13

Obama Nation?

Race, Multiraciality, and American Identity

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners—an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles, and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.¹

Thus spoke Barack Obama on March 18, 2008, at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. Responding to widespread public criticism of his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, candidate Obama issued what many took to be a call for Americans to look beyond race in thinking about the future of their country. I believe he was hoping to point us in rather a different direction: toward an honest conversation about race, something the United States has not had in a very long time.

Obama is an iconic figure in America’s racial history. On one hand, he represents racially what the United States has always been—a complicated mixing of peoples and identities that defies simple categorization. He also represents something distinctive about this particular moment in our racial history. In both these senses, historical and contemporary, we may be something like an Obama nation.²

Barack Obama is, to be sure, a man of multiracial parentage. Yet, at least since his university days, he has chosen to identify himself, not as a multiracial person, but simply as a Black American. He described his student years as a struggle

to escape from … my own inner doubt…. I was more like the students who had grown up in the suburbs, kids whose parents had already paid the price of escape. You could spot them right away by the way they talked, the people they sat with in the cafeteria. When pressed, they would sputter and explain that they refused to be categorized. They weren’t defined by the color of their skin, they would tell you. They were individuals.

That’s how Joyce liked to talk…. “I’m not black,” Joyce said. “I’m multiracial.” Then she started telling me about her father, who happened to be Italian and was the sweetest man in the world; and her mother, who happened to be part African and part French and part Native American and part something else. “Why should I have to choose between them?” she asked me. Her voice cracked, and I thought she was going to cry. “It’s not white people who are making me choose. Maybe it used to be that way, but now they’re willing to treat me like a person. No—it’s black people who always have to make everything racial. They’re the ones making me choose. They’re the ones who are telling me that I can’t be who I am….”

They, they, they. That was the problem with people like Joyce. They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people.³

Obama took another path—into the heart of monoracial, political Blackness. As much as he loves body surfing with his friends back in Honolulu, as much as he cherishes the memory of his young years in Indonesia and his Kenyan relatives, it was in Black Chicago as a community organizer that he found his racial home. Obama, in his own mind, is from Hawai‘i, but he is of Chicago. He is a Black man.⁴

Yet Obama is a special kind of Black man—maybe the only kind who could be elected president, even in an era that imagines itself enlightened about race. I trust I will not incite the feigned horror of the conservative press if I observe that one of the things that made Barack Obama acceptable to White voters was that we knew his story, and we knew it to be different from the story of, say, Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton or Charlie Rangel. We knew that he was raised not in Philadelphia or Shreveport but in exotic Hawai‘i, not by his Black father (who in any case was descended not from American slaves but from seemingly elite Kenyans); rather he was nurtured and taught life’s ways by his hippie mother and his cracker grandparents. Those features of Obama’s biography moved him enough off the center of Blackness that White voters could hear his voice in a way they could not hear Jackson’s or Sharpton’s or Rangel’s: not through a filter of Blackness, but as a comforting presence they knew to be as skilled in the ways of Whiteness as he was in the ways of Blackness.

Let me be clear. Barack Obama is not a savior of America’s racial soul. His presidency, even if it comes to be regarded universally as a splendid success, will not put an end to the relevance of race in American public life. Obama knows this, as do most thoughtful Americans.⁵ Race dwells too deeply in the warp and woof of everything we are and do for it to suddenly become irrelevant. Nonetheless, this is an unprecedented, hopeful moment in our history, and we ought not despise that.

In this chapter, I would like first to offer some reflections on America’s racial history, and in particular the history of racial mixing. Then I will attempt to assess the ways that scholars and popular writers have portrayed the meaning of racial mixing. In the past two decades a new field—multiracial studies—was born and has grown like Topsy. I had a hand in that founding and growth.⁶ I will suggest a few ways that I believe that movement has fallen short, and also some directions that it might take from here. Finally, I will attempt to assess the meaning of Barack Obama as a racial figure in America’s history.

RACE IN AMERICA

Race in America is not, and has never been, just about White and Black. The racial systems that Americans have devised and periodically revised have always been about Black, Red, and White, and in many places and times about Brown and Yellow as well.⁷ African American slavery is America’s national sin, but it is not the only set of racialized relationships in play in any time or any place in United States history.

I say “racialized relationships” because I do not take race to be a tangible thing but rather a set of relationships between groups of people who perceive themselves to be different, and usually unequal. I have argued elsewhere that race is a language, used to describe the power relationships that exist and are carried out between peoples; that race is a story about power that is written on the body. It is a story that tells who I think you are, who your parents were, and what your life chances ought to be, a story written on your features as I perceive them.⁸ That is, race makes use of physical markers (and, increasingly these days, of genetic markers) in order to pursue political ends between peoples. Although, like most racial theorists, I argue that race is a set of ideas fashioned by people whose identities we know, for purposes we can at least guess, that is not to say that race is not consequential. People kill people over race, and even in less extreme cases, many people’s life chances are sharply curtailed and others’ superabundantly blessed on account of their racial placements.

The US racial system has evolved in such a way that five very large panethnicities, or races—Black, White, Native American, Asian American, and Latino—have taken on the role of major categories.⁹ Each of these panethnicities brings together in one conceptual whole a congeries of different peoples. Recent African immigrants, Haitians, Jamaicans, and other West Indians, and African Americans whose ancestors were slaves in North America (themselves with roots from many African groups) all are treated more or less as Black people in the American system.¹⁰ American Indians include people of many different tribes, people whose ancestry is a mixture of different tribal origins, and people whose ancestry also contains European- or African-descended people.¹¹ Similar lumping together of disparate people has attended the forming and sustaining of the White, Asian, and Latino panethnic groups.¹²

There is nothing natural or inevitable about this configuration. The racialized map of Germany, Japan, Brazil, or Malaysia looks quite different from the US variety. In the census of the United Kingdom, when last I checked, the eight racial categories were “White, Black Caribbean, Black African or Black Other (please specify), Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Chinese, and Any Other Ethnic Group (please describe).”¹³ In Malaysia, the relevant racialized groups are Malay, Chinese, and Indian.¹⁴ In Germany, the major divide that is ordinarily recognized lies between ethnic Germans (who are simply German, whether or not they were born in Germany or hold German citizenship) and non-ethnic-German peoples, who are all presumed to be immigrants, are racialized as other and experience little to no social inclusion.¹⁵

RACIAL MIXTURE IN AMERICAN HISTORY

Racial mixing is not a new thing in the United States. We are commonly told that since the 1970s and with increasing velocity there has been a “multiracial baby boom.” That is, it is asserted that in the last third of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, more people have been marrying, having sex, and bearing babies across racial boundaries than ever before in history.¹⁶

Well, maybe not so much. In fact, there has always been a whole lot of racial mixing in the United States. Gary Nash, in his 1995 presidential address to the Organization of American Historians, called this the “hidden history of mestizo America.”¹⁷ As Winthrop Jordan taught us four decades ago and Martha Menchaca reminded us more recently, interracial sex—among Europeans, Africans, and Native North Americans—was probably more common in the eighteenth century than at any later time in US history.¹⁸ In what was to become the northern provinces of Mexico, and still later the US Southwest from Texas to California, Spaniards, Africans, and many different sorts of Native peoples mixed under conditions that sometimes involved compulsion, sometimes contract, sometimes romance, and oftentimes more than one of those dimensions. The mixing, and fluctuating racial positionings for the complicatedly mixed offspring, continued in that region through the nineteenth century and on through the twentieth.¹⁹

In the eastern provinces of central North America (what became the eastern and southeastern United States), interracial mixing took three predominant forms in the eighteenth century. In one instance, sex, cohabitation, and marriage were common between White indentured servants (usually women) and African-derived men (sometimes slaves, sometimes servants). The children of such unions sometimes became free Blacks, but probably just as often, they slid into the White working-class population; a third portion were enslaved.²⁰ In another colonial-era instance of meeting and mating, White men who lived and worked in Indian Country were taken as husbands by Native women; their children most often followed the lineage customs of Native peoples and became members (sometimes leaders) of tribes like the Cherokee and Creek. The third common pattern in this period consisted of unions that were formed between runaway slaves and members of various Native American tribes in the Southeast; their children, too, most often became Indians.²¹

As the slave regime hardened over the course of the first half of the nineteenth century, so too did the line between Black and White. It is to this era that we owe the invention of the one-drop rule: the custom, sometimes codified in law, that one drop of Black blood—one known African-descended ancestor—made one Black. In the Antebellum era, it is likely that interracial mixing between White and Black declined in frequency, and it took on a new characteristic shape. Now most interracial sex occurred between men of the master class and women and girls of the slave class. Usually it was brutally compelled; that is the dominant fact we must not forget. Yet in some instances there seem to have been long-standing arrangements between White masters and slave women that approximated marriage. And there are hints of a small number of relationships that broke what at that time had fairly recently become the strongest taboo: sex between Black men and White women.²²

The fact that interracial sex was forbidden by law and custom meant that any such unions, whether fully compelled or possessing an element of volition, could not be publicly acknowledged. The emerging one-drop rule and the financial imperatives of slavery meant that most children born of interracial sex in the Antebellum period became Black slaves, but some small number were set free or ran away to freedom in the North. In time they came to form the beigeoisie—the light-skinned leadership class of African America—that emerged more fully after the Civil War.²³

Just as racial mixing is not a new thing, so, too, complex, shifting relationships to racial identity on the part of racially mixed people are not new things, despite the seeming solidity of the one-drop rule. P. B. S. Pinchback was born in Georgia in the era of slavery, a free person who was known to have a little African parentage. He entered the Civil War on the Union side as a White sergeant and emerged a Black captain; his brothers remained on the White side of the color line. Pinchback went on to become a Reconstruction-era politician in Louisiana, served as lieutenant governor and governor, and was elected to but not seated in both the US House of Representatives and the Senate. He lived out his days on the Gold Coast in Washington, DC, home to the beigeoisie of the nation’s capital, one of the most prominent African American leaders in the Republican Party, even though he always maintained a consciousness of his mixed identity and only gingerly embraced unmixed African Americans.

Similarly complicated racial positionings were carried out by many other figures who are often thought of as monoracial African Americans, including the abolitionist Robert Purvis; the great Black novelist Charles W. Chesnutt; Jean Toomer, herald of the Harlem Renaissance; the archetypal African American intellectual, W. E. B. Du Bois; the NAACP executive secretary and anti-lynching crusader Walter White; and the reform leaders Adella Hunt Logan and Mary Church Terrell.²⁴

People of part Native ancestry also led racially complex lives. Alexander McGillivray led his people, the Creek Indians, in defiance of White encroachment in the late 1700s. John Ross served the Cherokee Nation as paramount chief for half a century, from before the Trail of Tears until after the Civil War. Both had Native mothers and Scotch fathers. By contrast, Charles Curtis, as Indian of ancestry as either Ross or McGillivray, was elected vice president of the United States in the 1920s as a more-or-less White man, although one known to have some Native ancestry.²⁵ And people from other racial groups also mixed, mated, and took on complicated racial identities. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Edith Maude Eaton and her sister Winnifred, the children of a White British man and a Chinese woman, pursued literary careers in the United States under the pen names Sui Sin Far and Onoto Watanna. About the same time, Robert Wilcox was just one of many part-Hawaiian, part-White people who attempted to defend Hawai‘i against American imperialism.²⁶

Fig. 13.1.
Abolitionist Robert Purvis. Courtesy of the Simon Gratz Collection, Image no. 2137, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

Fig. 13.2.
Novelist Charles W. Chesnutt. Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library.

All this manifest racial mixing, however, was obscured in the public imagination with the rise in the second half of the nineteenth century of a mania for racialist science. This movement, which also led to immigration restriction and eugenics, held that there were four or five distinct races of humankind and that mixing between them was unnatural and led inevitably to physical, mental, and moral decline.²⁷ Even though a very large part of the American population had mixed ancestry, some of it quite recent, and even though a lot of people were mating and marrying across racial lines, the intellectual pressure to see only pure, discrete races was overwhelming. The monoracial myth prevailed.

Fig. 13.3.
Vice President Charles Curtis. Courtesy of the Kansas State Historical Society.

Fig. 13.4.
Novelist and screenwriter Winnifred Eaton before she became Onoto Watanna. Courtesy of the Glenbow Museum, Calgary, image no. NA-4320-2.

Fig. 13.5.
Hawaiian nationalist Robert Wilcox. Courtesy of the Hawaiian Historical Society.

So, if a whole lot of people mated and more than a few married, and in both instances a lot of them had children, across racial lines in earlier periods in American history, what then is new in the last decades of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first? It is not that we have a dramatically larger number of mixed people but that we are beginning to see those people as mixed. We are also beginning to see racial mixing, mating, and marriage as normal, not aberrant—as part of the core experience of being Americans, not as something epiphenomenal. That is a huge change, but it is as much a change of consciousness as it is a change of demography or social behavior. This change of consciousness is built on the positive social value attached to interracial socializing that arose out of the Civil Rights movement. In that sense, it is a change of social etiquette.

It is true that since the 1970s or so, and with increasing frequency and social penetration each decade since, more people who have seen themselves as members of one racialized group—say, Latinos—have met, worked, studied, and socialized with people who have perceived themselves as Blacks, Whites, Asians, Arabs, or members of other groups. In addition, as the stigma that once attached to interracial mating has abated, more and more people who know they possess multiple ancestries have come to embrace that multiplicity. Many of them, probably most, still think of themselves, and are perceived by those around them, as monoracial people, White or Black or whatever. But they no longer so freely ignore their multiplicity. And a rapidly increasing number of people have come to identify themselves as racially multiple.²⁸

WRITING ABOUT MULTIRACIALITY—SOME DEAD ENDS

We see all these things quite a bit more clearly today than we did twenty-five years ago, when I wrote a book called Mixed Blood.²⁹ This is largely because of an outpouring of literature—history, biography, sociology, literary and cultural criticism, even some psychological studies—the scope of which can only be suggested in the notes to this essay. Two and a half decades ago, I think I saw the outlines of what a couple of hundred scholars have come to find out in recent years. But I never cease to be amazed at how richly they have documented and analyzed the phenomenon of interracial mixing and mating, the constructed and performed qualities of race itself, the identity situations of multiracial people, and the political implications of all these things.

One of the ways that I misspent my time in writing Mixed Blood was in trying to seek out what many took to be the underlying sociological laws of intermarriage behavior and racial identification. In this move, I was a child of the sociological turn in historical studies that consumed so much effort during the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond.³⁰ Like social scientists dating back to early in the twentieth century, I tried to tease out and evaluate theories about

•  what sociological circumstances tend to encourage or inhibit intermarriage;

•  which groups (and which sorts of individuals within such groups) tend to marry which other sorts of people from which other groups; and

•  the ethnic identity placements of racially mixed people.

Very distinguished social scientists—people like Bruno Lasker, Romanzo Adams, Robert Merton, Kingsley Davis, Ruby Jo Reeves Kennedy, Milton Gordon, and Harry Kitano—had all spent enormous energy theorizing about such issues and then testing their hypotheses.³¹

It is not that I don’t think there are discernible patterns to intergroup romance, mating, and marriage, nor to the identity situations of mixed people. But I have come over the years increasingly to be convinced that most of the so-called laws of intergroup mixing are just wrong. Seeking after them may be a fool’s errand. For instance, Merton, Davis, and others posited the law of “hypergamy,” where lower-caste men of unusual achievement or wealth marry up by partnering with higher-caste women. This law asserts that the men in question trade their tangible wealth or celebrity for the higher caste status of the women they marry.³² This assumes some things that are by no means universally agreed upon: for example, that men are active and women passive, or that we all can agree on which direction is up, socially speaking. It also flies in the face of a whole lot of intergroup mating that has actually taken place, including slavery-era relationships between White men and slave concubines. If we are seeking after ironclad rules for who marries whom and why, or who takes on which identity, the only rule I can be sure of is this one: It depends.

Then there is the matter of “passing.” Usually, this has been taken to refer to people of mixed ancestry (who according to the one-drop rule were really Black) choosing not to be Black but passing for White. Well, maybe. But if that be true, then were Walter White, W. E. B. Du Bois, and other multiracial, White-looking African American–identified leaders passing for Black? I asked that question gently in Mixed Blood and a subsequent essay, and I took a good deal of grief for having suggested it. I was told that passing went only one way, from truly Black to falsely White. I was told further that passing is a fraud, a deception, and an abandonment of one’s people. Those who scolded me spoke in tones like those of Alice Walker, as she lamented the complex and fluctuating racial identity choices that the great Harlem Renaissance author, Jean Toomer, made over the course of his lifetime. Walker said she had

feelings of disappointment and loss. Disappointment because the man who wrote so piercingly of “Negro” life in Cane chose to live his own life as a white man, while [Langston] Hughes, [Zora Neale] Hurston, Du Bois, and other black writers were celebrating the blackness in themselves as well as in their work. Loss because it appears this choice undermined Toomer’s moral judgment: there were things [White racism] in American life and in his own that he simply refused to see.³³

Regardless of whether Walker oversimplified the racial positionings of Hughes, Hurston, and Du Bois (I believe she did), I am quite certain that she mistook what Jean Toomer was up to. Toomer thought he knew who he was—not simply a monoracial Black man, but a man of multiple ancestries and identities in a nation that did not then recognize such multiplicity. Many decades before others took up the theme, Toomer asserted the constructedness of race and proclaimed a vision of a society that was not completely constrained by race. He lived his life accordingly, not as a White man as Walker contends, but not always as a monoracially Black man either.³⁴

In the years since I wrote that if some mixed people were passing for unmixed White, then others surely were passing for Black, we have come to understand that not all mixed people who identify as White do so simply to escape Blackness. Some surely do, but some people of mixed origins like P. B. S. Pinchback have passed for unmixed Black, with the purpose to achieve tangible benefits in employment, power, and social status. Was Pinchback a fraud? And some like Toomer have moved back and forth between identities over the course of their lifetimes. Some other people with mixed ancestry like John Ross or Robert Wilcox have passed for Indian or for Hawaiian. Perhaps most important, we have begun to see that passing is not necessarily a fiction or a fraud. It may simply be an expression of who one actually is: like Jean Toomer (and, for that matter, White and Du Bois), a racially complex person. Perhaps it is time to recognize that we have been trapped in a trope for too long; perhaps it will serve us better to retire the term passing altogether.

WHAT RACE MIXING DOES NOT MEAN, AND WHAT IT DOES

There has been considerable dispute about what may be the meaning of interracial sex, intermarriage, and multiracial people. A lot of the people who wrote about intermarriage from the 1940s through the 1960s assumed that intermarriage was a sure sign that racialized divisions were on the decline and that in the case of the couples in question, at least, racial differences, and racism itself, had pretty much been erased. Milton Gordon suggested as much:

If marital assimilation, an inevitable by-product of structural assimilation, takes place, fully, the minority group loses its ethnic identity in the larger host or core society, and identificational assimilation takes place. Prejudice and discrimination are no longer a problem, since eventually the descendants of the original minority group become indistinguishable, and since primary group relationships tend to build up an “in-group” feeling which encloses all the members of the group.³⁵

In recent decades, a number of scholars have taken pains to point out that racialized relationships—indeed, pretty blatantly racist attitudes, words, and actions—often exist within interracial couples. Often, it is observed, White men, for example, choose Asian or Latina partners for reasons having to do with their own racist stereotypes about sexy, submissive women, and some scholars suggest that racism pervades a lot of mixed relationships. Similar racist imagery may affect a lot of Black or Asian men and women who choose White partners.³⁶ I think that some of the scholars who perceive and emphasize racist qualities in the partners to intermarriages probably overstate their case, but for sure, the fact of intermarriage does not mean that racism has disappeared.

Neither does multiracial identity mean the end of racism, much less the end of race. Susan Graham, the White mother of multiracial, part Black children, was in the 1990s the most prominent political activist working to add a multiracial category to the US Census. She continues well into the new century to push the notion that the creation of a multiracial category for people of mixed ancestry would be a step toward a happy future day when the United States would be “post racial[,] … [when] we have finally, gone beyond race, transcended it, and have become … color-blind.”³⁷ Well, no. Graham is a social conservative who, it seems possible to me, may have been intent on saving her daughters from what she saw as the sad fate of having to grow up as Black people in America, and so she may have sought a middle racial status for them. But very few multiracial activists or scholars who study multiraciality would support Graham’s extreme interpretation, and most would repudiate it. A great deal of the scholarship that has emerged in the past decade, in fact, has carefully examined the ways that racism continues to operate in the context of racial mixture, multiracial identity, and the multiracial movement.³⁸

That has not kept a small cadre of monoracialists from attacking the multiracial movement and scholars who study racial mixture. Here I am thinking primarily of Lewis Gordon, Jon Michael Spencer, Rainier Spencer, and Jared Sexton. They point to a real tension that exists between some African American intellectuals and the multiracial idea over the lingering fear that, for some people, adopting a multiracial identity is a dodge to avoid being Black. If so, that might tend to sap the strength of a monoracially defined movement for Black community empowerment. So they open up the possibility of thinking critically about the political consequences of the multiracial idea. But sadly, all these authors argue from their conclusion to their evidence; that is, they start from the conviction that the multiracial idea is a bad one, and then they cherry-pick quotes and misrepresent the positions of key thinkers in order to pursue their point. They insist on monoraciality: one cannot be mixed or multiple; one must choose ever and only to be Black. I don’t have a problem with that as a political choice for an individual, but to insist that it is the only possibility flies in the face of a great deal of human experience—as Henry Louis Gates Jr., says, “We are all mulattos”³⁹—and it ignores the history of how modern racial ideas emerged. When nothing else seems likely to work, Sexton in particular simply resorts to ad hominem attacks on the motives and personal lives of the writers themselves.⁴⁰ Obama, in his critique of his college friend Joyce, made an argument similar to the one that these writers present, but he did it with more grace and intellectual integrity.

What the increasing acceptance of intermarriage over the past three or four decades, together with the rise of the multiracial movement, perhaps does mean is fairly simple. More than at any other time in US history, most Americans seem comfortable with the idea that people who are identified as members of different races should know each other, mix socially, and perhaps marry when they choose to do so. That is new in the current generations of adults. So, too, there is a new openness on the part of a lot of people to consider the constructed quality of racial identities and the contingent nature of racial affiliations.

STUDIES OF MIXED RACE: WHERE WE HAVE BEEN AND WHERE WE MIGHT GO

There is a long tradition of studies of Black-White mixing and multiracial people, dating back more than a century, to the novels of Charles Chesnutt and Nella Larsen, the sociology of W. E. B. Du Bois and Edward Reuter, and the philosophizing of Jean Toomer and George Schuyler.⁴¹ Romanzo Adams and his Hawai‘i colleagues added an Asian dimension beginning in the 1930s.⁴² The current wave of mixed-race studies development began much more recently, in the late 1970s and 1980s, with several dissertations by people like Christine Hall, Nathan Strong, and Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu.⁴³

Every student of multiracial matters will be familiar with the First Book of Root, the Second Book of Root, the Book of Davis, and the Book of Daniel. Maria Root gathered the work of two dozen social scientists in two edited volumes in 1992 and 1995, on topics as disparate as the psychology of multiracial people passing for Black or White, the racialized politics of Native American reservations, and the social dilemmas faced by Amerasians in Vietnam. One of her most celebrated achievements was the “Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People,” a fierce statement of identity independence that has been much reprinted, and indeed has been known to be chanted at retreats and to appear on T-shirts. F. James Davis in 1991 wrote a sociologically inflected history of the one-drop rule in the United States, in a book called Who Is Black? One Nation’s Definition. G. Reginald Daniel gave us what may turn out to be the definitive account of the multiracial movement, together with its intellectual and cultural antecedents, in More than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order. These are the foundational texts in this field.⁴⁴

Other major markers in the growth of mixed-race studies include Martha Menchaca’s Recovering History, Reconstructing Race: The Indian, Black, and White Roots of Mexican Americans; Ramón Gutiérrez’s When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away; Circe Sturm’s Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma; Karen Leonard’s Making Ethnic Choices; Theda Perdue’s “Mixed Blood” Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South; Jayne Ifekwunigwe’s masterful synthesis, “Mixed Race” Studies; Kip Fulbeck’s Part Asian—100% Hapa; Martha Hodes’s White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South; and Kimberly McClain DaCosta’s provocation, Making Multiracials: State, Family, and Market in the Redrawing of the Color Line.⁴⁵

I admire these writers and many others who work in the field. Yet, when I reflect on the development of mixed-race studies over the past couple of decades, I think I see some ways in which the field has fallen short of what it might have been. Some examples: For reasons that pretty much escape me, a lot of writers in this field have failed to distinguish between the study of interracial mating and marriage (the coming together of two monoracially defined people) and studies of multiraciality (the lives and identity choices of people who have mixed ancestry). It does not take a great deal of imagination to figure out that parents’ issues are not necessarily their children’s issues; anyone who has been either a parent or a child knows this. Yet somehow this distinction has escaped a whole lot of authors, including some very smart people like Werner Sollors. It is also an intergenerational issue that has plagued the multiracial movement and organizations like Multiracial Americans of Southern California and the Biracial Family Network.⁴⁶

Writing, scholarly and otherwise, on the mixed-race question has run very heavily to personal and family stories about identity. The story these books tell is usually pretty much the same. A person finds out he or she has mixed ancestry—maybe a long-kept family secret, as in the case of Edward Ball, perhaps something more immediate about mommy and daddy, as in the story of Gregory Howard Williams. The person goes on a quest, finds out the family secret, writes that story, achieves self-understanding and racial closure, goes on Oprah, and becomes a blessing to countless other mixed people (and a titillation, perhaps, to monoracially identified people everywhere who wonder whether, just maybe, their family has a more interesting story than they have been led to believe). This genre is useful for helping readers identify with the issue of racial mixedness and the complicated ways that families work and, well, don’t. Since the multiracial movement is largely a post-adolescent identity quest, books like these are helpful, even inspiring ones, and indeed I use them in my classes sometimes.⁴⁷

I am less clear what I think about a new development, which has chosen to go by the name Critical Mixed Race Studies (always capitalized, sometimes abbreviated CMRS). An association has been founded—the CMRS Association has been meeting since 2010—a discipline proclaimed, and an excellent online journal inaugurated. I don’t doubt the earnestness, insight, or skill of the scholars who are beginning this task. They say they want to look critically at racial issues, unpack received ideas about race, and bring a new, multiracialist perspective to scholarship and education, from universities down to secondary and even elementary schools. All well and good. But I do question whether critical mixed race studies is a discipline—we apply that term too loosely these days, when I think we really mean “field of study” or “point of view.” In this case I respect the practitioners and support the task, but I am a bit wary about the triumphal tone with which some of the CMRS people seem to be proceeding.⁴⁸

I do have a few ideas about where mixed-race studies might direct its energies with profit in the years to come. We have had a great deal of writing on the coming together of Black and White—both interracial couples and mixed-race people—and also on Asian and White mixing. The past decade has witnessed a spate of writing about the Black-Indian nexus.⁴⁹ We have had comparatively less writing on the complexities of Latino identities. What really is going on, racially and culturally speaking, in mixed Dominican–Puerto Rican families, for example? We don’t know very much about the social and psychological dynamics that have attended the pairing of African Americans and Asian Americans, of Asian and Latino mixes, of Latinos and Native peoples, and so on. Rudy Guevarra’s work on Mexipinos—interracial Filipino and Mexican working-class communities and families over several generations—is a start in this direction. I also am heartened by the writing of Julia Schiavone Camacho, Verónica Castillo-Muñoz, and others on the nexus of Mexicans, Native peoples, Chinese, and Japanese from the late nineteenth century up to the mid-twentieth, forming a multiracial working class, and in fact multiracial families, in northern Mexico and across the border into the US Southwest.⁵⁰

We also can learn some things from thinking about mixed race in other places besides the United States and Britain, where most of the research to date has been situated. Schiavone Camacho and Castillo-Muñoz take us across the US-Mexico border and remind us that if we are to understand racial relationships we are going to have to get outside nationalist frames. It will be very helpful, I think, if other scholars follow their lead, not only in crossing borders, but also in looking at all the peoples who make up Mexicans, not just the mestizo myth of Castilians and Indians, but also Africans, Chinese, Filipinos, and others. The burgeoning literature on mestizaje may lead us in that direction.⁵¹ We can learn a great deal about the role that empire has played in racial mixing if we follow Ann Laura Stoler and Eric Alan Jones to Indonesia, Lily Welty to Japan and Okinawa, or other scholars to Malaysia and the Philippines and contemplate mixedness in such places. What is the meaning of mixedness for Chinese Thais or Vietnamese Cambodians, who have lived for generations as partly mixed, partly segregated minorities, who also have ties to the homelands of some of their great-grandparents? How do people of mixed jati parentage function in Indian society? Rebecca King-O’Riain, Stephen Small, and their colleagues have published Global Mixed Race, which offers a comparative look at multiraciality in a dozen different countries, none of them the United States. From a very different platform—not mixed-race studies but creole studies—Robin Cohen and Paola Toninato have begun to compare mixed identities in a lot of places. I would like to see more of that work in the years to come. I am not sure how creole studies and mixedrace studies ought to come together, but it would be a good idea if they started to talk with each other.⁵²

I like very much the turn to beauty culture that Margaret Hunter, Joanne Rondilla, and others have been taking. It is a way of unpacking the issues attendant upon racial multiplicity, and of linking them with gender issues, for beauty is a far more important issue with regard to women’s life chances than it is to men’s. I would hope that someone would tackle the beauty issues related to race and mixedness for men as well.⁵³

The biggest thing that long was missing from mixed-race studies was the intersection of racial mixing and sexuality. Were I to write Mixed Blood today instead of a quarter century ago, I would have to reframe the entire discussion, because except for a couple of paragraphs, the book has nothing at all to say about gay or lesbian couples. There are racialized dimensions in gay and lesbian sex, romantic relationships, and marriages, as there are for heterosexual couples. Where a quarter century ago there was not much scaffolding on which to build an interpretation of interracial issues in gay and lesbian couples, scholars have begun to explore the racial dimensions of LGBT relationships in the new century.⁵⁴ Martin Manalansan addresses these issues for Filipinos in Global Divas. Amy Sueyoshi examines the complex racial and sexual wanderings of turn-of-the-last-century writer Yone Noguchi. Judy Tzu-Chun Wu opens up the interracial lesbian life of Doctor Mom Chung. Pablo Mitchell explores race and sexuality among Mexican Americans in Coyote Nation and West of Sex, as does Horacio Rocque Ramírez in Queer Latino San Francisco. Nayan Shah and Amy Steinbugler have contributed solid monographs.⁵⁵ We need many more such efforts. We need a lot of studies of gay sexuality and relationship building, including racialized dynamics in cross-racial gay and lesbian couples. As we expand our exploration of the racialized dynamics of lesbian and gay relationships, we might want to ask questions like these: Who pairs with whom, how and why? What are the images that groups have of each other, and how do those images work in the sphere of gay sexual thinking, feeling, and doing? When lesbian and gay couples have children, what place does race play in the ways they raise those children, and how do the children shape their racial identities?

As this book goes to press, the US Supreme Court’s decision invalidating the Defense of Marriage Act is still fresh. The arguments in that case, for and against gay and lesbian couples being allowed to marry, have been made for several years, but the judgment of history has not yet begun to coalesce.⁵⁶ At this early stage, it seems likely that the DOMA decision will take its place alongside 1967’s Loving v. Virginia case, which ruled that laws forbidding interracial marriage were unconstitutional. Instead of the Court insisting that states must allow formerly prohibited marriages, as in the Loving decision, gay marriage seems to be coming about piecemeal, one state after another, with increasing velocity. The somewhat parallel legal history of the end to bans on interracial and homosexual marriages will surely be part of the story that will be told in multiracial studies in the future.

IS MIXED RACE AN ETHNIC GROUP?

In 1995, in a paper at a mixed-race conference in Hawai‘i, I posed this grammatically awkward question: “Is there a groupness in mixedness?”⁵⁷ That is, given that people of mixed ancestry tend to have a complex of similar experiences, do they constitute a meaningful social group, or are these simply individual experiences that are similar? In particular, do mixed people constitute an ethnic or racial group of their own, independent from the groups with which they may share partial ancestry? That is, should we amend David Hollinger’s racial pentagram (Black-White-Asian-Latino-Indian) to include a sixth group, multiracial people?⁵⁸ Two decades later, the question remains.

To be sure, there is an individual experience of mixedness, one that is increasingly acknowledged by the public in the United States and elsewhere. Susan Graham contends that this amounts to an ethnic group–like quality for mixed people as well. She argues for a separate multiracial category, alongside the five current racial categories, on census and other government forms. And she believes this sixth, multiracial group to be a good thing, possibly because, if it were acknowledged widely, it would get her kids out of the racial trap of being thought to be Black. Jared Sexton agrees with Graham that there is a group quality to multiraciality, and he says it’s bad, because he sees it as a betrayal of monoracially defined Black people.

But Sexton and Graham are outliers in the conversation about multiraciality. Many people—from Maria Root and her “Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People” to the MAVIN Foundation to a host of community groups and Internet communication sites—avoid both these extremes. They simply do their best to create group cohesion, a common set of principles, a network of connection, and ultimately a panethnicity as multiracial people.⁵⁹

Still, there are a couple of problems with the idea that multiracial people can constitute a racial or ethnic group of their own. For one thing, it seems to me that the multiracial identity quest is something of a lifestage thing. I have spent more than a quarter century watching several thousand people of mixed ancestry struggle with their identity, encounter the multiracial idea, embrace it, become activists and students of the phenomenon, find stable places of identity, and then move on to other life tasks. Cathy Tashiro, a medical anthropologist and nursing scholar, interviewed elder multiracials—people in their sixties and seventies. What were their most pressing topics of concern? Their bodies did not work so well anymore. A spouse had died and they were lonely. Their children did not visit them enough. They were having a tough time getting by on a fixed income. Death loomed on the horizon. By that time in their lives, they had pretty much settled who they wanted to be, racially speaking, and other topics took center stage.⁶⁰ I have never heard of a similar study of aging issues for monoracially defined groups, so I don’t know for sure that the racial issue recedes in similar fashion for monoracial people. I suspect that for some it does. But for many of those on whom American racial hierarchy falls most heavily, I am pretty sure race remains powerful throughout their lives. Still, I do wonder if it is possible for a stable racial grouping to exist if it is based on an issue that people address in their young adult years and then set to the side as they go on with their lives.

It also strikes me that, in twenty-first-century America, it will be hard to sustain a long-standing group of people called multiracials or mixedrace people. In certain other historical settings, particular groups such as the Métis in Canada, the Coloureds in southern Africa, or small groups of triracial isolates such as the Brass Ankles, Redbones, or Lumbee in the United States have maintained definable mixed-race communities over many generations.⁶¹ But that was partly a matter of their being forced to form separate communities, because interracial mixing was officially forbidden. Racial boundaries between European and Native, European and African, and White and Black were officially kept solid, so people who in defiance of the rules in fact were mixed really had no choice but to stick together and mate within the pool of other (mostly related) mixed people.

In our time, by contrast, the very forces that gave rise to the multiracial movement and the acceptance of the multiracial idea—a society-wide openness to interracial interaction and to the idea of multiplicity—militate against the formation of an enduring, separate, mixed-race group. So while there surely are experiences—sociological, psychological, familial, perhaps political—that a lot of mixed folks have in common, and although there are a lot of support groups through which multiracial people cycle their activities for periods in their lives, it seems to me that there is not, in fact, an enduring groupness to multiracial mixedness.

What, then, does this multiracial moment—the Obama moment, if you will—suggest about the state and future of race in the United States? Well, it suggests that we do live at a moment when no one really blinks if a Black character kisses an Asian character on Grey’s Anatomy, when public figures like the musician Lenny Kravitz and the speed skater Apolo Anton Ohno are known to have multiracial parentage, and when that mixedness is not seen as a problem. The social taboo against interracial intimacy seems to have declined to the point where antimiscegenist sentiments that were commonplace a generation ago now seem retrograde and impolite, the stuff of radical Tea Partying. In that sense, perhaps we are becoming an Obama nation. On the other hand, if Gary Nash was right when he wrote about the “hidden history of mestizo America,” then maybe we have been an Obama nation all along.

BARACK OBAMA AS RACIAL EMBLEM

How are we to assess Barack Obama’s impact as a racial figure?⁶² He has not been a postracial president. Rather, for the most part, he has succeeded in performing a balancing act between Blackness and Whiteness in his self-presentation and in the public imagination. Obama has always performed Whiteness perfectly, and he has usually performed Blackness pretty convincingly—these are among the skills that have been crucial to his success. His breakthrough moment came at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, where the young Illinois state senator delivered the keynote speech. Showing promise of a future as Healer-in-Chief, he proclaimed:

There is not a liberal America and a conservative America—there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America—there’s the United States of America….

We worship an “awesome God” in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the red states. We coach Little League in the blue states, and yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the red states. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the Stars and Stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.⁶³

Not everyone caught it, but in that speech Obama marked himself as an evangelical Christian. His God remark strummed the chords of “Awesome God,” which was then the most popular praise song being sung in White evangelical churches across the nation.⁶⁴

Obama performed racial legerdemain once again four years later when he won the Iowa Democratic Party caucuses—a first, surprising victory in his meandering path to the Democratic nomination and later the presidency. Iowans are a churchy lot, Democrats nearly as much as Republicans. They are good neighbors and family folk. Most of them are sincerely good, Christian, White people who want to do a good, generous thing when they can. They believe in hard work and, the Democrats among them at least, believe that it’s important for people to work together and take care of one another. In Barack Obama, Iowa caucusers rightly perceived one of their own. He was that nice, clean-cut, well-spoken Negro young man who knew all the words to the hymns they sang on Sunday. It made them feel good to vote for someone Black who was like them in so many ways.

In that first campaign and as president, Obama performed his Blackness only sporadically, though with considerable fluency when he chose to do so. He was a Black man, but he was a particular kind of Black man, one whose multiracial, international growing-up story we knew: Kenya, Hawai‘i, Indonesia, Occidental College, Columbia, Harvard Law. More conventional Black politicians were not the sort who could get elected to the presidency, for as smart and driven and well connected as they might be, they could not perform Whiteness the way that Obama could. And then, in office, Obama chose to perform simply as President, seldom as an explicitly racialized figure, despite some opponents’ attempts to paint him as one.⁶⁵

None of Obama’s signature policy achievements—creating a national healthcare system, rescuing the auto industry, reforming the banking system, ending overt discrimination against gays in the military, exiting the Iraq war, avoiding a second Great Depression, killing Osama Bin Laden, surveillance of private citizens, drone attacks—had a racial or civil rights theme. It is as if, on the racial front, it was enough that a person of his race was elected. Obama chose to operate in a race-neutral manner throughout his first term and well into his second.

Does Barack Obama’s double election to the presidency then mean that America has arrived at a postracial moment in our history? Hardly.⁶⁶ Despite the nonracialized way in which Obama has acted as president, both those who supported him and those who opposed him did so at least partly in racial terms. The enthusiasm for Obama among American voters (and those millions in other countries who celebrated with us in November 2008) was racialized. Liberals—and a lot of nonliberals who were people of goodwill—applauded Obama’s ascendancy as a partial fulfillment of the promise of the Civil Rights movement. I confess that I did not think I would see a Black president in my lifetime, and I was pretty jazzed when it happened. The historic nature of this election was felt around the globe. On election night 2008 I was in a small city in Germany where five hundred university students took over an entire restaurant and stayed through the night, until five o’clock in the morning, awaiting the final news that Obama had been elected. Part of the enthusiasm, in the United States and abroad, was generated by Obama’s political skills, his positions on issues, and the respite he promised from George Bush’s mistakes. But much of it was that a Black man could be elected to America’s highest office.

Likewise, opposition to President Obama was and remains racialized. Tea Party rally signs regularly depicted the president as a witch doctor with a bone through his nose or in other dehumanizing disguises that had African themes. On April 19, 2010, White gun rights activists brought loaded weapons and fiery rhetoric to two small national parks—Gravelly Point and Fort Hunt—in Virginia just across the Potomac from the White House. Can you imagine the outcry if Black loudmouths had brought guns and made threatening speeches across from the White House while a White president was in residence? Michael Steel, former Republican National chairman, commented on the Republican 2013 shutdown of the federal government in a vain attempt to stop the Affordable Care Act: “It’s not about Obamacare. It’s about Obama.” He went on to label Obama’s race as the reason they opposed vehemently any attempt to work with him or his party. Conservative commentators, from Fox News and elsewhere, piled on Michelle Obama. They objected to Barack and Michelle exchanging a congratulatory fist bump, calling their gesture gangland thuggery. They made demeaning comments about Mrs. Obama’s arms, implying she lacked femininity, and the shape of her buttocks, suggesting she was no person to be lecturing the nation’s youth on weight and diet. And they tried to make her out to be an Angry Black Woman rather than a warm, intelligent, articulate First Lady.⁶⁷

Obama was repeatedly racialized as Other. It began during the Democratic primary campaign in 2008, with Hillary Clinton’s reference to “real Americans, White Americans” not supporting Obama, implying that her opponent, because he was not fully White, was not a real American and not fit to lead Americans. When some ignorant critics contended that the Protestant Obama was a Muslim (and Muslims have come in for a lot of hate since 2001), Mrs. Clinton did not correct them. Instead, responding to a Steve Croft question on CBS’s 60 Minutes, she stared into the camera and said merely, “I take him on the basis of what he says”—that he is a Christian—“and, you know, there isn’t any reason to doubt that.” She knew better, but she wanted the top job and so was willing to say pretty much anything to get it.⁶⁸

Then there were the contentions about the president’s place of birth, which escalated as the 2012 election approached. Presidential faux-candidate and TV personality Donald Trump and other birthers contended that Barack Obama was not an American citizen because he was born, they said, in Kenya. Hence, he was not legitimately president. They had no evidence for their claim about his birthplace, but that did not stop them from declaring him illegitimate. Orly Taitz, while a 2012 birther candidate for the US Senate from California, promised that if elected she would “demand investigation and prosecution of governmental officials who are aiding and abetting Barack Obama in his occupation of the position of the US President without any valid identification papers.”⁶⁹

President Obama produced his 1961 Honolulu birth certificate and the Republican governor of Hawai‘i pronounced it authentic. But Trump insisted that “a lot of people do not think it was an authentic certificate.”⁷⁰ Yes, it was authentic. But it doesn’t matter. Article 2 of the Constitution declares, “No person except a natural born citizen … shall be eligible to the office of President.” It does not say the person has to be born in the United States.

Since the founding of the nation, US law has always recognized two ways to be a “natural born citizen.” One can be born on US soil (the law of jus soli) or one can be born to a parent who is a US citizen (jus sanguinis). US law in this matter follows English Common Law, which has recognized both principles for many centuries. The first US Congress in 1790 passed a law declaring that “The children of citizens of the United States that may be born beyond the sea, or outside the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural-born citizens of the United States.”⁷¹

No one is arguing that President Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was not a US citizen in 1961. Therefore, it doesn’t matter if Barack Obama was born in Hawai‘i, in Kenya, or in a rocket ship on the way to Mars. He still is a natural born US citizen.

In 2008 no one questioned John McCain’s eligibility to hold the office of president. Yet McCain was born in—wait for it—Panama. He was born in a US naval hospital in the Canal Zone, territory that the United States controlled in much the same way that it controls Guantánamo Bay today. If the birthers want to argue that the Panama Canal Zone was US soil, then they will have to concede that Guantánamo Bay is US soil and subject to the rule of US law—hardly a position they are likely to advocate. Then there is the citizenship status of George Romney, the former Michigan governor and father of the 2012 presidential candidate. The elder Romney was born in Mexico and came to the United States with his US citizen parents when he was a small boy, apparently without papers. When George Romney ran for president in 1967, no one seriously questioned his citizenship status. Nor, to my knowledge, has anyone questioned the US citizenship of Mitt Romney.⁷²

It is worth pointing out that some of the people who questioned President Obama’s US citizenship, like US Senator Dean Heller (Republican of Nevada) and presidential candidate Ron Paul (then a Republican congressmember from Texas), also said they wanted to end jus soli—citizenship for immigrants’ children by virtue of their birth on US soil. They really can’t have it both ways. Without both jus sanguinis and jus soli, we would not have any natural born citizens at all, and no one would be eligible to run for president.⁷³

This is all about race, not about citizenship or personal history. Questioning President Obama’s US citizenship, like suggesting he is a secret Muslim, is thinly veiled code. What the conspiracy theorists really mean is that President Obama is not legitimately president because he is Black. It is long past time to end this birther nonsense. It doesn’t matter where President Obama was born (it was in Hawai‘i, but it doesn’t matter). He is a US citizen, and he is president. He has been elected twice, and he has been exercising the powers of the office for years. The birthers need to get over it, but they show few signs of getting that message.

Barack Obama maintained his balancing act—performing Whiteness daily, making a nod toward Blackness now and then, but mainly trying to be president of all the people and not merely a racial figure—until 2013. The year before, Trayvon Martin, an unarmed, Black, seventeen-year-old Floridian, was stalked and killed by George Zimmerman, a volunteer neighborhood watchman and wannabe cop. The case became a cause cèlèbre, with liberals horrified at what they saw as a racial killing and conservatives complaining that Zimmerman was being lynched for having behaved reasonably.⁷⁴

In the end, a jury acquitted Zimmerman. An uproar ensued. Barack Obama’s response was instructive in his departure from his usual neutral racial stance. A few days after the verdict, while demonstrations and counterdemonstrations were going on across the country and the punditry was aflame, Obama walked into the White House briefing room without a script and said some very personal things about race. He did not criticize the verdict, but he did say:

Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago…. [T]he African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away.

There are very few African American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me. There are very few African American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me—at least before I was a senator. There are very few African Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often. It happened to me….

The African American community is also knowledgeable that there is a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws—everything from the death penalty to enforcement of our drug laws.

Obama ended on a hopeful note:

I don’t want us to lose sight that things are getting better. Each successive generation seems to be making progress in changing attitudes when it comes to race. It doesn’t mean we’re in a post-racial society. It doesn’t mean that racism is eliminated. But when I talk to Malia and Sasha, and I listen to their friends and I see them interact, they’re better than we are—they’re better than we were—on these issues. And that’s true in every community that I’ve visited all across the country.⁷⁵

Clearly, Barack Obama was experiencing the Zimmerman verdict and the killing of Trayvon Martin as a Black man, not just as the president of all the Americans. In making a personal statement, he was spending some of the goodwill he had earned in his years as president. Yet he kept his response personal rather than programmatic. It was a human response, not a policy intervention.

But, as he said, on race, American society is indeed getting better. The very fact of his presidency; our society’s recognition of his racial mixedness; his ability to speak truth about the verdict instead of platitudes—all these point toward how far we have come since people like Emmett Till and Vincent Chin were targeted for murder on account of their race.⁷⁶ That he could not also speak his anger at the killing of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of George Zimmerman, without losing the attention and assent of White Americans, shows how far we have yet to go.

NOTES

This chapter began life as the keynote address at a conference on Obama and multiraciality hosted by Ramón Gutiérrez and Matt Briones at the University of Chicago in 2010. I am grateful to them and to the other conference participants, particularly Martha Hodes, Ralina Joseph, and Juliette Maiorana, for their perceptive comments.

  1. The text quoted here is from the New York Times, March 18, 2008. See also Clarence E. Walker and Gregory D. Smithers, The Preacher and the Politician: Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama, and Race in America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009).

  2. The title of this chapter represents an attempt to rescue a concept—a possible sense of historical identification between Barack Obama and the American people—from the clutches of a political hack named Jerome R. Corsi, whose screed, Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008), came out during Obama’s first presidential campaign.

  3. Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (New York: Kodansha, 1996), 91–92; original emphasis.

  4. Oscar Avila, “Obama’s Census Choice: ‘Black,’” Los Angeles Times, April 4, 2010.

  5. For a perceptive argument against the postracial fantasy, see Suki Ali, Mixed-Race, Post-Race: Gender, New Ethnicities and Cultural Practices (Oxford: Berg, 2003).

  6. This essay is both theoretical and historiographical. The notes are extensive, but they can only suggest the rich scholarship that has come into being. I hope the reader will be forgiving if I have left out some of his or her favorite books. I have left out many of my favorites, too.

  7. Gary B. Nash, Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early America (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974); Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Paul Spickard, Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity (New York: Routledge, 2007).

  8. Paul Spickard, “Race and Nation, Identity and Power: Thinking Comparatively about Ethnic Systems,” in Race and Nation: Ethnic Systems in the Modern World, ed. Paul Spickard (New York: Routledge, 2005), 1–29.

  9. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994); Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992); C. Loring Brace, “Race” Is a Four-Letter Word: The Genesis of the Concept (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). It may well be the case that a sixth racialized panethnicity—Arab or Middle Eastern or Muslim American—is currently being formed. See Anny Bakalian and Mehdi Bozorgmehr, Backlash 9/11: Middle Eastern and Muslim Americans Respond (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem: Being Young and Arab in America (New York: Penguin, 2008); Edward E. Curtis IV, Muslims in America: A Short History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, ed., The Muslims of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Amir Marvasti and Karyn D. McKinney, Middle Eastern Lives in America (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004); Michael W. Suleiman, ed., Arabs in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999).

10. Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Their Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); John A. Arthur, Invisible Immigrants: African Immigrant Diaspora in the United States (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000); Reuel R. Rogers, Afro-Caribbean Immigrants and the Politics of Incorporation: Ethnicity, Exception, or Exit (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Nancy Foner, ed., Islands in the City: West Indian Migration to New York (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Mary C. Waters, Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

11. Stephen E. Cornell, The Return of the Native: American Indian Political Resurgence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Hazel Hertzberg, The Search for an American Indian Identity: Modern Pan-Indian Movements (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1971); Joane Nagel, American Indian Ethnic Renewal: The Resurgence of Identity and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

12. On the formation of White race, see Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, 2 vols. (London: Verso, 1994, 1997); Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno, eds., Are Italians White? (New York: Routledge, 2003); Thomas A. Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Ian Haney López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998); David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991); Alexander Saxton, The Rise of the White Republic (London: Verso, 1990).

On the formation of the Asian American race, see Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity; Emma Gee, ed., Counterpoint: Perspectives on Asian America (Los Angeles: UCLA Asian American Study Center, 1976); Russell Jeung, Faithful Generations: Race and New Asian American Churches (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005); Edward J. W. Park and John S. W. Park, Probationary Americans: Contemporary Immigration Policies and the Shaping of Asian American Communities (New York: Routledge, 2005); Lavina Dhingra Shankar and Rajini Srikanth, eds., A Part, Yet Apart: South Asians in Asian America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998); Amy Tachiki et al., eds., Roots: An Asian American Reader (Los Angeles: UCLA Asian American Study Center, 1971); Linda Trinh Vo, Mobilizing Asian American Community (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004); Linda Trinh Vo and Rick Bonus, eds., Contemporary Asian American Communities (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002); William Wei, The Asian American Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992); Helen Zia, Asian American Dreams (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000).

On the formation of the Latino panethnicity, see William V. Flores and Rina Benmayor, eds., Latino Cultural Citizenship (Boston: Beacon, 1997); Juan Gonzalez, Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America (New York: Penguin, 2000); David E. Hayes-Bautista, La Nueva California: Latinos in the Golden State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Roberto Suro, Strangers among Us: Latino Lives in a Changing America (New York: Knopf, 1998); Hector Tobar, Translation Nation: Defining a New American Identity in the Spanish-Speaking United States (New York: Riverhead, 2005).

13. Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis, Racialized Boundaries: Race, Nation, Gender, Colour and Class and the Anti-Racist Struggle (New York: Routledge, 1992), 148–55.

14. Judith A. Nagata, “What Is a Malay? Situational Selection of Ethnic Identity in a Plural Society,” American Ethnologist 1.2 (1974): 331–50; Daniel P. S. Goh, Matilda Gabrielpillai, Philip Holden, and Gaik Cheng Khoo, eds., Race and Multiculturalism in Malaysia and Singapore (New York: Routledge, 2009).

15. I hasten to point out that very few ethnic Germans would be comfortable with the concept of an “ethnic German”—in their perception, they are simply Germans, and others are simply not Germans. Most Germans, even people versed in racial analysis of other places, take offense if it is suggested that the divisions in German society are racial. Surely, this is understandable, given Germany’s troubled racial history, and the degree to which the German government and public have unflinchingly faced up to the racial atrocities of the 1930s and 1940s. But that does not make the patently racialized quality of intergroup relations in Germany today any less real, and obvious to the outside observer. See Richard Alba, Peter Schmidt, and Martine Wasmer, eds., Germans or Foreigners? Attitudes toward Ethnic Minorities in Post-Reunification Germany (New York: Palgrave, 2003); Betigül Ercan Argun, Turkey in Germany: The Transnational Sphere of Deutschkei (New York: Routledge, 2003); William A. Barbieri Jr., Ethics of Citizenship: Immigration Rights and Group Rights in Germany (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); Rita Chin, The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Rita Chin, Heide Fehrenbach, Geoff Eley, and Atina Grossmann, eds., After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Europe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009); Deniz Göktürk, David Gramling, and Anton Kaes, eds., Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration, 1955–2005 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

16. www.mavinfoundation.org/generationmix/about_faqs.html (February 6, 2010); Maria P. P. Root, “A Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People,” in The Multiracial Experience: Racial Borders as the New Frontier (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995), 6.

17. Gary B. Nash, “The Hidden History of Mestizo America,” presidential address, Organization of American Historians, Washington, DC, March 31, 1995, printed in Journal of American History 82.3 (1995): 941–62; Gary B. Nash, Forbidden Love: The Secret History of Mixed-Race America (New York: Holt, 1999).

18. Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 136–78; Martha Menchaca, Recovering History, Constructing Race: The Indian, Black, and White Roots of Mexican Americans (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001).

19. Ramón A. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991); Laura E. Gómez, Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race (New York: New York University Press, 2007); Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Ilona Katzew and Susan Deans-Smith, eds., Race and Classification: The Case of Mexican America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009); James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

20. Jordan, White over Black; Winthrop D. Jordan, “Historical Origins of the One-Drop Racial Rule in the United States,” ed. Paul Spickard, Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies 1 (2013): 98–132; Martha Hodes, ed., Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 35–138.

21. Theda Perdue, “Mixed Blood” Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003); Circe Sturm, Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 27–51; James F. Brooks, ed., Confounding the Color Line: The Indian-Black Experience in North America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 21–134.

On the continuing mixing of Native-identified people with people of European and African ancestry, see the other sections of Sturm and Brooks, as well as Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Claudio Saunt, Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Tiya Miles and Sharon P. Holland, eds., Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

22. Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997); Hodes, Sex, Love, Race, 141–327; Joel Williamson, New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (New York: Free Press, 1980); Bernie D. Jones, Fathers of Conscience: Mixed-Race Inheritance in the Antebellum South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009); Joshua D. Rothman, Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

23. Willard B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880–1920 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000); Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly, “By the Least Bit of Blood: The Allure of Blackness among Mixed-Race Americans of African Descent, 1862–1935” (unpublished MS); Audrey Elisa Kerr, The Paper Bag Principle: Class, Colorism, and Rumor and the Case of Black Washington, D.C. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006); Kent Anderson Leslie, Woman of Color, Daughter of Privilege: Amanda America Dickson, 1849–1893 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995); Ira Berlin, Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: Random House, 1974).

24. Dineen-Wimberly, “Least Bit of Blood”; Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly and Paul Spickard, “It’s Not That Simple: Multiraciality, Models, and Social Hierarchy,” in Multiracial Americans and Social Class, ed. Kathleen Korgen (New York: Routledge, 2010), 205–21; Margaret Hope Bacon, But One Race: The Life of Robert Purvis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007); Jean Toomer, draft autobiography, JWJ MSS. Series 1, b. 18: f. 493 (Beinecke Library, Yale University); Cynthia Earl Kerman and Richard Eldridge, The Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989); Thomas Dyja, Walter White: The Dilemma of Black Identity in America (New York: Ivan Dee, 2008); W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940); Mary Church Terrell, A Colored Woman in a White World (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2005; orig. 1940).

25. John Walton Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007; orig. 1938); Gary E. Moulton, John Ross, Cherokee Chief (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1978); William E. Unrau, Mixed Bloods and Tribal Dissolution: Charles Curtis and the Quest for Indian Identity (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971).

26. Sui Sin Far, Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995); Annette White-Parks, Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995); Diane Birchall, Onoto Watanna: The Story of Winnifred Eaton (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Onoto Watanna, The Half Caste and Other Writings (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002). On Wilcox, see Lauren L. Basson, White Enough to Be American? Race Mixing, Indigenous Peoples, and the Boundaries of State and Nation (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 95–140.

27. Spickard, Almost All Aliens, 262–73; Bruce Baum, The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race (New York: New York University Press, 2006); Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, ed., Race and the Enlightenment (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997); Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 1996); Jonathan Marks, Human Biodiversity: Genes, Race, and History (New York: Aldyne de Gruyter, 1995); William H. Tucker, The Science and Politics of Racial Research (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).

28. Loretta I. Winters and Herman L. DeBose, eds., New Faces in a Changing America: Multiracial Identity in the 21st Century (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2003).

29. Paul R. Spickard, Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).

30. Journals like Social History, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and especially Social Science History are fruit of that intellectual movement.

31. Bruno Lasker, Filipino Immigration (New York: Arno, 1969; orig. 1931); Romanzo Adams, Interracial Marriage in Hawaii (New York: Macmillan, 1937); Robert K. Merton, “Intermarriage and the Social Structure,” Psychiatry 4 (1941): 361–74; Kingsley Davis, “Intermarriage in Caste Societies,” American Anthropologist 43 (1941): 376–95; Ruby Jo Reeves Kennedy, “Single or Triple Melting Pot? Intermarriage Trends in New Haven, 1870–1940,” American Journal of Sociology 49 (1944): 331–39; Milton M. Gordon, Assimilation in American Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 224–32; Harry H. L. Kitano, Japanese Americans, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1976), 210–11.

32. Merton, “Intermarriage and the Social Structure”; Davis, “Intermarriage in Caste Societies”; David M. Buss, “Human Mate Selection,” American Scientist 73 (January–February 1985): 47–51.

33. Alice Walker, “The Divided Life of Jean Toomer,” New York Times, July 13, 1980, reprinted in Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983).

34. This paragraph follows closely my argument in “The Power of Blackness: Mixed-Race Leaders and the Monoracial Ideal,” in Racial Thinking in the United States, ed. Paul Spickard and G. Reginald Daniel (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), 103–23, which is reproduced elsewhere in this volume. Toomer’s surviving relatives confirmed my analysis in subsequent correspondence.

35. Gordon, Assimilation in American Life, 80. Unfortunately, too many people still make this assumption, despite abundant evidence to the contrary. Jessica Vasquez echoes Gordon’s argument in an otherwise very smart book, Mexican Americans across Generations: Immigrant Families, Racial Realities (New York: New York University Press, 2011).

36. Gin Pang and Larry Shinagawa, “Interracial Relationships and the Language of Denial” (unpublished manuscript, ca. 1998).

37. Susan Graham, “Is This President Obama’s Post-Racial America?,” January 20, 2009, Project RACE website, www.projectrace.com/fromthedirector/archive/012009_obama_post_racial_america.php (retrieved April 25, 2009). See also Susan R. Graham, “The Real World,” in Root, The Multiracial Experience, 15–36; Susan R. Graham, “Grassroots Advocacy,” in American Mixed Race, ed. Naomi Zack (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995), 185–90; www.projectrace.com.

38. E.g., Margaret L. Hunter, Race, Gender, and the Politics of Skin Tone (New York: Routledge, 2005); Joanne L. Rondilla and Paul Spickard, Is Lighter Better? Skin-Tone Discrimination among Asian Americans (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007); Cedric Herring, Verna M. Keith, and Hayward Derrick Horton, eds., Skin/Deep: How Race and Complexion Matter in the “Color-Blind” Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004); Kimberly McClain DaCosta, Making Multiracials: State, Family, and Market in the Redrawing of the Color Line (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007); G. Reginald Daniel, More than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002); David L Brunsma, ed., Mixed Messages: Multiracial Identities in the “Color-Blind” Era (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2006).

39. Gates is quoted in Mateo Gold, “‘Faces of America’ Reveals Family Ties,” Los Angeles Times, February 10, 2010.

40. Lewis R. Gordon, Her Majesty’s Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997); Jon Michael Spencer, The New Colored People: The Mixed-Race Movement in America (New York: New York University Press, 1997); Rainier Spencer, Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1999); Rainier Spencer, Challenging Multiracial Identity (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2006); Jared Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). For more detail, see my reviews of Sexton’s book in American Studies 50.1–2 (2009): 125–27, and of Jon Michael Spencer’s in Journal of American Ethnic History 18.2 (1999): 153–56.

41. Charles W. Chesnutt, The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1899); Charles W. Chesnutt, The House Behind the Cedars (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900); Charles W. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1901); Charles W. Chesnutt, Charles W. Chesnutt: Essays and Speeches, ed. Joseph R. McElrath Jr., Robert C. Leitz III, and Jesse S. Crisler (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Nella Larsen, Quicksand (New York: Knopf, 1928); Larsen, Passing (New York: Knopf, 1929); Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn; Edward Byron Reuter, The Mulatto in the United States, Including a Study of the Role of Mixed-Blood Races Throughout the World… (Boston: Badger, 1918); Reuter, Race Mixture: Studies in Intermarriage and Miscegenation (New York: Whittlesey House, 1931); Jean Toomer, A Jean Toomer Reader: Selected Unpublished Writings, ed. Frederik L. Rusch (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); George S. Schuyler, Racial Intermarriage in the United States: One of the Most Interesting Phenomena in Our National Life (Girard, KS: Haldeman-Julius Publications, 1929).

42. Adams, Interracial Marriage in Hawaii; Sidney L. Gulick, Mixing the Races in Hawaii: A Study of the Coming Neo-Hawaiian American Race (Honolulu: Hawaiian Board Book Rooms, 1937).

43. Christine C. I. Hall, “The Ethnic Identity of Racially Mixed People: A Study of Black-Japanese” (PhD diss., UCLA, 1980); Nathan Oba Strong, “Patterns of Social Interaction and Psychological Adjustment among Japan’s Konketsuji Population” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1978); Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, “Voices of Amerasians: Ethnicity, Identity and Empowerment in Interracial Japanese Americans” (EdD diss., Harvard University, 1987).

44. Maria P. P. Root, ed., Racially Mixed People in America (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1992); Root, The Multiracial Experience; F. James Davis, Who Is Black? One Nation’s Definition (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991); Daniel, More than Black?

45. Martha Menchaca, Recovering History, Reconstructing Race: The Indian, Black, and White Roots of Mexican Americans (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001); Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came; Sturm, Blood Politics; Karen Isaksen Leonard, Making Ethnic Choices: California’s Punjabi Mexican Amereicans (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992); Perdue, “Mixed Blood” Indians; Jayne Ifekwunigwe, “Mixed Race” Studies: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004); Kip Fulbeck, Part Asian—100% Hapa (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2006); Hodes, White Women, Black Men; DaCosta, Making Multiracials.

46. Werner Sollors, Neither Black nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Werner Sollors, ed., Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Werner Sollors, ed., An Anthology of Interracial Literature: Black-White Contacts in the Old World and the New (New York: New York University Press, 2004).

47. Some examples (though their name is legion): Edward Ball, Slaves in the Family (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998); Gregory Howard Williams, Life on the Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He Was Black (New York: Dutton, 1995); Shirlee Taylor Haizlip, The Sweeter the Juice: A Family Memoir in Black and White (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994); Lawrence Hill, Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2001); Neil Henry, Pearl’s Secret: A Black Man’s Search for His White Family (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Kevin R. Johnson, How Did You Get to Be Mexican? A White/Brown Man’s Search for Identity (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999); James McBride, The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother (New York: Riverhead, 1996); Kym Ragusa, The Skin between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging (New York: Norton, 2006).

There is, however, a more sinister subgenre: self-indulgent diva writings by multiracial children who have a more or less famous Black parent. At least Danzy Senna and Zadie Smith can write, even if they don’t have much to say that makes much sense. Not even that much can be said for the autobiographical writings of Bliss Broyard, Lisa Jones, or Rebecca Walker. See Danzy Senna, Caucasia (New York: Riverhead, 1998); Zadie Smith, White Teeth (New York: Random House, 2000); Bliss Broyard, One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life—A Story of Race and Family Secrets (New York: Little, Brown, 2007); Lisa Jones, Bulletproof Diva: Tales of Race, Sex, and Hair (New York: Doubleday, 1994); Rebecca Walker, Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self (New York: Riverhead, 2001).

48. http://las.depaul.edu/aas/About/CMRSConference/index.asp (retrieved July 21, 2010). The journal’s website is http://escholarship.org/uc/ucsb_soc_jcmrs.

49. Sturm, Blood Politics; Brooks, Confounding the Color Line; Miles, Ties That Bind; Miles and Holland, Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds; Claudio Saunt, Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Gabrielle Tayac, ed., indiVisible: African-Native American Lifes in the Americas (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2009); Celia E. Naylor, African Cherokees in Indian Territory: From Chattel to Citizens (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Melinda Maynor Lowery, Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

50. Rudy P. Guevarra Jr., Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012); Julia María Schiavone Camacho, Chinese Mexicans: Transpacific Migration and the Search for a Homeland (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Schiavone Camacho, “Crossing Boundaries, Claiming a Homeland: The Mexican Chinese Transpacific Journey to Becoming Mexican, 1930s–1960s,” Pacific Historical Review 78.4 (2009): 545–77; Verónica Castillo-Muñoz, “Divided Communities: Agrarian Struggles, Transnational Migration and Families in Northern Mexico, 1910–1952” (PhD diss., University of California, Irvine, 2009); Grace Peña Delgado, Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusion in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012); Jason Oliver Chang, “Racial Alterity in the Mestizo Nation,” Journal of Asian American Studies 14.3 (2011): 331–59. See also the fascinating international transformations of Native American–Hawaiian–Chinese families and individuals portrayed by David A. Chang in “Borderlands in a World at Sea: Concow Indians, Native Hawaiians, and South Chinese in Indigenous, Global, and National Space, 1860s–1880s,” Journal of American History 98 (2011): 384–403.

51. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Press, 1986); José Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race/La raza cósmica, trans. Didier T. Jaén (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997; orig. 1979); Colin M. MacLachlan and Jaime E. Rodriguez O., The Forging of the Cosmic Race: A Reinterpretation of Colonial Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). For critiques, see Virginia Q. Tilley, “Mestizaje and the ‘Ethnicization’ of Race in Latin America,” in Spickard, Race and Nation, 53–68; and Marilyn Grace Miller, The Rise and Fall of the Cosmic Race: The Cult of Mestizaje in Latin America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004). For reassertions of the concept, see Raphael Pérez-Torres, Mestizaje: Critical Uses of Race in Chicano Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); and Peter Wade, “Rethinking Mestizaje: Ideology and Lived Experience,” Journal of Latin American Studies 37 (2005): 239–57.

52. Schiavone Camacho, “Crossing Boundaries, Claiming a Homeland”; Castillo-Muñoz, “Divided Communities”; Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Eric Jones, Wives, Slaves, and Concubines: A History of the Female Underclass in Dutch Asia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010); Lily Anne Yumi Welty, “Advantage Not Crisis: Multiracial American Japanese in Post–World War II Japan and U.S., 1945–1972” (PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2012); Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain, Stephen Small, Minelle Mahtani, Miri Song, and Paul Spickard, eds., Global Mixed Race (New York: New York University Press, 2014); Robin Cohen and Paola Toninato, eds., The Creolization Reader: Studies in Mixed Identities and Cultures (New York: Routledge, 2010).

53. Hunter, Race, Gender, and the Politics of Skin Tone; Margaret L. Hunter, “Buying Racial Capital: Skin-Bleaching and Cosmetic Surgery in a Globalized World,” Journal of Pan African Studies 4.4 (2011): 142–64; Rondilla and Spickard, Is Lighter Better?; Ingrid Banks, Hair Matters: Beauty, Power, and Black Women’s Consciousness (New York: New York University Press, 2000); Evelyn Nakano Glenn, ed., Shades of Difference: Why Skin Color Matters (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009); Herring, Keith, and Horton, Skin/Deep; Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain, Pure Beauty: Judging Race in Japanese American Beauty Pageants (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Noliwe M. Rooks, Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture, and African American Women (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996); Solomon Leong, “Who’s the Fairest of Them All? Television Ads for Skin-Whitening Cosmetics in Hong Kong,” Asian Ethnicity 7.2 (2006): 167–81.

54. The first steps in this direction were taken by two pioneering essays: George Kitahara Kich, “In the Margins of Sex and Race: Difference, Marginality, and Flexibility,” in Root, Multiracial Experience, 263–76; and Karen Maeda Allman, “(Un)Natural Boundaries: Mixed Race, Gender, and Sexuality,” in Root, Multiracial Experience, 277–90.

55. Martin Manalansan, Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Amy Sueyoshi, Queer Compulsions: Race, Nation, and Sexuality in the Affairs of Yone Noguchi (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2012); Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, “Was Mom Chung a ‘Sister Lesbian’? Asian American Gender Experimentation and Interracial Homoeroticism,” Journal of Women’s History 13.1 (2001): 58–82; Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Doctor Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: The Life of a Wartime Celebrity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Pablo Mitchell, Coyote Nation: Sexuality, Race, and Conquest in Modernizing New Mexico, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Pablo Mitchell, West of Sex: Making Mexican America, 1900–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Nayan Shah, Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Amy C. Steinbugler, Beyond Loving: Intimate Racework in Lesbian, Gay, and Straight Interracial Relationships (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). See also Jason Lee Crockett, “Narratives of Racial Sexual Preference in Gay Male Subculture” (PhD diss., University of Arizona, 2010); Christopher Cutrone, “The Child with a Lion: The Utopia of Interracial Intimacy,” GLQ 6.2 (2000): 249–85; Kenneth Chan, “Rice Sticking Together: Cultural Nationalist Logic and the Cinematic Representations of Gay Asian-Caucasian Relationships and Desire,” Discourse 28.2–3 (2006): 178–96; Arnaldo Cruz-Malave and Martin F. Manalansan, eds., Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism (New York: New York University Press, 2002); Daniel Hurewitz, Bohemian Los Angeles and the Making of Modern Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Michael Harms-García and Ernesto Javier Martínez, eds., Gay Latino Studies: A Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); and Kevin J. Mumford, Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). I am grateful to Maribel Mira Martinez and Ashkon Moleai for helping me begin research in this area.

56. Robert Barnes, “At Supreme Court, Victories for Gay Marriage,” Washington Post, June 26, 2013.

57. Some of the papers from that conference, though not my final presentation, were published in We Are a People: Narrative and Multiplicity in Constructing Ethnic Identity, ed. Paul Spickard and W. Jeffrey Burroughs (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000).

58. David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995). I have argued elsewhere that the pentagram is already a hexagram—that is, that Arab Americans, Muslims, and other people of Middle Eastern and North African origin have come to be racialized gradually since the 1970s; Almost All Aliens, 425–27, 453–56. See also Nabeel Abraham, Sally Howell, and Andrew Shryock, eds., Arab Detroit 9/11: Life in the Terror Decade (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2011); Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America (New York: Penguin, 2008); Warren J. Blumenfeld, Khyati Y. Joshi, and Ellen E. Fairchild, eds., Investigating Christian Privilege and Religious Oppression in the United States (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2009); Amaney Jamal and Nadine Naber, eds., Race and Arab Americans before and after 9/11: From Invisible Citizens to Visible Subjects (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008); Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).

59. The MAVIN Foundation can be found at www.mavinfoundation.org/; Swirl is at http://swirlinc.wordpress.com/; the Mixed Network is at http://themixednetwork.com/; Multiracial Americans of Southern California is at www.ameasite.org/masc.asp; etc.

60. Cathy J. Tashiro, “Identity and Health in the Narratives of Older Mixed Race Asian Americans,” Journal of Cultural Diversity 13.1 (2006): 41–49; Cathy J. Tashiro, Standing on Both Feet: Voices of Older Mixed Race Americans (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2012).

61. Jennifer S. H. Brown and Jacqueline Peterson, eds., New Peoples: Being and Becoming Métis in North America (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1985); George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study of American and South African History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 94–135; Juliette Bridgette Milner-Thornton, The Long Shadow of the British Empire: The Ongoing Legacies of Race and Class in Zambia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Brewton Berry, Almost White (New York: Macmillan, 1963); Karen I. Blu, The Lumbee Problem: The Making of an American Indian People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

62. Thoughtful takes on Obama’s racial persona appear in Obama and the Biracial Factor: The Battle for a New American Majority, ed. Andrew J. Jolivette (Bristol: Policy Press, 2012); and Thomas J. Sugrue, Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). An excellent account of Obama’s presidency and the 2012 elections is Jonathan Alter, The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013). See also H. Samy Alim and Geneva Smitherman, Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). The next half-dozen pages of this essay owe much to a chapter, “Obama, Race, and the 2012 Election,” in Race and the Obama Phenomenon: The Vision of a More Perfect Multiracial Union, ed. G. Reginald Daniel and Hettie V. Williams (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014), 329–38; and to an op-ed piece I wrote for the San Jose Mercury News under the title “Birthers’ Attack on Obama Is Not Only Bogus, It’s Irrelevant” (June 16, 2012); I am grateful to Salim Yaqub for hounding me until I wrote it.

63. Barack Obama, Keynote Speech, Democratic National Convention, Fleet Center, Boston, July 27, 2004, www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/convention2004/barackobama2004dnc.htm (retrieved November 21, 2012).

64. Michael W. Smith, “Awesome God,” www.sing365.com (retrieved November 21, 2012). The refrain goes, “Our God is an awesome God, He reigns from Heaven above. With wisdom, power and love, Our God is an awesome God.”

65. Patrice Peck, “Biracial versus Black: Thought Leaders Weigh in on the Meaning of President Obama’s Biracial Heritage,” http://thegrio.com/2012/11/19 (retrieved November 19, 2012).

66. Sugrue, Not Even Past; Donald R. Kinder and Allison Dale-Riddle, The End of Race? Obama, 2008, and Racial Politics in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Michael Tesler and David O. Sears, Obama’s Race: The 2008 Election and the Dream of a Post-Racial America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Desmond S. King, Still a House Divided: Race and Politics in Obama’s America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).

67. Ashley Fantz, “Obama as Witch Doctor: Racist or Satirical?,” CNN.com, September 18, 2009 (retrieved November 24, 2012); Fredrick Kunkle and Ann Gerhart, “Gun-Rights Advocates Gather in Va. and D.C. to Celebrate ‘Historic Moment,’” Washington Post, April 20, 2010; Alexis Garrett Stodghill, “Tea Party Group Makes Racially-Tinged Obama Skunk Reference,” http://thegrio.com/2011/12/12 (retrieved November 19, 2012); Michael Steele, on Hardball with Chris Matthews, MSNBC (October 1, 2013).

68. “Clinton Says Obama Muslim Rumor Not True ‘As Far as I know,’” ABC News blog Political Punch (retrieved November 25, 2012).

69. http://orlytaitzforussenate2012.com/platform.html (retrieved May 29, 2012).

70. Steve Peoples, “Trump Overshadows Romney with ‘Birther’ Talk,” Associated Press, May 29, 2012.

71. Michael LeMay and Elliott Robert Barkan, eds., US Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999), 17.

72. Apparently there was some question raised by the American Independent Party about the elder Romney’s citizenship, but the matter went nowhere. In his 2012 stump speech, Mitt Romney frequently alluded to his birth in Michigan and that of his wife as proof of their US citizenship, and contrasted that to the birthers’ questioning of Obama’s citizenship.

73. http://deanheller.com (retrieved May 29, 2012); www.ronpaul.com/on-the-issues/border-security (retrieved November 24, 2012).

74. George Yancy and Janine Jones, eds., Pursuing Trayvon Martin: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Manifestations of Racial Dynaics (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012); Earl Ofari Hutchinson, America on Trial: The Slaying of Trayvon Martin (Los Angeles: Hutchinson Report E-books, 2013); Hunter Billings III, The Lynching of George Zimmerman (Amazon Digital Services, 2013).

75. www.businessinsider.com/obama-trayvon-martin-race-speech-video-text-2013-7 (retrieved July 19, 2013).

76. Stephen J. Whitfield, A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); Who Killed Vincent Chin?, dir. Christine Choy and Renee Tajima-Peña, POV (PBS, 1989).