Mixed Race Studies

Black Is a Multiracial Country

The Atlantic
2011-02-15

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Senior Editor

Tami [Tamara Winfrey Harris] finds out she’s 30 percent white. This changes nothing:

So, now, after discovering that I am 70 percent sub-Saharan African with cultural ties to Balanta and Fula peoples in Guinea-Bissau, the Mende people in Sierra Leone, and the Mandinka people in Senegal… that I am part of Haplogroup L1b, one of the oldest female lineages on Earth… and that I am also 30 percent European…Who am I now?

Well… the same person I was before. I am a black American woman with all the rich, cultural history that implies. Thirty percent European biogeographical ancestry (likely derived through oppression and sexual violence), doesn’t change my identity. I don’t think 60 percent European ancestry would change my identity. I am a black American—my culture is my culture. I would also add that learning more about my African roots doesn’t make me Senegalese or Fula or Mende. I am a black American—my culture is my culture.

I’ve been thinking about my response to the whole beiging of America story, and part of it is premised on the arguments, but I think another part (and perhaps the deepest part) is premised on my own understanding of identity. I haven’t been tested, but I recently “discovered” that some generations back I also had “white” ancestors. My response was basically the same as Tami’s—I’m black…

…The point here is that when we discuss a “beiging of America” as though it’s new, it really ignores the fact that beige people are as old this country. But sometime in the 17th century, for rather embarrassing reasons, we decided to call them “black.” Therein is the diabolical lesson of American racism. Prejudice is arbitrary. There are no fixed, natural rules that say who is in and who is out. As soon as the people change, given a good reason, “race” and “racism” change with it…

Read the entire article here.

Race, Forgetting, and the Law

The Atlantic
2010-07-30

Sara Mayeux

Peggy Pascoe’s What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America is a tour-de-force of archival research, bringing to light countless criminal prosecutions, civil cases, and bureaucratic decisions through which miscegenation laws were enforced not just in the South but throughout the nation; and not just in the deep past, but well into my parents’ lifetimes; and not just between blacks and whites but between blacks and whites and Japanese and Filipinos and Mexicans….. the list could go on. The book spans the 1860s through the 1960s, with a focus on the less-well-known story of race-based marriage laws in the Western states, including California.

Throughout, Pascoe is attentive not just to ideologies of race but also to ideologies of gender, and the complex interactions between them. This history is not, she insists, simple, and “interracial couples should be relieved of the burden of having to stand as one-dimensional heroes and heroines.” Many, like the now-famous Lovings, wanted mostly to be left alone. “Mr. Cohen,” Richard Loving told his Supreme Court advocate, “tell the Court I love my wife, and it is just unfair that I can’t live with her in Virginia.”

One of Pascoe’s themes is the role that forgetting plays in the law. In the years immediately following the Civil War, some state courts had upheld interracial marriages (typically in cases involving a white husband whose privileges and property rights the courts wanted to protect), and some states had repealed their antebellum anti-miscegenation laws. But this was all quickly forgotten. After legislators had reinstated the laws and judges had overturned or simply abandoned the earlier rulings, bans on interracial marriage came to seem, to almost everyone, “natural” and “traditional,” the way it had always been…

Read the entire review here.

Miscegenation Ball

The Atlantic
2011-02-01

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Senior Editor

Reporters should stop writing these beiging of America stories, and listen to Jamelle Boiue:

The great majority of intermarriages take place between Hispanics, Asians and whites. If there is a great population of multiracial people, it’s almost certain that they will be some combination of Hispanic and white, or Asian and white. Undoubtedly, some of these people will “become” white in our racial discourse. To paraphrase myself, by 2050 or so, we’ll have a large population of white people with Latino or Asian last names, and a cultural understanding similar to the descendants of ethnic European immigrants.

Of course, the American racial landscape goes beyond white/black/Latino/Asian. Which is why it’s important to understand the significance of a black/non-black divide. On nearly every measure—from income and education to housing and health—the distance between blacks and everyone else is large and enduring. Upwardly mobile immigrant groups have always counterpoised themselves against the descendants of slaves in an effort to attain the privileges of whiteness. This is a simplified analysis, but my guess is that the dynamic will remain, with a few alternations. Some ethnic immigrants may never “become” white, but since blackness retains this social stigma, it’s very likely we’ll understand them as non-black, which in practice, is the same.

This is a depressing perspective. But it’s not only the likely truth about our future, it’s the truth about our past. The first thing to understand is that race, as we know it, is an invention and a re-invention. You need not go back but a century to see people referring to the “Irish Race”  or the “Italian Race.”  or the “Hebrew Race.” Indeed, by the standards of the 19th century racialism, today’s “white people” are an unholy, mongrel mix.

And so it has long been with “blacks,” an ethnic group whose members range in appearance from Beyoncé and Charlie Rangel to Yaphet Kotto and India Arie. I love my family. But the photos from our Christmas Eve dinners immediately reveal that the notion that we’re all of the same “race” is not so much a statement of phenotype, but of culture and sociology. It should not be forgotten that both America’s president and First Lady have “white” ancestry.

Well-meaning neophytes often suggest that if people of different “races” screwed each other, we’d all look the same, and our problems would disappear. Unfortunately, such magical thinking underestimates the abiding complexity of human thought.In fact people of different “races,” have been screwing for over two millenia. Our response—over the past 500 years—has been to invent more races…

Read the entire article here.