The New Colored People: The Mixed-Race Movement in America - Review

African American Review, Spring, 1999 by Katya Gibel Azoulay

Unfortunately, Spencer's comparative use of South Africa is not well established. Historically the status of "mixed-race" people has presented an administrative and political problem for racial oligarchies, but the situations of South Africa and the United States differ significantly. Keeping in mind that Afrikaners fine-tuned segregation/st policies of their British predecessors, a careful reading of the sophisticated vocabulary of apartheid reveals pronounced discomfort in relying on biology and genetics in differentiating population groups. The minimal interest in "mathematizing" ancestral heritage reflected an expedient means of preserving the fragile alliance between white Afrikaners and Anglos on the basis of white supremacy, while simultaneously accentuating ethnicity and language under the guise of preserving cultural groups (i.e., to protect Afrikaner hegemony).

After the 1976 Soweto uprisings, many (classified) Coloured South Africans aligned politically with Black Africans (who were classified into separate "national" groups by language, thus legitimizing territorial apartheid or the policy of Separate Homelands). Black came to signify a named political identity for Coloureds, Africans, and Asians, particularly youth activists. Spencer accurately argues that, while Black Americans "may be caught between devotion to white cultural forms and black cultural substance," nevertheless they "are not racially marginal like the coloured people" in South Africa, and yet he underestimates the profound significance of this observation. The racial binary which characterizes the U.S. is distinct, and in terms of culture - a very unstable concept - black, brown, beige, and white Negroes are very American. American culture has been shaped and colored by this diversity of people of African descent.

Spencer provides little new ground for Black Americans. The contradictions in the language of race may prompt white Euro-Americans to reconsider their own articulation of ancestral heritage under the overburdened label "white." In the final analysis, the mixed-race movement is about interrogating and naming subjective personal identities. Spencer appropriately reminds us to address the more substantive issue of finding structural solutions to the legacy of racial discrimination against people of African descent who have white and other ancestry.