Mixed Race Studies

Half-white is an insult

The Guardian
2008-11-13

Michael Paulin

The debate over how black Obama is obscures the racial reconciliation his election represents

Barack Hussein Obama’s stunning victory against what was a thoroughly cynical Clinton campaign and a confused and morally bankrupt conservative Republican opposition is as historically significant as the fall of the Berlin Wall. His victory has revealed that a radical new form of political discourse and dialogue is possible, and that the tired dichotomies the political class have sustained for so long can be challenged by the people.

We now have our first black president. The most powerful man in the world is a black man. A man partly raised by his white grandparents. We have the first black president of the United States and, simultaneously, our first mixed-race president.

In Britain, Obama’s victory has exposed a predominantly white minority’s inherent suspicion and mistrust of black people. Christopher Hitchens, appearing on Newsnight last week, declared: “We do not have our first black president. He is not black. He is as black as he is white. He is not full black.” Rod Liddle, writing in the current edition of the Spectator under the headline “Is Barack Obama really black?”, suggested that “coloured“—a term of reference used in apartheid South Africa—would be more appropriate…

…These commentators are ignorant of the realities of the black experience and of the possibility of being of mixed heritage. Hitchens’s reliance on the concept of being “full black”, which harks back to the age of eugenics, exposes just how reactionary he has become. At this great moment in the global struggle for genuine democracy and racial unity, such commentators wriggle in discomfort, clinging to Obama’s “whiteness” in order to appease their own anxieties about the fact that we now have a black president. Even Yasmin Alibhai-Brown wrote an atrocious piece in the Evening Standard suggesting it was an insult to Obama’s mother to call him black…

…It is unfortunate that this needs to be said but, for the avoidance of doubt: Barack Hussein Obama is black. Yet he is also mixed-race. Perhaps more important, he is a black, mixed-race intellectual…

Read the entire article here.

Post-race? Nation, Inheritance and the Contradictory Performativity of Race in Barack Obama’s ‘A More Perfect Union’ Speech

thirdspace: a journal of feminist theory & culture
Volume 10, Number 1 (2011)
18 pages

Bridget Byrne, Senior Lecturer in Social Sciences
University of Manchester

This article takes the speech that Barack Obama made in his campaign for democratic nomination in 2008 as a moment in the performativity of race. It argues that Obama was unable to sustain an attempt to be ‘post race’, but is also asks the extent to which Obama was able to re-write the way in which race is positioned within the US, particularly with reference to the place of African-Americans within the national narrative.

Introduction

[S]ome people have a hard time taking me at face value. When people who don’t know me well, black or white, discover my background (and it usually is a discovery, for I ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of 12 or 13, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites), I see the split-second adjustment they have to make, the searching of my eyes for some tell-tale sign. They no longer know who I am.
(Obama, Dreams from my Father xv).

It’s not likely that there are too many people left who do not know who Barack Obama is, or that he is the product of a ‘brief union’ as he puts it, between ‘a black man and a white woman, an African and an American’ (Obama, Dreams from my Father xv). Nonetheless, Obama’s racial identity remains a source of fascination. The website democraticunderground.com hosted a discussion thread in March 2008 prompted by the question ‘What ethnicity is Obama’. The original questioner was interested in exploring ‘his white half’s ethnicity’. One of the respondents to this thread provides links to a website publishing Obama’s family tree and writes ‘it is amazing to see just how ‘white’ his mother and grandparents are’. The same respondent also provides a picture from Obama’s mother’s high school yearbook to demonstrate her ‘amazing’ whiteness as well as one of Obama with his white grandparents. The thread continues with a string of photos of different members of his family (including his half-Indonesian sister’s ‘Oriental husband who came from Canada’). This is just one example of the fascination that Obama’s racial positioning prompts in supporters and detractors alike and suggests that for many, it takes more than a ‘split-second’ adjustment to reconcile themselves to complex ideas of family, heritage and racialized identities.

This paper will explore a particular moment in the racialized positioning of Obama and his own self-positioning as an example of the performativity of race or possibly of ‘post-race’. The paper will take a key instance when Obama put his own racial positioning on the stage, in response to a particular set of political events. Through an examination of his ‘A more perfect union’ speech in Philadelphia during his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination (18th March 2008), I want to consider the extent to which we can ‘trouble race’ in the same way that Judith Butler has argued for the troubling of gender. The campaign election of Barack Obama has inserted the concept of ‘post-race’ into popular discourse in a forceful way. This article will question what the theoretical literature, which might regard race to be ‘under-erasure’ rather than ‘overcome,’ can offer to an analysis of the positioning of Obama. This is important because, despite longstanding academic and activist insistence that ‘race’ is a social construction devoid of any inherent or essential meaning, the ontological status of ‘race’ remains in question. As the reaction to Barack Obama shows, race is something that we still appear to need to ‘know’ about each other (and perhaps particularly about those who are not ‘white’). Yet, as I will argue, the racialized performativity offered by Obama is far from clear-cut and suggests that a more complex analysis is required. This paper will first explore the ideas of being ‘beyond’ or ‘post’ race and then consider how the notion of gender performativity might be productively extended to race peformativity. Then it will return to the speech given by Barack Obama in the course of his nomination campaign to explore both the impossibility for some figures to step outside of race, but also the potential scope to re-fashion concepts of race and inheritance, and particularly their relation to the nation…

Read the entire article here.

Rhetoric, Identity and the Obama Racial Phenomenon: Exploring Obama’s Title as the “First Black President”

Wichita State University
May 2010
75 pages

Krystal Cole

A Thesis by Krystal Cole Bachelors of Communications, Southwestern College, 2008 Submitted to the Department of Communication and the faculty of the Graduate School of Wichita State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

In 2008, a nearly 200 year U.S. historical precedent was overturned when Barack Obama was named the “first Black president.” Although Obama is of mixed heritage, he adopted an almost singularly Black identity and has long been characterized by the media as Black. This study is concerned with the role that society and Obama’s acceptance of the title play in identifying and portraying him as the “first Black president.” This study compares Barack Obama’s self-portrayal in his book, Dreams From my Father, to mainstream and Black media portrayals of his race. Results track Obama’s self portrayal as Black, mainstream media’s sensemaking of his classification as the “first Black president” and Black media’s unquestioned acceptance of the classification.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• I. Introduction
• II. Literature Review
  • a. Racial Classification in History
  • b. Racial Classification in Today’s Society
  • c. Racial Classification of the Self
  • d. Mass Media and Social Impact
• III. Methodology
• IV. Results
  • a. Research Sub-Question 1a
  • b. Research Sub-Question 1b
  • c. Research Sub-Question 1c
• V. Discussion
  • a. Research Sub-Question 1a
  • b. Research Sub-Question 1b
  • c. Research Sub-Question 1c
• VI. Future Research and Conclusion
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• APPENDIX

…CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION

Racial identity is not fixed or mutually exclusive, but rests on individualistic choices within structurally and culturally defined parameters (Rockquemore & Brunsma, 2008). The common theme in research studies is that the one-drop rule is a significant factor in socially classifying race (Korgen, 1998: Rockquemore & Brunsma, 2008). Obama has primarily adopted a Black identity due to his life experiences, cultural upbringing and the effects of the one-drop rule. Consistent with prior findings, the one-drop rule still proves to be a potent, active agency in determining race. The larger society still sees Biracial individuals as Black, thus, in order to assist in their survival/success, having a Black identity is seen as the only option (Rosenblatt, Karis, & Powell, 1995). It is clear that racial classification has been a complex), multi-layered process in U.S. history.

As prior research notes, the addition of the “check all that apply” option in 2000 for reporting race on the U.S. Census suggests that the notion of assigning Biracial children to the Black race, is considered outmoded (Brunsma, 2006). This is not the case when it comes to Barack Obama’s self-portrayal. Anecdotal evidence indicates that multiracial people still encounter mono-racial categorizations (Shih & Sanchez, 2005). As a result of his Ambivalent Identity, Obama’s lifelong struggle with his race has led him to choose a Singular Identity. He has chosen to claim his Black ancestry. Although it took centuries for multiracial people to finally have the opportunity to “check all that apply'” on the U.S. Census, Obama chose to disregard the option.

On April, 2, 2010 it was reported by Washington Post that Obama had officially announced that he is Black on the U.S. Census. “The White House confirmed on Friday that Obama did not check multiple boxes on his U.S. Census form, or choose the option that allows him to elaborate on his racial heritage. He ticked the box that says Black, African American, or Negro” (Smith, 2010). Thus, Obama has proudly marked history as the “first Black president.” This characterization disregards his White ancestry and could possibly counteract the mixed-race movement if his example encourages Biracial people to identify with their Black heritage. Ironically, his acceptance of the title as the “first Black president” could indicate that America will never enter a post-racial future if Biracial individuals continue to allow themselves to be placed in arbitrary categories. Unfortunately, Biracial individuals may never break away from being caught between the two ends of the dominant race continuum.

Read the entire thesis here.

Talking About Brazil with Lilia Schwarcz

The New York Review of Books
2010-08-17

Robert Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor of History
Harvard University

On a recent trip to Brazil, I struck up a conversation with Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, one of Brazil’s finest historians and anthropologists. The talk turned to the two subjects she has studied most—racism and national identity.
 
I first visited Brazil in 1989, when hyperinflation had nearly paralyzed the economy, favelas erupted in shoot-outs, and Lula, a hero of the union movement but still unsure of himself as a politician, was undertaking his first campaign for the presidency. I found it all fascinating and frightening. On my second trip, a few years later, I met Lilia and her husband, Luiz Schwarcz, who was beginning to build the company he had founded, Companhia das Letras, into one of the finest publishing houses in Latin America. They treated me to a day so packed with Braziliana that I remember it as one of the happiest experiences of my life: in the morning a stroll with their children through São Paulo’s main park, where families of all shades of color were picnicking and playing in dazzling sunlight; lunch, a tour of Brazilian specialties undreamt of in my culinary philosophy (but no pig’s ears or tails, it not being feijoada day); an international soccer match (Brazil beat Venezuela, and the stands exploded with joy); then countless caipirinhas and a cabaret-concert by Caetano Veloso at his most lyrical and politically provocative…

Since then I have never stopped marveling at the energy and originality of Brazilian culture. But I don’t pretend to understand it, all the more so as it is constantly changing, and I can’t speak Portuguese. I can only ask questions in English and strain to grasp the answers. Has the myth of Brazil as a “sleeping giant” turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy? “He has awoken,” people say today. The economy is booming, health services expanding, literacy improving. There are also prophecies of doom, because Brazil’s economic history looks like cycles of boom and bust imposed on centuries of slavery and pauperization. Still, Lula is completing a second and final term as president. Whatever Brazilians may think of his newly assertive foreign policy, which includes cultivating friendly relations with Iran (most of them don’t seem to be interested in it), they generally agree that he has managed the economy well and has done a great deal to improve the lot of the poor. Lula’s term will end in October, and he has thrown his support behind Dilma Rousseff, his former chief of staff, whose chances of winning are much bolstered by Lula’s own popularity. The first debate of the new presidential campaign, which took place on August 5, was a dignified affair—an indication, I was told, that democracy is healthy and the days of military coups are over. Now foreigners are asking new questions about the character of this new great power. I directed some of the FAQs at Lilia…

…RD: Yes, like many New Yorkers, I have moments of fear when I get off the subway at the wrong station or wander too far from 125th Street. But when I visit Brazil, I like to think I am in a country that is coping successfully with its history of racism. Could Brazil evolve into a multi-nuanced mestizo society like the one imagined by the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre?
 
LMS: Let me first ask you Bob, do you think of Obama as a “black President”? I am asking this question, because in Brazil the definition of color depends on the context, the moment and the temperament of the person who asks the question and responds to it.
 
RD: Ask any American, ask Obama himself, the answer will certainly be that he is black. In the US, despite the many varieties of skin color, we do not have a multi-nuanced notion of race. You are black or you are white or you are something not closely linked to color such as Chinese, Hispanic.
 
LMS: In Brazil, you are what you describe yourself to be. Officially we have five different colors—black, white, yellow, indigenous, and pardo (meaning “brown,” “brownish,” or “gray-brown”), but in reality, as research has demonstrated, we have more than 130 colors. Brazilians like to describe their spectrum of colors as a rainbow and we also think that color is a flexible way of categorizing people. For several years, I have been studying a soccer game called “Pretos X Brancos” (Blacks against whites), which takes place in a favela of São Paulo, called Heliópolis. In theory, it pits eleven white players against eleven black players. But, every year they change colors like they change socks or shirts—one year a player will choose to play for one team, the next year for the other, with the explanation that, “I feel more black,” or “I feel more white.” Also, in Brazil, if a person gets rich, he gets whiter. I recently talked with a dentist in Minas Gerais. As he is becoming old, his hair has turned white, and he is very well recognized in his little town. He started smoking cigars, joined the local Rotary Club, and said to me: “When I was black my life was really difficult.” So one can see how being white even nowadays is a powerful symbol. Here we have two sides of the same picture: on the one hand, identity is flexible; on the other hand, whiteness is ultimately what some people aspire to. But one aspect is common, the idea that you can manipulate your color and race…

Read the entire interview here.

Politics: President Obama, of All People, Should Know That Some Rights Can’t be Left to the States

The New Gay
2011-07-18

Tony Phillips

In 1961, when Barack Hussein Obama II was born in the brand new State of Hawaii, laws on the books in 22 of the other 49 United States forbade the marriage of his White American mother to his Black Kenyan father. Arizona’s anti-miscegenation law prohibiting marriage between whites and any persons of color was repealed in 1962. Similar laws in Utah and Nebraska were overturned the following year. Indiana’s law prohibiting interracial marriage held out until 1965, Maryland’s until 1967, the same year that such laws were finally overturned in Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Loving v. Virginia that ended all race-based legal restrictions on marriage in the United States…

…Yes, we all know about America’s racially conflicted past, so what’s the point?
 
The point is that it’s incomprehensible to me that Barack Obama, a man whose legitimacy as an American has been publicly questioned by hate-rousing provocateurs, a man whose early life confounds the prevailing norms of his generation, a man whose ascendency in the 21st Century was made possible only by the bravery of justice-seekers in the 20th, that he, of all people, would be behind the times on marriage equality. How is it possible that his stance on gay marriage is still evolving?…

Read the entire article here.

The “inter” land: Mixing autobiography and sociology for a better understanding of twenty-first century mixed-race

Villanova University
October 2009
105 pages
Publication Number: AAT 1462397
ISBN: 9781109073102

Felicia Maria Camacho

A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of The Department of English Villanova University In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in English

In contemporary autobiographies by black/white biracial Americans, personal identity is a major source of conflict. The proposed study will address topics that are key to an understanding of biracial subjectivity and identity as presented in these autobiographies. The first chapter addresses the physicality of biracial people, paying special attention to such topics as family resemblance in interracial families, and the trope of “biracial hair” which is used as a metaphor for a distinct biracial identity that is neither black nor white. The second chapter examines another identity choice for black/white biracial subjects: singular black identity. It shows how biracial individuals can turn on its head the traditional notion of the “tragic mulatto” who is forced by the one-drop rule to accept his/her blackness. By exploring and honestly acknowledging the social experiences of both parents, the biracial individual can come to assert a healthy black identity. The final chapter links black/white biracial identity with intrinsically multiracial Latino identity. Do ethnicity, nationalism, and language suggest a way to avoid the black/white binarism of American society?

While examining these issues of biracial identity, this study will engage in a commentary on the relationships between and among various academic disciplines. When analyzing literature about race, critics often turn to race theory for secondary material. However, contemporary race theory does not do much to engage and illuminate these autobiographies of biracialism. Interestingly, sociological texts speak more directly to the “biracial phenomenon.” Therefore each chapter of this study shows how sociology and autobiography complement one another and provide a fuller, more informed picture of biracial identity.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Introduction
• Chapter One: The Roots of Biracialism: Physical Appearance, Inheritance, and Identity in the Autobiographies of Elliott Lewis, Angela Nissel, and June Cross
• Chapter Two: The End of Tragedy: The New Biracial Subject, Self-Exploration, and Singular Black Identity in the Autobiographies of James McBride and Barack Obama
• Chapter Three: Finding the Third Space: Jews, Latinos, and Black/White Biracialism in the Autobiographies of Rebecca Walker, Elliott Lewis, and Angela Nissel
• Conclusion
• Works Cited

Purchase the dissertation here.

More than a ‘tragic mulatto’

Runnymede Bulletin
Spring 2011, Issue 365
pages 26

Zaki Nahaboo
Department of Politics & International Studies
The Open University, UK

Daniel R. McNeil. Sex and Race in the Black Atlantic: Mulatto Devils and Multiracial Messiahs. London: Routledge, 2009, 186 pp. Hardback ISBN 978-0-415-87226-3, Paperback ISBN 978-0-415-89391-6, eBook ISBN 978-0-203-85736-6.

Daniel McNeil illuminates harrowing accounts and insidious perceptions of mixed-race that exist across Canada, America and Britain. His monograph charts the transgression of the ‘colour-line’, exploring the subjectivity of those compelled to negotiate a mixed-race heritage while providing a critical intervention into the discourse of mixed-race as the contemporary cosmopolitan signifier of a post-racial future. These issues leap from the pages as he draws upon influential figures and popular culture ranging from Philippa Schuyler to Barack Obama.

As the title suggests, these issues cannot be analysed without considering the gendered forms of violence and the masculine structuring of desire, which snare the mixed race woman, particularly, between a rock and a hard place.

This is best exemplified in the second chapter of the book, in which McNeil seeks to uncover the linkages between the likes of W. E. B Du Bois, Frantz Fanon and Otto Rank. McNeil does not undermine recent poststructuralist readings of these theorists, instead choosing to delve into their perceptions about the mulatto. Here he finds that within their masculinist framework the mixed-race woman, in particular, is perceived as a hindrance, a problem, a neurotic and an object of pity. McNeil has provided a novel contribution, subtly showing that mixed-race is not simply a position of the petty bourgeoisie, but rather is seen as a shameful reminder of colonialism and ‘dilution’.

McNeil’s account of renowned American child prodigy Philippa Schuyler is a strategically deployed case study for elucidating a far more complex identity than the ‘tragic mulatto‘: i.e. “a feminised and neurotic figure who desires a white lover and either dies or returns to the black community”. Schuyler’s life is deployed to expose how the black/white binary is paradoxically and simultaneously transcended, escaped, denied and repudiated, while also remaining a continuous weight upon her life…

Read the entire review here.

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.

What Is The Real Issue With Obama Choosing Black?

The Atlanta Post
2010-05-04

Yvette Carnell

During candidate Obama’s run for Presidency, he said “I self-identify as an African-American. That’s how I am treated and that’s how I am viewed. And I’m proud of it.” Case closed right?  One would think so, but now that President Obama has checked “black” on his Census form, some of his detractors are criticizing him for running away from his heritage. So please allow me to set the record straight….

President Obama checked “black” on his Census form because, well, he is black.

It is a mark of evolution that Americans are allowed to identify themselves as “some other race” on their Census forms, but aren’t most of us multi-racial?  If Obama’s critics have decided that he should adhere to the strictest of rules where his race classification is concerned, then shouldn’t all Americans be held to that same standard?  And if we’re all held to that standard, won’t that make the task of completing the Census form an act in futility for many, if not most, Americans? We are a melting pot, and as such, a significant number of us are an amalgamation of a wide variety of races and are therefore, by definition, multiracial.  The only distinction is that race isn’t as much about definition as it is about identification…

…Some observers have even made the case that Obama’s choosing “black” on his Census form was a marginalization of his white mother and grandparents.  It was not. It was, however, an acknowledgment of the visual queues associated with race, and to a larger extent-racism.

What’s more, isn’t it a bit hypocritical for those who’ve fought for the right of multiracial and biracial people to choose a race category which more suitably fits the way in which they self identify, i.e. a choice more ethnically encompassing than purely Black, White, or Asian to now force President Obama into their preferred “multiracial” box?…

Read the entire essay here.