Mixed Race Studies

Biraciality and Nationhood in Contemporary American Art

Third Text: Critical Perspectives on Art and Culture
Volume 14, Number 53 (Winter 2001-2002)
pages 43–54

Kymberly N. Pinder, Associate Professor of Art History
School of the Art Insitute of Chicago

An article on work by artists responding to racial hybridity that features a discussion of Lorraine O’Grady’s diptych, “The Clearing”.

For when we swallow Tiger Woods, the yellow-black-red-white man, we swallow something much more significant than Jordan or Charles Barkley. We swallow hope in the American experiment, in the pell-mell jumbling of genes. We swallow the belief that the face of the future is not necessarily a bitter or bewildered face, that it might even, one day, be something like Tiger Wood’s face: handsome and smiling and ready to kick all comers’ asses.

The hope in ‘the yellow-black-red-white man’, reflected in the Tigermania that swept the US in the mid-1990s, is indicative of the racial crossroads at which the US, as a nation, finds itself at the close of the twentieth century. As Stanley Crouch describes, ‘We have been inside each other’s bloodstreams, pockets, libraries, kitchens, schools, theatres, sports arenas, dance halls, and national boundaries for so long that our mixed-up and multiethnic identity extends from European colonial expansion and builds upon immigration.’ Where are we as a nation regarding race when Woods can consider himself ‘Cablinasian’ while some southern states are still officially ending their ‘one-drop’ rules and [taking] laws against mixed marriages off the books? How can we address the concerns of those who see Affirmative Action as all but dead?

Some contemporary artists in the US have been struggling with these issues during the 1980s and 1990s. Lorraine O’Grady is one of them. She originally titled her photomontage diptych The Clearing in 1991, however, later, she lengthened the title to The Clearing: or Cortez and La Malinche, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, N and Me to clarify the historical and personal relevance of the work. The left half of the piece presents the relationship between the black woman and white man as loving while the right as malevolent. The skeletal face of the man and the gun in the pile of clothing provide elements of violence and death. Yet O’Grady says, ‘it isn’t a “before/after” piece; it’s a “both/and” piece. This couple is on the wall in the simultaneous extremes of ecstasy and exploitation.’ The complex relationship between exploitation and defiance for such ‘women of color’ as La Malinche and Sally Hemings has become a trope of American hybridity and assimilation.

Though anthropologists have established the mixed-race heritage of all humans with the discovery of ‘missing link’ hominids in Central and South Africa, racial purity, mixing and conflict are still hotly debated issues in American society. I am not contesting any scientific definitions of race and human origins in this essay, but I will focus on representations of multiraciality and their socio-political currency in American society, specifically contemporary popular culture. Throughout this article, I will use the terms biracial, mixed-race, multi-racial, multi-ethnic, racial hybridity and multicultural with the understanding that such terms are socially constructed and based on perceptions, either of oneself or by others in our society. These terms and their instability reflect the challenge we face to discuss meaningfully the reality of racial mixing, as well as to create the very language needed to do so. Of course, the reality of a nation of immigrants, the legacy of slavery, and the genocide of native populations prevents issues of race and difference from being resolved in the US. In the last decade or so, as the collapse of Affirmative Action initiatives and the rise of white supremacy groups attest, racial divides seem to be widening rather than narrowing. Some race scholars such as Crouch think otherwise and see the increased mixing of the races in the US as the ‘end of race’:

The international flow of images and information will continue to make for a greater and greater swirl of influences. It will increasingly change life on the globe and also change our American sense of race… In that future, definition by racial, ethnic and sexual groups will most probably have ceased to be the foundation of special-interest power… Americans of the future will find themselves surrounded in every direction by people who are part Asian, part Latin, part African, part European, part Indian.

As panaceas or true saviors, historical figures, like Hemings, and contemporary celebrities, like Woods, have become national touchstones for unity. These biracial or multiracial individuals who were once outcast traces of taboo sexual transgressions, the stereotypical ‘tragic mulattos’, are now signifiers of a future of racial harmony. In February 1995, Newsweek devoted an entire issue to the ‘New Race’ in America and though its surveys showed some significant pessimism among blacks and whites regarding our nation’s race relations, the magazine presented the nation’s growing mixed-race population as a future remedy for current racial conflicts. As one biracial writer responded, the magazine declared it ‘hip to be mixed’. Another article, with a markedly flippant tone, in Harper’s Magazine in 1993, even recommended a more practical ‘need’ for racial mixing: melanin rich skin for the survival of future generations as our ozone layer erodes. Popular movies such as Bulworth (1998), written and directed by Warren Beatty, present a jaded white politician who, after living a few days with a black family in South Central Los Angeles, makes ‘procreative, racial deconstruction’ his political platform, his remedy for racial discrimination and the economic disparities it has caused in this country…

Read the entire article here.