As you can see from the above graph, what race a person was had little to do with geographical origin or skin color at first, but rather what set people apart was their free or enslaved status. The United States was not interested in where a person came from, but rather whether or not they had political power or could be used and abused as property. Race evolved in United States society to continue to be an instrument for upholding and enforcing the political power of the elites (Lyons, 2020). Anti-Blackness was a powerful tool for convincing non-Black people that the continued enslavement of Black people should be permitted, especially at a time when slavery had already been outlawed in the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe (from where many new Americans had originated) (Gjerde, 1999). Anti-Blackness combined with white supremacy allowed elite whites (wealthy, landowning) to convince poor whites to align their political power and agenda with theirs, despite having little to nothing in common in the past (Inventing black and white, 2022). Because elite and poor whites now had “whiteness” in common, they could join forces against nonwhites, particularly Black people, and elite whites could employ poor whites as tools in their continued enslavement of Black people as either overseers or slave catchers (early police units) (Brucato, 2021).

Access to Human Rights Depending on One’s Race

United States society continued to enshrine and encode white supremacy and anti-Blackness into its systems, institutions, laws, and norms, leading to a world where although race is not a biological reality, what race you are registered as/perceived to be can have a very real impact on one’s health, exposure to state violence, education, economic prospects, and physical location (Anderson, 2013) (Amezcua et al, 2021). Living in a racialized society like the United States has been proven to have drastic impacts on a person’s health, even giving rise to PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) and having a negative cascading effect on a person’s health and life overtime (Carter, 2007) (Amezcua et al, 2021).

Beyond the physical impacts on individuals, systemic racism and structural inequities include the very human rights people have in the United States. Although the letter of the law dictates that all people have equal access to human rights which are "universal," in practice this is not the case. Rather, people in the United States experience a stratification of human rights, meaning people on different societal "rungs" experience more or fewer rights than others. If we take the definition of “having human rights” to mean that you can only say you have a right when you have equal access to it and can exercise it without negative repercussions, then clearly nonwhite people in the United States do not have the same right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as do white people.

How does this access to human rights change when the person is “between” races? We define a mixed-race person as someone whose racial background is made up of more than one “race” – this often is a person with parents of two different races but can also be a person born to parents of mixed heritage themselves. While this may seem like “splitting hairs,” there are indeed implications and differences between a person’s experience depending on which is their situation. A person with parents of two distinct races/cultures will experience the world differently than a person whose parents are the same race, but whose physical appearance indicates to the world they are “mixed.” This matters because anyone who society deems “mixed-race,” meaning not fully white, will experience a stratification of rights in the US, both throughout history, and today (DasGupta, 2015).

Not only do people of mixed-race parentage experience a special kind of discrimination (being the product of marriages/unions that were illegal up until relatively recently), but we also experience a broken sense of identity and are often treated as pariahs by both cultures. People with one white parent and one nonwhite parent often do not look fully white or fully “of color,” and therefore people treat them accordingly: “too dark for the white folk” and “not really [their nonwhite ethnicity/race].” While stratification of rights in contemporary US depends on a person’s perceived race rather than codified laws based on racial identity, in the past, mixed-race people had their own category in the codified stratification of rights (DasGupta, 2015).

This leads us to the concept of “white passing” and the potential advantages therein. Throughout US history, as long as access to human rights has been tied either officially or unofficially to one’s race, being perceived as white (white passing) has offered a certain power and advantage to mixed-race people, but of course, it came at a price. In a society where Black people are over 3 times more likely to die in childbirth than white people (MacDorman et al, 2021) and more than 3 times more likely to be killed by police during an encounter (Schwartz & Jahn, 2020), then having the option of “passing” as white (or not Black) is a question of survival (Harris, 2018).

I refuse to shame anyone who, in the past or in today’s US, has decided to somehow obscure parts of their ethnic/racial identity for any reason when being nonwhite is quite literally life-threatening and rife with barriers white people do not have to face. Rather, I wish to acknowledge that if and when a person does try to pass as white by altering their physical characteristics, their name, or obscuring their family history, they are making a difficult, often painful choice, that can reinforce trauma, self-loathing, and further break ties with their nonwhite family or culture. The choices all nonwhites, regardless of their color or physical presentation, are forced to make in a racialized society such as ours, are inhumane and traumatic.

Being Mixed-Race and the Concept of Liminality

In a society that seeks to categorize and separate human beings to such an extent that it creates an entirely new and unnecessary concept by which to oppress them (race), mixed-race people pose a unique threat, in that they cannot truly be categorized. Mixed-race people exist in the “in-between,” the liminal spaces, the dawns and dusks, the neither here, nor there. Mixed-race people are not “white,” although one of their parents may be, and they may experience a childhood heavily influenced by that culture. They likely witness the power and privilege of whiteness up close, while also learning at an early age that those benefits will always be just out of reach. They may face awkward questions from strangers who do not believe they are the child of the person who bore them, simply because they are so much darker than them, or maybe their dark-skinned parent will face accusations of kidnapping their own much-fairer child. These things leave an imprint on a person; a mixed-race person will always know they belong to neither group. Outcast by both, belonging to neither, what space exists for them?

Conclusion

As we can see, race is far from a biological reality. If we revisit the Census graph from above, we can see that many peoples’ “race” changed several times over the course of their lifetime. For example, Middle Eastern people are considered white as far as the US government is concerned, but in the early years of Southern European migration to the US, Italians were not. Furthermore, whether a person chooses to “pass” and represent themselves either as fully white or racially ambiguous, clearly race is not fixed to physical or biological reality, but is rather fluid, changeable by society and a person’s own deliberate choices; it can even vary from social situation to social situation. After all, race is all about perception, and what the beholder believes to be true about race will influence how a person is viewed. I for instance, am assumed to be white by many Black people upon meeting me, despite having a Mexican-American father. Even the physical space in which a situation takes place can impact a person’s perceived race and therefore treatment by others. Growing up in Southern California I was assumed by most white and Hispanic people to be white, because I did not fit the idea many people had about what Hispanic people looked like. However during the past three years of living in South Florida I am assumed by most white and Hispanic people to be Hispanic, because here I do fit the image of what many Hispanic people look like in people’s minds. And yet, I am the same person in all three of these situations, regardless of who I am being perceived by or where I am presently located, proving that race is not a biological or physical reality.