Black Mixed-Race Men

Remi Joseph-Salisbury

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781787565333
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Black Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Winner of the 2018 British Sociological Association Philip Abrams Memorial Prize.

Whilst scholarship has increasingly moved to consider mixedness and the experiences of mixed-race people, there has been a notable lack of attention to the specific experiences of mixed-race men. This is despite growing recognition of the particular ways race and gender intersect. By centring the accounts of Black mixed-race men in the United Kingdom and United States, this book offers a timely intervention that extends the theoretical terrain of race and ethnicity scholarship and of studies of gender and masculinities. As it treads new and important ground, this book draws upon theories of performativity and hybridity in order to understand how Black mixed-race men constitute and reconstitute complex and multiplicitous identities. 'Post-racial' conditions mean that Black mixed-race men engage in such processes in a context where the significance of race and racism is rendered invisible and denied. By introducing the theoretical concept of 'post-racial' resilience, this study strives to capture and celebrate the contemporary, creative and innovative ways in which Black mixed-race men refuse the fragmentation and erasure of their identities. As it does so, the author offers a corrective to popular representations that have too readily pathologized Black mixed-race men. Focusing on the everyday through a discussion of Black mixed-race men's racial symbolism, experiences of racial microaggressions, and interactions with peers, Black Mixed-Race Men: Transatlanticity, Hybridity and Post-Racial Resilience offers an in-depth insight into a previously neglected area of scholarship.

Chapter 1

Multiplicitous Black Mixed-Race Men and ‘Post-Racial’ Resilience: Double Consciousness, Hybridity and the Threat of Racial Mismatch

Introduction

In this chapter, I build upon and develop the theorisations on ‘post-racial’ resilience (PRR) that I began to map out in the book’s introduction. As I develop an understanding of how Black mixed-race men negotiate their racial identities, I more fully illustrate the processes that are invoked through the concept of ‘post-racial’ resilience (PRR). In the book’s introduction, I defined PRR as:

1. The capacity to withstand and/or recover quickly from racist and racialised difficulties that are denied: toughness against the invisible.
2. The ability of one’s sense of self to remain in or spring back into shape, amidst threats that are deniable: elasticity.

These are the definitions I explicate more fully in this chapter. As I explore the way Black mixed-race men utilise PRR and negotiate their racial identities, the chapter is divided into three sections. The first two sections theorise key interrelated components of the men’s PRR: double consciousness and hybridity. Through a consideration of racial mismatches,¹ the third section shows the threats Black mixed-race men face and how they utilise PRR to respond. Let us first consider double consciousness.

‘Post-Racial’ Double Consciousness: White Supremacy, the White Gaze and (The Absence of) White Privilege

Double consciousness describes a ‘sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others’ (Du Bois, 1994, p. 2), or, as Yancy (2017) might put it, seeing one’s self through the white gaze. This has been a defining feature of the Black experience in the USA (Du Bois, 1994, p. 2; Yancy, 2017) and in the UK (Gilroy, 1993; Tate, 2005). To invoke the white gaze is to see a distortion of one’s self (Du Bois, 1994). Whilst encountering this distortion threatens one’s sense of identity, it would be a misnomer to see this as totalising or absolute. To draw on George Yancy (2017), to see and know the Black monster of the white gaze, does not mean one need become that Black monster. Nor does it mean that one becomes bound or fixed by the white gaze. Indeed, as I show in the next section, through processes of hybridity, Black mixed-race men are able to hold fluid, complex and multiplicitous identities. This allows Black mixed-race men to resist the threat of erasure. As they come to know the white gaze to be governed by a racist episteme, the men recognise its imposition to be untrue. This criticality brings about possibilities for double consciousness to be utilised as a site of strength, rather than weakness: a component of PRR. In a world underpinned by white supremacy, the ability to see how one is constructed through the white gaze has been integral to Black resistance, resilience and survival (Yancy, 2017). In our ‘post-racial’ epoch, this criticality takes on a new urgency: in order to understand the racist structures governing the white gaze, one must reject the pervasive ‘post-racial’ ideology that renders those very structures invisible: thus, what we have is a sense of ‘post-racial’ double consciousness. As we will see, those structures are maintained through a Black/white racial dichotomy that means there is also a necessary particularity and specificity to Black mixed-race men’s sense of double consciousness.

Having described double consciousness, let me now make things more tangible. Here, I draw upon the accounts of the Black mixed-race men in the study, in order to illustrate how double consciousness manifests as a fundamental component of PRR.

We begin with Leon, a UK participant from a working-class background in Manchester. Whilst maintaining contact with his Black father and Black family, Leon grew up living with his white mother and white sister (who had a different father) in a predominantly white area. He also attended a predominantly white school. As we discussed identity, it became clear that Leon saw race as fundamentally constitutive to his sense of identity. Not only this, but in understanding his racialised positionality, Leon drew upon his double consciousness to invoke the white gaze,

Say if there were any racist political parties came in, and they’d try to categorize you, you’d always say I’m Black, you know, I’m not white. They’d always put me in the Black, if there was a political party against Black people or different, you know, anyone that’s not English, they’d put me in the, even though I am, you know, English.

Here Leon draws upon the gaze of a hypothetical racist political party not in a literal sense but as a metaphor. Perhaps the metaphor of a political party acts as a stand in for the much more diffuse capillaries of white power that characterises the society in which Leon lives (Tate, 2013). He rejects the ‘post-racial’ script and sets the tone for a discussion in which the ubiquity of race is salient. There are several points of note in Leon’s account. Leon shows his sense that Black and white constitute the only identity options: two poles in a racially dichotomised structure (Ifekwunigwe, 2004). Perhaps it is through channelling the white gaze that Leon is best able to articulate his experiences of racialisation: through the white gaze, mixedness does not emerge as an identity option. Nevertheless, Leon’s initial identification in the interview was as mixed-race, and throughout the interview, he moved relatively freely between Black and mixed-race identifications. Thus, whilst recognising how he may be interpellated is an important component of his PRR, he is not bound by a white gaze that threatens to limit who he can be. Indeed, PRR is not just identifying the white gaze but is also resistance to its message: PRR is remaining in shape. Consider in the first sentence how Leon uses ‘you’ to position himself as part of a general Black ‘I’. As his interlocutors try to categorise him, Leon takes back control and says ‘I’m Black’. Put another way, Leon interpellates himself in resistance to the racist white gaze: his invocation of the white gaze allows him to emphasise the centrality of Blackness to his sense of self. Here, we begin to see an inversion of the one-drop rule and a commitment to affirmative Black politics (Senna, 1998) that was prevalent among many participants.

In the introduction to her seminal edited collection on Black British Feminism, Heidi Mirza (1997, p. 3) describes being Black in Britain as,

… a state of ‘becoming’ (racialized); a process of consciousness, when colour becomes the defining factor about who you are. Located through your ‘otherness’ a ‘conscious coalition’ emerges; a self-consciously constructed space where identity is not inscribed by a natural identification but by political kinship. Now living submerged by whiteness, physical difference becomes a defining issue, a signifier, a mark of whether or not you belong. Thus, to be black in Britain is to share a common structural location; a racial location.

There are clear parallels between those processes that Mirza describes and the articulations of Leon (UK). Through the white gaze, mixedness is erased in order to maintain a Black/white racial dichotomy. It is this to which Leon alludes. Notice, Leon’s ‘consciousness’ comes through his understanding of the white gaze; his double consciousness. It is through this that he becomes aware of his ‘otherness’ (Du Bois, 1994) and, as Mirza (1997, p. 3) suggests, a ‘conscious coalition’ emerges. Living, as he does, ‘submerged by whiteness’, Leon’s identity is ‘not inscribed’ but is based upon a ‘common structural location’. Through this ‘racial location’, a sense of ‘political kinship’ develops that sees Leon identify with Blackness.

Notice, too, that it is Blackness in Britain that Mirza refers to. To be Black in Britain is to be racially located as ‘other’. In the popular imaginary, Blackness is in contrast to Britain: to be Black is not to be truly British. This brings us to another point of interest in Leon’s account. Through oppositional binaries (Derrida, 1981; Lawler, 2014), there is a clear associative slippage from ‘Black’, to ‘not white’, to ‘not English’. He is Black, he is not white. He is Black, he is not English. Leon reminds us that race and nation, or, whiteness and Englishness, are inextricably bound (Gilroy, 1993). It is worth recognising that this is perhaps a reality particularly prevalent in Britain where the much more recent large Black migration continues to construct Black Britons as foreigners (Caballero, 2004). However, note that Leon does not accept the ‘largely unspoken racial connotations’ (Parekh, 2000, p. 38) that ‘you can be either one or the other… but not both’ (Mirza, 1997, p. 3). As he affirms ‘I am, you know, English’, Leon troubles the discursive synonymy of whiteness and Englishness. He speaks back to and rejects discourses that try to limit his identity. In so doing, Leon creates a third space for the negotiation and emergence of new identities (Bhabha, 1990; Hall, 1996). In this third space, he is Black and English. Leon’s utterance is subversive and counterhegemonic as he not only reconstitutes his own identity, but he threatens to redefine Englishness: ‘belonging and unbelonging is a question of negotiations that can undergo a number of shifts in the course of a given situation’ (Pettersson, 2013, p. 417). This is what Leon shows us. Whilst I will return to discuss hybridity more fully in the next section, it suffices to observe here how double consciousness facilitates positive hybrid identifications. We see Leon’s PRR in action as he rejects ‘post-racial’ logic and speaks back to the white gaze in order to position himself as something new.

To varying extents, Leon’s sense of double consciousness was representative of all of the Black mixed-race men in the study. Demonstrating the Transatlantic continuities in the double consciousness of Black mixed-race men, these parallels are particularly apparent in the account of Tayo (USA). Tayo comes from a lower middle-class background and was raised by his white mother. Like Leon, he grew up in a predominantly white area and attended a predominantly white school. Here he discusses how he feels the white gaze and structural white supremacy impact upon his sense of identity,

… it’s not like I don't identify, or I don't recognize my Caucasian heritage, ethnicity, whatever. I more so identify with African Americans because, okay, well one reason is because… I believe there is a set of privileges that sole-Caucasians – or not even necessarily full because in the example of George Zimmerman he's half Hispanic, half Caucasian but he benefits from the privilege – I believe there is a set of privileges that people of Caucasian heritage can take advantage of and I don't take advantage of that. I don't have the opportunity to. I'm perceived as a minority and that's what I identify as anyway. And there are institutionalized systems of racism and prejudice that I am victim of and there are systems of prejudices that apply to African Americans as disadvantages that African Americans face and these are the things that I identify with, and these are the things that are important to me, and these are issues that if I identified as purely Caucasian, I wouldn't be able to have part, well as much of a part of it. So, I believe that because these things apply partly to me they apply wholly. (Tayo, US)

As Tayo describes structural and institutional racisms that privilege whites (McIntosh, 1990), he – like Leon (UK) – rejects ‘post-racial’ logic. This – the first move in Tayo’s PRR – allows Tayo to better understand and articulate his racialised positionality. That is, he is somebody rendered outside of those white privileges. As he further articulates the particularities of his experiences of racialisation, Tayo draws a comparison with George Zimmerman. This is Tayo’s hybridity-of-the-everyday (Tate, 2005). This speech act allows Tayo to complicate the mixed-race category. Through his articulation of double consciousness, Tayo shows that his experience of racialisation and racism are different from Zimmerman. As Tayo suggests, as a mixed Hispanic-white man, after shooting and killing Trayvon Martin, Zimmerman was able to access white privilege. He was imbued with temporary or ‘honorary’ whiteness and white privilege (Hopkins, 2013): this is an assertion supported by wider literature that suggests Hispanics and Latinos can often be read as white (Lopez, 2003). Charles Mills (1997) and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2004) have both highlighted the elasticity of whiteness for certain groups: this is what we see here. There is evidence to suggest that Black mixed-race men are far more likely to identify and be identified with the race of their minority parent (Black) than men from other mixed-race groups and Black mixed-race women (Aspinall & Song, 2013; Rockquemore & Laszloffy, 2005; Davenport, 2016; Sims, 2016; Sims & Joseph-Salisbury, forthcoming). Like Leon, it is through double consciousness – his sense of seeing through the white gaze – that Tayo recognises the particularities of his racial location. Also like Leon, rather than Blackness being an imposition, this is something he actively affirms (‘that’s what I identify as anyway’). Blackness is important to Tayo, it is something he actively wants to be a part of. He is part of, as Mirza (1997) puts it, a conscious coalition. In Mulatto Millennium, Danzy Senna (1998, p. 16) illustrates how many Black mixed-race people invert the one-drop rule in opposition to the white gaze,

You told us all along that we had to call ourselves black because of this so-called one drop. Now that we don’t have to anymore, we choose to. Because black is beautiful. Because black is not a burden, but a privilege.

Notice how Senna – like Tayo (USA) and Leon (UK) – turns the imposition of Blackness on its head. The power of the white gaze is nullified as Senna claims Blackness with pride (‘we choose to’)! When Blackness is claimed, rather than imposed, something of its essence is transformed: it becomes positive rather than negative. To be affirmative about one’s Blackness is constitutive of, and constituted by, PRR.

Returning specifically to Tayo’s account, notice his assertion that he recognises his Caucasian heritage and ethnicity: whilst his sense of double consciousness engenders an acknowledgement that he is read as a Black man; this is not restrictive. By drawing upon notions of heritage and ethnicity, he is able to constitute a multiplicitous, fluid and hybrid identification that refuses erasure and fragmentation. His is a Blackness that also allows him to recognize his ‘Caucasian heritage [and] ethnicity’. This sense of fluidity – or elasticity to draw back upon those definitions developed in the introduction – as a component of PRR, was apparent in another account from Reece (UK).

Coming from a lower middle-class background, Reece was raised by his Black mother and white father in a racially diverse area of London. Here he invokes the white gaze,

I'm accepting of the fact that you know society and a white individual is going to view me as Black and it don't often mean, in its initial instance that the consequences of that are problematic but you know, I walk down the street and if you identify me as a proud mixed-race man or a proud Black man, I'm happy either way.

In understanding his identity and positionality, Reece (UK) draws upon the white interpellator. In a white supremacist society, the white subject is always, already interpellated as the norm who is in a position to interpellate the Other (Yancy, 2017). Seemingly rejecting any ‘post-racial’ persuasions that we are beyond race, he recognises how the white gaze interpellates him as Black. This is an astute observation that is historically and contemporarily grounded and perhaps constituted through what Yancy (2017) terms an episteme of Blackness.² As Tate (2005, p. 85) puts it, for ‘whiteness Blackness is undifferentiated’. To know this is to be doubly conscious. To be doubly conscious is to understand one’s racial location. To understand one’s racial location is essential to Black mixed-race men’s PRR. Notice, again, however, that Reece (UK) does not merely accept the white gazer as the purveyor of truth. Through an interview, Reece self-identified as ‘Black’, ‘mixed-race’ and, most often, as ‘Black mixed-race’. As in Leon’s account earlier, and as for so many of the participants, knowing that the white gaze would not see mixedness did not foreclose a mixed-race identification for Reece. He does not necessarily see the consequences of the white gaze as inherently ‘problematic’. The fluidity in his identifications allows him to remain resilient to the threat of fragmentation. To think metaphorically, a hammer would more easily destroy a fixed, rigid and brittle substance than it would a fluid and transformable one. On first reading of Reece’s account, it might appear that he makes a concession as, in part, he allows the white gaze to identify him racially. It is not only his having cultivated pride in mixedness and Blackness that allows Reece to take this position, but importantly, he wants this pride to be recognised. It is in insisting on being seen as ‘proud’ that Reece subverts and speaks back to a white gaze that too often tries to pathologise Black mixed-race men. If his counterhegemonic pride is recognised, Reece is happy. In a similar vein to the positive affirmations of Leon and Tayo, this is Reece’s hybridity-of-the-everyday. Double consciousness is a fundamental component of Black mixed-race men’s PRR. An understanding of the threat one faces is essential to the cultivation of resilience. Contemporarily, this requires a rejection of the dominant ideology: the ‘post-racial’. Double consciousness can inform one’s sense of self. As I have shown in this section, this double consciousness can lead Black mixed-race men to hold multiplicitous and fluid post-racially resilient identities. In these identities, Black mixed-race men often express pride and positivity that, in white supremacist societies, is counter-hegemonic. Double consciousness is conducive to hybridity. Let us now turn to consider identifications through hybridity-of-the-everyday more closely.

Fluidity, Multiplicity and Hybridity-of-the-Everyday

In the introduction and in the last section, I began to discuss hybridity. I argued that identities are constituted through, within and across discourse. Identities are historically located and constituted through repetition and reiteration (Butler, 1990; Youdell, 2000). Identities are not fixed or static. They are made and remade through interaction and negotiation. As Stuart Hall (1996, p. 17) explains,

… identities are never unified and, in late modern times, increasingly fragmented and fractured; never singular but multiply constructed across different often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices and positions.

This is the context in which Black mixed-race men’s identities are formed. For Black mixed-race men, it is conceivable that Hall’s words are intensified by the historical, structural and ideological dichotomisation of Black and white (Brunsma & Rockquemore, 2001; Ifekwunigwe, 2004). This dichotomy is perhaps productive of the pervasive and widespread stereotypes that imagine mixed-race people as confused, fragmented and marginal. As Mengel (2001, p. 101) argues,

The most common designation imposed on mixed race people of all ancestries is the inference that they are fragmented beings … in a race conscious society, [this] serves to reinforce the ideology that the mixed race individual is somehow less than a whole person.

Through the lens of hybridity-of-the-everyday, in this section, I argue that Black mixed-race men remain resilient against these threats of fracture, fragmentation and erasure. In so doing, Black mixed-race men draw upon multiple discourses to produce fluid, complex and multiplicitous identities. This is their refusal of, perhaps resilience against, a white gaze that always overdetermines who and what Black mixed-race men can be (hooks, 2004).

Let us recall the earlier definition of resilience: the ability of one’s sense of self to remain in or spring back into, shape amidst threats that are deniable; elasticity. If Black mixed-race men hold fluid and multiply constructed identities, they are better able to spring back into shape. It is, in part, the elasticity of their identities that allows them to be resilient against ‘fracture and fragmentation’ (Hall, 1996): elasticity is ...