Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

When do I use “we”? In a room full of people I do not know, I always search out the ones who fall in the middle, like me, out of some irrational ideal that we belong together. I worry that this is the wrong thing for the child of a mixed marriage to feel. My parents conquered difference, and we would all like to think that sort of accomplishment is something that could be passed down from generation to generation. That’s why we’re all, in theory, so excited by the idea of miscegenation—because if we mix the races, presumably, we create a new generation of people for whom existing racial categories do not exist. I don’t think it’s that easy, though. If you mix black and white, you don’t obliterate those categories; you merely create a third category, a category that demands, for its very existence, an even greater commitment to nuances of racial taxonomy.

Malcolm Gladwell, “Lost in the Middle,” in Half and Half: Writers on Growing Up Biracial and Bicultural, ed. Claudine Chiawei O’Hearn. (New York: Pantheon, 1998), 112.

Marvin Rees’s triumph as mayor defies Bristol’s racist past

Posted in Arts, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United Kingdom on 2016-05-09 21:43Z by Steven

Marvin Rees’s triumph as mayor defies Bristol’s racist past

The Guardian
2016-05-08

Simon Woolley

Source: Marvin Rees

The descendant of enslaved Africans is now running a former slave city. His symbolic victory gives hope – and should not be forgotten

While much has been said, rightly so, about a Muslim now leading London, we must not lose sight of the symbolism and enormous significance of Marvin Rees being elected mayor of Bristol this weekend.

Rees, the working-class son of an English mother and Jamaican father, makes history as the first directly elected city mayor in Europe of African or Caribbean heritage.

And that’s important, because the city of Bristol and its governance cannot effectively be understood without seeing it, in part, through the prism of race…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: Bristol, England, Marvin Rees, Simon Woolley, The Guardian

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Mixed Race Studies

Marvin Rees’s triumph as mayor defies Bristol’s racist past

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