Race mixing
Jones' research has ties to political, sports figures

Suzanne Jones has a scholarly interest in sports, political figures Woods and Obama.

By Joan Tupponce

No one is more intrigued with news about presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama or professional golfer Tiger Woods than Dr. Suzanne W. Jones, professor of English and women, gender and sexuality studies. But it’s not Obama’s bid for the presidency or Woods’ latest handicap that has Jones’ attention—it’s their racial identity, or more specifically, how they and others view their mixed ancestry.

For more than 20 years, Jones has been writing about and teaching classes about literature that explores U.S. race relations, especially black-white relationships. The idea for her latest book project stems from one of the chapters in her 2004 book Race Mixing: Southern Fiction since the Sixties. In her new work, Jones will be looking at the reappearance of the racially mixed character in the contemporary American imagination through the study of fiction, memoirs and family histories.

Jones first became personally interested in the topic about 15 years ago. “I taught a student in my African-American literature class whose mother was white and whose father was black,” she recalls.

Jones was unaware of the student’s heritage until she read a paper the student had written about her racial identity. Jones, like others, had assumed the student was white.

The young woman explained that in high school she had friends of both races but at the University she found it hard to make friends with black classmates. “When she told them she was biracial, they were willing to accept her, but she didn’t like the fact that she had to tell them,” Jones says. “That was in the pre-Tiger Woods days when no one was calling themselves mixed. She wasn’t able to define herself and that was creating a lot of difficulty for her.”

Jones believes “there are several factors that have perpetuated and in some cases promoted stereotypes about mixed-race people, especially those subject to the customary ‘one-drop’ rule, which rendered black anyone with any known African ancestry.”

Those include “the continued presence of prejudice and discrimination in our society, the climate of distrust and misunderstanding between people of different races, and popular culture’s preoccupation with racial authenticity,” she says.

The conflicted feelings and thoughts of mixed people play out in contemporary fiction, nonfiction and film by authors who are black, white and racially mixed.

“By examining these feelings and complex thoughts, the authors allow their characters to move beyond stereotypes and to explore new avenues of understanding,” Jones says.

The mulatto character figured prominently in American literature in the 19th century. “The so-called ‘tragic mulatto’ was used to point out the tragedy of defining race the way we did in the United States,” she explains. According to Jones’ research, the character disappeared by the 1960s—the time of the Black Power movement—only to resurface in the 1990s.

“This reappearance of the mixed character is happening in part because the children of 1960s mixed marriages have grown up and are writing both fiction and nonfiction,” Jones says. “Also an intense debate about racial classification began in the early 1990s, spurred both by racially mixed people and some parents of mixed children, particularly white parents, who didn’t want their children to be defined by the old ‘one-drop’ rule. This debate eventually led to a change on the 2000 U.S. census form, which allowed people to check more than one racial or ethnic category.”

Other factors leading to the reemergence of the mixed-race character include the slow but steady increase in interracial marriages, the recent upsurge in immigration to the United States and new theories about the social construction of identity and the value of multiculturalism.

At the University, Jones teaches a seminar on Race, Identity and Community and several other classes, in which she includes literature about race relations and racial identity, such as Women in Modern Literature. In that class, students study Caucasia, a novel written by biracial author Danzy Senna.

“I use that novel because I want mixed students in the class to see a person like themselves in the literature they read, and I want all my students to understand the social construction of racial identity,” Jones says. “I have been surprised how readers who are the children of many different types of mixed marriages, not just race but religion, for example, see themselves in the biracial protagonist.”

Tiger Woods is an important reference in Jones’ research because he was one of the first contemporary public figures who identified himself as mixed—Caucasian, Black, Native American and Asian. He coined the term “Cablinasian.”

“Critics were surprised that he did not identify himself simply as African American, and many thought he was naïve or an elitist,” she explains. “I think he was a little bit ahead of his time.”

Obama is another interesting figure. His mother was Caucasian, born in Kansas, and his father was an African from Kenya. Obama grew up in Hawaii with his mother and later his maternal grandparents, and he spent some time in Indonesia with his mother and her second husband. “He didn’t define himself one way or another when he was a boy,” Jones says. “But when he went to a private school in Hawaii, some of the white kids made racist remarks because he was darker than they were. Such incidents made him think about his racial identity.”

Obama struggled with his mixed heritage but eventually defined himself as African-American, while at the same time embracing both of his families. “You could say he chose his racial identity,” Jones says, noting that it will be fascinating to write her new book during his campaign because already there have been questions about his racial allegiances. “It will be interesting to see the outcome.”
In her books and classes, Jones hopes to point out the difficulties that face racially mixed people in life and American literature, especially when they aren’t allowed to choose their racial identity. “Society should not be imposing on anyone a definition of who they are.

“I still see racial prejudice in our society,” Jones says. “Look at the commotion about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. I agree with Adrian Piper that one of ‘the last outposts of racism’ is white inability to acknowledge their own mixed racial ancestry.”