Mixed Race Studies

“He [Herb Jeffries] told me he had to make this decision about whether he should try to pass as white,” the jazz critic Gary Giddins recalled in an interview for this obituary. “He said: ‘I just knew that my life would be more interesting as a black guy. If I’d chosen to live my life passing as white, I’d have never been able to sing with Duke Ellington.’”

William Yardley, “Herb Jeffries, a.k.a. ‘Bronze Buckaroo’ of Song and Screen, Dies at 100 (or So),” The New York Times, May 26, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/27/arts/music/herb-jeffries-singing-star-of-black-cowboy-films-dies-at-100.html.

“I don’t think we have any full-blooded Māori,” Dr. [Tīmoti] Kāretu said. “But it is not a problem. As long as you have a Māori (ancestor), you are Māori. It’s left to the individual to identify with their Māori or European.”

K. C. Cole, “Chickasaw and Māori Celebrate Similarities, Language and Culture,” Indian Country Today Media Network, May 31, 2014. http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/05/31/chickasaw-and-maori-celebrate-similarities-language-and-culture-155051.

The words “Latino” and “Hispanic” do not refer to a race—they refer to a multiracial ethnicity composed primarily of indigenous, European and African peoples and, most commonly, people of mixed race. In Latin America, there’s lots of different ways to describe people of mixed race—mestizo (mixed European and indigenous heritage) and mulato (mixed European and African heritage) being the most common.

Roque Planas, “The Census Can’t Fit Latinos Into A Race Box And It’s Causing More Confusion,” The Huffington Post (May 22, 2014). http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/22/census-latinos-some-other_n_5375832.html.

“”The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” John Roberts elegantly wrote. Liberals have yet to come up with a credible retort. That is because the theories of John Roberts are prettier than the theories of most liberals. But more, it is because liberals do not understand that America has never discriminated on the basis of race (which does not exist) but on the basis of racism (which most certainly does.)

Ideologies of hatred have never required coherent definitions of the hated. Islamophobes kill Sikhs as easily as they kill Muslims. Stalin needed no consistent definition of “Kulaks” to launch a war of Dekulakization. “I decide who is a Jew,” Karl Lueger said. Slaveholders decided who was a nigger and who wasn’t. The decision was arbitrary. The effects are not. Ahistorical liberals—like most Americans—still believe that race invented racism, when in fact the reverse is true. The hallmark of elegant racism is the acceptance of mainstream consensus, and exploitation of all its intellectual fault lines.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates, “This Town Needs a Better Class of Racist,” The Atlantic. (May 1, 2014). http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/This-Town-Needs-A-Better-Class-Of-Racist/361443/.

This assimilationist ideology, commonly called “whitening” by the elite after 1890 (Skidmore 1974), had taken hold by the early twentieth century, and continues to be Brazil’s predominant racial ideology today. In effect, the Brazilian elite argued that Brazil, unlike the U.S. to which they frequently (and unfavorably) compared it, had no racial problem: no U.S. phenomena of race hatred (the logical product of the white supremacy doctrine), racial segregation and, most important, racial discrimination. In a word, Brazil had escaped racism. It was on the path to producing a single race through the benign process of miscegenation. The unrestrained libido of the Portuguese, along with his cultural “plasticity,” had produced a fortuitous racial harmony. Brazil, thanks to historical forces of which it had not even been conscious, had been saved from the ugly stain of racism (DaMatta 1987).

Thomas Skidmore, “Fact and Myth: Discovering a Racial Problem in Brazil,” Kellogg Institute (Working Paper #173, April 1992): 6. http://kellogg.nd.edu/publications/workingpapers/WPS/173.pdf.

We could tie ourselves in knots trying to untangle the many complexities of racial identity, so let me simply address this with pure science. There is no “race gene,” it’s a biological myth. That doesn’t mean race isn’t real, it means it is a lived experience, rather than something we are born into. As Larry Adelman, Executive Producer of “Race – The Power of an Illusion,” so eloquently put it: “The factors that lead to differential outcomes between races live not in any ‘racial’ genes but in our social institutions and practices.

Celeste Headlee, “There’s No ‘Race Gene’, Halle Berry,” The Takeaway, February 9, 2011. http://www.thetakeaway.org/story/113822-halle-berry-theres-no-race-gene.

The specific details being reported aside, the deeper structural problem with mainstream media stories on the alleged postracial power of mixed-race identity or the supposed significance of changing racial demographics is that the information presented is often one-sided, simplistic, geared to a tabloid sensibility, and does not reflect the multiform ways that edifices of power have race embedded within them, whether visible or not. It is a matter of sensationalism taking precedence over serious analysis. David Roediger identifies this tendency of providing sensationalism without substance, noting that “often multiracial identities and immigration take center stage as examples of factors making race obsolete” and that “we are often told popularly that race and racism are on predictable tracks to extinction. But we are seldom told clear or consistent stories about why white supremacy will give way and how race will become a ‘social virus’ of the past.” Roediger’s words highlight the importance of unmasking this postracial aspiration for what it is: an effort to provide comfort to a nation that is unwilling to do the hard work required to deal effectively with centuries of entrenched racism and the resultant consequences.

Spencer, Rainier, “‘Only the News They Want to Print’: Mainstream Media and Critical Mixed-Race Studies,” Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies, Volume 1, Number 1, (January 30, 2014). http://escholarship.org/uc/item/3b34q0rf

Stuart McPhail Hall was born on February 3 1932 in Kingston, Jamaica, into a middle class family which subscribed to what he called “the colonial romance”. His father, Herman, was the first non-white person to hold a senior position – chief accountant – with United Fruit in Jamaica. Both his parents had non-African components in their ancestry, though as he recalled: “I was always the blackest member of my family and I knew it from the moment I was born.”

Growing up in what he called the “pigmentocracy” of the colonial West Indies had a profound effect on Hall’s childhood and outlook. His mother forbade him from inviting black school friends home, even though to white eyes he was black himself. When his sister fell in love with a black medical student, their mother barred her from seeing him. As a result she suffered a mental breakdown.

“Stuart Hall – obituary,” The Telegraph, (London: February 11, 2014). http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/10629087/Stuart-Hall-obituary.html.

“When I first went to Germany in January, 1959, I just finished my training in Columbus, Georgia, at Fort Benning. In Columbus, Georgia it was still segregated. There was discrimination. There was racism. For me as a young lieutenant, who couldn’t go off the post in Columbus, Georgia, could go off the post anywhere in Germany. It was a breath of freedom.”

—Colin Powell, 12th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former United States Secretary of State

“Breath of Freedom,” The Smithsonian Channel, 2014. http://www.smithsonianchannel.com/sc/web/show/3402153/breath-of-freedom. (00:02:58-00:02:24).

One might imagine, that the children of such connections, would fare better, in the hands of their masters, than other slaves. The rule is quite the other way; and a very little reflection will satisfy the reader that such is the case. A man who will enslave his own blood, may not be safely relied on for magnanimity. Men do not love those who remind them of their sins—unless they have a mind to repent—and the mulatto child’s face is a standing accusation against him who is master and father to the child. What is still worse, perhaps, such a child is a constant offense to the wife. She hates its very presence, and when a slaveholding woman hates, she wants not means to give that hate telling effect. Women—white women, I mean—are idols at the south, not wives, for the slave women are preferred in many instances; and if these idols but nod, or lift a finger, woe to the poor victim: kicks, cuffs and stripes are sure to follow. Masters are frequently compelled to sell this class of their slaves, out of deference to the feelings of their white wives; and shocking and scandalous as it may seem for a man to sell his own blood to the traffickers in human flesh, it is often an act of humanity toward the slave-child to be thus removed from his merciless tormentors.

Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, (Auburn, New York: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1855). 40-41.