The revisionist celebration of a mixed-race identity negates and eclipses a long history of white men crossing the color line to engage in sex with Black women, usually without their consent… |
The revisionist celebration of a mixed-race identity negates and eclipses a long history of white men crossing the color line to engage in sex with Black women, usually without their consent. It has rendered invisible violations of Black women while critiquing the strategic efficacy of privileging Black political identities. Although questions of appearance, performance and class require a separate analysis of diverse and divisive perceptions and conceptions of Blackness, the campaign for a multiracial category obscures the fact that Black/African-Americans is already a multiracial category. Legal scholar Patricia Williams skillfully encapsulates this sentiment when she writes, “what troubles me is the degree to which few people in the world, and most particularly in the United States, are anything but multiracial, to say nothing of biracial. The use of the term seems to privilege to offspring of mixed marriages as those ‘between’ races without doing much to enhance to social status of all of us mixed-up products of illegitimacies of the not so distance past.”
Katya Gibel Azoulay [Katya Gibel Mevorach], “Jewish After Mount Sinai: Jews, Blacks and the (Multi) racial Category,” Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal, Volume 9, Number 1 (Summer 2001): 31-45.
Tags: Katya Gibel Azoulay, Katya Gibel Mevorach