Multiracial families see Barack Obama as 'Other' like them

His mother, Maile, is half black and half Chinese American. His father, Jeff, is white and grew up Jewish in Evanston, Ill.

"I always check 'Other' on my college applications," Winograd said.

But on election day, Winograd was filling out a different kind of form. The 18-year-old accompanied his parents to the polling place across the street from their Glencoe, Ill., home to cast a ballot for president for the first time.

Winograd was excited just to be voting -- a simple act of citizenship that his African American grandfather told him people had died for. His parents were even more excited. The head of the Democratic ticket looked like their son. All of the Winograds voted for Barack Obama.

"I totally feel proud that he's a black man and he's mixed," Maile Winograd said of Obama. "I identified with him so much. What he went through as a biracial person, I went through. And my son must look at Barack and say, 'He looks like me.' That's a good thing. A very good thing."

For the parents of multiracial children, Obama's rise has been a vindication of sorts, a presidential rebuttal to a society that has not always been kind to their offspring, labeling them "half-breeds," "tragic mulattoes," "mutts," "mixed nuts," according to Susan Graham, the white mother of two multiracial children and the founder of the California-based Project Race, a 17-year-old nationwide group that advocates for a multiracial classification on all school, employment, census and other forms.

"Our membership has grown since the election," Graham said. "We've been fighting for a long time. This is a great boost for us."

But for Tyler Winograd, Obama's biracial background is no big deal. Winograd is the legal and psychological beneficiary of past struggles for racial and social justice. He and his friends look at race and culture through a different lens than their parents, who lived through the not-so-distant days of segregation, rioting and political assassinations.

"I think it's interesting that Obama is biracial," Winograd said. "But I think it's much more of a sense of pride for mixed-race people who are older or black people who are older, for people who went through the civil rights movement. . . . They had to fight for their rights. My rights were essentially handed to me."