Yao, C; (2018) Black, Red, and Yellow: Cross-Racial Coalitions and Conflicts in the Early African American Scientific Imagination. Occasion: Interdisciplinary Humanities Journal , 12 pp. 1-11.

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Abstract

On the question of biological human race, philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah sums up the current, dominant antiracist attitude simply: “I think there aren’t." Rigorous genealogies of the histories of race science, along with careful intellectual work tracing the development of racial formations, decouple biology from the social and cultural phenomena of what are now recognized as racialized identities. While shared histories of oppression and resistance may invite the unearthing of cross-racial ties that include the literally familial, the viability of contemporary coalition building, as outlined by Kwame Ture and Charles V. Hamilton in Black Power, requires clear assessments of self-interests and of the benefits of alliance, concrete objectives for specific goals and societal change, and attention to the need for self-determination. Nonetheless, the divide between the realm of the biologically essentialist and the domain of constructed culture has a certain porousness when it comes to metaphor, particularly in discussions of cross-racial and cross-cultural influences and coalition “So-called ‘mixed race’ children are not the only ones with a claim to multiple heritages. All of us are inheritors of European, African, Native American, and Asian pasts, even if we can’t exactly trace our bloodlines to these continents,” declares historian Robin G. Kelley, both pairing and unpairing the associations for effect in order to argue for the dynamism of polyculturalism and against static multiculturalism. Taking up Kelley’s research on the subversive political implications of these mutual inheritances, Vijay Prashad playfully refers to “our mulatto history,” using the formerly biological category for racial hybridity to describe “the long waves of linkage that tie people together in ways we tend to forget. The legacies of nineteenth-century race science in discussions of cross-racial alliances appear, at most, figurative.

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