Mixed Race Studies

Nuns told her that “no man will ever want you, because you’re black”; a career counsellor said she should “consider taking man friends” to support herself. “I was told I wouldn’t amount to anything and should consider prostitution,” [Rosemary] Adaser says.

Her black background was vilified and even denied, she says, and she was constantly told that she would never be wanted in Irish society. “I was not allowed any identity at all. That is very, very damaging for the soul.”

Kitty Holland, “Mixed Race Irish: ‘We were the dust to be swept away’,” The Irish Times, July 18, 2015. http://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/mixed-race-irish-we-were-the-dust-to-be-swept-away-1.2287196.

This identity and social experience is part of what [Rachel] Dolezal is denounced for having inauthentically appropriated. Unfortunately, it’s a darn sight messier and more complicated than that. For after all, blackness, responding to the dominant society’s definition and control of boundaries was in part defined by its opposition to the cultural construct of whiteness, and vice versa, whiteness was created in opposition and on the basis of the privileges generated by dividing our country into dominant and subordinate races.

Richard Kaplan, “Dolezal and the Defense of the Community,” Public Seminar, July 9, 2015. http://www.publicseminar.org/2015/07/dolezal-and-the-defense-of-the-community.

“There is an important difference between identity and identification, which Karen and I have talked about in our book Racecraft. Rachel Dolezal was able to define her identity well enough to become what she said she was in her environment, in Spokane. And that’s something available to her partly because of the way that we as a society define who is black and who is not.

Anybody can be black — black is defined as any known or visible ancestry — or “one drop of blood.” So it’s really not based on what you look like, even if you go to the trouble of tanning and wearing a wig and whatnot.

Most Afro Americans don’t have any control over identification. Their identity, how they define themselves, how they perceive themselves, can be overruled by that identification. That’s what happens when we see Afro-American police officers killed by their comrades by mistake. Their identity as a police officer is overruled instantly and fatally because the identification takes precedence.

That’s what happens to people who are visibly Afro American or who are identified that way in our racist society, if not always in so dramatic and terminal a way. Mistaken identification can put an end to one’s identity by terminating the human being it’s attached to.” —Barbara J. Fields

Jason Farbman, “How Race Is Conjured,” Jacobin, (June 29, 2015). https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/06/karen-barbara-fields-racecraft-dolezal-racism/.

One thing we often forget about that case is that Homer Plessy’s argument was that he was white! He got bounced from the white section because the conductor said he was black. The question wasn’t that all train passengers should be able to sit together, rather Plessy said, “No, I’m a white person, actually.” The court admitted that it was very important to be able to determine who was white and who was not, and that having the ability to be white is a form of property, that it’s valuable, extremely valuable, in 1896.

Brian Jones, “The Social Construction of Race,” Jacobin, June 25, 2015. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/06/racecraft-racism-social-origins-reparations/.

My choice, if you can call it that, to identify as black is much different from that of, say, my father or even my own sister, whose skin is at least three shades darker than mine. The eagerness with which people gravitate toward me is not shown to many of the other black people I know. These experiences led me to suspect that the breathless “post­racial” commentary that attached itself to our current president had as much to do with the fact that he is biracial as with the fact that he is black. His blood relationship to whiteness and its attendant privileges serve as a chaser to the difficult-­to-­swallow prospect that a black man might achieve ownership of the Oval Office.

Anna Holmes, “America’s ‘Postracial’ Fantasy,” The New York Times Magazine, June 30, 2015. page MM13. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/05/magazine/americas-postracial-fantasy.html.

We now know that the way we talk about race has no scientific validity. There is no genetic basis that corresponds with any particular group of people, no essentialist DNA for black people or white people or anyone. This is not a hippy ideal, it’s a fact. There are genetic characteristics that associate with certain populations, but none of these is exclusive, nor correspond uniquely with any one group that might fit a racial epithet. Regional adaptations are real, but these tend to express difference within so-called races, not between them. Sickle-cell anaemia affects people of all skin colours because it has evolved where malaria is common. Tibetans are genetically adapted to high altitude, rendering Chinese residents of Beijing more similar to Europeans than their superficially similar neighbours. Tay-Sachs disease, once thought to be a “Jewish disease”, is as common in French Canadians and Cajuns. And so it goes on.

Adam Rutherford, “Why racism is not backed by science,” Raw Story, June 29, 2015. http://www.rawstory.com/2015/06/why-racism-is-not-backed-by-science/.

“My father is black. My mother is white. I self-identify as black and as mixed and I don’t relate to those as mutually exclusive. I also try to be mindful and try to have a certain humility about how my experience differs from most other black people; about how I have certain types of residual white privilege which I don’t believe makes me less black. I also know that it is ultimately not up to me whether I am accepted as black. My experience though, has almost always been of black people welcoming me and accepting me as their own. And it’s only because of that lifetime of experience that I would feel comfortable telling Nancy Giles,“actually I’m black.” And I knew that even within that moment, I could tell her that and she would get it. And I’m not saying that there is never any exclusion within the black community. I’m not negating people who have experienced that. But I do think that there is a tradition of a loving welcoming inclusive blackness that is important as a rejection and a counter to the historical function of whiteness. It’s a tradition I’ve experienced as a beautiful thing and as Adam Serwer said, it’s a beautiful thing that Rachel Dolezal has “taken advantage of,” that she has manipulated, that she has poisoned just a little bit with what she’s done here.”

Jay Smooth, ““Empathy does not preclude accountability:” Jay Smooth on Rachel Dolezal,” Fusion, June 18, 2015 (00:01:53-00:03:11). http://fusion.net/video/153151/empathy-does-not-preclude-accountability-jay-smooth-on-rachel-dolezal/.

But Ms. [Rachel A.] Dolezal’s view of herself — however confused, or incongruent with society’s — reveals an essential truth about race: It is a fiction, a social construct based in culture and not biology. It must be “made” from what people believe and do. Race is performative. It is the memories that bind us, the stories passed down to us, the experiences that we share, the social forces that surround us.

Allyson Hobbs, “Rachel Dolezal’s Unintended Gift to America,” The New York Times, June 17, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/opinion/rachel-dolezals-unintended-gift-to-america.html.

There is a lesson here for us, for we who are white and care deeply about racial equity, justice and liberation, and the lesson is this: authentic antiracist white identity is what we must cultivate. We cannot shed our skin, nor our privileges like an outdated overcoat. They are not accessories to be donned or not as one pleases, but rather, persistent reminders of the society that is not yet real, which is why we must work with people of color to overturn the system that bestows those privileges. But the key word here is with people of color, not as them. We must be willing to do the difficult work of finding a different way to live in this skin.

Tim Wise, “Mimicry is Not Solidarity: Of Allies, Rachel Dolezal and the Creation of Antiracist White Identity,” Tim Wise: Antiracist Essayist, Author and Educator, June 14, 2015. http://www.timwise.org/2015/06/mimicry-is-not-solidarity-of-allies-rachel-dolezal-and-the-creation-of-antiracist-white-identity.

The spectrum of shades and colorings that constitute “black” identity in the United States, and the equal claim to black identity that someone who looks like [Walter] White or [Louis T.] Wright (or, for that matter, [Rachel] Dolezal) can have, is a direct product of bloodlines that attest to institutionalized rape during and after slavery. Nearly all of us who identify as African-American in this country, apart from some more recent immigrants, have at least some white ancestry. My own white great-grandparent is as inconsequential as the color of my palms in terms of my status as a black person in the United States. My grandparents had four children: my father and his brother, both almond-brown, with black hair and dark eyes, and two girls with reddish hair, fair skin, freckles, and gray eyes. All of them were equally black because they were equal heirs to the quirks of chance determining whether their ancestry from Europe or Africa was most apparent. Dolezal’s primary offense lies not in the silly proffering of a false biography but in knowing this ugly history and taking advantage of the reasons that she would, at least among black people, be taken at her word regarding her identity.

Jelani Cobb, “Black Like Her,” The New Yorker, June 15, 2015. http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/rachel-dolezal-black-like-her.