Mixed Race Studies

In my family, racial passing and the deception it involved was the ultimate taboo and betrayal. It was what the writer Nella Larsen called a hazardous business, “this breaking away from all that was familiar and friendly to take one’s chance in another environment, not entirely strange, perhaps, but certainly not entirely friendly.” The first time someone perceived me as white, it made me wonder if they thought I was passing or trying to pass. But unlike the character Clare in Larsen’s novel Passing, I did not become untethered or unhinged from my identity; I did not feel a desire to cross into whiteness. Instead I grabbed hold of my identity even tighter, as if somehow my blackness could slip away.

W. Ralph Eubanks, “Passing Strange,” The Common, November 4, 2016. http://www.thecommononline.org/features/passing-strange.

“As many of you know, I was adopted. As African-Americans in general, it’s often hard to know where our ancestry, where our roots are. As someone that was adopted, for me, it has been even harder. All I ever really knew was that I was from Milwaukee, but recently, I took an Ancestry DNA test and discovered that my ancestors are from Ghana and Nigeria. It changed everything for me. It helped me know that my history did not begin with being adopted. It did not begin with slavery. It’s even part of why I wear this Afro now. I’m not going to hide who I am.” —Colin Kaepernick

Shaun King, “KING: Colin Kaepernick’s ‘I Know My Rights Camp’ cements his status as a cultural superhero in the black community,” The New York Daily News, October 29, 2016. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/king-kaepernick-camp-cements-status-black-community-article-1.2850326.

“What’s scary is how many people don’t realize that racism is written into your system in America. We had a very simple, blatant system. You could see where the tumor was, and you could cut it out. In America, the tumor masquerades as an organ, and you don’t know which parts to cut out because it’s hard to convince people that there’s a problem in the first place.” —Trevor Noah

Ana Marie Cox, “Trevor Noah Wasn’t Expecting Liberal Hatred,” The New York Times Magazine, November 2, 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/06/magazine/trevor-noah-wasnt-expecting-liberal-hatred.html.

One thing I really stressed throughout the dissertation was focusing not so much on the forms of Blackness that can be accepted but focusing on the forms that can’t be accepted. For me that was a highly gendered and sexualized thing. So for example, the mulata can be accepted because she fits particular sexualized scripts that make her accessible to white men. And so that’s a way in which race intersects with gender – this racially mixed woman who is not white, but is not Black. She becomes aesthetically more beautiful yet still retains that hypersexual script. And so that’s another way of saying that Brazil is more benign because there are many interracial relationships and marriages and also [mixed race] children. Many people thought through interracial mixture, that Brazil could actually whiten itself within a hundred years. And it’s not just about women. Black men are expected to be able to have bodily mastery either in culture, such as music or dance, or athletics, such as capoeira or football, that can be consumed for national cultures and portray Brazil as more benign. As far as desire and attraction goes, Black men kind of take a back seat in the racial democracy discourses of miscegenation to white men. You see far less representations of Black men with white women in popular culture. The emphasis on interracial mixture is how non-Black men have access to Black women’s bodies, often without considering what her own desires are. And these really serve a heteropatriarchal and white supremacist desire to sexually and culturally consume Black bodies in various ways. And what is outside of what serves those interests is relegated to the realm of subalternity and deemed less worthy in Brazil. And so I wanted to emphasize that as the forms of Blackness that can’t be accepted in Brazil and using that as a site of critical inquiry. —Dr. Bryce Henson

Morten Stinus Kristensen, “Disrupting Racialized Knowledges: Blackness in Salvador da Bahia,” Friktion Magasin for Køn, Krop and Kultur, October 2016. http://friktionmagasin.dk/index.php/2016/10/01/disrupting-racialized-knowledges-blackness-in-salvador-da-bahia/

I was already dreading the thought of doing it again, having to face those saccharine smiles trying to understand, Why are you here?

Again, I’m a black woman with a Jewish mother, and I live in the United States of America. When I say that I’m used to being in places where I don’t look like I belong, I mean it. Looking out of place is one of the most consistent parts of my life.

But it’s different in a synagogue. There’s something about feeling like an outsider in the place where you grew up that stings. Like family members who no longer recognize you.

Leah Donnella, “Black, Jewish And Avoiding The Synagogue On Yom Kippur,” Code Switch: Race And Identity, Remixed (National Public Radio), October 12, 2016. http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/10/12/496868502/black-jewish-and-avoiding-the-synagogue-on-yom-kippur

Society still largely operates under the misapprehension that race (largely defined by skin colour) has some basis in biology. There is a perpetuating idea that black-skinned or white-skinned people across the world share a similar set of genes that set the two races apart, even across continents. In short, it’s what Appiah calls “total twaddle”.

“The way that we talk about race today is just incoherent,” he says. “The thing about race is that it is a form of identity that is meant to apply across the world, everybody is supposed to have one – you’re black or you’re white or you’re Asian – and it’s supposed to be significant for you, whoever and wherever you are. But biologically that’s nonsense.” —Kwame Anthony Appiah

Hannah Ellis-Petersen, “Racial identity is a biological nonsense, says Reith lecturer,” The Guardian, October 18, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/oct/18/racial-identity-is-a-biological-nonsense-says-reith-lecturer.

Centering ourselves means using our pain to erase the pain of others. It sends the message that light-skinned suffering—on offshoot of white fragility—is in greater need of addressing than actual anti-Blackness, and the white supremacy that generates it.

This is why “mixed” is an identifier I do not use. It is a term which privileges those of us who happen to know who some of our non-Black ancestors are, and which fails to acknowledge that most Black people on this planet are mixed—if not racially, then ethnically, culturally, geographically. All our Black identities are layered, and the fact of my having a white parent does little to make my experience of Blackness more nuanced than anyone else’s. We can acknowledge the complexities of our varied roots, without imagining that separate categories of Blackness are needed—especially ones designated for those who are read as something other than Black, a position that always comes with privilege.

rad fag (Benjamin Hart), “Black People Have Every Right to Distrust You For Being Light Skinned,” Radical Faggot, October 17, 2016. https://radfag.com/2016/10/17/black-people-have-every-right-to-distrust-you-for-being-light-skinned/

“He’s gonna have a hard time proving he’s a brother.” According to my mother, these are the first words I ever heard in my life. And they were spoken by the pediatrician who delivered me at Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley, California. Dr. Boynton was her name.

“He’s gonna have a hard time proving he’s a brother.” A brother.

This was the [19]70s. And, the doctor who said those words, our pediatrician, couldn’t have realized how right she was. But at the same time, she couldn’t have realized how wrong.

Because while I have spent my life proving in a sense, my black identity—I am of mixed race—I have also succeeded in sense that I have been accepted as an African-American and indeed have become a professor of Africana studies.

Zebulon Miletsky, “Tracing Your “Routes”,”  TEDx Talks: TEDxSBUWomen, Stony Brook University, State University of New York, July 10, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpqUAxh7X74. (00:00:09-00:01:22).

But what most people don’t realize is that the best part of being mixed-race isn’t that you don’t look like any certain race or anything physical. It’s the fusion of the different food styles your parents and community bring to the table.

Susanna Mostaghim, “What Growing Up Mixed-Race Taught Me About Food,” Spoon University, September 13, 2016. http://spoonuniversity.com/lifestyle/what-growing-up-mixed-race-taught-me-about-food/.

“I’m mixed race. I identify as a black woman from Ireland, who is quite pale,” she laughs. “The only heritage I ever had was Irish heritage.” [Lorraine] Maher is aware of her other ancestry, “but it is not important at the moment for me”, she says…

Anthea McTeirnan, “‘Growing up in Ireland I was the only black person’,” The Irish Times, September 30, 2016. http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/growing-up-in-ireland-i-was-the-only-black-person-1.2807492.