Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
I wanted to talk today a little bit about the changing views of race in this post race
era by looking imparticullarly at racial ambiguity. The increasing rise of people who are identifying
as multi-racial, bi-racial, mixed race and I wanted to do so by giving you a very personal
story about how my own ethnic identity has been marketed, in fact literally bought and
sold. A little over a decade ago, I was at another university and a photographer came
and wanted to photograph all the faculty of color for the university website. We all dutifully
signed into the waver - never do that - and unbeknownst to us he sold our images, our
pictures, to the worlds largest image bank, gettyimages. Gettyimages in turn now sells
my picture to any corporation or person who would like to use it for whatever purpose
they would like. And so, you will find me on the Rosetta Stone, the language unit, I
am soy maestra. Didn't know that, did you? I am also selling stocks and bonds for PNC
Bank. I get to travel in this world - I'm now at the University of Colorado in their
school of education. I'm a professional development officer on the side. I like this one because
here I am an applicant to Stanford continuing studies, not an instructor, and this appeared
many years before I even came to Stanford. I am also here for Hewitt Packard to help
you prepare your campus for success. I like this one a lot. I am promoting a dealer school,
so if anyone wants to change your career, learn how to deal cards. And I'm also supposed
to be one of the most inspiring teachers of English to those who are learning English
as a second language as well. Ambiguity sells. Part of what I realized after all of this,
I've been on the Congressional Hispanic Caucus website, I've been on the Harvard Alumni Association
website, which I felt vaguely guilty about being on - I've never attended Harvard. My
father in law a few years ago saw me on a Boston Globe ad, a full page add, and I was
the older-than-average non-english speaking student going back to community college. Everything.
So I finally caught up with a marketing executive and I asked them what's their marketing strategy
and she matter of factly told me that I was a type B and her explanation was type A is
ethically identifiable and her example was Chinese like to be marketed to by Chinese.
Type C is white, which was their dominant target audience and Type B was me, servicably
ethnically ambiguous and her explanation was white people won't be threatened by you and
people of color know you got a little something-something in you so it'll all be sort of good. This
is part of, obviously, a larger story about the commercialization and the monetization
of race. It's really not so much about racial progress because it was clear from my conversations
with her that I represented a palatable diversity what we used to call lhite, bright, and damn
near white. They weren't interested in particularly in civil rights or social justice in any kind
of way. But they were interested in selling that particular image. Now, in some ways it
doesn't represent racial progress, but it is also a total seat change in the way mixed
race people have been seen in the past three hundred years. Mixed race seen as Mulattos,
sterile, we are seen as genetically polluted, culturally degenerate. And now, things have
gone completely the other way as Danzy Senna, who's a Stanford Alumn and a novelist puts
it, "Strange to wake up and realize your in vogue, hybridity is in." And in fact what
she calls it is sort of a Mulatto glam. You can see the New York Times has been running
special issues about what they call Generation EA, ethnically ambiguous. Or the A list, it's
the new face of America and it's supposed to represent the end of race as we know it.
And here's just a few of the celebrities you will see, supposed to get the best tables
and New York, the best acting job. We know most of these people. Suzzane Malveaux. And
it's part of a larger national story that's very seductive and compelling that America
does represent the world's melting pot, that more liberal trends in immigration and the
legalization of interracial marriage in 1964. A census that came out in 2000, and again
in 2010, allows people to mark one or more race. It's a very compelling story but what
I want to suggest here is to ask the question, "Is this New Face of America just an execrable
demographics or does it also represent a profound change in our perceptions of race?" Because
racial ambiguity is a function of context and of cultural perception. We talk about
demographics and race's blood and biology but it's amazing to see what context does
in shaping our perceptions - how we actually see race. So a change in clothing, hairstyle,
linguistic cues, - if somebody comes up to you and speaks black-English vernacular versus
somebody with a British accent, profoundly changes the way you register them. Surnames,
geographic locations - I look more black in Louisiana than I would in Minnesota, for instance
- media cues, even in my own experience as you saw with the background there, shapes
the racial reception. I wanted to give you specific examples of how historical context
really changed because the way we think of somebody as looking ambiguous, and in my case,
black, has really changed over time, and I wanted to reintroduce you to some figures
who, a few decades ago, were seen as unequivocally black. Now, some of my undergraduates think
that they are ethnically ambiguous. So Homer Plessy, of course from Plessy vs. Ferguson,
famous Supreme Court case, that basically legalized Jim Crow segregation through the
middle of the Twentieth Century. One-eight black. He understood himself as black, and
certainly the law saw him as black. Walter White, the blonde blue eyed NAACP head who
was, both of his parents were African American, he uses light skinned to actually go down
in the south and document lynchings for the NAACP. Diane Nash, of course, gorgeous green
eyed at the front of Civil Rights. Lena Horne, so beautiful I love this picture of her's
- so sweet. Dorothy Dandridge, all of these people understood themselves as black, not
just because of the one drop rule, which was the legal convention that held that anybody
with a drip of black blood was African American because they understood race as not narrowly
defined by appearance but was also shared historical experience, a political commitment,
and a social responsibility to be black in America is to be mixed, for the large part
too. Some 85%+ of black people are already mixed so in their words it wasn't tethered
to identity. I love this sensational, somewhat sensational ebony series - this was in 1948
- that proved that there's 5 million white negroes out there. But notice that mixed is
an adjective here and not a noun. And there's a recognition that you can be black and blonde
although I wouldn't recommend it looking at here there. There's many many stories of people
who chose not to pass for white but who actually understand themselves as black and within
a larger capacious community as well. Even ad's at the time, even though you can clearly
see they are fetishizing white skin and straight hair, there isn't any question that they understand
themselves as black. So my take away from this to you is to think of ambiguity as a
Rorschach blot - it is not some empirical fact that is written for instance on this
young mans skin. Ambiguity, racial ambiguity, is as much a function as sort of an eye of
the beholder as it is in anything in the body of the person observed. In fact this young
man is basically a palimpsest of people's projections, expectations, assumptions, and
that's why I find mixed race so fascinating. It's not that it's a rarefied academic sub-specialty
or that I think mixed race people are a special race but it indexes and highlights the dynamic
process by which all identities are made and unmade by social negotiations and historical
circumstances.