{"id":41920,"date":"2015-07-25T02:37:50","date_gmt":"2015-07-25T02:37:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=41920"},"modified":"2015-07-26T02:44:46","modified_gmt":"2015-07-26T02:44:46","slug":"douglas-todd-mixed-unions-applauded-by-some-but-dismissed-by-others-as-brownwashing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=41920","title":{"rendered":"Douglas Todd: Mixed unions applauded by some, but dismissed by others as brownwashing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Douglas Todd: Mixed unions applauded by some, but dismissed by others as brownwashing<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The Vancouver Sun<\/a>
\nVancouver, British Columbia, Canada
\n2015-07-24<\/p>\n

Douglass Todd<\/a><\/strong>, Vancouver Sun columnist<\/p>\n

Ethnically mixed couples \u2014 involving whites, blacks, Japanese, Hispanics, Chinese, South Asians or others \u2014 were heralded not long ago as the wave of a tolerant, open, non-racist future.<\/p>\n

National Geographic<\/em> and Time<\/em> magazine ran cover features<\/a> with photos of mixed-race people, celebrating The New Face of America. The hero in the Warren Beatty<\/a> movie, Bulworth<\/em><\/a>, trumpeted inter-marriage as the way to end racial discrimination.<\/p>\n

Polls consistently reveal many whites, blacks, Asians and others are attracted more to other ethnicities than their own, particularly for dating. British writer Laura Smith<\/a>, who has a Guyanese mother and Scottish father, says she\u2019s often told her mixed-race children \u201clook cool.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the age of multi-ethnic celebrities such as Paula Abdul<\/a>, Vin Diesel<\/a>, Barack Obama<\/a>, Tiger Woods<\/a>, Halle Berry<\/a> and Mariah Carey<\/a>, Smith, who frequently writes about mixed unions, says white mothers, in particular, confess to her they yearn for mixed offspring; they want a society that\u2019s less white and more \u201cbrown.\u201d<\/p>\n

But three cultural trends are shaking up this utopian dream, which places inter-ethnic couples at the vanguard of cultural fusion…<\/p>\n

…Scholars SanSan Kwan<\/a> and Kenneth Spiers<\/a>, editors of Mixing it Up: Multiracial Subjects<\/em><\/a>, also maintain the melting pot ideal, in which people of different ethnicities inevitably join up to make babies together, is a \u201cproblematic\u201d form of \u201cbrownwashing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTo embrace a \u2018brown\u2019 or raceless society and to dispense with concepts of race are to deny the beauty there is in difference,\u201d say Kwan and Spiers.<\/p>\n

\u201cBrownwashing hopes to erase the ugly patterns of racism and in one grand gesture homogenize us all.\u201d<\/p>\n

Roosevelt University Professor Heather Dalmage\u2019s<\/a> book also questions the vision of a society replete with mixed marriages. In The Politics of Multiracialism: Challenging Racial Thinking<\/em><\/a>, contributors criticize white people who seek a \u201ccolour-blind\u201d society, claiming they just want to deny the prevalence of racism.<\/p>\n

British researcher Miri Song<\/a>, of Kent University, also suggests a Western inter-marriage involving a white person can lead to questionable \u201cassimilation,\u201d in which the ethnic minority loses their identity to the so-called \u201cdominant culture.\u201d<\/p>\n

Instead of being a sign of cultural success, Song writes, mixed marriages could \u201cengender deep ambivalence\u201d for minority members…<\/p>\n

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

Douglas Todd: Mixed unions applauded by some, but dismissed by others as brownwashing The Vancouver Sun Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada 2015-07-24 Douglass Todd, Vancouver Sun columnist Ethnically mixed couples \u2014 involving whites, blacks, Japanese, Hispanics, Chinese, South Asians or others \u2014 were heralded not long ago as the wave of a tolerant, open, non-racist future. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,19,33,8,394,20],"tags":[20514,20365,20511,46,182,20515,20513,3669,515,640,7499,20512],"class_list":["post-41920","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-canada","category-census","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-brian-bailey","tag-christoph-schimmele","tag-douglass-todd","tag-heather-dalmage","tag-heather-m-dalmage","tag-hou-zheng-wu","tag-kenneth-spiers","tag-laura-smith","tag-miri-song","tag-sansan-kwan","tag-the-vancouver-sun","tag-vancouver-sun"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41920","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=41920"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41920\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41947,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41920\/revisions\/41947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}