Mixed Race Studies

The Forum Council did not oversell its claim. The Du Bois-Stoddard debate turned out to be a singular event, as important in its way as Lincoln-Douglas or Kennedy-Nixon. The reason more people don’t know about it may be its asymmetry. The other historic matchups featured rivals who disagreed politically but wouldn’t have disputed their opponent’s right to exist. [Lothrop] Stoddard had written that “mulattoes” like [W. E. B.] Du Bois, who could not accept their inferior status, were the chief cause of racial unrest in the United States, and he looked forward to their dying out.

Ian Frazier, “When W. E. B. Du Bois Made a Laughingstock of a White Supremacist,” The New Yorker, August 19, 2019. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/26/when-w-e-b-du-bois-made-a-laughingstock-of-a-white-supremacist.

[Walter] Plecker was obsessed with white racial purity, a cause he clearly connected to his belief that the United States was a white man’s country. In a 1924 speech before the American Public Health Association, Plecker claimed that when the English, Dutch and Scottish landed on the shores of North America, they came “to found a civilization of the highest type, not to mix their blood with the savages of the land, not to originate a mongrel population.” The fatal error, he believed, was made in 1619 when the Dutch introduced African slaves to North America. “The problem was not slavery,” he told his audience, “but the presence of the negro in what should be a white man’s land.”

Susan Pearson, “Birth certificates have always been a weapon for white supremacists,” The Washington Post, September 11, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/09/11/birth-certificates-have-always-been-weapon-white-supremacists/.

Overall, I understand the feeling of need to tell our own personalised story about our ‘mixed-race’ identity, but we need to be thinking a lot harder about how we communicate these issues and how they should be attentive to intersectional specificities as well entangled proximities to whiteness.

Chantelle Lewis, “Please can we stop talking about ‘mixed-race’ identity (on its own)?” Discover Society, August 23, 2019. https://discoversociety.org/2019/08/23/please-can-we-stop-talking-about-mixed-race-identity-on-its-own/.

The UC [University of California] system needs to allow mixed students to be fully seen through their statistics. It might be hard for the UC system to find a way to record the specific ethnicities that mixed-race students identify with. But it’s a complicated issue worth tackling because as an institution that prides itself on diversity, the UC system must ensure each of its students is validated for all of their identities. UC Berkeley can, and should, take initiative to pioneer this change.

Genevieve Xia Ye Slosberg, “UC Berkeley must redesign data practices to give visibility to mixed-race students,” The Daily Californian, August 22, 2019. https://www.dailycal.org/2019/08/22/uc-berkeley-must-redesign-data-practices-to-give-visibility-to-mixed-race-students/.

When my siblings and I compare birth certificates for the first time, we discover that four of us have “White” listed under “Race,” and one has “Negro.” We’re all interracial children from the same parents, who died before we could ask them about this enigma. I proudly accept being “Negro”—African-American—although I embrace my full heritage and keep a healthy sense of humor whenever anyone asks, “What are you?”

Dr. Ruth L. Baskerville, “They Call Me “Negro”,” Embrace Race: Raising A Brave Generation, August 18, 2019. https://www.embracerace.org/blog/they-call-me-negro.

Had my name been Jessie Mendoza, then people might have asked, “What are you?” Not because I look ethnically ambiguous, but precisely because I don’t; I am absolutely white-passing. In Vermont, where my entire family (with the exception of my grandfather) is from, my white skin, green eyes, and light brown hair would blend in, but my surname certainly would not. In Tucson, my color and new surname would each be common, but not necessarily common together, especially when considered alongside my mother s French-Canadian last name, Geraw. As an adult in California, where even stricter phenotypic expectations by and for Mexicans often hold sway, people of any ethnicity might feel the need to clarify my own.

Jessie D. Turner, “La nueva tocaya” Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures, Volume 3, Number 2, Spring 2019 (Intersecting Latinx Lives: The Politics of Race), p 149. https://www.academia.edu/40047719/La_nueva_tocaya.

If anything, the public debate around race and science has sunk into the mud. To state even the undeniable fact that we are one human species today means falling afoul of a cabal of conspiracy theorists. The “race realists,” as they call themselves online, join the growing ranks of climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers and flat-earthers in insisting that science is under the yoke of some grand master plan designed to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes. In their case, a left-wing plot to promote racial equality when, as far as they’re concerned, racial equality is impossible for biological reasons.

Angela Saini, “The Internet Is a Cesspool of Racist Pseudoscience,” Scientific American, July 29. 2019. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/the-internet-is-a-cesspool-of-racist-pseudoscience/.

As more people claim a multiracial identity, and it subsequently becomes more mainstream, I have been disturbed to also see a lot of mixed-race work rewrite white supremacist ideologies of old (e.g. postracialism, excluding non-white mixed people, not naming race, anti-blackness, etc.). Same oppression, different era, under somewhat changed circumstances. Racism is a clever shapeshifter. I have been looking for a while for a mixed community that resists, holds fast to a hard edge, refuses to re-inscribe, and pushes forward transformative dialogue.

Midwest Mixed is that community.

Sharon H. Chang, “Midwest Mixed: Taking the lead on antiracist conversations about multiraciality,” Sharon H. Chang, author | photographer | activist, July 25, 2019. https://sharonhchang.com/2019/07/25/4943/.

The ability to pass oneself off as white—to choose between living with their existing identity or adopt the dominant racial identity—is the most extreme colorism privilege. It’s not an option to which the vast majority of black Americans has access. In an ethnic group in which “selling out” or being an “Uncle Tom” are major taboos, it’d be understandable if the discussion of passing focused on the supreme selfishness of the act. Passing is, at its essence, abandonment of the group to better the individual. And yet, the intra-community discussion about passing tends to avoid the question of the morality of the act. Instead, within the black community, family passing stories often serve other purposes: as a way of emphasizing the absurdity of race; as an example of a family’s access to the privileges of colorism; as a trickster performance of the ultimate racial transgression.

Mat Johnson, “Passing, in Moments,” Topic Magazine, Issue Number 25: Journeys (July 2019). https://www.topic.com/passing-in-moments.

But Dr. [Kristin] Pauker belongs to a small group of psychologists, many of them mixed themselves, who have begun to explore the advantages of being multiracial. For instance, Sarah Gaither at Duke, a frequent collaborator of Dr. Pauker’s, has discovered that, when reminded of their multiracial heritage, mixed-race individuals score higher on tests that measure creativity. This is probably not because they are inherently superior in some way, but because the very thing that’s so difficult for them — the need to navigate multiple worlds — may actually enhance mental flexibility.

Moises Velasquez-Manoff, Damon Winter (photography), “Want to Be Less Racist? Move to Hawaii,” The New York Times, June 28, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/28/opinion/sunday/racism-hawaii.html.