Mixed Race Studies

Intermarriage, even at high rates, does not, however, encompass or even represent the scope and nature of ethnic relations in society. While clearly influenced by the structure of ethnic group relations, intermarriage nonetheless is still fundamentally an interpersonal relationship. There has been a decided tendency to overemphasize the significance of outmarriage on the overall quality of interethnic relations in Hawai‘i. High rates of intermarriage may indicate an ethnically tolerant society but not necessarily a harmonious or egalitarian one.

Jonathan Y. Okamura, “The Illusion of Paradise: Privileging Multiculturalism in Hawai‘i,” in Making Majorities: Constituting the Nation in Japan, Korea, China, Malaysia, Fiji, Turkey, and the United States, edited by Dru C. Gladney (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1998), 269.

In Northern or Western communities, where negroes number usually less than five per cent of the total population, the admission of a few negro children to the public schools does not present any serious problem, and even if an occasional interracial marriage should occur, it would have little appreciable effect upon the cultural pattern or the blood-stream of community life, but in the South, where negroes constitute a large proportion, and in some areas a majority, of the population, the integrated school with its blurring of all racial distinctions presents a serious threat to the whole cultural pattern of community life, and points unmistakably to the gradual but eventual merging of the two distinct racial types into a mulatto race. This is not a baseless and fantastic phobia, but a well grounded and reasoned conviction which determines the attitude of Southern parents, and gives assurance that they cannot and will not acquiesce in a program which means the surrender of the birthright of their children and of generations yet unborn.

Rev. G. T. Gillepsie, D.D., Christian view on segregation, Association of Citizens Councils, (1954).

In fact, of course, we’re all mutts—and as Americans, we’ve been mixing it up faster and more thoroughly than anyplace on earth. At the same time, we live in a state of tremendous denial about the rambunctiousness of our recent lineage. The language by which we assign racial category narrows or expands our perception of who is more like whom, tells us who can be considered marriageable or untouchable. The habit of burying the relentlessly polyglot nature of our American identity renders us blind to how intimately we are tied as kin.

Patricia J. Williams, “The Elusive Variability of Race,” GeneWatch, (Volume 21, Issue 3-4, July-August 2009). http://www.councilforresponsiblegenetics.org/GeneWatch/GeneWatchPage.aspx?pageId=197

I won’t get into how I learned how not to identify as “mixed,” how I began to understand that “mixed-race” in my generation was predicated on racial essentialism, false notions of purity, historical inaccuracies and worst of all, a sense of superiority over those who were only Black. Soon, I understood “mixed” as an intermediary between Black and White, a cushion almost, between racism and progress.

Tiana Reid, “crossings: undone presents, pyrrhic futures,” The State (March 30, 2013). http://www.thestate.ae/crossings-undone-presents-pyrrhic-futures/

Race is a hierarchical social construct that assigns human value and group power. Social constructions are human inventions, the products of mind and circumstance. This is not to say that they are imaginary. Racialized taxonomies have real consequences upon biological functions, including the expression of genes. They affect the material conditions of survival-relative respect and privilege, education, wealth or poverty, diet, medical and dental care, birth control, housing options and degree of stigma.

Patricia J. Williams, “The Elusive Variability of Race,” GeneWatch, (Volume 21, Issue 3-4, July-August 2009). http://www.councilforresponsiblegenetics.org/GeneWatch/GeneWatchPage.aspx?pageId=197

Incidentally, the mixed-race woman of African and European descent has long functioned as a recognizable signifier for illicit sexuality and racial ambiguity in Western literary traditions. In both Europe and the Americas, the origins of the “mulatta” as cultural icon are linked to the erotic/exotic fantasies of a white (male) imagination. In early modern travel narratives dealing with the African coast and the Caribbean, European men often made careful observations about mixed race women. And the mulatta character appears with enough frequency in British novels to betray an ongoing British fascination with that figure. By critiquing her own stereotypical role as an eroticized/exoticized mixed-race woman, Onwurah also challenges the problematic iconography of the mulatta figure. Since the very process of identification is fraught, that is, “lodged in contingency,” the self-identification or self-representation of the mixed-race subject becomes a useful starting point for understanding and theorizing (white-black) mixedness. The Body Beautiful, a rare example of a film with a mixed-race woman behind and in front of the camera, literally speaks to these exigencies where representations of interraciality are concerned.

Diana Adesola Mafe, “Misplaced Bodies: Probing Racial and Gender Signifiers in Ngozi Onwurah’s The Body Beautiful,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies (Volume 29, Number 1, 2009): 38-39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/fro.0.0004

“Race has never been about biology and blood. Plenty of white people have African blood. I’m looking at this history of migration across the color line and what do categories of black and white mean? These categories have been proxies for hierarchies and discrimination… for having a full set of rights as citizens.” —Daniel J. Sharfstein

Stacie Williams, “Interview with Daniel J. Sharfstein, author of ‘The Invisible Line’,” The Christian Science Monitor, (February 23, 2011).

There is nothing new about crossing racial boundaries; what is new is the frequency of border crossings and boundary hoppings and the refusal to bow to the thorn-filled American concept, perhaps unknown outside the United States, that each person has a race but only one. Racial blending is undermining the master idea that race is an irreducible marker among diverse peoples—an idea in any case that always has been socially constructed and has no scientific validity. (In this century, revivals of purportedly scientifically provable racial categories have surfaced every generation or so. Ideas die hard, especially when they are socially and politically useful.) Twenty-five years ago, it would have been unthinkable for Time-Life to publish a computer-created chart of racial synthesizing; seventy-five years ago, an issue on “The New Face of America” might have put Time out of business for promoting racial impurity.

Gary B. Nash, “The Hidden History of Mestizo America,” The Journal of American History, Volume 82, Number 3 (December, 1995): 941-964.

“…The articles by Binning, Unzueta, Huo, and Molina (2009) and by Townsend, Markus, and Bergsieker (2009) showed the positive benefits that accrue when multiracial individuals are free to claim their multiracial backgrounds. Binning et al. (2009), for example, found that multiracial students who identify multiracially demonstrate higher levels of psychological and organizational well-being than multiracial students who identify with a single racial group… …The message in these articles is clear: when multiracial individuals are given the freedom to identify multiracially rather than being forced to identify with only one racial category, and they perceive little conflict with and distance from their identities, they display higher levels of psychological adjustment…”

Frank D. Bean and Jennifer Lee, “Plus ça Change…? Multiraciality and the Dynamics of Race Relations in the United States,” Journal of Social Issues, Volume 65, Number 1 (March 2009): 205-219

The 1850 census marked a watershed in census-taking in several ways. For our purposes, a large part of its significance rests in the introduction of the “mulatto” category and the reasons for its introduction. This category was added not because of demographic shifts, but because of the lobbying efforts of race scientists and the willingness of certain senators to do their bidding. More generally, the mulatto category signaled the ascendance of scientific authority within racial discourse. By the 1850s, polygenist thought was winning a battle that it had lost in Europe. The “American school of ethnology” distinguished itself from prevailing European racial thought through its insistence that human races were distinct and unequal species. That polygenism endured at all was a victory, since the European theorists to abandon it. Moreover, there was considerable resistance to it in the United States. Although most American monogenists were not racial egalitarians, they were initially unwilling to accept claims of separate origins, permanent racial differences, and the infertility of racial mixture. Polygenists deliberately sought hard statistical data to prove that mulattoes, as hybrids of different racial species, were less fertile than their pure-race parents and lived shorter lives.

Melissa Nobles, “History Counts: A Comparative Analysis of Racial/Color Categorization in US and Brazilian Censuses,” American Journal of Public Health, Volume 90, Number 11 (November 2000): 1738-1745.