ASA 115 Week 1: Comic Strip (Jasmeet Dhillon, Kaining Huang, Julia McCann)

In this comic strip, we illustrated Mary Christine Walker’s plight with regards to her status of color in the late 1980’s. Walker, a biracial woman, was given the status of “Caucasian” at birth by her parents, who were concerned that their daughter may be subjected to the cruel racism and discrimination at the time. At the age of 39 in the 80s, however, Walker sought employment and saw that minorities were favorable hires. She went to court and wanted her racial status revised to be “African American” rather than “Caucasian,” but ran into some difficulty. The courts saw her desire to be black as a downgrade, and questioned why she would want to legally be considered a minority group.

Using StoryBoardThat, we created a three-panel comic strip depicting Mary Christine Walker in this time. In the first panel, we show Walker’s parents with their infant, choosing to list their child as white rather than black on her birth certificate. The black and white squares in our comic strip are to represent the race cards. As shown, 39 years later, Walker then desires the opposite of what her parents thought best for her at the time, and wants to be considered legally black. In the second panel, we show the court minimizing the significance of her own personal identity by trivializing her issue with the racial status on her certificate. In the third panel, we show Walker having succeeded at legally changing her racial status on her birth certificate and expressing happiness at having done so. To her, it is important that she be able to choose her race, and not the government or anyone else for that matter. In her words, she was “very thrilled” when her status was changed successfully.

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