Mixed Race Studies

Reflections on Multiracial Identity on Another Thanksgiving Passed

Black Agenda Report: News, information and analysis from the black left.
2015-12-01

Danny Haiphong

The U.S. imperial domain floats on raw force and fairy tales. One myth “paints the U.S. as a safe haven for people of different backgrounds instead of the genocidal settler state that it is.” Another tale holds that multi-racial identity “carries with it new experiences with racism not yet easily understood or dealt with.” The truth is, the U.S.is racist to the core, and “proponents of multiracial identity possess little interest in solidarity.”

Over the last few years, much discussion has occurred in the US corporate media around the demographic shift in the US. Reports have verified that white Americans will be minorities in the general population after 2042. This impending change has struck fear in the eyes of the racist, rightwing sector of society and romanticism in the minds of the racist, white liberal sector of society. The right has responded with racist terror while self-identified white liberals have found new ways to boast of the so-called “progress” of US capitalist society. Multiracial identity has been a key concept recently devised to sanitize the racial political order of the US.

The politics of multiracial identity are a product of the same liberal mythology so embedded in the Thanksgiving holiday. This ideology, promoted by the liberal sector of the ruling class, celebrates Thanksgiving as proof that the US is a “nation of immigrants.” Thanksgiving positions the US as a cooperative society. The fairy tale paints the US as a safe haven for people of different backgrounds instead of the genocidal settler state that it is.

Similarly, multiracial identity has been featured in corporate media such as the New York Times as a product of an increasingly tolerant, diverse US Empire. The US corporate media is quick to cite how more self-identified “Americans” are marrying between racial groups and how migrations of peoples from Africa, Asia, and Latin America have increased as well. These developments are indeed fact. However, the past and present exploitation that underlies their meaning is left out of the discussion in the same manner that the continued plight and resistance of indigenous peoples is left out of the Thanksgiving narrative…

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Growing Up Black in American Apartheid – Ford Pt1

Reality Asserts Itself
The Real News Network
2013-10-23

Paul Jay, Host

Glen Ford, Executive Editor
Black Agenda Report

On Reality Asserts Itself with Paul Jay: Glen Ford, Executive Editor of Black Agenda Report, tells his story as a red-diaper baby, growing up facing racism in the North living with his white activist mother, and living in the Deep South with his black deejay father.

The Multiracial Sheep IS the White Supremacist Fox

Black Agenda Report: the journal of African American political thought and action
2010-03-16

Jared A. Ball, Associate Professor of Communication Studies
Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland

A government and society that is ever ready to restrict the freedoms of Black folks now offers “freedom” from Blackness. This census and social “opt-out” for the progeny of interracial couples allows them to hope to be considered “as something entirely separate, different and apart from” what Curtis Mayfield called the “dark deep well.” The Black “baggage” can be left behind.

Let’s be very clear from the outset.  Multiracial categorization is an aggressive defense of white supremacy.  Multiracial census categorization, particularly in the era of what some are calling the first Black and multiracial president, is, pun-intended, the bulked up steroid-induced version of the old sports aphorism that “the best defense is a good offense.”  By aggressively encouraging younger generations to identify officially as multiracial the national desire to disappear worsening racial divides gets further juice by offering folks a chance to both adopt the illusion of the “post-racial” and to seemingly categorize themselves away from, if not out of, oppression. The beautiful dialectic traditionally developed in this country’s form of white supremacy was its built-in inability to be white and forced inclusion into Black which has made Black America, if even to a fault, among the most diverse, open and accepting communities in the world.  It also increased the potential that that community would become more threatening to white domination which has led to the centuries-long development of neocolonial-styled light-skin privilege as a mechanism of siphoning off some of the more willing participants in an escape from blackness…

Read the entire article here.