What exactly is “critical” about critical race studies, and critical mixed race studies in particular? Of course, the term is widely demonized in political circles by people who have no direct knowledge of critical race theory or of the tradition of philosophical critique. While academic philosophers have generally not fallen prey to this demonization, they do have an unfortunate track record of using the term “critical race theory” in an ironically uncritical way as a catchall for academic work that touches on race, even when that work is neither deeply reflective nor engaged with rigorous traditions of thought on the subject. A truly critical race theory would refuse to take commonplace and unreflective assumptions about race and racial identities for granted and engage instead with the effects of racialization and the ways in which the concept of race is constructed and resisted.
On the subject of critical mixed race studies, where the all-but-universal definition of mixed identity is rooted in the racial identities of one’s (biological) parents, this critique starts at the most fundamental point, questioning the meaning of racial identity and mixedness in particular. Even as this critique opens up new ways of thinking mixed race embodiment, it also highlights ways in which the ostensible ambiguity of mixed race bodies is politicized–another crucial area for race theory.
The category of “mixed race” identity originates in the mid-20th century; before this point, terms for racial mixtures proliferated (mulatto, Eurasian, mestizo, melungeon are among those that have been used in the United States) but were not conceived as a single racial identity. “Mixed,” and the related term “multiracial,” emerged from the organizing of mixed race people and their parents, who sought greater acceptance and the ability to identify with more than one race on the US Census. The latter goal was achieved when, on the 2000 Census, Americans were for the first time permitted to “check all that apply” when identifying their race. Many mixed people, myself included, were glad to have official recognition and relieved to avoid the alienating pressure to choose one race in at least one official context. At the same time, this victory was a partial and ambiguous one from the perspective of racial justice; the “mixed race” category that achieved official recognition in the 21st century has all too much in common with outdated 19th-century conceptions of race.
Scholars and activists engaging with mixed race issues have, in the course of what is otherwise groundbreaking and critical work, nonetheless consistently defined mixed race in terms of biological parentage: a mixed person is someone with parents of two (or more) different races. While these definitions may not specify biological/genetic ancestry, the examples deployed and the populations recruited for research have, almost without exception, been the biological offspring of interracial couples, and texts often take pains to specify genetic ancestry in great detail, sometimes even specifying fractions or “blood quanta.” At the same time, contemporary scientists and sociologists firmly reject the idea that race is a biological reality, and theorists emphasize that lived racial identities are rooted not only in ancestry but in diverse and sometimes inconsistent elements such as appearance and culture. Defining mixed race identities purely through ancestry differentiates this category significantly from other modern racial categories, mistakenly treating (mixed) racial identity as a biological/genetic fact. This not only entrenches outdated racial essentialism but also heteronormative beliefs in which only heterosexual and reproductive biological relationships are recognized as real and formative relationships.
Against these outdated conceptions of racial identity, contemporary scholars of mixed race issues offer alternative accounts of the intertwining of racialization and kinship. Brigitte Fielder’s work explores proliferating accounts of mixed race kinship in 19th-century literature, including a story in which a mixed race protagonist embraces his racial identity only through the birth of his own child (what she calls “child to parent racialization”). Jaya Keaney’s research explores diverse and non-heteronormative instances of racializing intimacy in multiracial queer families’ use of assisted reproductive technology. My own work argues for a non-essentialist view of racializing kinships that makes space for transracial adoptions and other nontraditional family structures, making the case that a phenomenological account of racialized body habitus allows us to understand how intimate and formative relations can shape both bodies and identities in the absence of a biological relationship.
Two recurring themes in the memoirs of both mixed race and transracially adopted individuals are food and language. Mixed race theorist Samira Mehta and transracially adopted novelist Jenny Heijun Wills, for example, write of how their difficulty in tolerating spicy food was interpreted to mark them as not “really” Indian and Korean, respectively. Tolerance for the unique and delicious heat of kimchi, of course, is not biologically determined; despite their genetic ties to India and South Korea, neither Mehta nor Wills were raised eating these traditional cuisines. Mehta recounts realizing as an adult that most South Asian children are slowly acclimated to spicy food in their families of origin (a process that did not take place in her own family due to her Indian parent’s sensitive digestion.) Mehta learns to embody South Asianness–or at least, a South Asian palate–through the efforts of mixed race Indian friends who cook increasingly flavorful food for her over an extended period. Similarly, linguistic ability, or lack thereof, is often treated as a proxy for racial and ethnic identity, at least in many Asian and Hispanic communities. Like cooking and eating, language is a skill that can be learned (though, of course, it is often learned more easily and completely at a young age.) It is precisely for this reason that some might reject each as a marker of racial identity, though doing so begs the question, assuming that racial identities must be fixed and independent of context, agency, and experience; yet in mixed race experiences like Wills’ and Mehta’s, each is central to developing a sense of mixed race Asian identity.
Taking mixed race identity and experience seriously means reckoning with the embodied projects of racialization that Mehta and Wills describe as they cultivate racialized bodies (or at least, mouths and stomachs). Both language and food center the mouth, a site of particular porosity–one that epitomizes the ability of the body to affect and be affected by others through language, to be nourished by incorporating new material, and to engage in erotic exchange. While social constructivist accounts of identity can seemingly reduce away embodiment, I want to emphasize the ways that race is inscribed onto the body–not (only or primarily) through biological ancestry, but, after Ahmed, through the ways that bodies in proximity shape each other’s rhythms and capacities, and proximity shapes our perceptions of racial likeness.
The commonsense equation of mixedness and ancestry can be both a blessing and a curse for mixed race studies. On the one hand, it feeds the biological essentialism that dominates so much mixed race discourse, which roots mixedness in a quasi-genetic blood quantum. On the other hand, it invites us to think about bodies and kinships more deeply in relation to race, drawing out the ways in which kinships have themselves been racialized (think, for example, of the erstwhile one-drop rule and its effect of erasing white heritage from mainstream consciousness for generations of Black Americans) and the ways that relationships–both biological and non-biological–contribute to racialization. Freed from essentialist assumptions, mixed race experiences are a rich site at which to think through the lived experience of racialization and the way that it intersects with sexuality, kinship, embodiment, and more.
If the mixed race experience opens up the possibility for nuanced discussions of racial identity and racialized experience, mixed race people and bodies are more often misappropriated for the purposes of those who would rather avoid any critical discussions of race at all. Some exhibit “mixed race amnesia”–ignoring the histories of racial violence and colonial exploitation that have produced many generations of mixed race people and insisting that mixedness is new and intrinsically hopeful, an embodiment of postracial love and harmony. In these fantasies, race is disappearing into a medium-beige blend in which hard conversations about inequity and discrimination are no longer necessary. This utopian narrative, which I call “mixed race futurism,” erases the complex lived experiences of mixed people and the fraught histories of our ancestors.
Another more cynical approach seeks to discredit mixed race identities, as epitomized in Donald Trump’s jeer that mixed race Black and Indian 2024 Presidential candidate Kamala Harris had recently “turned black.” The fast-growing population of self-identified multiracial Americans, beneficiaries of a society that has increasingly allowed us to “check all that apply,” should chafe at the implied pressure to choose between our parents and our cultures. Many of us will also recognize from personal experience the whiff of authenticity testing–are you really Black?—and, I hope, have the critical perspective to recognize these authenticity tests as a divisive strategy to undermine people of color communities. Such attacks are, of course, attempts to divide and conquer racial and ethnic interest groups by turning the very bodies and identities of mixed people into a battleground.
Men like Trump, of course, have no particular interest in the historical and cultural shape of Blackness in America, or in Asian-American experiences, and so on; as much as they hope to foment discord in people of color communities, their central audience consists of those members of the racial majority who take evidence of racial ambiguity and multiplicity as a means to discredit racial identities and interests. If Kamala Harris isn’t Black–or just turned Black?—then their persistent attacks on her intelligence and sexual history–no matter how closely they map to classical strategies of misogynoir–must not be anti-Black, either. And if no one is sure who is Black–people are, they say, turning Black every day–then policies to create educational opportunities for Black students or protect Black voting rights would seem to be unjustified and incoherent. For these racial provocateurs, the ambiguity and multiplicity of mixed race identities are not only wedges used to divide people of color communities but also against analyses of racial inequity, demands for racial justice, or any analytical use of the concept of race at all.
It is behind such a regime of silence and invisibility, of course, that racism hides most effectively. Perhaps it does not matter, ultimately, whether racial injustice is whitewashed by utopian claims of a postracial society or by a contemptuous approach that seeks to mock and discredit racial identities. Both characteristically refuse to engage with the stark histories of racial injustices in the United States or with the deep inequities that persist. (Doing so, of course, is at the heart of “critical race theory.”)
Noting the ways in which mixed race identities are misappropriated to these ends, we can observe the risks of mixed race multiplicity, but also its promise. A nonfoundational, ambiguous account of mixed race identity, one not entirely rooted in biological ancestry, opens the door to ever more disparagement; at the same time, insisting on real and biologically essential identities not only cedes ground to the most extreme forms of biological racism (ethnic others are, we are told, “poisoning the blood of our country”) but also centers a divide-and-conquer politics that replaces racial coalition and solidarity with suspicion and authenticity tests. Critical mixed race studies should insist on the ability of mixed people to make sense of these ambiguities for ourselves, neither hiding them in a display of monoracial order nor allowing them to be weaponized politically against people of color communities. Luckily, the philosophical tradition–and that of Latine feminism most particularly–provides resources for thinking identities and politics which are resilient against these sorts of attacks, emphasizing instead the way that points of ambiguity can also be sites of coalition that cut across differences of race, ethnicity, and sexuality. Mixed race perspectives don’t only push for ambiguity and multiplicity in our thinking about race but also center how ambiguities are exploited in the name of white supremacy and highlight means of resistance.
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Sabrina Hom
Sabrina L. Hom is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville, Georgia, and an affiliate faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies. Her book, Critical Mixed Race Philosophy,is forthcoming from Bloomsbury. The views expressed here are her own and should not be taken to reflect those of her employer.
