Mixed Race Studies

In Kamala Harris’s Blackness, I See My Own

The New York Times
2024-08-04

Danzy Senna

We seem to be beginning yet another season of a perennially popular American spectacle, “How Much Is That Mulatto in the Window?” I frequently think that, after 400 years, this show is about to go off the air — jump the shark, as it were. But then it returns, with ever more absurd plot lines. Yet even as a so-called mulatto myself, I can’t stop watching.

The Hollywood pitch goes something like this: Put racially ambiguous Black people in the public eye — Kamala, Meghan, Barack. Have them declare themselves Black. Count down the minutes before the world erupts into outrage, distress and suspicion. People scream their confusion and doubt, accusing the figures of lying about who they really are. It makes for good TV.

On last week’s episode, Donald Trump got his cameo, accusing Vice President Kamala Harris of switching races. “She was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she became a Black person,” he said during an appearance in front of the National Association of Black Journalists. His staged bewilderment, implying that she was practicing some sort of sinister racial sorcery, felt wild for 2024, when mixed-race people are everywhere, visually overrepresented in Target commercials and Kardashian family reunions. Yet even in the midst of our fetishization, a stubborn strain of mulattophobia remains widespread. And no matter what answer we give to the ubiquitous question — What are you? — someone, somewhere, will accuse us of lying, of being a grifter trying to impersonate another race, a more real race.

Multiracial, mulatto, mixed-nuts, halfies — whatever you want to call us today, we remain the fastest-growing demographic in our country. When we enter the spotlight, we are often treated as specimens, there to be dissected, poked, debated, disputed and disinherited. We are and always have been a Rorschach test for how the world is processing its anxiety, rage, confusion and desire about this amorphous construction we call race…

Read the entire essay here.

On Turning Black

The New York Times
2024-08-01

Esau McCaulley, Contributing Opinion Writer

During his interview before the National Association of Black Journalists this week, Donald Trump was asked if he would call upon his fellow Republicans to refrain from labeling Vice President Kamala Harris a “D.E.I. candidate” for the presidency. Rather than condemn his party’s increasingly troubling language on the topic, Mr. Trump took the opportunity to question Ms. Harris’s racial identity.

“She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage,” he said. “I didn’t know she was Black, until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black? I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t.”

This is all clearly untrue. Ms. Harris graduated from Howard University, a historically Black university, and she is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, a historically Black sorority. Her biographies and self-descriptions throughout her career have cited both her Black and Indian identities.

My wife is white, so we have multiracial children. Depending on the context, they can refer to themselves as Black or multiracial. When my children describe themselves using the latter term, they are acknowledging that their mother is a part of their story as well. Does Mr. Trump really expect interracial people to deny half of their families?…

Read the entire essay here.

Should Harris Talk Much About Her Racial Identity? Many Voters Say No.

The New York Times
2024-08-03

Jeremy W. Peters

Even as Trump plays up racial divisions, many Americans said they would rather not dwell on race or identity. “We can all see that you’re Black.”

“Obviously, we have eyes.”

That was the somewhat jaded response by Larhonda Marshall, a 42-year-old health care worker from Chicago, about all the attention being paid to Vice President Kamala Harris’s racial identity.

As a Black woman herself, Ms. Marshall said that the symbolism of a Harris victory would surely be on her mind as she considers her vote for president. But it was not the most important factor at all, she said. And she wishes the Harris supporters who keep mentioning it would drop it.

“I’m tired of hearing it,” Ms. Marshall said. “That’s not an issue. I just want what’s best for the country.”

This week, after former President Donald J. Trump claimed falsely that Ms. Harris “happened to turn Black” only recently, the vice president did not attempt to clarify the obvious: that she has, in fact, been Black all her life…

Read the entire article here.

Why Kamala Harris’ biracial identity upsets Donald Trump so much

MSNBC
2024-08-01

Sarah E. Gaither, Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

Samuel R. Sommers, Professor and Chair, Department of Psychology
Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts

Acknowledging the existence of multiracial identities completely scrambles Trump’s stereotypes.

Early in Donald Trump’s meltdown at this week’s National Association of Black Journalists convention, the former president offered unsolicited commentary on the racial identity of Vice President Kamala Harris, who has an Indian mother and a Jamaican father. “She was Indian all the way,” Trump said of his presumptive opponent, “and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she became a Black person. Somebody should look into that.”

There is a multitude of problems with Trump’s comments, from his presumption that he has the expertise and jurisdiction to judge someone else’s identity to his argument that Harris lacks the racial bona fides to merit the Black audience members’ allegiance. But the former president’s ramble offers another important conclusion: Trump simply doesn’t understand race. When Trump asks for somebody to “look into that,” the truth is that for years researchers have looked into that. What they’ve found is that overly simplified perspectives on race like Trump’s are not only misplaced, but they are counterproductive and dangerous.

Scholars of race have long argued, and demonstrated, that race is a socially constructed category that still has very real outcomes. We, as members of society, constantly construct, deconstruct and reconstruct what race means.

Even the basics of how race is measured in America have evolved over time. The 1850 U.S. census was the first to acknowledge people of multiracial descent, with the category “Mulatto” used as a way to exclude them from having full political rights. Not until the 2000 census were multiracial Americans able to formally mark more than one racial identity. In fact, the multiracial population is the fastest growing racial group in the United States, with a 276% increase between 2010 and 2020…

Read the entire article here.

The Lesser-Known Side of Harris’s Identity: Asian American

The New York Times
2024-07-28

Amy Qin

Some Asian American leaders are rooting for Kamala Harris to become the first Asian American president. But she is not widely known as Asian American, reflecting the complexity of the identity.

Daniel Chiang can remember one Asian American who ran for president in 2020: Andrew Yang, a Taiwanese American entrepreneur. But he was surprised to learn last week that there was another person running for president then, and in 2024, who counted herself an Asian American: Kamala Harris.

“I never got that impression,” said Mr. Chiang, 38, a Taiwanese American from Connecticut.

Ms. Harris, the vice president and likely Democratic nominee for president, is known widely as the first Black woman to be elected vice president.

But Ms. Harris, whose mother emigrated from India and whose father emigrated from Jamaica, is less known as an Indian American and Asian American. Asked to name a famous Asian American, only 2 percent of Americans said Kamala Harris, according to a recent survey by The Asian American Foundation…

Read the entire article here.

Thinking While Black: Translating the Politics and Popular Culture of a Rebel Generation

Rutgers University Press
2022-12-09
218 pages
7 b-w illustrations
6 x 9
Paperback ISBN: 9781978830875
Cloth ISBN: 9781978830882
EPUB ISBN: 9781978830899
PDF ISBN: 9781978830905

Daniel McNeil, Department of Gender Studies
Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario

Thinking While Black brings together the work and ideas of the most notorious film critic in America, one of the most influential intellectuals in the United Kingdom, and a political and cultural generation that consumed images of rebellion and revolution around the world as young Black teenagers in the late 1960s. Drawing on hidden and little known archives of resistance and resilience, it sheds new light on the politics and poetics of young people who came together, often outside of conventional politics, to rock against racism in the 1970s and early ‘80s. It re-examines debates in the 1980s and ‘90s about artists who “spread out” to mount aggressive challenges to a straight, white, middle-class world, and entertainers who “sold out” to build their global brands with performances that attacked the Black poor, rejected public displays of introspection, and expressed unambiguous misogyny and homophobia. Finally, it thinks with and through the work of writers who have been celebrated and condemned as eminent intellectuals and curmudgeonly contrarians in the twenty-first century. In doing so, it delivers the smartest and most nuanced investigation into thinkers such as Paul Gilroy and Armond White as they have evolved from “young soul rebels” to “middle-aged mavericks” and “grumpy old men,” lamented the debasement and deskilling of Black film and music in a digital age, railed against the discourteous discourse and groupthink of screenies and Internet Hordes, and sought to stimulate some deeper and fresher thinking about racism, nationalism, multiculturalism, political correctness and social media.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Chapter 1: Theories in Motion
• Chapter 2: Black and British
• Chapter 3: A Movie-Struck Kid from Detroit
• Chapter 4: Slave-Descendants, Diaspora Subjects, and World Citizens
• Chapter 5: Enlarging the American Cinema
• Chapter 6: Middle-Aged, Gifted, and Black
• Coda
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index

The “Miscegenation” Troll

JSTOR Daily
2019-02-20

Mark Sussman, Adjunct Professor of English
Hunter College, City University of New York

The term “miscegenation” was coined in an 1864 pamphlet by an anonymous author.

In 1864, a pamphlet entitled “Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro” began to circulate on the streets of New York. The title certainly would have given New Yorkers pause. No one had ever seen the word “miscegenation” before. In fact, the pamphlet’s anonymous author invented it, giving the reason that “amalgamation”—then the most common term used to describe “race mixing”—was a “poor word, since it properly refers to the union of metals with quicksilver.” The term “miscegenation”—from the Latin miscere (to mix) and genus (race)—had only one definition.

Besides introducing a new word into the English language, the pamphleteer was also responsible for what appeared to be one of the most fearless documents in the archive of nineteenth century abolitionist writing. Among many other claims and political recommendations, the pamphlet notes that, “the miscegenetic or mixed races are much superior, mentally, physically, and morally, to those pure or unmixed;” that “a continuance of progress can only be obtained through a judicious crossing of diverse elements;” that “the Caucasian, or white race… has never yet developed a religious faith on its own;” that “the true ideal man can only be reached by blending the type man and woman of all the races of the earth;” that “the most beautiful girl in form, feature, and every attribute of feminine loveliness [the pamphleteer] ever saw, was a mulatto.” Most provocatively, the writer claimed that “the Southern beauty… proclaims by every massive ornament in her shining hair, and by every yellow shade in the wavy folds of her dress, ‘I love the black man.’”…

Read the entire article here.

Confronting Latino Anti-Black Bias

The American Prospect
2022-10-06

Yalidy Matos, Assistant Professor of Political Science and Latino and Caribbean Studies
Rutgers University

Civil rights lawyer Tanya Katerí Hernández takes up a sensitive but critical subject.

Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality by Tanya Katerí Hernández from Beacon Press

The Latino vote has confounded Democrats who were expecting it not only to grow but also to become a bulwark of a new progressive majority. While a majority of Latinos voted Democratic in the past two presidential elections, the share voting for Donald Trump increased by an estimated eight percentage points between 2016 and 2020. That shift, along with more recent polling data, has prompted scholars and journalists alike to ask why Latinos would support a party whose nominee for president was overtly racist and anti-immigrant.

In Racial Innocence, Tanya Katerí Hernández points to Latino anti-Black bias as one answer to this puzzle. A professor of civil rights law at Fordham University, Hernández draws on legal cases from 1964 to 2021, individual stories, interviews with leaders, educators, and attorneys, and academic research to make the case for openly discussing and confronting anti-Black racism within the Latino community.

As an Afro-Latina herself, Hernández explains how her own family history motivated her interest in the topic. Her mother suffered mistreatment and exclusion even by family members, part of a larger pattern of colorism in the Latin world that affects family relations, public spaces, educational institutions, workplaces, housing, and the criminal justice system…

Read the entire review here.

Mexico’s new racial reckoning: A movement protests colorism and white privilege

The Los Angeles Times
2022-10-20

Kate Linthicum, Staff Writer

MEXICO CITY — A few months ago, several employees of an upscale Mexico City steakhouse came forward with a damning allegation: The restaurant had a policy of segregation in which the best tables were reserved for the customers with the lightest skin.

The notion of whiter Mexicans getting preferential treatment was not surprising in a country where darker-skinned people have long earned less money, received less schooling and been all but invisible in the media. But the ensuing public outrage was.

Within days, activists mounted a boycott and the city launched an investigation into the restaurant, Sonora Grill Prime, which denied the accusations. Multiple public figures highlighted the scandal as evidence of pervasive bigotry. “Racism is real,” Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum told reporters, using a word long regarded as taboo. “We have to accept that it exists and fight it.”.

For the vast stretch of Mexico’s modern history, many denied that racism existed here at all.

They embraced the nation’s foundational myth that its people are mestizos, a single blended race of indigenous and Spanish blood, insisting that there could be no prejudice if all Mexicans were the same.

But a growing social movement is challenging that thinking, thrusting discussions of discrimination based on skin color to the fore…

Read the entire article here.

Striving to Sing Our Own Songs: Notes on the Left not Right in Africana Studies

The Discipline and African 2022 World Report
National Council for Black Studies
pages 186-192

Mark Christian, Ph.D., Professor of Africana Studies
City University of New York, New York, New York

By way of an introduction, the last year or more has witnessed an unprecedented upsurge in human insecurity across the globe. Perhaps it is the right time to put some historical context into what this means for peoples of African heritage globally—and more specifically, those located within the borders of the United States. This article will briefly consider the continued battle for Africana liberation, employing a Sankofa perspective—to go back and retrieve for present use. Moreover, there will be a critique of the so-called “Black Radical Left,” as it seems that scrutiny of such scholars rarely occurs. Indeed, many appear “untouchable” in terms of criticism from within Africana studies—yet the same cannot be stated in regard to African-centered scholars who, ironically, argue for largely similar forms of Black liberation. Therefore, while taking into account the developments of the last year for this NCBS annual report, it is necessary to consider some of the various schools of thought in the discipline and the imperative to develop a cross-fertilization of ideas in Africana studies.

In the last 18 months, I have traveled back in time to the 19th and 20th centuries in regard to my research output, completing two major studies (Christian, 2021a, 2021b). It has been palpably worthwhile because one finds that there is nothing particularly original in terms of the struggle for social justice. Of course, there have been major structural changes in the U.S. with the collapse of enslavement in 1865, followed by the ephemeral Reconstruction era, then de jure segregation, followed largely by de facto segregation. Women’s rights have also markedly improved since the 19th century, yet here we are, comfortably into the 2020s, in what could be deemed the “George Floyd era,” wherein the need for racialized justice across the spectrum of society remains ubiquitous. The seemingly insuperable reality of racism remains an ever-present social problem. Meanwhile, Africana scholars, in all their various schools of thought, continue to tackle an array of “isms” in their varied capacities throughout higher education…

Read the entire article here.