Mixed Race Studies

Can we just pretend that White people wrote the ACA and enjoy it? Like Elvis Presley, but with healthcare. Or can we just pretend to discover that it was always a part of our healthcare system? Like when you “discover” that you’ve always been able to check out National Treasure for free at the library. Yea. That. But with flawed but reasonably crafted insurance marketplaces.

David Bradley Isenberg, “I Only Protested the Affordable Care Act Because the President Was Black. Please Don’t Take Away My Health Insurance,” McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, June 27, 2017. https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-only-protested-the-affordable-care-act-because-the-president-was-black-please-dont-take-away-my-health-insurance.

One possible antidote to the misappropriation of multiracial identity is for Loving Day celebrations to focus upon what was the ultimate civil rights objective of the Loving v. Virginia decision – the impermissible pursuit of what the Supreme Court there termed “White Supremacy.” This is because interracial bans only prohibited interracial marriage involving white persons. Fifty years later, after the Loving v. Virginia decision, interracial marriage bans no longer exist, but White Supremacist violence and rhetoric still flourish. Whether or not Loving Day ever becomes an official federal holiday, it is to be hoped that its celebrations will specifically commemorate the decision’s fundamental civil rights concern with racial hierarchy.

Tanya K. Hernández, “What the“Loving Day” 50th Anniversary Celebrations of the Loving v. Virginia Court Decision Really Need – A Challenge to Ongoing White Supremacy,” The Huffington Post, June 11, 2017. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/593b4961e4b094fa859f1878.

We have been warned not to get under one another’s skin, to keep our distance. But Jordan Peele’s horror-fantasy—in which we are inside one another’s skin and intimately involved in one another’s suffering—is neither a horror nor a fantasy. It is a fact of our experience. The real fantasy is that we can get out of one another’s way, make a clean cut between black and white, a final cathartic separation between us and them. For the many of us in loving, mixed families, this is the true impossibility. There are people online who seem astounded that Get Out was written and directed by a man with a white wife and a white mother, a man who may soon have—depending on how the unpredictable phenotype lottery goes—a white-appearing child. But this is the history of race in America. Families can become black, then white, then black again within a few generations. And even when Americans are not genetically mixed, they live in a mixed society at the national level if no other. There is no getting out of our intertwined history.

Zadie Smith, “Getting In and Out,” Harper’s Magazine, July 2017. https://harpers.org/archive/2017/07/getting-in-and-out/.

Upholding interracial marriage as proof that we have overcome racism reinforces the idea that racism is primarily about individual acts of prejudice, rather than about systemic (and collective) vulnerability to state violence.

Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda, “No, Interracial Love is Not “Saving America”,” Wear Your Voice: Intersectional Feminist Media, June 12, 2017. https://wearyourvoicemag.com/identities/race/no-interracial-love-not-saving-america.

Within this context [of the failed policy of eugenics], it becomes clear that the issues involved in Loving extended beyond its current popular understanding as a tribute to romance. Indeed, for a case heralded for being about the boundless nature of love, there is surprisingly little discussion about this in the Loving decision apart from the appellants’ surname and rather dry assertions that marriage is a civil right.

Osagie K. Obasogie, “Was Loving v. Virginia Really About Love?,” The Atlantic, June 12, 2017. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/loving-v-virginia-marks-its-fiftieth-anniversary/529929/.

As a white supremacist society, the United States privileges [Rachel] Dolezal’s challenging ethnoracial boundaries. This is so unlike the thousands of blacks who quietly dissolved into the white population a century ago. A media stir would have cost them their lives. Even Anatole Broyard, the New York Times film critic who passed away in 1990 took his hidden blackness to the grave to be taken seriously in his career as a writer. At the same time, unlike the acceptance that many Afro-Brazilians have for their negra frustradas, many Afro-Americans find her problematic at best. Their relatives and ancestors who passed as white (or do so now) do not receive the same rewards. Instead, it has to be quiet without any fuss, for fear of upsetting the status quo.

Chinyere Osuji, Ph.D., “Rachel Dolezal: ‘Negra Frustrada’ (Frustrated Black Woman),” Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, May 24, 2017. http://chinyereosuji.camden.rutgers.edu/2017/05/24/rachel-dolezal-negra-frustrada-frustrated-black-woman/.

After the first African slaves arrived at Jamestown, Virginia, a population of mixed-race blacks emerged. Their masters and fellow slaves celebrated their exotic features – not quite African, but not exactly white. The women were called “fancy girls” and paraded at quadroon balls, events for wealthy white men to meet and mingle with them. Lighter-skinned black men, meanwhile, were dubbed “run ‘round men” because, with their fairer skin, they could supposedly have their pick of any woman in the black community.

Ronald Hall, “Too pretty to play? Stephen Curry and the light-skinned black athlete,” The Conversation, April 30, 2017. http://theconversation.com/too-pretty-to-play-stephen-curry-and-the-light-skinned-black-athlete-76638.

“Certain promoters would want to highlight that I was mixed race, and they’d want me to say that I was like, Southeast Asian, or not Black. Or one guy wanted me to not speak English. I was uncomfortable with a lot, obviously.

I was told I couldn’t have my hair natural. It’s not like I have the curliest of ‘fros. But they didn’t want me to have natural hair, so I would wear a hair weave because you couldn’t be a mixed Blasian if you didn’t have silky straight hair.

I had to buy my identity for $220 a pop.” —N’jaila Rhee

Esther Wang, “Let’s talk about sex (and race, and gender, and intersectionality),” Open City, March 23, 2015. http://opencitymag.aaww.org/lets-talk-njaila-rhee/.

The continued rejection of racial mixing lies in deep-seated notions of racial difference and maintenance of racial boundaries. In the U.S., we are still highly segregated in our neighborhoods and friendship circles. Even in our favorite TV shows and movies, interracial couples are infrequent, and biracial children even rarer. Most individuals will maintain that race does not matter in terms of who they work with or are friends with. But despite that, it remains socially acceptable for us to discriminate in terms of who we date. Most whites will not admit they do not want a black neighbor, but will freely admit their racial preferences in dating, referencing physical attraction and lack of cultural similarities as reasons not to consider dating anyone of another race.

Erica Chito Childs, “Williams’s Pregnancy Proves Interracial Couples Still Aren’t Accepted,” Fortune, May 3, 2017. http://fortune.com/2017/05/03/serena-williams-pregnant-fiance-alexis-ohanian-photo/.

With respect to Latinos in particular, the suggestion that on the whole they are becoming white underestimates the ongoing racial stigmatization and exclusion faced by many in this community. Such arguments do not account for present-day anti-Latino and anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric. Should we assume that mass deportations, which, too, often lead to the separation of Latino families, or inflammatory electoral campaigns will have no effect on how Latinos identify and understand their place in U.S. society for years to come? And what of the widespread presumptions of illegality that Latino citizens must contend with?

G. Cristina Mora and Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz, “A Response to Richard Alba’s “The Likely Persistence of a White Majority”,” New Labor Forum: A journal of ideas, analysis, and debate, April 28, 2017. http://newlaborforum.cuny.edu/2017/04/28/a-response-to-richard-albas-the-likely-persistence-of-a-white-majority/.