Mixed Race Studies

Hybridity haunts the dreams of racial purity, then but not solely as its structural foil.  Certainly the existence of racial “hybrids” infuriated racists, as demonstrated by the efforts of nineteenth-century scientists to prove that mulattos were infertile and would naturally die out.  But hybridity also interrupts the ability of race to narrativize time.  I find a suggestive emblem of such disjunctive or hybrid temporality in “the miscegenation of time,” a phrase from which the state of racialist thinking can never be fully removed.  The hybridization of genre implied in the miscegenation of time entails not simply the splicing together of different forms but the encounter of genre with its law and therein its indeterminancy.  Exposing fictions of race and progress, hybridity unsettles collective and corporeal memory…

Nyong’o Tavia, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance and the Ruses of Memory, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009) 12.

“If, however, one is critical of race, it then becomes apparent that there is an inherent contradiction in the idea of multiraciality; for if race is a myth, then multirace must of necessity be a myth as well.  Yet how is one to self-identify, to assert an identity, when the only language seeming available is infused with the terminology of racialism?  The answer lies in challenging rather than acceding to the hemogeny of race and rejecting the premise that personal identity need be race based to begin with.“

Rainier Spencer, Spurious Isses: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States, p. 89

…A major deficiency in multiracial scholarship has been the lack of historical context, together with the concomitant error of viewing mixed-race identity as an exclusively recent phenomenon…

Rainier Spencer, Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States, 1999-08-12

…professors and medical doctors offered scientific evidence that ‘race mixture’ contaminated Europeans, biologically and culturally, and gave rise to a population of mixed origins that was physically inferior and psychologically unstable. …At the same time, the vigour with which White men opposed ‘race mixture’ officially, especially for men of colour, was exceeded only by the fervour with which they practiced it privately…

Stephen Small’s (2001) ‘Colour, Culture and Class: Interrogating Interrracial Marriage and People of Mixed  Racial Descent in the USA’…

What this current discourse is about is lifting the lid of racial oppression in our institutions and letting people identify with the totality of their heritage. We have created a nightmare for human dignity. Multiracialism has the potential for undermining the very basis of racism, which is its categories.

(G. Reginald Daniel, The New Yorker, 1994-07-25)

…The ‘mixed’ population is now the fastest growing ethnic group in Britain. While the substantial increase in the size of this group is a recent phenomenon, population mixing has happened throughout the 20th century and earlier. By the 1920s there were settled mixed race populations in a number of British seaports, including Liverpool and Cardiff, brought about in part by visiting African and Asian seamen, and significant communities in other cities including London and Manchester.

University of Kent, “‘Invisible’ history of mixed race Britain becomes the subject of a major study”, News Release, (May 15, 2008).

‘In certain circumstances, race mixing is known to be bad. Further knowledge of its biological effects is needed in order to make it possible to frame a practical eugenic policy.  Meanwhile, since the process of race mixture cannot be reversed, great caution is advocated.’

Records of the Eugenics Society, 1934

Multiracial ideology, like the monoracial ideology it depends on, is a false consciousness. The frustration its adherents feel would be better directed at criticizing the American racial paradigm itself rather than at attempting to modify the paradigm’s configuration.  A modified paradigm, one containing a multi-racial category, would be a fallacious as one without a multiracial category.  As long as the idea of race has legitimacy, and as long as the racial hierarchy remains undisturbed, nothing will really change.

Rainier Spencer, Mixed Race Studies: A Reader, Chapter 29.

Within the United States, ‘mixed race’ has gained currency as a loaded but culturally comprehensible term referencing individuals where one parent is white and the other is of color. Some […] challenge this approach and claim recognition for ‘mixed-race’ identities that were never legally proscribed. It is a strategic but frivolous petition as the explicit legacy of Anglo-European slavery and colonialism, which gave birth to the ominous idea of race in the first place, facilitated the abhorrent notions of miscegenation, hybridity, and mixed race. Efforts to expand the discourse of ‘mixed race’ to include any combination that abridges diverse ethnic/ national origin – e.g., Chinese-Chicano, Southeast Indian and Iranian – seem rather disingenuous given the mating history of humankind. Scholarship on the impact of contemporary demographic changes and their impact on mixed identities per se must not confuse the historical particularity of mixed race. Again – more, not less, clarity and precision is needed and the appealing notion of third-ness, a separate space defined for mixedness, still confuses the challenges of racial ambiguity with panethnic mixing between minority communities.

Azoulay, K.G. 2003. “Rethinking ‘mixed race’ (review),” Research in African Literatures. 34(2):233-235

“…’race’  as it is understood … was a social mechanism invented in the eighteenth century to refer to those populations brought together in colonial America: … European settlers, conquered Indians, and Africans brought in to supply slave labor… [Race] … subsumed a growing ideology of inequity devised to rationalize European attitudes and the treatment of the conquered and enslaved peoples…”

American Anthropological Association 1998 Statement on Race