Tragic No More: Mixed-Race Women and the Nexus of Sex and Celebrity

Introduction

1 Introduction The year 2008’s historic spectacle of an African American man and a white woman running for President illuminates the ways in which the nation still contends with the difficult,unfinished business of a society configured through structural inequalities of race and gender. During the protracted primary campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, many aspects of public discourse became consumed by the troubling history of white-black interracial sexuality and the charged politics of black/white mixed-race identity. Tragic No More takes up the compulsive attention to racial boundaries in the United States and explores why female figures are so often the visual representation of race mixing. This book is a multidisciplinary study of women on the color line—black/white women and their role in the simultaneous creation and undoing of racial categories. I analyze black/white femininity through fictional characters in selected novels and television, as well as through examples of biracial women in music and film who achieved celebrity status in the 1990s and after. I have also included selected narratives of black/white women from earlier decades that became re-contextualized in the late twentieth century. My work joins a significant body of texts published since the first decade of the new millennium, which are in dialogue across a range of topics that engage mixed race in the United States. This critical mass of exceptional work 2 introduction constitutes an emerging academic field of cultural studies in mixed race. The field is radically multidisciplinary,including historiographies of interracial romance and marriage,1 research about contemporary biracial identity2 and the multiracial movement,3 and critical theory in the humanities engaging literature, film, and performance.4 In this book I argue that women of black and white descent act as lightning rods illuminating how the historical trauma of race relations plays out in current social life. Black/white women exercise this powerful triggering function because they resonate with the historical mulatto of American culture.Whereas contemporary mixed race is undeniably “tragic no more,” the tragic mulatto has not been displaced. This is because contemporary figures of mixed race trigger the mulatto of historical memory. Mixed-race people may be our future, but at the present time they also function as vectors for uncanny returns to the past. My study of black/white women theorizes their significance as markers of sameness and difference on the boundary between the races, and on the spectrum of femininity among representations of African American women. The deeply troubled history of interracial sexuality is a critical part of what makes mixed-race people a repressed yet crucial aspect of America’s national identity. As both the products of miscegenation and potential agents of interracial sex, black/ white women symbolize a constitutive knot of dread and desire. In the pages that follow, I identify two frameworks for understanding mixed race in the United States today. One is historical, derived from the abject condition of slaves and shaped by asymmetrical power relations. It remains a powerful narrative in African American communities.The other framework is more recent, oriented toward capturing the significance of contemporary social change since the 1990s. What the two frameworks share is engagement with the fraught terrain of interracial sexuality and the conundrum of racially hybrid identities. The conjunction of these narratives facilitates, on one hand, a reinscription of the so-called tragic mulatto as emblematic of the troubled past. At the same time, contemporary discourse invokes the tragic mulatto precisely to refute any lingering stigma attached to late twentieth-century mixed-race identity. To declare mixed race is “tragic no more” is a virtual truism, as ample evidence indicates its apparent incorporation as a valid American identity, along with the integration of interracial couples and multiracial families in the general social landscape.5 The nation’s first generation of so-called 3 introduction post-Loving6 children are nearing forty, and they are a dizzyingly diverse group, reflecting the growth of Latino and Asian populations and embodying the inevitable “exotic” mixtures of a global society. Mixed-race people are indeed attractive representations of multicultural diversity and seem to gesture toward the eventual diffusion of racial conflict. Healthy biracial identities and widely admired mixed-race icons seem to repudiate the tragic mulatto stereotype. In 1993 Time magazine published a special issue called “The New Face of America: How Immigrants Are Shaping the World’s First Multicultural Society...