Irish and ‘brown’ – Mixed ‘race’ Irish women’s identity and the problem of belonging |
Irish and ‘brown’ – Mixed ‘race’ Irish women’s identity and the problem of belonging
Women’s Movement: Migrant Women Transforming Ireland
Selection of papers from a conference held in
Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
2003-03-20 through 2003-03-21
pages 86-90
Angeline Morrison
Falmouth College of Arts
People are beginning to talk about the ‘invisibility’ of Whiteness. I am referring in particular to Richard Dyer’s project to ‘make Whiteness strange’, to hold it up for inspection and to question the tacit association of ‘Whiteness’ with ‘the human condition’ (Dyer 1997) I want to talk about another kind of Whiteness that has almost total invisibility—this is the Whiteness of the Mixed Race subject. I use the term ‘Mixed Race’ mindfully, aware that the term is contested and that some find its reference to the unscientific non-sense of ‘Race’ offensive (Harker 2000). For now, I want to define ‘Mixed Race’ people as the offspring of one White and one non-White parent. Such people have, inscribed on their bodies, evidence of migration somewhere along the line. Such people have, also, traditionally had problems at the tricky task of belonging. Although visually combining a phenotypic mixture of both White and Black features, the Mixed Race subject in a White, racialised society has, overwhelmingly, tended to be read by that society as, simply, ‘Black’. I am interested in also considering the Whiteness of the Mixed Race subject, particularly since this is something that both Black and White racialised societies alike – and by ‘racialised’ I mean operating according to what Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe has referred to as the ‘popular folk concept’ of ‘race’–have tended to deny. (Ifekwunigwe 2001:42).
So, the Mixed Race subject as I define her here, inhabits Blackness and Whiteness equally–but in a racialised society, she inhabits Whiteness invisibly. Her whiteness is like a deep stratum; present and felt, but rendered invisible by society. Whilst scholars have written about the cultural or behavioural Whiteness of Mixed Race subjects, I am so far unaware of any work that specifically foregrounds or makes visible the actual, lived, and (usually) ignored Whiteness that the brown-skinned subject of Mixed Race may claim as a birthright, should she so desire…
Read the paper here.
Tags: Angeline Morrison, Ireland