Mixed Race Studies

In school, there were rules. You stuck with the kids from your neighborhood. In the instances when we were forced to interact with Eastie kids, especially the black kids, it was confusing for everybody—I know I’m supposed to hate you but I have to pick you for my kickball team. So then we would be friends for that brief period of time, but it was a distant, temporary friendship. I was aware that I couldn’t get too close to them. I figured if I were friends with a black kid, it would confirm to everyone that I was really black. I was managing an already teetering identity in Southie, and I couldn’t afford it. Besides, they didn’t want to be friends with me either. They saw me as a race traitor, a white wannabe, a defector.

Any new kid I met—black, white, or ­whatever—had just one question for me: “What are you?” Always. I learned quickly that my mother’s answer didn’t work. “I’m Irish” was met with skepticism, laughter, or confusion: “And what else?” Even adults would give me a fake smile, and I knew they didn’t believe me. Black kids would say, “Oh, you think you’re white, bitch?” Spanish kids just spoke Spanish to me—“¿Cómo se llama?”—and when I stood there in silence, they called me “puta,” sucked their teeth, and walked away.

Jennifer J. Roberts, “One of Us,” Boston Magazine, November 2014. http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/article/2014/10/28/jennifer-roberts-irish-black-race-southie/.

A growing body of evidence from anecdotes, historians, and recent studies suggests that this [racial and ethnic identities are fixed and exogenous] is not always true. In fact, there may be reason to believe that race is, to some extent, a choice made by an individual because of social-economic and political factors. For example, historians have long noted that Americans with African ancestry often chose to ‘pass’ for white to obtain better economic and political opportunities (e.g. O’Toole 2003 and Sharfstein 2011). Mill and Stein (2012) find that amongst mixed-race siblings, those that identify as white later in life earn significantly higher wages. Recent studies have also documented that individuals have responded to political-economic incentives and changed castes in India (Cassan 2013), manipulated their racial appearance for higher wages in Brazil (Cornwell et al. 2014), or have strategically chosen the official ethnicity of mixed children in China (Jia and Persson 2013). More generally, studies of identity, such as the theoretical work of Akerlof and Kranton (2000), argue that “choice of identity may be the most important ‘economic’ decision people make. Individuals may – more or less consciously – choose who they want to be … Previous economic analyses of, for example, poverty, labor supply, and schooling have not considered these possibilities”.

Emily Nix and Nancy Qian, “Is race a choice?” VOX: CEPR’s Policy Portal, January 26, 2015. http://www.voxeu.org/article/race-choice.

All mixed people are entitled to self-identify how they please. But, for some, it is very simple: you are mixed, but you are Black – not in a reductive sense, but in a reflection of a structural reality. In my case, whilst I recognise that I am mixed (my father is white), I have always been brought up with an awareness that I live in a structurally racist society and therefore am engaged with on the spectrum of blackness. Accordingly, I politically align myself to Blackness. I am Black.

Sekai Makoni, “I Am Mixed And I Am Whole,” Ain’t I A Woman Collective, October 19, 2015. http://www.aintiawomancollective.com/i-am-mixed-and-i-am-whole/.

Even though my skin is fair, not once have I considered what it would be like to somehow transform myself into “being white.” I wouldn’t even know where to begin. By the time I was in the seventh grade, I exclusively sat at the “black lunch table,” not as a guest, but as a resident. I’ve been sitting there ever since.

Shaun King, “Shaun King: I’ve been called the N-word since I was 14, but now those same people want me to be white,” The New York Daily News, November 3, 2015. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/king-people-call-n-word-white-article-1.2421243.

“Today,” [Larry] Sabato said, “a mixed-race family is a political plus. Without saying a word, you project an image of progress and modernity.”

Michael Paul Williams, “Williams: A positive among the attack ads in the Gecker-Sturtevant race,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, November 2, 2015. http://www.richmond.com/news/local/michael-paul-williams/article_6b52ef50-c465-5bc0-a03f-fa1789661a0c.html.

In contrast to the courts that openly struggle with fluid racial identities,  others deal with the problem by merely assigning a category to a fluid identity individual in order to make the prima facie case analysis a simpler proposition. In cases out of Virginia, Texas, and Minnesota, courts were presented with claims brought by a mixed race plaintiff but gave scant if any attention to this complex identity, preferring to simply assign the plaintiff a category that allowed for easy application of the McDonnell Douglas protected class paradigm. In these cases, the courts typically noted that the plaintiffs identified themselves as “multiracial,” or “biracial,” and then proceeded to describe them simply as “black” or “African American” for the remainder of the opinion. This was the case even where the alleged discrimination consisted of harassing statements that seemed to have been directed specifically at the plaintiff’s mixed race status.

Leora F. Eisenstadt, “Fluid Identity Discrimination,” American Business Law Journal, Volume 52, Issue 4, Winter 2015, 817. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ablj.12056.

The varied tragedy of human life furnishes few more pathetic spectacles than that of the educated mulatto who is honestly seeking the welfare of a race with which a baleful commingling of blood has inexorably identified him, — who is striving to uplift to his own level a people between whose ideals and ambitions and capabilities and his own a great gulf has been fixed by nature’s laws. Frequently inheriting from the superior race talents and aspirations the full play of which is denied him by his kinship to the inferior, — through no fault of his own he is doomed to be an anachronism in American political and social life.

Alfred Holt Stone, “The Mulatto Factor in the Race Problem,” The Atlantic Monthly, May 1903, 662.

But the most wrenching reactions to Obama centered on how he did or did not respond to the numerous highly visible acts of violence and injustice against African-Americans during his tenure. Charles Coleman Jr., a civil-rights attorney in New York, talked about two critical moments in Obama’s presidency. “So, George Zimmerman is acquitted,” he says about the man who killed Trayvon Martin. “There is a significant faction of the country that’s at a loss: How do we have a dialogue on this? And the president delivers an incredible speech.” Extemporaneously, from the looks of it. He said Trayvon could have been him 35 years ago. “It represented the pinnacle of where he’s been on race. It was an example of the president speaking to black America as a black American, from within our community. He made us feel like he really does get it.”

Jennifer Senior, “The Paradox of the First Black President,” New York Magazine, October 7, 2015. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/10/paradox-of-the-first-black-president.html.

To be white is not about your skin color but about your ready socialization into a privileged group membership that defines itself against blackness, a legacy emerging from an understanding of black bodies as fuel, the needed refuse by which a capitalist, slave labor economy can sustain itself. As long as blackness is its opposite point, whiteness is willing to cross all sorts of awkward ethnic lines in strange, irrational ways in order to ensure its survival.

Ryan Kenjii Kuramitsu, “what we talk about when we talk about whiteness,” A Real Rattlesnake Meets His Maker, October 22, 2015. http://arealrattlesnake.com/2015/10/22/what-is-whiteness/.

“I consider myself black. I consider myself biracial too. But for me—I’m not trying to define it for other people—because as you just said, other people feel differently. But, I look at being biracial as a category of being black.” —Lacey Schwartz

Ebro in the Morning, “Movie “Little White Lie” Creator Lacey Schwartz Talks Not Knowing She Was Black [VIDEO],” HOT 97, WQHT 97.1 FM New York, New York, November 26, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWHrA_-5Fp8. (00:07:02-00:08:10).