Recognition

2020 ◽  
pp. 203-216
Author(s):  
Shanti Chu
Keyword(s):  
Mixed Race ◽  
Multiple Identities ◽  
Social Understanding ◽  
Multiracial Identity ◽  
Mixed Race Identity ◽  
Race Identity ◽  
Mestiza Consciousness ◽  
The World ◽  
Queer Phenomenology ◽  
Ways Of Being

Being multiracial can be a contradictory experience characterized by misperception and a lack of agency; however, embracing multiple identities can constitute an internal revolution of consciousness. This internal revolution of consciousness cannot occur without a societal recognition of multiracial identity. There needs to be a substantive social understanding of multiracial identity in order for true recognition to occur. Frida Kahlo’s The Two Fridas serves as an opening anecdote to this chapter as it illustrates multiplicity, which can characterize multiracial consciousness. Racial identity and multiracial identity are explored through Linda Alcoff’s Visible Identities, which also establishes the need for a substantive social understanding of mixed-race identity. An internal revolution of consciousness can be developed through Sarah Ahmed’s notion of queerness in Queer Phenomenology and Gloria Anzaldúa’s notion of mestiza consciousness in Borderlands: La Frontera. The parallels between queerness and a mixed-race consciousness are further explored in this chapter to embody new ways of being and seeing the world.

scholarly journals Imagining a Mestiza-Self Through the Double-Consciousness Trope

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 2510-2518
Author(s):  
Regina Sanders
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
The United States ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
Internalized Racism ◽  
Mixed Race Identity ◽  
Black And White ◽  
American Novels ◽  
Race Identity

This paper is a comparative study between two African-American novels: Caucasia by Danzy Senna (1998) and Quicksand by Lenna Larsen(1928). It specifically discusses how their respective mixed-race protagonist re-appropriates the double-consciousness trope –a term originally coined by African-American scholar W. E. Du Bois to describe the existence of blacks in the United States. More specifically, I argue that Danzy Senna’s novel Caucasia transcends traditional notions of mixed-race identity found in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand. First, I establish that Helga, the mulatta protagonist of Quicksand is constructed to play the version of the double-consciousness which assumes that mixed people (black and white) in United States live with internalized racism. Next, I demonstrate that Caucasia challenges Quicksand by providing us with a mulatta protagonist who re-appropriates the notions of double-consciousness by making it instrumental to her own survival and birth-right to be mixed.

The Way Forward

2018 ◽  
pp. 111-126
Author(s):  
Tanya Katerí Hernández
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
White Privilege ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Identity Recognition ◽  
Mixed Race Identity ◽  
Race Identity ◽  
The Social ◽  
Racial Mixture

This chapter will first summarize how the book’s review of multiracial discrimination cases reveals the enduring power of white privilege and the continued societal problem with non-whiteness in any form. Specifically, the cases illustrate the perspective that non-whiteness taints rather than the concern that racial mixture itself is worrisome. Yet this insight is lost in the midst of the multiracial-identity scholars’ singular focus on promoting mixed-race identity. Multiracial victims of discrimination will be better served by legal analyses that seek to elucidate the continued operation of white supremacy. Such a focus will also better serve all Equality Law and public policies. But this can only be done by shifting away from a focus on personal individual identity recognition to a focus on group based racial realities. The chapter concludes with a proposal for an explicit “socio-political race” lens for analyzing matters of discrimination rather than the Personal Identity Equality perspective that misapprehends the social significance of race in the assessment of equality problems. The book’s emphasis on a socio-political race perspective meaningfully preserves an individual’s ability to assert a varied personal identity, while providing a more effective tool for addressing racism and pursuing equality.

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