Jenice Armstrong: Answer to 'What are you' isn't black and white

THERE MAY BE a black president in the White House, but America still isn't the postracial society that it could and should be.

There's still a tendency to want to place each other into neat, little racial categories, even though it's becoming increasingly difficult to do that. According to U.S. census figures, Americans who identify as mixed race are one of the fastest-growing demographic groups in the country.

Yesterday, an interview on XM radio of Hoda Kotb, a host on NBC's "Today" show who just published her memoirs, caught my attention as the interviewer voiced her confusion about Kotb's ethnicity. Kotb, who is Egyptian, explained that this happens to her all the time and recalled an incident during her days as a rookie reporter when an elderly stranger approached while she was on a pay phone and asked, "What is you?" I was struck by how the XM host was all but doing the same thing.

Some things don't seem to change. It seems rude to me to put someone on the spot by asking flat out: "What are you? Are you black? Or are you white?" As in the case of Kotb, the answer isn't always that simple, which is why Lori Tharps, a Mount Airy-based writer, co-created a T-shirt line aimed specifically at people of mixed racial and ethnic backgrounds.

The line's website, whatRUgear.com, has T-shirts emblazoned with phrases such as "mixed to perfection" and "same family. different colors."

"People don't know how to begin the conversation about race and identity," said Tharps, an African-African married to a white man from Spain. "We still can't get a handle on a conversation about race without getting nervous or uncomfortable or hostile. So, we put it on the shirt and start the conversation for you.

"Our shirts aren't about labeling people. They are about allowing people to identify themselves any way that they want to. Our slogans are deliberately open-ended. For example, our favorite slogan is 'ambiguously brown.' "

The T-shirt project was a labor of love for her two biracial sons, ages 6 and 9.

"People don't recognize how difficult it is to be not one or the other," added Tharps. "We are trying to get a shirt to President Obama, but President Obama doesn't consider himself biracial."

Obama's mother is a white woman from Kansas and his father a black man from Kenya, but the president reportedly checked the category for "Black, African Am., or Negro" on his 2010 Census form, rather than checking two boxes.

Kathrin P. Ivanovic, a Bensalem-based fundraiser who describes herself as Afro-German and Cuban and who grew up "the only brown kid in school," owns one of the whatRUgear T-shirts.

"I get the 'what are you' when people see my last name and it doesn't jive with what I look like," said Ivanovic, who organizes the Philly chapter of Swirl Inc., a national multiethnic organization that challenges prevailing notions about race.

"It can be awkward because I don't think we've been given good language to discuss it with. I like having that opportunity to explain my heritage and have a wider discussion. I don't think that we have that discussion enough," she added.

Racial identity in America is often the elephant in the room that people dance around, often because we don't want to offend. And when someone does broach the topic, it can be awkward. Take what happened the other day to 25-year-old Sam Watson, who was at a laundromat in Fairmount when an older man plopped down on a seat next to him and bluntly asked him, "What are you?"

"I can't believe that we are still asking this question," Watson told me later. "It is 2010. I think it's flat-out rude . . . especially to a complete stranger. As if what you are isn't the norm."

But Watson has been in this situation many times and chooses not to get angry.

"I explained I was half African-American and half Ukranian," Watson said. "I very calmly talked to the guy while at the same time, I thought, 'I hope he goes away.' "

Watson, who blogs for whatRUgear.com, said he wishes he had been wearing one of the message T-shirts.

Send e-mail to heyjen@phillynews.com. My blog: http://go.philly.com/heyjen.