Mixed Race Studies

Passing for white and straight: How my looks hide my identity

Salon
2013-12-08

Koa Beck
Brooklyn, New York

I’m neither straight nor white, but I’m frequently mistaken for both — and it’s taught me a lot about privilege

I first became aware of my passing as a young child confronted with standardized testing. My second grade teacher had walked us through where to write our names in capital letters and what bubbles to fill in for our sex, our birth date and ethnicity. But in the days before “biracial” or “multiracial” or “choose two or more of the following,” I was confronted with rigid boxes of “white” or “black” – a space that my white father and black-Italian mother had navigated for some time.

But even at 8 years old, I knew I could mark “white” on the form without a teacher’s assistant telling me to do the form over with my No. 2 pencil. I could sometimes be “exotic” on the playground to the grown-ups who watched us for skinned knees and bad words. But with hair that had yet to curl and a white-sounding last name, I was at first glance – and many after – a dark-haired white girl with a white father who collected her after school…

…Because with my invisibility has come her privilege, an experience that has undeniably marked most of my life.  Due to my passing, I have the W.E.B. Du Bois-patented “double consciousness” for the opportunities that have been placed before me, scholastic and professional, from generally white and hetero establishments that look at me and always see their own. Is it the presumed commonality that garnered me those interviews? Those smiles? Those callbacks? Those firm handshakes?

When I read statistics about how employers are more likely to hire white people than people of color, I know that I can count myself in the former, despite the fact that I identify as the latter. I’m hyper-aware that when a bank, a company or any public office hears the sound of my voice and reads my legal first name (under which this article does not appear), they assume that they’re talking to a white woman, and therefore give me better service…

…My privilege in passing reflects a racism and heterosexism that continues to flourish, despite romantic notions that racial mixing and gay marriage will create a utopian future free of prejudices…

Read the entire article here.

Creole Echoes: The Francophone Poetry of Nineteenth-Century Louisiana

University of Illinois Press
January 2004
280 pages
6 x 9 in.
1 black & white photograph
Paper ISBN: 978-0-252-07149-2

Translated by:

Norman R. Shapiro, Professor of French
Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut

A collection of the first published works of Creole poets of the 1800s, in French, appearing beside the new English translations by the award-winning translator Norman R. Shapiro

Creole poets have always eluded easy definition, infusing European poetic forms with Louisiana themes and Native American and African influences to produce an impressive variety of often highly accomplished and always strikingly engaging verses. The first major collection of its kind, Creole Echoes contains over a hundred of these poems by more than thirty different poets—Louisiana residents of European, African, and Caribbean origin.

The poems gathered here exhibit the Creole poets’ wide range of theme, tone, and sensibility. Somber elegies, whimsical verse, animal fables, love sonnets, odes to nature, curses, polemics, and lauds all find voices here.

There is nothing more bizarre to me than when people who identify as biracial/mixed race etc, demand that those of us who also have parents of differing races, identify ourselves just like they do. Barack Obama self-identifies as a black man. Period. Finished. Let him be. It is those people (and not black/white people) who actually hurt the multiracial “cause” (if such exists), by forcing one experience on us. To me, they are exactly like those who invented the tragic mulatto. We all have different experiences and should be free to identify as we wish. My mother is black (African) and my father a white man. I never got to meet or know him or his family, but my mother made sure that I was proud of who I am from all angles. I have always chosen to identify myself as a black woman. Not because I hate my “white side”, but because my experiences closely mirror those of black people, especially the black people who raised me. While I do share some experiences with biracial people, I have not come close to identifying myself as such. However, I think it’s great when anyone can chose who they are or identify with. I’m not ashamed of either of my parents, just ashamed of the society we live in, where people try and force you to be who they want you to be. It comes from all sides, but it’s uglier when it comes from those who have front-row experience on the pain of being society outcasts because people are unable to box us immediately. I don’t think this topic will ever go away, in fact it will get worse, no matter how much we try and wish it away. Race was born out of capitalist ambitions, invented by human beings so one group can control and benefit from the subjugation of another. That’s a human problem that will never go away. If you call yourself biracial…good for you. But I call myself black, and so does Barack. Leave us alone.

Rosalie (from NY), Reader’s Comments (#45) for article “Pushing Boundaries, Mixed-Race Artists Gain Notice,” The New York Times, July 5, 2011. http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2011/07/06/arts/mixed-race-writers-and-artists-raise-their-profiles.html?permid=45#comment45

Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective: “The Democratization of Beauty?: Skin Bleaching, Skin Bronzing and the Global Market in Color Enhancement”

University of California, Merced
California Room
5200 North Lake Rd.
Merced, California 95343
2013-12-12, 10:30 PST (Local Time)

France Winddance Twine, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

The seminar series “Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective” is organized by Tanya Golash-Boza, Nigel Hatton, and David Torres-Rouff. The event is co-sponsored by the UC Center for New Racial Studies, Sociology, and SSHA.

For more information, click here.

Loving v. Virginia as a Civil Rights Decision

Cosponsored by the Center for African American Studies and the Program in Law and Public Affairs
102 Jones Hall
Princeton University
Princeton, New Jersey
Monday, 2013-12-09, 12:00-13:20 EST (Local Time)

Dorothy E. Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology; Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania

The Workshop in American Studies brings together students and faculty from the wide range of departments that contribute to the Program in American Studies. By encouraging a diversity of topics from researchers from a variety of departments, we hope the Workshop highlights the advantages of the “in-between” disciplinary space that American Studies inhabits at Princeton. Our goal is to provide a forum where presenters can receive feedback from a wide variety of disciplinary perspectives and participants can be exposed to new methodologies and new topics for research. Moreover, we hope to foster a community of advanced undergraduates, graduate students and faculty who share in the common project of researching the American experience.

The format of the workshop is that the speaker introduces the paper for ten minutes and then we open up the floor to questions. Copies of the papers are made available outside the American Studies office, 42 McCosh Hall…

For more information and reservations, click here.