Mixed Race Studies

Black On Black Crime And The Peculiar Responsibility Of Biracial Positionality

The Magic Mulatto
2015-03-28

Brett Russell Coleman, Doctoral Student of Community & Prevention Research
University of Illinois, Chicago

In this piece I am 1) making the argument that anti-blackness is pervasive, and 2) concluding that biracial (black/white) people have a peculiar responsibility to confront anti-blackness.

I come to that conclusion as a result of much experience and some study, and illustrate the argument with a small slice of that experience.

First, let’s think about what “black on black crime” really means.

When the topic of police violence against black people comes up, people often change the subject. “What about black on black crime?” they ask.

This is what logicians call a red herring fallacy,

A Red Herring is a fallacy in which an irrelevant topic is presented in order to divert attention from the original issue. The basic idea is to ‘win’ an argument by leading attention away from the argument and to another topic.

The “what about black on black crime?” argument is a particularly effective red herring because 1) it seems relevant enough and 2) it is supported by an anti-black narrative that is always hovering in the air, even when you don’t notice it.

By presenting this different argument, people not only change the subject but they shift blame.

Confronting the disproportionate killing of black people at the hands of the police means confronting systemic, culturally bound racism. Few people want to do this because if they confront systemic racism embedded in everyday life, they have to confront the racism embedded in themselves, in their everyday ways of thinking, talking and doing. This comes very close to blame, and no one wants to be responsible for “being racist.”

It is much easier to change the subject, and shift the blame, to black on black crime because this fits nicely with our hyper-individualized culture that makes people solely and completely responsible for their own conditions of living. Then one needn’t confront systemic racism, or one’s own racism, because everything that happens to you is your fault.

If you find it difficult to understand how insidious it is to change the subject from police killing blacks at disproportionately high rates to “black on black crime,” ask yourself this: would you go to a lecture about fighting cancer and ask the lecturer why she wasn’t talking about fighting AIDS? That would be absurd, would it not? You’d be chased out of the place.

Changing the subject from police violence against blacks to “black on black crime” is not only a red herring; it’s also an example of the systemic, culturally embedded, anti-black racism that nearly everyone is guilty of…

Read the entire article here.

Talkin’ Race with Laura and Wei Ming

The Magic Mulatto: Bringing the fine art of Race Talk straight to the people
2013-03-26

Brett Russell Coleman, Doctoral Student of Community & Prevention Research
University of Illinois, Chicago

“In 1969, we weren’t at war with China.”

If that sentence leaves you perplexed in any way, you need to do two things. First listen to the audio of the conversation I had with Laura Kina and Wei Ming Dariotis…

…The second thing you need to do is check out their project, War Baby / Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art, which investigates constructions of mixed heritage Asian American identity in the United States. This is a “multi-platform project (book, traveling art exhibition, website and blog) that examines how, or even if, mixed heritage Asian Americans address hybrid identities in their artwork, as well as how perspectives from critical mixed race studies illuminate intersections of racialization, war and imperialism, gender and sexuality, and citizenship and nationality.”…

Read the article and listen to the interview here.

More Thoughts on The Magic Mulatto Myth

The Magic Mulatto: Bringing the fine art of Race Talk straight to the people
2013-01-29

Brett Russell Coleman

Elsewhere on this blog I have described the trope or myth of the magic mulatto (see the “about” page, for example, or this post about Frank Schaeffer). To my surprise, some people have asked me to expand on this myth (that is, I’m surprised that anyone reads any of this, but glad you do). Far be it from me to shirk my duty to my loyal readers, so expand I shall.

One of the ways in which this myth gets perpetuated is through research, scholarship, and sometimes everyday talk about mixed-race identity. In these discourses, you will often hear some clap-trap about mixed people being peculiarly skilled at “cultural adaptation” or “boundary spanning”, even “cognitive flexibility” (I’ve been guilty of this myself, I must admit, which is why I feel so free to criticize). It is clap-trap not because it isn’t or couldn’t be true (it may very well be true for some mixed-race people, under some circumstances), but because it could not possibly be true for all mixed-race people, or even some of them all of the time. It is especially ridiculous because it implies (perhaps inadvertently) that there is something magical about the intermingling of gene pools that predisposes one for cultural adaptation, as opposed to opportunities or demands of the sociocultural situation. More importantly, it implies that a “mixed-race” person would have an advantage over a “mono-racial” person in a similar sociocultural situation which demands the ability to “adapt” or “code-switch” or change like a “chameleon.” I suppose one could argue that familiarity with two or more racial or ethnic groups, plus a racially ambiguous appearance, might socialize one for this special ability in a way that is unlikely for a mono-racial person. I would argue that such an argument is absurd, but I suspect that neither you nor I am are temperamentally equipped for the conceptual and methodological nightmare that such a study would entail. So lets leave it at the level of argument for now. My argument is this: there is no good reason to believe that any given mixed-race person would be more adept at cultural adaptation, code switching, etcetera, than any given mono-racial person, given similar socializing conditions for both. That is to say, if the situation demands that the mono-racial person make some sort of psychological or behavioral leap across the racial or cultural boundary, he or she will be just as able to make that leap as the mixed-race person would be. To argue otherwise is to uphold the belief in “race” as something essential to the human “personality” and puts unfair demands on mixed-race people to do the hard work of bridging the racial divide that the majority of humanity are unwilling to do. Put another way, if you’re so interested in bridging the racial divide, do it yourself…

Read the entire article here.