Mixed: Race cannot be invisible

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

Otis Houston: You agree that it’s important for people to see a black family in the White House, if only to demonstrate that it’s possible. Is it also important for black children to be able to see people who look like them on television, or in movies, or even in television commercials? Is there an importance in people, whatever their background, seeing folks who superficially resemble them included in mainstream media?

Thomas Chatterton Williams: Yeah, there probably is. I’m sure that there is. But one thing that often gets lost in a lot of these debates is that black people have only ever been around 12 percent of the population. So it doesn’t really bother me or my sense of myself if I don’t always see myself. Also — getting back to my own obtuseness or naïveté — I saw myself in Crime and Punishment in a way that I did with very few novels in which the protagonist resembled me and my American contemporary social identity. I saw myself in The Brothers Karamazov. I saw myself in the novels of Roberto Bolaño, and in Borges’s Ficciones set in Buenos Aires. The self is really something that I don’t think can be boiled down to physical appearance, necessarily, or to gender, to epoch, to time or era, to language. The notion that to see myself is to see a mixed race, heterosexual, endomorphic contemporary, I think really reduces what the self is.

I never saw myself more clearly than in the novels of Dostoyevsky when I was in college. No one has ever spoken more to my sense of myself. And I can see myself in Batman. I relate to Bruce Wayne more than I do to the Black Panther, if we have to go into comic books. I don’t want to be glib about it — I understand why a young boy or young girl needing some self-esteem, a young girl seeing Wonder Woman … I get it. But I think we really should not go too far with it, or we risk restricting the self too severely. The self is a multitudinous thing, right?

Otis Houston, “The Singular Power of Writing: A Conversation with Thomas Chatterton Williams,” Los Angeles Review of Books, April 12, 2019. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-singular-power-of-writing-a-conversation-with-thomas-chatterton-williams.

Mixed: Race cannot be invisible

Mixed: Race cannot be invisible

The Daily of the University of Washington
2012-10-27

Hayat Norimine

For most of my life, I was opposed to the concept of “diversity.” Half-Japanese, half-Syrian, I was the definition of racially diverse, but I also loathed being labeled.

I thought diversity was difficult to define. I thought race alone was never a good indication of someone’s personal experiences.

I was afraid of what my race meant. And of all the superpowers that I could wish for, invisibility was always my choice — not just for me, but for the world. Colorblindness seemed like the opposite of racism to me: Ignore race and move beyond seeing race as essential. To be completely free from judging eyes is something I would have wished on everyone growing up. To be both colorblind and color-free…

…We don’t live in a post-racial world. Luckily, we live in a world after Martin Luther King Jr. We live in a country in which “diversity” is no longer used as slander and is actually seen as a positive attribute. But even in Brazil — arguably the most diverse country in the world — where there are up to 500 racial categorizations, there is still discrimination. There is still historical oppression…

Read the article here.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 26th, 2014 at 01:27Z and is filed under Articles, Asian Diaspora, Autobiography, Media Archive, United States. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Mixed Race Studies

Mixed: Race cannot be invisible

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