There Are No ‘Mixed-Race’ People
By: Shourya Agarwal
Tags: History, Equality, Culture, Politics, Race

There Are No ‘Mixed-Race’ People

Why it’s troublesome to believe otherwise

Standing in clogged queues can lead to all sorts of epiphanies. And so it happened in one such serpentine line at the Delhi Airport where my phone succumbed to two hours of fervent texting. Looking up, my eyes reeled on to a cheerful family who had just managed to secure a spot at the customs counter. When inquired about their ethnicity by the gentlemanly officer the family gave a reply that left me totally fanboyed.

“I am full Asian and full Hispanic and my husband is Caucasian.” Seeing the officer’s forehead furrow up in confusion the father stepped in. “Our children are full Asian, full Hispanic, and full Caucasian. As a family, we believe that ethnicity is much more than some digit that can be chiseled away into percentages. We cherish all the distinct bloodlines we descend from and see ourselves as fully included in all of them. You see, we are multiracial and not mixed-raced.” By the time he finished, the electronic barrier was already up in salutation. As the family proceeded, everyone in the earshot was left awe-struck.

Initially, I couldn’t grasp the profundity of his words, but now as I think about them everything makes perfect sense. In our day to day lives, we meet hundreds of people who introduce themselves with a ‘half’ squeezed before their racial identity. So much so that it seems that there’s some strange law forcing us to limit our identities to a grand total of one. As if the infinite catenations of biology and history can be boiled down to a singularity. It turns out that this method of measuring ethnicity has a deeply racist past something which we must be aware of before we can cartwheel into a post-racial world.

The method of representing race as fractions is actually a vestige of the time where miscegenation was outlawed. Because huge pockets of the globe profited by subjugating the ‘colored’ races, they had to ensure a distinction between the white and the rest to hold on to authority. This led to the genesis of ubiquitous laws that banned any relationships across the arbitrary racial divide. Now, just putting up laws, did not completely stop the creation of multi-raced individuals. In fact, sexual abuse in the plantation was rampant with even eminent leaders like Thomas Jefferson culpable. Not to mention, the select few who had the courage to see beyond their day and age. Across the oceans, the colonizers abused their respective enslaved women resulting in a burgeoning biracial population.

To keep the conjured up races distinct, the 19th-century society saw the creation of accounting for the multiracial individual based on the percentage of their black heritage. They were so obsessed with it that they even came up with complex signifiers like sacatra and maribou to refer to people with seven-eighths and five-eighths of black ancestry. It is important to remember that this was not some quasi-empirical attempt to account for diversity but only a tool for further oppression. In white majority regions such as the United States people with even a single drop of black genealogy were labeled as colored to ensure that miscegenation does not disturb the economic interests of the ‘masters’. Conversely, in regions like South Africa where the whites were in the minority, they bent the rules to rank biracial people on the basis of the increasing amount of ‘whiteness’. In short, the idea of ‘mixing races’ was presented as some sort of adulteration. And its produce as spurious liquor whose identity can be measured as easily as one measures ‘proof’.

Thankfully, humanity has outlived those truly horrible times. And we should foster an understanding of ‘multirace’ which aligns with our time. The concept of ‘mixed-race’ assumes the dangerous premise that one cannot be a member of more than one ethnicity. In the 21st century, we know that nothing can be farther from the truth. Time and time again, we see people all around us who outgrow these limits to carve out fresh identities for themselves. Families that shatter all barriers of religion, nationality, and color in an exultant celebration of their diversity. It is high time to realize that the ever-gregarious roots of history and biology lead us to love and mutual respect.

All this is not to say that race or even racism does not matter, in fact, quite the opposite. Today, race lingers on more like a culture than as a rigid ranking of human beings. By and large, all racial identities are moving towards establishing an independent existence based on a common way of living. Ethnicity is no longer defined against some ‘enemy’ race like it has been for the larger part of our past. Now, I get it that many of us have hurtful experiences to the contrary, but we cannot deny the fact that things are improving. As we head out into the future, age-hold enemy-lines will only get thinner until the one fine day they would kneel before our collective desire for love. However, until then we have to constantly remind ourselves to stop seeing races as antithetical. A step towards that would be dismantling the worn-out myth of ‘mixed-race’ cleaves a person into a set of genetic contradictions. If a person chooses to see themselves with a double identity we cannot let diminutives like ‘half’ and ‘quarter’ force them to quantify the unquantifiable. Just like how in the world of citizenship there’s no room for ‘three-fourth Canadians’, let us remind ourselves that in our multiracial world, there are simply no ‘mixed-raced’ people.

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