&#8230;there are whole blocks and rows of houses with ‘every tenement occupied by families the head of each of which is, the one black and the other white!’

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

The presence of a biracial race would certainly disrupt popular ideas about race, but as scholars supporting biracial identity root it in biological notions of race “mixture,” it seems unlikely that such a disruption would result in the end of racial classifications. Work on race in the Caribbean and Latin America shows that a racially mixed identity is entirely consistent with a racialized social system. Moreover, recent work interrogating-color blindness has shown that this is the current dominant racial ideology, suggesting that a color-blind society as a goal is more likely to ensure the persistence of racism than its decline. I therefore find especially troubling the claims by Naomi Zack, G. Reginald Daniel, Kathleen Odell Korgen, Paul R. Spickard, Maria P. P. Root, and others discussed below, that the biracial project represents a progressive social movement.” In my view, based both on the popular push for such a reclassification and the scholarship discussed here, this project is less concerned with ending racism than with responding to the racialization of all people of African descent in the United States as black.

Minkah Makalani, “Race, Theory, and Scholarship in the Biracial Project,” in Race Struggles edited by Theodore Koditschek, Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, and Helen A. Neville Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 139-140.

…there are whole blocks and rows of houses with ‘every tenement occupied by families the head of each of which is, the one black and the other white!’

Marriage and cohabitation have become so common in New York and Boston as scarcely to attract attention, except as the astounding fact occasionally breaks upon one, that there are whole blocks and rows of houses with ‘every tenement occupied by families the head of each of which is, the one black and the other white!’

“Amalgamation, North and South,” Sacramento Daily Union, Volume 24, Number 3619 (November 3, 1862). (Source: California Digital Newspaper Collection, http://cdnc.ucr.edu/cdnc/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&cl=search&d=SDU18621103.2.13&srpos=4.)

Tags: Boston, California Digital Newspaper Collection, Massachusetts, New York, New York City, Sacramento Daily Union

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 22nd, 2016 at 21:29Z 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.

Mixed Race Studies

…there are whole blocks and rows of houses with ‘every tenement occupied by families the head of each of which is, the one black and the other white!’

Pages

Categories

Calendar of Posts

Links

Meta