Mixed Race Mess: Alicia Keys and Unthinkable Interracial Dating [Mixed Media Watch]

Which I suppose brings me to my personal beef with this video: as the mixed race product of an interracial relationship watching a song/video made by two other mixed race products of interracial relationships, I am really irritated that Keys is presenting these unions as so wholly pure, good and anti-racist.

This is obviously an irrational personal projection, but I often hope (expect? sigh) that mixed race celebrities have a more nuanced understanding race and racism**.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think they are going to end racism just by being a manifestation of love across racial lines.  Rather I assume that if you live at the intersection of race and love, as many mixed families do,  you’ll have insight into just how complicated that intersection is.  You might have a sense that interracial relationships, like any relationships, are muddy, confused things that are not wholly good, bad or anything.

You might know how people confuse fetishes with love. You might know that love is not always strong enough to end racism; maybe you have family members who love you, and still have effed up racist ideas.  You might know that people take offense at mixed race pairings sometimes out of real, understandable pain, not just hate.

Yet instead Keys chooses to give a painfully simple drawing of a mixed relationship that lets racist stereotypes about her own people stand, presumably so as to cash in on that socially conscious rep from a mainstream media that just likes anything shiny.***

Fail Alicia – this lets a lot of us down.

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*By “mixed race” I assume he meant someone with one white parent and one parent of colour.

** I don’t mean a more nuanced understanding than other people of colour, just more nuanced than the white establishment around them.

***Hey, there’s cache in the safe socially conscious, just ask multimillionaire Bono.

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