Mixed Race Studies

On Being Biracial and Affirmative Action: Where Do I Fit in?

Skirt Collective
2015-07-23

Shannon Luders-Manuel
Los Angeles, California

Abigail Fisher, a white student who was denied entrance to the University of Austin, Texas [University of Texas, Austin], is taking her case to the Supreme Court, calling the decision a clear result of affirmative action. While I don’t know the figures (but this For Harriet writer does), I do have a personal investment in enlightening others on the role that affirmative action may play out for a real live, three-dimensional, skin and bones person. Perhaps learning someone’s story can help those who may be quick to judge the policy.

The only instance in which I know for sure that I was a recipient of affirmative action was at the preschool in my town’s local community college. As a black biracial kid of a white single mother, I attended the preschool along with a few other minorities and many white children. Throughout the rest of my schooling, particularly in graduate school, I’ve wondered if affirmative action played a role in my education. While I believe affirmative action is important, and even crucial, knowing that it exists makes myself and other minorities wonder if we’re one of the few who’ve been “given a pass.” Despite my fear, I’ve faced my fair share of educational discrimination, which began in 5th grade…

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“I am on the Coloured Side”: The Roles of the White Suitor and the Black Mother in the Tragic Mulatta Narrative

University of Massachusetts at Amherst
2013

Shannon D. Luders Manuel

What I propose to add to the already established dialogue regarding the tragic mulatta narrative is an investigation into the commonalities of the genre’s endings, as well as to assert that the tragic mulatta genre is present even at the turn of the 21st century with such works as Danzy Senna’s Caucasia. While my investigation by no means covers an exhaustive list of tragic mulatta narratives, the readings provide an overview of the ways in which the narrative has both evolved over time and stayed consistent during the antebellum, post-bellum, Harlem Renaissance, and the present day. I present each author as both building from previous authors’ works and as limited to the time period in which he or she pens the novel(s).

The tragic mulatta of the post-bellum rejected white male suitors as a larger and more crucial rejection of sexual slavery and depravity, as well as attempting to shield the suitors from experiencing rejection from their own white contemporaries, as Angela does at the end of Plum Bun: “But I want you to know that from now on, so far as sides are concerned, I am on the coloured side. And I don’t want you to come over on that side” (373). However, the tragic mulattas continue to reject white male suitors even into the 21st century, and I assert that this repetition is limiting both to the characters themselves and to the narrative lives of contemporary mulatta readers. I further assert that the genre continues to pair rejection of the white male suitor with a reappropriation of true “blackness” and maternal domesticity. Through observing the tragic mulatta’s need to gain identity and sense of place through her darker mother or sister and the rejection of a white male suitor, tragic mulatta scholars—as well as critical race theorists in general—become more aware of the unique position the genre holds in identity formation as seen through what I believe are critical fictional texts for an interracial nation.

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Filling in the Chasm Between Black and White

The Siskiyou
Southern Oregon University
2006-02-27

Shannon Luders-Manuel

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the lecture by James McBride, having read his memoir a few years ago when I was at my most-heightened search for identity. Without retaining much of the details of his life story, what has remained with me is the knowledge that someone else had experiences similar to my own. To know that he too struggled with feelings of shame over his white mother and questions over whether he, as a black child, had been adopted, brought down the wall of alienation I felt was between me and the rest of the world…

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