Mixed Race Studies

Black, White, Other: Racial categories are cultural constructs masquerading as biology

Natural History Magazine
December 1994
pp. 32–35

Jonathan Marks, Associate Professor of Anthropology
University of North Carolina, Charlotte

While reading the Sunday edition of the New York Times one morning last February, my attention was drawn by an editorial inconsistency. The article I was reading was written by attorney Lani Guinier (Guinier, you may remember, had been President Clinton’s nominee to head the civil rights division at the Department of Justice in 1993. Her name was hastily withdrawn amid a blast of criticism over her views on political representation of minorities.) What had distracted me from the main point of the story was a photo caption that described Guinier as being “half-black.” In the text of the article, Guinier had described herself simply as “black”

How can a person be black and half black at the same time? In algebraic terms, this would seem to describe a situation where x = 1/2 x, to which the only solution is x = 0.

The inconsistency in the Times was trivial, but revealing. It encapsulated a longstanding problem in our use of racial categories—namely, a confusion between biological and cultural heredity. When Guinier is described as “half-black,” that is a statement of biological ancestry, for one of her two parents is black. And when Guinier describes herself as black, she is using a cultural category, according to which one can either be black or white, but not both.

Race—as the term is commonly used—is inherited, although not in a strictly biological fashion. It is passed down according to a system of folk heredity, an all-or-nothing system that is different front the quantifiable heredity of biology. But the incompatibility of the two notions of race is sometimes starkly evident—as when the state decides that racial differences are so important that interracial marriages must be regulated or outlawed entirely. Miscegenation laws in this country (which stayed on the books in many states through the 1960s) obliged the legal system to define who belonged in what category. The resulting formula stated that anyone with one-eighth or more black ancestry was a “negro.” (A similar formula, defining Jews, was promulgated by the Germans in the Nuremberg Laws of the 1930s.).

Applying such formulas led to the biological absurdity that having one black great-grandparent was sufficient to define a person as black, but having seven white great grandparents was insufficient to define a person as white. Here, race and biology are demonstrably at odds. And the problem is not semantic but conceptual, for race is presented as a category of nature…

…Unlike graduated biological distinctions, culturally constructed categories are ultrasharp. One can be French or German, but not both; Tutsi or Hutu, but not both; Jew or Catholic, but nor both; Bosnian Muslim or Serb, but not both; black or white, but not both. Traditionally, people of “mixed race” have been obliged to choose one and thereby identity themselves unambiguously to census takers and administrative bookkeepers—a practice that is now being widely called into question…

Read the entire article here.

Family Identity: Black-White Interracial Family Health Experience

Journal of Family Nursing
(2006)
Vol. 12, No. 1
Pages 22-37
DOI: 10.1177/1074840705285213

Marcia Marie Byrd, PhD, RN
College of St. Catherine

Ann Williams Garwick, PhD, RN, LP, LMFT, FAAN
University of Minnesota

The purpose of this interpretive descriptive study was to describe how eight Black-White couples with school-aged children constructed their interracial family identity through developmental transitions and interpreted race to their children. Within and across-case data analytic strategies were used to identify commonalities and variations in how Black men and White women in couple relationships formed their family identities over time. Coming together was the core theme described by the Black-White couples as they negotiated the process of forming a family identity. Four major tasks in the construction of interracial family identity emerged: (a) understanding and resolving family of origin chaos and turmoil, (b) transcending Black-White racial history, (c) articulating the interracial family’s racial standpoint, and (d) explaining race to biracial children across the developmental stages. The findings guide family nurses in promoting family identity formation as a component of family health within the nurse-family partnership with Black-White mixed-race families.

Tragic Mulatto Girl Wonder: The paradoxical life of Philippa Duke Schuyler

QBR The Black Book Review
February/March 1996

Lise Funderburg

Composition in Black and White: The Life of Philippa Schuyler
by Kathryn Talalay
Oxford University Press (317 pp.)
Hardcover ISBN 0-19-509608-8

As a child prodigy, pianist and composer, Philippa Duke Schuyler incited both awe and envy. Performing at the 1939 New York World’s Fair when she was just eight, she seemed to live a charmed life, full of whirlwind concert tours in distant lands, where she met politicians, artists and royals. But while she was known as a gifted and serious musician and, later, a journalist, she was also viewed as the quintessential tragic mulatto. (Her father was the conservative black journalist and satirical novelist George Schuyler; her mother, a rebellious white Southern belle who married across the color line.) She seemed trapped at times by her talents and the constraints of relentlessly watchful parents whose aspirations for her were often suffocating. She acquired a reputation both as a temptress whose greatest interest in life was men and sex and as a perpetually frightened child. When she died in 1967, at age 35, in a helicopter crash in Vietnam during a war-orphan airlift, she met with a final irony. For all her achievements and worldliness, she could not swim to save her life…

…Talalay places Philippa’s racial identity at the center of this biography and rightfully so. Here was a woman whose parents placed tremendous expectations on her to transcend race, even as her music career was constantly limited by it. Philippa had few opportunities to make real friends among any racial group and never developed a community of support beyond her immediate family, which had its own tensions and estrangements. Her father, who adored her, was frequently away on reporting trips. As Philippa grew older, she began to see his politics and his color as embarrassments. When he ventured to spend five pages of a 150-word manuscript, The Negro in America, on his daughter, she wrote to her mother from Europe: “Get me OUT of that book. Everyone here thinks of me as a Latin, and that’s the way I want it. Anyone who had any paternal sentiments would want a child to escape suffering.” Her mother, whom the author describes as “forever Machiavellian,” collaborated on Philippa’s many acts of racial passing. As Talalay found in her research into George Schuyler’s papers, to this day the manuscript has not one, but three blank pieces of paper taped over each of the five pages concerning Philippa…

Read the entire book review here.