Mixed Race Studies

Why Obama is African American, Not Biracial

New America Media
Commentary
2008-12-18

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Here’s the ‘What is President-elect Barack Obama—black, biracial or multiracial?’ quiz. If he did not have one of the world’s most recognizable names and faces, he would fume at being turned away from restaurants, bypassed by taxis, racially profiled by police on street corners, refused from viewing an apartment by landlords, followed in stores by security guards, denied a loan for his business or home purchase, confined to living in a segregated neighborhood, or passed over for a corporate management position.

He would not be spared any of these routine petty harassments and annoyances—the subtle and outright forms of discrimination—because he checked the biracial designation on his census form. That’s a meaningless, feel-good, paper designation that has no validity in the hard world of American race politics.

The deepest part of America’s racial fault has always been and still remains the black and white divide. This has spawned legions of vile but durable racial stereotypes, fears and antagonisms. Black males have been the special target of negative typecasting. They’ve routinely been depicted as crime prone, derelict, sexual menaces and chronic underachievers. University researchers recently found that Obama’s win didn’t appreciably change these stereotypes.

The roughly six million or 2 percent of Americans who checked the biracial census box may take comfort in trying to be racially precise, but most also tell of their own bitter experience in feeling the sting of racial bigotry in the streets and workplace. Obama can too, and he has related his racial awakening in his best selling bare-the-soul autobiograhy “Dreams from My Father.”

Despite his occasional references to his white mother and grandmother, Obama has never seen himself as anything other than African American. That worked for and against him during the campaign. In countless polls and surveys, the overwhelming majority of whites said that they would vote for an African American for president, and that competence and qualifications, not color, were the only things that mattered. Many meant it and showed it by enthusiastically cheering him on. More than a few didn’t. Despite the real and feigned color-blindness, nearly 60 percent of whites still did not vote for Obama. Most based their opposition to him on Republican political loyalties, ties, regional and personal preferences. But a significant minority of white voters did not for him because he’s black, and they did not hide their feelings about that in exit polls in the Democratic primaries and the general election. Tagging him as multiracial or biracial did not soften their color resistance to him, let alone change their perception that he was black…

Read the entire article here.

Being Black and White

The American Prospect
2001-09-09
 
E. J. Graff, Associate Director and Senior Researcher
The Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism
Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts

• Life on the Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He Was Black By Gregory Howard Williams. Plume (1996), 285 pages, paperback
• The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother By James McBride. Riverhead Books (1996), 297 pages, paperback
• Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self By Rebecca Walker. Riverhead Books (2001), 323 pages, hardcover
• Divided to the Vein: A Journey into Race and Family By Scott Minerbrook. Harcourt Brace and Company (1996), 261 pages, hardcover

When I was 18, I learned, quite belatedly, that my father’s brother had married a black woman. The wedding took place in 1958—the year I was born, the year after my parents married. Instantly I knew that racism had kept me from knowing my uncle (by then dead of a heart attack), my aunt, my cousins. Instantly I knew I would have to find them. But it was one thing to discover that the deepest, most volatile division in the country ran right through my family; actually crossing that divide to claim kinship was, for a long time, too daunting for someone whose only experience with “diversity” was being the sole Jewish kid among her semirural Ohio high school’s 2,300 students.

And so it wasn’t until my thirties that I finally met my aunt and cousins. To my surprise, they treated me not just as a cousin but as a living symbol of racial reconciliation. Once we’d met, told stories, and compared features—we share a long jaw and sharp chin—I started to notice how arbitrarily I’d sorted the world around me into “black” or “white.” All around were black people who looked related to me. White friends had color in their families of blood or choice: a stepfather, a spouse, a sister-in-law, a dearest friend. I started to feel that every American whose family has been here more than a few decades is from a mixed-race family, that somewhere out there—however near or far—we all have relatives of the “other” color. African Americans know this, of course, often down to the name of at least one plantation owner in the family tree. But for a white girl in a color-bound world, this was news.

As it happened, the insight that was striking me so personally—that the color line is drawn in shifting sand—would soon strike the culture. In the past few years, the headlines have been full of such things as the 2000 census’s mix-and-match option; genetic evidence that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings (his dead wife’s half-sister and slave) left a widening delta of descendants; and the ascending god Tiger Woods’s refusal to reject his plural ethnicity. And since 1995, a number of mixed-race memoirs have hit our shelves, opening discussion of a new identity: biracial writers who have a black parent and a white one. These authors grapple with the sense that they don’t quite belong anywhere, that they aren’t fully claimed by either race. But their wide range of experiences reveals how deeply racial identity, like any identity, is affected not just by society but also by family, character, time, and place…

Read the entire article here.

Greg Carter to be Featured Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

Mixed Chicks Chat (The only live weekly show about being racially and culturally mixed. Also, founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival) Hosted by Fanshen Cox and Heidi W. Durrow
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #191-Greg Carter
When: Wednesday, 2011-02-02, 22:00Z (17:00 EST, 16:00 CST, 14:00 PST)

Greg Carter, Assistant Professor of History
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Greg Carter is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His book, The United States of the United Races, a survey of positive ideas about racial mixing in the United States is forthcoming from New York University Press.

‘Land of our Mothers’: Home, Identity, and Nationality for Anglo-Indians in British India, 1919–1947

History Workshop Journal
Volume 54, Issue 1
pages 49-72
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/54.1.49

Alison Blunt, Professor of Geography
Queen Mary, University of London

This paper explores the symbolic and material intersections of home, identity and nationality for Anglo-Indians (previously known as ‘Eurasians’) in the period between the Montague Chelmsford Reforms and Indian Independence. Community claims for a legitimate heritage were articulated through images of Britain as fatherland and India as motherland, and were closely tied to political attempts to gain a legitimate stake in national life. The paper examines public debates about home, identity and nationality with reference to the two main Anglo-Indian leaders of the twentieth century, Henry Gidney and Frank Anthony. While a British imperial lineage was imagined through the figure of a British forefather, political debates about home, identity and nationality largely erased the figure of an Indian maternal ancestor and instead focused on Mother India and on the domestic roles of Anglo-Indian women. The political recognition of both women and the home was an attempt not only to domesticate Anglo-Indian women, but also to domesticate a new national identity that regarded India more than Britain as home. But the home life of Anglo-Indians remained more British than Indian and political attempts to foster national loyalty to India as motherland were contested on a domestic scale. The mixed descent of Anglo-Indians was thus both manifested and erased in public debates about the future and status of the community.

…This paper is about India as ‘land of our mothers’ at a time when questions of home, identity and nationality were bound together in complex and contested ways for Anglo-Indians and other minority communities in India. Through my focus on a distinct community of mixed descent, I examine the ways in which national identity was embodied in gendered and racialized ways that reflected and reproduced a dual affiliation to both Britain and India as home. Community claims for a legitimate heritage were articulated through images of Britain as fatherland and India as motherland, and such claims were closely tied to political attempts to gain a legitimate stake in national life. For this reason, I analyse public debates about home, identity and nationality, drawing on political representations by Anglo-Indian leaders and on articles and letters published in the Anglo-Indian Review. I focus on the period from the Montague Chelmsford Report of 1919, which laid the foundations for Indianization in government employment and political representation, to independence in 1947. This also allows me to contrast the policies of the two main Anglo-Indian leaders of the twentieth century. Henry Gidney led the community from 1919 until his death in 1942, when he was succeeded by Frank Anthony, who served as president of the [All-India Anglo-Indian Association] AIAIA and as a nominated member of parliament representing community interests from 1942 until his death in 1993. Rather than render spaces of home as more symbolic than actual in forging a national identity, I argue that political attempts to foster a greater national loyalty to India as motherland rather than Britain as fatherland were contested on a domestic scale. Anglo-Indian homes continued to be imagined as more British than Indian despite political attempts by Gidney and Anthony to identify the community as a nationalist minority. Rather than explore the home merely as a feminized space, I am interested in how it also came to be shaped by a masculine imperial heritage. While a British imperial lineage was imagined through the figure of a British forefather, political debates about home, identity, and nationality largely erased the figure of an Indian maternal ancestor and instead focused on Mother India and on the present and future political roles of Anglo-Indian women within and beyond the home. While ideas of home and identity were potent sites in shaping ideas of nationality, the mixed descent of Anglo-Indians was thus both manifested and erased in public debates about the future and status of the community…

Read the entire article here.

Every mixed race marriage is building a better Britain

The Independent
1999-03-04

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

Lynchings, imprisonment and social exclusion will never stop individual s breaking racial barriers

WE HAVE looked, for a good many days, at the poisonous worms of racism as the Lawrence inquiry team turned over the soil. The coverage of this event has been unprecedented. Usually black issues have their small, insignificant place in the scheme of things. Suddenly what happened to one young black man became a statement of who we are as a nation.

The only other event that provoked similar levels of engagement was the Satanic Verses saga. The white elite has never tried harder to understand how racism, crude as well as subtle, violent as well as polite, is an abomination…

…But by far the biggest story is that this country has almost the highest rate of interracial relationships and number of young, mixed-race people anywhere in the Western world. More than half of British-born black men have a white partner, as do a third of Asian men. The rates for black and Asian women are rising. And prominent people in mixed marriages include Mr McDonald himself, Michael Caine, Lenny Henry and Dawn French, Baroness Scotland, Lord Taylor, Bernie Grant, Jemima Goldsmith, Salman Rushdie, Zeinab Badawi, Madhur Jaffrey, Sayeed Jaffrey, Jung Chang, Frank Bruno, Ainsley Harriot, Sharron Davies, Oona King, Hanif Kureishi, Sade…

…Read Titus Andronicus and you get the most modern debates on the identity of a mixed-race child. And in this country this has been going on since the 16th century. In the 17th and 18th centuries fashionable rich ladies liked to have slaves as ornaments, and black lovers in their beds. One of these, Soubise from St Kitts, was adored by the Duchess of Queensberry and was the toast of fashionable London. Some of the earliest race riots in this country, at the start of the 20th century, were over the number of white women having sexual relationships with black men. In 1930 an official report said: “[Mixed race] families have a low standard of life, morally and economically. It is practically impossible for half-caste children to be absorbed into our industrial life.”

There will never be a speculative film made about what Queen Victoria really did with her handsome Indian servant Abdul Karim, but she did have his portrait painted; their letters were burnt by fusty officials after her death. In the Sixties, when free sex and false Indian gurus co-existed with rampant racism, mixed race relationships became the obsession of the media and others.

Last night I spent a glorious evening with Earl Cameron and Harry Baird, two black movie actors of that period. They talked about their roles in Sapphire, one of the first feature films about mixed-race relationships, and how “carefully” the intimacy between the two lovers had to be presented, and how nevertheless the audience left the cinema as if they had been at a funeral.

Well, it is not like that any more. Young mixed-race Britons are challenging all those who would rather they did not exist. They include the writer Jayne Ifekwunigwe, who has just written a marvellous book called Scattered Belongings, and stylish Chris Cleverly, the youngest barrister in this country with his own chambers, who cannot even understand my questions about the problems of being half-English and half African. His heritage has been, he says, one of his biggest assets…

Read the entire article here.