Mixed Race Studies

Indigenous Giles stands by Abbott

NT News
Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia
2012-11-15

Nigel Adlam

TERRITORY indigenous politician Adam Giles has refused to condemn Tony Abbott.

Mr Abbott said Alison Anderson was an “authentic representative” of ancient Central Australian culture but mixed-race MP Ken Wyatt was “not a man of culture”.
 
Mr Giles also refused to criticise the Coalition leader for not including him in a list of the NT’s Aboriginal Members of the Legislative Assembly…
 
But Mr Giles did warn that Aboriginality was a “sensitive subject”.
 
“Sometimes the smallest word can get the hairs on your back going,” he said.
 
Mr Abbott said he wanted to increase indigenous representation in the national parliament.

But he seemed to blunder into the “who’s an Aborigine?” minefield when he then made the comparison with Mr Wyatt – calling him an “urban Aboriginal”.
 
Mr Abbott’s office yesterday said he had not been implying Mr Wyatt was not indigenous…
 
Mr Giles said he wouldn’t get involved in the argument about “who is more authentic”.
 
“It’s abhorrent,” he said.
 
“All indigenous people know who they are.”
 
In a seeming reference to the difference between mixed-race people and full-blooded Aborigines, the Transport Minister said: “I know how many indigenous Australians have a hole in their heart in wanting for cultural enrichment…
 
Read the entire article here.

For most of my life, I primarily identified as biracial, multiracial, or mixed, but over the last year, where I’ve encountered more racism and privilege than I have in the 40-something previous years—and that includes 18 years in Virginia—I notice that I’m more likely to identify as Black. This jives with my own dissertation findings that biracial individuals identify as how they’re treated, not how they see themselves.

Johanna Workman, Facebook Post, November 14, 2012. http://www.facebook.com/#!/johanna.workman.96/posts/4746274822162.

“I’m not black,” Joyce said. “I’m multiracial.” Then she started telling me about her father, who happened to be Italian and was the sweetest man in the world; and her mother who happened to be part African and part French and part Native American and part something else. “Why should I have to choose between them?” she asked me. Her voice cracked, and I thought she was going to cry.  “It’s not white people who are making me choose. Maybe it used to be that way, but now they’re willing to treat me like a person. No—it’s black people who always have to make everything racial. They’re the ones making me choose.  They’re the ones who are telling me I can’t be who I am…”

“They, they, they.  That was the problem with people like Joyce.  They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people.  It wasn’t a matter of conscious choice, necessarily, just a matter of gravitational pull, the way integration always worked, a one-way street.  The minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around.  Only white culture could be neutral and objective.  Only white culture could be nonracial, willing to adopt the occasion exotic into its ranks.  Only white culture had individuals.  And, we the half-breeds and college-degreed, take a survey of the situation and think to ourselves, Why should we get lumped in with the losers if we don’t have to?  We become only so grateful to lose ourselves in the crowd, America’s happy, faceless marketplace; and we’re never so outraged as when a cabbie drives past us or the woman in the elevator clutches her purse, not so much because we’re bothered by the fact that such indignities are what less fortunate coloreds have to put up with every single day of their lives—although that’s what we tell ourselves—but because we’re wearing a Brooks Brothers suite and speak impeccable English and yet somehow have somehow been mistaken for an ordinary nigger.”

Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1995), 99-100.

What is most disturbing about the paradoxical use of race is the effect it may have on the trajectory of ongoing human genetic variation research. By making the moral argument that race-based therapeutics address injustice in health care, and at the same time maintaining that genetics research will ultimately eliminate the need for racial categories, racialization is allowed to proceed unchallenged despite its inherent contradictory claims that race is both biologically meaningful and meaningless. Rather than serving as a way station, the use of race is allowed to become more fully embedded in the production of scientific knowledge and medical practice.

Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, “Racializing Drug Design: Implications of Pharmacogenomics for Health Disparities,” American Journal of Public Health, Volume 95, Number 12 (December 2005): 2137. http://dx.doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2005.068676.

Strange Fruit: Dr. Yaba Blay’s (1)ne Drop Project; Director Kenny Leon

WFPL 89.3 FM
Louisville, Kentucky
2012-11-03

Laura Ellis, Producer

Who is black? That’s the question the (1)ne Drop Project seeks to answer. The project, created by Dr. Yaba Blay, features photographs of people who identify as black, African-American, biracial, and other identities—but whose physical appearances may provoke curiosity, or even disbelief, in strangers. Dr. Blay will appear on CNN’s Black in America 5 to talk about what it means to be black. But this week she made some time to talk to us about her work…

Listen to the interview here (00:38.42). (The interview with Dr. Blay begins at 00:14:54 and ends at 00:26:01).