Mixed Race Studies

Race takes on a particular relevance in the United States, given our history and also the political climate now. In science, we see the way race has become this enduring variable that explains things like oppression. It’s very powerful and it resonates, so there’s even more responsibility to use it carefully and to really uncouple and deconstruct what it’s a proxy for. While most people would argue that we need to break down what race is standing in for in those studies, that research doesn’t actually happen. So what we’re left with is race as this very crude proxy for difference that has all the power to explain issues that relate very directly to social justice. We need to really move beyond race. —Sandra Soo-Jin Lee

Lynette Chiu, “Dr. Sandra Soo-Jin Lee: Toward a More Precise Genetics,” Guernica / a magazine of global arts & politics, February 27, 2017. https://www.guernicamag.com/dr-sandra-soo-jin-lee-toward-a-more-precise-genetics/.

Being biracial or multiracial doesn’t stop white parents from teaching their kids internalized racism and colorism. Not all interracial relationships begin with a white partner who has a deep understanding of systemic racism, white privilege and colorism. Undoing privilege and anti-blackness is a lifelong endeavor.

Lara Witt, “Stop Weaponzing Biracial Children,” Wear Your Voice: Intersectional Feminist Media, March 16, 2017. http://wearyourvoicemag.com/identities/race/stop-weaponzing-biracial-children.

The idea that white identity is under attack assumes that whiteness is something fixed, something immutable. But whiteness has always been a fluid category. Whiteness isn’t a biological fact, rather it is a sort of members-only club that has rewritten its entry requirements over the years.

Arwa Mahdawi, “I’m a bit brown. But in America I’m white. Not for much longer,” The Guardian, March 21, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/21/us-census-whiteness-race-colour-middle-east-north-africa-america.

Specifically, many of the problems arose out of my claims of Irishness itself. That was what really seemed to offend people’s sensibilities. Irishness is synonymous with whiteness, it seemed. Whiteness is “pure” and doesn’t extend to brown girls, even those who can trace their Irish ancestry back to the 10th century. How frequently I heard that I “wasn’t really Irish”. But I am Irish. In addition to being born there, my mother, her parents before her, and theirs before them, for generations and generations, are all Irish.

Emma Dabiri, “I’m Irish but I’m not white. Why is that still a problem as we celebrate the Easter Rising?,” The Guardian, March 29, 2016. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/29/irish-white-easter-rising-ireland-racism.

“I’ve seen some of the interviews NASA has done with its modern figures’—women of color at NASA who are scientists, mathematicians and engineers, and they make me really happy,” [Heather] Graham says, “because I want the message to get out that Katherine Johnson’s achievements aren’t history but rather the beginning of a movement of women in space science! Katherine Johnson is not the first black woman to accomplish some of the things she did but the first woman, period. She’s such an all purpose hero!”

Linda Billings, “Before “Hidden Figures,” There Was a Rock Opera About NASA’s Human Computers,” Air & Space Magazine, February 3, 2017. http://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/hidden-figures-there-was-rock-opera-about-nasas-human-computers-180961980/.

I enjoy a lot of privileges. I’m middle class and I go to a good school. On top of that Asian Americans just seem to fare better in terms of bias and racism — at least these days.

I think it’s important to acknowledge that privilege exists. We don’t have to become defensive, and we don’t have to feel guilty for it, but we do have to know when it’s there.

Sierra Fang-Horvath, “Mixed Race Privilege?” KQED Radio, March 9, 2017. https://ww2.kqed.org/perspectives/2017/03/08/mixed-race-privilege/.

Let’s not ask if European Jews are white. The more urgent question is: what price have they paid in colluding with whiteness? The price of heritage, of language, and of culture? Or the price of dignity, of accountability, of moral authority? Far from giving white Jews a free pass on confronting their own white privilege, I hope that answering this question might just lead more of our Jewish communities towards truly joining the multi-racial, multi-faith fight against white supremacy.

Mark Tseng-Putterman, “More than a Feeling: Jews and Whiteness in Trump’s America,” Unruly: A racial justice blog by the Jews of Color Caucus organized in partnership with Jewish Voice for Peace, February 23, 2017. http://jocsm.org/more-than-a-feeling-jews-and-whiteness-in-trumps-america/.

In contrast to the Loving litigators’ approach, the ideology that race is important to genetics but not to society is spreading in the United States today. The current resurgence of genetic definitions of race at a time when a majority of Supreme Court justices have embraced a colorblind approach that ignores white supremacy has the potential to intensify racial inequality. The coincidence of these two flawed ideologies—that human beings are naturally divided into genetically distinct races and that racism has ceased significantly to affect society—reinforces a biological explanation for persistent racial inequities. Finding racial differences at the molecular level seems to make sense of the paradox of intensifying racial gaps in health, economic status, and incarceration since the civil rights movement.

Dorothy E. Roberts, “Loving v. Virginia as a Civil Rights Decision,” New York Law School Law Review, Volume 59, Number 1 (2014/2015), 208. http://www.nylslawreview.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/2015/02/Volume-59-1.Roberts.pdf.

Ultimately, the narrative that imagines mixed-race people as a panacea for racism is a flawed one that reinforces ideas around the very existence of race. Instead, we might want to refocus our conversation around how the collective fiction of race is weaponized to limit access to equality and justice for some groups and not others, then maybe we’re onto something.

Alexandros Orphanides, “Why Mixed-Race Americans Will Not Save The Country,” Code Switch: Race and Identity, Remixed, National Public Radio, March 8, 2017. http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/03/08/519010491/why-mixed-race-americans-will-not-save-the-country.

Like many mixed race kids I felt that I didn’t belong anywhere, but I wasn’t really an outsider: I was full of the invisible tensions of inside, hyper-aware of the contradictions and tensions my friends and peers ignored or never saw in the first place. I couldn’t put a name to any of it then, it was just this intuitive sense of the anger and hatred that pulse through modern life, how America in all of its contradictions hates itself and how that hatred is everywhere and nowhere to see, layered over with sanctioned forms of like and dislike, but never love, that spiritual love Mimi was drawing always closer to — never love because love is too close to hate for America to allow it into daylight.

Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis, “Dispatch from the Floor of the Model Minority Factory,” The Offing, September 8, 2015. https://theoffingmag.com/essay/dispatch-from-the-floor-of-the-model-minority-factory/.