Mixed Race Studies

About 15% of all new marriages in the United States in 2010 were between spouses of a different race or ethnicity from one another, more than double the share in 1980 (6.7%). Among all newlyweds in 2010, 9% of whites, 17% of blacks, 26% of Hispanics and 28% of Asians married out. Looking at all married couples in 2010, regardless of when they married, the share of intermarriages reached an all-time high of 8.4%. In 1980, that share was just 3.2%.

Wendy Wang, “The Rise of Intermarriage: Rates, Characteristics Vary by Race and Gender,” Pew Research Center, (Washington, D.C., February 16, 2012), 1. http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/02/16/the-rise-of-intermarriage/.

My racial composition and my position in the world are realities which I alone may determine… I do not expect to be told what I should consider myself to be.

—Jean Toomer to his publisher Horace Liveright (September 5, 1923)

Continuing this discussion of terminology, I prefer mixed race over multiracial, to distance myself from those who wanted to create a new category for racially mixed people. Coverage of the 2000 census gave the impression that all within the Multiracial Movement wanted this. In reality, most wanted some useful identifier of mixed heritage, and the decision to implement multiple checking was satisfactory to them. The faction that did want a new category tended to believe that there was a true, singular, multiracial consciousness that united racially mixed people across race, class, gender, and geography. Because mixed-race experiences are so varied, I reject this notion. Similarly, I avoid labels that connote specific configurations of mixing, for example, hapa or biracial. The former hails from the native Hawaiian term hapa haole and often refers to mixed Asian and white individuals. It is a term popular with racially mixed Asian Americans to express pride in their mixture. At the hands of scholars of mixed race, Multiracial Movement activists, and journalists, the latter term often refers to mixed black and white individuals. Although the word is indeterminate, its use reinforces the notion that race in the United States is only about blacks and whites.

Greg Carter, The United States of the United Races: A Utopian History of Racial Mixing, (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 9.

I have never seen the results of amalgamation on so large a scale as the Doctor proposes with his great caldron; but I have seen the white, black and Indian, all mixed up in one person, but that person was nothing like Dr. Talmage’s beauty nor was he 95 per cent. beyond anything I had ever seen. The white and yellow were very much marred in the mixture, and the black not much improved, if improved at all. The mulatto may, in some respects, be an improvement on the negro, but he is certainly no improvement on the white man, and in the long run the mulatto, like all the other hybrids, becomes extinct. My long observation goes to prove that in mixing the races all are weakened and none are benefitted.

Rev. S. P. Richardson, D.D., “Amalgamation,” Weekly Banner-Watchman [Athens, Georgia], (March 26, 1889). Source: Digital Library of Georgia.

“Nothing so accelerates the human race as the mingling of races. And in this country we are going to have all the opposite nationalities intermingled. It is the intermingling of the races in America that is going to destroy the last vestige of race prejudice. How heaven feels about it you may conclude from the fact that Christ, a Jew and born of a Jewess, promulgated a religion for all races, and that Paul, a Jew, became the chief apostle to the Gentiles..” —Reverend Thomas De Witt Talmage

“Room for All,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, (Monday, March 3, 1889, page 2, column 4). Source: Brooklyn Public Library’s Brooklyn Collection.

[Kip] Fulbeck’s book accomplishes its goal of bringing awareness about Hapas to themselves and to the larger society. It creates a recognizable space for a particular group of mixed-race people that asserts itself against the traditional racial paradigm dominated by a logic of monoraciality, expands race beyond a black/white racial line, and sutures personal narrative back onto the visual images of mixed-race bodies. Although some elements of the book may work against the very multiplicity it seeks to convey, its most powerful impact is its promotion of a self-identification process through storytelling and narrative, which cannot be accomplished through the current racial language of identity, nor through bodily identification. By permitting the subjects not only to see themselves in the visual images of Hapaness but, more importantly, to speak for themselves and formulate their own sense of identity (whatever that may be), Fulbeck’s project resists simply (re)figuring Hapaness as a stabilized identity or giving into the community-forming demands of horizontal comradeship and hapagenization.

Nicole Miyoshi Rabin, “Picturing the Mix: Visual and Linguistic Representations in Kip Fulbeck’s Part Asian, 100% Hapa,” Critical Studies in Media Communication, (Volume 29, Issue 5, 2012). http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2012.691610.

I consider racialized medicine to be the inappropriate use of racial categories in medical practice and drug development. It often involves constructing practices around mistaken assumptions of some innate genetic difference among racial groups. For me, the important issue is not whether to use race in biomedicine, but how to use it–and when. There are very real health disparities in the country that are based on a long history of social, economic, and legal practices that have consistently and deliberately subordinated groups of people based on their race. As a social and historical phenomenon the health impacts of race are very real and can only be addressed by taking race into account. The key is to recognize that in these contexts it is the social and historical practices of racism that have become manifest in racialized bodies as the very real biological differences of health disparities. That is, it is history and culture that has created these biological differences in the incidence of disease across racial groups–not genes. —Jonathan Kahn

“An Interview with Race in a Bottle author Jonathan Kahn,” Columbia University Press, (January 16, 2013). http://www.cupblog.org/?p=8710.

But blackness also points to a history of mixed racialization that, although always acknowledged among blacks, is rarely understood or seen among other groups. I have argued elsewhere, for instance, that to add the claim of “mixture” to blacks in both American continents would be redundant, because blacks are their primary “mixed” populations to begin with. Mixture among blacks, in particular, functions as an organizing aesthetic, as well as a tragic history. On the aesthetic level, it signifies the divide between beauty and ugliness. On the social level, the divide is between being just and unjust, virtuous and vicious; “fair skin” is no accidental, alternative term for “light skin.” And on the historical level, the divide signifies concerns that often are denied.

Lewis R. Gordon, Her Majesty’s Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997). 57.

What was race anyway? That’s the big question Miss Anne’s actions raised. If race was simply a myth or fiction, could one reimagine racial identity as something based on affiliation rather than blood? Some of the writers of the Harlem Renaissance asked much the same thing. In Nella Larsen’s “Passing” and James Weldon Johnson’s “Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man,” for example, light-skinned protagonists of African-American heritage successfully pass as white, demonstrating that racial identity could hinge on voluntary association and careful self-presentation. Their radical acts blur the color line and expose the absurdity of the one-drop rule. Approaching the color line from the other side, Miss Anne reframed the issues. If race wasn’t determined by biology, why couldn’t a white woman feel black? Why couldn’t she repudiate her own culture to embrace another?

Martha A. Sandweiss, “Uptown Girls,” Sunday Review of Books, The New York Times, (September 22, 2013). http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/books/review/miss-anne-in-harlem-by-carla-kaplan.html.

“I always joked with my friends that I was ‘light’ not ‘white.’ Half Latino and half white. Just what does that mean? When the name Bengochea precedes me, I am always asked to explain. You don’t necessarily guess my Cuban roots by looking at me, but maybe you should look harder. As a person of mixed race/ethnicity, I have always wrestled with my identity. In certain contexts I feel that I am not Hispanic enough, and in others I feel like I am not expressing myself completely unless I reference my mixed ethnicity. As I get older, I become more comfortable in these situations and learn to embrace the fullness of who I am. In a black-and-white society, I am the grey; I am other; I am what cannot be clearly defined.” —Matt Bengochea, Project Coordinator, President’s Office

“RISDiversity: Community Narratives Project: 2013 Participants,” Rhode Island School of Design, (Providence, Rhode Island, 2013). http://diversity.risd.edu/participants2013.php.