Mixed Race Studies

Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism

University of Minnesota Press
2008
328 pages
6 x 9
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8166-5105-4; ISBN-10: 0-8166-5105-1
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8166-5104-7; ISBN-10: 0-8166-5104-3

Jared Sexton, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Film & Media Studies
University of California, Irvine

Questions the ramifications of multiracialism for progressive social change.

Despite being heralded as the answer to racial conflict in the post–civil rights United States, the principal political effect of multiracialism is neither a challenge to the ideology of white supremacy nor a defiance of sexual racism. More accurately, Jared Sexton argues in Amalgamation Schemes, multiracialism displaces both by evoking long-standing tenets of antiblackness and prescriptions for normative sexuality.

In this timely and penetrating analysis, Sexton pursues a critique of contemporary multiracialism, from the splintered political initiatives of the multiracial movement to the academic field of multiracial studies, to the melodramatic media declarations about “the browning of America.” He contests the rationales of colorblindness and multiracial exceptionalism and the promotion of a repackaged family values platform in order to demonstrate that the true target of multiracialism is the singularity of blackness as a social identity, a political organizing principle, and an object of desire. From this vantage, Sexton interrogates the trivialization of sexual violence under chattel slavery and the convoluted relationship between racial and sexual politics in the new multiracial consciousness.

An original and challenging intervention, Amalgamation Schemes posits that multiracialism stems from the conservative and reactionary forces determined to undo the gains of the modern civil rights movement and dismantle radical black and feminist politics.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: On the Verge of Race
• 1. Beyond the Event Horizon: The Multiracial Project
• 2. Scales of Coercion and Consent: Sexual Violence, Antimiscegenation, and the Limits of Multiracial America
• 3. There Is No (Interracial) Sexual Relationship
• 4. The Consequence of Race Mixture
• 5. The True Names of Race: Blackness and Antiblackness in Global Contexts
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index

The Silly Debate Over Whether Obama is Black or Mixed-Race

The Huffington Post
2008-06-14

Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Political Analyst and Social Issues Commentator

Presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama gave the best answer to the question whether he’s black, mixed race or something in between. He recently told a Chicago fundraiser crowd that to some he wasn’t black enough, and he then promptly added that others say he might be too black. He’s right; the knock against him has either been that he is too black or not black enough, not that he is too mixed race or not mixed race enough. Despite his occasional references to his white mother and grandmother, Obama by his own admission has never seen himself as anything other than being black. He says that’s it been that way since he was 12. It’s that way for those whites who flatly say that they won’t vote for him because he’s black. His Democratic primary losses to Hillary Clinton in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky showed there are legions of white voters who feel that race does matter to them. Few have said that they oppose him because he’s mixed race.

Yet, the silly debate continues to rage over whether Obama is the black presidential candidate or the multi-racial candidate. The debate is even sillier when one considers that science has long since debunked the notion of a pure racial type. In America, race has never been a scientific or genealogical designation, but a political and social designation. Put bluntly, anyone with the faintest trace of African ancestry was and still is considered black, and treated accordingly. Their part-white ancestry doesn’t give them a pass from taxis refusing to stop for them, clerks following them in department stores, from being racial-profiled by police on street corner stops, from landlords refusing to show them an apartment, or being denied a promotion. The mixed race designation doesn’t magically make disappear the countless other racial sleights and indignities that are tormenting reminders that race still does matter, and matter a lot to many Americans…

Read the entire article here.

Machado de Assis: Multiracial Identity and the Brazilian Novelist

Penn State University Press
2012-05-19
336 pages
6 x 9, 1 illustration
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-271-05246-5

G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908) was Brazil’s foremost novelist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a mulatto, Machado experienced the ambiguity of racial identity throughout his life. Literary critics first interpreted Machado as an embittered misanthrope uninterested in the plight of his fellow African Brazilians. By midcentury, however, a new generation of critics asserted that Machado’s writings did reveal his interest in slavery, race, and other contemporary social issues, but their interpretations went too far in the other direction. Reginald Daniel, whose expertise on Brazilian race relations gives him special insights, takes a fresh look at how Machado’s life—especially his experience of his own racial identity—was inflected in his writings. The result is a new interpretation that sees Machado as endeavoring to transcend his racial origins by universalizing the experience of racial ambiguity and duality into a fundamental mode of human existence.

The Racial Politics of Culture and Silent Racism in Peru

Paper prepared for the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) Conference on Racism and Public Policy
Durban, South Africa
2001-09-03 through 2001-09-05
13 pages

Marisol de la Cadena, Associate Professor of Anthropology
University of California, Davis

In this talk mestizaje is both the topic and a pretext. Treating it the topic of the paper, I want to explain why, in contrast with other Latin American countries such as Mexico, Bolivia, and Ecuador mestizaje—or the project of racial mixing—never became an official national ideology in Peru. But I also want to use mestizaje as a pretext to analyse the historical production of the Peruvian culturalist scientific definition of race, which is partially similar to what analysts of contemporary European forms of discrimination have called ‘racism without race’ or “new racism.” I call it silent racism, because in the case of Peru, as we shall see, culturalist forms of discrimination are neither new, nor without race. The debate about racial mixture (or mestizaje) that took place in Peru in the first half of the 20th century, is a good window to explore the reasons that Peruvian intellectuals might have had in developing this presumably peculiar definition of race which eventually allowed for the current denial of racist practices in Peru. Illustrative of these denials Jorge Basadre, one of Peru’s most eminent historians declared in the mid 1960s.

Historically, racism as it is understood in South Africa or in parts of the Southern United States has not existed in Peru. (…) This is not to say that there do not exist prejudices against Indians, cholos, and blacks, however these prejudices have not been sanctioned by the law and more than a profound racial feeling, they have an economic, social, and cultural character. Colour does not prevent an aborigine, mestizo, or Negroid from occupying high positions if they can accumulate wealth or achieve political success. (If there exists a distance between them and us) it is not racial, (…) rather it corresponds to what can be termed an historical state of things.

Basadre acknowledges the existance of prejudices, but acquits those prejudices of the charge of racism because they do not derive from biological race. This acquittal, which continues to characterize the Peruvian racial formation, is not a whimsical national peculairity. Rather, I argue that it is historically rooted in the scientific definition of race that Peruvian intellectuals coined at the turn of the century. Then they used it to contest European and North American racial determinisms which positioned intellectuals from my country (and Latin Americans in general) as hybrids and thus potentially–if not actually–degenerates. During this period Peruvian intellectuals delved into the scientific interconnection of “culture” and ‘race,” and produced a notion of “race” through which—borrowing Robert Young’’s words— “culture” was racially defined and thus historically enabled to mark differences. When, roughly in mid-century, the international community rejected race as biology, it did not question the discriminatory potential of culture, nor its power to naturalize differences. Then Peruvian intellectuals—like Basadre— dropped race from their vocabulary and criticized racism, while preserving culturalist interpretations of difference to reify social hierarchies, and to legitimate discrimination and exclusion…

Read the entire paper here.

Yes We Can? White Racial Framing and the Obama Presidency, 2nd Edition

Routledge
292 pages
2012-12-17
Pages: 296
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-64536-2
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-64538-6

Adia Harvey Wingfield, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Georgia State University

Joe Feagin, Ella C. McFadden Professor of Sociology
Texas A & M University

The first edition of this book offered one of the first social science analyses of Barack Obama’s historic electoral campaigns and early presidency. In this second edition the authors extend that analysis to Obama’s service in the presidency and to his second campaign to hold that presidency. Elaborating on the concept of the white racial frame, Harvey Wingfield and Feagin assess in detail the ways white racial framing was deployed by the principal characters in the electoral campaigns and during Obama’s presidency. With much relevant data, this book counters many commonsense assumptions about U.S. racial matters, politics, and institutions, particularly the notion that Obama’s presidency ushered in a major post-racial era. Readers will find this fully revised and updated book distinctively valuable because it relies on sound social science analysis to assess numerous events and aspects of this historic campaign.

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1. White Racial Framing and Barack Obama’s First Campaign
• Chapter 2. “Too Black?” Or “Not Black Enough?”
• Chapter 3. From Susan B. Anthony to Hillary Clinton
• Chapter 4. The Cool Black Man vs. The Fist-Bumping Socialist
• Chapter 5. The Dr. Jeremiah Wright Controversy
• Chapter 6. The 2008 Primaries and Voters of Color
• Chapter 7. November 4, 2008 : A Dramatic Day in U.S. History
• Chapter 8. “Post-Racial” America?
• Chapter 9. President Obama’s 2009-2013 Term and the 2011-2012 Primaries
• Chapter 10. The 2012 National Election
• Endnotes
• Index

With Obama, not a post-racial nation, but something more complex

The Washington Post
2013-01-21

Marc Fisher, Staff Writer

The huge oil painting propped up on a bridge table at 13th and F streets NW was arresting enough to stop people even as they hurried toward the Mall. There they were, heroes of black America, Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, Martin Luther King Jr. and Tupac Shakur, Huey Newton and Barack Obama, all on horseback in a classic Western tableau.

One after another, potential customers, almost all of them black, stepped up to inspect the painting and the $20 prints of it that were for sale Monday. Then they did a double take, because the couple selling the prints, Corey Francis and Kelly Allen, were white.

Francis pointed to the center of the painting, to a convincing likeness of the president: “That’s Will Smith, isn’t it?”

A suspicious silence fell over his black customers — was the white guy making fun or having fun? And then Francis smiled, they all cracked up, and three more Obama supporters bought a print.

On the day the nation witnessed the second swearing-in of the first black president, race mattered, as it has at every turn throughout American history. But blacks and whites along the Mall and the parade route, as well as others across the land, say it matters in different ways at the midpoint of this historic presidency…

Read the entire article here.

Inauguration: Celebrating President Barack Obama and Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

On Being Both: Interfaith Parent, Interfaith Child: Life With Two Religions
2013-01-17

Susan Katz Miller

Four years ago this week, we awoke before dawn, bundled our children into layers of clothing, and walked from our house to the Metro station. We wedged our family onto a subway car with throngs of neighbors and tourists, and emerged in downtown Washington DC, just as the sky began to turn pink. As we sleep-walked past the grand Constitution Hall heading towards the Washington Monument, I told my children how the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) prevented opera singer Marian Anderson from performing in that Hall in 1939. They were amazed that their own grandparents had lived through such times…

Read the entire article here.

Have a complicated identity? America’s future looks ‘A Lot Like You’

The Seattle Globalist: Where Seattle Meets the World.
2013-01-25

Sarah Stuteville, Cofounder

“The bibimbap, is that dolsot?” asks documentary filmmaker Eli Kimaro looking up from the menu of Wabi-Sabi in Columbia City.

She’s trying to gauge the authenticity of the Korean dish in question. This version doesn’t come in the traditional heated stone pot (dolsot), but she goes for it anyway–calling the rice bowl a favorite “comfort food.”

Kimaro couldn’t be more at home ordering Korean food in a neighborhood with an African American history and a growing reputation for international diversity.

Her father is Tanzanian and her mother is Korean. They both worked in international aid and development in Washington DC and Kimaro grew up in a community where being cross-cultural “was the norm.”…

…Kimaro, who identifies as a black woman and a “Tanzkomerican” explores these themes in “A Lot Like You,” which follows her journey back to Tanzania to explore her family’s roots in the Chagga culture while telling the story of her unique childhood…

Read the entire article here.

Michael Jeffries on the Cultural Significance of President Obama

Wellesley College News
Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts
2013-01-18

New Book by Wellesley American Studies Professor Tackles Race in America

Michael Jeffries, Knafel Assistant Professor of Social Sciences and Assistant Professor of American Studies, studies race, gender, politics, identity, and popular culture. His new book, Paint the White House Black: Barack Obama and the Meaning of Race in America, looks at how race relies on other social forces, like gender and class, for its meaning and impact.

The book features discussions of race and nationhood, discourses of “biracialism” and Obama’s mixed heritage, the purported emergence of a “post-racial society,” and popular symbols of Michelle Obama as a modern black woman; we asked him about some of those themes.

Your book focuses on “an understanding of how race works in America” rather than emphasizing the details of President Obama’s political career; why is it important for the reader to think about the topic this way?

We need to move away from “great man” or “great woman” explanations for historical change. President Obama is a supremely talented politician, and an important thinker and speaker in many ways, but he operates within all sorts of constraints. Likewise, our impressions of the president are constrained by our cultural context—the language we use, the images we see, and the stories that are amplified by media outlets become the raw material for building our own personal models of Barack Obama. The way we talk and think about race is obviously a major factor in all this, but race is such a contentious and taboo topic that racial discussion is fraught with missteps and misunderstandings. The only way to get a grip on Obama-mania and effectively counteract racism is to force ourselves to think about race in concert with other ideas, like class and gender…

Read the entire interview here.

Paint the White House Black: Barack Obama and the Meaning of Race in America

Stanford University Press
2013
224 pages
2 tables
Cloth ISBN: 9780804780957
Paper ISBN: 9780804780964
E-book ISBN: 9780804785570

Michael P. Jeffries, Sidney R. Knafel Assistant Professor of American Studies
Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts

Barack Obama’s election as the first black president in American history forced a reconsideration of racial reality and possibility. It also incited an outpouring of discussion and analysis of Obama’s personal and political exploits. Paint the White House Black fills a significant void in Obama-themed debate, shifting the emphasis from the details of Obama’s political career to an understanding of how race works in America. In this groundbreaking book, race, rather than Obama, is the central focus.

Michael P. Jeffries approaches Obama’s election and administration as common cultural ground for thinking about race. He uncovers contemporary stereotypes and anxieties by examining historically rooted conceptions of race and nationhood, discourses of “biracialism” and Obama’s mixed heritage, the purported emergence of a “post-racial society,” and popular symbols of Michelle Obama as a modern black woman. In so doing, Jeffries casts new light on how we think about race and enables us to see how race, in turn, operates within our daily lives.

Race is a difficult concept to grasp, with outbursts and silences that disguise its relationships with a host of other phenomena. Using Barack Obama as its point of departure, Paint the White House Black boldly aims to understand race by tracing the web of interactions that bind it to other social and historical forces.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• CHAPTER 1: THROUGH THE FOG
• CHAPTER 2: MY (FOUNDING) FATHER’S SON: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Inheritance
• CHAPTER 3: “MUTTS LIKE Me”: Barack Obama, Tragic Mulattos, and Cool Mixed-Race Millennial
• CHAPTER 4: POSTRACIALISM RECONSIDERED: Class, the Black Counterpublic, and the End of Black Politics
• CHAPTER 5: THE PERILS OF BEING SUPERWOMAN: Michelle Obama’s Public Image
• CHAPTER 6: A PLACE CALLED “OBAMA”
• Appendix I. A Discussion of Racial Inequality
• Appendix II. Interviewing Multiracial Students
• Notes
• Index