The Wormiest of Cans: who gets to be “mixed race”?

Using the term “mixed race” in this narrow way is to systematically erase ethnic histories that bear witness to slavery and colonization; or simply, to erase ethnic histories, period. To do so can be read as an act of white supremacy: it covers up the fact that many Americans, regardless of skin colour or the stories elders are willing to tell, have mixed lineages. To do this silences a whole community’s right to express their experience.

And another thing: it is grating to hear the term “mixed race” applied solely to MR2s, as if we invented mixedness. Cultural forces (usually — though not always — powered by white folks) that select MR2s as somehow unique, or the antidote to racism, or hybridly vigorous, or exquisitely beautiful, are just pouring salt in the wound. After generations of MR folks being ostracised or having to commit violent contortions to have a peaceful life, being mixed is all of a sudden hot – and this is the very moment that the label is being rescinded from MRs. You don’t even get invited to speak at the damn mixed race festival.

And let us note that a lot of this friction gets even hotter when we are talking about MR2s who have a white parent and a parent of colour, because we are talking about people of colour who also have white privilege and/or light-skin privilege.

There are other reasons why MRs get angry when MR2s say that being MR2 mixed is different from being MR mixed – and you are welcome to chime in in the comments, if you are so inclined – but these are the ones I have come across, time and again.

After my Racialicious education, I tried to be sensitive to the fact that “mixed race” can mean MRs or MR2s. To acknowledge this widening of the category, in a post I was writing about Alicia Keys and her warped presentation of historic racial relations, I referred to Alicia Keys as a first generation mixed race person. To my dismay, this language was deemed just as offensive as my original ignorance. Because, a commenter said, the language of generations is offensive and recalls such awful categories as quadroon and octoroon, and because, why, after everything, did I have to keep on insisting that there was a difference between mixed race people from long lines of mixedness, and mixed race people who were racial anomalies in their families?

It wasn’t, I started to realize, that MRs were solely mad that MR2s and the dominant culture didn’t recognize them as mixed. They were mad that a distinction was even being made between themselves, and MR2s. (Perhaps my very decision to say “MRs” and “MR2s” is aggravating this tension right now.)

When you are dealing with sensitive people who are reeling from cultural rejection, distinctions feel like rejections. Why do MR2s think they are so special that they can’t possibly be in the same club with MRs?

So I will dig deep into my horrible well of childhood pain to explain what this distinction business is about.

I come from a nation of two. There’s me, and there is my sibling. When I was growing up, I had no language to explain my experience. I did not know people who were mixed. And these problems were exacerbated by the fact that I was a TCK in a postcolonial nation that was still dealing with a lot of (justifiable) anger towards Westerners, and I was read as white, and I was given a hard time because of that. This was all without a real knowledge of race or racism, but simply a sinking feeling that I was hopelessly and sometimes offensively different from everyone around me, and that those gaps could never be bridged. Until I was in my mid-20s, this was what being mixed was for me. In my family of origin I  did not know a single person — not my grandparents, cousins, my mother and father, or even my sibling (who, thanks to the genetic lottery, came out looking a different race from me and so had their own experience altogether) — who could understand my ethnocultural identity.

Note: I am not saying that only MR2s understand true isolation. Pulllease. I am just saying that this was my experience, and I am sure, sadly enough, that there are many other roads to that kind of loneliness.

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