Mixed Race Studies

Blood Simple: The politics of miscegenation

Slate Magazine
1996-08-22

Eric Liu

The “Negro problem,” wrote Norman Podhoretz in 1963, would not be solved unless color itself disappeared: “and that means not integration, it means assimilation, it means—let the brutal word come out—miscegenation.” Coming after a lengthy confession of his tortured feelings toward blacks—and coming at a time when 19 states still had anti-miscegenation statutes on the books—Podhoretz’s call for a “wholesale merging of the two races” seemed not just bold but desperate. Politics had failed us, he was conceding; now we could find hope only in the unlikely prospect of intermarriage.

Podhoretz’s famous essay was regarded as bizarre at the time, but 33 years later, it seems like prophecy. We are indeed intermarrying today, in unprecedented numbers. Between 1970 and 1992, the number of mixed-race marriages quadrupled. Black-white unions now represent 12 percent of all marriages involving at least one black, up from 2.6 percent in 1970. Twelve percent of Asian men and 25 percent of Asian women are marrying non-Asians. Fully a quarter of married U.S.-born Latinos in Los Angeles have non-Latino spouses. We are mixing our genes with such abandon that the Census Bureau is now considering whether to add a new “multiracial” category to the census in the year 2000. This orgy of miscegenation has not yet brought the racial harmony for which Podhoretz longed. But recent publicity about the intermarriage figures has stirred hope once again that our racial problems might be dissolving in the gene pool…

…Race, you see, is a fiction. As a matter of biology, it has no basis. Genetic variations within any race far exceed the variations between the races, and the genetic similarities among the races swamp both. The power of race, however, derives not from its pseudoscientific markings but from its cultural trappings. It is as an ideology that race matters, indeed matters so much that the biologists’ protestations fall away like Copernican claims in the age of Ptolemy. So the question, as always, is whether it is possible to break that awful circle in which myth and morphology perpetually reinforce one another…

…One possibility is that all multiracials, over time, will find themselves the intermediate race, a new middleman minority, less stigmatized than “pure” blacks (however defined) but less acceptable than “pure” whites. Their presence, like that of the “coloreds” in old South Africa, wouldn’t subvert racialism; it would reinforce it, by fleshing out the black-white caste system. Again, however, the sheer diversity of the multiracials might militate against this kind of stratification.

Yet this same diversity makes it possible that multiracials will replicate within their ranks the “white-makes-right” mentality that prevails all around them. Thus we might expect a hierarchy of multiracials to take hold, in which a mixed child with white blood would be the social better of a mixed child without such blood. In this scenario, multiracials wouldn’t be a distinct group—they would just be distributed across a continuum of color.

Sociologist Pierre van den Berghe argues that such a continuum is preferable to a simple black-white dichotomy. Brazilians, for instance, with their mestizo consciousness and their many gradations of tipo, or “type,” behold with disdain our crude bifurcation of race. Yet no amount of baloney-slicing changes the fact that in Brazil, whitening remains the ideal. It is still better for a woman to be a branca (light skin, hair without tight curls, thin lips, narrow nose) than a morena (tan skin, wavy hair, thicker lips, broader nose); and better to be a morena than a mulata (darker skin, tightly curled hair). Subverting racial labels is not the same as subverting racism.

Still another possibility is that whites will do to multiracials what the Democrats or Republicans have traditionally done to third-party movements: absorb their most “desirable” elements and leave the rest on the fringe. It’s quite possible, as Harvard Professor Mary Waters suggests, that the ranks of the white will simply expand to engulf the “lighter” or more “culturally white” of the multiracials. The Asian American experience may offer a precedent: As growing numbers of Asian Americans have entered the mainstream over the last decade, it is increasingly said—sometimes with pride, sometimes with scorn—that they are “becoming white.”…

…These cautionary scenarios demonstrate that our problem is not just “race” in the abstract. Our problem is the idea of the “white race” in particular. Scholar Douglas Besharov may be right when he calls multiracial kids “the best hope for the future of American race relations.” But even as a “multiracial” category blurs the color line, it can reaffirm the primacy of whiteness. Whether our focus is interracial adoption or mixed marriages or class-climbing, so long as we speak of whiteness as a norm, no amount of census reshuffling will truly matter…

Read the entire article here.

“One of the things that interested me in the last campaign, was the byplay having to do with Obama’s racial origins. It struck me that the press and the public generally reserve the ‘mixed race’ label for the offspring of racially mixed marriages. But there is a paradox here. Obama, half black and half white, is, genetically speaking, not much whiter than I am, even though my nearest white forebears were Virginia slave owners who lived and died in the 19th century. Similarly, there are people who think of themselves as black who are, genetically speaking, 70 percent white or more.”…

Brent Staples, quoted in “Up Front: Brent Staples,” The New York Times, September 2, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/books/review/up-front-brent-staples.html.

Up Front: Brent Staples

Sunday Book Review
The New York Times
2011-09-02

The Editors

Brent Staples, who reviews Randall Kennedy’s “Persist­ence of the Color Line” in this issue, is working on a history of mixed-race identity in the United States. “One of the things that interested me in the last campaign,” Staples wrote in an e-mail, “was the byplay having to do with Obama’s racial origins. It struck me that the press and the public generally reserve the ‘mixed race’ label for the offspring of racially mixed marriages. But there is a paradox here. Obama, half black and half white, is, genetically speaking, not much whiter than I am, even though my nearest white forebears were Virginia slave owners who lived and died in the 19th century. Similarly, there are people who think of themselves as black who are, genetically speaking, 70 percent white or more.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Too Black, Too White Presidency

The New York Times
2011-09-02

Brent Staples

Randall Kennedy, The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency, New York: Pantheon Books, 2011. 322 pp.

The next time you see Barack Obama gliding into a White House press conference, take note of that jazzy walk. It is a dead ringer for the strut that was the bearing of choice among ­inner-city cool guys in the 1960s, when Barry Obama was still a tyke growing up in the exotic precincts of Hawaii and Indonesia. The Obama glide represents his embrace of a black aesthetic that was not his by circumstance of birth. It speaks on an intimate frequency to African-­American men, who have been smiling in recognition and rating it for style ever since he stepped into the national spotlight. President Obama is acutely aware of how to deploy the physical self to excellent effect. If we looked back closely at 2008, we would no doubt notice him amping up the glide for black audiences and dialing it back elsewhere…

…The messianic glow that surrounded Obama’s candidacy—Kennedy and others call it “Obamamania”—precluded closer scrutiny of his pronouncements, especially those having to do with race. The widely held notion that the now-famous race speech, “A More Perfect Union,” ranked with the Gettysburg Address or “I Have a Dream” strikes Kennedy as delusional. The speech, he writes, was little more than a carefully calibrated attempt to defuse the public relations crisis precipitated by the Wright affair. Far from frank, it understated the extent of the country’s racial divisions and sought to blame blacks and whites equally for them, when in fact, Kennedy writes, “black America and white America are not equally culpable. White America enslaved and Jim Crowed black America (not the other way around).” The speech was in keeping with the candidate’s wildly successful race strategy, which involved making white voters feel better about themselves whenever possible.

The cornerstone essay, “Obama Courts Black America,” is a breath of fresh air on many counts, not least of all because it offers a fully realized portrait of the black political opinion—left, right, center, high and low—that was brought to bear during the campaign. This is the most comprehensive document I’ve yet read on the near street fight that erupted over the question of how Obama should identify himself racially. There were those who viewed him as “too white” to be legitimately seen as black; those who had no problem with his origins; those who viewed the attempt to portray him as “mixed race” as a way of trying to “whiten” him for popular consumption; and those who accused Obama of throwing his white mother under the bus when it became clear that he regarded himself as African-American…

Read the entire article here.

SOCI W 3277x: Post-Racial America?

Barnard College, Columbia University
Fall 2011

Alondra Nelson, Associate Professor of Sociology

What is race? Is the US a post-racial society? Is such a society desirable? Is a post-racial society necessarily a just and egalitarian one? We consider these questions from ethnographic, historical, and theoretical perspectives. Topics discussed include intersectionality, multiracial identity, colorism, genetics, and the race and/or class debate.

For more information, click here.

“Are You Black or Are You Jewish?”: The New Identity Challenge

Lilith Magazine
Fall 1996
pages 21-29

Sarah Blustain

Two or three times a week, on the streets of San Francisco, complete strangers walk up to Lisa Feldstein and I ask, “What are you?”

She’s not Indian, South American, Puerto Rican or—her favorite suggestion—French. The child of a black Christian woman and a white Jewish man from an Orthodox family, she usually gives them a straight answer. But for Lisa, and the estimated thousands of other biracial children of black-Jewish origin, the answers are not so simple.

A large segment of this biracial population was born into the liberalism of the 1960s, whose adherents hoped to achieve, by activism and example, an America in which race and religion would invite no bias. They have not succeeded. Indeed, in the subsequent three decades, the ideal has shifted more than once away from color-blindness toward racial and ethnic identification—stranding these black-Jewish offspring in hostile territory.

From all over the country, we found individuals willing, even eager, to describe their lifelong struggles to define themselves. Often, and movingly, they report childhoods spent in confusion, and adulthoods spent negotiating die polarized alliances of their birth.

But at this moment in America, they also find themselves with another choice. It is a choice evolving into a national grassroots movement of “multiracial pride,” an attempt to assert all parts of the self as equally valid. They have organized nationally to add a “multiracial” category to the year 2,000 census—their option in the last census was “other”—and political and cultural groups have begun operating both online and face-to-face in cities throughout the country. A retreat for multiracial Jewish families is being planned for November at the Jewish Retreat Center in Falls Village, Connecticut; and, in the company of black Jews by descent (Ethiopian), adoption, or conversion, they formed last year the Alliance of Black Jews. Organizer Robin Washington, the son of a Jewish woman and a black man, says of his own identification: “[I’m] one hundred percent of both.”

These individuals defy the dictates of history, politics and simple appearance, and their stories illuminate the fracturing biases of a society that is not ready for them. But even as they demand recognition, the question arises: Does the multiracial movement add yet another allegiance to the list demanded by their social and political communities; or, in an increasingly multiracial country, does “their very existence,” as one observer suggested, “change society”?…

Read the entire article here.

The Consequence of Race Mixture: Racialised Barriers and the Politics of Desire

Social Identities
Volume 9, Issue 2 (2003)
pages 241-275
DOI: 10.1080/1350463032000101588

Jared Sexton, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Film & Media Studies
University of California, Irvine

The political… is not in itself stable, but is rather conditioned by mutability. Writ large for criticism, this means that a political criticism must not take its object for granted: in a specific sense, the object is not there in the first place, for its condition is that it is marked by an interior historicity which subjects it to constant modification, constant shifting. The proper ‘object’ of the critic who is aware of the materiality of history is, paradoxically, an object conditioned not by its appearance relative to a covert essence, but rather an object conditioned precisely by its temporal disappearance or ‘immaterialization’.

Thomas Docherty, 1996

Reality is not composed of things-in-themselves or things-behind-phenomena, but things-in-phenomena. Because phenomena constitute a non-dualistic whole, it makes no sense to talk about independently existing things as somehow behind or as the causes of phenomena … The referent is… a phenomenon.

Karen Barad, 1998

These epigraphs should be considered heretical to the project of the contemporary multiracial movement in the United States Insofar as its proponents and intellectuals speak of the ‘the end(s) of race’, the concept of multiraciality prides itself on the trouble it supposedly causes to the white supremacist rage for order, that is, its ostensible violation of racial discipline and its alleged threat to spurious notions of racial purity. The multiracial, as it were, cannot be fixed in place; by definition, it eludes the capture of a pernicious schema of racial classification. Nevertheless, this reputed disturbance of the colour line bears a cost.

A self that is internally heterogeneous beyond repair or resolution becomes a candidate for pathology in a society where the integration of self is taken to be necessary for mental health. (Alcoff, 1995, p. 261)

The multiracial is, then, fundamentally convoluted—essentially difficult and complicated without end—yet the seemingly inevitable link between such radical ‘otherness’ (other even to itself) and the pathology of disintegration is, in fact, an effect of the labour of articulation. That is to say, the relation between the terms can be re-inscribed in a gesture of more thoroughgoing…

Read or purchase the article here.

Emory and CNN Launch Public Dialogue Series

The Emory Wheel
2011-09-02

Amanda Serfozo

Emory University hosted an inaugural event in partnership with CNN on Wednesday evening that aims to facilitate discourse related to the results of the 2010 Census and its reflection of new population trends in America.
 
CNN Dialogues—an ongoing colloquium with panels scheduled throughout October, November and December—is organized in partnership with Emory University, the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference, and the National Center for Civil and Human Rights. Panelists discussed how popular culture, urban studies and sociology explores the identities behind the 2010 U.S. Census and how people live.
 
Panelists included Heidi W. Durrow, author of the novel The Girl Who Fell From the Sky; Edward James Olmos, actor and activist; Yul Kwon, the host of PBS’s “America Revealed”; Kris Marsh, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Maryland at College Park; and Dana White, Goodrich C. White professor of Urban Studies at Emory University…

…Panelists discussed the U.S. Census, which the government administers each decade and is federally mandated by the Constitution.

It serves not only as a population marker used to reapportion electoral seats, but also to reassess state funding…
 
Durrow addressed the recent argument over having a one “box” limit for the race category on the Census form, to a multi-choice option for citizens with multiple ethnicities.
 
“As someone with a Danish mother and an African-American father, I struggled with my [Census form] selection,” she said. “I understand that the Census is not exactly the place for self-identification. It’s about reapportionment and money, but it’s also important to know that there’s an evolving mix occurring.”
 
Adding to Durrow’s point, Marsh acknowledged the differences in inner and outer identity in standardized Census data collection.

“I believe that there are two Americas today,” Marsh said. “There’s how we selectively self-identify—for instance, I could claim I’m a white woman all day—and then there’s how the outside world identifies us, where I would be more apt to be seen as a black woman.”…

Read the entire article here.

“A Race of Mules”: Mixed-Bloods in Western American Fiction

The Canadian Journal of Native Studies
Volume 15, Number 1 (1995)
ISSN  0715-3244
pages 61-74

Brian Hubner

The regional literature of the American west includes a wide variety of characters. One character is hard to find, however: the Métis or mixed blood, for these novels lack appropriate literary space within their structure for Métis. As a result Métis, when they do appear, are forced to choose between either White or Indian worlds.

Read the entire article here.