Sex and Race in the Black Atlantic by Daniel McNeil

Author:Daniel McNeil [McNeil, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Ethnic Studies, African Studies, Discrimination, Media Studies
ISBN: 9781135156633
Google: 1MmMAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2010-01-27T04:40:45+00:00

To replace the racial fiction of black and white with the nationalistic vocabulary of “American” is surely as potentially problematic as any narrative of passing would be. It is difficult, after all, to extricate “American” from a history of racialized hierarchies and imperialism.

Siobhan Somerville, Queering the Color Line (2000)

In the 1990s, many multiracial crusaders celebrated Tiger Woods when he won a lucrative endorsement and reminded American consumers that he was not just black.2 Others looked back to 1980 and Joel Williamson’s attempts to claim Du Bois’s Talented Tenth as American individuals, or turned back to editorials in The New York Times during the 1960s that maintained, “The question must be not whether a group recognizable in color, features or culture has its rights as a group. No, the question is whether any American individual, regardless of color, features or culture, is deprived of his rights as an American.”3 Wryly observing this deliciously hybrid form of individualistic nationalism, Canadian poet Wayde Compton has even composed a “Declaration of the Halfrican Nation,” evoking Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks as he ironically asks his ‘fellow mixed sisters and brothers’ in North America to put their lives on the line and ‘mount an offensive for our state.’

Heeding Compton’s clarion call, this chapter addresses the longing for cool, masculine warriors who can lead an army of mixed-race Americans. It collects the life stories of mixed-race celebrities who grew up after the 1960s, and points out that many of them have tried to cast off roles linked to “tragic mulattoes” by investing their hopes in an American creed where class, if not race, is deemed irrelevant. I recall Du Bois’s commitment to Communism and Third World solidarity, a commitment that has largely been ignored by prominent mixed-race figures like Barack Obama. I also show journalists at The New York Times adopting Rank in order to market mixed-race athletes such as Franco Harris as American heroes, a trend Fanon warned us about in The Wretched of the Earth when he derided members of a bourgeoisie who consumed national sportsmen rather than encourage the development of “fully human men.”4 I begin, however, by addressing the efforts of filmmakers such as Melvin and Mario Van Peebles to make Fanon’s work accessible to an American public and define their identity as Black “race men” (responsible fathers to their families, race and/ or nation) against a mixed-race identity that is feminised and infantilised.

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