Mixed Race Studies

Why Media Representation Matters To Biracial And Multiracial People

Blue Nation Review
2015-06-04

John Paul Brammer, Identity Editor

“So, you’re sort of nothing then.”

I’ve only heard this once. Someone asked me what my race was because they were curious. I explained to them that I was mixed, that I had both indigenous and European blood, and after mulling it over for a second, that was their response.

They meant no malice by it. If anything, they were trying to be playful. But it still reminded me that when it comes to the dominant narratives on how we perceive race and culture in this country, I don’t quite fit the story.

I am reminded of this again with the debate over Emma Stone’s multiracial character in Cameron Crowe’s certified stinker Aloha. Stone, a white woman, was cast to portray a half-white, quarter-Chinese, quarter-Native Hawaiian character by the name of Allison Ng.

Crowe has come forward and apologized for his decision. But casting Stone in the first place has opened a very necessary dialogue on multiracial characters in the media.

In the context of the media diversity debate, multiracial people exist in a precarious place. On the one hand, they seem to be left out for the sake of a more direct approach to criticism of media representation of minorities…

Read the entire article here.

4th Annual “What Are You?” with Lacey Schwartz’s “Little White Lie”

Brooklyn Historical Society
128 Pierrepont Street
Brooklyn, New York 11201
Monday, 2015-06-08, 18:30-21:00 EDT (Local Time)

A BHS “Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations” program.

Top: Lacey Schwartz, photo by Michael Hill; Bottom: Lise Funderburg, photo by Tigist Tsegie

On the week of Loving Day 2015, filmmaker Lacey Schwartz comes to BHS to presents her provocative documentary about being a biracial woman who grew up believing she was white, Little White Lie, as part of our 4th Annual What Are You? program looking at mixed heritage and identity.

Lise Funderburg, the author of the ground-breaking book on multiracial identity, Black, White, Other leads Schwartz in a post-screening talkback.

For more information and to reserve a free ticket, click here.

Competencies for Counseling the Multiracial Population

Multi-Racial/Ethnic Counseling Concerns (MRECC) Interest Network of the American Counseling Association Taskforce
American Counseling Association
2015-02-02
51 pages

Co-Chairs/Authors:

Kelley R. Kenney

Mark E. Kenney

Taskforce Members/Authors:

Susan B. Alvarado

Amanda L. Baden

Leah Brew

Stuart Chen-Hayes

Cheryl L. Crippen,

Hank L. Harris

Richard C. Henriksen, Jr.

Krista M. Malott

Derrick A. Paladino

Mark L. Pope

Carmen F. Salazar

Anneliese A. Singh

In memory of Dr. Bea Wehrly for her tireless work and advocacy. The publication of her book, Counseling Interracial Individuals and Families, by the American Counseling Association in 1996 was a major part of this journey.

Competencies for Counseling the Multiracial Population: Couples, Families, and Individuals; and Transracial Adoptees and Families (Endorsed and adopted by the ACA Governing Council, March 2015)

The Multiracial/Ethnic Counseling Concerns (MRECC) Interest Network of the American Counseling Association has developed the following competencies in order to promote the development of sound professional counseling practices to competently and effectively attend to the diverse needs of the multiple heritage population.

Section I: Overview

This document is intended to provide counseling competencies for working with and advocating for members of the multiracial population including interracial couples, multiracial families, and multiracial individuals, and transracial adoptees and families. The document is intended for use by counselors and other helping professionals; individuals who educate, train, and/or supervise current and future counseling and other helping professionals; as well as individuals who may conduct research and/or other professional activities with members of the multiracial population. To this end, the goal is for these competencies to serve as a resource and provide a framework for how counseling and other helping professionals can competently and effectively work with and advocate for members of the multiracial population…

Read the entire report here.

Racism under a Friendly Guise

Joy Huang Stoffers: Writer and Novelist
Saturday, 2015-05-09

Joy Huang Stoffers

racism, n.

A belief that one’s own racial or ethnic group is superior, or that other such groups represent a threat to one’s cultural identity, racial integrity, or economic well-being; (also) a belief that the members of different racial or ethnic groups possess specific characteristics, abilities, or qualities, which can be compared and evaluated. Hence: prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against people of other racial or ethnic groups (or, more widely, of other nationalities), esp. based on such beliefs. —The OED.com

Since beginning my MA degree in Creative Writing at Newcastle University, England, I haven’t been subject to racism. Maybe it’s because the British are usually reserved. Maybe it’s because I don’t go out much. Most likely the answer lies in an amalgamation of these two factors and others.

Today, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, this changed.

This morning I ordered a taxi to go on my once-a-month trip to Costco. (For those of you who don’t know, Costco is a warehouse that offers members sundry high-quality goods, often in comical bulk.) The cabbie was a jovial, middle-aged Caucasian man with an understandable Geordie accent. I buckled myself in and he, smiling, immediately began to interrogate.

“Joy, right? Where are you from?”…

Read the entire article here.

The Color Conversation-Healthy Identity Happy Kids: Fostering Positive Racial Identity in Mixed Youth

Multiracial Americans of Southern California (MASC)
World City Center
3911 W. Adams Blvd.
Los Angeles, California 90018
Saturday, 2015-06-20, 13:00-16:00 PDT (Local Time)

Join our 3rd parenting seminar where we focus on issues relating to adolescence – specifically, racial identity.

Hear a presentation on how parents can better understand the racial identity process in youth and what you can do to support your youth! Join a supportive conversation in a safe space with similar parents and families.

Bring your mixed race or transracially adopted TEEN for a special breakout session JUST for them!

FREE childcare will be provided at the preschool playground and garden for younger children.

Children will engage in an identity building and affirming art project presented by Art Zone!

This event will be beneficial for ALL parents, not just those with teens!…

For more information, click here.

‘Loving Day,’ by Mat Johnson

Sunday Book Review
The New York Times
2015-06-01

Baz Dreisinger, Associate Professor of English
John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York

“A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Abraham Lincoln declared in his 1858 speech presaging the Civil War. Such a house sits at the heart of Mat Johnson’s ribald, incisive novel “Loving Day.” Bequeathed to the narrator, Warren Duffy, by his deceased father, it’s a roofless, ramshackle mansion in a black neighborhood in Philadelphia: “I look at the buckling floors. I look at the cracks in all the walls, the evidence of a foundation crumbling beneath us. I smell the char of the fire, the sweet reek of mold, the insult of mouse urine. I see a million things that have to be fixed, restored, corrected, each one impossible and each task mandatory for me to escape again.”

The house is haunted. There are ghosts, mostly of neighborhood crackheads — that is, if we take Warren’s word for it; our narrator’s psyche is as wrecked as his inheritance. An “inept” comic book artist — “My work is too realistic, too sober” — he has moved back to America from Wales after a failed business and broken marriage. He’s wrecked, too, by his liminal ­racial status: His father was an Irishman, his mother was black and he comfortably claims neither — call him a man divided against himself. “I am a racial optical illusion,” he says.

Warren lives and breathes what W. E. B. Du Bois called double consciousness, by which the American black person is “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others. . . . One ever feels his two-ness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.” Except Warren’s body is white, making things even thornier; he’s perpetually performing a black identity that isn’t written all over his face — as when he describes “letting my black voice come out, to compensate for my ambiguous appearance. Let the bass take over my tongue. Let the South of Mom’s ancestry inform the rhythm of my words in a way few white men could pull off.”…

Read the entire review here.

Review: Mat Johnson’s ‘Loving Day’ Takes a Satirical Slant on Racial Identities

The New York Times
2015-05-26

Dwight Garner, Senior writer and book critic

Mat Johnson’s new novel, “Loving Day,” takes its title from an unofficial holiday, one his narrator likens to “Mulatto Christmas.” It’s the observance of the Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. Virginia, which in 1967 decriminalized interracial marriage in America.

Mr. Johnson, whose previous novels include the excellent “Pym” (2011), is himself the product of such a marriage — his mother is black, his father not just white but Irish white — and the politics of his own racial mix is a topic he’s written about with discernment and a rumbling wit.

In The New York Times Magazine recently, he described learning from a DNA test that he is 26 percent African. “I wasn’t a mustefino,” he said, as if paging through a field guide. “(Who has even heard of a mustefino?) I surpassed octoroon status, too; I was a quadroon with a percentage point to spare.”

“Loving Day” is about being blackish in America, a subject about which Mr. Johnson has emerged as satirist, historian, spy, social media trickster (follow him on Twitter) and demon-fingered blues guitarist.

The novel is about a man in early middle age named Warren Duffy, who loosely resembles Mr. Johnson. That is, he’s a culturally sophisticated black man who can just about pass for white. He considers himself “black, with an asterisk,” adding, “The asterisk is my whole body.”…

Read the entire review here.

A Qualitative Examination of Multiracial Students’ Coping Responses to Experiences with Prejudice and Discrimination in College

Journal of College Student Development
Volume 56, Number 4, May 2015
pages 331-348
DOI: 10.1353/csd.2015.0041

Samuel D. Museus, Associate Professor of Higher Education
Morgridge College of Education
University of Denver

Susan A. Lambe Sariñana, Clinical Psychologist
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Tasha Kawamata Ryan

National data indicate that multiracial individuals comprise a substantial and growing proportion of the US population, but this community is often invisible in higher education research and discourse. This study aims to increase knowledge of mixed-race students in higher education by examining the ways in which they cope with experienced prejudice and discrimination in college. Findings indicate that multiracial college students cope with prejudice and discrimination by educating others about multiracial issues, utilizing support networks, embracing fluidity of multiracial identity, and avoiding confrontation with sources of prejudice and discrimination. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Crowe’s ‘whitewashing’ sparks criticism from advocates

BBC News
2015-06-07

Elena Boffetta, BBC Washington

Hollywood’s reliance on bankable – and often white – actors has led to another round of sharp criticism of filmmakers for “whitewashing” roles where race and ethnicity play a part.

In Aloha, Cameron Crowe’s latest film, Emma Stone, a American actress with blonde hair and green eyes, was cast as Allison Ng – a junior fighter pilot who was part-Chinese, part-Hawaiian and part-Swedish.

Soon after the release, there was an uproar of criticism from social media against Crowe’s casting choice.

Both Asians and non-Asians asked why they didn’t pick an Asian actress to play a character who is part-Asian.

One advocacy group called Aloha “a whitewashed film” that failed to portray the ethnical diversity of Hawaii.

The Media Action Network for Asian Americans (MANAA) noted 60% of Hawaii’s population is Asian-American Pacific Islanders and 30% Caucasian, a fact not reflected in the film.

Crowe apologised on his website but said he based the Ng character on a real-life redheaded Hawaiian who felt compelled to constantly over-explain her unlikely ethnicity.

“I can understand what Crowe said about his intention that he based his character on someone that didn’t look Asian but identified with the culture but you could have casted someone who was part Hawaiian,” Guy Aoki, the founding president of MANAA, said.

“Whitewashing” casting differs from “colour-blind casting,” where a role is cast when factors of race or ethnicity are irrelevant to the character or plot…

…Hollywood has been accused of whitewashing Asians for decades…

Read the entire article here.

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow
Public Broadcasting Service (PBS)
2002

Richard Wormser, Series producer, Co-writer

Jim Crow was not a person, yet affected the lives of millions of people. Named after a popular 19th-century minstrel song that stereotyped African Americans, “Jim Crow” came to personify the system of government-sanctioned racial oppression and segregation in the United States.

In June 7, 1892, 30-year-old Homer Plessy was jailed for sitting in the “White” car of the East Louisiana Railroad. Plessy could easily pass for white but under Louisiana law, he was considered black despite his light complexion and therefore required to sit in the “Colored” car. He was a Creole of Color, a term used to refer to black persons in New Orleans who traced some of their ancestors to the French, Spanish, and Caribbean settlers of Louisiana before it became part of the United States. When Louisiana passed the Separate Car Act, legally segregating common carriers in 1892, a black civil rights organization decided to challenge the law in the courts. Plessy deliberately sat in the white section and identified himself as black. He was arrested and the case went all the way to the United States Supreme Court. Plessy’s lawyer argued that the Separate Car Act violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution. In 1896, the Supreme Court of the United States heard the case and held the Louisiana segregation statute…

Read the entire article here.