Mixed Race Studies

The Problem With Obama’s Faith in White America

The Atlantic
2016-12-13

Tressie McMillan Cottom, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Virginia Commonwealth University

The president’s optimism about race blinded him to the pervasiveness and stubborn persistence of racism.

I screamed a lot while reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s My President Was Black. When I was done reading and screaming, I cried.

The last time I felt this far removed from this president was when I first worked so hard to elect him.

In 2007, the very idea of a President Barack Obama was ridiculous to me. I was and am southern, god bless. I am black. I come from black people who are southerners even when they were New Yorkers for a spell. We are the black American story of enslavement, rural migration, urban displacement, resistance, boostrapping, mobility, and class fragility. In this milieu we, as a friend once described it, know our whites. To know our whites is to understand the psychology of white people and the elasticity of whiteness. It is to be intimate with some white persons but to critically withhold faith in white people categorically. It is to anticipate white people’s emotions and fears and grievances because their issues are singularly our problem. To know our whites is to survive without letting bitterness rot your soul…

Read the entire article here.

“As a daughter of a black mother and a white father, we have here in Brazil this kind of negotiation about identity. When I say “I’m black,” people try to negotiate this telling me: “No, you’re not black, you are mestiço, you are mulata.” And they think they’re doing me a favor not calling me a black woman.” —Ana Maria Gonçalves

“Ana Maria Gonçalves – New columnist for The Intercept,” The Intercept Brasil, December 2, 2016. (00:00:20-00:00:46). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPFj5ToQ9xc.

The Physics of Melanin: Science and the Chaotic Social Construct of Race

Bitch Media
2016-12-19

Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Research Associate
Department of Physics
University of Washington, Seattle

It could have been earwax. It turns out that the texture of a person’s earwax is not determined by environment but rather is written into a person’s genetic code. Some of us have hard, dry earwax, some of us have goopy earwax, and some of us have a combination. Thus, 500 years ago when it seemed useful to Europeans to start organizing people by skin color, they could have gone by earwax instead. Had they, for some reason or another, been fascinated by earwax, chattel slavery might have been organized around whoever had the earwax that was deemed less valuable. Race might have been defined by our ear excretions.

Inferior Science

Hundreds of years after the advent of chattel slavery, it’s easy to see why race is defined by skin color. Skin color offers a highly visible cue that makes sorting easy—at least until rape proliferates. The variation in human skin tones is due to a pigment called melanin, which comes from the Greek word melas, “black, dark.” Melanin is found in most living creatures, and when it is studied scientifically, researchers usually use the ink of Sepia officinalis, the common cuttlefish. Our social sorting by skin color can be put in more technical terms as a question of how much melanin our bodies produce and maintain as part of our epidermic structure.

Of course, in 2016, melanin content is not the only reason for one’s identification or racialization as Black. Today, Blackness is recognized as a cultural identity that is entangled with a historicity rooted in melanin content but not limited to it. In one study, the same picture of a woman with dark skin was racialized differently when her skin was lightened, and especially when her nose was made smaller. Studies show that phenotypic stereotypes about nose shape, hair texture, and hair melanin content function as cues in tandem with skin melanin. Meanwhile, what we have learned from studying dna and biochemistry tells us that sorting people by skin color is arbitrary for many scientific purposes, and that race is more about how we organize ourselves than about any absolute scientific truth. As the Africadian George Elliott Clarke, Canada’s parliamentary poet laureate, tells it, “Black is maple brass coffee iron mahogany copper cocoa bronze ebony chocolate.” Black identity is a sociogeographic construct with a real but tenuous connection to science.

Technically, melanin is a set of biomolecules that we think are synthesized by enzymes and that are notably very visibly colored. There are three types of melanin: the most common, eumelanin, which appears black or brown and occurs in skin and hair; the less abundant pheomelanin, which is on the yellow-to-red spectrum; and neuromelanin, which appears in high concentrations in the human brain, but the function of which we essentially don’t understand at all. For the most part, it seems, we don’t understand melanin…

…Today, many of us would agree there is no scientific basis for the animus toward eumelanin-abundant people, only economic convenience. The timeline is consistent with this perspective, since race was invented hundreds of years before the 19th-century discovery of melanocytes—the cells that produce the pigment we call melanin. Before that, racial construct was a chaotic mix of hatred, cruelty, greed, and perversity. In a classic example of the illogical nature of racial construction, we have Thomas Jefferson, who owned his Black mistress (or what many of us today would call “sex slave”) Sally Hemings and their children, waxing on about whiteness: “Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of color in the one [whites], preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immovable veil of black, which covers all the emotions of the other race?” In other words, the still highly esteemed founding father of the United States preferred the expressive faces of free white people to the stoic faces of enslaved Black people, and he believed these apparent differences were due to race, not relative states of freedom and captivity…

Read the entire article here.

A long history of accepting interracial couples and mixed race children exists in the black community, if only because no alternatives seem to exist. James Baldwin laid bare this ugly truth during a televised debate with a white conservative. When asked about what whites feared most, “Would you want your [white] daughter to marry one [black]?” Baldwin retorted, “You’re not worried about me marrying your daughter—you’re worried about me marrying your wife’s daughter. I’ve been marrying your daughter since the days of slavery.”

Peter Cole, “Where Has All the Loving Gone? A Review of the New Film, ‘Loving’,” African American Intellectual History Society, November 27, 2016. http://www.aaihs.org/where-has-all-the-loving-gone-a-review-of-the-new-loving-film/.

Opinion of Judge Leon M. Bazile (January 22, 1965)

Source: Encyclopedia Virginia

In this written judgment, dated January 22, 1965, Leon M. Bazile, judge of the Caroline County Circuit Court, refuses a motion on behalf of Richard and Mildred Loving to vacate their 1959 conviction for violating the state law that forbids interracial marriage. The Lovings eventually appealed their case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in their favor in 1967.

The parties were guilty of a most serious crime. As said by the Court in Kinney’s Case 30 Gratt 865: “It was a marriage prohibited and declared absolutely void. It was contrary to the declared public law, founded upon motives of public policy—a public policy affirmed for more than a Century, and one upon which social order, public morality and the best interests of both races depend. This unmistakable policy of the legislature founded, I think, on wisdom and the moral development of both races, has been shown by not only declaring marriages between whites and negroes absolutely void, but by prohibiting and punishing such unnatural alliances with severe penalties. The laws enacted to further uphold this declared policy would be futile and a dead letter if in fraud of these salutary enactments, both races might, by stepping across any imaginary line bid defiance to the law by immediately returning and insisting that the marriage celebrated in another state or county should be recognized as lawful, though denounced by the public law of the domicile as unlawful and absolutely void.”

Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his [arrangement] there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix…

Read the entire opinion here.

“I’ve been describing Sheryll Cashin’s next book partly as a history of white supremacy in America,” says Cashin’s editor, Joanna Green. “Cashin powerfully illustrates how white supremacy was and is foundational to US capitalism and expansion; thus, segregation proves to be an essential tactic. The Lovings dared to cross the color line, and their story reveals why that color line was constructed. In fact, the Loving decision was the first and only time the Court ever used the potent words ‘White Supremacy’ (in caps) to name such ideology. It’s surprising that so few people are aware of this case.”

Ayla Zuraw-Friedland, “Beacon Goes to the Movies: “Loving” and the History of White Supremacy,” Beacon Broadside: A Project of Beacon Press, December 15, 2016. http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2016/12/beacon-goes-to-the-movies-loving-and-the-history-of-white-supremacy.html.

Dating in the Time of #BlackLivesMatter

Racism Review: shcolarship and activism toward racial justice
2016-02-24

Shantel Buggs, Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Sociology
The University of Texas, Austin

When I started my dissertation research a year ago, I had not considered what impact the widespread media coverage of #BlackLivesMatter as a movement and rallying cry might have on my respondents. With my research, I intended to explore the online dating experiences of women who identify as multiracial here in Texas; what I have found has been a complex mobilization of Black Lives Matter as a metric of racial progressiveness. In 2016, it has become clear that the increased media attention being paid to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement is shaping a particular orientation toward, and conversation around, race and racism in the United States. As scholar Khury Petersen-Smith notes, the movement has “shattered what remained of the notion of a ‘post-racial’ America.” More specifically, my work has found that BLM has impacted individual-level relationships, creating a framework within which people are able to evaluate and “vet” their dating partners, especially amidst claims that society is more “progressive” and that the atrocities we have witnessed are “not about race.”

As every good social scientist knows, words mean things. The language around, and produced by, movements like BLM – particularly in regards to discourses of race, racial inequality, state-sanctioned violence, and racism – has influenced the ways in which the multiracial women in my study discuss race, racism, and inequality in the context of their intimate relationships. Several women have described using their own stances on the issues BLM addresses as a means of selecting potential dating partners. This finding suggests that BLM and other widespread social justice movements are having significant impacts on how people are navigating racial politics on an interpersonal level. This is particularly pertinent during a time where U.S. media and popular culture is especially focused on issues of racism and state-sanctioned violence…

Read the entire article here.

What does it mean to be “black enough?” Three women explore their racial identities

The Washington Post
2016-12-11

On “Historically Black,” our podcast about black history, narrator Roxane Gay introduces three new voices.

“What are you?”

“Are you adopted?”

“What are you mixed with?”

Many photos and stories submitted to “Historically Black,” The Washington Post Tumblr project, have touched on what it means to identify as a particular race and ethnic background. Throughout this project, multiple stories surfaced a theme that pointed to an ongoing internal and external conflict based on the societal criteria that deemed a person “black.” These stories identified the struggle to understand the judgment — by both black and non-black communities — based on the way one dresses, speaks and acts.

This has led to a hard, and conflicting, question: What does it mean to be “black enough” in modern America?

That’s the question Marcelle Hutchins faced ever since she, her twin sister and their mother emigrated from Cameroon to Portland, Maine. Hutchins’s mother married a white man, and together they settled in as a family. But as early as the third grade, Hutchins faced the harsh reality of integrating into American society.

“Growing up, I really struggled with my identity in America. For a long time, I often questioned, you know, who I was in this world. And I was told by a variety of different people that I didn’t fit my birthright, that I didn’t act the way I should act or the way black people should act, and because of my mannerisms I was too white,” Hutchins said.

According to Jelani Cobb, a historian and writer at the New Yorker, defining “blackness” is inherently complicated — because race is an invented category dating back to slavery, and the category can encompass a range of identities and cultures. People identify as black, African American, African, Muslim, Native American, biracial and sometimes more.

“The most kind of basic understanding is the one-drop rule, wherein people said if a person had any drop of blood, black blood, they were black. And the purposes of that were to present whiteness as a category of purity and that any tincture of African ancestry would irrevocably taint a person and remove them from the, you know, pure category of whiteness,” Cobb said. “There’s a wide range of ancestries that are included within the category of black, and so the category itself is amorphous.”…

Read the entire article here.

Even today, being biracial in America is not always easy

Observer-Reporter
Washington County News
Washington, Pennsylvania
2016-12-17

Karen Mansfield, Staff Writer

Celeste Van Kirk/Observer-Reporter
Dontae Monday, a student at Washington & Jefferson College, stands in front of Old Main recently.

Koron Harris is used to strangers sneaking glances at her, and she knows why.

“They’re trying to figure out if I’m black or I’m white.”

The daughter of a black father and white mother, Harris has encountered curiosity and fascination about her biracial heritage since she was in elementary school.

“I don’t really think about it at this point, but everybody else does. I’ve had people ask me whether I think I’m black or I’m white, and I honestly don’t see it that way,” said Harris, 19, of Washington. “I just think of me as being Koron.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Monoracial Millennium (a parody): Rethinking Mixed Race in the Age of Obama

Medium
2016-12-18

Gino M. Pellegrini

“The Four Races” from Le Tour de la France par duex enfants (1877) by G. Bruno

It sucks to wake up and realize that you’re back out of style — viewed as a promising development in one decade, viewed as an impediment to racial justice in the next.

It was the 1990s. Racial pure breeds were fading to beige, and ethnic ambiguity was starting to matter. The public was interested in topics like the biracial baby boom, the browning of America, and Tiger “Cablinasian” Woods. Time magazine issued its “New Face of America.” Maria Root published her “Bill of Rights for People of Mixed Heritage.” And multiracial grassroots activists were lobbying the state to account for the growing multiracial population via a new multiracial identifier for Census 2000.

Many in the old vanguard of the US Civil Rights Movement were troubled by this development. They responded by propagating new sayings about the new mixed people: “I’m mixed is another way of saying that you want to be white” and “the multiracial movement is anti-black.”…

Read the entire parody here or here.