Reflection: How Multiracial Lives Matter 50 Years After Loving

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

If we’re going to play race games let’s do it scientifically. For example, if you’re black that’s meaningless unless you specify Bantu, Hutu/Tutsi, San, or any number of other lineages within Africa. Africa has the biggest human variety in the world. Obama looks totally different from the rest of the Black Caucus; it’s because he is. He belongs to a different biological lineage. He’s not a Bantu. But most American blacks are mixed-race, of course, like Obama himself.

Likewise, if you’re pure Irish, your race is Gaelic. If you’re Irish-English, you’re Gaelic-Caucasian or something close to that. If you look blond, you’re likely to be a Northern European. If you’re Jewish but you look like a Russian, you are Semitic-Nordic-Slavic. If you’re Jewish and you look like a Spaniard, you’re Semitic-Hispanic. If you’re Jewish from Yemen, you’re probably Semitic-Arabic. If you’re a pure cohen, you’re Semitic back some 3,000 years, especially if you have heritable diseases like Tay-Sachs. But of course going earlier than that, there are plenty of generations back to the human population bottleneck in North Africa, where humans were reduced to some 5,000 individuals. That’s the shared founding population for all of us. (And everybody was Black at that time.).

James Lewis, “How to really be accurate on ‘race’ on the Census,” The American Thinker, (March 17, 2010) http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/03/how_to_really_be_accurate_on_r.html.

Reflection: How Multiracial Lives Matter 50 Years After Loving

Reflection: How Multiracial Lives Matter 50 Years After Loving

Creighton Law Review
Volume 50, Number 3 (2017)
pages 718-724

Lauren Sudeall Lucas, Associate Professor of Law
Georgia State University

Black Lives Matter. All Lives Matter. These two statements are both true, but connote very different sentiments in our current political reality. To further complicate matters, in this short reflection piece, I query how multiracial lives matter in the context of this heated social and political discussion about race. As a multiracial person committed to racial justice and sympathetic both to those pushing for recognition of multiracial identity and to those who worry such recognition may undermine larger movements, these are questions I have long grappled with both professionally and personally. Of course, multiracial lives matter—but do they constitute a sub-agenda of the Black Lives Matter movement, or is there an independent agenda the moniker “Multiracial Lives Matter” might represent? If the latter, is there a danger that such an agenda might be co-opted by other forces and used to further unintended purposes, such as the advancement of colorblindness? To the extent that agenda demands unique recognition of multiracial identity, how can it co-exist with broader identity-based racial justice movements?…

Read the entire article here.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 10th, 2017 at 23:06Z and is filed under Articles, Law, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, 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

Reflection: How Multiracial Lives Matter 50 Years After Loving

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