Mixed Race Studies

While my mixed heritage may have created a grey area surrounding my self-identification, keeping me with a foot on both sides of the fence, I have come to embrace that. To say who I am, to share where I’m from, to voice my pride in being a strong, confident mixed-race woman. That when asked to choose my ethnicity in a questionnaire as in my seventh grade class, or these days to check ‘Other’, I simply say: ‘Sorry, world, this is not Lost and I am not one of The Others. I am enough exactly as I am.’

Meghan Markle, “I’m More Than An ‘Other’,” Elle UK, August 17, 2015. http://www.elleuk.com/now-trending/more-than-an-other.

Having your core ‘Irishness’ questioned raises issues when attempting to get to grips with your own sense of self.

As a teenager, I referred to myself as white, perhaps in an attempt to fit in with my peers.

Today I define myself as half-white, half-Asian, but no less Irish.

Dean Van Nguyen, “Half-white, half-Asian, but no less Irish,” The Irish Examiner, August 15, 2015. http://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle/features/half-white-half-asian-but-no-less-irish-348324.html.

Most of the time I see myself as mixed, but when I see black men and women brutalized or killed for breathing while black, I’m black, and proudly, viscerally so.

Shannon Luders-Manuel, “What it Means to be Mixed Race During the Fight for Black Lives,” For Harriet, August 12, 2015.
http://www.forharriet.com/2015/08/what-it-means-to-be-mixed-race-during.html.

I am where I am today only because men and women like Rosanell Eaton refused to accept anything less than a full measure of equality. Their efforts made our country a better place. It is now up to us to continue those efforts. Congress must restore the Voting Rights Act. Our state leaders and legislatures must make it easier — not harder — for more Americans to have their voices heard. Above all, we must exercise our right as citizens to vote, for the truth is that too often we disenfranchise ourselves.

President Barack Obama, “President Obama’s Letter to the Editor,” The New York Times Magazine, August 12, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/magazine/president-obamas-letter-to-the-editor.html.

“In Brazil we do talk about race but not in an honest way – about white privilege, concentration of power, about the importance of diversity – no, we talk about how we’re all Brazilian, we’re all mixed.” —Paulo Rogerio

Stephanie Nolen, “Three personal stories that show Brazil is not completely beyond racism,” The Globe and Mail, July 31, 2015. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/three-personal-stories-that-show-brazil-is-not-completely-beyond-racism/article25761242/.

When she fills out the census, Ms. de Lucena ticks the box for “negra.” Her husband, Joacinei Araújo de Lucena, 48, has a black parent and a white one, just like she does, but identifies himself as “pardo,” or brown. He insists that he, Ms. de Lucena and their two children are mixed – not one, not the other – and that mixed is a race of its own. Ms. de Lucena doesn’t buy it. “Não passou por branco é preto,” she often says, often tells their teenagers: If you’re not white, you’re black.

Stephanie Nolen, “Brazil’s colour bind,” The Globe and Mail, July 31, 2015. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/brazils-colour-bind/article25779474/.

“A lot of people when they look at me and when I reveal to them that I’m half Korean, they say that they don’t see it at all and think that I’m black. I get a lot of people that say that and they try to impose their own classification of my identity and I embrace both sides.” —Moogega (무지개) Cooper

David Lee Sanders, “Interview with Moogega Cooper,” HalfKorean.com: An online community for mixed-race Koreans, April 10, 2013. http://www.halfkorean.com/?page_id=8947.

Scholars also analyze a multiracial movement that emerged around mixed-race identity in the 1990s. Rainier Spencer (2006, 2011) complicates previous scholars’ and activists’ claim that the emergence of multiraciality in the 1990s uncovered a new racial order. As opposed to challenging the racialized structure in the United States, Spencer argues the actions of the American multiracial movement protected Whiteness and was conservative—rather than transformative—of the existing U.S. racial order. Daniel and Castañeda-Liles (2006) similarly posit that the neoconservative rearticulation of racial classification to denote egalitarian ideals of individual choice influenced conservative politicians and policymakers’ push to add multiraciality to formalized methods of racial categorization. Melissa Nobles (2000) extends this pertinent analysis by centering on the discursive context of the multiracial movement. According to Nobles, multiracial public recognition in the midst of ongoing American cultural wars publicly legitimated multiracial visibility and helped disseminate discourse on multiraciality and create an imagined politicized community. Indeed, the emergence of multiracialism in the 1990s also influenced public recognition of multiraciality through increased marketing and commercialization of mixed-race identity and interracial families (DaCosta 2007).

Celeste Vaughan Curington, “Rethinking Multiracial Formation in the United States: Toward an Intersectional Approach,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Volume 2, Number 1 (January 2016), 3. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2332649215591864.

Q. What have you learned about race while working on this documentary?

A. That the conversation has just started. And a lot of the time it’s framed as black and white. Well, where do Latinos and Asians fit in that conversation? Where do biracial people fit into that conversation? Where do multiracial people fit into that conversation? Where do the Rachel Dolezals of the world, of this country, fit into that conversation?

Jonathan Wolfe, “Jose Antonio Vargas on Donald Trump, Rachel Dolezal and His MTV Documentary, ‘White People’,” The New York Times, July 22, 2015. http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/22/jose-antonio-vargas-white-people-interview.

Often when mixed-race identities are discussed today, they are conflated with this idea of our “post-racial future.” A future where race is no longer an issue and everyone looks like Halle Berry. The kinds of people who seem to be the most vocal about mixed-race are the people who claim that, “Everyone is a bit mixed-race” or “I don’t see race, we are beyond it” etc. There is this belief that Love and its mixed-race children will help break down the barriers that have been so doggedly safe-guarded for the past several hundred years. Parents of mixed-race children often believe this too, I’ve heard it coming from their mouths many times.

Sophie Steains, “Not Your Post-Racial Future: Why Interracial Families Need to Talk About Race,” ARMED, May 17, 2015. http://armedpublishing.tumblr.com/post/119170717528/not-your-post-racial-future-why-interracial.