Mixed Race Studies

As scientists have repeatedly pointed out, the concept of race is fundamentally cultural, not biological. Nevertheless, because some realities of population genetics are unfortunately caught up in the false rhetoric of race, we might have to rely on the construct and acknowledge the biological differences in HLAs in order to save lives.

Black people already have a highly mixed genetic heritage because of the history of involuntary migrations across the world imposed by slavery and colonialism. “As those mixes take place it creates a more complicated HLA type,” much rarer than that of somebody who comes from a single ethnic heritage, says Galen Switzer, a University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine professor. Such diversity in HLA types makes it more difficult even for any two black people to match.

Cici Zhang, “When Your Medical Treatment Depends On Your Race,” The Establishment, April 11, 2018. https://theestablishment.co/when-your-medical-treatment-depends-on-your-race-ef2c24691b78.

When Your Medical Treatment Depends On Your Race

The Establishment
2018-04-11

Cici Zhang

Human red bone marrow Jill Doughtie

Why do minority patients have a much harder time finding a match for bone marrow transplants?

It’s not easy to look for a specific boy among hundreds of first graders, especially when they swarm into lines for cupcakes and cotton candy. On this fall bake-sale day, the cafeteria of Public School 106 in the Parkchester section of the Bronx is buzzing with energy and children’s happy shrieks. A few teachers shout across the hall to keep things from spinning out of control. And when I finally spot 6-year-old Asaya Bullock, he seems to be well in hand.

“Ready for your green soup?” Charline, his mother, takes out a thermos with a Spider-Man design on the side.

The green soup is one of the only three things Asaya has ever been able to eat. He drinks it for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner; he drank it for the whole trip that his family took to the Caribbean to visit his mom’s relatives. Luckily, with broccoli, kale, green beans, and some minced meat, Asaya’s soup is at least healthy — and better than the small bowl of potato chips used as comfort food after his bi-weekly belly infusion. The recurring medical procedure helps keep him alive…

Read the entire article here.

How My White Mother Helped Me Find My Blackness

The Establishment
2016-08-31

Ijeoma Oluo, Editor at Large

The author (left) with her sister, uncle, brother, and mother

“Hold still.”

“Mom, you’re hurting me!”

“I am not. Hold still or your headwrap won’t look right.”

“I don’t want to wear the headwrap. It looks weird. Everyone will laugh at me!”

“What kind of African are you??”

I looked up at my white mom as she tugged on the gele around my head, and tried very hard not to roll my eyes…

Read the entire article here.

My Multiracial Identity Isn’t A Party Trick

The Establishment
2016-06-16

Natasha Diaz

We sat in a diner at 4 a.m. with a stack of chocolate chip pancakes and chicken fingers between us, the only meal that made sense at that time of night. After a while, the food soaked up enough of the alcohol that we could converse somewhat effectively. He looked up at me and smiled, pancakes drooping from his fork. “Babe,” he said, “the guys and I were talking last night, trying to figure out who had hooked up with the most girls of different races. And I won!”

I sat stiffly as he listed off different ethnicities, not attaching a name or even an anecdote to any of these women, as if he was running through ROYGBIV for some elementary school test. When he finished, he took another bite of pancakes and added triumphantly, “We thought no one had hooked up with a mixed girl, but then we realized: Natasha! She’s ­… what was that word for you? Mulatto?”

I took a sip of water, stalling for time to gather my thoughts. I ran through the timeline of our three-week relationship. I was a freshman, newly free from my childhood; he was a senior, well­-liked on campus. Over warm keg beers, he had vowed that he would watch over me. But this wasn’t the first time I had told myself, “He’s just drunk. He means it as a compliment.”

I had found myself making a lot of mental excuses during my first month of college. I’d been justifying the continual inappropriate jokes, invasive questions, and strange obsession with my lack of melanin: How can you be Black when you’re so… white?…

Read the entire article here.

Despite the fact that both Rachel [Dolezal] and Vanessa [Beecroft] seem to have found their “true” identities, I am still searching for where “multicultural” fits within the landscape that is race in America. When I was younger, I had moments of weakness where I allowed racist, ignorant, hurtful behavior to occur around me without repercussion. Speaking out, would mean having to explain myself, and then be questioned and teased for “not really being” who I say I am. I struggle with a permanent guilt for the way my appearance allows me to move through the world so much more easily than my family members, and I am grateful for the constant reminder. As much as I am connected to and proud of my Black and Brazilian heritage, an intense awareness of how I am perceived by everyone around me is part of who I am. It has taken 29 years to get here with far more work to be done. And when these white women proclaim themselves to be spiritually Black, it feels like they’re pouring multiple varieties of artisanal salt (available at the aforementioned, gentrified storefronts) on the wound.

Natasha Diaz, “White People, Stop Saying You’re ‘Black On The Inside’,” The Establishment, August 15, 2016. http://www.theestablishment.co/2016/08/15/white-people-stop-saying-youre-black-on-the-inside/.

White People, Stop Saying You’re ‘Black On The Inside’

The Establishment
2016-08-15

Natasha Diaz

White and Wrong

White people are consistent; I’ll give them that. They take Black culture as the blueprint for their fashion, entertainment, music, and new hip terms to enhance their Urban Dictionary posts. They colonize neighborhoods, forcing out people who have lived there for generations, stripping the area of culture, and filling it with ridiculous storefronts that specialize in multiple varieties of a single condiment that could easily be made at home. Just when you thought they couldn’t take any more, they’ll figure out a way to snatch even the intangible away. Take #BlackLivesMatter, a slogan built to anchor a human rights movement, stolen to protect Smurfs. (Presumably that’s what “Blue Lives Matter” is about, since otherwise it makes no goddamn sense.) Usually, white people want everything Black, except to actually be Black. That is, until Friday, June 12th, 2015, when Rachel Dolezal and her circus full of weave and spray tan came marching out into the public eye.

Everyone I knew emailed to tell me about Dolezal. As a woman of mixed race that inadvertently passes as white, I clearly needed to be in the know. A few idiots even reached out to say that they “finally understood now” where I was coming from in explaining my racial background. Let’s have a moment of silence for those poor unfortunate souls, now eternally “unfriended” in all senses of the term—R.I.P. But none of my friends’ and ex-friends’ responses were as offensive as Dolezal’s spurious claim to be Black…

Read the entire article here.

Why I Cut My Racist In-Laws Out Of My Life

The Establishment
2016-08-02

TaLynn Kel

I won’t lie and say that I never had issues with the demographics of my mixed-race marriage. I definitely did. I worried about what my mom would think, and what my dad would say were he alive. I worried about what his parents thought. I worried about how the world would treat us.

I still worry.

After all, 2016 has all the hallmarks of an impending racial schism, and interracial couples are straddling a fence that may not be tenable.

When I entered my own relationship, I told myself that my significant other (S.O.) was different. That he wasn’t with me because of some fetish. That he loved me, all of me. That my brown skin didn’t matter to him. Over time came the revelations of his racism. I shouldn’t actually call them revelations, as they were more a matter of me acknowledging the truth. I repeatedly pulled the veil over my eyes and told myself that love was enough. Over and over again, I’d feel this buildup of dread as time would reveal some other facet of his racism. Then we’d talk. Then we’d fight. Then we’d talk some more. It is painful and confusing to have someone love you, cherish you, support you, and then wound you with their inability to accept the whole of you. But how our love and communication about racism evolved is another story…

Read the entire article here.

For a long time, I gave white people the benefit of the doubt. I told myself that they didn’t know what they were doing. They were ignorant. If only we explained it to them, helped them relate, then they’d understand. Over the past three years I’ve seen explanation after explanation and still people deny racism. They deny profiling. They deny persecution of Black people. They deny and when they can’t deny, they lie. It was in the past six months that I finally accepted that all of this is 100% deliberate, including the “ignorance.” It is willful. It is a choice.

My denial of this was the only thing that made me feel slightly safe in this world. It was what helped me stay optimistic about the future and aided me in giving white people the benefit of the doubt. I don’t give them the benefit of the doubt anymore. Now I just understand that if they aren’t challenging racism, they support it. I can no longer call my husband’s racism unconscious. It was unchallenged. Now we both live with the challenge of what that means and how he needs to continue to change and grow.

TaLynn Kel, “The Danger Of Unchallenged Racism In Interracial Relationships,” The Establishment, July 18, 2016. http://www.theestablishment.co/2016/07/18/the-danger-of-unchallenged-racism-in-interracial-relationships/.

The Danger Of Unchallenged Racism In Interracial Relationships

The Establishment
2016-07-18

TaLynn Kel

It shouldn’t surprise me that interracial relationships are here to stay, considering that I’m in one. Still, I worry about the people in them. When I started dating “Kevin,” I was concerned about the demographics of the relationship. I worried about how it would play out with our families and friends, the rest of the world.

The one thing I didn’t really understand was how it would play out between us.

So I wrote about it. I wrote about how I’d desensitized myself to a lot of casual racism in my life as a survival tactic. I wrote about how I’d internalized anti-Blackness. Then I wrote about retuning myself to hear the anti-Blackness in my relationship, and subsequently having to address it with my white spouse before we ruined our marriage…

Read the entire article here.

Blackness cannot be taken away from us. Biraciality cannot be taken away from us. They exist as tangibly as our skin, made from Europe and Africa. We are the colonizer and the colonized. We are the oppressor and the oppressed. We bleed for our brothers and sisters. We carry on our backs the weight of what one half of us did to the other. We slip easily into white spheres, taking notes and taking names while nodding our European heads.

Shannon Luders-Manuel, “Can Biracial Activists Speak To Black Issues?,” The Establishment, July 6, 2016. http://www.theestablishment.co/2016/07/06/can-biracial-activists-speak-to-black-issues-jesse-williams-bet/.