Mixed Race Studies

Germany’s history has established a unique context for biracial individuals. For one, foreigners that look different have a hard time being accepted as German citizens. While the most prominent political activists of the Afro-German movement were women, Afro-German men chose the venue of music to express their struggle for identity and acceptance. Their contribution to the Afro-German movement of the early 1990s emphasized German citizenship and a demand to be recognized as Germans (El-Tayeb, 2003). Afro-Germans do not enjoy the advantages of “uncontested national belonging that come with being white” (El-Tayeb, 2003, pg. 479). The Hip-Hop group Brother’s Keepers addressed this issue with their song “Fremd im Eigenen Land” (Stranger in your own country) (El-Tayeb, 2003). African Americans living in the United States do not typically struggle with this issue. Nationality of Americans is not defined by racial make up, but in national allegiance (Asante, 2005). As a consequence, Afro-Germans have a problem with “cultural location”: The dilemma they face because they are “born in Germany, are educated in Germany, and view themselves as German yet in the minds of their fellow citizens they are not truly German because they do not have pure German ancestry” (Asante, 2005)…

At the federal university in Brazil’s capital city, Brasília, a special committee was constituted in 2004 to evaluate the application file photographs of self-classified negros (read “blacks” or “Afro-Brazilians”) applying to the university via a new racial quota system. An anthropologist, a sociologist, a student representative, and three negro movement actors make up that committee, and their identities are kept sub secreto (Maio and Santos 2005). If the committee does not consider a candidate to be a negro or negra, then he or she is disqualified. The applicant can, however, appeal the decision and appear in person before the committee to contest his or her racial classification (Universidade de Brasília 2004). The State University of Mato Grosso do Sul has also adopted the use of photographs and a verification committee for a racial quota system (UEMS 2004). At that institution, the committee is made up of two university representatives and three negro movement actors (Corrêa 2003).

This unusual modus operandi highlights a period of instability in racial categories, associated with a novel phase in the political struggle for identity and inclusion by the Brazilian negro movement. Through a multifaceted process, but without disruptive protest or mass mobilizations, the movement has successfully pressured state actors to mandate negro inclusion in higher education and to encode that legislation with language emic to the movement. The label negro is not an official census term; the Brazilian state has for well over a century used a ternary, or three-category, format to represent the black-white color continuum that includes an intermediate or mixed-race category. In contrast, negro is part of a dichotomous racial scheme, counterposed to white, whose novelty in official contexts leads to the thorny issue of defining its boundaries. Nonetheless, some 30 Brazilian public universities have already adopted race-targeted policies (Ribeiro 2007).  Moreover, legislation is now before the national congress mandating that all federal universities adopt racial quotas…

Stanley R. Bailey. “Unmixing for Race Making in Brazil”, American Journal of Sociology. 2008, Volume 114, Number 3, pages 577–614.

The rape which you gentlemen have done against helpless black women in defiance of your own laws is written on the foreheads of millions of mulattoes, and in ineffable blood.

W. E. B. DuBois

…One wonders whether any of the interwar eugenists, anthropologists, or biologists, Cedric Dover excepted, could have foreseen that in the twenty-first century to be both ‘English’ and ‘mixed race’ is not a contradiction in terms. And ‘passing’ has nothing to do with it.

Lucy Bland. “British Eugenics and ‘Race Crossing’: a Study of an Interwar Investigation”, New Formations. 2007, Number 60, pages 66-78.

…Fleming’s use of the term ‘passing’ is also worthy of comment. Not only does it have the connotation of deceit and disguise, but it also implies that the offspring of mixed heritage could never be truly English, despite their birth in England and their English mothers. To cross racial boundaries (‘race crossing’) had two meanings: crossing the ‘colour line’ in terms of sexual relationships, and crossing races in the sense of being of mixed race. The white women who crossed the colour line and gave birth to mixed race children were not aliens as such, but liminally placed by virtue of their ‘unBritish’, ‘unpatriotic’ behaviour. Where the mothers were Irish, as some were (as Hodson noted) the mixed race children were even less likely to have been permitted the mantle of Englishness, for the Irish were not only ‘not English’, but frequently seen as ‘not white’ either. There was (and is) a hierarchy of whiteness, in which some people were/are white only some of the time, such as Irish, Latinos, and Jews. Fleming’s assumption that mixed race children were not, and implicitly could not, be English, sounds not dissimilar from the ‘one drop of black blood’ rule that was operating at this time in US Deep South. This ‘rule’ proclaimed that even a single black person in ones ancestry deemed one black. The system was a means of policing entry to the privileged category ‘white’. In the context of Britain in the interwar, the Eugenics Society was concerned with classifying and codifying those of mixed race in an attempt to reduce the threat to racial and national boundaries represented by their presence…

Lucy Bland. “British Eugenics and ‘Race Crossing’: a Study of an Interwar Investigation”, New Formations. 2007,  Number 60, pages 66-78.

Mixed-race women’s experiences cannot be separated from the history of race and gender politics and contemporary racial debates. The history of hybridity is one in which bodies of mixed-race people have been observed, theorized about, and used as evidence in racial power debates, but their individual experiences are often disregarded. Women of mixed heritage, mixed white and “of color,” are caught in these politically charged, race-based controversies. Given general heteronormative assumptions, as women, and thus as people who can potentially bear offspring and who are expected to assume primary responsibility for raising children in a patriarchal culture, mixed-race women occupy a particularly charged social position. No matter what path a mixed-race woman chooses, she can be perceived as a traitor to both whites and people of color—a traitor to either side of her family, a traitor to equity, a traitor to cultural preservation, and a traitor to cultural purity.

Silvia Cristina Bettez. “Mixed-Race Women and Epistemologies of Belonging”, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. 2010, Volume 31, Number 1, pages 142-165.

…The Korean word for a bi or multiracial person, despite the composition of their mixture, is honhyeol (in), which literally translates into impure blood. There has been a “pride” instilled in Koreans for their “ethnic homogeneity” which has resulted in “fear and distrust of outsiders” (The Economist, 2006). The connotation for Korea, which bases its national identity upon the notion of Koreans descending from one common ancestor and speaking one language, is that these offspring of interracial relationships are not Korean, because they have more than Korean blood coursing through their veins. It makes sense then that the oppositional identity of these “pure blooded” Koreans came about as a sort of resistance to the first Chinese invasion, then Japanese imperialism, and then finally Western imperialism in the form of American occupation after the Korean War. Korean nationalism was wrapped up in the idea of “consanguinity” to link “ethnic homogeneity” to a “profound sense of cultural distinctiveness and superiority.” (Kim, 2007) As these countries made their presence known, Korea began to rely on internal colonialism, which economically exploited and political excluded groups different from the dominant group, becoming a reminder there can be “colonial subjects – on the national soil.” (Gordon, 2006; Blauner 1972, p. 52) For many then, international marriages were “associated with the invasion of Korea by other countries” and were subsequently seen as “betrayals of nationalism” where the children resulting from those unions became physical reminders of that betrayal (Lee). Kim Sok-soo believes that the coupling of nationalism with ethnic homogeneity ultimately has became a “useful tool for the South Korean government when the country was embroiled in ideological turmoil. It was used as an effective tool to make its people obedient and easy to govern” (Park, 2006). The way the bodies of these bi and multiracial Koreans are, in both social and political realms, recognized, regulated, and ultimately utilized through relationships maintained by various institutions of the state is essential to a particular form of governmentality…

Washington, Myra. “More than a Metaphor: Blood as Boundary for Korean Biracial Identity” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the NCA 95th Annual Convention, Chicago Hilton & Towers, Chicago, IL, Nov 11, 2009 Online <PDF>. 2010-08-09 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p368501_index.html>

If blackness in America has been defined broadly enough to claim me as one of its own, that still leaves the question of why I claim my blackness. I could call myself mixed race or even Latina/Hispanic.  I certainly recognize that I am multi-racial, but I don’t feel a common bond with mixed people simply because we have parents of different racial backgrounds. Equally, I’ve always been unnerved by the categories Latino and Hispanic to describe people from the Spanish Caribbean and parts of Latin America that are heavily populated by people of African descent precisely because they erase/e-race our ties to Africa. The categories Black and Latino/Hispanic are often defined as mutually exclusive on identification forms in the U.S., such that one is instructed to check “Black” provided they are “not of Hispanic origin” and to check “Hispanic – regardless of race”!  Since when has anything in America ever been regardless of race? As history has too often demonstrated this is a calculated attempt to create divisions between black people based on language and country of origin.

Ray, Carina. “Why Do You Call Yourself Black And African?” The Zeleza Post (July 4, 2009), http://www.zeleza.com/blogging/global-affairs/why-do-you-call-yourself-black-and-african.

What is particularly interesting about the high percentage of multiracial children is that children do not fill out census forms. Children are being identified as multiracial by their parents, or by the parent who fills out the census form as the head of the household. This tends to corroborate the claim that the multiracial movement has been fueled by parents of multiracial children. But it also underlines the instability of this category, not to mention the other categories as well. We do not know, for example, if these children will continue to identify as multiracial when it is their turn to fill out the census form. Lee suggests that the “number of people who identify with more than one race is likely to increase as interracial marriages increase.”  This may be so, but we also know that many people who could report themselves as multiracial choose not to. We also know that how people report their identity depends on the prevailing discourse of race and the options available at any given time. Current multiracial children, and multiracial adults for that matter, may in the future decide not to identity themselves as multiracial. They may decide to identify with a single minority race, or they may decide to identify themselves as white. When these multiracial children are grown, the categories will undoubtedly have changed, just as they have every year since 1790, and with them, the debate about race and identity. What is clear is that “the parameters of self-definition have never been open-ended, for the state has always furnished the range of available, credible, and reliable-that is, of licensed and so permissible-categories in which self-definition could occur.”

Naomi Mezey. “Erasure and Recognition: The Census, Race and the National Imagination”, Northwestern University Law Review. 2003, Number 97, Number 4, pages 1701-1768.

While “racial profiling” in medicine has generated significant discussion in medical and bioethics circles, it has thus far gained relatively little attention in legal literature. This Article aims to develop the discourse concerning this important topic. It argues that “race-based” medicine is an inappropriate and perilous approach. The argument is rooted partly in the fact that the concept of “race” is elusive and has no reliable definition in medical science, the social sciences, and the law.  Does “race” mean color, national origin, continent of origin, culture, or something else? What about the millions of Americans who are of mixed ancestral origins—to what “race” do they belong? To the extent that “race” means “color” in colloquial parlance, should physicians decide what testing to conduct or treatment to provide based simply on their visual judgment of the patient’s skin tone? “Race,” consequently, does not constitute a valid and sensible foundation for research or therapeutic decision-making.

Sharona Hoffman. “‘Racially-Tailored’ Medicine Unraveled”, American University Law Review. 2005, Volume 55, Number 2, pages 395-452.