Mixed Race Studies

Based in part on our review of discrimination cases in which President Obama’s name has been invoked—in most cases, either to demean minority workers or with an otherwise discriminatory purpose—we conclude that having a biracial, black-white (or self-identified black) president has had a surprising effect on the enforcement of anti-discrimination law. Indeed, we contend that Obama’s campaign and election have, to an extent, had an unusual effect in the work environment. Rather than revealing that racism is over or that racial discrimination is diminishing in the workplace, Obama’s presence and prominence have developed a specialized meaning that ironically has resulted in an increase in or at the very least a continuation of regular discrimination and harassment within the workplace. In fact, our review of a number of anti-discrimination law cases filed during the political ascendance and election of Obama suggests that, within certain contexts, individuals have made references to Obama in ways that demonstrate racial animus against Blacks and those associated with Blacks or as a means for explaining why offending conduct toward racial minorities does not involve discrimination. In other words, in these contexts, the term “Obama” itself has become a new tool for racial harassment and discrimination as well as a new tool for denying the reality of racism.

Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Mario L. Barnes, “The Obama Effect: Understanding Emerging Meanings of “Obama” in Anti-Discrimination Law,” Indiana Law Journal, Volume 87: Issue1 (Spring 2012): 328.

…And I think with racial issues in the country, historical memory has really played to serve the ends of White Privilege, essentially. And it has done so in any number of ways. The most basic to start with, is simply we have as a nation erased essentially from any of our larger memory the racial complexity of the country. That this has been a racially mixed country from the very beginning. That every racial group has played a really interesting role in constructing and building the country. That there has been racial mixing between groups from the beginning. That race lines have been fluid. And that history of racial mixing, racial contributions just gets lost…

Renee C. Romano, “Multiraciality Is As Old As This Country: Gender, Sexuality & Race Mixing with Professor Renee Romano,” Is That Your Child?, (February 10, 2010): 00:11:30-00:12:21.

Thus the effectiveness of a public policy argument in defense of miscegenation statutes stands on very weak ground today. The mind of the modern Supreme Court was well expressed by Mr. Chief Justice Vinson in Shelley v. Kraemer, when he stated: “Equal protection of the laws is not achieved through indiscriminate imposition of equalities.”

Edmund L. Walton Jr., “Present Status of Miscegenation Statutes,” William and Mary Law Review, Volume 4, Issue 1, (January, 1963): 33.

The suggestion of a fruitless future for the black American is reinforced in the faces of the two young figures. Homer endows the women with traditional Caucasian features by painting them with light skin and slender facial bone structure. By representing the figures with a combination of both prototypical black and white physical characteristics, Homer portrays them as products of sexual mingling between the races. Although interracial cohabitation had been prevalent since the Colonial era, mulattos born in the period from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries were often the result of sexual relations between white males of the planter class and their domestic slaves. Common almost to the point on institutionalization, wealthy Southern planters kept regular concubines and bred entire families of mixed-race children, the result being an unprecedented increase in mulatto slavery during the years 1850-60.  Based on the appearance of the two figures in Homer’s 1876 painting, their logical birth dates would fall near the height of interracial procreation, raising the distinct possibility that these women were fathered by the plantation owner.

Susanna W. Gold, “A measured freedom: national unity and racial containment in Winslow Homer’s The Cotton Pickers, 1876,” The Mississippi Quarterly, (Spring 2002).

People of mixed racial heritage, or “mulattoes,” symbolized the dependence of white men on black labor, both in the field and in the bed. Marked by their very skin color and other features as products of the white-black encounter in the South, mulatto women were obviously white and not-white, like “our white Caroline.” They were products of the long encounter between white exploiters of labor and black sources of labor, productive and reproductive. Their commodification reminded all that, in the South, every child of an enslaved mother was some form of slave laborer, an arrangement that enabled plantation slavery to function. Every enslaved man, woman, and child was a repository of reproductive capital and a source of production. The white political economy of the South would have collapsed without the legal and cultural fictions that assigned the “mulatto” and other children of African women to the created categories “black” and “enslaved.” Women like the “fair maid Martha,” and “the Yellow Girl Charlott” also, in their phenotypes, illustrated the long past of white sexual assault. “Mulatto” women thus embodied white dependency and white power, and offered men the chance to recapitulate and reexamine the past that had produced both white power and mixed-race individuals. Unwillingly, such women introduced a pornographic history, one obscene yet for that very reason more lusted-after, into the parlors, bedrooms, and above all, the markets of the elite white man’s world. They made flesh the years of white men desiring and depending on women (and men) who were supposedly less than civilized, Christian, or even human.

Edward E. Baptist, ““Cuffy,” “Fancy Maids,” and “One-Eyed Men”: Rape, Commodification, and the Domestic Slave Trade in the United States, 1876,” The American Historical Review, (December, 2001).

Regardless of the criticism directed toward fair-complexioned Negroes who allegedly withdrew into color conscious “blue vein societies,” most black Americans fully understood why some chose to “pass,” namely to reap the benefit of first-class citizenship. Although blacks were careful to guard the secret of those who did “pass”and tended to treat such people as dead, there was always the possibility of exposure and with it humiliation. The unwritten rule in the black community appeared to be that it was acceptable to “pass” but unacceptable to be caught at it. To be exposed was to risk condemnation not only from whites but from blacks as well. Such were the ironies, incongruities, and tragedies of racial, or more specifically color, prejudices.

Willard B. Gatewood, Jr., “The Perils of Passing: The McCarys of Omaha,” Nebraska History, Volume 71, Number 2 (Summer 1990): 67.

Instead of advocating for an endless slide of identities, Cablinasian works effectively as a marker of a racialized identity if its users momentarily stop its movement and claim identities, while retaining their original reflexivity. In two parallel arguments, cultural critics Stuart Hall (1996) and Candice Chuh (2003) advocate for an understanding of race as fiction, while simultaneously accepting the strategic “closure” of identity for political projects. This approach differs from conventional identity politics in its temporality. Rather than claim an essential, stable, and unitary community identity, these identities are contingent, flexible, and porous. Certainly, this transforms traditional notions of racial politics based on an unwavering allegiance to a particular racial identification, but it also makes for a more inclusive and descriptive rather than prescriptive politics.

LeiLani Nishime, “The Case for Cablinasian: Multiracial Naming From Plessy to Tiger Woods,” Communication Theory, Volume 22, Issue 1 (February 2012): 105.

I find it quite ironic—and perhaps a bit amusing—that after all of the debate surrounding multiracial identity and the United States Census, the most famous son of an interracial couple and the daughter of the most famous interracial couple, checked only one racial identity on their census form.  It would appear that the heralding of an era of multiraciality via Loving v. Virginia and an era of post-raciality via the election of President Obama leaves much to ponder.  The truth is that our rose-colored view of a landmark court case and a landmark election tends to obscure the fact that America has been multiracial since its inception.

Steven F. Riley. Commenting (02/13/2012) on the singular racial census choice of President Barack Obama and Peggy Loving Fortune (daughter of Richard Mildred Loving) in Carol Morello’s article “Virginia’s Caroline County, ‘Symbolic of Main Street USA’,” The Washington Post, February 10, 2012. http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginias-caroline-county-symbolic-of-main-street-usa/2012/01/26/gIQAKH0z2Q_story.html.

It is impossible to do more by way of an introduction to a study of race mixture, but it is clear from the foregoing generalizations that concepts of racial purity are largely invalid and that the psychic homogeneity of the human species is much greater than is commonly supposed. It is also evident that differences in language and culture are by no means coincident with differences in physical traits. A rational approach to the question is needed-one which dispenses with what can only be the dead-weight of national ideologies and which acknowledges that an excessive degree af miscegenation must have taken place over thousands of years to account for the present day distribution of physical traits and the variability about a norm which obtains in even the most race-conscious of societies. Given the psychological abhorrence of race mixture which persists as a corollary of untenable theories of racial purity, we must endeavour to assess in quantitative and qualitative terms the indisputable fact of race mixture as it exists in the world to-day.

A. Dickinson, “Race mixture: a social or a biological problem?” The Eugenics Review, Volume 41, Number 2 (July 1949): 81.

At the very time that some in the United States have timidly embraced multiracialism as a fitting ideal for North Americans, Latin American critics have begun to argue that multiracialism, like racial democracy, functions as an ideology that masks enduring racial injustice and thus blocks substantial political, social, and economic reform.

Melissa Nobles, “The Myth of Latin American Multiracialism,” Daedalus, Volume 134, Number 1 (Winter 2005): 82. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/0011526053124398.