Mixed Race Studies

As a kindergartner, [Dorothy] Roberts recalls, she embraced her parents’ philosophy. “I remember being proud that I had parents of different races and that was an important part of my identity. But by the time I was in seventh grade, I identified as black and was much more interested in liberation for black people than in interracial relationships,” she says. “Until extremely recently, I really diminished the fact that my parents were black and white. Most people think of me as black. I don’t identify as biracial or mixed race.”

Melissa Jacobs, “Dangerous Ideas,” The Pennsylvania Gazette, June 20, 2016. http://thepenngazette.com/dangerous-ideas/.

For a long time, I gave white people the benefit of the doubt. I told myself that they didn’t know what they were doing. They were ignorant. If only we explained it to them, helped them relate, then they’d understand. Over the past three years I’ve seen explanation after explanation and still people deny racism. They deny profiling. They deny persecution of Black people. They deny and when they can’t deny, they lie. It was in the past six months that I finally accepted that all of this is 100% deliberate, including the “ignorance.” It is willful. It is a choice.

My denial of this was the only thing that made me feel slightly safe in this world. It was what helped me stay optimistic about the future and aided me in giving white people the benefit of the doubt. I don’t give them the benefit of the doubt anymore. Now I just understand that if they aren’t challenging racism, they support it. I can no longer call my husband’s racism unconscious. It was unchallenged. Now we both live with the challenge of what that means and how he needs to continue to change and grow.

TaLynn Kel, “The Danger Of Unchallenged Racism In Interracial Relationships,” The Establishment, July 18, 2016. http://www.theestablishment.co/2016/07/18/the-danger-of-unchallenged-racism-in-interracial-relationships/.

“As officials split white indenture from black enslavement and established ‘white,’ ‘Negro,’ and ‘Indian’ as distinct legal categories, race was literally manufactured by law… Colonial landowners inherited slavery as an ancient practice, but they invented race as a modern system of power.” —Dorothy Roberts

Melissa Jacobs, “Dangerous Ideas,” The Pennsylvania Gazette, June 20, 2016. http://thepenngazette.com/dangerous-ideas/.

And as a report that came out just this week reminded us, there are a lot of African-Americans—not just me —who have that same kind of story of being pulled over, or frisked, or something. And the data shows that this is not an aberration. It doesn’t mean each case is a problem. It means that when you aggregate all the cases and you look at it, you’ve got to say that there’s some racial bias in the system.

President Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President at the 122nd Annual IACP Conference,” The White House (Office of the Press Secretary), October 27, 2015. https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/10/27/remarks-president-122nd-annual-iacp-conference.

Two-hundred forty years after the first Independence Day, Americans still live by the same color codes established before the nation’s birth. We mark each other by complexion. We assign meaningless stereotypes to people according to skin color. We adore and fear and hate people on the basis of how light or dark they are.

Race, as many scientists will tell you, is not real, but racism is.

Darryl Fears, “Racism twists and distorts everything,” The Washington Post, July 8, 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/racism-twists-and-distorts-everything/2016/07/08/d0f03364-4542-11e6-bc99-7d269f8719b1_story.html.

“I think the media does a great job of wanting to silo who we are as Americans… They’re like, ‘Oh, that’s the immigrant issue, that’s the African-American issue, that’s the Asian issue.’ No, it’s us. And until we understand that we have a vested interest in all these different topics we can’t actually come together with an American agenda.” —Maria Teresa Kumar

Carolina Moreno, “Voto Latino CEO On Why Police Violence Against Latinos Isn’t In The News,” The Huffington Post, July 8, 2016. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/voto-latino-ceo-on-why-police-violence-against-latinos-isnt-in-the-news_us_577f9fa5e4b0c590f7e8df88.

Blackness cannot be taken away from us. Biraciality cannot be taken away from us. They exist as tangibly as our skin, made from Europe and Africa. We are the colonizer and the colonized. We are the oppressor and the oppressed. We bleed for our brothers and sisters. We carry on our backs the weight of what one half of us did to the other. We slip easily into white spheres, taking notes and taking names while nodding our European heads.

Shannon Luders-Manuel, “Can Biracial Activists Speak To Black Issues?,” The Establishment, July 6, 2016. http://www.theestablishment.co/2016/07/06/can-biracial-activists-speak-to-black-issues-jesse-williams-bet/.

Chinyere (Chi-chi) Adah Nwanoku, was born in Fulham, London, in 1956 to Michael Nwanoku and the former Margaret Ivey. Her parents had met at a chance encounter at a dance in London, in 1955 and were inseparable from then on and they got married shortly afterwards. The young couple faced prejudice on account of their Interracial relationship at the time, recalling a period in Britain, where signs on Houses, advertising lodging vacancies, would boldly state, “No blacks, no dogs, no Irish”. The couple humorously recalled thanking God they didn’t have a dog (since they were both black and Irish).

Ed Keazor, “Chi-chi Nwanoku: A classical legacy and an African heritage,” Music Africa Magazine, June 16, 2016. http://musicinafrica.net/chi-chi-nwanoku-classical-legacy-and-african-heritage.

“My identity is not fixed,” she [Nawal El Saadawi] says. “It is not an iron jacket but it is changing and is multiple and multiplying. I have mixed blood from Africa, Asia and Europe till Iceland; from Ancient Egyptian polytheism to Hindu philosophy to monotheistic religions. All people are mixed blood, the more mixed you are the better.”

Zahrah Nesbitt-Ahmed, “Nawal El Saadawi: “All people are mixed blood, the more mixed you are the better”,” African Arguments, June 24, 2016. http://africanarguments.org/2016/06/24/nawal-el-saadawi-all-people-are-mixed-blood-more-mixed-better/.

Some critics complain that the film suffers from a white savior narrative because [Matthew] McConaughey plays a white protagonist who aids former slaves. But [Newton] Knight was an actual historical figure who aided African-Americans, and the film is based on a well-researched book by historian Victoria Bynum.

Adam Domby, “‘Free State of Jones’ depicts realities of Reconstruction,” The Post and Courier, July 3, 2016. http://www.postandcourier.com/20160703/160709926/free-state-of-jones-depicts-realities-of-reconstruction.