Sentences:

Pinder: Pinder focuses on the duality of representations of multiraciality and their sociopoltical currency in popular culture.

Waegner: Waegner calls the trend of yellowface/blackface impersonation a performative playful passing instead of cultural appropriation.

Response:

In Pinder’s article, Lorraine O’Grady addressed biraciality by stating the ‘mixed product’ will not only negate the idea of purity but also the idea of superiority, commentating on the perceived dualism and hierarchy in multiracial people. However, this amount of responsibility and consumer status given to multiracial people is problematic. For example, the article states there is a growing trend of multiraciality as superior and a ‘perfect hybrid’, blending together the so called Melting Pot. This status as the ‘Universal Child’, given to Tiger Woods due to his African, European and Asian descent negates the individualist cultural and heritage that the multiracial people have, by ‘melting’ them together into a elite hybrid resembling all the parts of the globe. Thus, how is “mixing to be a great strength of multiethnic people”? (394) By assimilating a multitude of cultures and backgrounds so that no racial and cultural tensions become absorbed in this union and birth of a multiracial child? By generating the power given to white privilege and the complexity of cross racial unions so that the “color of the skin makes you think I [can] be lucky”? (395). I have a problem with authors stating multiraciality is now superior because it’s still another form of eugenics and designing human biology for a desired outcome and product. I think O’Grady highlights this problem of assigning values to people based on race in her The Clearing series, juxtaposing unions of multiracial people and historical names, broadening the viewer’s sense of the consequences and appropriation that has come out of these unions.

Lorraine O’Grady Photo credit David Velasco Lorraine O’Grady The Clearing: or Cortez and La Malinche, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, N. and Me, 1991;