Mixed Race Studies

Both black and white Brazilians have long considered “whiteness” something that can be striven towards. In 1912 João Baptista de Lacerda, a medic and advocate of “whitening” Brazil by encouraging European immigration, predicted that by 2012 the country would be 80% white, 3% mixed and 17% Amerindian; there would be no blacks. As Luciana Alves, who has researched race at the University of São Paulo, explains, an individual could “whiten his soul” by working hard or getting rich. Tomás Santa Rosa, a successful mid-20th-century painter, consoled a dark-skinned peer griping about discrimination, saying that he too “used to be black”.

“Slavery’s legacies,” The Economist, September 10, 2016. http://www.economist.com/news/international/21706510-american-thinking-about-race-starting-influence-brazil-country-whose-population.

To begin to undo the work of racecraft is to insist on the subjective—on one’s own individuality, and that of all others. After all, racism’s most insidious wounds are not of policy, economics, or even life and limb, though those do of course hurt, but of the psyche. The classifications that we claim to derive from nature and then ascribe to people and groups are confining to any human spirit: We are all injured by racism. So in that way, calling for the end of white supremacy necessitates calling for the end of whiteness itself, which, thankfully, might be well understood nowadays. In the fullness of time, we may also come to understand, in a life-giving manner, that the end of whiteness must also mean the end of blackness, brownness, and any other colorness.

Matthew McKnight, “Black as We Wanna Be,” The Nation, September 15, 2016. https://www.thenation.com/article/black-as-we-wanna-be/.

Passing is both a social and political act: a form of revolt against slave owners and slavery, outlawed and feared by segregationists and white supremacists, yielding a breath of freedom and yet systemically injurious to those still oppressed. Because of this latter fact, it’s hard for me to work through how to perceive it morally, how to weigh all of its effects. As Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy writes in his 2001 essay, “Racial Passing,” passing, when a choice, “requires that a person be self-consciously engaged in concealment.” But it is not just a concealment of the self—my grandmother erasing who she may have been at one time, keeping her skin powdered. It’s a concealment of history—a concealment and erasure of others: we have no photographs of my grandmother’s parents, and none of their parents either—not even a photo of her brother.

Ashlie Kauffman, “Our Secret Family Legacy,” The Rumpus, August 31, 2016. http://therumpus.net/2016/08/our-secret-family-legacy/.

Wrestling with the labels that outsiders put upon him fuelled his interest in style, in clothes, and in labels that come from Paris and Milan. “My interest in fashion probably would have developed anyway,” he continues. “But all this stuff made me ask myself in a really focused way: ‘What do I represent?’ And you know what? My racial heritage is something I want people to be well aware of. I do want to be a representative of the African community, and I want to hold myself and dress myself in a way that reflects that. I want black kids to see me and think: ‘OK, he’s carrying himself as a black man, and that’s how a black man should carry himself.’”—Colin Kaepernick

Andrew Corsello, “Mr Colin Kaepernick: The Look,” Mr Porter, Journal, October 7, 2015. https://www.mrporter.com/journal/the-look/mr-colin-kaepernick/535.

And yet, it is shockingly easy for me to locate the information. Instead of showing us the microfiche records that I thought we’d have to comb through, the librarian says it’s easier if we just access their subscription to Ancestry.com, and so leads us past the exhibits to the room with the large wooden desks and logs us in on one of the computer stations. And there, we see that in 1940—the first and most recent census in the list—before my mother was born and when my grandmother was a widow by her first husband, my grandmother and her first five children, ages 13, 10, 8, 6, and 1, are all classified as “C” for “colored.” When we click on the 1930 census, she and her first two children are designated as “Neg”: “negro.”

Ashlie Kauffman, “Our Secret Family Legacy,” The Rumpus, August 31, 2016. http://therumpus.net/2016/08/our-secret-family-legacy/.

“…interracial relationships and interracial marriages are anything but color-blind. Yes, there is love, but that love is tinged and affected by the history of colonialism, skin color hierarchy, White racial privilege, unequal economic opportunity and by racist/sexist imageries that define the politics of sexual desire and acceptability.” —Larry Hajime Shinagawa

Karen Ye, “Love Sees No Color? Chinese American Intermarriage,” AsAmNews, July 10, 2014. http://www.asamnews.com/2014/07/10/love-sees-no-color-chinese-american-intermarriage/.

There is nothing unusual in this. There is no tension, no hypocrisy, no contradiction, between [Colin] Kaepernick being a black person of unusual status, fame, and financial success and his demand that the United States treat black people equally. African Americans are a hybrid people, he is nowhere near the first black man of mixed ancestry to protest against racism. Du Bois had white ancestors, Frederick Douglass believed that his father was the white man who owned his body, Malcolm X, with his red hair and light skin, was asked by a student why he identified as black upon his visit to Ghana. There is also the current president of the United States.

Adam Serwer, “Colin Kaepernick’s True Sin,” The Atlantic, August 30, 2016. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/kaepernicks-true-sin/498122/.

Like [Shikha] Dalmia, I self-identify as belonging to more than one culture. I have fought for at least a decade with newspapers about how my national and ethnic origins should be described. I reject the hyphen (the term “hyphenated identity” was first struck by Horace Kallen in his 1915 essay “Democracy Versus the Melting Pot”), which looks far too much like a minus sign to me: black minus British, Irish minus American. Always, I ask to be described as British and Sierra Leonean. I did this after many years of being described in various ways: British-born Sierra Leonean, British of Sierra Leonean origin, or—erasing my Scots mother from the picture altogether—simply as Sierra Leonean. (Notably, never have I been described by British papers as Scottish.) But I am both. I belong to both worlds; not just culturally but physically, I move between them. I have family in both, own property in both, have paid taxes in both. I now live in the United States, where I also pay taxes. As a so-called transnational, I belong to a growing class of people.

Aminatta Forna, “Your Nationalism Can’t Contain Me,” The Nation, August 25, 2015. https://www.thenation.com/article/your-nationalism-cant-contain-me.

“Now, I have a black son in Baltimore,” the white police detective remembered thinking as he cradled his baby boy.

Rachel L. Swarns, “‘I Have a Black Son in Baltimore’: Anxious New Parents and an Era of Unease,” The New York Times, August 23, 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/24/us/i-have-a-black-son-in-baltimore-anxious-new-parents-and-an-era-of-unease.html.

Despite the fact that both Rachel [Dolezal] and Vanessa [Beecroft] seem to have found their “true” identities, I am still searching for where “multicultural” fits within the landscape that is race in America. When I was younger, I had moments of weakness where I allowed racist, ignorant, hurtful behavior to occur around me without repercussion. Speaking out, would mean having to explain myself, and then be questioned and teased for “not really being” who I say I am. I struggle with a permanent guilt for the way my appearance allows me to move through the world so much more easily than my family members, and I am grateful for the constant reminder. As much as I am connected to and proud of my Black and Brazilian heritage, an intense awareness of how I am perceived by everyone around me is part of who I am. It has taken 29 years to get here with far more work to be done. And when these white women proclaim themselves to be spiritually Black, it feels like they’re pouring multiple varieties of artisanal salt (available at the aforementioned, gentrified storefronts) on the wound.

Natasha Diaz, “White People, Stop Saying You’re ‘Black On The Inside’,” The Establishment, August 15, 2016. http://www.theestablishment.co/2016/08/15/white-people-stop-saying-youre-black-on-the-inside/.