Mixed Race Studies

Critical ‘Mixed Race’?

Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture
Volume 1, Issue 2, 1995
pages 381-395
DOI: 1080/13504630.1995.9959443

Lewis R. Gordon, Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy, Director of the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought and Director of the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies
Temple University

An African-American couple found themselves taking their child, a baby of a few month’s age, to a physician for an ear infection. Since their regular physician was out, an attending physician took their care. Opening the baby girl’s files, he was caught by some vital information. The charts revealed a diagnosis of ‘H level’ alpha thalassemia, a genetic disease that is known to be among two per cent of Northeast Asian populations. He looked at the couple.

The father of the child, noticing the reticence and awkwardness of the physician, instantly spotted a behaviour that he had experienced on many occasions.

‘It’s from me’, he said, ‘She’s got the disease from me’.
‘Now, how could she get the disease from you?’, the physician let out.
‘My grandmother is Chinese’, the father explained.

The physician’s face suddenly shifted to an air of both surprise and relief. Then he made another remark, ‘Whew! I was about to say, ‘But — you’re black’.

Silence.

Realizing his error, the physician continued. ‘I mean, I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, I know Hispanics who are also Asians, so why not African Americans?’

Yeah. Why not?

The expression mixed-race has achieved some vogue in contemporary discussions of racial significations in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. It is significant that these three countries are marked by the dominance of an Anglo cultural standpoint. In other countries, particularly those marked by Spanish, Portuguese, and French influences, the question of racial mixture has enjoyed a great deal of specificity and simultaneous plurality. For the Anglos, however, the general matrix has been in terms of ‘whites’ and ‘all others’, the consequence of which has been the rigid binary of white and non-whites. It can easily be shown, however, that the specific designations in Latin and Latin-American countries are, for the most part, a dodge and that,…

Read or puchase the article here.

Facts of Blackness: Brazil is not Quite the United States… and Racial Politics in Brazil?

Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture
Volume 4, Issue 2, 1998
pages 201-234
DOI: 10.1080/13504639851807

Denise Ferreira Da Silva, Professor in Ethics
Queen Mary University of London

Studies of racial subordination in Brazil usually stress the puzzling co-existence of racial inequality with Brazil’s self-image as a ‘racial democracy’. Frequently, they identify the absence of racial conflict and a clear white-black distinction as explanations for the low level of black political mobilisation. In doing this, these studies (unreflectedly) take the United Sates as a universal model of racial subordination of which Brazilian difference is a mere variation. What seems to escape these analysts is that the Brazilian construction of race was set against the view that ‘racial differences’ identify distinct groups, a view which still prevails in the United States and in sociological constructions of race. Actually, an analysisof writings on Brazilian subjectivity suggests that the texts which write blackness do so by deploying various modern categories of ‘being’ (race, nation, gender, and class) both in the narratives—which have produced blacks as subordinate subjects in modernity and in the texts which aim to foster black emancipation.

October, 1995, After three years living in the United States, during which time I had followed the unfolding of three episodes which placed race at the centre of the political debate (the L.A. riots, O.J. Simpson’s trial and the Million Man March), I was very excited by the timing of my second trip back home. I would have the opportunity to participate in an event which seemed (finally) to place race at the centre of the political debate in Brazil: the 300th anniversary of the death of Zumbi dos Palmares, the last leader of the most lasting (one hundred year) community of runaway slaves in Brazil, Quilombo dos Palmares. Over the past 20 years, the black movement has chosen Zumbi as the symbol of a separate identity and has declared 20 November (the supposed date of his death) as the national day of black consciousness.

In 1995, however, Zumbi was at risk of being captured by the dominant racial discourse, as a national hero—as Palmares reconstructed by academics and politicians as an initial experience of racial democracy in Brazil. Throughout the year, city, state and federal administration promoted several events (conferences, parties, and political activities) to celebrate the third centennial of Zumbi’s death. Black movement organisations, on the other hand, seized the opportunity (once again) to denounce the ‘myth of racial democracy’ and the continuing subordination of blacks in Brazilian society. Excited about the…

Read or purchase the 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.

Institutions, Inculcation, and Black Racial Identity: Pigmentocracy vs. the Rule of Hypodescent

Social Identities
Volume 14, Issue 5 (September 2008)
pages 567-585
DOI: 10.1080/13504630802343390

Richard T. Middleton IV, Associate Professor of Political Science
University of Missouri, St. Louis

This research paper investigates the effect political institutions have on black racial identity. In particular, I study individual inculcation in contexts where political institutions institutionalize either of two forms of racial social structures—a pigmentocracy (the Dominican Republic), or the rule of hypodescent (the US South), and the effect such inculcation has on black racial identity. I sampled 101 respondents from the Dominican Republic and 102 from the state of Mississippi, USA. Consistent with the basic assumptions of my hypotheses, respondents in the Dominican Republic study sites showed a weaker degree of identification with blackness vis—vis something ‘whiter’. Nevertheless, respondents in the Dominican Republic sites demonstrated a stronger identification with blackness than what most conventional observers would have anticipated. Respondents in the Mississippi study sites showed a stronger sense of identification with blackness. Surprisingly, however, Mississippi respondents demonstrated a larger degree of neutrality than expected in their belief of being of a mixed racial heritage rather than just a black African heritage.

Read or purchase the article here.

Multiracial Identity in the Post-Civil Rights Era

Social Identities
Volume 11, Issue 5 (September 2005)
pages 531-549
DOI: 10.1080/13504630500408164

Gino Michael Pellegrini, Adjunct Assistant Professor of English
Pierce College, Woodland Hills, California

This article, which utilizes personal experience as well as other perspectives and theories on race and mixed race, suggests that multiracial identity is a manifestation of recent date that differs from traditional conceptions and descriptions of mixed race that conform to the dichotomous and hierarchical logic of the binary racial system. As delineated in this article, the emergence of multiracial identity is properly understood in the context of the post-civil rights era and has been coextensive with multiculturalism, the proliferation of information technologies, and with the emergence of the multiracial political movement in the 1990s. Further, this article suggests that multiracial identity is also in part a by-product of multicultural American universities of the 1980s and 1990s. That is, multiracial identity has to a certain extent taken shape in reaction to the rigid ethnoracial boundaries and discourses that are imposed on mixed race students in the multicultural academy.

Read or purchase the article here.

Interrogating the Hyphen-Nation: Canadian Multicultural Policy and ‘Mixed Race’ Identities

Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture
Volume 8, Number 1, 2002
pages 67-90

Minelle Mahtani, Associate Professor
Department of Geography & Planning
University Toronto

This paper examines the ways ‘mixed race’ women in Canada contemplate their relationship to national identity. Through qualitative, open-ended interviews, the research demonstrates how some women of ‘mixed race’ contest ideas of the nation as constituted through the policy of multiculturalism in Canada. To challenge the tropes of the national narrative, some women of ‘mixed race’ develop nuanced models of cultural citizenship, illustrating that national identities are formed and transformed in relation to representation. Refusing to be positioned outside the nation, they effectively produce their own meanings of identity by working through their own personally identifed ‘mixed race’ bodies to the national body politic, where some of them see their own bodies as intrinsically ‘multicultural’.  The paper ends by addressing the paradoxes of multiculturalism, emphasising through narratives that the policy produces hierarchical spaces against which some ‘mixed race’ women imaginatively negotiate, contest and challenge perceptions of their racialised and gendered selves.

Read the entire article here.