He was really funny. I seem to recall that he was especially good at climbing things. He had a thing about The Six Million Dollar Man, as many 8-year-old boys did in the mid-1970s. He was also what was then called hyperactive, come to think of it.

But in terms of how we were to process my schoolmate, whom I'll call Troy, the most important and interesting thing was supposed to be that he was -- oh, dear -- mixed.

The "mixed" kid -- usually with a white mother and black father -- was thought of as a bit of a "situation" back then. The idea was that when he was around 12, he was going to have to realize that he was "really" black.

Or else white people would show him, we supposed. How that would make his mother feel didn't matter. He might want to go around saying that he was two things -- but it wouldn't do him much good in a society that saw him as, well, you can fill in the word. I'll never forget a "mixed" girl at one of those confessional college assemblies (this was 1982) breaking into tears at basically having to deny her mother's half of her ancestry on pain of black kids giving her grief for thinking she was better than they were.

This was just the way it had to be back then. The color line was much fuzzier in the 1980s than 20 years earlier, but it was there. Time passes, though, and I love this business of people openly and insistently calling themselves biracial. Really -- I love it; I read the recent New York Times piece on this subject with joy. I first encountered an actual person taking this line about 10 years ago. It threw me a bit, but I could feel, even then, that this was the way it was supposed to be in 2002.

In the '90s, I already had trouble truly understanding how my godchildren were going to be only "black" as adults. Pecan-colored like hyperactive Troy, and raised in a Bay Area town full of people of all shades by a black father with barely any family and a white mother with a huge one, including a live-in grandmother, were these three really going to have to "admit" when they were 12 that they were "black" in the same way that Dave Chappelle is?

A standard line on why degree and mixture are not supposed to matter for black-white hybrid folk is that the cops will always treat you as black. Even President Obama trotted out this line in defending his classification of himself as black rather than biracial, and comedians had a blast when Tiger Woods declared himself "Cablinasian," crowing, "Wait till Tiger gets stopped by the cops!"

But wait: "No matter what they take from me/They can't take away my dignity." And: "They cannot degrade Frederick Douglass. The soul that is within me no man can degrade. I am not the one that is being degraded on account of this treatment, but those who are inflicting it upon me."

Good. But then we're going to base our racial identity on what ignorant white cops do? I'm afraid we'll have to try again. Feel "black" in 2011 as a response to how some white people feel about you, and you are letting racism win.