Mixed Race Studies

“Best of both worlds” arguments are also problematic because at times they border on claiming a biracial identity is superior. While some biracial children may have exposure to diverse environments that gives them broad knowledge, it is unfair to assume that monoracial children cannot have this exposure or that biracial children do have this exposure… …Moreover, it is not safe to assume that a racially diverse set off experiences can translate into success.

Another problem with this argument is that it accepts the notion that the parents really are from “two different worlds” and necessarily have two different set of experiences that they share with their children. Parents of biracial children could have similar views about racial issues and similar socialization experiences. Moreover, they could both take the race blind approach to racial socialization, in which the differences of parents are denied of minimized. While very few couples in this study appeared to be raising their children in race blind manner, this is clearly a possibility.

Sullivan, Rachel. “Revisioning Black/White Multiracial Families: The Single-Parent Experience,” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Atlanta Hilton Hotel, Atlanta, GA, Aug 16, 2003.

A number of serious problems with using race/ethnicity as a variable in genetics research have emerged in our analysis of our interviews with this group of genetic scientists. At the most basic level, the common racial/ethnic classifications they routinely use are of questionable value for delineating genetically related groups. The ubiquitous OMB categories in fact were designed for political and administrative purposes; they were not designed for use as scientific variables (Kertzer & Arel, 2002; Shields et al., 2005). These are notably ambiguous and arbitrary categories, based on strikingly diverse criteria such as skin color, language, or geographic location. They do not compose clear classifications, but instead are overlapping and not mutually exclusive. In the absence of clear principles for applying the labels, in practice, different aspects of an individual’s identity are arbitrarily prioritized, in order to fit individual cases into the schema.

A serious conceptual problem that reinforces the use of these questionable categories is that many of the researchers presume racial admixture is relatively rare and recent, and that specific geographically defined groups, such as Finnish or Japanese, can unproblematically be equated with broad socially designated racial/ethnic groups, such as white or Asian. However, this logic relies on several unsubstantiated assumptions: that historically there were pure racial types associated with particular geographic locations; that migrations were sporadic and relatively rare; and that racial/ethnic groups are primarily endogamous. (A recent study of the views of genetics journals editors reports similar findings: Outram & Ellison, 2006.) These assumptions are contrary to much of what is known about human population history. Genetic isolation among humans is in fact quite rare: human populations have always exchanged mates across broad geographic areas throughout time, producing clinal variation (gradual variation between places), rather than clearly distinct genetic stocks. Furthermore, racial admixture is not an exceptional event; indeed, there has been significant intermarriage between socially designated groups throughout history (Weiss, 1998; Harry & Marks, 1999; Race Ethnicity and Genetics Working Group, 2005). Compounding these conceptual problems is the practical fact that assigning these labels to individuals is often done in the absence of any specific knowledge of their actual familial migration histories.

Linda M. Hunt and Mary S. Megyesi, “The Ambiguous Meanings of the Racial/Ethnic Categories Routinely used in Human Genetics Research,” Social Science & Medicine, Volume 66, Number 2 (2008): 349-361. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2213883.

The clever positioning by multiracial identity activists of the Loving marriage as the 1960s vanguards of multiraciality, promotes several troubling ideologies that should exposed and examined. These ideologies effectively distance the Lovings’ saga from the greater African-American struggle for freedom and justice. Firstly, the emphasis on the marriage of the Richard and Mildred Loving implies that these unjust anti-miscegenation laws had no adverse impact towards Black-Americans and other people of color as a whole. Finally, and most importantly, the continual dissemination of the myth of increased multiracial births since the Loving decision, is an insidious maneuver that illogically seeks to erase the history of over three centuries of interracial marriages and the millions of descendants from those unions. As I have stated before, we are not becoming a multiracial society, we already are a multiracial society and we have been so for centuries.

Steven F. Riley, “Don’t Pass on Context: The Importance of Academic Discourses in Contemporary Discussions on the Multiracial Experience,” (paper presented at the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival, Los Angeles, California, June 11, 2011).

Even if multiracialism shifts us from the “one-drop rule” to a more graduated mestizaje model of racialization, this changes nothing for black people because blackness is still located at the “undesirable” end of the continuum—or, more accurately, hierarchy. In my view, it is necessary that we first understand the stability of that unethical structural relation before we can say that multiracialism challenges racism by injecting into the racist structure a “more fluid” sense of identity. Rainier Spencer’s 2009 Chronicle of Higher Education article, [“Mixed Race Chic”] (Spencer, 2009, May 19), for example, asked, “how can multiracial identity deconstruct race when it needs the system of racial categorization to even announce itself?” Posing this question as a statement would be to say that one needs for there to be a structure of race in order to call oneself multiracial. Small wonder, then, that so many celebrations of multiracial identity sound antiblack. They are…

Omar Ricks, “Playing Games with Race,” The Feminist Wire, June 3, 2011. http://www.thefeministwire.com/2011/06/03/playing-games-with-race/

If the present ratio were to remain permanent, the inevitable product of the melting pot would be approximately an octoroon. It should not be necessary to stress the significance of this point. We know that under Mendelian law the African strain is hereditarily predominant. In other words, one drop of negro (sic) blood makes the negro (sic). We also know that no higher race has ever been able to preserve its culture, to prevent decay and eventual degeneracy when tainted, even slightly, with negro (sic) blood. Sixty centuries of history establish this rule. Since the first page of recorded fact, history can show no exception. Were the American people to become an octoroon race, it would mean their sinking to the level of Haiti and Santo Domingo…

John Powell, “Music and the Individual,” The Rice Institute Pamphlet, Volume 10, Number 3 (July 1923), p. 135.

Nonetheless, correctly and jointly, these articles recognize that we live in a society dominated and dictated by white supremacy. To understand multiracial Americans, we must place individuals with this identity within this context. Additionally, this collection does what no other has: It includes in this recognition the role that class can and does play when it comes to understanding a multiracial identity and construction.

Beth Frankel Merenstein, “Book Review: Multiracial Americans and Social Class: The Influence of Social Class on Racial Identity,” Teaching Sociology,Volume 39, Number 2 (2011): 214-216. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0092055X11403292.

This lame and utterly boring series has yet to even reach the already low, low bar set in the mid-1990s regarding this topic by Time and Newsweek. Beyond the drippingly bathetic nature of the reporting throughout the series, there is never more than a sentence or two given over to the fact that there is a huge ideological debate occurring within critical mixed-race studies circles about just what mixed race is and is not, about whether or not supporting it requires belief in the fallacy of biological race, about how much it does or does not advance the cause of white supremacy (whether overtly and knowingly or not), and about the propriety of the disproportionate influence of white mothers of black/white children within the multiracial movement.

The only boundary being pushed by the “Race Remixed” series is the continued fencing off of any significant input (beyond that sentence or two acknowledged above) by scholars who are critical of multiracial identity. If this thoroughly unbalanced series wanted to actually provide real news, it would dare to investigate how multiraciality poses a danger to civil rights compliance monitoring, how multiraciality is assisting certain persons of Hispanic and Asian descent in their transition to “honorary whiteness” while persons of African descent remain barred from doing the same, and how the multiracial movement remains absolutely exclusionary in terms of setting itself apart from the nearly 40 million Afro-Americans of mixed descent in this country. If that thoroughly mixed population is not mixed race, then no one is.

Rainier Spencer (Professor and author of Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix, 2011), Reader’s Comments (#49) for article “Pushing Boundaries, Mixed-Race Artists Gain Notice,” The New York Times, July 5, 2011. http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2011/07/06/arts/mixed-race-writers-and-artists-raise-their-profiles.html?permid=49#comment49

As [Matt] Wray puts it: “It speaks to the fastest-growing segment of Americans—those of mixed race—starting to rewrite the script. Obama, in his blackness, is free to explore his whiteness.”

The circle won’t be closed, of course, until millions of white Americans embrace the Africa in their pasts. Forty million claim Irish roots. How many will claim African?…

John Timpane, “In visit to Ireland, O’Bama seeks to reverse U.S. notions of race,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 25, 2011. http://articles.philly.com/2011-05-25/news/29582090_1_ollie-hayes-barack-obama-president-obama.

…Consider the irony of a man so long under fire for his origins, comes to Ireland to celebrate one strand of those origins. He is called black because in the United States, we are messed up about origins. Why not call him “Barack Obama, America’s 44th white president?” Or “America’s third Irish American president” (after Ronald Reagan and John Kennedy)? He is as much those things as its first black president. No? Never happen? Why not?

Charles Gallagher, chairman of the Sociology, Social Work and Criminal Justice Department at La Salle University, sees the notorious “one-drop rule” of U.S. social attitudes at work: “A single ‘drop of black blood’ negates your ability to reconnect back to Europe. Race trumps all other questions of ethnic origin. Yet we know that 80 percent of all African Americans have European ancestors. Their history, which includes slavery, has cut them off both from Africa and from Europe, from being able to reclaim that great-grandfather in Sicily or Eastern Europe.”…

John Timpane, “In visit to Ireland, O’Bama seeks to reverse U.S. notions of race,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 25, 2011. http://articles.philly.com/2011-05-25/news/29582090_1_ollie-hayes-barack-obama-president-obama.

The harm done by racial mixtures I believe is much wider than the scope of this paper. Its importance as a factor in asthma, eczema and spasmophilia are beyond question to me. So wrapped up it seems are racial mixtures with the ailments of mankind, that I have almost reached the stage that I would dogmatically assert that “If you show me a family where the doctor is metaphorically always on the doorstep, I will show you a family of profound racial mixture.”

Frank N. Walker, M.B., “Sterility Among Hybrids,” The Canadian Medical Association Journal, Volume 16, Number 6 (June 1926): 661-665. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1708963/pdf/canmedaj00465-0083.pdf.