Exploring the Popularization of the Mixed Race American

Stanford Scholar Investigates the “Mulatto Millennium” through Literature, Theatre, Art, & Pop Culture

The United States has its first mixed race president, a man with a black African father and white American mother. Actress Halle Barry, golfer Tiger Woods, rocker Lenny Kravitz and singer Alicia Keyes—all people acknowledging a blended racial heritage—are household names. Since the 2000 U.S Census granted the MOOM (mark one or more) racial option, mixed race advocacy groups have gained political visibility and influence. Are there proportionally more mixed race Americans today then say twenty or a hundred years ago? Or has something changed about how Americans see mixed race, thereby contributing to the increased prominence of the mixed race American in our country’s landscape?

In considering those questions, Stanford University English professor Michele Elam analyzed why and with what effect those identified (and identifying) as mixed race in the U.S. have gained such tremendous cultural cachet in the last decade.

Looking beyond the usual explanations for the increased visibility of mixed race people, such as immigration trends and the 1967 Supreme Court Loving Decision lifting bans on interracial marriage, Elam is interested in how contemporary literature, theatre, art and popular culture are re-shaping the way we perceive and understand mixed race in the new millennium. The creative works she examines in The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium, released by Stanford University Press in March, include comic strips, novels, art exhibitions, websites, theater, and even Comedy Central late night TV.

In her latest research, Elam seeks what she outlines in the book as a “middle way” between those who uncritically celebrate mixed race as an answer to the “race problem” in America and those for whom mixed race rings only the “alarmist bells of civil rights destruction,” given the decline in influence of traditional civil rights organizations. So what would progressive mixed race art and politics look like? she asks;  how do creative works—art, literature, theatre, pop cultural expression—address mixed race as both an  “aesthetic challenge and social concern”? 

“I started noticing the increasing popularization of certain kinds of images of mixed race people in media,” a popularity that extended into education curricula, from children’s books on how to raise a mixed race kindergartener through to college courses in “mixed race studies” Elam explains when discussing what inspired her to research mixed race in America. “I also noticed there wasn’t a lot of conversation about what impact these cultural works are having on our society; I wanted to see more attention paid to the literature, performance, and art that was engaging the debates about mixed race to think more carefully and more broadly about race’s saliency in the new millennium.”

Artists and Writers Help to Define what it means to be Biracial

To get a sense of Elam’s wide-ranging scholarship, start by looking at the cartoon displayed on the outside of her office door. It’s a copy of one of The Boondocks cartoons created by social satirist Aaron McGruder containing a pointed message about the issues biracial people encounter. In the comic, mixed race pre-teen Jazmine sits alone in a grassy field, lamenting in a self-pitying way, that she feels so different from everyone else - like a lonely yellow flower in a bed of red roses - even though her parents assure her that her blended background makes her special. Then the strip’s realist, Huey, appears and bluntly declares: “You’re black. Get over it."

Elam said the strip sparked great anger among some mixed race advocacy group members who were upset because the Huey character seemed to so flatly dismiss Jazmine’s desire to be recognized as biracial. Many were especially upset when, after Jazmine insists her hair is not an Afro but “just a little frizzy today,” Huey diagnoses her with “ethno-ambiguo hostility syndrome.”  “That’s why I put it out there, somewhat as a humorous provocation and also kind of as an illustration of the pop cultural engagements with mixed race that I think are interesting,” Elam said. 

Huey is actually not simply dismissing Jazmine’s experience, she argues. According to Elam, in much of The Boondocks, Huey is actually attempting to educate Jasmine about just how inclusive black identity is and has been, and which includes a long history of black activists who happened to be just as light-skinned and frizzy haired as she.

Her examination extends to other artwork, including "Baby Halfie Brown Head," the unique doll sitting on her office desk that she says no child would ever love.

The toy’s look is arresting, a mahogany-hued baby head atop a pudgy, nude, white-skinned infant body.  The doll was part of an exhibition by African-American assemblage artist Lezley Saar that is now visible on Saar’s web site mulattonation.com.

“Baby Halfie’s arms are raised high as if asking to be lifted up for parental comfort and affirmation, but I suspect no parents will embrace it, let alone purchase it for their tots in hopes of inspiring proud mixed race identification or development empowerment—and that is no doubt precisely the point,” Elam writes in The Souls of Mixed Folks. ”The doll is not an effort to capture how a person of mixed black and white descent might actually appear in the flesh. Its creative affront provides a vivid example of the alternative progressive directions for mixed race art and activism in the post-civil rights era that are at the center of this book.”

The Problem with “Mulatto Glam”

Of course, mixed race Americans have been around for many generations. But the current popularity of people identified or self-identifying as mixed, Elam

"Baby Halfie Brown Head," part of artist Lezley Saar's on-line installation "Mullato Nation."

argues, is in striking contrast to earlier images of the “tragic mulatto” (which figures in the work of many authors, from Harriet Beecher Stowe to William Faulkner) or of the politically greedy and lustful mulatto in, for example, the infamous 1915 film, Birth of a Nation.

Elam suggests that, though certainly preferable to these earlier denigrating images, the new millennial “Mulatto Glam,” is also problematic. She is referring to the cool factor highlighted in a 2003 New York Times article that introduced readers to “Generation E.A.: Ethnically Ambiguous.” Today’s generation of mixed race people are considered “members of society’s hip new A-list,” Elam writes in her book’s preface, “racially mixed ambassadors to a new world order, the fashionable imprimaturs of modernity.”

As Elam described it, people buy in to these seductive images in part because they seem proof of America’s success as a “melting pot” in which racial tensions and inequities are resolved, and where, therefore there seems little need for civil rights lobbies or social justice campaigns.  For some mixed race advocacy groups, the main “civil rights” issue has instead focused almost entirely on the idea that one should be able to choose one’s own race.  This, too, according to Elam, can have its downside to the extent it emphasizes the idea of race as a simple act of free will and of personal self-expression only, often turning attention away from larger social questions about racial inequities.

Marketing Mixed Race

Elam also explores how the mixed race experience is bought, sold and promoted—sometimes cynically—for commercial purposes. As an example, she points to companies that market educational products, skin creams and hair treatments specifically for mixed race children, items she says “advertise good self-esteem through proper care of one’s specialized epidermis (and) package a step-by-step program to happier family life in detailed ‘mixed’ hair instruction fliers.”

Elam finds some of the most insightful social commentary about these issues in some unexpected places. She turns, for example, to late-night television, like “The Racial Draft,” Dave Chappelle’s controversial spoof launched in 2004 on Comedy Central network. Modeled after the hyped televised drafts for the National Football League and National Basketball Association, the parody features a panel of stereotyped black, Asian, Latino, Jewish and white representatives who rowdily negotiate and barter the race of various celebrities, from former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice to rapper Eminem. The episode reminds audiences of how racial selection is a national sport but that the good fun also always has economic and political consequences.

A Personal Connection Leads to an Academic Investigation

Comedian Dave Chappelle launched "The Racial Draft" spoof in 2004, on Comedy Central.

Starting out a long way from late night television, Elam’s earlier research focused on 19^th and early twentieth century African American writers, including the study of literature from noted authors Paul Laurence Dunbar and Langston Hughes.  Her investigation into the cultural and literary representations of mixed race developed when she arrived at Stanford in 2002 as a Hewlett Fellow at the Research Institute for the Comparative Study in Race and Ethnicity.

She was intrigued by the increasing prominence of mixed race people in the media—including a photograph of her taken at the University of Puget Sound, where she had been teaching. Although the image was originally meant only for the department website, it was sold to Getty Images, one of the largest commercial image banks in the country, where it has been endlessly repurposed: the Congressional Hispanic Caucus has featured her as a Latina on their website; an ad in the Boston Globe for adult education represents her as a non-English speaking applicant.

 Her racially ambiguous appearance has been used to represent a diverse spectrum of ethnicities, from corporate sales to college alumni sites.

Struck by how serviceable ambiguity was becoming, Elam decided to take a broader look at the mixed race issue from an academic perspective.

“I’m interested particularly in how literature and the arts do not just reflect but also can actually influence and change our ideas about race, and society,” Elam explained. What was happening with these images? What was their appeal? How were they shaping how we perceive race and related social issues?

While those over 45 tend to view themselves as belonging a single race, she said her students from the younger Millennial Generation were often unsatisfied with a mono-racial identification. 

 Nonetheless, they were very thoughtful about how they might represent racial identity on a continuum in ways that were more “politically nuanced, historically attentive and socially transformative.”  Her classes on mixed race often turn to the expressive arts for what she and her students think are some of the most innovative ways of addressing these challenges. 

Bringing a Humanistic Perspective to South Africa

Elam is continuing her focus on multiracial scholarship by examining what mixed race means in culturally complicated South Africa. Elam received a Ford Foundation Research Grant in 2007 that took her to Cape Town and Johannesburg to research the issue along with her husband and, for this project, academic collaborator, Harry Elam, Jr., a Stanford drama professor, and the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education at Stanford.

The Elams are studying the fluid dynamics of the country’s mixed race or ‘coloured’ population, many of whom voted overwhelmingly for the white-led National Party—not for Nelson Mandela’s black-led African National Congress—in the 1994 election that ended Apartheid. Specifically, the project compares racial identity in the post-apartheid, post-Civil Rights era in the U.S. and South Africa, focusing on novelists, playwrights, comedians who are helping explore and define what it means to be a mixed “community” where the strict lines of black and white no longer holds even as inequalities still persist.

(Source: humanities.stanford.edu/mixedrace)