I was completely unaware they were any racist overtones to it.

I said, "Sluts like you muddy the race."

Allyson was joking around (and the absurdity of the argument is a rich source for humor; cf. Richard Pryor's "Black Ben the Blacksmith"), but "mulatto" comes from a time and place where people were saying the same thing without humor and without irony (not intentional irony anyway.)

I never realized how central and pernicious the theme of "muddying the races" was to American history until I read Eric Sundquist's Faulkner: The House Divided. I knew the huge role that racism played in our history, but the fear of "miscegenation (from miscere, to mix, and genus, race)" seemed like a fringe of the fringe concern. Sundquist makes clear that it was crucial, and marshals one appalling quotation after another drawn from literature, diaries, stump speeches, newspaper articles and many other sources and ranging from hundreds of years ago to at least the mid-20th century.

The book is great and I recommend it unreservedly, especially to Faulkner fans. If you're intrigued but are pretty sure you won't bother to track it down you can go to Amazon and use its "search inside the book feature" on terms like mulatto and miscegenation.

The argument in a nutshell: racism was an indispensible element of chattel slavery as practiced in America. Blacks were viewed not just as inferior but literally as other. "They aren't human, they're ___ (property, animals, etc.)" provided the non-economic rationale for slaveholding. Mulattoes - the word shares its etymology with mule, a "mongrel" animal - not only offended the sensibilities of white racists they also threatened the logic of the system. They were a direct challenge to the proposition that blacks and whites were essentially different, that they weren't even the same species. A recurring image in Faulkner is the juxtaposition of two faces, the same except for the color, of children of the same slaveowner. Sundquist points out that many abolitionists argued that abolishing slavery was necessary because it was the only way to "protect the integrity of the race" (i.e., slaveowners will inevitably abuse their power and their slaves and spawn "mogrels"). At the same time pro-slavery elements argued that the peculiar institution had to be maintained to protect the race and Southern womanhood from "the big black bucks of the field" who would be running wild post-emancipation. That argument was picked up, reiterated and amplified over the course of the next hundred years, underpinning Jim Crow laws as it had provided a foundation for slavery. The toll of all this on the American psyche was profound and the exploration of it was at the heart of Faulkner's work. And as he wrote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Mooooolatte.

Sorry about this bummer of a post, but it's important for people to know. I'll end with two quotations, the first from the Sundquist book, the second about another Mississippi governor who was the namesake of the character Vardaman Bundren in As I Lay Dying:

During Faulkner's lifetime [such sentiments] were embodied in Theodore Bilbo, longtime United States Senator and governor of Mississippi, and staunch advocate of African colonization for American blacks, who insisted that he "would rather see his race and civilization blotted out with the atomic bomb than to see it slowly but surely destroyed in the maelstrom of miscegenation, interbreeding, intermarriage, and mongrelization." (Sundquist, p. 146)

Widely known as "The White Chief," James Kimble Vardaman strategically blended outlandish claims of racial superiority with a near evangelical commitment to a violent Jim Crow society. He hated the wealthy landed class of white society and the entire Black race with near-equal vehemence. Ironically, the widening of the electorate in Mississippi provided Vardaman with a constituency - disaffected and uneducated poor whites - that, in turn, provided his single-minded platform of racial hatred with the legitimacy of elected office. Influenced as a populace by The White Chief's propaganda, Mississippi led the nation in lynching well into the 1930s. A keystone event inaugurating this philosophy occurred during Vardaman's initial 1904 campaign for governor. Subsequent to a lynch mob in the town of Rocky Ford, Mississippi chaining African-American J.P. Ivy to a woodpile and dousing him with gasoline prior to roasting him alive, soon-to-be governor Vardaman offered a few choice and well-received words. "I sometimes think that one could look upon a scene of that kind and suffer no more moral deterioration than he would by looking upon the burning of an 'Orangoutang' that had stolen a baby or a viper that had stung an unsuspecting child to death." (http://www.americanlynching.com/infamous-old.html)

People suck.

Several years ago, a southern black friend and I were talking about a classmate. I had remarked about how pretty I thought she was and what a beautiful skin-tone she had. My friend said, very casually, "Oh, you know she mulatto, right?"

This was stated by my friend as statement of fact, and I did not take her meaning to be derogatory. I wasn't trying to fish for information about our classmate, and the fact that she had mixed parentage (is that ok to say?) seemed obvious. She was a beautiful girl with fantastic coloring.

Honestly, until reading this conversation, I never knew "mulatto" was considered derogatory.

I just wanted to throw that in and thank the Buffistas for once again teaching me something.

Some people use the term to mean one black parent, one white. Some people use it more, uh, shadily, and tie a million things to it.

Don't use it carelessly, and for god's sake don't even get started into the coffee world with it, where the race-mixing metaphor already lives.

I wasn't trying to fish for information about our classmate, and the fact that she had mixed parentage (is that ok to say?) seemed obvious. She was a beautiful girl with fantastic coloring.

Honestly, until reading this conversation, I never knew "mulatto" was considered derogatory.

Nor did I, really. Is there a non-offensive term? Or are you just supposed to say "mixed" or something? And look, you even thought that might be bad. Is it wrong to make an observation ?

Is there a non-offensive term?

Biracial seems to be used pretty neutrally, at least to my ear. I could be wrong, of course.

Bi-racial and mixed work. Except I'm technically both, but actually not what anyone usually means by either term.

How would you describe someone half Asian, half white? Or half Asian, half black? Do you need a different word? Why?

The black/white terms touch some really historically breeding program bad places.

Is there a non-offensive term?

Biracial seems to be used pretty neutrally, at least to my ear. I could be wrong, of course

Different people definitely have different acceptability thresholds. A Creole friend of mine was dating a woman who had a Black mother and an Irish father. She used to tell him he shouldn't consider himself biracial for complicated cultural reasons.

This same friend once read someone the riot act for asking him if he was a mulatto. It was quite a rant. Might have been the root of my discomfort with the DQ creation, come to think of it.

I'm not sure that we have a satisfactory term at this point. In research projects, if you ask teenagers/young adults for their racial/ethnic background an increasingly high percentage say that none of the standard categories fit. People who have one parent who self-identifies as Black and one parent who self-identifies as White seem comfortable with Biracial as a term because they have one parent from each race. But people who have two mixed-race parents often don't see themselves as Biracial, because their parents don't come from different cultural or racial backgrounds. They prefer 'other.'

How would you describe someone half Asian, half white?

for me, someone to whom it applies, I go with hapa or bi-racial or mixed.

Or half Asian, half black? Do you need a different word? Why?

Don't need a different word. again, for my world.

They prefer 'other.'

HATE other. HATE it a lot, primarily because it's so... well, yucky. "Oh, you can't conceive of what I am? I am other."

Thank god on the census you can just pick as many races as apply to you.