{"id":13899,"date":"2013-11-09T15:10:53","date_gmt":"2013-11-09T15:10:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=13899"},"modified":"2017-06-29T20:18:15","modified_gmt":"2017-06-29T20:18:15","slug":"all-the-parts-of-myself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=13899","title":{"rendered":"All the parts of myself…"},"content":{"rendered":"

For similar reasons, The Boondocks<\/a><\/em> also critiques one of the mainstays of mixed race representation: the obligatory rehearsal of one\u2019s multiracial family tree. Replacing calls for social justice or racial equity, the most often repeated goal of \u00a0\u201cmixed race rights\u201d is merely to \u201cname all the parts of myself.\u201d The rhetorical or graphic display of the family tree (almost de rigueur<\/a> in the growing genre of mixed race narratives)\u00a0participates in a racial gaze that can interrupt political reflection. For Jazmine<\/a> and her family, description has come to stand in for politics, genealogy substituting for political discussions of the body politic. The family tree is paraded as revelatory and socially transforming fact. It has come to serve as proxy for social change, in which representing one\u2019s family tree has become a political end in itself. The exercise of those rights often amounts to making identity a category of genealogical documentation, documentation which, to the extent that it is complacently represented as an end in itself whose social good is somehow self-evident, obscures identity as social index and mode of analysis. When Huey<\/a> asks Jazmine, \u201cOK… if you\u2019re not black, then what are you, hmmm?\u201d she responds dutifully with a list documenting down to the fraction her ethnic racial portfolio: \u201cMy mother is one-quarter Irish, one-quarter Swedish, and one-half German, and on my father\u2019s side is part Cherokee, and my grandfather is mostly French, I think, because he\u2019s originally from Louisiana, and his father was from Haiti I believe, which makes me…<\/strong>\u201d Huey intervenes: \u201cWhich makes you as black as Richard Roundtree<\/a> in \u2018Shaft in Africa<\/a>\u2019\u201d (A Right to Be Hostile <\/em>15).\u00a0 Huey disparages not so much her mixed genealogy as the idea that a recapitulation of ethnic and national descent really says anything meaningful about racial identity. At the very least, he suggests, her genealogy is neither progressive nor has sufficient explanatory force. Rather, her accounting retroactively ratifies the idea of racially homogeneous categories and national identities by suggesting that each parent\u2019s race or ethnicity is unitary.
\n<\/strong>
\nHer laundry list also collapses blood and nation and then fractionalizes both\u2014how else can the notion of \u201cone-quarter Swedish\u201d make sense\u2014and looks less like the new millennial model of post-race and more like an uncritical revival of classic nineteenth-century positivist racialism.<\/strong> Huey interrupts her\u2014and the discourse itself\u2014by insisting instead on the political nature of racial identity: he teases her by saying, \u201cI understand, Jazmine. I\u2019m mixed too.\u201d We see an up-close shot of her face, which lights up as she says hopefully, \u201cYou are?\u201d only to have him sarcastically claim, much to her disappointment, to be \u201cpart Black, part African, part Negro, and part colored.<\/strong>\u201d Significantly, his designations do not pretend to be descriptive; they all carry heavy historical and political implication. He then walks off wailing, \u201cPoor me. I just don\u2019t know where I fit in,\u201d as she cries after him (again): \u201cYou\u2019re making fun of me!\u201d (16). Of course, Huey is<\/em> making fun of Jazmine in this exchange. However, his send-up is social critique to the degree that it does not concede the reduction of racial identity to the sum of one\u2019s parts; he thinks of race not in terms of\u00a0 blood but in relation to representation. Shaft in Africa<\/em>, after all, is late in the series of 1970s campy sex-and-adventure Blaxploitation<\/a> films. Huey\u2019s invocation of the hyper-blackness represented in the Blaxploitation genre of film is a spoof of <\/em>them\u2014he is concerned not with black authenticity but with cultural figurations of blackness. Race, for McGruder<\/a>, is always cast as a matter of historical consciousness, social play, and political engagement. This perspective is reinforced in his comments on the racial status of\u00a0 Barack Obama<\/a>, when he notes, \u201cWe all share the common experiences of being Black in America today\u2014we do not all share a common history.\u201d In such scenes, The Boondocks<\/em> replaces mere optic confirmation of race with black cultural performance and historical citation as more useful markers of racial identity. His coherent sense of \u201cBlack\u201d is historically informed, historically evolving, and historically heterogeneous in both community composition and cultural practice.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Michele Elam, The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium<\/a><\/em> (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2011), 69-70.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Replacing calls for social justice or racial equity, the most often repeated goal of \u201cmixed race rights\u201d is merely to \u201cname all the parts of myself.\u201d The rhetorical or graphic display of the family tree (almost de rigueur in the growing genre of mixed race narratives) participates in a racial gaze that can interrupt political reflection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[4188,1386,6391],"class_list":["post-13899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-excerpts","tag-aaron-mcgruder","tag-michele-elam","tag-the-boondocks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13899","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=13899"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13899\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54363,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13899\/revisions\/54363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}