Mixed Race Studies

The Politics of “Passing”: American Indians and Racial “Passing”

University of Arizona
2004
80 pages

Veronica R. Hirsch

Introduction

How is the racial “passing” behavioral concept applicable to American Indians, and what political forces created the socio-cultural circumstances that prompted this behavior? Beyond these immediate, sociologically-focused questions, what generational impacts does racial “passing” have upon tribal sovereignty and how does tribal sovereignty effect certain forms of racial “passing?” Until now, racial “passing” has been oversimplified as an exclusively Black/White social phenomenon, given the term “passing” was originally coined to describe an African-American’s attempts to identify him/herself, or to accept identification as a white person (Caughie 1999, p. 20). However, racial “passing” is neither historically nor contemporarily unique to the African-American community, since racial “passing” is facilitated by any social organization, such as the United States, that holds certain “subordinate” groups in disesteem (Sollors 1997, p. 248). Taking the United States’ “trust responsibility,” American Indian nations’ “domestic dependent” statuses, and documented history of Indian-specific, institutionalized racism together, one readily witnesses that the societal “disesteem” to which American Indians are and were subjected also positions and positioned them as both participants in and subjects of racial “passing.”…

Read the entire thesis here.

Race is a true lie and a social construction. The meaning of race, and how different people are located within its shifting boundaries and categories, is a function of the politics of the moment, and the type of “social work” that race does in a given society.

Chauncey DeVega, “He Really Just Wants to be the ‘Brown Paper Bag Test Referee’ for Black Folks: Ironically, Tim Graham is More Right Than Wrong in His Insight About Karen Finney and the One-Drop Rule,” We Are Respectable Negroes: Happy Non-Threatening Coloured Folks, Even in the Age of Obama. (April 3, 2013). http://wearerespectablenegroes.blogspot.com/2013/04/he-really-wants-to-be-brown-bag-test.html

War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art [Exhibition]

DePaul Art Museum
935 West Fullerton
Chicago, Illinois 60614
2013-04-25 through 2013-06-30

As an increasingly ethnically ambiguous Asian American generation is coming of age, War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art looks at the construction of mixed-heritage Asian American identity in the United States. Working in traditional media as well as video, installation, and other approaches, artists explore a range of topics, including US wars in Asia, multiculturalism and identity politics, racialization, gender and sexual identity, citizenship and nationality, and trans-racial adoption.

The exhibition features works across diverse mediums by emerging, mid-career and established artists who reflect a breadth of mixed heritage ethno-racial and geographic diversity: Mequitta Ahuja, Albert Chong, Serene Ford, Kip Fulbeck, Stuart Gaffney, Louie Gong, Jane Jin Kaisen, Lori Kay, Li-lan, Richard Lou, Samia Mirza, Chris Naka, Laurel Nakadate, Gina Osterloh, Adrienne Pao, Cristina Lei Rodriguez, Amanda Ross-Ho, Jenifer Wofford, and Debra Yepa-Pappan.

Major funding for this exhibition was awarded through The National Endowment for the Arts Art Works Museums grant to DePaul University.

For more information, click here.

When do I use “we”? In a room full of people I do not know, I always search out the ones who fall in the middle, like me, out of some irrational ideal that we belong together.  I worry that this is the wrong thing for the child of a mixed marriage to feel.  My parents conquered difference, and we would all like to think that sort of accomplishment is something that could be passed down from generation to generation.  That’s why we’re all, in theory, so excited by the idea of miscegenation—because if we mix the races, presumably, we create a new generation of people for whom existing racial categories do not exist.  I don’t think it’s that easy, though.  If you mix black and white, you don’t obliterate those categories; you merely create a third category, a category that demands, for its very existence, an even greater commitment to nuances of racial taxonomy.

Malcolm Gladwell, “Lost in the Middle,” in Half and Half: Writers on Growing Up Biracial and Bicultural, ed. Claudine Chiawei O’Hearn. (New York: Pantheon, 1998), 112.

Unfortunately, so long as ideas of racial categories continue to fragment our ability to imagine humanity, many minorities have few choices but to cash in on their ‘exotic’ appeal. For Eurasian women, this means accepting all the baggage of deviancy, prostitution and foreignness that is implicit in it. It also means a lifetime of answering the “what are you?” question and being told that they are not their parents’ children.

Lyn Dickens. “Being a Eurasian Australian,” Yemaya: Sydney University Law Society’s annual interdisciplinary Women’s journal, 2010 (2011): 34-36. http://www.suls.org.au/s/yemaya_2010.pdf.

Not only physical but also mental and temperamental incompatibilities may be a consequence of hybridization. For example, one often sees in mulattoes an ambition and push combined with intellectual inadequacy which makes the unhappy hybrid dissatisfied with his lot and a nuisance to others.

To sum up, then, miscegenation commonly spells disharmony—disharmony of physical, mental and temperamental qualities and this means also disharmony with environment. A hybridized people are a badly put together people and a dissatisfied, restless, ineffective people. One wonders how much of the exceptionally high death rate in middle life in this country is due to such bodily maladjustments; and how much of our crime and insanity is due to mental and temperamental friction.

This country is in for hybridization on the greatest scale that the world has ever seen.

Charles B. Davenport, “The Effects of Race Intermingling,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Volume 56, Number 4 (1917): 364-368.

Intermarriage bans arose in the late 1600s, when tobacco planters in Virginia needed to shore up their new institution of slavery. In previous decades, before slavery took hold, interracial sex was more prevalent than at any other time in American history. White and black laborers lived and worked side by side and naturally became intimate. Even interracial marriage, though uncommon, was allowed. But as race slavery replaced servitude as the South’s labor force, interracial sex threatened to blur the distinctions between white and black—and thus between free and slave.

David Greenberg, “White Weddings: The incredible staying power of the laws against interracial marriage,” Slate, June 15, 1999. http://www.slate.com/id/30352/.

‘Mixed Kids Are the Cutest’ Isn’t Cute?

The Root
2013-04-08

Jenée Desmond-Harris, Staff Writer

“I’m a Caucasian woman with a biracial child (her father is black). I live in a predominantly white community. Why is it that whenever people discover that I have a ‘mixed’ child, they always say things like, ‘Oh, he/she must be so cute/gorgeous/adorable, those kids are always the best looking. You are so lucky.’

I know they mean well, but it seems off to me, and maybe racist. Do they mean compared to ‘real’ black children? When a German and Italian or an Asian and Jewish person have a child, black people don’t say, ‘Mixed children like yours are always the best looking.’ (Plus, it’s not true—not all black-white biracial kids are the ‘best looking.’)

Am I being overly sensitive by feeling there’s something off about these comments? If not, what’s the best way to respond?”

I chose this question for the first installment of Race Manners, The Root’s new advice column on racial etiquette and ethics, because it hits close to home. Like your daughter, I’m biracial. Like you, my white mother has developed an acute sensitivity to the subtle ways prejudice and bigotry pop up in daily life. I should know. She calls me to file what I’ve deemed her “racism reports.”

And let’s be clear. Americans of all races say bizarre things to and about mixed people, who can inspire some of the most revealing remarks about our black-white baggage. Just think of the public debates about how MSNBC’s Karen Finney, and even President Obama, should be allowed to identify…

…As Marcia Dawkins, the author of Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity, told me, “The myth that mixed-race offspring are somehow better than nonmixed offspring is an example of ‘hybrid vigor,’ an evolutionary theory which states that the progeny of diverse varieties within a species tend to exhibit better physical and psychological characteristics than either one or both of the parents.”

And just take a wild guess how this idea has popped up for black people. You got it: In order to demean and oppress African Americans, thought leaders throughout history, including the likes of Thomas Jefferson, have said that black-white mixed offspring are better, more attractive, smarter, etc., than “real” blacks and not as good or attractive or smart as “real” whites, Dawkins explains….

Read the entire article here.

Special Event: An Evening with U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey

The Newseum
Walter and Leonore Annenberg Theater
555 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20001
Telephone: 888/NEWSEUM (888/639-7386)
Tuesday, 2013-04-16, 23:00Z (19:00 EDT Local Time, 16:00 PDT)
This event will be streamed live on Newseum.org

The 19th U.S. Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, Natasha Trethewey will read selections from her work, followed by a conversation with Charles Haynes of the First Amendment Center, about her poetry, her national role, and the place of poetry in society. She is currently the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University.

Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Miss., on April 26, 1966. She is the author of four poetry collections and a book of creative non-fiction. Her honors include the Pulitzer Prize and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2012, she was appointed State Poet Laureate of Mississippi.

Emory University president James W. Wagner will also pay tribute to the university’s long history with poets and their art, much of which is housed in Emory’s Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library collections.

Emory alumni board president Isabel Garcia will emcee the evening.

The event is free and open to the public, but space is limited. For more information, click here.