Sometimes I get comments that just beg to have a response, mainly because they include many of the same myths about race that are repeated over and over again. This is my reponse to a comment left over at Rachel’s Tavern.
In one of my earlier posts on inappropriate comments directed at interracial relationships a commenter, Stu, gave a response that I wanted to respond to. Lyonside gave a very long and eloquent response, which you can read here. I was at the conference when this was posted, but I wanted to give an long response to several statements Stu made.
Let me start with the following quote:
Why is no one worried about the mixed cultural identity/confusion of the child in one of these relationships? I hear talk that cultures can co-exist but the fact is they don’t really. They compete with one another until one eventually wins out. If that doesn’t happen, the child will no doubt struggle with identity issues throughout his/her life and never truly belong to either. That’s sadly the way it is with culture. Say a black person and a white person marry one another and have a kid. Well, chances are that kid will always be looked upon by both families as “different” and perhaps even “not really one of them” because of his genetics. The families might not even outwardly know they are thinking this way, it’s just an innate human behavior to put importance in blood-lines and pedigree.
There are no studies that I am aware of that indicate that mental health problems are greater in multiracial people than any of the rest of the population. The notion that a multiracial person is somehow confused or troubled extends well into American history, and it is called the tragic mulatto myth. This myth assumes that biracial or multiracial people are confused, lost souls who are accepted by no one. From what I have seen, this is often a form of projection. Projection occurs when people see their own insecurities or discomfort in others, so in the case of multiracial people, many people who come from monoracial backgrounds are uncomfortable with interracial relationships and multiracial people, so they assume that because they are uncomfortable that the mixed race person must also be uncomfortable. Moreover, mixed race people have long been part of American culture, and in the case of Black/White mixed race people, they were traditionally considered Black. In spite of the mixed race background, this group was considered Black and was accepted in the Black community. This is an important point because mixed race people have traditionally been accepted in the African American community. The African American community is a mixed race and mixed cultural group (and the vast majority of African Americans have European and/or American Indian backgrounds). So traditionally, it was the Euro-American whites who rejected mixed race people. This challenges the tragic mulatto image because it undermines the idea that there is no community that has accepted mixed race people. This is not to say that there were not individual whites who accepted mixed race people and individuals blacks who rejected mixed race people.
The second point is more a general point about sociology–race and culture are not the same. They are two different concepts. Culture is a synonym for a “society.” Cultures generally have similar norms, values, beliefs, language, and material items. Of course, most modern societies have some cultural mixing, but there is generally a dominant culture and some subcultures. Race refers to people who are grouped together based on subjectively, selected phenotypical (physical) characteristics. Race is generally about the appearance of people whereas culture is more about their beliefs and practices. If I marry a Polish guy, we would have a cross cultural marriage, and assuming he is white we would have a same race marriage. If I marry an African American man, we would have an interracial marriage, but I wouldn’t consider it to be cross cultural. What is fascinating about the United States is that even though people frame their discussions of interracial marriage in terms of “culture,” what really bothers them is race. Think about the example above. I suspect that most people would have more trouble with me marrying the Black man who comes from the same culture than they would the Polish man who comes from a different culture. I do think there are some subcultural differences between African Americans and European Americans here in the US, but they are probably less than those between myself and people in many European countries. Thus, I think the notion that racial differences=cultural differences needs to be framed in a different way. To the extent that there are subcultural differences between racial groups here in the US, this is largely the result of segregation, and in many cases cultural differences within racial categories are greater than those across racial categories. Can there be conflicts when people cross cultural lines, sure, but we should not limit our critique of this to when people cross racial lines.
Last, point. In my own research most relatives of interracial couples actually became more accepting when their relatives had children. I think the idea that families see biracial children as genetically different defies logic. No matter how a child is defined racially they still have half of their genes from each biological parent, which is no different than couples where people are from the same race. There is no unique genetic pattern that occurs when people have mixed race children, genetics works the same not matter the race(s) of the parents.
I don’t have much to add about biological notions of race. I think Lyonside did an excellent job challenging the idea of biological races. However, I do want to challenge this statement:
There is, because of all this, much tention in the IR nuclear family and it comes at a critically impressionable time in the child’s life. This problem of inner struggle for acceptance of family and culture is only solved a few ways in the big picture…
1. One world/large regional race (such that race wouldn’t be an issue)
2. A replacing of traditional cultures ( because trad. cultures don’t really fit together in the long run)
3. TRUE acceptance by all members of the family (highly unlikely)
I have not seen any studies that directly look at the amount of conflict in interracial families, so I think this is an empirical question that is not validated by any data that I am aware of. I have seen a study that indicates that IRs are more likely to end in divorce, but I think rather than putting this on the couple. We need to think about the social stigma that many people put on interracial relationships–not so much the couple themselves, but the social reaction to the couple. That is where the real problem is. Rather than viewing mixed race people or interracial couples as the problem we need to think of racism and racist reactions to (and from) the couple as the real problem.
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Rachel,
Any chance you can continue this in more detail? I pick up on what you’re saying vis a vis “culture” and “race” not being always synonomous. But are you saying there’s no link? I hear/read a lot about “Black culture” and “White culture,” for example, and have seen those terms used by members of various races. Perhaps your point is that those definitions are so broad as to be meaningless…?
Yes, I think that the terms “black culture” and “white culture” are way too broad and they also contribute to the conflation of race and culture. If we want to talk about European culture or African culture, I suppose that is a little better, but it is still problematic because of the variations within these geogrpahic regions.
Sometimes people are using the term Black as a synonym for African American, and I would agree that African Americans are a subculture here in the US. But African American culture, Yoruba culture, Jamaican culture, etc are all different. French culture, Polish culture, Irish culture, and Euro-American culture are also different.
Different liberal arts define “culture” differently. However, I have never seen society and culture equated before, as you have it here. Culture is NOT a synonym for society.
Plunky, do you care to elaborate. Here is the definition of culture in from an intro. to sociology textbook-‘”all that human beings learn to do, to use, to produce, to know, and to believe as they grow to maturity and live out their lives in the social groups to which they belong.” (Tischler 2005)
While I do not think society is a perfect synonym, I think it is the closest term we have that the general public uses.
Would you care to elaborate on how you use the term?
I have a feeling that a lot of people who say “culture” or (less often) “race” actually mean class, that is socioeconomic status. I used to work with a woman who seriously believed that all African-Americans were lazy no-good drug-dealing welfare bums who had 5 kids by the age of 20. When I pointed out to her that the African-Americans who worked in another office of the same company and with whom we dealt quite often were demonstrably none of these things, she said “well, I meant in the inner city” — but I think the people we actually knew were invisible to her or didn’t count in her mind as African-American because they didn’t fit her stereotype.
I suspect that a lot of people who know they’re not supposed to be so blatant about all this (this woman had immigrated from Europe in her early 20s and had not absorbed PC language and thought patterns) when they say “black culture” really mean “lazy no-good drug-dealing welfare-bum bling-flashing pimps and whores.” African-Americans who are culturally very similar don’t count as representatives of “black culture,” of the feared alien species.
I got a little tangled up there; my apologies. Most poor people demonstrably have none of the stereotypical characteristics I listed either. I should have said that I think a lot of people who say “black culture” have a particular stereotype in mind, which includes poverty as well as all of those other characteristics.
It’s all bullshit. I’m half Irish, half Italian, and while that’s not considered any kind of big deal now, it was when my parents got married (in east coast cities, there was a huge amount of animosity between the Italian and Irish populations. The result? Lots and lots of Shamwops like myself.) Alot of people on both sides weren’t happy about the arrangement. But–they got over it. There was also a huge difference, culturally, between the two sides- but I never thought anything of it- not until I was older anyway, and then I thought it was awesome that I got to experience both.
(PS- Some other Irish/Italian friends and I invented the word “Shamwop” ourselves, it’s toungue in cheek and non-derrogatory.)
I largely agree with you–let that be clear from the beginning. That said, I do have a question.
Is that actually the case in your experience? Mine (as a school teacher) was that skin-color-related taunts and boasting were one of my biggest discipline problems. (I am not going to mention any specific taunts unless asked).
I think it’s fascinating that he talks about “identity issues” and internal struggle for the multiracial child, then goes on to the example where other people don’t accept the child, but apparently the cause for the struggle is the child’s multiracialness, rather than people’s response to it. The leap there is astounding. And makes me really angry, to be honest. Why are my parents responsible for other people being asshats to me? Why aren’t those other people responsible for their asshattery?
The other thing that fascinates me is that in his ‘3 solutions’, he labels the option that involves people accepting each other as “highly unlikely”, but makes no such mention of likelihood for option 1, which is the fuzzy notion of “one world/large regional race”. I know he says that it wouldn’t be a good idea, but the fact that he seems to automatically think the complete dissolution of race (How exactly would this occur? Which race would be adopted as the standard? What would we do with people who don’t fit?) is more likely than people accepting eachother. That’s some lack of faith in humanity, right there. And people think feminists and anti-racists hate on everyone?
SamChevre:
Do you/did you teach children /young teens? I wouldn’t use them as the best barometer of acceptance, if so. Nor would I, in general, assume that the things they say to each other, and the teasing, insults and so on regarding skin color were things that they would necessarily repeat at home. And certainly not at a family reunion or something, where (for any number of black families) skin tones range from white to purple black, with everything else in between, and facial features span African, European, Asian, Native American and so on.
I’m sure not every black person/family is accepting of multiracial (black-something else) children, although I have never personally met one who was not.
Rachel I think you have this all wrong here. Have you read any tragic mulatta tales? And being considered Black and being Accepted as Black are very different issues. And intraracial racism/classism in the Black community is something that is very prevalent even today, and that issue alone contradicts much of what you say.
While I think Stu was reaching in his analysis I think you’re reaching in the opposite direction in yours. This sounds way more intellectual theory than reality based.
The “one drop of blood” idea of Blackness in the United States means that the offspring of a union between a Black person and a White person will be seen as Black by most people, including (probably) the families of the parents, and perhaps this is what Rachel meant when she said that, traditionally, individuals of mixed race found more acceptance in the Black (she specified African American) community. Also, historically, Black people who faced more intraracial discrimination were those of dark skin color – I’m not sure what argument is being made by the commenters who refer to intraracial discrimination in terms of mixed race children. Certainly in my high school, the light brown and “high yellow” kids consistently won all the “Best Looking” and “Most beautiful eyes” superlatives. Also also (on preview), what Ariella said.
TJ said, “Have you read any tragic mulatta tales? And being considered Black and being Accepted as Black are very different issues. And intraracial racism/classism in the Black community is something that is very prevalent even today, and that issue alone contradicts much of what you say.”
I think it is important to make a distinction between accepted and celebration. Traditionally, biracial or multiracial people were considered black and were accepted into African American communities. Now there have a been a few places like New Orleans where mixed race people created their own subcultures, but in the vast majority of places here is the US mixed race people were raised within African American communities. This was not the case for whites, who never viewed multiracial people as part of the Euro-American community.
Now, I’m not saying that the light skin vs. dark skin problem has not existed for an extended period of time in African American communities. The tension between African Americans and multiracial activists is really very recent, and it has emerged because many African American leaders view the creation of a biracial category as a way to decrease the number Blacks and reject Blackness altogether. This view were not exist if the tradition of counting black/white multiracial people as black. People wouldn’t be making such arguments if biracial people were not viewed as part of the African American community.
Interestingly enough, its both the hard-racist and the strongly liberal people who are most adamant about classifying everyone with black ancestry about black. (Not to equate the two groups.)
Its the people like me who are ehh-whatever about many racial categorizations who really get yelled at :).
I wish I had time to read this more completely.
I do want to point out that culture is a synonym for society not only from the perspective of one of my majors – which happens to be anthropology, specifically concentrating on cultural, or as it is sometimes called social anthropology ,- but from the standpoint of the thesaurus.
The problem with using the term culture and race synonymously is that it is not at all synonymous.
One must choose a basic culture or society to belong to or be overwhelmed, but culture is a large concept, often broken down into small elements which are taken individually and called culture, when indeed they are not.
I have no idea about mixed race children being at greater risk for problems but I do know that the mixed race adults I know, and I know quite a few,( not all but I’d say seventy percent) do have “issues” which they deal with in regard to their acceptance into their family, their acceptance into a particular peer group at college, and several worry about of their future mate will have to be biracial in order for there not to be any tension between them in the future.
So, I’m not sure theory bears out reality. I’ve lived in a few different places in my life mainly here but Australia and Venezuela as well and it seems to me that that being of mixed race in any country has it’s issues based on that particular society and any sub culture within that society. Education may change that but it seems to be taking a particularly long time.
This is an interesting story I read which may or may not have anything to do with what you are trying to say but the way the author speaks of her mixed racial heritage is very similar to the way my friends also speak; friends from both the US, Europe, South America and Australia.
Black White and Jewish
The children of a bi-racial couple are often not identifiable as such as opposed to just regular mixed up coloring black people, outside of their families and those who know the parents. People sometimes are unsure if my daughter is black, asian or latino, but both of her parents are black. Ish. She has 3 kids… one has their dad’s coloring and features, very dark. The other has their mom’s coloring and features, looks just like her. And the third is somewhere in between.
The problems a bi-racial couple might face themselves are not (always) the problems the children will face, at least among black people for the most part. I do know a woman whose daughter married a black man and they have children. I’m sure she loves the children and would proclaim to the heavens that she wasn’t in the least bit racist, but she was absolutely enraged when the other set of grandparents told the children that they were black. She did not feel there was any reason for them to be black, and that they didn’t have to be black, and as far as she was concerned they were going to go to school, go to college, get good jobs, and they would never be black.
I have a feeling that to her, “black” means drug users and thugs and so on, as someone posted above. Anyway, it’s quite possible those children will grow up with issues, identity and otherwise, depending on how much influence she actually has with them, and contact they have with her. I don’t know how prevalent that sort of feeling is though.
I also think that sometimes a problem arises with people who self identify as bi or multi racial when it seems they are attempting to “escape” the black category, as mentioned above, but that has to do with all sorts of issues, including acceptability to white people, especially if you are a high achiever in some way (I mention that Tiger Woods is black in a group of white people and the almost immediate reply is that he is not, he is Calabasian (or whatever he calls himself).
A person who identifies as bi-racial is often more acceptable to white cultures than a person with identical heritage who identifies as black. Why, I am not sure, but there is so much not even that long ago history with ‘passing’ and all that, that it all just adds yet another layer to an already sort of complex way of viewing things.
Actually, from what I’ve seen it doesn’t matter what the other half is (acceptability wise), as long as one half is identified as not black. There is no assumption that the other half is white (or less than half, like with Woods).
Mind you, I am fairly old, so among younger people the dynamics might be very different.
Look if you look Negro, then u will be consiedered a Negro (famous black folks excluded, ie Tiger Woods). So u can self identify as bi-racial and that’s great but if u look BLACK then u will be treated as such. Period. Those who benefit from identifying as “biracial” r those who have ambiguous looks and can avoid the Black stigma.
My wife is Afro-Colombian on her mother’s side, Croatian-Czech on her dad’s. Believe me, it’s the “Afro” part of her inheritance (her maternal grandfather was born on Victoria Island, Lagos, Nigeria) that everyone seems to focus on. The fact that she’s half Slavic and a quarter Latin is of far less interest and significance than that one-quarter black. It’s truly remarkable.
Sad but true, Hugo. Sad but true.
Rachel, I love your stuff – particularly your posts on race and interracial relationships. I also agree that lots of people confuse race and culture, both in the sense you mentioned and by assuming they can tell a person’s background and ideas from what they look like.
Maybe she was from a particularly bigoted corner of Europe, or perhaps she was just an ignorant or prejudiced person, but racism isn’t a European thing any more than it is an American or Australian thing. I’m sure you didn’t intend it as a blanket statement against Europeans, but as a European person from a mixed community, I found it a little hurtful.
TJ, not to go all European on you or anything, but … N***o? I consider that an offensive term.
TJ, I don’t think identification as biracial is necessarily an attempt to avoid stigma, though of course it can be, and often is. I’m of Chinese/Scottish/English heritage, and how ‘Asian’ I look actually varies (which personally I still find a bit weird). I often make a point of identifying myself as multiracial as against the fact that people usually assume I’m white. Particularly here in Australia when we had that period of anti-Asian sentiment being particularly rife and being perpetuated explicitly by a political party. Whether that’s an internalised attempt to assuage my own guilt about ‘passing’, or to prompt the people assuming I’m white to think about what they’re doing is a arguable question. Realistically speaking, it’s a mixture of the two, with more of the former than I’d probably like to admit.
(Also, bean – I make the same jokes as your best friend. biracial, bisexual, and pagan. I didn’t have the decency to stick to a monotheistic religion. *chuckle*)
Jeefie, I did not in any way mean to imply that Europeans in general were bigoted, and I apologize. What I meant was that not having grown up in the US (specifically the Northeast), my coworker hadn’t had it drilled into her from an early age that overtly racist remarks were socially unacceptable and hadn’t learned any of the typical racist doublespeak (“culture,” “values,” etc.) used in this country.
She was from Russia (still the Soviet Union when she left), and I don’t think she’d ever actually met a Black person there.
Thanks for your reply, Lu. I understand what you mean and I’m not offended. Some people are brought up without ever having to think about racial issues or even interact with people of colour, and as a result are really clueless and unintentionally racist. It happens all over the Western world. Your coworker probably isn’t a bad person but as she had never met a Black person before and didn’t know much about American history she assumed that Black people as a group were worse off because of something they did, not something that was done to them.
I agree with you that people try to justify their social Darwinist racist attitudes with more socially acceptable statements about ‘culture’. E.g. if what they actually think is ‘Many Black people are poor because they make bad choices, since they’re lazy and less intelligent’ they will say something like ‘Black people don’t have good careers because Black culture is anti-intellectual’.
I’m not biracial, but I’m bi-cultural. Two very close cultures :US and UK. More specifically, I’m the child of an Englishman and a Californian, born and raised in Scotland. I was very quickly labelled as an outsider in my Scottish elementary school, because I wasn’t as Scottish as the rest of them. This instant categorization as “the yank” continued until I went to University in England, where my label diversified into about 50/50 “yank” or “haggis-eater”. Also, later on, after moving to Calofirnia, I was given a lecture by a housemate about how I wasn’t a “true” or “real” American, despite being a full citizen, because I didn’t share specific cultural exposure and experience with her.
Those are the highlights. All these strange attitudes taught me very early on that “nationality” “culture” and, by extension, “race” are more often labels people apply to others, and that it’s all very constructed. I never felt particularly confused or conflicted by having different cultural influences from the kids I grew up with. It confused them though!
All of which lead me to realise that if I, a middle class white woman, have experienced a fair bit of cultural prejudice and even some full on contempt just for having a pretty common dual nationality, and the attending differences in family culture…how much worse must it be for bi-racial people. Not that simply being biracial is bad, but the way ignorant jackasses choose to treat those who do not conveniently fit into prearranged categories.
What do people think about the distinction between race, culture, and ethnicity? I think there is a strong case to be made for defining ethnicity as the confluence of race and culture, which tidies things up a bit.
Over here we only speak about ethnicity and sometimes culture – we don’t accept race as a concept and the American way of defining race on questionaires etc. seems very racist to us.
I don’t think most people conflate ethnicity and race – though ethnic discrimination certainly exists. And I believe this is the reason why your US discourse on racism seems so different.
My cousin, who hasn’t had any contact from her very black Ethiopian father since she was four, is together with lots of adopted people and other “interracial” children an ethnic Swede. I don’t think anyone questions her swedishness or have specific assumptions on her place in society based on her skin tone.
If you are an immigrant however, speaking broken swedish and/or having a dificult name, maybe wearing a veil – then you will face discrimination. I believe discrimination here is much more based on perceived cultural differences and class than ideas of racial characteristics. Still there – just another context.
I am a ‘mixed race’ 28 year old male in the UK. My blog is dedicated to issues and articles regarding this topic. Acceptance is definately an issue. Its often the case that a white or black person may accept a mixed race person. Also its not as straight forward as outright acceptance. In terms of being accepted by people, it is not unusual to experience conditional acceptance. ie “OK, We will accept you if you act more like us”.
I think the issue of acceptance can only be overcome when an individual is comfortable accepting that it is unlikely that an entire ethnic group will accept you, regardless of what you do. Unless, of course, you offer some additional benefit to the said ethnic group.
This is a pretty interesting video: