‘Your momma is day-glow white’: questioning the politics of racial identity, loyalty and obligation

ABSTRACT

This article utilizes discourse analysis and an auto-ethnographic approach to explore the impact of US racial and ethnic categorization on the experiences of an individual marked as ‘mixed-race’ in terms of individual identity and familial/cultural group loyalty and obligation(s). This essay focuses on an incidence of public policing through the popular social networking platform Facebook, centring on the invocation of racial obligation by white friends and family members. I analyse how racial loyalty is articulated by friends and family members in their posts on my personal Facebook page and how this ‘loyalty’ is used as means of regulating my mixed-race identity performance. This essay aims to understand several things, namely how identity is mediated through the invocation of racial obligation and how tension around identity plays out in the multiracial family.

KEYWORDS:

• Auto-ethnography
• racialization
• race/ethnicity
• mixed-race
• colour-blind racism
• white racial obligation

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Anima Adjepong, Simone Browne, Ben Carrington, Jillian Powers, Jyoti Puri, and Brandon Andrew Robinson for their support and feedback on the many drafts of this manuscript. The author also thanks the editors and two peer-reviewers for their comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See: TIME covers from 18 November 1993 and 23 April 2001; the October 2013 National Geographic online story and photo gallery ‘The Changing Face of America’.

2. My personal Facebook account is not publicly accessible; thus, the identities of the posters included in this analysis have been changed and date and time stamps on comments have not been included. Text has been reproduced in the format in which it was written, with grammar/syntax uncorrected, in line with Bonilla-Silva’s (2013) transcription methods that allow for demonstration of ‘rhetorical incoherence’ when talking about race (117–119).

3. The process through which white women come to believe that their own claims of subordination are the most urgent and that they are not implicated in the subordination of other women (335).