oday I'd like to talk about two things very important to me. The first one is home, and the second one is work. I know these things are important to many of us. So I’d like to share a little about what they mean to me as a member of the interracial community.

There is a saying, "Home is where the heart is" and I believe this to be true. Home is more than a physical location. It is a way of feeling and a way of being. Home means belonging in some fundamental way so that when the day is over, the work is done, you return to a place that is true to your being, a place that is true to your inner values, a place where it is safe to be you.

"We know that dominance still lies with white America, and this provides a continuing source of conflict. We know, too, that conflict is not only a quality of the dominant group."

My home is here, in the interracial community. I don't know how I came here, but here I am. I am European American. My wife Charley is African American and native American. We’ve been together twenty years. We are adoptive parents of our 6 year old African American son, Matthew, and birth parents of our 4 year old multiracial son, Nathaniel. Together our small family of four contains many of the relationships that comprise the interracial community - interracial couples, transracial adoptions, multiracial individuals.

Charley and I were raised, as most Americans, in largely monoracial settings. We have families that extend into the African American and European American cultures of this country. Our families support us. They are part of our foundation. Charley has not left the African American community. I have not left the white community.

But in our larger society, we know that race is still very much an issue. We feel the tension between black and white, between white people and people of color, between Hispanic and black and Asian. On all fronts we see tension. We know that dominance still lies with white America, and this provides a continuing source of conflict. We know, too, that conflict is not only a quality of the dominant group.

There is a cold war going on in America. Two years ago an African American friend of mine said it feels like the country has declared war on black people. It's hard not to feel this war. It’s being fought on many fronts between white and black, Asian, Hispanic, native American. As I live and rejoice in the presence of the interracial community, I know if this cold war ever turns hot, our houses will be the first to burn.

Yet I feel safe here. I feel safe in the interracial community. I know race itself is not the enemy, nor is color. I know it is one thing to talk equality. It is another thing to live it. I know our community that we celebrate here today is as much of that vision as American has ever seen. It brings us freedom. It frees us all.

I don’t always feel the same sense of safety in my work. I am an activist. And I work in the white community. Though I come home to the interracial community, when I work, I go back among the people where I was raised. I know them. They are my people.

I do my work not out of anger or alienation, but out of concern and love. I know white people. Many of us are deeply troubled by race and we are lost. No matter how hard we try, it seems impossible to get it right. Some of us quit trying. Some of us lead quiet lives, trying at best to do no harm. Some of us lash out at others, blaming those others for feelings in ourselves we do not understand.

Much of this is unconscious. Much of this is cultural. We live a lifestyle we are unable to acknowledge, and which we fail to comprehend. As a professional and as the co-founder and Director of the Center for the Study of White American Culture, I am engaged in the process of helping white Americans understand our own social context.

Our goal is to examine white American culture in the context of the greater American culture. Our organization is multiracial. We believe both white people and people of color are needed to make this process of examination a worthwhile one. So I work closely with the concept of white culture. Today I'd like to share some personal feelings and observations about whiteness and white American culture that have a bearing on the interracial community.

Unlike people of color, who often can not walk away from being aware of their color in America, as white people we can walk away from being aware of our whiteness. We do it all the time. We say, "I'm not white." "There is no such thing as race." "Color does not matter." "I'm colorblind."

"Some of us realize that we can say to our openly, blantantly racist brothers and sisters that I am just as white as you, and you are wrong."

But color does matter. Color does matter in this undeclared cold war in America. It is still problematic to be a person of color, and so long as that is the case, then so too is it a problem to be white. We can exercise our privilege and walk away from being aware of our whiteness, but being white is still a problem. And we feel it. White people feel it. Whatever our denial, at some level we feel it.

Not all of us deny our privilege. Not all of us walk away. I want to speak now of those white people who remain. Those who realize race matters,. Those white people who see color, and embrace it.

Some of us are willing to take a stand in this war.

Some of us are willing to work from the inside and say how it feels to be white.

Some of us are willing to say as white people we do have feelings about our racial being.

Some of us realize that we can say to our openly, blatantly racist brothers and sisters that I am just as white as you, and you are wrong.

Some of us answer the subtle, unspoken racism in our culture by saying it's time we talk about it.

I hope that white people in the interracial community can begin to play a role here. It's important, not just for our wives, our husbands, our partners, our children, but for ourselves and for our families of origin. It's important for our country. We must begin to end this war.

In the interracial community, I have seen both monoracial and multiracial people of color remain connected to their racial communities of origin and take to those communities the message that racial reconciliation is both possible and desirable. As white people in the interracial community, we too must do this. We must begin to educate our race on its own ground, from within. It is not easy. It has taken me many years to learn how to do this work. I can tell you it is not easy, but we must begin.

Now let me say something about the one-drop rule. The white community is characterized as being unwilling or unable to recognize the claim of multiracial individuals to their white heritage. This is true. As a parent, I know I must take this into account in raising my children.

But change must come sometime and it must come from individuals. As a white person, as a longstanding member of the white community, as a person who speaks for the white community as I now profess to do, I recognize that claim. I recognize all the blood of European Americans that flows through the rich interracial mix of America. I am not here to tell you who you are. I am not here to tell you that you can not also be something else at the same time, for in fact, many of us are. But if as a multiracial person you make a claim to our common white heritage, I am here as a monoracial person to affirm and support that claim.

In the interracial community we know very well the concern on the part of the black community that a multiracial category is an attempt to set up an intermediate class between black people and white people. We all know this is NOT true.

But let me say also, we should not brush aside these fears lightly. For despite the intentions of the interracial community, white culture in the past has created an intermediate class of multiracial people. This is not fantasy. It has happened in other countries. It has happened here, in New Orleans, in Charleston. We need to realize that that intermediate class of people was us. That is our history. That role of buffer group is part of the history of the interracial community.

"We need to help the black community feel more comfortable in relaxing its rigid adherence to the one-drop rule. We need to help the white community understand that replacing white-skin with light-skin is really no change at all."

Now America is a great machine for assimilation. Even today as we speak we see light-skinned Asians and Hispanics being absorbed into the white community as honorary whites. Toni Morrison has pointed out that it is the presence of African Americans that has powered this machine of assimilation for Europeans. As our families arrived from Europe, we discarded our differences and became "not-black", "not one of them".

Now a white person may feel affirmed by accepting a light-skinned person as a cultural insider, as an honorary white person, or maybe as some common form of raceless American as many whites believe themselves to be. That person may say "Look at what I do. I'm not racist. The barriers of whiteness have fallen."

But we all need to look on this process with a critical eye. There is nothing in this process that does not build upon the same, light-skinned, race-driven process of assimilation of the past that was based on the exclusion of dark-skinned people. I don't think there is a conscious attempt by white folks to do this. But that does not make the effects any less a problem.

We need to work with our communities of origin to understand what's at stake here. We need to help the black community feel more comfortable in relaxing its rigid adherence to the one-drop rule. We need to help the white community understand that replacing white-skin with light-skin is really no change at all.

We must help the Asian American, the Hispanic American and native American communities resist being seduced by the strange American polarity of black and white. We need to do this by claiming our own space and pointing equally to the problems of all sides, black and white, red, yellow and brown, who would try to make us pawns to their own historical patterns.

We need to show them how to do it right. Not like the monoracial communities in the United States when everyone supposedly is trying to be equal, but first you have to choose your side. Not even like South America and the Caribbean, where race-mixing is common and accepted but whiteness is still favored. We need to create our own reality, our own being, our own community, and challenge others to follow.

But enough of work. Today we are creating that reality. I know we have many viewpoints here. I know we need more discussion. But in some fundamental way, we are that reality. And being here today, I feel like I'm coming home again, back home to the interracial community. I feel I am where I should be, and where I will be for the rest of my life. I feel privileged, not by power and dominance, but truly privileged as a person to be here and to share this experience.

I thank the sponsors of this march and particularly Charles Michael Byrd [of Interracial Voice] for the opportunity for us to assemble. I thank everyone for this opportunity to come home.

Jeff Hitchcock can be contacted at jeffhitchcock@euroamerican.org.