In America, once I got there, things seemed at first relatively simple. I had an African father and so, like President Obama later, I was black. But the story here, too, is complicated . . . and has changed over the years, in part because of the rise of the idea of mixed-race people as an identity group. Color and citizenship, however, were quite separate matters: after the Civil War no sensible person doubted you could be black and American, at least so far as the law was concerned, despite a persistent undercurrent of white racial nationalism.
