Mixed Race Studies

“We tough girls tough it out,” she [Anne Wiggins Brown] said with a wry grin. “I’ve lived a strange kind of life—half black, half white, half isolated, half in the spotlight. Many things that I wanted as a young person for my career were denied to me because of my color.”

“On the other hand, many black folks have said, ‘Well, she’s not really black.’ Except for Todd Duncan, our original Porgy, who died last month at the age of 95 and with whom I was very close, the ‘Porgy’ cast didn’t associate with me very much, though it wasn’t because I didn’t want to. Only when I went on a train or into a theater did I think about passing, and even then I didn’t consider it passing. I figured if I simply asked for a ticket it was their problem. Onstage, though, if they couldn’t take me as I was—the hell with them.”

Barry Singer, “Theater; On Hearing Her Sing, Gershwin Made ‘Porgy’ ‘Porgy and Bess’,” The New York Times, March 29, 1998. http://nytimes.com/1998/03/29/theater/theater-on-hearing-her-sing-gershwin-made-porgy-porgy-and-bess.html?pagewanted=all.

“I’m a product of two biracial parents—so actually, I’m not biracial, but I’m a product of it,” he [Brendon Ayanbadejo] said, laughing. “My dad is Nigerian. My mom is Irish-American. So I kind of never really fit in. From the black community, I was considered white. From the white community, I was considered black. And then from my own Nigerian community, I wasn’t considered Nigerian. I was considered a black American. I kind of never fit in, kind of had to find my own niche and find my own way. So I’ve experienced discrimination at a young age, and it’s made me the person who I am today.”

Michelangelo Signorile, “Brendon Ayanbadejo, Baltimore Ravens Linebacker, Talks Gay Marriage And LGBT Rights,” The Huffington Post, September 12, 2012. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/12/brendon-ayanbadejo-baltimore-ravens-gay-marriage-homophobia-jamie-kuntz_n_1877048.html.

If personalized medicine is to bear out its name and become truly “personalized,” then a focus on racial differences at the level of the genome constitutes a step off the path with many ramifications, including the possibility of racial and ethnic stereotyping and discrimination during routine medical care that could lead to misdiagnoses and ineffective treatment regimens. Efforts to achieve personalized medicine in clinical settings would do better to focus on patterns in genomes and how such patterns may be associated with disease, rather than trying to find genetic correlates for existing racial and ethnic categories.

Ramya Rajagopalan, Ph.D. and Joan H. Fujimura, Ph.D., “Will Personalized Medicine Challenge or Reify Categories of Race and Ethnicity?,” Virtual Mentor: American Medical Association Journal of Ethics, Volume 14, Number 8 (August 2012): 661.

Well, I’ve always joked that it was channeled to me. [Be]cause it was very easy. But it was after talking, just talking with people. That’s what people told me. So I wrote it down. You know, I organized, wrote it down. It was really given to me by the people. And that’s why I’ve always said it’s for anybody’s public use. It’s not mine. I don’t own that. So, there’s no great story behind it, other than this is what people were sharing with me, with their stories when I go to mixed family groups, or conferences, or just  talking with people individually. It all came out of that. I didn’t make a single piece of that up myself.

—Maria P. P. Root describing the creation of her “The Bill of Rights for People of Mixed Heritage”.

“Episode 113 – Dr. Maria P. P. Root,” Mixed Chicks Chat, August 7, 2009, (00:22:31 – 00:23:22). http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-34257/TS-237195.mp3.

Now, I have always believed that what is now widely considered one of slavery’s worst legacies—the Southern “one-drop” rule that indicted anyone with black blood as a nigger and cleaved American society into black and white with a single stroke—was also slavery’s only upside. Of course I deplore the motive behind the law, which was rooted not only in white paranoia about miscegenation, but in a more practical need to maintain social order by keeping privilege and property in the hands of whites. But by forcing blacks of all complexions and blood percentages into the same boat, the law ironically laid a foundation of black unity that remains in place today. It’s a foundation that allows us to talk abstractly about a ” black community” as concretely as we talk about a black community in Harlem or Chicago or L.A.’s South Central (a liberty that’s often abused or lazily applied in modern discussions of race). And it gives the lightest-skinned among us the assurance of identity that everybody needs to feel grounded and psychologically whole—even whites, whose public non-ethnicity is really ethnicity writ so large and influential it needs no name. Being black may still not be the most advantageous thing in the world, but being nothing or being neutral—the rallying cry of modern-day multiculturalists—has never made any emotional or real-world sense. Color marks you, but your membership in black society also gives you an indestructible house to live in and a bed to rest on. I can’t imagine growing up any other way.

Erin Aubry Kaplan, Black Talk, Blue Thoughts, and Walking the Color Line: Dispatches from a Black Journalista,  (Lebanon, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 2011), 16.

The presence of a biracial race would certainly disrupt popular ideas about race, but as scholars supporting biracial identity root it in biological notions of race “mixture,” it seems unlikely that such a disruption would result in the end of racial classifications. Work on race in the Caribbean and Latin America shows that a racially mixed identity is entirely consistent with a racialized social system. Moreover, recent work interrogating-color blindness has shown that this is the current dominant racial ideology, suggesting that a color-blind society as a goal is more likely to ensure the persistence of racism than its decline. I therefore find especially troubling the claims by Naomi Zack, G. Reginald Daniel, Kathleen Odell Korgen, Paul R. Spickard, Maria P. P. Root, and others discussed below, that the biracial project represents a progressive social movement.” In my view, based both on the popular push for such a reclassification and the scholarship discussed here, this project is less concerned with ending racism than with responding to the racialization of all people of African descent in the United States as black.

Minkah Makalani, “Race, Theory, and Scholarship in the Biracial Project,” in Race Struggles edited by Theodore Koditschek, Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, and Helen A. Neville Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 139-140.

One of the first things we notice about people when we meet them (along with their sex) is their race. We utilize race to provide clues about who a person is. This fact is made painfully clear when we encounter someone whom we cannot conveniently racially categorize—someone who is for example, racially ‘‘mixed’’ or of an ethnic/racial group we are not familiar with. Such an encounter becomes a source of discomfort and momentarily a crisis of racial meaning.

Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s, (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 59.

“In Michigan, most people identify me as Asian, but here in California, I’m a white guy,” Mark-Griffin said…

Chelsea Hawkins, “Mixed But Not Divided: Multi-ethnic populations redefine racial lines,” City on a Hill Press: A Student-Run Newspaper (University of California, Santa Cruz), October 20, 2011. http://www.cityonahillpress.com/2011/10/20/mixed-but-not-divided/

Irish and Italian Americans came to be considered members of the white race as their assimilation provided them with the material resources that allowed them to move away from the menial labor that was seen as synonymous with being black. Occupational and class mobility along with the loss of ethnic identity allowed these groups to assert what they were; phenotypically white immigrants from Europe who had been denied the ability to claim that identity because of racialized ethnocentrism. Today, Asian and Latino Americans who are light-skinned and have high economic status, particularly those who have white partners, may also gain entry into the white race. Those who marry whites are almost assured that their offspring will be accepted as white.

Charles A. Gallagher, “In-Between Racial Status, Mobility and Promise of Assimilation: Irish, Italians Yesterday, Latinos and Asians Today,” in Multiracial Americans and Social Class: The Influence of Social Class on Racial Identity, edited by Kathleen Odell Korgen, 20. London and New York: Routledge, 2010.

Neville’s and Cook’s solution to the half-caste problem was biological absorption, colloquially called ‘breeding out the colour’. This entailed directing persons of mixed descent into marital unions with white people, so that after several generations of interbreeding all outward signs of Aboriginal ancestry would disappear. It held an incongruent array of aims and means. Absorption promised to resolve the supposed problems resulting from racial intermixture by encouraging still more intermixing. It aimed to uphold the ideal of white Australia but flew in the face of popular notions of white Australia as a doctrine of racial purity. While racist in many ways, absorption simultaneously defied prevalent racist assumptions of hybrid inferiority. It parallelled eugenicism in certain respects, but also clashed with eugenic principles. It was inspired partly by humanitarian welfarism, but evinced profound disdain for the subjects of its welfare interventions.

Russell McGregor, Indifferent Inclusion: Aboriginal people and the Australian Nation, (Canberra, Australian Capital Territory: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2011), 1-2.