Is Obama black or biracial? Obviously he is both of these things. However, he is usually referred to as our first black president, not our first biracial president. Certainly, it is monumental that we have a black president and it should be celebrated and highlighted. I only ask the question because, after my last post, where I began a discussion by asking why race exists and looking at how the government classifies race, many people responded by explaining how they identify themselves and their children. So, why and how do we identify ourselves and how are we defined by others? For instance, is Keanu Reeves white even though his father is Chinese/Hawaiian? Is Tiger Woods black because of his skin color and certain features, even thought he identifies as “Cablinasian?” Frida Kahlo is a Mexican Painter but is she also a painter of Hungarian Jewish ancestry?

My daughters, although they have kinky hair and their mother’s features, are lighter skinned. It is pretty obvious that their parents are of different races, but how will they self-identify? My wife and I teach them that everyone is a human being first but they should be proud of their heritages, their ancestry on both sides and their unique physical appearance. We also prepare them to understand that humans seem to have a need for categorizing. And, the obvious way to do this is by physical traits. Therefore, many people will make assumptions about race. People with black features will be called black; those with Asian features will be called Asian and if you look white, you’ll be called white, regardless of actual racial make-up.

Since identification has so many ramifications in everything from health care to education, before I even start to break down these complicated issues further, I thought it would be good to see how other mixed-race people identify themselves in the 21st century. To that end I would like to take this post to share a resource I found. It is called the The Mavin Foundation and it is a foundation that raises awareness about the experiences of mixed heritage people and families. They recently started a project called “What are YouTube?” which challenges mixed people to self-identify on their own terms. I encourage you to take a look at the many ways people of multiple heritages see themselves and to contribute a video if you are so inspired.

GreatDad.com has always been a collection of many voices of the dad experience. Rather than one man’s opinion, we have had many writers including twelve author contributors who have domain expertise in some aspect of fatherhood, from medical to humor to psychological. Many many people have asked us to include their voices in the site but we felt we had to limit our contributors just so we could understand all of the content we were curating.

Now we feel we can expand our perspective to tell the stories of even more dads. One way to do this is to add guest blogs to GreatDad.com. Soon, you will be seeing graphic changes to the blog to represent the inclusion of many other voices. For now, you may notice new authors of posts and in the Authors section in the sidebar. I will introduce our newest author in a separate post. And, we’ll have other news soon on how we’ll be adding more new viewpoints to GreatDad.com. We may even add a mom or two.

For those of you, friends and family, who only want to follow my particular thoughts, recommendations, and observations on my kids, you can find the official GreatDad Blog at GreatDad.com/GreatDadblog.

If you’re interested in adding your blog RSS feed to the GreatDad blog, please let me know in the comments section and I’ll let get back to you quickly. While we can’t include everyone, I want to get as many different perspectives as possible while putting extra emphasis on the quality of writing including humor and insight.

Thanks to readers and writer for making GreatDad an enthusiastic source of ideas on modern parenting.