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THE SOULS OF MIXED FOLK
RACE, POLITICS, AND AESTHETICS IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM
By Michele Elam
Stanford University Press
Copyright © 2011 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5630-3
Chapter One
The Mis-education of Mixed Race
The emergence of university courses and student organizations by, for, and about biracial and multiracial people strongly indicates that this identity deserves social and academic legitimacy and institutional sustenance. Teresa Kay Williams et al., "Being Different Together in the University Classroom"
[W]hat I am always cautious about is persons of mixed race focusing so narrowly on their own unique experiences that they are detached from larger struggles, and I think it's important to try to avoid that sense of exclusivity, and feeling that you're special in some way. Barack Obama, from the documentary Chasing Daybreak
I. THE RISE OF MIXED RACE STUDIES
The U.S. national education industry has emerged as one of the most powerful vehicles through which mixed race is manufactured and marketed. Anthologies, collections, pedagogical manuals, and educational materials in print, media, and Web form have popularized, propagandized, and institutionalized particular ideas and ideals of mixed race. This chapter explores the ways in which K–12 and college curricula have begun canonizing the emergent field of "mixed race studies." Its canonization often occurs with the explicit rationale of inclusiveness and equity of representation, and sometimes lays claim to a revolution that shares much with radical challenges to education that the black and brown power movements initiated in the 1960s and 1970s. These earlier reforms critiqued the standard canons of knowledge and content of education—what got taught and who decided—as well as the way education naturalized traditional racial and social hierarchies. The opening lines to Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (1970), with its incantation, and then revision, of the familiar and reassuring children's primer, the dick and Jane story, is an example of this challenge:
Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family. Mother, Father, Dick, and Jane live in the green-and-white house. They are very happy.
The novel immediately enacts a refutation of this ideal through a grotesque orthographic bleed that anticipates the novel's social critique of the domestic ideal:
Hereisthehouseitisgreenandwhiteithasareddooritisveryprettyhereisthe family-motherfatherdickandjaneliveinthegreenandwhitehousetheareveryhappy
As the novel suggests, literacy is not just the acquisition of language but also the internalization of cultural and racial norms. How does literacy instruct children and adults in certain ways of thinking about race? about beauty? about family? about the world? And how does not only how we read but also what we read shape or reshape those very early perceptions? Morrison, then a senior editor at Random house, was and is very concerned also about the literary canon—what counts as "good" or "bad" literature, what texts should be validated and taught or not taught in schools. This, too, is related to the racial politics of literacy and cultural education.
Literacy, Morrison understood, implicitly and explicitly introduces expectations of normalcy, of standard cultural practices, and of aesthetic valuation; in short, literacy establishes tacit instructions for social and political relations, naturalizing racism, too, in all its subtle forms. For The Bluest Eye, the racism emerges through norms of beauty that render people of color ugly. However, potentially these forms of pedagogical instruction can set up countervailing literacies, and in that sense, their power brings with it both risks and opportunities, a vehicle for social change and justice.
Mixed race educational reforms often evoke this civil rights tradition, and sometimes their proposed curricula do challenge certain social assumptions, particularly promoting the acceptability of interracial unions and transracial adoption. But like the earlier bids for curricular change, this more recent move to integrate the study of mixed race into schools shares much with traditional educational systems that normalize certain acceptable forms of cultural literacy over others, and to that extent, mixed race education functions as a vehicle of both change and not-change, of challenge and yet of accommodation. In the case of mixed race education, the cultural literacy being taught involves and presumes the acceptance of mixed race as a unique and distinct type of racial experience deserving of its own recognition and thus requiring its own special cultural instructions and social prescriptives. Just as educational systems usually pose as neutral "information delivery" mechanisms, so do these; the fact that analysis of their claims is unwelcome—even, at times, represented as politically backward—makes study of them all the more pressing. As mixed race education has been increasingly mainstreamed, and continues to gain influence in shaping perception, it is essential to examine its particular educational mandates and requisites, to explore advocates' assumptions about race and identity that inform their policy recommendations. The cultural instructions in these textbooks and curricula posit mixed race education as for and about the "next" generation: this is education as script and illustration for a projected future, one that both models and prescribes ideal social relations.
Of course, their project does not differ from most children's books or educational programming, some of which also tends towards this didactic impulse. But much mixed race education is particularly unself-reflective of the ways it sometimes replicates traditional prejudices as part of the very process it uses to overturn others. For in the progressive effort to normalize the "atypical" family of multiply raced individuals, targeted consumers are almost invariably cast as an imagined community of light-skinned children of suburban middle-class, heterosexual parents, as well as educators enlightened enough to recognize their peculiar needs. One of the needs that has been identified, and ostensibly requires catering to, is the right to self-identify racially. The educational industry has valorized the notion of race as non-contingent free choice—with its implicit suggestion that racial self-definition is equally available to all regardless of skin color or context. These assumptions are then emplotted into the educational content, including, as I will examine, narratives of literary and political history. From the 1990s through the first decade of the twenty-first century, almost all mixed race educational mandates have been tacitly couched in these similar conceptual frames, frames that both enable and yet complicate the goal of what has been called "oppositional" and "transgressive" pedagogy. Articles such as "Challenging Race and Racism: a framework for educators" by Ronald David Glass and Kendra R. Wallace; "Being different Together in the University Classroom: Multiracial Identity as Transgressive Education" by Teresa Kay Williams, Cynthia L. Naka Shima, George Kitahara Kich, and G. Reginald Daniel; and "Multicultural Education" by Francis Wardle are all important contributions to the study of mixed race. But as the titles of their articles suggest, they tend to take as a given that the educational project of institutionalizing the concept and practice of mixed race is, in and of itself, "progressive"—that is, to assume that it ipso facto challenges the status quo. My argument here involves a provisional critique of some of the notions of mixed race that are currently emerging in curricula, but is not meant as an end in itself. Rather, my challenges here aim to clear space for alternative pedagogies that potentially encourage more politically complex understandings of mixed race identification, as well as to lay the ground for the radically different engagements of mixed race in the literature and drama I examine in the subsequent chapters, works unaccounted for within current educational rubrics. I hope, then, that this analysis will not only facilitate the ability of people who identify as mixed race to examine critically their experiential claims as the basis for epistemic social insight, but also, more broadly, to help explain how mixed race studies and politics are affecting and taking shape within the educational realm, civil rights initiatives, and literary studies of race.
II. THE CURRICULAR INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF MIXED RACE
Since the 1990s, the undergraduate classroom has become a locus of advocacy, in part because demographic study of those who identify as mixed race suggests that the vast majority have been people under twenty-five. It is no accident, therefore, that there has been a nationwide mushrooming of undergraduate courses on mixed race in the humanities and social sciences at institutions such as Yale, NYU, Vassar, Smith, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and many others. Many have hosted student-sponsored national conferences, educational workshops, and leadership summits on the subject. The national organization EurasianNation offers a link on its Web page to "The Top 19 Mixed Race Studies Courses" in the United States and Canada. On that same site is an article, "The Explosion in Mixed Race Studies" by Erica Schlaikjer (April 2003), which refers to "the new generation of academics ... pushing the boundaries of ethnic studies." Many of the mixed race organizations, Web pages, affinity and advocacy groups, magazines, and journals that have emerged in the last few years of the twenty-first century have begun aggressive campaigns for educational reform, particularly regarding reading lists and curricula for, and representation of, the so-called mixed race experience at the college level.
The explicit goal of much of this work is to educate a cohort; but, in fact, mixed race constituencies are as often generated by these efforts. The classroom is a hub for some of the most active work in creating populations who identify as mixed race. In fact, the new crop of undergraduate courses on mixed race around the country have, to a great extent, preceded and anticipated the emerging body of critical literature on mixed race. These courses, often requested by the students themselves, have become the developing ground for nascent political identities and social organizing, both the result of and the inspiration for student clubs, youth leadership summits, and national student conferences devoted to the issue of mixed race. That educational environments have become a crucible for defining and refining what it means to be "mixed race" should remind us that pedagogy is not the mere by-product of research, that these classroom events and practices are more than just the application of theoretical models and principles and certainly more than an inevitable effect of changing demographics. The activism of students suggests that a certain youthful populism is reshaping curricula, a very appealing idea to students' sense of empowerment. And to some extent that is true. But as Chandra Talpade Mohanty argues, institutions of higher education have, since the 1970s, developed "what might be called the Race industry, an industry that is responsible for the management, commodification, and domestication of race on American campuses." Mixed race studies is no exception—it is driven by student and social interest, but it is highly managed, marketed, and to some extent tamed within the educational system. And if the classroom has become a particularly dynamic engine of invention and community building, the educational and publishing industries have been just as quick to capitalize on this phenomenon.
III. COVERING: THE EYE'S INSTRUCTION
I begin by reviewing what has become an increasing mainstay in these courses—the mixed race textbook, which is commonly a collection or anthology billed as foundational or field-defining. And I am focusing first on a few representative covers from this spate of mixed race anthologies. I chose to examine covers over content, first, precisely because they are often seen as insignificant—after all, we are warned from an early age not to judge books (or people) by their covers, to assume that the substance within rarely corresponds to outward appearance. By presuming the general deceitfulness of such sources, readers can complacently assume that they have performed the only necessary critical act required when it comes to them. But this posture of suspicion does not encourage closer examination of all the sorts of subtle cultural and readerly work that covers perform. After all, covers provide the eye's instruction, the prefatory function of visually glossing the pages within. They implicitly sanction certain ways of reading over others, coax certain interpretative moves even before a page has been read. Their readerly orienting becomes especially powerful when the genre or topic is new on the scene: they are one of the first forms of guidance to readers, implicitly telling us what and how to think about a work, what kind of context and frame of reference by which to understand it.
But literary covers can conceal as well as reveal, and unintentionally narrow as well as open perspective. This is a particularly fascinating issue when it comes to covers of texts representing what mixed race is or is supposed to be. How to represent mixed race when some expressions of ethnic identity are socially encouraged and approved of and others are not? when the social performances of ethnic identity occur in the context of a society that rigorously delimits and monitors expressions of ethnicity? Kenji Yoshino argues, in Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights, that "covering," the coerced pressure to hide crucial aspects of one's identity, provides an adaptive strategy for the ethnic minorities that deploy it, but that the conditions for it are necessarily repressive.
And in fact, covers have quietly played a role in the creation of certain restrictive, normative models of mixed race: The Sum of Our Parts, Mixed-Race Literature, and Mixed: An Anthology of Short Fiction on the Multiracial Experience people their covers with stylized facial abstractions (Fig. 1.1); New Faces in a Changing America: Multiracial Identity in the 21st Century (Fig. 1.2), The Multiracial Experience: Racial Borders as the New Frontier (Fig. 1.3), Multiracial Child Resource Book: Living Complex Realities (Fig. 1.4), and Of Many Colors: Portraits of Multiracial Families (Fig 1.5), as well as What Are You?: Voices of Mixed-Race Young People, Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America, Blended Nation: Portraits and Interviews of Mixed-Race America, and many others feature pictures of "real" people, suggesting, similarly, that the mission of the volume is to represent a snapshot of a population previously invisible. In both cases, stylized or realistic, the images function as typological, as marking a diverse but distinct people. Most of these are filled, some to the margins, with middle-class studio portraits of interracial couples and school pictures of their light-skinned, well-groomed children that not only seek to domesticate cross-racial sex, to visually pardon its historical stigma and taboo, but also to trigger the realist commitment to photo-documentary and the putative unimpeachability of the seen. We are encouraged to take for granted the idea that the photoshopped families on the page are but a synecdoche: they imply there must be millions of others similarly miscegenated in Middle America.
The covers equate visibility not only with social recognition but also with political representation. Indeed, mixed race advocacy groups that claim a civil rights–oriented agenda often have as their goal that mixed race people must be seen in the census, onstage, in media, in office. But this act of rendering mixed race intelligible to the eye, understood as a political act, can sometimes actually interrupt more meaningful political engagement. The anthology covers, for instance, in the admirable service of making visible one marginalized population, effectively—and no accidentally—marginalize another: the images work together to codify anew the already iconic status of the heteronormative unit at the expense of other family formations. The photos are not merely reportage of a neutral demographic phenomenon, but the graphic naturalization of a particular political representation of a people. The fact that only heterosexual couples appear (and appear over and over again) on these "family album" covers extends the presumption of heterosexuality to the other images of solitary mixed race children—if they are the biological or adopted offspring of same-sex or intersex couples, we never see it. By implication, these alternative family mixes are not deemed "representative" of the mixed race constituency, and thus are silently omitted from the field of representation. To borrow Toni Morrison's insight in "unspeakable Things unspoken," "invisible things are not necessarily 'not there,'" and "certain absences are so stressed, so planned, they call attention to themselves ... like neighborhoods that are defined by the population held away from them." if we take Morrison's cue, then the covers, in this way, can teach us to see what is left unseen.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE SOULS OF MIXED FOLK by Michele Elam Copyright © 2011 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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