My self-designation: Black with Access to Residual White Privilege (BWATRWP).

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

As my critical contemplative response tempered my emotional one, I saw that the antiblack bias at the core of many multiracial organizations had shaped the larger discourse of mixedness and multiracial identity. While many mixed individuals and organizations are engaged and invested in social justice, discussions about mixed identity the realm of popular culture and mass media tend to frame the presence of black ancestry as a hindrance. While I believe that there is a definite mixed experience, I think that care must be taken not to cleave that experience from the broader historical continuum of how race has been constructed and reconstructed in America and that any analysis of race/identity must begin with defining whiteness and how the construction of whiteness has directly impacted the construction of all other identities in this country. As parents of black/white mixed kids and black/nonwhite mixed kids, we have to address the ways in which we’ve all internalized messages of antiblack bias and how that affects both the identity choices we make for our children and the ones we want them to make for themselves. For those outside the realm of the black/white/black/nonwhite mix, it’s still important to consider how antiblack bias relates to your child’s particular identity construction and how the historical black/white mixed binary informs how all mixed/multiracial identities are understood in our society.

Michelle Clark-McCrary, “Coming Clean About Blackness, Mixed Race Identity and the Multiracial Movement,” Is That Your Child? Thought in Full Color, (December 11, 2012). http://www.isthatyourchild.com/2012/12/coming-clean-about-blackness-mixed-race.html.

My self-designation: Black with Access to Residual White Privilege (BWATRWP).

…I don’t believe multi-racial makes sense by my understanding of race. Race is socially constructed and “multi-racial” seems to assume that race is biological: if parents are of different then the kid is “mixed”. But that is not how race works. Race is constructed through law, history, culture, practice, custom, etc.

“Black” does not designate having two parents who are both “un-mixed” descendants of Africa and African diaspora. “Black” [is] derived from society. There is no “mixed race” history, institutions, cultural practices. There are mixed race [people] who are part of all these, but no group history. I believe all people can self-identify themselves in ways that feel comfortable and honest, but the social/political part is bigger. I have a white mother and black father, but this doesn’t make me mixed race. Race is not biology. In USA this combo makes me black.

My self-designation: Black with Access to Residual White Privilege (BWATRWP)…

Melissa Harris-Lacewell

Eddings, Jeff, “Princeton Professor tweets about her views on mixed-race identity,” Mixed Child: The Pulse of the Mixed Community, (July 27, 2009). http://www.mixedchild.com/NEWS/August2009/Princeton_Professor.htm or http://coleridgehead.blogspot.com/2009/07/melissa-harris-lacewell-on-race.html.

Tags: BWATRWP, Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Melissa Harris-Perry

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Mixed Race Studies

My self-designation: Black with Access to Residual White Privilege (BWATRWP).

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