Mixed Race Studies

As is the case with so much of multiracial ideology, the claim of racial bridging is merely stated without the least bit of critical backing, while no one inside the movement, and precious few outside it, care to point out the inconsistency. It is no more than an unproven desire, a case of wishful thinking, based on a supposed alterity of multiracial people that harks back to the marginal man. [Read the entire chapter, “The False Promise of Racial Bridging” here.]

Rainier Spencer, Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix, (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Reinner, 2011), 207.

You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago. And when you think about why, in the African-American community at least, there’s a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it’s important to recognize that the African-American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that—that doesn’t go away.

There are very few African American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store.  That includes me.  There are very few African American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars.  That happens to me—at least before I was a senator.  There are very few African Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off.  That happens often…

President Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President on Trayvon Martin,” The White House: Office of the Press Secretary, (Washington, D. C., July 19, 2013). http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/07/19/remarks-president-trayvon-martin.

“I’m proudly biracial. I’m very adamant about this. I don’t understand why people pick one. I’m Jamaican and Jewish. I have friends who are biracial and say they’re black Jews or Latino Jews. I’m like, ‘You’re mom’s white, knock it off.’ … I like [Shlomo] Carlebach and Biggie Smalls. I listen to both on a daily basis.”

—Simone Weichselbaum

Julie Wiener, “Black And Jewish And Read All Over,” The Jewish Week, (July 16, 2013). http://www.thejewishweek.com/features/new-york-minute/black-and-jewish-and-read-all-over.

Notwithstanding the long-held belief that Machado sought to at best to camouflage and at worst deny being a mulatto, I contend that his primary motivation was to achieve a sense of racelessness. He endeavored to go beyond the physical limitations of being a mulatto to become a “meta-mulatto,” that is, a mulatto whose writing grappled with the universal questions of duality and ambiguity in all human existence—miscegenation in a higher sense. He displayed what has been termed “mestizo consciousness,” “radical mestizaje,” and “critical hybridity” (Anzaldúa 1987, 77; Ramirez 1983, 6; Sandoval 2000, 72; Daniel 2005, 264; Lund 2006, 55) by affirming a mulatto identity grounded in a more inclusive or universal self, beyond questions of racial, cultural, or any other specificity.  As a multiracial individual of African and European descent in a society that prized whiteness and stigmatized blackness, Machado viewed the challenge of achieving upward mobility and public success without also compromising his personal integrity as merely one of the myriad epiphenomena of universal duality and ambiguity.

G. Reginald Daniel, Machado de Assis: Multiracial Identity and the Brazilian Novelist, (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012): 120-121.

Genetic analysis strongly suggests that early humans first arose in Africa and emerged out of Africa only ~100,000 years ago, a fairly recent development, evolutionarily speaking, which explains why we are all closely related. Any classification of biological races within our species is arbitrary because there are no major discontinuities in our diversity across the globe. Importantly, genetic data show that currently populous groups are not necessarily reflected by their past abundance, and human history is one of repeated admixture, not maintenance of purity. It is this genetic admixture that has left an imprint on every human disease with a genetic component, including common chronic ones. Thus, it is quite unlikely that the genetic variations underlying our diseases, which represent only a small fraction of our genetic diversity, will vary markedly across humanity.

Aravinda Chakravarti, “Racial profiling in medicine,” Nature Medicine, Volume 19, Number 7 (July 2013), 808. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nm.3254

We are going to need new terms that reflect numerical reality and social-political reality. Part of that implies thinking about what race and ethnicity mean in general and what specific racial and ethnic, and multiracial and multiethnic, identities mean in particular. At the same time, we’ve got to remember that every racial or ethnic community has some issues and experiences in common and is also unique.

For one, these changes mean that the white-black and white-people of color binaries need to be rethought and replaced with a full-color perspective on race and ethnicity. A full-color perspective acknowledges that racial and ethnic mixing has been part of our social fabric since Europeans met and mated with Native Americans; that it continued on through African enslavement and segregation and Asian exclusion and internment; that it progressed with increased rates of Hispanic immigration and is still with us as increasing numbers of interracial and multiracial couples get together and have children today. A full-color perspective must also acknowledge that racial and ethnic mixing has been occurring for centuries in same-sex communities as well.

On one hand, sociologists predict that the definition of whiteness will expand to include Hispanic and Asian groups but will always exclude those with African-American descent in order to maintain political and social power. On the other hand, this prediction is reductive because it assumes that only those who will continue to identify as white will be privileged and that those who will continue to identify as black will be non-privileged. It also ignores the fact that, generally speaking, to be African American is to be racially mixed…

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, “The Future of the ‘Tan Generation’,” (interview with Jenée Desmond-Harris), The Root, June 6, 2012, http://www.theroot.com/views/browner-america-marcia-dawkins-qa.

This study adds to the growing body of literature on multiracial identity by illustrating the importance of reflected appraisals in shaping racial identity. Importantly, these findings also show how reflected appraisals are fundamentally shaped by the one-drop rule (for black-white Americans in particular). Few studies examine reflected appraisals as a determinant of racial identity (Khanna 2004), and I find that biracial respondents frequently explain their black identities as due, in part, to how they believe they are viewed by “others” and by “larger society.” As suggested by Brunsma and Rockquemore (2001), however, who argue that how biracial people think others view them is moderated by social context, many respondents draw distinctions between how they believe they are perceived depending upon whether the observers are white or black. Other white people, they argue, see them as black, while other black people are more likely to recognize their multiracial backgrounds. These conflicting perceptions have the potential to shape different “racial reflections” (e.g., as black or multiracial), yet I find that the one-drop rule affects the entire reflected appraisal process, subsequently shaping “internalized” black identities for the majority of respondents.

Nikki Khanna, “‘If You’re Half Black, You’re Just Black’: Reflected Appraisals and the Persistence of the One-Drop Rule,” Sociological Quarterly, Volume 51, Issue 1 (Winter 2010). 113-114. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1533-8525.2009.01162.x.

Steve Scher: “What is President Obama?”

Ralina Joseph: “Well, if you were to ask him. President Obama is black. He is African-American.”

Steve Scher: “Yeah. When President Obama came out after the Trayvon Martin killing and he said, ‘My kids would have looked like Trayvon Martin if they had been boys.’… Let’s unpack all of the things that were being said there. What was he saying about his identity?”

Ralina Joseph: “So, this is a really interesting question. I think that he is identifying as black and in the way which we have seen President Obama identify publically it has been as black. He has also talked about his white family. He’s also famously referenced his mother from Kansas and his father from Kenya. But that has not precluded his identifying as African-American. I think that in real life that these identities are always together. They’re very much a part of each other. They’re fluidly understood. They’re simultaneous. And yet, when we understand race, we think about them in these really separate binaristic manners. So it makes sense to me that he identifies very much with Trayvon Martin’s family and also can talk about his white and Asian-American family, for example.”

Steve Scher, “Ralina Joseph discusses her book Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial,” Weekday with Steve Scher, KUOW.org Seattle, 94.9 FM. (April 15, 2013). http://cpa.ds.npr.org/kuow/audio/2013/04/WeekdayA20130415.mp3 (00:18:50-00:20:07).

Exhibit A is President Barack Obama. He declined to check the box for “white” on his census form, despite his mother’s well-known whiteness.

Obama offered no explanation, but Leila McDowell has an idea.

“Put a hoodie on him and have him walk down an alley, and see how biracial he is then,” said McDowell, vice president of communications for the NAACP.

Jesse Washington, “Black or biracial? Census forces a choice for some,” The Associated Press, April 14, 2010. http://www.jessewashington.com/im-not-biracial.html.

What remains perplexing is that given the history of racial mixing, the Census Bureau estimates that about 75-90% of Black Americans are ancestrally multiracial, yet even today, only 7% choose to identify as such (Davis, 2001; Lee and Bean, 2010). Clearly, genealogy alone does not dictate racial identification. Given that the “one-drop rule” of hypodescent is no longer legally codified, why does the rate of multiracial reporting among Blacks remain relatively low?…

Jennifer Lee and Frank D. Bean, “A Postracial Society or A Diversity Paradox? Race, Immigration, and Multiraciality in the Twenty-First Century,” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, Volume 9, Issue 2, (Fall 2012). 423. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X12000161.