Mixed Race Studies

“What are you trying to do to me? You have caused a lot of problems in my family. I know my nose is sharp and my skin is light, but my politics are as black as night. Today, I don’t identify as mixed. I reject my white privilege in a racist America. There is no way that I or my kids will identify as anything other than black” —Bernard

Anita Foeman, “DNA Tests, and Sometimes Surprising Results,” The New York Times, April 20, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/23/us/dna-ancestry-race-identity.html.

A multiracial actress, [Katie] Chang has considered changing her last name in an attempt to land more roles. But when her first film, “The Bling Ring” directed by Sofia Coppola, came out in 2013, she decided against it. While she noted that some casting directors aren’t looking to cast “Katie Chang as a lead actress” in teen-focused romantic comedies, she said her decision not to use a stage name has pushed her to work harder.

Tiffany Hu, “‘The Bling Ring’ Actress Katie Chang Finds Drive In Activism and Identity,” NBC News, April 20, 2017. http://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/bling-ring-actress-katie-chang-finds-drive-activism-identity-n745736.

I couldn’t escape Rachel Dolezal because I can’t escape white supremacy. And it is white supremacy that told an unhappy and outcast white woman that black identity was hers for the taking. It is white supremacy that told her that any black people who questioned her were obviously uneducated and unmotivated to rise to her level of wokeness. It is white supremacy that then elevated this display of privilege into the dominating conversation on black female identity in America. It is white supremacy that decided that it was worth a book deal, national news coverage, and yes—even this interview.

Ijeoma Oluo, “The Heart of Whiteness: Ijeoma Oluo Interviews Rachel Dolezal, the White Woman Who Identifies as Black,” The Stranger, April 19, 2017. http://www.thestranger.com/features/2017/04/19/25082450/the-heart-of-whiteness-ijeoma-oluo-interviews-rachel-dolezal-the-white-woman-who-identifies-as-black.

If interracial relationships were widespread prior to the abolition of slavery in 1888, they became a matter of national duty afterward. That didn’t happen “just because we all happened to get along,” said Mirtes Santos, a law student and Coletivo Negrada member. “It was a way to erase black identity.” Brazil’s government launched a full-on propaganda and policy effort to “whiten” Brazil: It closed the country’s borders to African immigrants, denied black Brazilians the rights to lands inhabited by the descendants of runaway slaves, and subsidized the voyage of millions of German and Italian workers, providing them with citizenship, land grants, and stipends when they arrived.

Cleuci de Oliveira, “Brazil’s New Problem With Blackness,” Foreign Policy, April 5, 2017. http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/04/05/brazils-new-problem-with-blackness-affirmative-action/.

“I have some Chinese roots, I’m mestizaje [mixed]. I’m always sincere with people who know me. To be honest I never had an interest in Chinese culture before. I never wanted to get involved in the Chinese Association. But my mother always wanted to be connected to the community, to have Chinese friends,” he told me. “But what I’m trying to say is that for me I started to get involved with all this and it changed me.” —Junior Chen

Nidhi Prakash, “The forgotten history of Chinese immigrants in this Mexican border town,” Fusion, October 13, 2016. http://fusion.net/the-forgotten-history-of-chinese-immigrants-in-this-mex-1793862816.

When my son first started to black identify at about 5 or 6 years old, an acquaintance of ours asked my husband, in my presence, if he felt like we were “depriving” our son of his “white side.” My husband, a sociology professor and the author of two books on the failure of housing and school desegregation in the United States, said: “If my parents had instilled any Italian culture in me, I might want to share that with my son. But if you’re talking about general whiteness, there’s nothing there to pass down.”

Rebecca Carroll, “Black and Proud. Even if Strangers Can’t Tell.” The New York Times, April 1, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/01/opinion/sunday/black-and-proud-even-if-strangers-cant-tell.html.

People with mixed backgrounds can disrupt notions of purity that undergird race and synthesize vast cultural traditions. People with mixed backgrounds can also internalize and carry out racism.

Daniel José Camacho, “Diversity doesn’t make racism magically disappear,” The Guardian, April 1, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/01/diversity-doesnt-make-racism-magically-disappear.

Just as [Donald] Trump cannot seem to utter “the African Americans” sans “inner city,” [Rachel] Dolezal’s conception of blackness is steeped in a fetishizing of struggle, pain and oppression. Opting into the struggle is yet another place where her whiteness acutely rears its head. The choice to take on a racial mantle at will is a mark of white privilege; so, too, is the choice to take it off when it suits. Ironically, then, in manifesting her blackness she most flagrantly manifests her whiteness.

Baz Dreisinger, “When saying you’re black and being black are two different things,” The Washington Post, March 24, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/when-saying-youre-black-and-being-black-are-two-different-things/2017/03/24/d41a6590-0a4b-11e7-93dc-00f9bdd74ed1_story.html.

“I eventually realized I could never make everyone happy with how I saw myself and my own relation to race,” Johnson continued. “I focused on making myself happy with how I identified. Ultimately, race is a strategy. Race doesn’t exist. It’s something we use to deal with ethnicity and class. We use it to keep one race or class in power.” —Matt Johnson

“Creighton hosts two-day event to commemorate Loving v. Virginia ruling,” Creighton University News Center, March 27, 2017. http://www.creighton.edu/publicrelations/newscenter/news/2017/march2017/march272017/lovingeventnr032717/.

America’s “one-drop rule” historically identified any individual with a single black ancestor as black, and therefore inferior. And while most of us these days know that “racial purity” is as grounded in reality as mermaids and unicorns, the “one-drop” idea continues. Harvard University psychologists found that mixed-race individuals are still perceived as belonging to the racial group of their “lower-status” parent. Imagine the world classifying Barack Obama as a white man as a result of his white heritage? It would never happen.

Claire Hynes, “Rachel Dolezal’s pick-your-race policy works brilliantly – as long as you’re white,” The Guardian, March 27, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/27/rachel-dolezal-race-white.