Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

The first Africans to arrive in North America did not arrive as slaves and almost certainly did not conceive of themselves as “negros.” The word, appropriated from the Latin word for “black” was a descriptive device divorced from any cultural or historical context for these people. Over time, that descriptive device would become a social designation constructed in opposition to and structurally inferior to “whiteness.” The first Africans to arrive in Virginia may not have arrived as slaves, but legislation would ensure that black freedom would exist only as a misshapen simulacrum of white freedom. Where whiteness signified privilege, blackness had to signify subordination, a dynamic which was eventually codified in racial slavery. For those without claim to “whiteness,” there was no recourse to white domination and so within this racialized caste system, “half-blackness” or “half-whiteness” were as problematic concepts as “partial-oppression” or “half-supremacy.”

Darryl G. Barthé, Jr., “Racial Revisionism, Caste Revisited: Whiteness, Blackness, and Barack Obama,” in Obama and the Biracial Factor: The Battle for a New American Majority, edited by Andrew J. Jolivétte (Bristol: The Policy Press, 2012), 82.

I’m Black But Look White. Here Are The Horrible Things White People Feel Safe Telling Me.

Posted in Articles, Autobiography, Media Archive, Passing, Social Justice, United States on 2021-12-10 18:41Z by Steven

I’m Black But Look White. Here Are The Horrible Things White People Feel Safe Telling Me.

The Huffington Post
2021-12-09

Miriam Zinter

The author. “I’ve had people tell me it ‘disgusts’ them to see interracial couples,” she writes. “They’ve told me they don’t understand why Black neighborhoods look so ‘ghetto.'” *COURTESY OF MIRIAM ZINTER*

“Many of these people are educated, and hold jobs or positions that give them some form of power or influence over Black people.”

I was outside my house gardening a few weekends ago when a neighbor, whom I had known for almost 30 years, stopped by so I could pet his large, fluffy dogs. I took my gloves off, squatted down to give the dogs a really good scratching around their ears and felt the sun on my back. What could be better? And then my neighbor said: “Why do you have a ‘Black Lives Matter’ sign on your front lawn when all those people do is kill each other?”

My lovely day screeched to a halt.

“You know I’m Black, right?” I said, standing up as tall as my 5’4” frame would allow, the sun shining on my blond hair. I continued to pet his dogs, because I needed the comfort of petting dogs at that moment, and because I needed to keep my hands busy so they didn’t slap that man’s face…

Read the entire article here.

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Mixed Race Studies

I’m Black But Look White. Here Are The Horrible Things White People Feel Safe Telling Me.

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