{"id":12536,"date":"2013-03-31T04:54:10","date_gmt":"2013-03-31T04:54:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=12536"},"modified":"2017-03-07T18:43:55","modified_gmt":"2017-03-07T18:43:55","slug":"mama%e2%80%99s-baby-papa%e2%80%99s-too","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=12536","title":{"rendered":"Mama\u2019s Baby, Papa\u2019s, Too"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mama\u2019s Baby, Papa\u2019s, Too<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Trans-Scripts: An Interdisciplinary Journal in the Humanities and Social Sciences at UC Irvine<\/a>
\nFirst Issue Launch (2011-02-16)
\nVolume I (2011): Race: Theories, Identities, Intersections, Histories, and the \u201cPost-Racial\u201d Society<\/a>
\n4 pages<\/p>\n

Hortense Spillers<\/a><\/strong>, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English
\nVanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee<\/em><\/p>\n

In the world of newspapers, \u201cbeneath the fold\u201d apparently means that the feature bears only secondary interest or importance compared to what is situated above it, but in all fairness to the writer of the article that I am alluding to, all news for the last three weeks has taken a back seat\u2014or should I say, assumed a beneath-the-fold-posture?\u2014to events unfolding in Egypt. In a very real sense, though, post-millennium changes in American racial attitudes\u2014the topic of the article\u2014are in fact revolutionary-seeming and may go far to explain both the 2008 national elections and their midterm mate of 2010. Both elections \u201caddressed\u201d race in a more or less explicit manner and dispatched glaringly opposite messages concerning it. We might put it this way: It was as though 2010 were furious with 2008 and wrought its revenge in an election result that all but cancelled out the previous outcome. It seems that the Facebook crowd\u2014the young and the restless\u2014stayed home that day, and it is precisely that generational cohort toward which Susan Saulny\u2019s New York Times<\/em> piece, \u201cBlack? White? Asian? More Young Americans Choose All of the Above<\/a>,\u201d is aimed and from which it draws its inspiration. For this cohort, race is no longer just \u201crace,\u201d but becomes a playful smorgasbord of this, that, and the other. My head spins and my eyesight grows cock-eyed, trying to figure this one out. In short, I fall down in the dizziness.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve been here before, and that is<\/em> the disappointment. Reminded in the course of Saulny\u2019s treatment that terms like \u201cmulatto<\/a>,\u201d \u201conce tinged with shame\u2026is enjoying a comeback in some young circles\u201d (1), one wonders what all the brouhaha about \u201cpost-racial\u201d identity actually means, unless the new racialist reflexes are intended to be taken as parodic gestures, but I\u2019m not at all sure that is the case. Ms. Saulny\u2019s article, designated as a single entry in a series that \u201cwill explore the growing number of mixed-race Americans\u201d (20), is based on the author\u2019s probe of the issues, conducted among some fifty students who are members of the Multiracial and Biracial Student Association at the University of Maryland in College Park. Though membership in the MBSA is said to be open, the rationale for the group\u2019s existence is predicated on the number of racial mixtures that converge on a single personality and the descriptive apparatuses that differentiate skin tone and hair type: \u201ctan skin\u201d and \u201ccurly brown hair,<\/strong>\u201d for instance, signal, in one case, that the person\u2019s ancestry \u201ccould have spanned the globe\u201d (1). Americans are in the midst of a demographic shift, we know, that is fuelled by immigration and intermarriage, as \u201cone in seven new marriages is between spouses of different races or ethnicities\u201d (1). As a result, today\u2019s undergraduate population comprises the \u201clargest group of mixed-race people ever to come of age in the United States\u201d (1). Needing, then, names for racial categories that do not fit the traditional census classifications, the \u201cnew\u201d subjects of race welcome \u201cthe multiracial option\u2026 after years of complaints and lobbying, mostly by white mothers of biracial children who objected to their children being allowed to check only one race.\u201d<\/p>\n

What amounts to demographic data and genetic input is here transliterated into terms of human and ontological value, and that is precisely the rebarbative boomerang of the old race concept, or \u201cthe racialized perception of identity,\u201d as Robin Blackburn<\/a> describes it. Rainier Spencer\u2019s<\/strong><\/a> view, cited in the article, that \u201c\u2018mixed race identity is not a transcendence of race, it\u2019s a new tribe,\u2019\u201d penetrates to the heart of the matter, which I would conceptualize as the mimesis of a social and political problem that misnames its vocation.<\/strong> And what, exactly, is the problem?<\/p>\n

…We very much doubt that the fury here is that there are not enough boxes on the census form, or a deficit of classificatory items, or the prohibition to check more than one, or even the thwarted desire to express racial pride, but, rather, the dictates of a muted self-interest that wishes to carve its own material and political successes out of another\u2019s hide.<\/strong> To that degree, these celebratory, otiose gestures are very American! In other words, if \u201cracial ambiguity\u201d or looking that way, can be amplified and translated into a legitimate political interest (as it is increasingly becoming a commercial one), then the padded new racism that comes about as a result will gladly declare a new class of winners. But the historical reality (which the nineteen-year olds are not aware of, and neither this author, nor anyone else has informed them of it) is that racial ambiguity is itself a new-world thematic\u2014probably about seven centuries old by now\u2014so that 300 million coeval Americans, all of them, could check off several race boxes on the decennial census form, and who could argue with them?<\/strong> But I suspect that the citizen-taxpayer is not thinking, first and foremost, about traditional race ascription when she responds to the census taker\u2019s queries, but, rather, by what cultural name she is interpellated. Saulny apparently found out (and how silly is this?) that President Obama<\/a>, for instance, checked only one box on his 2010 census form<\/a>, and that was the black one, while he could have checked two, Saulny trumpets. Well, yes, he could have checked two, but this President likely has a solid grasp of race and how it operates in the social and political context of the United States, and to call oneself mixed-race, or black and white, or something and something else, means what? What work is that supposed to do for you?…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

…We\u2019ve been here before, and that is the disappointment. Reminded in the course of Saulny\u2019s treatment that terms like \u201cmulatto,\u201d \u201conce tinged with shame\u2026is enjoying a comeback in some young circles\u201d (1), one wonders what all the brouhaha about \u201cpost-racial\u201d identity actually means, unless the new racialist reflexes are intended to be taken as parodic gestures, but I\u2019m not at all sure that is the case. Ms. Saulny\u2019s article, designated as a single entry in a series that \u201cwill explore the growing number of mixed-race Americans\u201d (20), is based on the author\u2019s probe of the issues, conducted among some fifty students who are members of the Multiracial and Biracial Student Association at the University of Maryland in College Park.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,33,125,8,26,394,20],"tags":[5641,45,5644,4216,2327,5643,5642],"class_list":["post-12536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-census","category-identitydevelopment","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-hortense-spillers","tag-rainier-spencer","tag-robin-blackburn","tag-susan-saulny","tag-the-new-york-times","tag-trans-scripts","tag-trans-scripts-an-interdisciplinary-journal-in-the-humanities-and-social-sciences-at-uc-irvine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12536"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12536\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52186,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12536\/revisions\/52186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}