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7. Praising Ambiguity, Preferring Certainty
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192 > 193 Americans praise ambiguity but prefer certainty. The mystery is exciting, but the solution is what they really want. More often than not, the “What are you?” moment comes from a benign wish to get to know an ambiguous-looking person better. The speaker may consider blended features to be exotic and stories of mixed backgrounds especially interesting. Since the development of the Tragic Mulatto, who was exceptionally beautiful if female or exceptionally dashing if male, positive notions around comeliness have surrounded racially mixed people in the United States along with the more prominent negative notions. In the current moment, it appears that positive notions match the negative. Some mixed people, such as Vin Diesel, star of Pitch Black, XXX, and The Fast and the Furious, have made a point of concealing their racial makeup. Whether the moviegoing public knew he was mixed or not, it delighted in the urbane, confident, muscular values he embodied. As Rob Cohen, his director in The Fast and the Furious and the XXX franchise, said, “He’s a new American. You don’t know what he is, and it doesn’t even matter, because he’s everybody. Everybody looks at Vin and goes, ‘I see myself.’”1 However, the public withheld higher adoration from Diesel, in part, because it could not categorize him. This is because, while Americans praise ambiguity, they prefer certainty. In general, they have settled on monoracial ways of understanding racially mixed people, rather than adopt more complex paradigms that appreciate the ambiguities they initially praise. Even though laws against interracial intimacy are a memory, acceptance has surpassed past levels, and mixed figures are more visible than ever, the tensions between stabilization of racial identity and defense of racial mixing have remained relevant. Since April 2001, when the Census Bureau released basic data on race from the previous decennial, several areas of discourse made titillation over blended physical appearances even more explicit. More so, they helped Americans process physical appearances, backgrounds, and public figures that many had never encountered before. In turn, they helped Americans express their thoughts in a liberal way. The first decade of the twenty-first century has been a short period of time, recent enough that one might miss the connections. But placing recent discourse on ambiguity on a continuum reveals the historical roots that connect it to past and future episodes. The use of racially mixed people as symbols of progress has been most prominent in visual representations of mixed faces and bodies. Some were models showcasing goods in print ads. Some were actors, whether box-office draws (such as Vin Diesel, Halle Berry, and Keanu Reeves), smiling faces populating commercials, or extras diversifying a mise-en-scène. Others were regular subjects in photographs illuminating some point about American [3.237.87.69] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 08:54 GMT) 194 > 195 other scientists of the twentieth century who worked to put an end to racial science. While multiple checking was an issue that racially mixed people saw as their own, D.N.A. tests appealed mostly to people without racial mixture in their immediate background. Like the box checking of the 2000 census, the molecules achieved a figurative power, helping the public grasp racial mixture. Counting them helped Americans manage the mysteries of genetic makeup. Even more, it helped them interpret the racial mixture of the people they encountered. Consumer D.N.A. tests relied on recent breakthroughs as well as age-old notions. With the expansion of common knowledge about scientific advances, these contradictory ideas circulated simultaneously, and Americans cobbled together meanings that included them all.3 The third of these phenomena of the early 2000s was the emergence of Barack Obama on the national scene. His white grandparents moved from Kansas to Hawaii, where their daughter met his father, an international student from Kenya. Obama was born in 1961, but his father soon left to seek a Ph.D. at Harvard and then move back to Kenya. The boy’s mother remarried a few years later, to an Indonesian businessman, and the family moved to Djakarta. She sent Barack back to Hawaii to attend a prestigious prep school and live with his grandparents. He attended Occidental College in Los Angeles and then transferred to Columbia University. In March 2004, journalist and novelist Scott Turow wrote, “No other figure on the American political scene can claim such broad roots within the human community. Obama is the very face of American diversity...