Mixed Race Studies

It was against this backdrop that the three races met and mingled along the western shore of Narragansett Bay. Long before the end of the eighteenth century, miscegenation had become a problem for New England settlers, who, if they had no clear idea of the nature of Africans, had even less understanding of the nature of the growing number of mulattos. Unlike blacks, who might be of African, Caribbean, or American birth, mulattos were usually born in the New World and were, therefore, not only racially distinct from Africans and Europeans but culturally distinct as well. The New England colonies recognized them as a separate group. Massachusetts made the first distinction between blacks and mulattos in 1693, Connecticut did so in 1704, and Rhode Island and New Hampshire followed in 1714. In addition to sexual relations between blacks and whites, Native Americans and blacks also came together and produced children. Greene believes the lowly status assigned both groups in white dominated New England served to erase any distinction between them, and, as they were common victims of oppression, they naturally drew together. In any event, along the eastern seaboard there was a mixing of Native Americans, whites, and blacks during the colonial era.

Rhett S. Jones, “Miscegenation and Acculturation in the Narragansett Country of Rhode Island, 1710-1790,” Trotter Review, Volume 3, Issue 1 (1989), 10. http://scholarworks.umb.edu/trotter_review/vol3/iss1/4/.

Mulattoes like Sally Hemings have been both weaponized and victimized in a complicated racial structure designed to protect white supremacy while satisfying the sexual fetishes of white, slave-owning rapists. Light skinned slaves were often given better positions on plantations, treated better. Sometimes they became enforcers over other, darker people. Sometimes they were freed upon the death of their masters/fathers. But, the success of the Haitian Revolution was predicated in part on the ability of mulattoes, quadroons and octaroons to overlook these light skinned privileges and see the white supremacy behind them so they could join in arms with darker Black people to throw off their French masters and become the first free, European-style democracy in the western hemisphere. Around the same time, laws defining whiteness and the rights of white people in the United States were being more clearly and cleverly delineated, to prevent indentured Irish from joining with Black slaves in a similar fashion.

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, “Hold Fast to Blackness,” Medium, July 29, 2015. https://medium.com/@chanda/hold-fast-to-blackness-3e4fa529917d.

The Slave Trail of Tears is the great missing migration—a thousand-mile-long river of people, all of them black, reaching from Virginia to Louisiana. During the 50 years before the Civil War, about a million enslaved people moved from the Upper South—Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky—to the Deep South—Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama. They were made to go, deported, you could say, having been sold.

This forced resettlement was 20 times larger than Andrew Jackson’s “Indian removal” campaigns of the 1830s, which gave rise to the original Trail of Tears as it drove tribes of Native Americans out of Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama. It was bigger than the immigration of Jews into the United States during the 19th century, when some 500,000 arrived from Russia and Eastern Europe. It was bigger than the wagon-train migration to the West, beloved of American lore. This movement lasted longer and grabbed up more people than any other migration in North America before 1900.

Edward Ball, “Retracing Slavery’s Trail of Tears,” Smithsonian Magazine, November 2015. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/slavery-trail-of-tears-180956968.

“I’ve never strayed away from being black. I’m biracial but something that my mom constantly said to me growing up in southern California was ‘Yes, you are Italian, you are German, and you are black, but you are going to be viewed by the world as a black woman’.” —Misty Copeland

Maya Chung, “New Film Shows Misty Copeland’s Journey as a Black Ballerina,” NBC News, September 30, 2015. http://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/new-film-shows-misty-copelands-journey-black-ballerina-n434951.

The “mixed race” community—powered to a significant (embarrassing?) extent by white mothers of kids who are not white—seeks a unique “mixed” identity, and Obama could be a poster child. But I don’t think we need poster children for mixed identity: we need a world in which a Black man can be president, no matter who his mother is. In such a world, “mixed” wouldn’t matter politically—we could still have our cultural identities, as many as we want, actually, us Americans with our occasional Cherokee grandmother, French great grandfather, Italian immigrant great, great grandmother, and maybe a couple of Jews and the occasional Black ancestor. Celebrating ethnicity can be fun. But race in America is not about fun or celebration: it’s about power. In the world we’ve got, it’s the Black ancestor that sets the identity, because that’s still the racial fault line in America.

Barbara Katz Rothman, “Obama’s Mixed Heritage: A Mother’s Perspective,” Beacon Broadside, February 14, 2008. http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2008/02/obamas-mixed-he.html.

“Being a writer was a counter-force to people saying I was a half-caste, a Paki, a mongrel. It was a real thing in the world, an identity. I needed to call myself a writer back then because they were calling me a fucking Paki… We are all mixed-race now – me, Obama, Tiger Woods, Lewis Hamilton.” —Hanif Kureishi

James Kidd, “Hanif Kureishi: ‘We’re all mixed-race now,” The Independent, October 23, 2011. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/hanif-kureishi-were-all-mixed-race-now-1909507.html.

Before Obama ran for president, when we tended to talk about racial identity, we did so as the defense of a settlement. Black was understood to be black, nontransferably. Negro intellectuals — Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray and James Baldwin, for starters — debated strategies for equality and tolerance. Some of them asserted that to be black was also to be American, even if America begged to differ. For most of those many decades, blackness stood in opposition to whiteness, which folded its arms and said that was black people’s problem. But Obama became everybody’s problem. He was black. He was white. He was hope. He was apocalypse. And he brought a lot of anxiety into weird relief. We had never really had a white president until we had a black one.

Wesley Morris, “The Year We Obsessed Over Identity,” The New York Times, October 6, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/magazine/the-year-we-obsessed-over-identity.html.

We also call multiracial and biracial community members to interrogate the ways in which we are complicit in the erasure of Native and Indigenous people. Moreover, multiracial, biracial and Indigenous identities are not separate—there are multi- and biracial people who hold Indigenous identity. We, as a community that experiences multiple histories of racism and colonization while often being heralded as a signal of the end of racism, must evaluate, address, and decolonize our own actions.

Multiracial and Biracial Students at Brown, “A Statement from a Collective of Multiracial and Biracial Students,” bluestockings magazine, October 10, 2015. http://bluestockingsmag.com/2015/10/12/a-statement-from-a-collective-of-multiracial-and-biracial-students/.

The story of John Roland Redd a.k.a. Korla Pandit is unlike any I’ve encountered in popular culture. He presented an abstracted yet alluring version of India without even a semblance of authenticity. Korla represented the Far East as viewed through the eyes of the West. That speech comparing rubies to wisdom, for instance, comes not from anything in the Hindu religion but is a paraphrase of Proverbs 8:11 from the Old Testament. Even more obviously, the electric organ is not remotely Indian in nature. From what I can determine, the instrument was largely developed and popularized in the United States. However, the eerie and unearthly tones Pandit/Redd was able to conjure from it seemed to transport listeners to an exotic world of mystery, some indefinable place far away. That was the real magic behind what he did.

Joe Blevins, “The Greatest Pretender: Korla Pandit, music’s most magnificent fraud,” Dead 2 Rights: A Folksy Down-Home Blog, May 19, 2013. http://d2rights.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-greatest-pretender-korla-pandit.html.

But the longer I spent at that university, the more of them I ran into. People who confused having an “interest” in Indigenous culture with “going full redface.” We organized a student pow-wow and some of the attendees had clearly studied at the Grey Owl School of Indian fakery. They showed up with feathers in their hair and introduced themselves with names like, “Running Wolf.” I remember that name very clearly because it belonged to a man well over three hundred pounds and I remember cattily whispering that a better name would have been: “Sedentary Wolf.”

Dawn Dumont, “That’s What She Said: Red-face,” Eagle Feather News, August 2, 2005. http://eaglefeathernews.com/opinion/index.php?detail=1458.