Mixed Race Studies

This film affected me remarkably. As an individual of mixed races, I am all too familiar with the dilemma of being caught between cultures and I thought that Imitation of Life captured the failure of American binaries perfectly. It was only by overcoming my desire to be stereotypically beautiful (read: white), was I able to recognize my own place independent of racial expectations. The unresolved ending between Lora and Susie in the 1959 version seems to represent the lack of resolution regarding race. Although troublesome endings may have been a convention of postclassical films, [Douglas] Sirk forces the audience to consider the future of Lora, Steve and Susie, and, in the process, alludes to the unresolved issues of Sarah Jane’s existence. Annie’s death may have forced her to recognize her misgivings as a daughter, but her life as a light-skinned young woman has only begun, just as our battle with civil rights.

Charisse L’Pree, “Imitation of Life,” Charisse L’Pree, Ph.D.: The Media Made Me Crazy, April 20, 2005. https://charisselpree.me/2005/04/20/imitation-of-life/.

One of the most stubborn aspects of America’s racial imagination is the insistence on having a term to separate and identify people of Latin American descent.

It’s a minefield of geography, color and language since we can be of any race and have few things in common beyond some degree of adherence to the Spanish tongue. This is why U.S. Latinos generally prefer to self-identify by their family’s country of origin — Mexican, Colombian, Salvadoran, etc.

Non-Latinos, though, have always needed an umbrella term for labeling us as one. It was French colonists who first dubbed us “Latin” Americans, as a way of distinguishing their colonial project from Anglo colonization in the Western Hemisphere.

Daniel Hernandez, “The case against ‘Latinx’,” The Los Angeles Times, December 17, 2017. http://beta.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-hernandez-the-case-against-latinx-20171217-story.html.

Black people have always accepted mixed-race people as part of their community. With [Barack] Obama, I think white people needed to be OK with voting for him. They needed to feel that he would look out for them. One way to do that was to emphasize the white part of his identity … With Meghan Markle, people want to correct the cognitive dissonance where [in their minds] black women aren’t princesses or duchesses. If she’s half-white, then that’s closer to the reality that makes sense. There’s a lot of people who are uncomfortable with the idea of a black person in such a position. It’s a way to set the world back right for them [by focusing on her white heritage]. —Camille Z. Charles

Valerie Russ, “In an increasingly mixed-race America, who decides what we call ourselves?,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, December 18, 2017. http://www.philly.com/philly/news/meghan-markle-race-camille-charles-biracial-post-20171218.html.

By phone I’m white, British and middle class. A Londoner maybe. Definitely educated and probably called Oliver. An accent they can’t place on a black baritone that blends with feminine cadences. Physically, I’m often mistaken for half-Asian. Occasionally when my broad shoulders, thick thighs and big belly are accounted for, the answer is Samoan. But my beard suggests I have a relationship with the Quran, certainly when it comes to airports in Southend, Stockholm and San Francisco.

So I feel the double-take when people meet me for the first time.

“Oh!” they will say. “I had no idea you were…”

…Gay?

Ashley Thomas, “Life in The Hinterlands; Growing up Gay & Mixed Race on The Isle of White,” The Afropean: Adventures in Afro Europe, May 9, 2017. http://afropean.com/life-in-the-hinterlands-growing-up-gay-mixed-race-in-the-isle-of-white/.

“Africa has the greatest amount of phenotypic variability in skin color, and yet it’s been underrepresented in large scale endeavors,” said Alicia Martin, a postdoctoral scientist in the lab of Broad Institute member Mark Daly. “There are some genes that are known to contribute to skin pigmentation, but by and large there are many more new genes that have not been discovered.”

David Cameron, “Skin pigmentation is far more genetically complex than previously thought,” Broad Institute, November 30, 2017. https://www.broadinstitute.org/news/skin-pigmentation-far-more-genetically-complex-previously-thought.

The answer is that [Elizabeth] Warren, like millions of other Americans, is mixed-race, and percentages shouldn’t matter when we consider such ancestry.

Martha S. Jones, “Why calling Elizabeth Warren ‘Pocahontas’ is a slur against all mixed-race Americans,” The Washington Post, November 29, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/11/29/why-calling-elizabeth-warren-pocahontas-is-a-slur-against-all-mixed-race-americans.

“There is no consensus on who is considered Métis or a non-status Indian, nor need there be,” the court wrote. “Cultural and ethnic labels do not lend themselves to neat boundaries. ‘Métis’ can refer to the historic Métis community in Manitoba’s Red River Settlement or it can be used as a general term for anyone with mixed European and Aboriginal heritage.” For eastern Métis, proof of the latter is enough. Their organizations typically accept anyone who can provide a genealogical chart showing an Indigenous ancestor.

Graeme Hamilton, “Who gets to be Metis? As more people self-identify, critics call out opportunists,” National Post, November 23, 2017. http://nationalpost.com/news/canada/who-gets-to-be-metis-as-more-people-self-identify-critics-call-out-opportunists.

No doubt I am mixed, but I’m mixed and black. Blackness can accommodate mixedness, in a way that whiteness, with its myths of purity cannot. In some contexts I am black, in others mixed, sometimes I am Irish, others Nigerian (white is still off limits), but I am always me, always with the potential to identify as any of these things.

Emma Dabiri, “Emma: On Whether Irish Black People Are Woke, and on Changing “Foreign” Names,” Dublin Inquirer, October 25, 2017. https://www.dublininquirer.com/2017/10/25/emma-on-whether-irish-black-people-are-woke-and-on-changing-foreign-names/.

I’m not the only mixed race person who longs for a space where I can work through my complicated relationship with race free from fear of hurting the cause for racial justice rather than helping.

Elise Chen, “The quest for racial validity,” The Berkeley Beacon, November 2, 2017. http://www.berkeleybeacon.com/opinion/2017/11/2/the-quest-for-racial-validity.

For the first time, the 2000 Census offered an option for mixed race that gave the respondent the chance to self-declare the components of his or her own identity. Dozens of racial and ethnic categories were listed for those who wished to check all the boxes of their multicultural, multi-racial, selves, including a box for white, allowing people like me to acknowledge, legally and honorably, both sides of their heritage. After more than 200 years, the census had stopped dictating who people had to be and asked me to define myself.

E. Dolores Johnson, “The Census Always Boxed Us Out,” Narratively, October 30, 2017. http://narrative.ly/census-always-boxed-us/.