Mixed Race Studies

Raceless Like Me: Students at Harvard Navigate their Way Beyond the Boundaries of Race

The Harvard Crimson
Harvard University
2011-10-13

Zoe A. Y. Weinberg, Crimson Staff Writer

One day last fall, Paula M. Maouyo ’14 sat in front of her laptop in Matthews trying to think of a topic for her Expos paper about racial identity.

When Maouyo was a child, she identified as biracial. Her father is black, originally from Chad and her mother is white and American. But by the time she was nine, she began to move away from a biracial identity.

“For a long time I just didn’t identify,” Maouyo said, though she acknowledges that when most people look at her, they immediately categorize her as black.

She had never articulated her non-identification in concrete terms. That is, until she began brainstorming for her Expos paper.

After floating around ideas and fiddling with labels and words, Maouyo suddenly conceived of a term she felt most accurately captured her own identity: araciality.

“People use apolitical and asexual,” Maouyo observed. “Why not aracial?”…

…THE RACIAL SKEPTIC

“Transcendent identity” was first described by Dr. Kerry Ann Rockquemore, a former sociology professor and author of Beyond Black: Biracial Identity in America. The current working definition of racial transcendence that she offers—and the one that will be used in this article—is the conscious rejection of racial identity altogether. Not “black,” “white,” or “both” —but rather, “none.”

“My journey has taken me past constructions of race, past constructions of mixed race, and into an understanding of human difference that does not include race as a meaningful category,” wrote Rainier Spencer, the founder and director of Afro-American Studies at the University of Nevada, who identifies as racially transcendent.

Spencer grew up in a black neighborhood in Queens in the 60s with a white mother and black father. Over the years, Spencer has identified as everything from Afro-German to New Yorker to academic to baby boomer. It was not until his thirties, when he was a philosophy teacher at a northeastern college, that he began to question racial identity itself.

During the 1990s, debates about the politics of multiracial identity began to emerge in academic circles. According to Spencer, most of the discussion at the time revolved around the relative importance of multiracial versus monoracial identity.

Spencer entered the debate as a racial skeptic. “A lot of the black scholars who are against multiracial identity are very invested in black identity,” Spencer said. “I think all racial identity is bogus, and that makes me kind of unique.”

Race transcendence should not be confused with color-blindness, which advocates ignoring race without confronting the inequality and discrimination it breeds. Color-blindness implies that racism can be solved passively. Racelessness is far more complex, because people who transcend race “are actually aware of how race negatively affects the daily existence of people of color. They have very likely experienced discrimination, yet they respond by understanding those situations as part of a broad societal problem; one in which they are deeply embedded, but not one that leads to their subscription to racial identity,” according to Rockquemore as cited on a website for race transcenders…

…WHO GETS TO BE RACELESS?

A lot of people might claim not to have a race for one reason or another. According to professor Jennifer Hochschild, who teaches “Transformation of the American Racial Order?”, there are three groups of people that might refuse to identify by race: 1) disaffected (probably white) people who believe the world is post-racial and that we should all be color-blind; 2) recent immigrants for whom American racial categories simply do not resonate nor make any sense; and 3) bi-racial or multiracial people who do not identify with any particular racial category…

…White students might also check “none” for other reasons. Sometimes white students will check the “other” box is if they are uncomfortable with the social meaning of whiteness, said Natasha K. Warikoo, an associate professor at the Graduate School of Education who studies race, immigration, and inequality in educational contexts. “It signifies privilege and racial exploitation, a history that some white people are uncomfortable with,” she said. In the blank line, these students might write “Italian-American,” or “Jewish-American,” Warikoo said.

To solve this problem, Harvard could have two sections—one in which you identify for the purpose of statistics and civil rights compliance, and one in which you identify in the way that reflects your personal life. This would allow raceless students (and the perplexed white students) to identify by race, and by whatever else they like…

Read the entire article here.

Fade To Black: Racelessness In The Age of Obama

A. Little Bit of Enlightenment
2009-10-09

Anita Little

The new 21st century epithet of racelessness, which most associate with the positive qualities of a post-race society, can actually be a guise for a much more sinister motivation. The tendency of society to assign the quality of racelessness to only successful African-Americans and other minorities, denotes an underlying belief that a minority who doesn’t let go of his racial identity gives up a chance at success. Racelessness becomes code for “whiteness,” making it the norm that members must abide by to climb the social ladder. Raceless non-identity becomes the normative benchmark by which our society’s hegemonic structure judges racial outsiders. If Barack Obama had marketed himself as the African-American candidate, he would have alienated white voters and potentially lost like so many other black politicians before him who were seen as the “black candidates” such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. In the new era of race and ethnicity precipitated by President Obama’s election, the designation of racelessness to successful African-Americans reflects how America’s hegemonic structure still strives to perpetuate negative stereotypes.

Racelessness is a quickly rising form of cultureless non-identity that allows one to “rise above” the labels of race and be seen as simply human, devoid of the epithets that subject many to stereotypes. President Obama has often been praised for his ability to transcend race and become “raceless,” garnering a broad appeal to diverse demographics. Fordham suggests that academically or professionally successful African-Americans must adopt a “raceless” persona and reject their cultural links in order to achieve social mobility. Success and intellectualism are qualities that are stereotypically not assigned to the black community, so in a form of internalized and structuralized oppression, successful African-American have the title of racelessness forced upon them. These transcendent individuals are allowed to break through barriers and be accepted by the hegemonic society as equals.

The title of racelessness is often a double-edge sword however. The goal of being racially transcendent implies that race is a bog that must be overcome. One would only want to “transcend” their ethnicity if they find the label oppressive. Giving an African-American the title of racelessness can actually be a way to disassociate that person’s accomplishment from their race. Racelessness becomes code for normal and in America, the normative standard is often seen as white. Racelessness becomes the 21st century name for whiteness, a wolf dressed in sheep’s clothing. The very fact that being raceless or racially transcendent is a quality only assigned to minorities, but never whites, shows that whites are perceived as already having this quality. The other races are abnormal and need to conform to the white standard Americanness. Calling President Obama raceless may seem an innocuous claim at first, but it is dissociating him from his accomplishments as a black man. In a hegemonic structure where European Americans have dominated for centuries, achievement and success is a designation reserved for whiteness only. High-achieving minorities defy social expectations. This threatens the white hegemony and in order to maintain the status quo the individual’s race is simply erased. In order words, the black basketball player who also becomes a Rhodes Scholar is suddenly no longer seen as “black-black.” He has crossed over into the realm of racelessness, lest his success defy stereotypes and introduce the dangerous idea that all minorities are capable of such multi-platform success…

Read the entire article here.

Refusing to Identify by Race

The New York Times
2013-07-11

Carlos Hoyt
Andover, Massachusetts

Re “Has ‘Caucasian’ Lost Its Meaning?” (news analysis, Sunday Review, July 7 [2013]):

I recently completed a doctoral study at the Simmons School of Social Work about people who are commonly ascribed to the black/African-American, biracial or multiracial categories, but who do not themselves subscribe to any racial identity.

These race transcenders refuse to self-racialize, while being fully conscious of the fact that they are and have been racialized by others since the Constitution mandated the census, making racialization legal and compulsory beginning in 1790. We have been knotted up in meaningless terms like Caucasian ever since…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Race and ethnicity II: Skin and other intimacies

Progress in Human Geography
Volume 37, Number 4  (August 2013)
pages 578-586
DOI: 10.1177/0309132512465719

Patricia L. Price, Professor of Geography
Florida International University

The intimate turn in geography has centralized approaches to race and ethnicity which foreground bodily encounters. The quirky spatialities of intimacy, involving not just proximities but also distancing and borders, operate in racial and ethnic ‘contact zones’. Skin is one of these, and it is central to an understanding of race and ethnicity as arising through bodily encounters in places. Geographic scholarship emphasizing embodied racial and ethnic topics has highlighted processes of approximation, distancing, and bordering in race and ethnicity as lived events. Set within the intimate turn, this work has the potential to inform geographers and geographic scholarship with respect to criticality, the stickiness of place, and visceral geographies. In addition, the need to elucidate further the relationship between race and ethnicity is underscored.

Read or purchase the article here.