100% Cablinasian: Getting the Race Facts Right on Tiger Woods
By Deputy Editor Thea Lim
Update: You can find a follow-up, clarification and response to the comments on this post here.
Thanks to Carmen, Andrea and Latoya for helping me flesh out my thoughts!
One night last summer, my Vietnamese friend Winston began recounting the number of top world athletes who also happen to be Asian. “Manny Pacquaio…Yao Ming…Ichiro Suzuki…Tiger Woods…”
“Hey wait,” another friend interrupted. “Can Asians really claim Tiger Woods? What, just because his great-grandmother is Asian he’s proof of Asian superiority?”
“Are you kidding?” Winston responded. “He’s more Asian than anything else.” Immediately, multiple super phones were put to work verifying this.
This is what Tiger Woods’ Wikipedia page says:
Earl, a retired United States Army lieutenant colonel and Vietnam War veteran, was of mixed African American, Chinese and Native American ancestry. Kultida (née Punsawad), originally from Thailand, is of mixed Thai, Chinese, and Dutch ancestry. This makes Woods himself one-quarter Chinese, one-quarter Thai, one-quarter African American, one-eighth Native American, and one-eighth Dutch. He refers to his ethnic make-up as “Cablinasian” (a syllabic abbreviation he coined from Caucasian, Black, (American) Indian, and Asian).
As you know, I am not a fan of referring to mixed race people in terms of percentages and fractions. But I was startled to discover that
1) Tiger Woods is in fact more Asian than anything else.
2) Tiger Woods’ parents are also mixed race – both of his parents can (and probably do) identify as people of colour.
Actually, Tiger Woods is just as Asian as I am. I was stunned by this information. Why had I not known this? I always assumed that Tiger Woods’ dad was black and his mom was white, and that his Asian connection was a little more indirect, a la Barack.
It seems like I’m not the only one who misconstrued the complexity of Tiger’s roots. By now we’re all familiar with the outrage around Tiger Woods’ racial taste in women. Newspapers, blogs and Twitter feeds have blown up with commentary that Tiger’s apparent penchant for white women is just more evidence of how he tries to create distance between himself and black folks. In essence, because he chooses to bed white women instead of black women, Tiger is not a real black person.
I’m not going to talk about the fact that it is absurd and small-minded to try and mandate the lovelife of an individual by threatening them with explulsion from a racial community. What I am bothered by is that in all this race vetting, folks can’t even bother to get Tiger’s race right.
In an article alternatingly titled “Tiger Woods alienates black community with white lovers” and “Tiger’s troubles widen his distance from blacks,” Jesse Washington writes
…Woods’ already shaky standing among many blacks took a beating…As one blogger, Robert Paul Reyes, wrote: “If Tiger Woods had cheated on his gorgeous white wife with black women, the golfing great’s accident would have been barely a blip in the blogosphere.”
The darts reflect blacks’ resistance to interracial romance. They also are a reflection of discomfort with a man who has smashed barriers in one of the whitest of all sports and assumed the mantle of world’s most famous athlete, once worn by Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan.
But Woods declines to call himself black, famously choosing the term “Cablinasian” (Caucasian, black, Indian and Asian) to describe the racial mixture he inherited from his African-American father and Thai mother.
A comment that we didn’t publish on the Tiger Woods piece we ran last week articulated the anger around “Cablinasian,” suggesting it is offensive for Tiger Woods to call himself Cablinasian because most African-Americans are some mix of white, native and black – why does Tiger Woods get to have a special name for it?
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