Multiracial?

[asterroc]

Two thoughts on one topic.

1) Anyone else here multiracial? It occurred to me after some discussion elsewhere that I am not aware of knowing anybody in real life who identifies as being of more than one race, and I can only think of one person that I know online. So if you are multiracial and and willing for me to know, please comment!

I have set this post to screen anonymous comments, so if you want me to know but not others to know, then log out and comment, putting your name in the comment and I'll keep it screened so no one else need know.

2) If you are multiracial, what term do you prefer to use to describe yourself? If you are not multiracial, what connotations do you infer in words such as multiracial, multi-ethnic, multicultural, mixed race, mulatto, mutt, hapa, mix-up, or even "you may check more than one" (as in the 2000 census)?

A week ago I got into a conversation with T$ and some of his friends that wandered into the term mulatto, and then D-- asked what the more appropriate word was. T$ replied "mixed-race" and I surprised myself by realizing that I myself didn't like that term. To me it has negative connotations of being even worse than a pure breed non-white. I usually use multicultural myself, b/c I do not feel most of the obvious effects of having my race stamped upon my face. However the problem with using the term is that white often throw back at me that they're multicultural b/c their background is of different groups of whites. I jokingly use mutt to describe myself to friends, but I would never accept it from others - much like "nigger" is a term that blacks can use on each other but you can't use on a black.

Comments

[q10.livejournal.com]

i'm used to hearing ‘mutt’ used as a broader term - roughly anybody who's more than three- or four-ways multiethnic, even if all of their source ethnicities fall under one ‘race’ heading - so, under the system as i've encountered, i'm a mutt but unambiguously white.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Well, FWIW my mother is half Shanghai and half Cantonese. The two were (and I believe still are) different socio-economic classes within Chinese culture, and even speak different dialects. It might be akin to a rich Yankee liberal woman marrying a Southern poor white trash man. Not different ethnicities, but possibly different cultures or at least sub-cultures.

Not in response to your comment, but is there a specific word for people with a Jewish father but not-Jewish mother?

[q10.livejournal.com]

i wasn't questioning your &lsuqo;mutt’ credentials - just pointing out that as i'm used to hearing it use it's not synonymous with ‘multiracial’. for your other question, i don't know of such a term offhand, but i assume there is one (or, more likely, a few, with varying degrees of offensiveness) - maybe sammka has looked into this?

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Ah, and I didn't mean my comment as being defensive. I meant it more as trying to see how my own background compared to yours, and trying to help me figure out the difference between "ethnicity" and "race" - the term "ethnicity" has always been fuzzy for me.

[q10.livejournal.com]

the term is not used consistently and is heavily contingent on the particular social biases of the people using it, but, for reference, the People's Republic of China recognizes 56 ethnicities, several of which, like ‘Han’ and ‘Gaoshan’ contain a number of subgroups with distinct linguistic traditions and senses of identity as peoples, which means that a count looking for a more nuanced picture of Chinese identity politics might pick a large number. however, as most Americans conceive of ‘race’, most of these would be lumped together under ‘Asian’ or ‘East Asian’. of course, most of the time these kinds of groupings tend to be reflections of existing social biases much more than they are of anything you'd want to call an objective reality.

[seekingferret.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, the only term I know is mamzer/mamzeret. Which generally translates to English as bastard and refers to any child of a union unsanctioned by Jewish law. And is definitely offensive, and is not a term I would use to actually describe someone unless we were having an academic discussion of their specific status in Jewish law.

[q10.livejournal.com]

this is far beyond my expertise but the definition of ‘mamzer’ i'd encountered seems non-applicable.

[seekingferret.livejournal.com]

That's what I meant by the specific academic discussion. In practice mamzer is used more broadly as an offensive colloquial term.

[framefolly.livejournal.com]

I don't remember this unless a conversation like this comes up -- because it's such a small fraction and hasn't really been a part of my life experience -- but my mother's maternal grandmother was Vietnamese. Is that multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-racial, or none of the above? I dunno.

I think the RL friend who tilted my world on its ear was a college friend from Seattle whose mother is Chinese and whose father is Japanese. I know that pairing is actually not that uncommon given recent history, but also given recent history, it's fairly taboo. I didn't realize how much I subscribed to the prejudice that this was a WHOA BAD WRONG pairing until I met her. Of course, very quickly I smacked myself over the head metaphorically many times, and have not had to relearn the lesson (so far) ;) .

A significant fraction -- I might say 1/5th -- of my UCLA students self-identified as bi- or multi-racial -- black/Asian, Asian/white, Latino/black, Latino/Asian, black/white, etc. It was particularly exciting for me because a good half of them knew what it's like to be immersed in two languages, which was very useful in teaching film and freshman composition.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Now that you mention it, I think another friend of mine is Chinese and Japanese. My (Jewish) father often talks about the recent enmity between China and Japan, but my mother does not. I'm not sure whether it's because she doesn't care, she's oblivious, or it's too sensitive for her to discuss. She tends to bottle up things so all would appear the same.

There's a lot of my students who speak Spanish before English, and I suspect some are black Hispanic rather than white Hispanic, or even all of the above, but in a physics class this sort of discussion doesn't come up. Occasionally an Asian student will ask me about my background, and when they do I feel this is license to ask which type of Asian they are (I'm not as good about telling from appearance as I once was), but otherwise I do not feel it's appropriate to ask.

There's a few really outspoken minority women on my campus, and I always feel a bit awkward talking about race with them (we're all on the Diversity Caucus) because they have obviously had to face so much more prejudice than I.

[oh-chris.livejournal.com]

i usually go by "biracial". i'm not really sure how much west indian blood is in my family: my grandfather and aunt look it to a great deal, and my skin is definitely dark (although more of a "light coffee"), but my grandfather's mother was light-skinned. I never knew, or even saw a picture of either great-grandfather, so i don't know from their skin tones. Both of my paternal grandparents were born in Jamaica.
I mostly go by biracial or whatever because i do, in fact, look it. My sister shares my father's Jamaican blood, but is light-skinned, brown-haired, and blue-eyed. If i looked like her, i'd probably identify as "white" because i could, in fact, pass. My dad can usually pass, as can his brothers and one sister; his other sister, as mentioned, is dark like me.
I'll also use "mutt", "mixed-race" and sometimes "half-breed" disparagingly. I checked "white" and "black" on the 2000 census for lack of a better option.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

See that just goes to show how little appearances can tell us about someone: I would've put you down as Hispanic. :-P

I was delighted the 2000 census didn't say "check only one". In that situation I often check two anyway, or else refuse to check any.

[oh-chris.livejournal.com]

I've gotten "Hispanic" a few times. I usually get "Arabic", which isn't in my ancestry at all that i know of.. but i still got searched a lot in airports at the beginning of the century..
I usually check "other" when given one option.

[galbinus-caeli.livejournal.com]

I personally hate to self identify by "race". I am almost pure European, but from very scattered areas. Paternal grandmother was a Polish immigrant, Paternal grandfather a German one. Maternal grandfather Swedish, but US born, though his grandfather, in Sweden, had married a French "Princess" while he was out to sea as a pirate, so my great-great grandmother would be French (though of very doubtful parentage). Maternal grandmother's family has been on this continent since being kicked out of Newgate prison in 1640, and there is certainly some African and Native American blood in there somewhere. Stir well and you get me.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

I personally hate to self identify by "race".

OMG WHITE PRIVILEGE!

Sorry, just had to say that. :-P It's a lot easier for those of us who are privileged by the current social structure to pretend that the stratification doesn't exist. Race is definitely not my primary way of describing myself, nor is my gender, but they are both part of who I am and how I experience the world. Thankfully these experiences have been mostly not negative.

[galbinus-caeli.livejournal.com]

LOL

Well, 90%+ of my interactions with the world are either on line or on the telephone, so my "race" is less than apparent. When someone needs to know what I look like I do tell them "A tall bearded white guy with salt and pepper hair".

The most common place I a running into the question these days is on employment applications where they are required to ask for EEOC purposes. I "decline to answer" where ever possible.

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

As q10 pointed out, 'race' is in large part a cultural construction.

150 years and more ago, my ancestry would have been considered 'mutt' category: Scots, Irish, English, German. (There used to be quite a lot of discrimination against Irish in the early days of their large-scale immigration to the US, for example.) Now, of course, my 'race' is probably considered by most to be effectively 'white American'; my ancestors have all been here for quite some time (back at least four generations, I think). There's really no current connection between my family and any of these ethnicities other than those we've constructed ourselves (e.g., my choice of last name).

I've been mistaken for (ethnic) Jewish before, but that's probably a combination of (a) ignorance, (b) dark hair, (c) penchant for academics, and (d) knowledge of a couple of songs in Hebrew. :)

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

'race' is in large part a cultural construction.

I never said otherwise.

150 years and more ago, my ancestry would have been considered 'mutt' category:

As would have my mother: Shanghai and Cantonese.

It's possible that 150 years ago my parents would have been forbidden to marry due to miscegenation laws. (I've never been clear if it applied to blacks and whites only.) Not to mention that my (Jewish) father would not have been considered white.

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

I didn't intend to imply that you had said otherwise; I was just acknowledging q10's statement (and I could easily have said 'as you and q10 have been saying').

I don't know what the history of US miscegenation laws is. I know that there would have been significant cultural barriers against such marriages (and I believe that there still are, in some places anyway).

Just to be clear: I don't think of myself as 'multiracial' or any variant thereof. It's not that I reject such labeling, just that the distinction between those ethnicities in the context of the US is really not a matter of great interest or controversy at this point. Since there are still cultural barriers and prejudices against certain ethnic mixtures, it would feel pretentious to make a point of my own 'mixed' heritage (unless I was being confronted by someone who was reveling in his supposedly 'pure' ancestry and denigrating mixed-ethnicity folks).

[spazzy444.livejournal.com]

While I am a white mutt (German, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, English and Dutch from my mom. Ukrainian from my dad - and if you want to get really technical I am a Canadian-American), I cannot answer the specific question you are asking. However my brother married a Vietnamese woman and they have a son. I'd be more than happy to ask what they intend on raising him using. My brother already made one comment that said "Our children will be mutli-racial".

In my area (TX) hispanic x white is very common. I usually hear these people refer to themselves as mixed or biracial.

On places where there is a check mark for your race I had a professor tell my class to NEVER EVER put anything but "other", you can be a European-American, Aggie, Mutt or Pastel-Skinned for all intents an purposes. Checking other opens a lot more pathways apparently.

[l0stmyrel1g10n.livejournal.com]

In a discussion about privilege, I call myself white, because in that context everyone knows what it implies. I would be labeled as white by any random passerby. Outside of that, I try not to label myself. Anyone with Russian ancestry is probably at least part Asian; is it enough for me to say I'm of mixed race? What about being Jewish?

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

i dislike the abuse of the term 'multicultural' to mean 'multiracial', because to me ethnicity and place of origin are not the same thing as culture. i wouldn't even apply the term 'multicultural' to a person, actually. mulatto i'd find offensive simply because it has associated itself with a time when it was a value judgement (similarly 'octoroon' and that spectrum of words). 'mutt' is offensive because of its association with dogs. never heard 'hapa' or 'mix-up', 'mixed-race' and 'multiethnic' both seem like clean, connotation-free, descriptive words to me. 'you may check more than one' is, of course, a beautiful, engineer's solution.