“Until the philosophy which hold one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned...
Everything is war. Me say war.
That until the're no longer 1st class and 2nd class citizens of any nation...
Until the color of a man's skin is of
no more significa...nce than the color of his eyes, me say war. That until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race me say war!”
------------------------
I thought it fitting to open this response with those lyrics. Very true, are they not? They were written almost 40 years ago, and sadly, they still describe our current sociopolitical affairs. Collectively here in the U.S., we are blinded by our indifference and obsession with war and politics. We simply cannot conceive another way to live-- because the current one is so hegemonic. It seems that U.S. can ONLY obtain resources by creating wars; ONLY obtain property by land-grabbing; ONLY have national and/or ethnic pride at the degradation of others; ONLY allow assimilation and not integration of other peoples.
We have been "taught" that this is "just the way things are" when, in actuality, we have been racially mixing since modern man stepped in the evolutionary timeline.
The interesting thing is that we are still on a Neo-Malthusian course of action in attempting to "preserve the superior race" and exterminate the "undesirables". We are doing it so much and creating tons of phenomena as a result of this biopolitics until we have a whole academic area of study dedicated to this: Critical Race Theory.
We are also mixing in many of the same ways still today: Expatriates living and working internationally; people immigrating; people emigrating; women being taken for harems and my favorite (as a feminist): sex-trafficking: all point to us being just as keen on mixing as we were centuries ago. These complicated scenarios continually create and perpetuate conflicts about "mixed-race" identity. Thus, it seems that "racial mixing" and the resultant problematics have all been the norm and not the novelty, as Smallwood brilliantly points out in his essay.
North Carolina A&T profile for Dr. SmallwoodThe Hapa Project - Kip Fullbeck
Asian American Literature Review's Mixed Race Project
