Mixed Race Studies

Though I am younger than Ms. Harris by six years, in her Blackness, I recognize my own. It is a Blackness born not in slavery but much later, in a whole other context, in the wake of the civil rights and Black Power movements, when there was no mixed-race category. You were either Black or white. To claim whiteness as a mixed child was to deny and hide Blackness. Our families understood that the world we were growing into would seek to denigrate this part of us and we would need a community that was made up, always and already, of all shades of Blackness. The big secret I knew — and Ms. Harris surely knows it as well — is that our Blackness was born not out of something lost but out of something gained.

Danzy Senna, “In Kamala Harris’s Blackness, I See My Own,” The New York Times, August 4, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/04/opinion/kamala-harris-biracial.html.

“What’s interesting is when I started ballet at 13 years old, I was told I had everything that it took to be a ballet dancer, physically, artistically. So that’s why there’s kind of this interesting dichotomy when I think about Black women specifically in ballet and the language that’s being used in telling us that we are wrong for ballet. Again, I had the ideal body when I joined American Ballet Theater. Of course, I went through puberty — and like a lot of dancers who become professionals between the ages of 16 and 18 … my body did change. But once I became a professional, that’s when people started to really see me as a Black woman in a company where there weren’t any. And that’s when the language started to change around me fitting in.” —Misty Copeland

“‘It chips away at you’: Misty Copeland on the whiteness of ballet,” Fresh Air (National Public Radio), November 14, 2022. https://www.npr.org/2022/11/14/1136026492/misty-copeland-ballet-raven-wilkinson-wind-at-my-back.

For some people, identifying themselves as more than one race matters little if Americans tend to put people in either the “Black” or “White” categories. Former President Barack Obama, who has a White mother though he identifies as Black, has described being mistaken for a waiter or parking valet before he was famous.

“I am a White woman who married a Black man and had a Black baby,” said Amanda Lewis, a sociologist who runs the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

“That’s the way others see her. That’s the way we think of her,” Lewis said of her daughter. “The opposite doesn’t happen. Instead of trying to make White people more comfortable, we need to embrace the multiracial democracy we’ve become.”

Tim Henderson, “Multiracial Residents Are Changing the Face of the US,” Stateline, May 13, 2022. https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2022/05/13/multiracial-residents-are-changing-the-face-of-the-us.

Conversely, it is essential to recognize that [racial] passing can take on an ethical and political significance by exposing the internal contradictions and contingency of seemingly totalizing systems of oppression, revealing gaps and openings for liberation and working to create and exploit them. Black success—in the skillful work of passing itself as well as in endeavors passers pursue once they access opportunities they had been denied—disrupts the ideological backbone of racial injustice, enacting a reductio of white superiority and revealing whites to be easily fooled. Successful acts of fugitivity achieved by passing also serve to undermine the hegemony of oppression, disrupting its ideological functioning as a natural or inescapable condition.

Meena Krishnamurthy, “The Burdened Virtue of Racial Passing,” The Boston Review, May 13, 2022. https://bostonreview.net/articles/the-burdened-virtue-of-racial-passing/.

[Meghan] Markle’s frankness should be applauded as brave in a nation that still fails to fully acknowledge the roughly 7% of us who claim multiple races. Indeed, either through erasure or denial, American media—both social and traditional—seem to insist that biracial folks like myself simply do not exist.

David Kaufman, “Meghan Markle is the biracial hero I’ve always wanted,” Quartz, November 28, 2017. https://qz.com/quartzy/1138712/is-meghan-markle-black-no-shes-biracial/.

Continental ancestry categories fail to adequately capture human diversity. Newly assembled datasets, such as those referenced in Science, highlight that there are no distinct categories of genetic variability, only blurred continuities. Recent high-profile studies in statistical genetics have shown that, in many cases where the use of population categories was previously considered necessary, categories can be avoided entirely. When basic and translational researchers can avoid categories, they should do so.

Anna C. F. Lewis, “Substituting genetic ancestry for race in research? Not so fast,” STAT: Reporting from the frontiers of health and medicine, May 2, 2022. https://www.statnews.com/2022/05/02/substituting-genetic-ancestry-for-race-in-research-not-so-fast/.

Three years after the release of “Lost Boundaries,” Dr. [Albert] Johnston was fired from his job as a radiologist at Keene Community Hospital. The president of the hospital board told reporters “racial prejudice was not the reason for the dismissal,” but the doctor believed otherwise. “They have been picking on me ever since my story came out,” he told the press. “In spite of all that I have accomplished as a white man, I have, more or less, an empty life.” The Johnston family abandoned New Hampshire in 1966 and moved permanently to Honolulu, Hawaii. Dr. Johnston died in 1988 and Thyra Johnston in 1995. One of Albert Jr.’s original songs had been used in “Lost Boundaries,” and he became a successful composer.

J. Dennis Robinson, “Lost Boundaries: How a UNH student inspired one of America’s first “race films” and why we’re still talking about it,” New Hampshire Magazine, April 12, 2022. https://www.nhmagazine.com/lost-boundaries/.

This is the problem with using biracial identity as an excuse to be racially neutral. Doing so often results in ignoring both black suffering and the racist political, economic, and social structures which produce black suffering. Dak Prescott claimed that being biracial helped him in being a leader for the Dallas Cowboys because he can relate to both his black teammates and his white teammates. Yet, when it comes to the issue of kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality, Prescott opposed doing so. It turns out that Prescott’s views on the NFL protests are more in line with how the majority of white Americans feel about the protests, so on a very serious political matter which is black and white, Prescott is comfortably on the white side.

Dwayne Wong (Omowale), “Being Biracial Shouldn’t Be An Excuse To Be Racially Neutral,” Medium, January 26, 2020. https://dwomowale.medium.com/being-biracial-shouldnt-be-an-excuse-to-be-racially-neutral-a0e04242d5fc.

“I see the ways in which the media has sold me, and other light-skinned actors in general, as monolithic representations of a Blackness. It is so damaging and gross – honestly, it’s nasty.” The anger in her voice is palpable. “It’s just like sneaky racism.” She says that she is now very wary when people try to position her as representative of all Black people’s experiences. “I have only one sliver of experience, and that sliver is also drenched in light-skin privilege.”

Micha Frazer-Carroll, “Trailblazer with Amandla Stenberg,” Net-a-Porter, February 8, 2022. https://www.net-a-porter.com/en-gb/porter/article-9e95acbdd72f91f5/cover-stories/cover-stories/amandla-stenberg.

We need treatments based on actual and not assumed genetic variation. That means assessing the patterns of diversity that reflect the distribution of human genetic variation across the globe. To this end, genetic ancestry should be understood as a continuum that it is not categorized in such a way that serves as a surrogate for race (40). Contemporary usage of continental ancestry categories (e.g., European, Middle Eastern, South Asian, Oceanic, East Asian, American, and African) serves as an example of how presumed “ancestral” geographies are assumed as equivalent to biological categories and serve as a false proxy for race. Such groupings correspond to Western racial categorizations and assume genetic homogeneity based on geographical separation, but these groupings misrepresent the actual distribution of genetic variants and neglect continuous movement of people and the resulting degree of mixture across global populations.

Talia Krainc and Agustín Fuentes, “Genetic ancestry in precision medicine is reshaping the race debate,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 119, Number 12, Article e2203033119. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2203033119.