Mixed Race Studies

Book review: The Black Irish Onscreen: Representing Black and Mixed-Race Identities on Irish Film and Television

Film Ireland
Temple Bar, Dublin, Ireland
2013-11-19

Sarah Griffin

Zélie Asava, The Black Irish Onscreen: Representing Black and Mixed-Race Identities on Irish Film and Television (Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Wien: Peter Lang, 2013)

Sarah Griffin welcomes Zélie Asava‘s book that applies divergent theoretical concepts of Irishness, whiteness, gender and the particular place of the ‘other’ to the ‘conceptual whiteness of Irishness itself’.

While the intricacies of white and non-white filmic representation has been a subject of much study, most particularly in relation to Hollywood’s output, there has been less focused investigation into the particular relationship Ireland has to its own ‘whiteness’ and how that translates on our big and little screens.  Zélie Asava does so here, bringing together theorists and researchers from disparate decades and tying their ideas to a particularly Irish situation—a country that has only begun to integrate the multicultural nature of a relatively recently expanded populace.  From Sigmund Freud’s ‘return of the repressed’, Julie Kristeva’s abjection, Richard Dyer’s seminal contributions to the study of whiteness, and Judith Butler’s performativity, to the more recent work of Diane Negra on ‘off-white Hollywood’ and a compendium of Irish contributors, Asava blends theorists and personal experience (as an Irish/Kenyan actor) to position herself at the front line.  This book provides a welcome opportunity to apply divergent theoretical concepts of Irishness, whiteness, gender and the particular place of the ‘other’ to, as she calls it, “the conceptual whiteness of Irishness itself”…

Read the entire review here.

Changing Space, Making Race: Distance, Nostalgia, and the Folklorization of Blackness in Puerto Rico

Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power
Volume 9,  Issue 3, 2002
pages 281-304
DOI: 10.1080/10702890213969

Isar Godreau
Institute of Interdisciplinary Research
University of Puerto Rico, Cayey

In this article, I critique some of the discursive terms in which blackness is folklorized and celebrated institutionally as part of the nation in Puerto Rico. I examine a government-sponsored housing project that meant to revitalize and stylize the community of San Antón, in Ponce, as a historic black site. Although government officials tried to preserve what they considered to be traditional aspects of this community, conflict arose because not all residents agreed with this preservationist agenda. I document the controversy, linking the government’s approach to racial discourses that represent blackness as a vanishing and distant component of Puerto Rico. I argue that this inclusion and celebration complements ideologies of blanqueamiento (whitening) and race-mixture that distance blackness to the margins of the nation and romanticize black communities as remnants of a past era. I link these dynamics to modernizing State agendas and discourses of authenticity that fuel cultural nationalism worldwide.

In March 1995, The San Juan Star, one of Puerto Rico’s leading newspapers, announced that “Puerto Ricans will ‘bleach away’ many of the physical traces of its African past by the year 2200, with the rest of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean following a few centuries later” (Bliss 1995:30). The article, which was written to commemorate the 122nd year anniversary of the abolition of slavery on the island, also seemed to be commemorating the future “abolition” of blackness itself, “in two centuries.” said one of the experts interviewed, “there will hardly be any blacks in Puerto Rico” (historian, Luis Diaz Soler, in Bliss 1995: 30).

This racial forecast and concomitant claims to the gradual disappearance of black cultural manifestations reinforces ideologies of blanqueamiento well known and thoroughly documented in Latin America (Burdick 1992; de la Fuente 2001; Lancaster 1991; Martinez-Echazabal 1999; Skidmore 1974; Stephan 1991; Wade 1993,1997; and Whitten and Torres 1992. among others). Scholars and activists have demonstrated that such notions of whitening often go hand in hand with…

Read or purchase the article here.

Race in Biological and Biomedical Research

Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Medicine
Volume 3, Issue 11 (November 2013)
10 pages
DOI: 10.1101/cshperspect.a008573

Richard S. Cooper, Anthony B. Traub Professor of Community and Family Medicine
Loyola University Medical School

The concept of race has had a significant influence on research in human biology since the early 19th century. But race was given its meaning and social impact in the political sphere and subsequently intervened in science as a foreign concept, not grounded in the dominant empiricism of modern biology. The uses of race in science were therefore often disruptive and controversial; at times, science had to be retrofitted to accommodate race, and science in turn was often used to explain and justify race. This relationship was unstable in large part because race was about a phenomenon that could not be observed directly, being based on claims about the structure and function of genomic DNA. Over time, this relationship has been characterized by distinct phases, evolving from the inference of genetic effects based on the observed phenotype to the measurement of base-pair variation in DNA. Despite this fundamental advance in methodology, liabilities imposed by the dual political-empirical origins of race persist. On the one hand, an optimistic prediction can be made that just as geology made it possible to overturn the myth of the recent creation of the earth and evolution told us where the living world came from, molecular genetics will end the use of race in biology. At the same time, because race is fundamentally a political and not a scientific idea, it is possible that only a political intervention will relieve us of the burden of race.

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that he cannot close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris in front of him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

—Walter Benjamin
Theses on the Philosophy of History

RACE AS THE UNWELCOME GUEST IN THE DISCIPLINES OF SCIENCE

We rarely appreciate the presence of history in our day-to-day experience. The quotidian is a mixture of the repetitive and the predictable, carried forward by habit and punctuated by random events that we regard as either good or bad fortune. But in a more reflective mood, we have to acknowledge the relentless force of history that holds us in its grasp and accept that it creates the possibilities we use to negotiate with the future. The imposition of racial categories on human populations has been one of the most enduring historical forces that sets limits on opportunity and thereby shapes our life trajectory. As a projection of the underlying power relationships onto individuals, racial categories are used to structure social inequality. These power relationships are manifested both in the belief system that rank orders intrinsic human qualities according to group membership and the social institutions that enforce this hierarchy by restricting access to wealth, education, and other social goods. This daily reality is central to the history of all modern societies.

The racial structuring of society also has pervasive influence on biological research and the patterns of health and disease. Enormous effort has been expended to describe human demographic history through reference to an ever-changing array of constructs and categories, all of which include a hierarchical arrangement—either explicit or implicit. In the United States, most prominently, public health has embraced racial/ethnic categories as fundamental structural elements. Clinical medicine has similarly evoked racial categories to explain causation and outcomes across the entire spectrum of diseases. At the same time, race has met some of the strongest challenges to its legitimacy in biology and biomedicine. All of biology is grounded in the theory of descent from a common ancestor. The belief in racial categories was one of the most powerful liabilities of pre-modern biology and lent credence to the established view of divine creation. Indeed, it has recently been argued that the challenge to race brought by the abolitionist movement was a key factor behind Darwin’s transformative insight that the biological world—on the evolutionary time scale—is a single indivisible whole (Desmond and Moore 2009). Biomedicine still grapples with the implications of that insight for our species, yet substantial progress—uneven, tentative, and ultimately disappointing—has been made. In the current era, genomic science has opened new vistas onto previously unobserved dimensions of biology, and that proportion of the concept of race that has been attributed to genetics can finally be subjected to empirical scrutiny. Integrating this new knowledge into practice and focusing the technology on socially productive work, as always, remains our most difficult challenge.

The narrative of race therefore wanders the border territory between what we call science and what we recognize as history and politics. In the pre-genomic era, there was no requirement—indeed, no opportunity—to validate the authority of race with molecular evidence; causal inferences were made on the basis of phenotype, in its broadest possible sense, from disease to accumulated material wealth to social graces. The primary purpose of the race concept was to serve as a shortcut, an organizing tool that allowed post-enlightenment Europe to explain—and thereby justify—how imperialism had reshaped the world. Consequently, for both the social and biological sciences, race felt like the rude cousin whose claim on our affection was based on obligation, not choice. In every historical period, an incremental struggle has been waged to overcome the disruption that this unwelcome intruder has caused within empirical scientific disciplines.

In its origins, race was a “label of convenience” that biologists used interchangeably with the construct of “varieties” as they tried to create taxonomic categories below the level of the species (Cooper 1984). Writers from across the intellectual spectrum of literature and politics also felt free to make use of the idea. Thus, Baudelaire spoke of the “race of Abel” and the “race of Cain” when describing the polarization of 19th-century French society, and Marx characterized the English working class as a “race of peculiar commodity owners” (Baudelaire 1857; Marx 1957) (“Hence the sum of the means of subsistence necessary for the production of labour-power must include the means necessary for the labourer’s substitutes, i.e., his children, in order that this race of peculiar commodity-owners may perpetuate its appearance in the market.” [p. 172]). Malleability continues to be an essential quality of race, although it is now primarily used as a label for the temporary and often random aggregation of population subgroups, usually tied in some rough way to the perceived continent of origin (Kaufman and Cooper 1996). In its contemporary sense, biological race has now come to signify the inherited qualities of a population group hidden inside the DNA molecule…

Read the entire article here.

American Identity in the Age of Obama

Routledge
2013-11-28
250 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-72201-8

Edited by:

Amílcar Antonio Barreto, Associate Professor of Political Science
Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts

Richard L. O’Bryant, Assistant Professor of Political Science; Director of the John D. O’Bryant African American Institute
Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts

The election of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States has opened a new chapter in the country’s long and often tortured history of inter-racial and inter-ethnic relations. Many relished in the inauguration of the country’s first African American president — an event foreseen by another White House aspirant, Senator Robert Kennedy, four decades earlier. What could have only been categorized as a dream in the wake of Brown vs. Board of Education was now a reality. Some dared to contemplate a post-racial America. Still, soon after Obama’s election a small but persistent faction questioned his eligibility to hold office; they insisted that Obama was foreign-born. Following the Civil Rights battles of the 20th century hate speech, at least in public, is no longer as free flowing as it had been. Perhaps xenophobia, in a land of immigrants, is the new rhetorical device to assail what which is non-white and hence un-American. Furthermore, recent debates about immigration and racial profiling in Arizona along with the battle over rewriting of history and civics textbooks in Texas suggest that a post-racial America is a long way off.

What roles do race, ethnicity, ancestry, immigration status, locus of birth play in the public and private conversations that defy and reinforce existing conceptions of what it means to be American?

This book exposes the changing and persistent notions of American identity in the age of Obama. Amílcar Antonio Barreto, Richard L. O’Bryant, and an outstanding line up of contributors examine Obama’s election and reelection as watershed phenomena that will be exploited by the president’s supporters and detractors to engage in different forms of narrating the American national saga. Despite the potential for major changes in rhetorical mythmaking, they question whether American society has changed substantively.

Contents

• Introduction: The Age of Obama and American Identity; Amílcar Antonio Barreto and Richard L. O’Bryant
• 1. Obama and Enduring Notions of American National Identity; Amílcar Antonio Barreto
• 2. Racial Identification in a Post Obama Era: Multiracialism, Identity Choice and Candidate Evaluation; Natalie Masuoka
• 3. The Son of a Black Man from Kenya and a White Woman from Kansas: Immigration and Racial Neoliberalism in the Age of Obama; Josue David Cisneros
• 4. Immigrant Resentment and American Identity in the Twenty-First Century; Deborah J. Schildkraut
• 5. Browning our way to Post-Race: Identity, Identification, and Securitization of Brown; Kumarini Silva
• 6. White Masculinities in the Age of Obama: Rebuilding or Reloading?; Steven D. Farough
• 7. “Exceptionally Distinctive: President Obama’s Complicated Articulation of American Exceptionalism; Joseph M. Valenzano and Jason A. Edwards
• 8. Barack Obama’s Foreign Policy Leadership: Renewing America’s Image; Mark A. Menaldo
• 9. The First Black President?: Cross-Racial Perceptions of Barack Obama’s Race; David Wilson and Matthew Hunt

Revolutionizing Romance: Interracial Couples in Contemporary Cuba [Williams Review]

Association for Feminist Anthropology
Book Reviews
2012-12-21

Erica Lorraine Williams, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Spelman College, Atlanta, Georgia

Nadine T. Fernandez, Revolutionizing Romance: Interracial Couples in Contemporary Cuba (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010)

In this insightful and well-written ethnography, Nadine Fernandez explores a central paradox: if mestizaje (racial mixing) is the “essence” of the Cuban nation, then why are interracial couples, the purported “engines of mestizaje” (184), still perceived with disdain? Why are interracial couplings – particularly those between black and white Cubans – so infrequent and often met with resistance? A deeply historical and ethnographic account, Revolutionizing Romance advances the compelling argument that “nowhere is race more salient than in romance” (50). Moreover, Fernandez argues that the conflicts surrounding interracial relationships actually highlight “the ideological aspects of racism at work” (53).

This important and timely book documents the shifting meanings of interracial relationships over time in Cuba. The first half of the ethnography provides the historical and conceptual background that sets the stage for the rest of the book by unpacking the history of whitening ideologies and the ideological construction of Cuba as a mestizo nation. Fernandez analyzes how the “revolution’s ideological insistence on ‘racelessness’…provided a sociocultural and ideological space for interracial couples” (68). For instance, Sofia, a mulata engineer and Fernando, a white art historian, are an interracial couple who were both born in the early 1950s and who met while studying in the former Soviet Union. Their families supported their relationship in part because of the color-blind ideology that the revolution had fostered. Interestingly, while race scholars are often dismissive of the concept of color-blindness (rightly so, I might add), Fernandez points out that in the context of Cuba, this concept has some redeeming qualities…

Read the entire review here.

A Racial Paradise? Race and Race Mixture in Henry Louis Gates’ Brazil

Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies
Volume 8,  Issue 1, 2013
pages 88-91
DOI: 10.1080/17442222.2013.768464

Chinyere Osuji, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Camden

In this documentary, Henry Louis Gates explores the extent to which the notion of being a racial paradise applies to Brazil. He introduces Brazil’s contradictions of being the last country to abolish slavery’ in the New World in 1888, yet the first to declare that it was free of racism. He explores a variety of cities in Brazil in order to understand the history of early race mixture, contemporary valorization of Blackness, and attempts to address racial inequality. As a viewer, we watch how Gates’ fascination with the Brazil’s African heritage and race mixture at the beginning of the film turns into a questioning of the myth of racial democracy.

The film is useful in terms of providing a primer on race in Brazil for novices on race in Latin America. Geared towards the general public, this is a film that could be used in an introductory course for undergraduates about race in Brazil or Latin America more broadly. Its strengths are in illuminating the nature of slavery and race mixture in Brazil’s history while introducing the racial ideologies of whitening and racial democracy. Gates introduces scholars such as Manoel Querino and the more renowned Gilberto Freyre to discuss their scholarship on black contributions to Brazilian society. Gates’ film also has vibrant images of Carnaval, capoeira, and a Candomblé ceremony, providing opportunities for students to gain exposure to these African-influenced cultural practices.

This film is somewhat problematic in terms of illuminating racial and color categories in contemporary Brazil. Gates indirectly cites a 1976 Brazilian National Household Survey study that found people used over 100 terms to describe their color. Gates says: ‘In the U.S., a person with any African ancestry is legally defined as black. In Brazil, racial categories are on steroids.’ However, this perspective has been discredited by scholars who argue that most Brazilians only use a handful of terms to describe themselves. In fact, re-examinations of the same 1976 survey found that 95 percent of Brazilians used only six terms to describe themselves: branco, moreno, pardo, moreno-claro, preto and negro (Silva, 1987; Telles, 2004). The 10 most common terms were the aforementioned as well as amarela, mulata, clara, and morena-escura. All together, these 10 terms account for how 99 percent of all Brazilians think of their race/color. These findings have been replicated using more national survey data (Petruccelli, 2001; Telles, 2004). However, the myth of the hundreds of racial and color terms that Brazilians use to identify themselves will not die, and now Gates aids in perpetuating it…

Read or purchase the article here.

Carlton Mackey: Conversations beyond color

Emory Profile
Emory News Center
2013-11-22

Kimber Williams

As director of Emory’s Ethics and the Arts program — and a lifelong photographer and filmmaker — Carlton Mackey is used to exploring the questions that intrigue him through an artist’s lens. 

So as he prepared to become a father for the first time, questions of skin tone and identity, beauty and culture came to captivate him as never before: Will this child identify as biracial? Will he identify as black? What is blackness? What does skin tone mean in the search for identity?

His response was to embark upon a deeply personal exploration of the topic, which has resulted in “50 Shades of Black” (self-published, 2013), a multi-disciplinary art project funded, in part, by a grant from Emory’s Center for Creativity & Arts, that investigates the intersection of skin tone and sexuality in shaping identity through both a book, a website and traveling art exhibit…

…Emory Report caught up with Mackey to discuss the evolution of “50 Shades of Black,” which will be the focus of a public exhibition at the Center for Ethics next February. 

Where does your story as an artist begin?

My roots go back to Southern Georgia. I was born in Jesup, Georgia, and raised by a mom (Burnell Mackey) and dad (Carl Mackey) who loved me dearly. When I was 4 years old, my mom passed away after battling cancer. After that, I moved to Blackshear, Georgia, to live with my grandmother, Pearl Taylor — the single most important female figure in my life, outside of my mom, who spent my formative years rearing, shaping and molding me. 

As an adult, I have a new set of eyes for understanding how she influenced me as an artist. But it doesn’t look like painting or drawing or making films. She got as far as the sixth grade and worked hard her entire life — so no, not a lot of art in that sense. But I’ve come to understand some of the key ingredients for being a successful artist are thinking outside the box, being resourceful. Creativity can flourish more when there are limitations than when there is excess, I think. That’s what she showed me day after day. I use that as an artist…

…How did you come up with the idea for the “50 Shades of Black” project?

Before I had my son Isaiah, I’d never dated anyone who didn’t look like me. But I fell in love with my wife (Kari, who is white). When I was going to become a father, I started having these questions: What is this kid going to look like? Is he going to identify with me? Am I going to identify with him? Is he going to be black? What is blackness? 

When I saw him, all that went out the window, didn’t even matter. But the root of those questions are very real and continue to be very real, not only for parents, but for children who look like him, historically, who will go through life with people asking, “What are you? Where are you from?”…

Read the entire interview here.

Many Rivers to Cross: From Black Power to the Black President

The Root
2013-11-26

Peniel E. Joseph, Professor of History
Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts

In the sixth and final installment of his PBS series, Henry Louis Gates Jr. leads us from the black power movement to the historic election of Barack Obama.

Americans have notoriously short memories when it comes to race and history, especially black history. And it’s in that context that Harvard professor and The Root’s editor-in-chief, Henry Louis Gates Jr., has looked back through time to bring us The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, a six-part documentary film, airing on PBS, that concludes tonight and that has offered an important capstone to a year full of important civil rights anniversaries.

Over the past five weeks, the series has taken viewers to locations around the world to explore the origins of trans-Atlantic slavery, plumb the depth of America’s antebellum era and chronicle the exploits for black political, economic and cultural self-determination in the Civil War’s bloody aftermath.

And after watching this series, which is a timely corrective to contemporary discourse around race relations, all Americans will gain a better understanding of the way in which both the distant and recent past continue to shape and inform our national present…

Read the entire article here.

Hello World: How Nike Sold Tiger Woods

The Margins (After 1989)
Asian American Writer’s Workshop
2012-08-02

Hiram Perez, Assistant Professor of English
Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York

How did a multinational corporation like Nike appeal to diverse markets without violating the principle of colorblindness that became increasingly and insidiously sacrosanct in the U.S. in the 1990s? A deconstruction of two infamous Tiger Woods ads sheds some light.

Percussion punctuates the chanting voices of boys and men as images of Tiger Woods, first as a toddler, then a young man, are choreographed into a montage that builds to an emotional, triumphalist crescendo. Over footage of fist-pumping victories and slow-motion shots of Woods, golf club in hand, walking across greens surrounded by galleries of peers, media, and fans, the following title sequence appears:

Hello world.

I shot in the 70s when I was 8.

I shot in the 60s when I was 12.

I played in the Nissan Open when I was 16.

Hello world.

I won the U.S. Amateur when I was 18.

I played in the Masters when I was 19.

I am the only man to win three consecutive U.S. Amateur titles.

Hello world.

There are still courses in the U.S. I am not allowed to play

because of the color of my skin.

Hello world.

I’ve heard I’m not ready for you.

Are you ready for me?

Nike made Woods the new major face of its brand when he turned professional in 1996. That year Nike signed Woods to a 40-million dollar, five-year contract (eclipsed by the $100 million dollar contract that followed in 2001) and released its controversial “Hello World” television campaign. The skilled editing, writing, and scoring of the ad elicits goose bumps to this day, even from cynical viewers (like me)…

…Tiger Woods’ racial celebrity personifies the paradox of ’90s racial discourse: a simultaneous institutionalization of diversity politics and colorblind universalism. This union of seemingly contradictory ideologies becomes a hallmark of liberal multiculturalism and its commodity forms. Race does not matter, or it matters only insofar as it can be commercialized.

We see this clearly in “I am Tiger Woods,” the second Nike campaign for Tiger Woods released in 1996, which universalizes multiraciality to herald colorblindness. The television commercial begins with a black boy pronouncing, “I am Tiger Woods.” The next shot features an Asian girl doing the same—hardly a coincidence since Woods is the son of a black father and Thai mother. Accompanied by percussion and the flute-like sounds of a falsetto chant, several more children follow, each making identical pronouncements. In the final shot, Tiger Woods appears on a dewy green striking a golf ball in slow motion, and a white subtitle at the bottom of the screen announces, “I am Tiger Woods.” The ad succeeds in evacuating the fact of Woods’ blackness much more effectively than his now infamous identification as “Cablinasian.” Personal criticism of Woods at the time for his use of this neologism could have been more productively directed at Nike’s construction of Woods’ transcendent racial celebrity, an iconography that so effectively sutured multiculturalism to colorblindness. The celebrity of Tiger Woods and its corporatization safeguard status quo, institutionalized racism.

However paradoxical, colorblindness and multiculturalism ultimately advance similar ideologies. Each imagines racial difference independently from systemic racism. Liberal multiculturalism promotes diversity for the sake of diversity and has little interest in radically challenging the institutions that secure white privilege…

Read the entire article here.

How to Rehabilitate a Mulatto: The Iconography of Tiger Woods

Chapter in East Main Street: Asian American Popular Culture (pages 222-245)

New York University Press
May 2005
382 pages
29 illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 9780814719626
Paperback ISBN: 9780814719633

Edited By:

Shilpa Davé, Assistant Dean, College of Arts and Sciences; Assistant Professor of Media Studies and American Studies
University of Virginia

LeiLani Nishime, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies
University of Washington

Tasha Oren, Associate Professor of English
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Foreword by:

Robert G. Lee, Associate Professor of American Studies
Brown University

Chapter Author:

Hiram Perez, Assistant Professor of English
Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York

“A Real American Story”

Tiger Woods’s tongue-in-cheek identification as “Cablinasian” on the Oprah Winfrey Show in April 1997 resulted in such contentiousness within the black community that Winfrey followed up later that same month with a program devoted to the “Tiger Woods Race Controversy” Woods’s identification as Cablinasian during that interview has more often than not been taken out of context. He relates arriving at that category (“Ca, Caucasian; bl, black; in, Indian; Asian—Cablinasian”) during his childhood as a survival strategy against racist taunting and violence, including an incident after the first day of kindergarten when he was tied to a tree and called a monkey and a nigger. However, that moment on Oprah when he pronounced the word “Cablinasian” constituted for the multiracial category movement an Amalgamation Proclamation of sorts. Following the program, he was soundly blasted by black media and intellectuals, among them Manning Marable, but such criticism has only deepened the resolve of the multiracial category movement that its ranks are misunderstood and victimized not only by a dominant culture but by other racial minorities, particularly what they regard as a militant, uniracial old guard.

The white parents of biracial (in this case, usually black and white) children constitute the majority of the proponents for the addition of a multiracial category to the census. These parents are attempting to protect their children from what they perceive as the hardships that ensue from identification as black. As Tanya Katerí Hernández explains, “White parents will seize opportunities to extend their privilege of whiteness to non-White persons they care about.” Their naiveté lies in the belief that evading the legal classification “black” or “African American” will entirely spare a child from the socioeconomic and psychic hardships common to black people. An examination of the history of passing confirms that the legacy of hypodescent is never eradicated by the act of passing. Part of the insidiousness of racial classification in the Americas, which relies on notions of racial contamination and purity, is the manner in which that one drop of tainted blood assumes a ghostly life, not just in terms of its symbolic quality (by which the threat of invisibility is managed) but by its perpetual return either across generations or, for the subject who passes, at that inevitable moment of confession or betrayal.

I argue that the celebrity of a figure such as Tiger Woods functions to rehabilitate the mulatto in order to announce the arrival of a new color-blind era in U.S. history. Woods’s multiracial identity is recuperated as a kind of testimonial to racial progress that simultaneously celebrates diversity in the form of Cablinasianness and the multiplicity that category suggests while erasing the histories of black disenfranchisement, racial-sexual violence, and U.S. imperialism that generate, result from, and entrench the legal, scientific, and popular definitions of race, including each racial component of Cablinasianness and their various amalgamations. The word Tiger Woods chooses to describe his racial makeup effects, ironically, his racial unmaking. As I demonstrate in this essay, Nike advertising, with the exception of the company’s very first television advertisement featuring Woods, obliquely references race only to register its insignificance (within the discourse of constitutional color-blindness) or to capitalize (just as obliquely) on racial fantasies about the black body and the Asian body. The Tiger Woods iconography shuttles seamlessly between race consciousness and racial elision. That seamlessness is facilitated by the unlikely union in recent years between the ostensibly incompatible ideologies of multiculturalism and color-blindness. Although multiculturalism and the rhetoric of color-blindness appear to espouse contradictory positions, these philosophies ultimately advance very similar ideologies, as various critical race theorists and cultural critics have already argued. Diversity, as a central goal of multiculturalism, does not transform the economic, legal, and cultural institutions that secure white privilege. Both multiculturalism and color-blindness conceive of racial difference as independent of institutionalized racism. The inconsistencies implicit in the iconography of Tiger Woods (i.e., a celebration of multiraciality that simultaneously heralds color-blindness) become transparent in the U.S.,” provides one of the earliest articulations of the model minority stereotype: “At a time when it is being proposed that hundreds of billions be spent on uplifting Negroes and other minorities, the nation’s 300,000 Chinese Americans are moving ahead on their own with no help from anyone else.” Just as model minority rhetoric functions to discipline the unruly black bodies threatening national stability during the post-civil rights era, the infusion of Asian blood together with his imagined Confucian upbringing corrals and tames Tigers otherwise brute physicality. Some variation of his father trained the body and his mother trained the mind is a recurring motif for sports commentators diagnosing Woods’s success at golf. Earl Woods has encouraged this fantasy:

Her teaching methods weren’t always orthodox, but they were effective. When Tiger was just a toddler, she wrote the addition and multiplication tables out for him on 3-by-5-inch cards, and he would practice them over and over every day. He started with addition and later advanced to multiplication as he got older. His reward was an afternoon on the range with me. Tida established irrevocably that education had a priority over golf. (Woods 9)

The qualities of Woods’s model minority mother compensate for the black man’s cognitive deficiencies. In fact, since the stereotype of the model minority secures the normalcy of whiteness by attributing Asian American successes (the evidence for which is often exaggerated and overly generalized) to a biological predisposition toward overachievement, the contributions of the Asian mother actually exceed the capacity for white blood and a Protestant work ethic to compensate for black degeneracy. Woods’s success at golf, traditionally a sport reserved for the white elite, is in part explained by the logic of eugenics.

The celebration of Tiger Woods as the embodiment of American multiculturalism and racial democracy institutes an instance of “organized forgetting.” Oprah Winfrey’s celebratory vision of Tiger Woods as “America’s son” displaces, for example, historical memories of the bastardized children of white slave owners or U.S. soldiers overseas. Miscegenation as a legacy of slavery is forgotten, as is the miscegenation that has resulted from the various U.S. military occupations in Asia dating back to the late nineteenth century…