Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

While Goldberg and Gilroy have alluded to mixed-race metaphors in their recent work, Lewis Gordon has written more extensively about the attempts to establish ‘critical’ mixed-race studies. Reflecting on the historical discrimination and colourism in an anti-black world, Gordon has argued that it is understandable – if not morally justifiable – for working-class individuals and darker-skinned individuals to be distrustful of middle-class individuals and lighter-skinned individuals who claim to be progressive. Gordon’s use of slime to describe the aims of a wide variety of mixed-race activists and ‘sensitive’ scholars – who talk politely about racial transcendence while denying the facticity of their privileged position in an anti-black world – is a particularly interesting term since it evokes animalistic behaviour, infantile play, salesmen pitching new, hip commodities for a polyethnic culture. It also offers a transracial, transdisciplinary and transnational engagement with Francophone theory. Aside from adapting Fanon’s critique of European man, Gordon’s analysis of multiracial celebration draws on Sartre’s ontology of slime (a sticky, viscoelastic material that resists shear flow and strain linearly with time when a stress is applied,) and reminds us of Barthes’s famous description of neither-norism (a ‘mythological figure which consists in stating two opposites and balancing the one by the other so as to reject them both… It is on the whole a bourgeois figure, for it relates to a modern form of liberalism… one flees from intolerable reality … one no longer needs to choose, but only to endorse.’)

Daniel McNeil, “‘Mixture is a Neoliberal Good’: Mixed-Race Metaphors and Post-Racial Masks,” Darkmatter, Volume 9, Issue 1, (Post-Racial Imaginaries), July 2, 2012. http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2012/07/02/mixture-is-a-neoliberal-good-mixed-race-metaphors-and-post-racial-masks/

The Law Could Make You Rich

Posted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, History, Media Archive, United States on 2013-06-17 20:49Z by Steven

The Law Could Make You Rich

Common-Place
A Common Place, An Uncommon Voice
Extra Issue: Volume 13, Number 3.5 (June 2013)

Jared Hardesty
Department of History
Boston College

Jared Hardesty is a PhD candidate in history at Boston College and is currently writing a dissertation on slavery, freedom, and unfreedom in eighteenth-century Boston

Julie Winch, The Clamorgans: One Family’s History of Race in America. New York: Hill & Wang, 2011. 432 pp.

Governor Riggins, a leader of Boston’s nineteenth-century black community, once publicly admonished a fellow person of color, William Patterson, and took the opportunity to offer a lesson to the community at large. Patterson had purchased unlicensed liquor for some fellow African Americans, and the authorities in Boston caught him red-handed. In the midst of dressing Patterson down, Riggins expressed the hope that the “law will make you smart.” His proclamation to his fellow Afro-Bostonians—the law could be a source of empowerment for African Americans—may have been lost on Patterson, but it was a message that blacks across the United States heard loud and clear. Half a continent away in St. Louis, Missouri, the mixed-race grandsons of Jacques Clamorgan geared up to file suit and lay claim to their grandfather’s extensive lands. For them, Riggins’s message carried special resonance and an additional caveat. For the Clamorgan men, the law not only made them smart, but could also make them rich…

Read the entire review here.

Tags: Common-Place, Jared Hardesty, Julie Winch, Missouri

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Mixed Race Studies

The Law Could Make You Rich

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