There are no three primary races, no three major groups.

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

…Onwurah’s ending is not, however, Utopian; neither her own objectification and labeling by discourse nor her mother’s stigmatization is miraculously resolved. Onwurah’s comment on “a world that sees only in black and white” is both fitting and predictive, since viewers and critics continue to lean towards that very essentialism (if existing scholarship on the film is any indication). But on a fundamental level, Onwurah’s The Body Beautiful remains an unusual example of a film directed by a woman of white-black racial heritage, which centralizes the consciousness of the mixed-race identity. The film delivers a rare message by encouraging viewers to challenge ethnic absolutism and essentialist codes of gender. To borrow an appropriate quotation from Françoise Lionnet, The Body Beautiful effectively “subverts] all binary modes of thought by privileging (more or less explicitly) the intermediary spaces where boundaries become effaced and Manichean categories collapse into each other.” And it is precisely where binaries and essentialist codes of identity are subverted that the process of identification becomes constructive, rather than a site for problematic exclusion, inclusion, and marginalization.

Diana Adesola Mafe. “Misplaced Bodies: Probing Racial and Gender Signifiers in Ngozi Onwurah’s The Body Beautiful.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. 2008, Volume 29, Number 1, pages 37-50.

There are no three primary races, no three major groups.

There are no three primary races, no three major groups. The idea of three primary races stems from nineteenth-century typology; it is totally misleading to put the black-skinned people of the world together-to put the Australian in the same grouping with the inhabitants of Africa. And there are certainly at least three independent origins of the small, dark people, the Pygmies, and probably more than that. There is no single Pygmy race.

S. L. Washburn, “The Study of Race,” American Anthropologist, Volume 65, Issue 3 (June 1963): 521-531. https://dx.doi.org/10.1525/aa.1963.65.3.02a00010

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Mixed Race Studies

There are no three primary races, no three major groups.

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