for myself and that’s what she’s going to have to decide—how she identifies in the world. And I think, largely, that will be based on how the world identifies her. That’s how I identify myself. But I feel like she’s Black. I’m Black and I’m her mother, and I believe in the one-drop theory. (Barnett, “On the Very Solid”) Berry’s comment created a small media buzz, prompting reactions and commentary on various websites, from celebrity gossip site TMZ to Psychology Today. Rebecca Walker responded to Berry’s comment two issues later, writing , “[N]one of my feelings of admiration and respect kept me from thinking she had . . . lost her mind when I read her pledge of allegiance to the one-drop rule when discussing her daughter’s race” (Walker, “Ebony Debate: One-Drop Rule”). That Carey and Berry have made reference to the one-drop ideology after the 2000 census and the election of a mixed-race president suggests that the racial past of the United States continues to shape mixed-race identity in the twenty-first century: even our most well-known mixed-race celebrities are not “post-race.” This chapter examines the public personas of Mariah Carey and Halle Berry, two celebrities who have directly and indirectly, consistently (Berry) or sometimes (Carey), identified as black while always, as Berry says, embracing “the white side of who I am, too” (qtd. in Barnett). Drawing from Richard B(l)ack to Last Drop? 107 Dyer’s Stars, I read these celebrities by analyzing autobiographical representations , celebrity statuses, public reception, and the publicity surrounding their representations. Dyer writes, “Stars are, like characters in stories, representations of people. Thus they relate to ideas about what people are (or are supposed to be) like...