Permanent Markers by Sarah Abel;

Author:Sarah Abel;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press

Roberts’s statement underlines how focusing on deconstructing beliefs of ancestral purity as the linchpin of antiracist action can create blind spots about how structural conditions (e.g., class inequalities) contribute to the reproduction and intensification of socially engineered racial distinctions, which in turn reinforce societal beliefs that these differences are “natural” and “innate.” As Roberts identifies, the solution to these problems requires not only ideological shifts but also (and principally) political and economic action. As an expression of personal commitment, Roberts draws a moral distinction between knowing about one’s mixed ancestry and making it the focus of one’s public identity.

The strategic cultivation of Black identities among biracial children (who could feasibly have access to different “ethnic options”) has been framed elsewhere by France Winddance Twine as a form of “racial literacy”: a set of “practices that resist racial hierarchies that privilege whites and people of multiracial heritage over blacks in a context in which the boundaries between blackness and whiteness are permeable.”43 Many of the Black U.S. and Brazilian test-takers I interviewed demonstrated their own racial literacy by pragmatically affirming the salience of their existing racial identities over their DNA ancestry portraits, based on their understanding of how racism continues to operate in these societies. As Jessica, a U.S. college student, put it: “I self-identify as African American. I identify as such because genetically I am predominantly African American, not to mention that, when people see me, they automatically assume I am African American. Just because I have European blood in me does not mean that people won’t see me a certain way, that’s just how it is. That’s the bad part about self-identification; just because you see yourself that way doesn’t mean the world will.”

Nonetheless, some Black and mixed-race interviewees indicated that they saw their DNA ancestry reports as a way of opening up certain “ethnic options” within Blackness, at a moment when cosmopolitanism and multiethnicity are increasingly valued.44 Hasan, a financial executive who had taken several DNA tests to try and deepen the scope of his genealogical research, told me that he also wanted his children to “have a sense of where they came from outside of slavery.” In addition to gaining information about their African ethnic origins, he felt that the admixture tests offered them “a larger view of the world and their place in it—they are citizens of the world, to borrow the quote. My wife’s parents are from Jamaica and Cuba, and their recent ancestry includes Chinese, Native American, England, and African in high percentages. So the world is really them.” Others found that the diverse categories in their admixture reports were good for striking up new friendships or strengthening cultural affinities. For instance, one test-taker reported that after discussing his newfound “Jewish” genetic ancestry at his workplace, a Jewish colleague had invited him for dinner with his family, and they had since become firm friends. Similarly, a Mexican American test-taker who found she had a small percentage of “Middle Eastern” DNA said that on hearing

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