Race is a power relationship; racial categories are not about interesting cultural or physical differences, but about putting other people into groups in order to dominate, exploit and attack them.

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

“I was born in the Dominican Republic,” he said. “My work, among many of the things that it wrestles with, wrestles with the kind of, the often invisible and vigorously disavowed, long shadow of enslavement. I’m very much interested in how people like me, who are part of the African Diasporic community, and how do we deal with the consequences of the fallout from the calamity that we call slavery. And most specifically, I’m kind of interested in how do bodies like mine that were raped into existence – our community doesn’t look the way it looks without systematic rape – and so how do communities like ours, with this long history of sexual violence and sexual predation, how do we as a consequence of that wrestle with the possibility of intimacy. In other words, where does love reside in bodies that spent centuries being told that they could not partake in love?” —Junot Diaz (University of Missouri, January 22, 2018)

Sara Shahriari, Abby Ivory-Ganja & Elena Rivera, “Intersection – Author Junot Díaz on Immigration, Empire and White Supremacy,” KBIA 91.3 FM, Columbia, Missouri, February 6, 2018. http://kbia.org/post/intersection-author-junot-d-az-immigration-empire-and-white-supremacy.

Race is a power relationship; racial categories are not about interesting cultural or physical differences, but about putting other people into groups in order to dominate, exploit and attack them.

To really grasp race, we must accept a double paradox. The first one is a truism of antiracist educators: we can see race, but it’s not real. The second is stranger: race has real consequences, but we can’t see it with the naked eye. Race is a power relationship; racial categories are not about interesting cultural or physical differences, but about putting other people into groups in order to dominate, exploit and attack them. Fundamentally, race makes power visible by assigning it to physical bodies. The evidence of race right before our eyes is not a visual trace of a physical reality, but a by-product of social perceptions, in which we are trained to see certain features as salient or significant. Race does not exist as a matter of biological fact, but only as a consequence of a process of racialisation.

Gregory Smithsimon, “How to see race,” Aeon, March 26, 2018. https://aeon.co/essays/race-is-not-real-what-you-see-is-a-power-relationship-made-flesh.

Tags: Aeon, Gregory C. Smithsimon, Gregory Smithsimon

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Mixed Race Studies

Race is a power relationship; racial categories are not about interesting cultural or physical differences, but about putting other people into groups in order to dominate, exploit and attack them.

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