Happy New Year Mixed Race America!

I had hoped to post on the first day of 2013, but posting a day late is better than not posting at all--and since I'm heading out of town to go to MLA (big academic conference for English & Lit & Language profs) and will have sporadic internet availability while in Boston, I figured I should post something that is both meaningful for a new year and something I've been wanting to post for quite some time now:

Dr. Maria Root's Bill of Rights for People of Mixed Heritage.

Essentially, it's the Bill of Rights for Mixed Race America.

Because I've just finished a draft of my Tiger Woods chapter, I've been reading a variety of essays, articles, books, blogs, and esoterica about Tiger Woods and the many opinions that people have ab out Woods.  But I think Thea Lim of Racialicious sums it up best:

“Tiger Woods seems like a jackass. . . . But that’s no reason to deny him the right to self-identify.”

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!


Bill of  Rights  
for  
 People of Mixed Heritage 
    I
 HAVE THE RIGHT...
Not to justify my existence in this world.
Not to keep the races separate within me.
          Not to justify my ethnic legitimacy.
                    Not to be responsible for people’s discomfort with
                        my physical or ethnic ambiguity.
       I
  HAVE THE RIGHT...
 To identify myself differently than strangers  
     expect me to identify.
                    To identify myself differently than how my parents
                        identify me.
                         To identify myself differently than my brothers and
                        sisters.
                    To identify myself differently in different
                        situations.
       I
 HAVE THE RIGHT...
 
 To create a vocabulary to communicate about
    being multiracial or multiethnic.
                    To change my identity over my lifetime--and more
                       than once.
                    To have loyalties and identification with more
                       than one group of people.
                    To freely choose whom I befriend and love

American default modes: white men

From page 72 in psychologist Maria Root's book, Love's Revolution: Interracial Marriage. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001:

"The philosopher Lewis Gordon provides an analysis of the structural power enacted through race and gender that links the dialogue between them. Gordon points out that from a white point of view, the assumed race of the human race is white. To be non-white is to be racialized in an anti-black world. To be raceless is to be 'pushed up toward whiteness. Gordon also notes that for centuries the Western tradition has configured the gender of the human race as male. So although power may be defined as genderless and raceless, the default values for power are male and white.

Gordon contends that a hierarchy of sexual desirability naturally follows from this view of gender and race. Given the traditional Western view of power as white and male, white women can be constructed as black by their gender. This might help to explain why pairings of white women with black men are more common than pairings of black women with white men, a phenomenon that flies in the face of early exchange theories. White women and black men are not so distant from each other in social location."