Mixed Race Studies

I’m Middle Eastern And White, And Those Are Not The Same Thing

xoJane
2015-06-08

Erica Pishdadian

It’s time to stop the confusion and give Middle Eastern and North African people our own racial classification.

I recently moved to New York City, and in between my two favorite hobbies (climbing up to my fifth floor apartment and sobbing over the state of my post-broker-fee bank account), I’ve been filling out a lot of job applications.

Agonizing over my resume and writing endless cover letters is time-consuming, but the most annoying part of the application process for me has nothing to do with trying to fit why I’m useful into a few short paragraphs.

I’m most aggravated by one of the simplest parts of the application: the “Please Select Your Race” portion.

My father is Iranian, and my mother is a mix of Western European. According to the Census definitions, I’m white. And that’s true; I am. But I’m only half white, because Middle Eastern and white are not the same thing.

The United States Census Bureau’s definition of white is “a person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.”

The first time I remember filling in a bubble for this question, I was in elementary school. I had to ask my teacher which races I counted as, and when she told me, all I could think about was how much darker I was than the kids around me. I’m visibly Middle Eastern, and while I’m not particularly dark-skinned, I’m not really white either…

Read the entire article here.

I Became So Exhausted With Proving My South Asian Identity That I Started to Ignore It

xoJane
2015-02-24

Anjali Patel

The rules of miscegenation were set long before I came along, and my self-determination to “be myself” was not going to change it.

A couple of years ago, I was at a rooftop party in New York with some of my cousins. I was too young to drink and too shy to mingle, so I hung around awkwardly while they chatted with an attractive blond man who appeared to be in his late 20s. They tag teamed as he pried them with exoticizing questions about their “home country,” flashing his white teeth in jovial approval when they played along with his racist quips. They seemed to be having a good time amusing one another, so I was shocked when pointed his glass in my direction to acknowledge me.

“And what about you?” he said. “You don’t even look Indian.”

Before I could open my mouth, one of my cousins chimed in, “Oh, she’s not. She’s half black.”

“Oh,” he said. They resumed their conversation and I resumed trying to look like I was having a good time.

This happens when I am with my cousins. I was at a St. Patty’s party with one of them about a year ago when I heard someone whisper into her ear, “Is your cousin black?” A few months later I was out to dinner with their group of friends when someone asked me, “Are you guys actually related? You look like you’re from Eritrea or Ethiopia or something.”

“I’m from Pennsylvania, and we’re first cousins. Believe it or not you don’t actually have to look alike to be related,” is what I would have liked to have said. But I was tipsy and there were too many people around, so I said something along the lines of “Yeah, we get that a lot.”

My mother tried to explain to me when I was younger that I was black, and only black, because that is how the world would see me. I resented that. In my eyes, I had an African American mother and a Gujarati father, and that is how the world would see me, because that’s what I was…

Read the entire article here.

Want to know how the average African-American came to be 65 percent sub-Saharan African, 29 percent European, and 2 percent Native American (source: Ancestry.com)? Most of America doesn’t want to talk about how the beginnings of “mixed-race utopia” started with slave owners raping slaves. And do you really need me to explain how not-utopic that’s turned out?

What this Mixed-Race Fantasia really implies is: The more we erase Black/Brown/Foreign bodies (who are the targets of racism), the less racism there will be. By romanticizing a future of mixed-race babies as symbols for “racial progress” without more meaningful interrogations of history, we equate an end of racism with the eradication of people of color.

Kristina Wong, “UNPOPULAR OPINION: 6 Reasons Why Your Utopic Vision for a Mixed-Race Future is My Nightmare,” xoJane. December 10, 2014. http://www.xojane.com/issues/your-mixed-race-utopia-is-my-nightmare.

UNPOPULAR OPINION: 6 Reasons Why Your Utopic Vision for a Mixed-Race Future is My Nightmare

xoJane
2014-12-10

Kristina Wong

Guess what? One day, when we’re all mixed race, racism won’t magically disappear.

Before you start trolling me (not that I don’t need the attention), let me tell you the specific sentiment that this whole essay addresses. It usually starts when someone chimes in with their wide-eyed vision for 2050, the year when people of color will outnumber white people in America:

“One day when all the races have mixed together, and we can’t tell what anyone is anymore, there won’t be racism! All our cultures will blend together! And…the babies will be beautiful!”

Ah yes! This magic mixed-race future, where everyone will have fucked the hate out of everyone and in the process, thousands of years of colonialism, violence, and systemic oppression disappear into the “interesting facial features” of mixed-race people!

I’m not indicting the lives of mixed-race people nor chastising interracial relationships. But let’s get real — the hypothetical “Future World of Mixed-Race Babies” being the end of racism suffers from frighteningly naive logic about how racism actually works.

Here are SIX reasons why racial utopia won’t suddenly appear once we pull our pants down and start boning across borders…

Read the entire article here.