Nature and the "Mongrel"

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

My choice, if you can call it that, to identify as black is much different from that of, say, my father or even my own sister, whose skin is at least three shades darker than mine. The eagerness with which people gravitate toward me is not shown to many of the other black people I know. These experiences led me to suspect that the breathless “postracial” commentary that attached itself to our current president had as much to do with the fact that he is biracial as with the fact that he is black. His blood relationship to whiteness and its attendant privileges serve as a chaser to the difficult-to-swallow prospect that a black man might achieve ownership of the Oval Office.

Anna Holmes, “America’s ‘Postracial’ Fantasy,” The New York Times Magazine, June 30, 2015. page MM13. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/05/magazine/americas-postracial-fantasy.html.

Nature and the “Mongrel”

Nature prevents the development of the mongrel; in the few cases in which nature has for the time being successfully been outraged and a mongrel produced, nature degrades that mongrel mercilessly and in time stamps it out.

Nature suffers no mongrel to live.

Alfred P. Shultz. Race or mongrel: a brief history of the rise and fall of the ancient races of earth: a theory that the fall of nations is due to intermarriage with alien stocks: a demonstration that a nation’s strength is due to racial purity: a prophecy that America will sink to early decay unless immigration is rigorously restricted. (Boston: L. C. Page & Company, 1908), 4.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 25th, 2011 at 04:25Z and is filed under Excerpts/Quotes. 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

Nature and the “Mongrel”

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