Mixed Race Studies

Ultimately though, I identify as a daughter of the Diaspora. The descendants of the millions of Africans taken to the new world share a similar heritage to mine; black African and white European, and I feel an affinity with these fellow Diasporians. I reject a racist hierarchy of value and worth and refuse to position myself as separate from other black people in a bid to try and position myself that little bit closer to whiteness. The historical processes, of which we Diasporians are a part, stem from the same source: the European slave trade and the subsequent European colonisation of Africa. And it is for this reason that I locate myself within this historical continuum rather than buy into an ideologically problematic, a-historical approach which constructs being ‘mixed-race’ as something new.

Emma Dabiri, “Why I see myself as a daughter of the Diaspora rather than mixed-race,” Black Girl Dancing at Lughnasa (March 12, 2013). http://thediasporadiva.tumblr.com/post/45223779733/why-i-see-myself-as-a-daughter-of-the-diaspora-rather.

Throughout the various media realms—television, film, news media, and the less clearly defined intersecting worlds of music, sports, and youth culture—representations of interracial sex and relationships follow certain patterns, and what emerges is a delicate dance between interracial sex sells and interracial sex alienates.  The small number of representations as well as the particular types of depictions of interracial relationships, when they are shown, reveals the lingering opposition to interracial sexuality and marriage as well as the persistent racialized images of racial Others and the protection of whiteness. Interracial representations are symbolic struggles over meaning, not only in how interracial relationships are portrayed but also in how they are received, understood, and responded to in the larger society.  In particular, interracial images are used to perpetuate negative stereotypes yet are simultaneously marketed as an example of how color-blind we have become and of the declining significance of race. Yet one may ask, Why are interracial relationships shown at all if they are still widely opposed by whites and other racial groups? The answer is twofold, as we have seen throughout the book, that showing interracial relationships is a necessary piece of the current rhetoric that asserts race no longer matters and the representations are only shown in ways that either deviantize these relationships, privilege whiteness, or support the contention that America is color-blind.

Erica Chito Childs, Fade to Black and White: Interracial Images in Popular Culture, (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009): 177-178.

I am a Negro. My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me.

Walter White, “Why I Remain a Negro,” The Saturday Review of Literature, October 11, 1947: 13

Am I Black? Hell yeah! I have light green eyes, when I had hair it was curly and blonde. My complexion is café au lait.

Billy Calloway, “Am I Black? Hell Yeah!,” (1)ne Drop Project, (January 16, 2013). http://1nedrop.com/am-i-black-hell-yeah-by-billy-calloway/

The year 1967 becomes the temporal landmark for the beginning of an interracial nation. That year, the United States Supreme Court ruled state antimiscegenation laws unconstitutional in Loving v. Virginia. In addition to outlawing interracial marriage, these restrictive laws had created a presumption of illegitimacy for historical claims of racial intermixture. Not all states had antimiscegenation laws, but the sting of restriction extended to other states to forge a collective forgetting of mixed race. Defenders of racial purity could depend on these laws to render interracial relationships illegitimate. Looking back to Loving as the official birth of Multiracial America reinforces the prevailing memory of racial separatism while further underscoring the illegitimacy of miscegenations past. By establishing racial freedom in marriage, Loving also sets a misleading context for the history of mixed race in America. Even though Loving instigates the open acceptance of interracialism, it unintentionally creates a collective memory that mixed race people and relationships did not exist before 1967…

Kevin Noble Maillard, “The Multiracial Epiphany of Loving.” Fordham Law Review. May 2008, Volume 76, Number 6 pages 2709-2733. http://fordhamlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/assets/pdfs/Vol_76/Maillard_Vol_76_May.pdf.

This book examines two of the most insidious ideas in American history. The first is the belief that interracial marriage is unnatural.  The second is the belief in white supremacy. When these two ideas converged, with the invention of the term “miscegenation” in the 1860s, the stage was set for the rise of a social, political, and legal system of white supremacy that reigned through the 1960s and, many would say, beyond.

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Pascoe, Peggy. What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America. (New York, London: Oxford University Press, 2008). 1.

Similarly, the idea that racial identity can be freely chosen appeals to the high value Americans place on individualism.  The novelty of a mixed racial identity makes one stand out against dominant modes of identification. At the same time, the elaboration of sense of a multiracial group identity makes one feel as if one belongs to a community where one is, if only in one’s perceived marginality, just like everyone else.  The irony here is that while the discourse of choice in racial identification suggests we as individuals are determining for ourselves who we want to be, in fact we are “choosing” within a given set of epistemological, social, and political conditions that make only certain choices possible.

DaCosta, Kimberly McClain, Making Multiracials: State, Family, and Market in the Redrawing of the Color Line, (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2007), 179.

Colleges or universities with monoracial cultural centers pose a challenge for biracial and multiracial students. While we know that challenge is an important feature of the student development process, we must still think deeply about the challenges we present through the messages sent by our programs and services. Is this level of challenge harmful or helpful? Are we asking students to choose which part of themselves they are going to identify with during their time at the college or university? Are we asking students to deny a part of themselves in order to identify with another part? Are we allowing biracial students to be their whole selves? How does this current design for the delivery of cultural programs and services help with the students’ identity development? This is a critical period in which students learn about themselves and their identity… What are biracial students learning through monoracial cultural centers, and what are we teaching students about our view of the world?

Larry D. Roper and Kimberly McAloney, “Is the Design for Our Cultural Programs Ethical?,” Journal of College & Character, Volume 11, Number 4, (2010): 3 pages, doi:10.2202/1940-1639.1743.

The contrast between the multigenerational and first-generation experiences is further underscored by the fact that the latter is frequently viewed as a more legitimate basis for multiracial identity. The reasons for this are related to the repeal of anti-miscegenation laws in 1967 and the liberalization of social attitudes on race over the past three decades. Moreover, the first-generation experience originates in the context of interracial marriage and thus includes an element of choice. Marriages confer equal legal status on both parties and, by extension, equal legitimacy on both parents’ identities. The one-drop rule, therefore, has been less consistently enforced, both in theory and in practice, in the case of their offspring. This is particularly true of policies at the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) and to a lesser extent of the Census Bureau. Before the 1980s, the NCHS ciassified racially blended children in terms of the “minority” parent, while the Census Bureau classified them in terms of the father’s racial or ethnic identity. Since the 1980s both agencies have based the children’s race on the racial identity of the mother. Many multiracial  children of European American mothers have therefore been designated as “white” rather than as “biracial.” Since the mid-1960s, however, adoption agencies have tended to describe blended children as “racially mixed” or “biracial” in order to attract white adoptive parents by appealing to their Eurocentric bias.

Such flexibility has not been extended so readily to multi generational individuals. Their experience carries with it the implicit stigma of concubinage, rape, and illegitimacy; and the parents and families of these individuals have typically been seen as African American. Attitudes toward Native Americans and Latinos—two other populations that have experienced significant miscegenation with European Americans—provide a point of contrast. The European American, as well as the Native American and Latino communities, have more openly acknowledged multiple racial and cultural backgrounds in the discourse on identity. In these populations as well, however, the same divisive and pernicious “colorism” that has infected African-descent Americans has arisen, with the result that  lighter-skinned and otherwise more European-appearing Latinos and Native Americans are  treated preferentially within and outside their communities. Nevertheless,  greater openness among these groups to multiracialism has mitigated the generational differences as the primary factor determining the legitimacy of multiracial identity. Multigenerational individuals of European American and African American decent, therefore, find themselves at odds not only with the larger society and the African American community, but often with first-generation individuals as well. Since most African-descent Americans have some European American ancestry in their genealogy but identify themselves as black, blacks often accuse multigenerational individuals of trying to escape the stigma attached to “blackness.”  Some first-generation individuals contend that their own biracial experience is the legitimate starting point for a blended identity…

Daniel, G. Reginald. More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002). 104-105.

If you do not understand White Supremacy—what it is, and how it works—everything else that you understand, will only confuse you.

Neely Fuller, Jr., The united-independent compensatory code/system/concept: A textbook/workbook for thought, speech, and/or action, for victims of racism (white supremacy), (1969).