{"id":31580,"date":"2013-06-09T01:05:17","date_gmt":"2013-06-09T01:05:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=31580"},"modified":"2015-10-09T15:40:32","modified_gmt":"2015-10-09T15:40:32","slug":"love-desire-and-impossible-measures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=31580","title":{"rendered":"love, desire, and impossible measures"},"content":{"rendered":"

love, desire, and impossible measures<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The State<\/a>
\n2013-06-08<\/p>\n

Tiana Reid<\/a><\/strong>
\nColumbia University<\/em><\/p>\n

Children rule. No, certain<\/em> children rule the ways in which we measure fantasies of progress. I read Meagan Hatcher-Mays\u2019 Jezebel<\/em> piece<\/a>, \u201cI\u2019m Biracial, and That Ad Is a Big Fucking Deal. Trust Me.,\u201d before I saw the Cheerios commercial<\/a> itself. The commercial, like most ads, is simple and taps into the unsupervised kiddie trope: it presents a chubby-cheeked maybe-blonde making a mess. Distressingly enough, my first reaction was to claim a resolutely anti stance to not watch the video but respond to the Jezebel<\/em> post and say, \u201cI\u2019m Biracial, and That Ad Is the Worst Thing Ever. Trust Me.\u201d Quickly, however, I felt it and thought, \u201cOh, fuck no. I\u2019m black.\u201d And it\u2019s not the ad, but the liberal reactions to it, the way it becomes a siphon for deliciously delirious national imaginaries of cosmopolitan ideas of race that cracks my core. (For instance: how could they<\/em> say those things about that cute little girl?!) But here I am, writing…<\/p>\n

…It\u2019s hard enough, I would think, to hate on a beautiful little \u201cmixie<\/a>\u201d and wonder what or how her presence, no, the way in which she is presented, eclipses other lives. Hatcher-Mays, whose hyphenated name perhaps tells us what we need to know of her wholeness, went as far to say that the commercial \u201cvalidates the existence<\/em> of biracial and multiracial people.\u201d (Her emphasis.) The way we think about \u201cmixed-race,\u201d however, is grounded in a neoliberal narrative that is narrowly individualized (again, \u201cMixie Me<\/a>\u201d). What does it mean for children of color to bring into \u201cexistence\u201d this \u201cbiracial\u201d child who is not one or the other or even both but maybe, here, a symbol of what\u2019s to come? Who has access to this claim? What does it even mean to grope for a way to ask such questions? When visibility becomes the proxy for \u201cthe state of things\u201d\u2014when it becomes a measure of who we are and that we exist, what we lose is vitality….<\/p>\n

…If the goal is to normalize mixed-race families, as Hatcher-Mays applauds Cheerios for, then we should all be scared for our lives. Normalization is a bit like reform\u2014as simultaneously boring and dangerous\u2014and, as American sociologist and race theorist Howard Winant<\/a> wrote<\/a> in a nod to Gramsci\u2019s theory of hegemony, \u201creformism is better understood as incorporation and absorption of conflict than as conflict resolution.\u201d Multiculturalism, multiracialism, pluralism, diversity, and the endless etc. of 21st<\/sup> century neologisms fit into this schema of subsumption rather than disruption. What isn\u2019t embraced in the script is that Blackness isn\u2019t that normal at all<\/a>…<\/p>\n

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

love, desire, and impossible measures The State 2013-06-08 Tiana Reid Columbia University Children rule. No, certain children rule the ways in which we measure fantasies of progress. I read Meagan Hatcher-Mays\u2019 Jezebel piece, \u201cI\u2019m Biracial, and That Ad Is a Big Fucking Deal. Trust Me.,\u201d before I saw the Cheerios commercial itself. The commercial, like […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,8413,8,394,20],"tags":[14814,14861,14228,14229],"class_list":["post-31580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-communications","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-cheerios","tag-general-mills","tag-the-state","tag-tiana-reid"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31580","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=31580"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31580\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43147,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31580\/revisions\/43147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}