Mixed Race Studies

Notes On A Theory Of Multi-Racial White Supremacist Patriarchy, aka MRWaSP

it’s her factory: pop culture and philosophy from a critical-race feminist perspective.
2013-11-29

Robin James, Associate Professor of Philosophy & Women’s & Gender Studies
University of North Carolina, Charlotte

Multi-Racial White Supremacist Patriarchy, or MRWaSP, is my term for early 21st-century globalized Western race/gender/sexuality/capitalist hegemony. I put a lower-case “a” in the acronym to both make the acronym something pronounceable to English speakers, and to echo the older acronym WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant). You say it like “Mr. Wasp”–emphasis on the “mister” shows that this is not just about white supremacy, it’s also about patriarchy.

MRWaSP is an upgrade on WASP. As critical theorists of race have been arguing, white supremacy has retooled itself to work more efficiently in and for globalized, neoliberal hegemonies. Not only are exclusion and border-patrolling resource-intensive, they’re also not the most efficient ways of promoting nationalist, capitalist, patriarchal interests. As Jared Sexton argues, contemporary multiculturalism/multiracialism is a “protest less against the genocidal objectives of Anglo white supremacy than the inefficiency of unrestrained violence as the means of its accomplishment” (Amalgamation Schemes [: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism], 200). You can extend this argument to patriarchy and other institutionalized forms of identity-based oppression. It is more cost-effective to include some formerly excluded/abjected groups in racial/gender/sexual supremacy, because this inclusion further reinforces both the supremacy of the hyperelites and the precarity of the most unruly groups (those who pose the greatest threat to MRWaSP hegemony)…

Read the entire article here.

The Fluid Symbol of Mixed Race

Hypatia
Volume 25, Issue 4 (Fall, 2010)
pages 875-890
DOI: 10.1111/j.1527-2001.2010.01121.x

Naomi Zack, Professor of Philosophy
University of Oregon

Philosophers have little to lose in making practical proposals. If the proposals are enacted, the power of ideas to change the world is affirmed. If the proposals are rejected, there is new material for theoretical reflection. During the 1990s, I believed that broad public recognition of mixed race, particularly black and white mixed race, would contribute to an undoing of rigid and racist, socially constructed racial categories. I argued for such recognition in my first book, Race and Mixed Race (Zack 1993), a follow-through anthology, American Mixed Race (Zack 1995), and numerous articles, especially the essay, “Mixed Black and White Race and Public Policy,” which appeared first in Hypatia in 1995. I also delivered scores of public and academic lectures and presentations on this subject, all of which expressed the following in varied forms and formats: Race is an idea that lacks the biological foundation it is commonly assumed to have. There is need for broad education about this absence of foundation; mixed-race identities should be recognized, especially black–white identities.

Given some of the discussion of my work on race and mixed race, I should reiterate that my position was neither a denial of the existence of race nor advocacy of the elimination of race as a category. That is, while I believe that the elimination of race as a category would be a good thing in many contexts,  I have never advocated for such elimination as a next step for a society that is as entangled with ideas of race as ours is. And furthermore, I am wary of the delusional aspect of any philosopher believing that she has the authority, much less the power, to wield an idea like a magic wand over the world.  Race exists insofar as people use race to identify themselves and others racially. What does not exist is a biological foundation for human races or human racial divisions. It is an empirical question whether broad public understanding of this lack of foundation, in a society where many think that such a foundation in biological science exists, would result in an “elimination” of race terms and practices.

The recognition of mixed race that I have advocated would proceed from where we are now, in a society where many people continue to think that human racial taxonomy has a biological foundation. Recognition of mixed race would be fair, because if racially “pure” people are entitled to distinct racial identities, then so are racially mixed people.  Also, the false belief in biological races logically entails a belief in mixed biological races. But, of course, in true biological taxonomic terms, if pure races do not exist, then neither do mixed races (Zack 1997, 183-84; Zack 2002, chap. 7).

However, by the time I finished writing Philosophy of Science and Race (Zack 2002), I had come to the conclusion that broad understanding of the absence of a biological foundation for “race,” beginning with philosophers, was more urgent than mixed-race recognition or identity rights. Against that needed shift away from the false racialisms to which many liberatory race theorists still clung, advocacy of mixed-race recognition seemed self-serving, if not petty. And I think that the shift is still a work in progress. But still, the ongoing historical phenomena of mixed race and the distinctive experiences of mixed-race people continue to merit consideration, and I am grateful for this opportunity to revisit my earlier confidence and enthusiasm that mixed-race recognition was on the near horizon, with the full-scale undoing of race soon to dawn.

The twenty-first century has so far supported greater recognition of mixed race, but not as a distinct or stand-alone racial category, which was what I had hoped to see happen.  Biracial black and white Americans continue to voluntarily identify and be identified by others as black. This is surprising because the efforts of several overlapping multiracial “movements” culminated in the  U.S. Census 2000 allowance for more than one box to be checked for race. In response to that opportunity for new self-identification, 6.9 million respondents, or 2.4% of all respondents, designated themselves as members of “two or more races,” while 16 million, or 5.5 percent, indicated that they were “some other race” (Zack 2001). However, these substantial figures are rarely disaggregated as statistics pertaining to specific racial mixtures.  Based on recent political events and a current unscientific sense of contemporary culture, it’s now safe to say that the black–white distinction is as sharp as it ever has been in the United States. And mixed race, despite more robust acknowledgment, seems to have passed from a possibly viable independent identity into a variable or fluid symbol of not only this or that presumptively pure race, but a symbol of race relations as well. I think that if we carefully examine this symbolic condition of mixed race, we might learn or relearn something about the nature of our ongoing social, racial categories. Such an examination of mixed race and race would be a project of what has come to be accepted as critical race theory.  Maybe these terms should be defined before proceeding further…

…RACE, MIXED RACE, AND CRITICAL RACE THEORY

The term race refers to a system of human typology or a classification scheme in modern Western history that is believed to be based on real and important biological differences among groups. In addition to its presumed, but false, biological foundation, race has a real genealogical foundation that connects the race of an individual with the race of his or her parents and ancestors. However, children have the same race as their parents and ancestors only if those forebears are of the same race. If forebears are of different races, offspring are “mixed.” In the U.S., racial mixture usually results in assignment to the ancestral group of lower “racial” status, a practice known as hypodescent. For example, biracial black and white Americans are classified as black, according to the “one-drop rule” of black racial identity.  This “one drop” has become almost completely metaphorical, since educated people no longer believe, as they did in the nineteenth century, that racial inheritance is a matter of the intergenerational transmission of racial blood types; indeed, it’s unlikely that anyone still knowingly subscribes to pre-Mendelian hereditary theories of this nature. Also, hypodescent is not applied rigorously and literally; for example, few if any believe that one remote black ancestor automatically means that an individual is black. Rather, black racial identity is based largely on how others identify the person, which is in turn based mainly on appearance. Individuals are assumed to be black and likely to identify as black if their appearance conforms to broad expectations of what black people look like. But this rule has never been symmetrical. If a person looks white, but has recent known black ancestry, many may still consider her identification as white to be an instance of “passing,” and passing is generally regarded as a kind of inauthenticity—whatever that may be…

…Overall, the term mixed race refers to a variable characteristic of individuals whose parents or ancestors are of different races. If race lacks a biological foundation as a system of human types, then so does mixed race, which would derive its foundation from that of the races in any given mixture. Culturally, mixed race has been more of a highly variable property of individuals than a stable property of groups, because mixed-race groups do not have the same extended, intra-group shared history as their members’ variable ancestry in presumptively pure racial groups. Self-identified intergenerational, mixed-race groups have nonetheless existed in quasi-isolated communities throughout the U.S., particularly in the mid-Atlantic region. But such groups have remained largely invisible to the broad population, are small in number, and do not have any political clout or distinctive entitlements. These small, intergenerational communities of multiracial Americans are primarily attended to as subjects of specialized study for anthropologists and sociologists (Reginald 2002). By contrast, the multiracial “movements” of the late twentieth century consisted largely of first-generation, mixed-race individuals, who to varying degrees continue to study themselves and their situations, in virtual communities…

…MIXED RACE IDENTITY NOW…

…The dangers of insisting on black and white mixed-race political recognition in a system in which blacks are disadvantaged is that a mixed-race group could act as a buffer between blacks and whites and re-inscribe that disadvantage. It is interesting to note that under apartheid in South Africa, there was not only a robust mixed population known as “colored,” but individuals were able to change their race as their life circumstances changed (Goldberg 1995).  From the perspective of mixed-race individuals, this example may seem as though even South Africa was more liberatory on the grounds of race than the one-drop-rule-governed U.S. (This is not to say that South African coloreds had full civil liberties under apartheid, but only that they were better off than many blacks.)  But from a more broad perspective, in terms of white–black relations, recognition of mixed-race identity, while it may advantage mixed-race individuals and add sophistication to a black and white imaginary of race, does little to dislodge white supremacy overall. The public and political recognition of mixed-race identities could be quite dangerous to white–black race relations overall if the position of blacks remained unchanged (Spencer 1999).  But continued obliviousness about mixed-race identities holds the immediate danger of denying the existence of injustice for some presumptively pure blacks who do not have the advantages of white parentage…

Read or purchase the article here.

The Duty to Miscegenate

University of Michigan
152 pages
2013

Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Philosophy)

In ‘The duty to miscegenate’, I harness John Stuart Mill’s 19th century theory of social freedom to explain and to dismantle contemporary racialised and gendered injustice. In the first chapter—Social stigmatisation: ‘a social tyranny’—I argue that persons racialised-and-gendered-as-black-women were, in the past, unjustly stigmatised by legal penalties against ‘miscegenation‘ and are still, today, unjustly stigmatised by white male avoidance of cross-racial marriage and companionship. In the second chapter—Encounters that count: ‘a foundation for solid friendship’—I argue that we can dismantle this stigmatisation, by engaging in regular and frequent cross-racial commensality with persons racialised-and-gendered-as-black-women. In the third chapter—White right: ‘a right to avoid’—I argue that, although we have a right to avoid commensal encounters with others, we do not have a right to avoid persons we racialise as black. On the contrary, we have a duty to encounter them, on terms of equality and intimacy.

Table of Contents

• DEDICATION
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• LIST OF TABLES
• 1. Social stigmatisation: ‘a social tyranny’
  • The chief mischief of the legal penalties
  • They strengthen the social stigma
• 2. Encounters that count: ‘a foundation for solid friendship’
  • The real remedy for breaking caste is inter-marriage
  • Another plan of action for the abolition of caste is to begin with inter-caste dinners
• 3. White right: ‘a right to avoid’
  • We have a right to avoid it
  • A right to avoid blacks?
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

Read the entire dissertation here.

Irish and white-ish mixed “race” identity and the scopic regime of whiteness

Women’s Studies International Forum
Volume 27, Issue 4, October–November 2004
pages 385-396
DOI: 10.1016/j.wsif.2004.10.007

Angeline D. Morrison
Falmouth College of Arts, Falmouth, Cornwall, United Kingdom

When speaking about the paradoxical “invisibility” of whiteness, I am referring in particular to Richard Dyer’s project to “make whiteness strange”, to hold it up for inspection and to question the tacit association of whiteness with unquestioned normality with the human condition Dyer points out that the unspoken understanding that whiteness is not a “raced” condition has very specific implications for the balance of power. “There is no more powerful position than being ‘just’ human. The claim of power is the claim to speak for the commodity of humanity. Raced people can’t do that—they can only speak for their race. But non-raced people can, for they do not represent the interests of a race” (Dyer, 1997, p. 2). Like blackness, whiteness is not reducible to a matter of simple visual appearance. However, when historical and political circumstances allow the conflation of the so-called “ideals” of whiteness–Enlightenment ideals such as literacy, civilisation, artistic creativity, scientific excellence, power, dignity, assumed superiority and so on—with a particular “race” or skin color (here, “white”), things start getting dangerous. The visual becomes vital, and the optical surface of the “raced” subject is imbued with I hyper-significance that can be very uncomfortable to wear. When this subject is of mixed “race” and thus occupies a range of different possible positions within, without, around and between the binary categories, difficulties can arise.

I use the term “mixed race” mindfully, aware that the term is contested by some, while others warn against its reference to die unscientific non-sense of “race” (Gilroy, 2000). Therefore, for the purposes of this article only, I want to define “mixed race” people as the offspring of one white and one non-white parent. If racialized society relies on the false foundational Logocentric binary “black white”, then it follows that it will taxonomize its subjects accordingly. Sander H. Gilman points out that, “. . .in this view of mankind, the black occupied the antithetical position to the white on the scale of humanity.” (Gilman, 1985, p. 231).

Concentrating on the visual, this article intends to use the figure of the mixed “race” subject to investigate the particular scopic regime of whiteness. I wish to consider some of the things that the dominant scopic regime accords visibility to, and some of those it does not. Clearly, what ends up being seen and the various interpretations the afforded depend largely on cultural registers, power relations, and epistemologies that continually shift the white phenotype of Irish people, for example, was all but “invisible” to the white scopic regime of the 19th Century Britain. The racist caricaturing of the Irish that is now so well documented…

Read or purchase the article here.

Race, Biraciality, and Mixed Race—in Theory

Chapter in: Her Majesty’s Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age

Rowman & Littlefield
288 pages
August 1997
Size: 6 1/4 x 9 1/4
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-8476-8447-2
eBook ISBN: 978-0-585-20172-6
pages 51-71

Lewis R. Gordon, Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy, Director of the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought and Director of the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies
Temple University

“You, who are a doctor,” said I to my [American] interlocutor, “you do not believe, however, that the blood of blacks has some specific qualities?”

He shrugged his shoulders: “There are three blood types,” he responded to me, “which one finds nearly equally in blacks and whites.”

“Well?”

“It is not safe for black blood to circulate in our veins.”

—Jean-Paul Sartre, “Return from the United States”

An African American couple found themselves taking their child, a few months of age, to a physician for an ear infection. Since their regular physician was out, an attending physician took their care. Opening the baby girl’s files, he was caught by some vital information. The charts revealed a diagnosis of “H level” alpha thalassemia, a genetic disease that is known to afflict 2 percent of northeast Asian populations. He looked at the couple. The father of the child, noticing the reticence and awkwardness of the physician, instantly spotted a behavior that he had experienced on many occasions.

“It’s from me,” he said. “She’s got the disease from me.”

“Now, how could she get the disease from you?” the physician asked with some irritation.

“My grandmother is Chinese,” the father explained.

The physician’s face suddenly shifted to an air of both surprise and relief. Then he made another remark. “Whew!” he said. “I was about to say, ‘But—you’re black.'”

The couple was not amused.

Realizing his error, the physician continued. “I mean, I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, I know Hispanics who are also Asians, so why not African Americans?”

Yes. Why not?

The expression “mixed race” has achieved some popularity in contemporary discussions of racial significations in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. It is significant that these three countries are marked by the dominance of an Anglo-cultural standpoint. In other countries, particularly with Spanish, Portuguese, and French influences, the question of racial mixture has enjoyed some specificity and simultaneous plurality. For the Anglos, however, the general matrix has been in terms of “whites” and” all others,” the consequence of which has been the rigid binary of whites and nonwhites. It can easily be shown, however, that the specific designations in Latin and Latin American countries are, for the most part, a dodge and that, ultimately, the primary distinctions focus on being either white or at least not being black.

We find in the contemporary Anglophone context, however, a movement that is not entirely based on the question of racial mixture per se. The current articulation of racial mixture focuses primarily upon the concerns of biracial people. Biracial mixture pertains to a specific group within the general matrix of racial mixing, for a biracial identity can only work once, as it were. If the biracial person has children with, say, a person of a supposedly pure race, the “mixture,” if you will, will be between a biracial “race” and a pure one. But it is unclear what race the child will then designate (a mixture of biraciality and X, perhaps, which means being a new biracial formation?).

To understand both mixed race and its biracial specification and some of the critical race theoretical problems raised by both, we need first to understand both race and racism in contemporary race discourse…

…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…

Read the entire chapter here.

Race, Identity and Citizenship: A Reader

Wiley-Blackwell
June 1999
454 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-631-21021-4
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-631-21022-1

Edited by

Rodolfo D. Torres, Professor of Planning, Policy & Design and Political Science
University of California, Irvine

Louis F. Mirón
University of California, Irvine

Jonathan Xavier Inda, Associate Professor of Latina/Latino Studies and Criticism and Interpretive Theory
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

In recent years, race and ethnicity have been the focus of theoretical, political, and policy debates. This comprehensive and timely reader covers the range of topics that have been at the center of these debates including critical race theory, multiracial feminism, mixed race, whiteness, citizenship and globalization. Contributors include Angela Davis, Stuart Hall, Richard Delgado, Robert Miles, Michael Eric Dyson, Saskia Sassen, Étienne Balibar, Patricia Hill Collins, Renato Rosaldo, Stanley Aronowitz, and Collette Guillaumin.

Table of Contents

• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments/Copyright Information
• Introduction
• Part I: Mapping The Languages of Racism
  • 1. Does “Race” Matter? Transatlantic Perspectives on Racism after “Race Relations” Robert Miles and Rodolfo D. Torres
  • 2. “I Know it’s Not Nice, But. . . ” The Changing Face of “Race” Colette Guillaumin
  • 3. The Contours of Racialization: Structures, Representations and Resistance in the United States Stephen Small
  • 4. Marxism, Racism, and Ethnicity John Solomos and Les Back
  • 5. Postmodernism and the Politics of Racialized Identities Louis F. Mirón
• Part II: Critical Multiracial Feminism
  • 6. Theorizing Difference from Multiracial Feminism Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill
  • 7. Ethnicity, Gender Relations and Multiculturalism Nira Yuval-Davis
  • 8. What’s in a Name? Womanism, Black Feminism, and Beyond Patricia Hill Collins
• Part III: Fashioning Mixed Race
  • 9. The Colorblind Multiracial Dilemma: Racial Categories Reconsidered john a. powell
  • 10. Multiracial Asians: Models of Ethnic Identity Maria P. P. Root
  • 11. Cipherspace: Latino Identity Past and Present J. Jorge Klor de Alva
• Part IV: The Color(s) of Whiteness
  • 12. Establishing the Fact of Whiteness John Hartigan, Jr.
  • 13. Constructions of Whiteness in European and American Anti-Racism Alastair Bonnett
  • 14 The Labor of Whiteness, the Whiteness of Labor, and the Perils of Whitewishing Michael Eric Dyson
  • 15. The Trickster’s Play: Whiteness in the Subordination and Liberation Process Aida Hurtado
• Part V: Cultural Citizenship, Multiculturalism, And The State
  • 16. Citizenship Richard Delgado
  • 17. Cultural Citizenship, Inequality, and Multiculturalism Renato Rosaldo
  • 18. Cultural Citizenship as Subject Making: Immigrants Negotiate Racial and Cultural Boundaries in the United States Aihwa Ong
• Part VI: Locating Class
  • 19. The Site of Class Edna Bonacich
  • 20. Between Nationality and Class Stanley Aronowitz
  • 21. Class Racism Étienne Balibar
• Part VII: Globalized Futures And Racialized Identities
  • 22. Multiculturalism and Flexibility: Some New Directions in Global Capitalism Richard P. Appelbaum
  • 23. Analytic Borderlands: Race, Gender and Representation in the New City Saskia Sassen
  • 24. Globalization, the Racial Divide, and a New Citizenship Michael C. Dawson
• Part VIII: Critical Engagements
  • 25. Interview with Stuart Hall: Culture and Power Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal
  • 26. Angela Y. Davis: Reflections on Race, Class, and Gender in the USA Lisa Lowe
• Index

Walking While Black in the ‘White Gaze’

The New York Times
2013-09-01

George Yancy, Professor of Philosophy
Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

“Man, I almost blew you away!”

Those were the terrifying words of a white police officer — one of those who policed black bodies in low income areas in North Philadelphia in the late 1970s — who caught sight of me carrying the new telescope my mother had just purchased for me.

“I thought you had a weapon,” he said.

The words made me tremble and pause; I felt the sort of bodily stress and deep existential anguish that no teenager should have to endure.

This officer had already inherited those poisonous assumptions and bodily perceptual practices that make up what I call the “white gaze.” He had already come to “see” the black male body as different, deviant, ersatz. He failed to conceive, or perhaps could not conceive, that a black teenage boy living in the Richard Allen Project Homes for very low income families would own a telescope and enjoyed looking at the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn.

A black boy carrying a telescope wasn’t conceivable — unless he had stolen it — given the white racist horizons within which my black body was policed as dangerous. To the officer, I was something (not someone) patently foolish, perhaps monstrous or even fictional. My telescope, for him, was a weapon.

In retrospect, I can see the headlines: “Black Boy Shot and Killed While Searching the Cosmos.”

That was more than 30 years ago. Only last week, our actual headlines were full of reflections on the 1963 March on Washington, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and President Obama’s own speech at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to commemorate it 50 years on. As the many accounts from that long ago day will tell you, much has changed for the better. But some things — those perhaps more deeply embedded in the American psyche — haven’t. In fact, we should recall a speech given by Malcolm X in 1964 in which he said, “For the 20 million of us in America who are of African descent, it is not an American dream; it’s an American nightmare.”…

…The president’s words, perhaps consigned to a long-ago news cycle now, remain powerful: they validate experiences that blacks have undergone in their everyday lives. Obama’s voice resonates with those philosophical voices (Frantz Fanon, for example) that have long attempted to describe the lived interiority of racial experiences. He has also deployed the power of narrative autobiography, which is a significant conceptual tool used insightfully by critical race theorists to discern the clarity and existential and social gravity of what it means to experience white racism. As a black president, he has given voice to the epistemic violence that blacks often face as they are stereotyped and profiled within the context of quotidian social spaces…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Anti-Essentialism and Intersectionality: Tools to Dismantle the Master’s House

Berkeley Women’s Law Journal [now Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice]
Volume 10 (1995)
pages 16-30

Trina Grillo (1948-1996), Professor of Law
University of San Francisco

I am pleased to be here today to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Berkeley Women’s Law Journal (“BWLJ”). From its inception, the BWLJ has devoted itself to giving voice to underrepresented women and has continued this mission even through difficult times. In preparing for this talk I reviewed a number of past volumes of this journal. I was impressed with how often articles published in the BWLJ foreshadowed controversies that were later discussed in more traditional journals.

I want to begin my talk with a quote from the late poet Audre Lorde: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” was asked to speak today about anti-essentialism and intersectionality. I am glad to do so, for I believe both concepts are indispensable tools for dismantling the master’s house. I will begin by briefly describing these concepts to you. I will suggest that it is time to turn inward, to use the tools of intersectionality and anti-essentialism to guide our own academic, political, and spiritual work, and I will give you a few examples of how we might do so.

My thesis today is that sometimes the governing paradigms which have structured all of our lives are so powerful that we can think we are doing progressive work, dismantling the structures of racism and other oppressions, when in fact we are reinforcing the paradigms. These paradigms are so powerful that sometimes we find ourselves unable to talk at all, even or especially about those things closest to our hearts. When I am faced with such uncertainty and find myself unable to speak, anti-essentialism and intersectionality are to me like life preservers. They give me a chance to catch my breath as the waves come crashing over me and they help me sort through my own confusion about what work I should be doing and how I should be doing it.

The basis of intersectionality and anti-essentialism is this:

Each of us in the world sits at the intersection of many categories: She is Latina, woman, short, mother, lesbian, daughter, brown-eyed, long-haired, quick-witted, short-tempered, worker, stubborn. At any one moment in time and in space, some of these categories are central to her being and her ability to act in the world. Others matter not at all. Some categories, such as race, gender, class, and sexual orientation, are important most of the time. Others are rarely important. When something or someone highlights one of her categories and brings it to the fore, she may be a dominant person, an oppressor of others. Other times, even most of the time, she may be oppressed herself. She may take lessons she has learned while in a subordinated status and apply them for good or ill when her dominant categories are highlighted. For example, having been mistreated as a child, she may be either a carefully respectful or an abusive parent.

I am going to talk now about intersectionality and anti-essentialism and will begin by talking about them separately. I believe these two concepts embody what is essentially the same critique, but made from two different starting points. For simplicity’s sake, as I continue I am often going to talk about them together.

INTERSECTIONALITY

Above, I described a single, whole woman. Yet if we turn the traditional tools of legal analysis upon this woman, we find she is someone entirely different. She is fragmented, capable of being only one thing at a time. For example, under a traditional legal approach, when her situation is analyzed as a woman, it is not analyzed as a Latina. She is a mother or a worker, but never both at the same time. Her characteristics are not connected one to the other, instead, they exist separately, suspended in time and space. This fragmenting of identity by legal analysis, a fragmenting entirely at odds with the concrete life of this woman, is the subject of the intersectionality critique.

The intersectionality critique is described succinctly in the title of a book on Black women’s studies: All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave. Kimberlé Crenshaw explodes the discussion of race and gender discrimination in her work on intersectionality. She notes that women of color stand at the intersection of the categories of race and gender, and that their experiences are not simply that of racial oppression plus gender oppression. One case she uses for her analysis says it all: When a group of Black women faced discrimination, they were held to have no legal cause of action because neither white women nor Black men were discriminated against in the same way. Therefore, they were recognized as victims of neither race nor gender discrimination. Makes perfect sense. And, of course, you have all seen the many newspaper articles talking about the progress of “women and Blacks”; Black women are completely lost in this description…

…ANTI-ESSENTIALISM

Essentialism is the notion that there is a single woman’s, or Black person’s, or any other group’s, experience that can be described independently from other aspects of the person—that there is an “essence” to that experience. An essentialist outlook assumes that the experience of being a member of the group under discussion is a stable one, one with a clear meaning, a meaning constant through time, space, and different historical, social, political, and personal contexts…

LESSONS TO BE LEARNED FROM THE ANTI-ESSENTIALISM AND INTERSECTIONALITY CRITIQUES

Now that I have summarized the anti-essentialism and intersectionality critiques of feminist legal theory, I want to talk about at least three lessons they bring to our own work.

Lesson One

The anti-essentialism and intersectionality critiques teach us to look carefully at what is in front of our faces. When things are being described in ways contrary to our sensory experiences, we must pay particular attention. We must look at the evidence of our bodies, and we must believe what our bodies tell us. They teach us to check for the deep, internal discomfort we feel when something is being stated as gospel but does not match our truth. Then they teach us how to spin that feeling out, to analyze it, to accept that it is true but to be able to show why that is so. They also teach us to be brave.

My father was born in Tampa, Florida of Cuban Black parents. Much of his life was spent firmly claiming his place among American Blacks. My mother was the daughter of Italian immigrants. I was born in 1948 and soon thereafter moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. There were four children in my family. At times it seemed to me that we were half the biracial population of the Bay Area. We were stared at wherever we went, although it took me awhile, probably until I was five, to realize that the stares were not always ones of admiration. Of course, we did not define ourselves as biracial then. Instead, we were considered, and considered ourselves, Black, or Negro as we then said. Still, our skin color and our parents’ interracial marriage were always causes for comment. My race and my skin color have been issues that have preoccupied me for a good part of my life, and I see little prospect of this changing anytime soon.

When I began teaching at Hastings Law School in 1977, I knew that I wanted to write about multiraciality. I did a little research, and proceeded to write nothing. At that time there was little interest in the popular culture in that subject, and virtually nothing in the legal literature, so it is easy to see why I gave up on my project. Multiraciality did not seem to matter to anyone but me.

But now I cannot turn on “Oprah” without seeing a segment on multiraciality, right in between the shows on incest and the shows on weight loss. There is a movement (I think a misguided one in the particular form it takes) on the part of some people of mixed race to have a separate census category. We are everywhere, in numbers hard to ignore. But one thing has not changed. No one knows how to talk about us.

I looked at two newspapers yesterday, and saw the racial descriptions of the jurors in the O.J. Simpson trial. One paper said there were “eight Blacks, one Anglo, one Hispanic and two persons of mixed race.”  The other paper said there were eight Blacks, two Hispanics, one Anglo, and one person who identified himself as half white and half American Indian. There were four items about each juror described in the paper: gender, age, occupation, and racial background. From a more complete description of the racial backgrounds of the jurors, I found out that one of the Hispanics was a Hispanic/Black, classified as mixed race by one paper and as Hispanic by another. Interestingly, neither paper classified this juror as Black, although that would be my “first” classification of myself.

So we have no stable conventions for describing multiracial persons, at least none that match what we perceive to be reality. However, that someone is of mixed race is a fact now being noted and thought to be of enough importance to be mentioned separately in a news story.

There have also been hundreds of articles and a number of books on multiraciality written in the past five years. This is an important topic to me, one that affects my life, and the lives of my children every single day. Still, seventeen years after I first decided to write in this area, I am silent. My one, feeble attempt to write about issues of multiraciality was abandoned the first time my tentative musings (which, now that I think of it, were actually put to paper by one of my co-authors, such was (my state of paralysis) were criticized. And I am not alone; I have talked to two multiracial colleagues who have described to me similar experiences.

I explained yesterday to my friend Catharine Wells that I had abandoned my original plan to talk a little bit today about multiraciality. “It is too much,” I said, “to describe anti-essentialism and intersectionality and also get into this other complicated terrain. I feel so unsure about what I think anyway. Besides, there really just isn’t time. They only gave me an hour.” She saw right through my excuses, and convinced me that I would be lacking in courage if I spoke about intersectionality and anti-essentialism and yet was unwilling to speak about the place in my life where these concepts have the most meaning. She also convinced me that my example is a good one for showing the silencing effect of essentialism and the role that an intersectional, anti-essentialist analysis can have in permitting us to talk. She told me that it would be enough to just tell you about the problems I am having figuring this out and that I didn’t have to provide you with any conclusions.

To begin with, we must fully understand that race is not a biological concept, but a social and historical construct. The reason that I grew up considering myself, as we then said, Negro, is that a racist system described me in that way. Most Blacks in the United States are persons of “mixed blood,” if such a thing can be said to exist, and have both white and Black ancestors. If there were such as thing as a biological white, I would be at least half that, and so would many other Blacks. However, the fact that race is an historical and social construct certainly does not mean that it does not exist. Experiences, histories, and communities have all developed around this concept; so if we abandon race, we abandon communities that may have been initially formed as a result of racism but have become something else entirely.

All the scientific literature says that biological races do not exist. Instead, races were created as a mechanism for the oppression of certain groups of people. But once created, they remain. We are then left with these questions: How should we regard people of mixed race? How is it possible to take our experiences seriously without having them turned into a means of separating ourselves from other Blacks or into a means of ranking people of color, with those of mixed race given more power than  other Blacks? (I should say that my focus is on mixtures which include Black because that is the experience with which I am familiar; because the history is different, the issues are surely different for persons of mixed race who are, for example, Asian and white).

If we accept the definition of Black which we have been given—a definition which historically defined anyone with “one drop of Black blood” as Black—we ignore the existence of multiracial people. We ignore people whose experiences may be different from those experiences which have been defined as constituting the Black experience—that is, the “essentialized” Black experience. By so essentializing, we assume that the taxonomy of race proposed by nineteenth-century white supremacists—that human beings can be classified into four races and everyone fits neatly into one slot—is a valid one. On the other hand, if we do classify multiracial people as Black, the potential for group solidarity is much greater. “We are all Black,” we say. “You cannot divide us.”

The move for a “multiracial” category, both on census and other forms, and in terms of how we talk in daily life, is in part an attempt to recognize what is in fact the case—that some people have parents of two races, that even people who have parents of the same race may have other ancestors of a different race. A multiracial category would permit children to claim a racial relationship to both, or all, their parents, rather than being forced to choose. Moreover, even though over the years many Black leaders have been biracial, today some multiracial people, especially those with very light skin or who have been raised only by a white parent, may not feel completely comfortable or accepted in Black groups.

But the move to define people as multiracial has serious risks. How would we distinguish between those who are multiracial because they have one white parent, such as myself, and the general Black population of the United States, many of whom in one way or another have a similar amount of white ancestry? Why would we want to make such a distinction? Echoes of the way people in “colored” categories have been used in other countries—as mediators, enforcers, the secret police—make many Blacks fear that the multiracial movement has to do with establishing a higher category in the social hierarchy for multiracial people than for Blacks. There is a fear that multiracial people want to “get out of” being Black, that it is a new form of passing. The history in this country of colorism—the discrimination even within communities of color against those with darker skins—makes the attempt by multiracial persons to leave the Black category more stinging still.

The multiracial movement is not helped by the fact that some of those pressing most vigorously for a multiracial category are the white mothers of children whose fathers are Black. I went to a conference on multiraciality a few years ago that included time for discussion in small groups. There were a number of white mothers of biracial children in my group. The refrain I heard from these mothers was this: “My child is not Black. My child is golden.” So it is not simply because of paranoia that some members of the multiracial movement are perceived as wanting to dissociate from Blacks. (Other members of the movement, of course, have a completely different set of motivations.) We have to acknowledge that if we count people as mixed race rather than Black when the census is taken, it is going to mean that social services to Black communities will be decreased even further than they have been already.

What does anti-essentialism teach about this situation? Does it help me struggle with my dilemma? Perhaps. The confusion that a biracial child feels does not derive from being classified as Black, but from essentialist notions that being Black is one particular experience, and that this experience is not hers or his. Take for example a family, my family in fact, where one child appears so essentially “Black” that he sees no reason to look further for an identification, and the other is so fair, and so blond, that identity issues for her are a constant struggle. Some of her Black friends are bothered if she presumes to call herself Black and suspicious if she does not. Given the history, this is a perfectly coherent reaction on their part, but it is a hard one for her to deal with. Of course, multiracial people will try to find a place to call home if they cannot be at home being Black.

At the conference I previously mentioned, a Black man chastised those in the group pressing for a multiracial designation. “Black,” he said in a booming voice, opening his arms wide, “is the ocean into which all rivers flow.”

I wonder if it is possible for that to be true. Is it possible to create a Black-identified biracial identity? Can one be biracial or multiracial and also be Black? Or is the historical freight still too great for that to be possible? One thing I am sure of: The fact that a person is biracial is an important piece of who she is. It is something I would find of interest if I were reading her work or listening to her speak. We need a way to say that, a way which does not compromise the community of Black people…

Read the entire article here.

The Stuart Hall Project (2013) (John Akomfrah – Smoking Dogs Films)

darkmatter: in the ruins of imperial culture
General Issue 10 (2013-07-18)
ISSN: 2041-3254

Dhanveer Singh Brar

“With deepest gratitude and respect” – If there is a moment when the pieces of Akomfrah’s The Stuart Hall Project fall into place, it is with this closing note. Gratitude and respect might seem like old fashioned words, pointing to sentiments which are thought to be out of date. They bring to mind images of unashamed acts of deference, of laying prostate (whether physically or intellectually) in front of an elder, but on the flip side there is nothing wrong with paying some dues. There is nothing wrong with acknowledging a debt, when you know how and why that debt has been earned. Gratitude and respect. With deepest gratitude and respect. Akomfrah is reaching for something infinite here, something he knows he owes Hall, but equally that neither he nor Hall would ever have any interest in cutting a deal on. There is a sense in which perhaps the film is clouded by those sentiments. It can be construed as one-eyed in its attempt to mark Hall’s importance to the history of intellectual and political life in this country, but I think such criticism might be missing the point: Hall is the condition of possibility for too many of us to forget what it is we owe him, and there is a danger, in our current moment, that such an act of collective forgetting might already be underway. It is between gratitude and the refusal to turn that gesture into credit, that The Stuart Hall Project goes to work…

Read the entire review here.

imagining hybrid cities

The State
2013-07-25

Tiana Reid

I started this series on crossing and mixing by considering temporality and its hold on how we imagine hybridity. The recent discourse centered on the unshakable ‘browning’ or ‘beiging’ of mostly urban populations in the decades to come offers itself up through the prevailing ‘hybrid futures’ narrative. In The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory, NYU professor Tavia Nyong’o made it clear that his 2009 book was not “yet another attempt to claim mixed-race America as a utopian future that ‘will’ just happen ‘in time,’ as Theodore Tilton held.” And last month, still, a claim against this mixed futurism persisted in my writing for The State as I drew on Lee Edelman to consider the “figural Child” as the ultimate citizen.

What is in the background of this, all of this, but also undergirding it, is the hybrid city. The urban and the cosmopolitan. While ‘hybrid cities’ isn’t necessarily an accepted or used concept at large, a quick Google and Google image search shows a technology-based, almost people-free imaginary. We know, too, that hybrid cities come synonymously with hybrid cars, that is, ‘pure’ innovation and more recently perhaps, the ‘White entrepreneurial guy.’ And, what’s more, they’re Jetsons-esque, a projection in which jokes are made to signify that the future is White.

Here, I’d like to think again about hybrid futures. And, broadly speaking, how race codes the city without falling into what, say, the contested terrain of afrofuturism at large attempts to counter, i.e. that blackness and technology (/future) do not make sense together. The city, more so than the country, is emblematic of everything new. The hybrid future, then, is a decidedly urban one…

Read the entire article here.