TRANSCENDING BLACKNESS

From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional MultiracialBy RALINA L. JOSEPH

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2013 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5277-8

Contents

PREFACE From Biracial to Multiracial to Mixed-Race to Critical Mixed-Race Studies…………………………………………………..ixINTRODUCTION Reading Mixed-Race African American Representations in the New Millennium………………………………………………11. Televising the Bad Race Girl: Jennifer Beals on The L Word, the Race Card, and the Punishment of Mixed-Race Blackness…………………372. The Sad Race Girl: Passing and the New Millennium Mulatta in Danzy Senna’s Caucasia……………………………………………….673. Transitioning to the Exceptional Multiracial: Escaping Tragedy through Black Transcendence in Mixing Nia…………………………….954. Recursive Racial Transformation: Selling the Exceptional Multiracial on America’s Next Top Model……………………………………125CONCLUSION Racist Jokes and the Exceptional Multiracial, or Why Transcending Blackness Is a Terrible Proposition……………………….155NOTES……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….173BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………201INDEX……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….219

Chapter One

TELEVISING THE BAD RACE GIRL

Jennifer Beals on The L Word, the Race Card, and the Punishment of Mixed-Race Blackness

From 2004 to 2009, the premium cable channel Showtime aired a groundbreaking nighttime television program, a “lesbian soap opera” that featured a cast of beautiful, and almost exclusively white, young women, whose love, friendship, family, and work lives provided much (melo)dramatic fodder for the show’s many loyal fans. At The L Word’s inception, its two bankable, big-name stars were women of color both famous for earlier cult-classic films: Jennifer Beals, most notable for her breakout “racially ambiguous” welder/dancer Alex in Flashdance (1983), and Pam Grier, celebrated for her “sassy supermama” roles in the Blaxploitation films Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974). For a certain segment of viewers hungry to see mixed-race actresses and images in popular culture, extra-textual information conveniently provided by press coverage about how Beals “really” is mixed-race (the daughter of an African American man and a white woman) paved the way for her multiracial iconicity. From her first film role to The L Word, Beals’s race(s) can be seen multiply according to the viewer’s differential readings of race; she becomes variously white or racially ambiguous in the films The Bride (1985), Vampire’s Kiss (1988), Troubled Waters (2006), and The Book of Eli (2010), but she is singularly multiracial and African American in the film Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), the television movie A House Divided (2000), and the miniseries The Feast of All Saints (2001). With this multiply racialized representational past, Beals entered The L Word as the feisty “power lesbian” Bette Porter, a role the writers made mixed-race at Beals’s request.

The best way to understand The L Word’s depiction of Bette is to enter into one of her characteristic scenes. In season 2, as in every season of the show, Bette endures emotional punishment. In this particular episode, Bette transitions from scenes of personal strife to workplace strife. She works at a starkly white, modern, and metal-infused museum as a curator. Light-brown-skinned Bette sits at a board meeting, with her dark hair long, loose, and curly. Her white, tailored pinstriped shirt, replete with silver and black cufflinks, peeks out from her snug brown pinstriped vest; she stands out among the gray-haired, pink-skinned, suit-and-tie-wearing men (see fig. 1). In this scene the only people shown talking are Bette and the man seated directly across the table from her, her boss Franklin, the straight white chair of the board. Franklin makes the mistake of casually describing a lesbian museum associate as “one of your people.” Bette immediately understands that Franklin is talking about the associate’s sexuality, but as she has already endured a punishing day and as her explosive personality has been written, she dives headfirst into conflict. Her eyes flash with anger and her voice quivers just slightly as she questions, “What are you referring to? What, is she a Yale graduate? Is she an art history major? Is she a mulatto gal? Is that what you’re trying to say?” (2.3).

The movement in Bette’s questions is telling: her descriptors traverse from two elite markers, an Ivy League degree and a prestigious college major, to a racialized identity of the past. “Mulatto” is an antiquated and, to many, derogatory term. It is not neutral. Paired with “gal,” a demeaning and antebellum South-sounding way of describing black women, it seems racist and frozen in the past. Bette’s twenty-first-century deployment of the phrase “mulatto gal” in a Los Angeles-area art gallery board meeting is so out of place with “Ivy League” and “art history major” that any discussion of her race is exposed as inappropriate, incongruous, and even laughable. Sexual orientation remains the structuring force in Bette’s questions, so large and present that she does not have to name it. Bette constantly and explicitly highlights her sexuality, gender, and class (the show manages to drop the phrase “Ivy League” into a surprising number of episodes), so her lesbian identity, womanhood, and privileged status are understood to be integral, constitutive parts of herself. But by dismissing mixed-race blackness as outdated, The L Word makes any racialized identity inappropriate for Bette to apply to herself. By inserting race talk through the phrase “mulatto gal” into the show’s progressive, post-racial ideological space, the character of Bette uncomfortably “plays the race card,” or, through the erroneous and post-racial logic of the phrase, drops racialized meaning into a situation where race supposedly does not exist. By her actions, Bette, a primary signifier for multiracial African American women on television, constantly oversteps her bounds. She is the “bad race girl,” the volatile new millennium mulatta who uses race, or, more specifically, uses blackness, when she needs it. The message remains: if Bette would just silence all references to her mixed-race African Americanness, that is, metaphorically transcend her blackness, the entire show would become more functional (and, admittedly, for some viewers, less deliciously dramatic).

Through six seasons of The L Word, Bette is written as a character whose multiple, intersectional identities are celebrated in all of their complexity, except when race surfaces. While the show presents Bette’s identities of gender, sexuality, and class as imbricated, it compartmentalizes race as a separate, nonintersectional, and ultimately damaging add-on. The treatment of race as a single-axis distraction produces an anti-intersectional “elision of difference,” in the words of the critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw. This scene showcases a persistent narrative element of The L Word: the attempted boxing in of Bette’s racialized identity and dismissing it as so trivial that it devolves into a mere quip that remains on the level of playing the race card. At times, Bette speaks back to power structures, which Franklin represents, in ways that many minoritized subjects might only fantasize about. In these moments Bette is presented as a superwoman of the type named by Michele Wallace in 1979 as “a woman of inordinate strength, with an ability for tolerating an unusual amount of misery and heavy, distasteful work. This woman does not have the same fears, weaknesses and insecurities as other women, but believes herself to be and is, in fact, stronger emotionally than most men.” However, she is not solely a superwoman because Bette is often punished after she speaks back.

The punishment of mixed-race African American characters is typical in representations of the historic tragic mulatta, the damned mixed-blood whose racial illegitimacy marks her as destined for tragedy. Such characters cause an emotional rupture in the text because they are, in the words of Valerie Smith, “signs of the inescapable fact of miscegenation[;] they testify to the illicit or exploitative sexual relations between black women and white men or to the historically unspeakable relations between white women and black men.” The difference in this twenty-first-century portrayal, or what makes Bette Porter a new millennium mulatta, is the reimagining of the tragic mulatta through the superwoman; although Bette appears destined for punishment, she refuses to accept such a lot, and, as a result, stops just short of becoming tragic. She is also a new millennium mulatta because she plays the race card. She can “play” race as a “card” because it fails to hold structural, institutional, or material weight in her life. Despite the softening of the historical stereotype of the tragic mulatta (i.e., she no longer goes insane and now has a powerful job), the new millennium mulatta is inevitably a tragic figure (i.e., she is emotionally volatile, which causes her to lose her powerful job). Just like the tragic mulatta, issues of blackness arise only in times of strife for the new millennium mulatta. While The L Word negotiates the intersections of upper-class, female, and queer identity through Bette, the series ultimately fails to fully contend with her mixed-race blackness, and instead it embraces a post-racial formulation to treat race as a card. Bette Porter, an emblematic multiracial African American character on television, becomes a convenient metaphor to reinscribe the centrality of whiteness and denigrate blackness.

The Race Card: A Mark of the New Millennium Mulatta

To fully uncover how “the race card” becomes a marker of the new millennium mulatta, I will contextualize the phrase. What, precisely, does “the race card” mean? What are its origins? Who is playing the race card and who is being played? Most writers appear to use the metaphor as a oneoff, drop-in, attention-grabbing phrase that is meant to bring a heightened awareness to a person’s, an article’s, or a book’s political leanings; it is a signifier for a certain type of politics rather than a clear-cut, descriptive metaphor. To be reductive for the sake of clarity, this polysemic phrase is used to mean two divergent entities: (1) to an audience that acknowledges racism, it means race baiting (as cause and effect of racism) by white people (and this is the original and more historic usage of the term), and (2) to an audience that denies racism, it means (so-called) race baiting (as cause and effect) by people of color (and this is the more contemporary treatment of the term that I believe The L Word is using in its portrayal of Bette). In this first estimation, white people are playing the card and people of color are being played, and in this second estimation, people of color are playing the card and white people are being played. Both envision race, or more specifically, blackness, as a card to be dealt, an ultimate trump, a trick up one’s sleeve that is played at a key moment to boost the odds of winning. Because power sets the terms for both sides of this so-called game, I must refute the equivalence of these two readings; the deployment of white racism is not comparable to people of color either illuminating the fact of white racism or inserting discourses of racialized difference.

An early usage of “the race card,” deployed in the first formulation, was in newspaper coverage of racist i96os-era political campaigns in the United States and United Kingdom. This is exemplified in the United Kingdom by the Tory candidate Peter Griffiths’s campaign slogan “If you want a nigger for a neighbour—vote Labour” and Enoch Powell’s famous “Rivers of Blood Speech.” Race baiting also has had much political success in the United States as part of the “Southern strategy,” which journalists described as the race card. Race baiting is, of course, not just a Southern phenomenon and is not rooted to some version of the racist, historic past, as illustrated by George H. W. Bush’s 1988 Willie Horton ads or the ads from 2006 that targeted the African American Democratic Senate candidate Harold Ford Jr. In these instances, playing the race card means race baiting perpetrated by white racists, for example, how white political campaigns garnered votes by inciting fear of minority encroachment.

The first usage of the “race card” meaning white racism, still exists in contemporary academia; some scholars analyze how racists play the race card with the end result of fomenting white racism. For example, in Welfare Racism: Playing the Race Card against America’s Poor, the sociologists Kenneth Neubeck and Noel Cazenave call out how racially coded language results in racially stratified poverty. They write of “playing the welfare ‘race card’ as a strategy in rising calls for meanspirited welfare reform.” Similarly, in Playing the Race Card: Exposing W/hite Power and Privilege, the education scholars George Dei, Leeno Karumanchery, and Nisha Karumanchery-Luik expand the field of antiracist pedagogy “to critically address and resist the foundations and machinery for racism.” They want “to address how the subtleties of racism go unseen, unacknowledged and denied in the eyes and ears of privilege. The phrase is used in the books’ titles by antiracist scholars to mark that they are going to speak out against color blindness, or against the assumptions that the United States is now a meritocracy. Such scholars center race and racism as contemporary, structuring forces in personal and institutional ways of life. This scholarship can be used as a call to arms, a statement of praxis, or a way of integrating antiracist theory and action. This is the historic, less popular today, and therefore resistive reading of the phrase “the race card.”

But The L Word uses the second meaning of “the race card,” the predominant, hegemonic one deployed by both popular audiences and academics. The legal scholar Richard Thompson Ford, in The Race Card: How Bluffing about Bias Makes Race Relations Worse, defines the phrase as “jumping to a conclusion not compelled by the facts” and “false or exaggerated claims of bias” Interestingly, “race” is not named in Ford’s definition. Today the phrase is most often used to mean that people of color unfairly use their racialized difference to their advantage. This usage surged in popularity during the O. J. Simpson trial where media critics accused the defense, and Johnnie Cochran in particular, of playing the race card or of introducing issues of race and racism as a type of bait-and-switch technique. However, in Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and W/hite from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson, the film theorist Linda Williams writes that in actuality, the prosecution’s deployment of the phrase in the Simpson trial illustrates that “the metaphor of the race card attempts to discredit any racialized suffering that can be turned to advantage now that colorblindness is supposedly in effect.”

In this second definition, minority status becomes both beneficial and a choice, not an entity laden with economic, structural, historic, and political legacies. There is no understanding of the contemporary salience of racism and of how race structures life chances. There is no understanding of how racism today is often “inferential,” to use the words of Stuart Hall, and not always “overt.” “Race” functions as a stand-in for minority status, or, more usually, blackness, while whiteness remains the absence of race, and, by extension, the absence of bias. To clarify: in the second use of the phrase, “playing the race card” is really the moment of white racist accusation. In a sense, in crying “race card!,” white racists are accusing black people of doing what they themselves are doing. But white racists also do not acknowledge that they are playing the race card as no one actually says publicly, “hey, I’m going to play the race card.”

In this second use of the phrase, “the race card” functions as a cover-up for protecting white power, a narrow, ahistorical, nonreality-based understanding of people of colors’ racialized identities as merely strategic choice. Even though the phrase is supposedly about minority identity, it reveals far more about whiteness and, in particular, the true material benefits of whiteness, or the “possessive investment in whiteness,” to use George Lipsitz’s phrase. The assumption in the second use of the phrase is that people of color are winning because of or are making money off of race. The opposite is true. “Playing the race card” is a post-racial statement about the so-called utility of race, which illustrates, as Roopali Mukherjee puts it, “white ‘sympathy fatigue’ metastasizing to racial resentment and wrath.” The second use of the phrase is an outgrowth of new millennium white power, where the benefit of “whiteness as property,” to cite Cheryl Harris, is ignored. Race outside of (illegitimate claims to) victimhood is erased in popular understanding of the phrase, and whiteness is not seen with its concomitant material gains. It is not seen as institutional, or even real or operative, in the twenty-first century.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from TRANSCENDING BLACKNESSby RALINA L. JOSEPH Copyright © 2013 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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