Trey Ellis - Cultural Mulatto

Cultural Mulatto

The phrase, coined by Ellis in his essay "The New Black Aesthetic," (NBA) refers to a black individual who possesses the ability to thrive and successfully exist in a white society while simultaneously maintaining all facets of his or her complex cultural identity.

Ellis writes: "Just as a genetic mulatto is a black person of mixed parents who can often get along fine with his white grandparents, a cultural mulatto, educated by a multi-racial mix of cultures, can also navigate easily in the white world."

Ellis appropriates the somewhat offensive term mulatto in his creation of rhetoric to describe this contemporary black locus as a means to challenge prevalent notions of multiracial; or in this case, "culturally multiracial", black people falling subject to the fate of the tragic mulatto. The tragic mulatto is an individual who, while struggling to fit into white culture, alienates him or herself from black culture. "Today's cultural mulattoes echo those 'tragic mulattoes' critic Sterling Brown wrote about in the Thirties only when they too forget they are wholly black." While prevalent as a stereotypical figure in 19th and 20th century American literature, the tragic mulatto need not exist in postmodern society. The NBA, as characterized by Ellis, allows space for the cultural mulatto to perform a self-defined, authentic form of identity that does not rely on the self-deluding practice of negating his or her blackness. Relatedly, the cultural mulatto need not perform a "superblackness" to overcompensate for "acting white" or to gain cultural credibility from the black community. Cultural mulattos exist in great numbers and, fueled by the ideology of the NBA, space for hybridity is opened and, subsequently, feelings of dislocation in a strictly dichotomous society are collectively obliterated.

Through their skills that allow successful navigation in both the white and black social spheres, the cultural mulattos that typify the NBA are using their access to higher education and various breeds of dominant cultural capital to make "atypically black" art and earn respect devoid of essentialist racial categorizations.