Mixed Race Studies

“I’m not black,” Joyce said. “I’m multiracial.” Then she started telling me about her father, who happened to be Italian and was the sweetest man in the world; and her mother who happened to be part African and part French and part Native American and part something else. “Why should I have to choose between them?” she asked me. Her voice cracked, and I thought she was going to cry.  “It’s not white people who are making me choose. Maybe it used to be that way, but now they’re willing to treat me like a person. No—it’s black people who always have to make everything racial. They’re the ones making me choose.  They’re the ones who are telling me I can’t be who I am…”

“They, they, they.  That was the problem with people like Joyce.  They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people.  It wasn’t a matter of conscious choice, necessarily, just a matter of gravitational pull, the way integration always worked, a one-way street.  The minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around.  Only white culture could be neutral and objective.  Only white culture could be nonracial, willing to adopt the occasion exotic into its ranks.  Only white culture had individuals.  And, we the half-breeds and college-degreed, take a survey of the situation and think to ourselves, Why should we get lumped in with the losers if we don’t have to?  We become only so grateful to lose ourselves in the crowd, America’s happy, faceless marketplace; and we’re never so outraged as when a cabbie drives past us or the woman in the elevator clutches her purse, not so much because we’re bothered by the fact that such indignities are what less fortunate coloreds have to put up with every single day of their lives—although that’s what we tell ourselves—but because we’re wearing a Brooks Brothers suite and speak impeccable English and yet somehow have somehow been mistaken for an ordinary nigger.”

Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1995), 99-100.

What is most disturbing about the paradoxical use of race is the effect it may have on the trajectory of ongoing human genetic variation research. By making the moral argument that race-based therapeutics address injustice in health care, and at the same time maintaining that genetics research will ultimately eliminate the need for racial categories, racialization is allowed to proceed unchallenged despite its inherent contradictory claims that race is both biologically meaningful and meaningless. Rather than serving as a way station, the use of race is allowed to become more fully embedded in the production of scientific knowledge and medical practice.

Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, “Racializing Drug Design: Implications of Pharmacogenomics for Health Disparities,” American Journal of Public Health, Volume 95, Number 12 (December 2005): 2137. http://dx.doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2005.068676.

The essence of this [racial democracy] myth is contained within an allegory common to school texts in Brazil addressing the origins of that nation’s population: the “fable of three races” (Da Matta 1997). This fable holds that the people of Brazil originated from three formerly discrete racial entities: Europeans, Africans, and Indians. These “races” subsequently mixed, each contributing to the formation of a uniquely Brazilian population, culturally and biologically fused, whose strength is in its hybridism. Results from a 1998 national survey speak to the embedded nature of this fusion understanding. Brazilians were asked in open-ended format: “Of what ancestry (origem) do you consider yourself to be?” To this question, 68 percent responded simply “Brazilian,” with only 3.5 percent replying “indigenous,” 5.8 percent answering “Portuguese,” and 1.4 percent saying “African”) (Schwartzman 1999).

Stanley R. Bailey, “Group Dominance and the Myth of Racial Democracy: Antiracism Attitudes in Brazil,” American Sociological Review, Volume 69, Number 5 (October 2004): 728. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/000312240406900506.

I think it would be wise for people who are biracial and multiracial to never forget that this is a system of formal historical and institutional white supremacy. And I’m afraid sometimes, there are a lot incentives that the culture puts out there to biracial and multiracial people to forget that… …Because they’re not quite as Black, or they’re not quite as Brown. And so there is a tendency for people to think that they really escape that system… …That they’re not really in that system… …So, multiracial, biracial folks: claim all of, claim every piece of it. Do not forget where one still sits on the trajectory of white supremacy. Because when once you forget that, there is real danger, real danger.

Tim Wise, “Racism, White Supremacy and Biracial/Multiraciality (2011),” Tim Wise, Antiracist Essayist, Author and Educator, Talk at Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky, (September, 2011). http://www.timwise.org/2012/09/insights-and-outbursts-volume-2/.

What explains the rise of Intermarriage?

• The US had a big immigration reform in 1965, which led to a sharp rise in immigration from Asia and Latin America. As the US population became more racially diverse, there was more opportunity for Americans to meet (and fall in love with) people from other races. Immigrant destinations like New York City tend to have more intermarriage as a result of having more racial diversity.
• The age at first marriage has been steadily rising since the 1960s. Age at first marriage in the US is now 27 or 28 years of age. In the past, age of first marriage was typically about 21 years. The later age at first marriage means that young people are more likely to travel away from home before they marry. Travel away from home increases the chances of meeting (and falling in love with) someone who is different from you.
• Attitudes have changed. Interracial marriage is not very controversial for people who were raised in the post- Civil Rights and post- Loving v. Virginia era. As interracial marriage has become more common and more visible, more Americans have gotten used to the idea that interracial couples are part of the panorama of American families. Opposition within families to intermarriage has declined, but has not disappeared.

Michael J. Rosenfeld, “Interracial Brooklyn,” Brooklyn Historical Society: Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations, (September 2012).

Unless radical measures are used to prevent it, Virginia and other parts of the Nation must surely in time go the way of all other countries in which people of two or more races have lived in close contact. With the exception of the Hebrew race, complete intermixture or amalgamation has been the inevitable result.

To succeed, the intermarriage of the white race with mixed stock must be made impossible. But that is not sufficient, public sentiment must be so aroused that intermixture out of wedlock will cease.

The public must be led to look with scorn and contempt upon the man who will degrade himself and do harm to society by such abhorrent deeds.

W. A. Plecker, “The New Virginia Law To Preserve Racial Integrity,” Virginia Health Bulletin,Volume XVI, Extra Number 2 (March 1924): 2. http://lva.omeka.net/items/show/62.

I continue to identify myself as black. I don’t see it in contradiction with my white and Mexican ancestry. Nor does it negate these other parts of myself. I have come to understand that my multiplicity is inherent in my blackness, not opposed to it. To be black, for me, is to contain all colors. The choice stems from my childhood decision not to define myself differently from my sister or my father. But it also grows out of my increasing understanding that race is not real, but rather is a social, political, and historical construct. Race has never been about blood, and it has never been about reason. Rather, it has to do with power and economics and history. One of my concerns about the multiracial movement is that it buys into the idea of race as a real, biological category. It seems to see race almost as chemistry: Mix black and Japanese, you get Blackanese, mix Caucasian, black, Indian, and Asian and you get Cablinasian. I wonder if it will work toward a deconstruction of race, or a further construction of it. When we look at societies that acknowledge racial mixture, such as Haiti, Brazil, and South Africa, it becomes clear that multiracial pride does not necessarily mean the end of racism. Even when we look at the history of our own country—blue vein societies, brown paper bag tests, and light-skinned privilege—it becomes clear that a multiracial identity can live happily with racism and white supremacy intact.

Source: DanzySenna.com

Danzy Senna, “Passing and the Problematic of Multiracial Pride (or, Why One Mixed Girl Still Answers to Black),” in Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture, edited by Harry J. Elam, Jr. and Kennell Jackson, (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press: 2005), 85.

In Judaism, one’s mother must be Jewish in order to be ‘officially recognized’ as Jewish. Because it was my father who was Jewish, I didn’t count. And although I was born in Japan, I was not granted citizenship because only my mother was Japanese. From both sides, stranded. When I was 18, I decided to convert to Judaism. My mother was supportive, but she insisted that if I were to have a mikvah I must also start taking Japanese lessons. I’m not sure why she though these two things went together, or that they somehow balanced each other out. Balance was something both my parents strove for. Balance was important, they explained.

Naomi Angel, “On the Train,” in Other Tongues: Mixed Race Women Speak Out, edited by Adebe De Rango-Adem and Andrea Thompson (Toronto: Inanna Publications, 2010): 143.

…race is not a biological category that naturally produces health disparities because of genetic differences. Race is a political category that has staggering biological consequences because of the impact of social inequality on people’s health.

Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century, (New York: The New Press, 2011), 129.

The claims of modern genetics notwithstanding, race remains a biologically meaningless concept of human categorization. Race simply has no traceable genetic essence, and the proliferation of racial DNA testing represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of race rather than the neutral application of scientific principles.

Christian B. Sundquist, “The Meaning of Race in the DNA Era: Science, History and the Law,” The Temple Journal of Science, Technology & Environmental Law, Volume 27, Number 2 (Fall 2008): 233.