Mixed Race Studies

imagining hybrid cities

The State
2013-07-25

Tiana Reid

I started this series on crossing and mixing by considering temporality and its hold on how we imagine hybridity. The recent discourse centered on the unshakable ‘browning’ or ‘beiging’ of mostly urban populations in the decades to come offers itself up through the prevailing ‘hybrid futures’ narrative. In The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory, NYU professor Tavia Nyong’o made it clear that his 2009 book was not “yet another attempt to claim mixed-race America as a utopian future that ‘will’ just happen ‘in time,’ as Theodore Tilton held.” And last month, still, a claim against this mixed futurism persisted in my writing for The State as I drew on Lee Edelman to consider the “figural Child” as the ultimate citizen.

What is in the background of this, all of this, but also undergirding it, is the hybrid city. The urban and the cosmopolitan. While ‘hybrid cities’ isn’t necessarily an accepted or used concept at large, a quick Google and Google image search shows a technology-based, almost people-free imaginary. We know, too, that hybrid cities come synonymously with hybrid cars, that is, ‘pure’ innovation and more recently perhaps, the ‘White entrepreneurial guy.’ And, what’s more, they’re Jetsons-esque, a projection in which jokes are made to signify that the future is White.

Here, I’d like to think again about hybrid futures. And, broadly speaking, how race codes the city without falling into what, say, the contested terrain of afrofuturism at large attempts to counter, i.e. that blackness and technology (/future) do not make sense together. The city, more so than the country, is emblematic of everything new. The hybrid future, then, is a decidedly urban one…

Read the entire article here.

Obama’s “Double Consciousness” On Race

The New Yorker
2013-07-26

Jonathan Alter, Author, Reporter, Columnist, TV Analyst, Lecturer

More than a century ago, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote of the “double consciousness” of the black man: “One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings.” President Barack Obama’s extemporaneous remarks in the press room last week about the Trayvon Martin case and the plight of young black men were pitch-perfect in part because they let no one off the hook, not even well-intentioned people who want him to lead what he predicted would be a “stilted” national conversation on race.

But the surprise appearance will have lasting importance if it keeps the President on the hook, too—if it helps reconcile a double consciousness that had left the Obama White House facing some of the most important issues of the day as if under a veil (another of Du Bois’s concepts).

Those who know the President well attest that, for the most part, there aren’t “two Obamas” the way that there were famously “two Clintons” (the policy wonk and the man of appetites). The gap between the public and the private Obama is much smaller than it is for most politicians—except when the subject is race.

In public, he has, until now, tread gingerly; in private, after hours and especially with friends and family, race is often an overt part of the conversation—or else it inhabits a place close to its surface.

The President’s Trayvon talk, and its generally positive response, represents the narrowing of the gap between the public and private Obama. The caution that grew out of his status as the first black President, which one close aide described to me as “the President’s inability to swing at certain pitches” before being reelected, made it harder to confront social issues that have engaged him deeply since he was a young man…

Read the entire article here.

White-Race Problems: White Hispanic, White Black, Geraldo Rivera

Living Anthropologically: Anthropology – Understanding – Possibility
2013-07-25

Jason Antrosio, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Hartwick College, Oneonta, New York

A strange meme circulates, apparently fueled by Geraldo Rivera’s White Hispanic, Yellow Journalism. It goes like this: George Zimmerman is not really white, he’s Hispanic, and so the [liberal, race-baiting] Main Stream Media [MSM] invented “White Hispanic.” And if Zimmerman’s White Hispanic, does that make President Obama a White Black? Hahaha. #LiberalLogic Gotcha!

Rivera’s account is not completely inaccurate, it’s just a bit twisted and incorrect. First, the claim that “White Hispanic” is a completely made-up term for the Zimmerman trial should be news to the more than 26 million people who in 2010 marked in as White Hispanic on the US Census form–the categories for Hispanic yes/no and race are both separate and both mandatory, as they have been since at least the 1980 Census. Second, as of 2000, people like Obama could indeed check in as White Black on the US Census–however, understanding this issue means knowing about the traditional US framework of hypodescent. Finally, Rivera’s claim that the Hispanic immigrant experience is different from the Irish and Italian one–that Latinos will transform the US racial landscape–is intriguing but unsupported. If anything, the move seems to be toward a Hispanic White/Black bifurcation…

Read the entire article here.