Couple Creates Magazine to Serve Increasing Number of Interracial Families in U.S.

SCHENECTADY, N.Y. —  Candy Mills, a black woman married to a white man, sat in the living room of her apartment recently filling out a government form.

The ambiguities that arose during her attempt to complete what should have been a simple task helped inspire the nation’s first magazine for interracial couples.

Mills was asked to check a box listing a “race” for the couple’s 6-year-old daughter, Gabriella. The boxes for “black” and “white” did not fit accurately. But neither did “other.”

Out of that head-on collision with society’s indifference to the situation of mixed couples, Mills said, has come Interrace Magazine, a biweekly publication designed by Mills and her husband, Gabe Grosz, that she says will be a “celebration of the beauty of a race, any race.”

“It’s not about color. . . . That would be too superficial. It’s about cultures,” she said.

By 1990, Mills said, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that there will be 1 million interracial marriages in the United States. The couple wants to make money, but they also want to serve that audience.

“What Interrace Magazine wants to do is close the gap between races, show that we all have differences, but when you come right down to it we are all the same,” Mills said.

That’s a lesson Mills and Grosz were trying to get across long before they got into magazine publishing.

Grosz was 28 and Mills 15 when they met in Los Angeles. Grosz was her track coach. They had to endure breaking the taboo against a student-teacher relationship and the disapproving eye both families cast upon the relationship, because of both the racial and the age difference.

Mill’s family scorned her and she says she nearly suffered a mental breakdown from the strain.

“Just because I’m married to Gabe doesn’t make me any less black or whatever,” said Mills, 26, now a college student. “It’s what’s in my heart that makes me what I am, and what’s in my heart is a very proud black woman.”

The magazine addresses not only the problems of interracial couples, but also those of other families of mixed racial background. Many families are transracial, with adopted children of other races, she noted.

“We will deal with the family a lot. People write to me as if I’m Dear Abby or something,” Mills said.

Celebrity interracial couples will be featured, as will support groups and other organizations.

Mills and Grosz, now a teacher in the Schenectady school system, hope their magazine can become a forum for readers to share experiences, such as the problems Mills had trying to see their daughter in the hospital after giving birth.

Gabriella was light-skinned at birth. The hospital’s nurses thought Mills was a patient from the hospital’s psychiatric ward when she begged to see the child, and tried to steer her clear of the maternity ward.

The hospital’s administration finally realized what was going on and apologized. Mills demanded her child and left the same day she gave birth.

“They said she may develop jaundice,” Mills said. “I said, ‘How are you going to know if she turns yellow? You don’t even know what color she is now!’ ”