Mixed Race Studies

No, Bill Clinton, we’re not ‘all mixed race’ – and you of all people should know that

The Independent
London, United Kingdom
2016-02-15

Remi Joseph Salisbury

If you’re claiming you’re ‘colour-blind’, you’re not being progressive. You’re part of the problem

In a seemingly fear-fuelled attempt to halt the rapidly growing popularity of Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton has once more turned to her husband – her “secret weapon” – to move along the discussion. Except it’s all gone terribly wrong.

At a rally in Memphis on Friday, Bill Clinton demonstrated his ineptitude in offering any meaningful contribution to political debates about racial equality when he argued that “we are all mixed-race people”.

This comment – an attempt to downplay the significance of race – represents a lack of respect towards, and disregard for, the lives of people of colour living in the United States.

Bill Clinton has had a lot of opportunities to think about race. He might have thought about the centrality of race to prejudice in US society when his “tough on crime” stance saw him introduce the 1994 crime bill. When this bill supported a burgeoning prison-industrial complex that disproportionately incarcerates African Americans, often for non-violent and petty crimes, he might have stopped to think about race…

Read the entire article here.

Obama, Blackness, and Postethnic America

The Chronicle of Higher Education
2008-02-29

David A. Hollinger, Preston Hotchkis Professor of American History
University of California, Berkeley

The Obama candidacy challenges our notions of identity politics

In their support for Hillary Rodham Clinton over Barack Obama, prominent black leaders have made it clear that black skin color itself is not as big a deal in American politics as it once was. The spectacle of John Lewis, Charles B. Rangel, and Andrew Young, among others, trying to persuade black Americans to vote for a white woman rather than the first black man with a real chance at the White House is a striking example of how the Obama campaign has become a postethnic phenomenon.

There are plenty of other signs as well. In a society long accustomed to a sharp black-white color line — and to relying on the rule of “one drop of black blood” to locate that line — commentators are discussing the choices of identity available to the mixed-race Obama. In a recent video on The New York Times Web site, Glenn C. Loury and John H. McWhorter, two prominent black intellectuals, casually reviewed Obama’s range of options. Yet it was not so long ago that the lightskinned Colin Powell declared matter-of-factly: “When you look like me, you are black.”…

…Obama’s mixed ancestry, however, is not what most generates the new uncertainty about blackness. Much more important is the fact that his black ancestry is immigrant rather than American-born. Before getting to that, however, let me clarify the postethnic flavor of the support for Clinton on the part of a substantial segment of the black political establishment…

Read the entire article here.