Mixed Race Studies

3rd Annual: What Are You? – A Discussion about Mixed Heritage

Brooklyn Historical Society
Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations
Saturday, 2013-11-09, 14:00 EST (Local Time)

From the Travyon Martin murder trial, to racist responses to the Cheerios commercial starring an interracial couple, recent media events illustrate that the U.S is definitely not post-racial. Join BHS in exploring critical questions relating to multicultural and multiracial identity. We’ll discuss big questions like: How do we perform and display our identities? How does media, film, art, humor and photography shape and mediate mixed-race identity?

I will be introducing the panelists.

Panelists include:

• Michael David Murphy and Alyson West, creators of We are the 15%
• Chris Johnson of transmedia project, Question Bridge: Black Males
• Anoushka Ratnarajah and Marcelitte Failla of Toasted Marshmallows, and
• Jay Smooth, host of hip-hop video blog Ill Doctrine and video producer at Colorlines.com.

Plus a dance performance by special guests – We’re Muslim, Don’t Panic.

Co-sponsored by LovingDay.org, SWIRL, MAVIN: The Mixed Heritage Experience, and MixedRaceStudies.org.

Brooklyn Brewery beer and light refreshments will be served.

For more information, click here.

For similar reasons, The Boondocks also critiques one of the mainstays of mixed race representation: the obligatory rehearsal of one’s multiracial family tree. Replacing calls for social justice or racial equity, the most often repeated goal of  “mixed race rights” is merely to “name all the parts of myself.” 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. For Jazmine 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’s 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 asks Jazmine, “OK… if you’re not black, then what are you, hmmm?” she responds dutifully with a list documenting down to the fraction her ethnic racial portfolio: “My mother is one-quarter Irish, one-quarter Swedish, and one-half German, and on my father’s side is part Cherokee, and my grandfather is mostly French, I think, because he’s originally from Louisiana, and his father was from Haiti I believe, which makes me…” Huey intervenes: “Which makes you as black as Richard Roundtree in ‘Shaft in Africa’” (A Right to Be Hostile 15).  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’s race or ethnicity is unitary.

Her laundry list also collapses blood and nation and then fractionalizes both—how else can the notion of “one-quarter Swedish” make sense—and looks less like the new millennial model of post-race and more like an uncritical revival of classic nineteenth-century positivist racialism. Huey interrupts her—and the discourse itself—by insisting instead on the political nature of racial identity: he teases her by saying, “I understand, Jazmine. I’m mixed too.” We see an up-close shot of her face, which lights up as she says hopefully, “You are?” only to have him sarcastically claim, much to her disappointment, to be “part Black, part African, part Negro, and part colored.” Significantly, his designations do not pretend to be descriptive; they all carry heavy historical and political implication. He then walks off wailing, “Poor me. I just don’t know where I fit in,” as she cries after him (again): “You’re making fun of me!” (16). Of course, Huey is 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’s parts; he thinks of race not in terms of  blood but in relation to representation. Shaft in Africa, after all, is late in the series of 1970s campy sex-and-adventure Blaxploitation films. Huey’s invocation of the hyper-blackness represented in the Blaxploitation genre of film is a spoof of them—he is concerned not with black authenticity but with cultural figurations of blackness. Race, for McGruder, 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  Barack Obama, when he notes, “We all share the common experiences of being Black in America today—we do not all share a common history.” In such scenes, The Boondocks replaces mere optic confirmation of race with black cultural performance and historical citation as more useful markers of racial identity. His coherent sense of “Black” is historically informed, historically evolving, and historically heterogeneous in both community composition and cultural practice.

Michele Elam, The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2011), 69-70.

The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium [Ibrahim Review]

Modern Language Quarterly
Volume 74, Number 4, December 2013
page 566
DOI: 10.1215/00267929-2153679

Habiba Ibrahim, Associate Professor of English
University of Washington

The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium. By Elam Michele. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. viii + 277 pp.

Read or purchase the review here.

Cuba’s mixed-race population grows

Fox News Latino
2013-11-08

EFE News Service

The number of mixed-race people in Cuba continues to increase as the ranks of those identifying themselves as white or black declines, according to the results of the 2012 Census released Friday.

The proportion of mixed-race people grew from 24.9 percent in 2002 to 26.6 percent last year, the ONEI statistics agency said in an advance summary of the study.

In the same period of time, the population identifying itself as white dropped from some 65 percent to 64.1 percent, while blacks fell from 10.1 percent to 9.3 percent…

Read the entire article here.

How Diversity Will Alter Black History

The Root
2013-11-06

Lynette Holloway

A changing population will help shed more light on America’s multiracial past.

(The Root)—This is part 3 of a three-part series. To see the previous stories, here and here.

Time was, the social construct of the one-drop rule made United States history either black or white. The rule emerged from the South as a way to facilitate slavery and implement Jim Crow segregation. But while the courts and the civil rights movement have dismantled legal segregation, vestiges of the one-drop rule still linger.

But now, 7 million Americans self-identify as multiracial, quickly changing the meaning of who is black, white, Asian, Hispanic or other. For some, it raises questions about how history is perceived by future generations, black history specifically. Will there still be a need for Black History Month?

“We’ve been biracial or a multiracial country since the 17th century,” Bernard W. Kinsey told The Root. He and his wife, Shirley, are touring their Kinsey Collection, a national museum exhibit of African-American art and history dating back to the 1600s.

“America is the only country in the world where having one drop of black blood still makes you black,” Kinsey continued. “We operate on this notion of color as a basis of identity in America. I’ve been to 94 countries, and no other country operates quite like America does with this notion of color.”

Douglas A. Blackmon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II, told The Root that a multiracial America will only bring to the surface what has been hidden for centuries.

“All American history has always been multiracial, at least certainly since the early 1600s,” Blackmon told The Root. “It’s not a question of whether there has been a multiracial history, but whether it’s been acknowledged or specifically understood…

Read the entire article here.