Mixed Race Studies

Allyson Hobbs’ A Chosen Exile makes summer reading lists

Stanford News
Stanford University, Stanford, California
2017-07-14

Alex Shashkevich

Allyson Hobbs

A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, written by historian ALLYSON HOBBS, made it to the 2017 summer reading lists of Harvard University Press and The Paris Review.

The 2014 book examines the phenomenon of racial passing, which is an intentional attempt by a person to assume a different racial identity, in the United States from the late 18th century to the present. Hobbs was inspired by a story her aunt told her about a distant cousin who passed as a white woman in the 1940s.

“Necessarily, Hobbs writes, passing involves erasure: gradations gone, subtleties of color and culture reduced to black and white,” wrote Julie Orringer in The Paris Review. “What’s lost in the process: families and friends, a sense of belonging. A Chosen Exile illuminates those losses with acuity, rigor and compassion.”…

Read the entire article here.

“So If You’re From Africa, Why Are You White?”

FLY: (Freedom. Love. You.)
Cambridge University
2017-03-16

Nina Grossfurthner

I woke up a week ago and started my day eating breakfast and scrolling through Facebook. I usually read my Bible in the morning, but on that particular day I had a lot to get through before mid-day lectures so I decided I would leave it to the evening. Thinking back now, perhaps skimming through a quick verse would have allowed me to approach what happened next with a bit more grace. I don’t know how many of you have been keeping up with the story of Rachel Dolezal, in all honesty I don’t encourage you to do so. But, for those of you who haven’t I will briefly outline who this woman is and why I needed to write about her, a decision that didn’t come easy because I didn’t want to assign her any more space than that which she has so carelessly claimed.

Rachel Dolezal blew up on the internet a few years ago by claiming that she, a fully Caucasian woman, identified as ‘black’. When I first came across the story, I quickly scrolled past because I didn’t think it worth my time to hear her try and justify why she should appropriately be called black. However, what made me stop scrolling that morning, was the recent name change which Dolezal has undertaken.

Adding insult to injury, Rachel Dolezal recently made the decision to change her name to Nkechi Diallo – a confusing medley of both the Igbo language of southern Nigeria and that of the Fulani tribe whose people can be found in many West African nations (because African nations were effectively decided by white men using a ruler and a pen). Setting aside the obvious disturbance of taking on an ‘African sounding’ name, the seeming thoughtlessness behind picking whatever name she felt suited her reflects the same precarious attitude with which she chooses to engage with the ‘black’ identity…

Read the entire article here.

From ADEFRA to Black Lives Matter: Black Women’s Activism in Germany

Black Perspectives
2017-07-05

Tiffany Florvil, Assistant Professor of History
University of New Mexico

Black Lives Matter activists in Berlin in July 2016 (WOLFRAM KASTL/AFP/Getty)

On Saturday, June 24, 2017 at 4:30pm, a Black Lives Matter (BLM) protest took place in Berlin, Germany with thousands of people expressing solidarity and promoting awareness of racial injustice. The event built from the momentum of two BLM marches that occurred last summer. Initially meeting at the 2016 BLM marches, Mic Oala, Shaheen Wacker, Nela Biedermann, Josephine Apraku, Jacqueline Mayen, and Kristin Lein remained in contact and eventually established a Berlin-based multicultural German feminist collective. With their new group and local connections, they planned the 2017 demonstration as a part of a month-long series of events, which included film screenings, poetry readings, workshops, exhibitions, and more.

Taken together, these events highlight the diversity of Black protest and activism within the German context. Using these events, especially the protest, the organizers publicly drew attention to instances of racism and oppression and attempted to gain visibility for Black people in Germany and beyond. The different events as well as the BLM Movement in Berlin represent the conscious efforts of these feminist and anti-racist activists to not only engage in practices of resistance, but to create and own spaces of resistance, solidarity, and recognition within a majority white society. In this way, they demand their “right to the city” and continue to make Germany a critical site for blackness and the African diaspora.

Ika Hügel-Marshall and Audre Lorde (Feminist Wire, Image Credit: Dagmar Schultz)

…[Audre] Lorde was a visiting professor teaching courses at the Free University of Berlin (FUB) in 1984, which a few of these women attended. Black German women also cultivated connections to her outside of the classroom. Lorde emboldened Black German women to write their stories and produce and disseminate knowledge about their experiences as women of the African diaspora in Germany. Inspired, Oguntoye, Ayim, and Dagmar Schultz, a white German feminist, produced the volume Farbe bekennen: Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte in 1986 (later published in 1992 as Showing our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out). The volume helped Black German women and men connect and socialize with one another and forge a dynamic diasporic community after years of isolation in predominantly white settings…

Read the entire article here.

Liminality, hybridity and ‘Third Space:’ Bessie Head’s A question of power

Neohelicon
First Online: 2017-06-07
pages 1–17
DOI: 10.1007/s11059-017-0387-8

Sayyede Maryam Hosseini
University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

Hybridity has been a controversial issue not only in eugenic hypotheses of the nineteenth century but also in the postcolonial, cultural, linguistic, and geographical contexts. It can be seen as a ‘Janus-faced’ entity. Theorists like Bhabha consider it as a ‘Third Space’ which is fraught with ambiguities, while some use the term ‘liminal’ to point to its location in history, culture, and society in general. This essay deals with a ‘coloured’ writer’s coloured character in the light of hybridity. Elizabeth, the coloured protagonist of Bessie Head’s A question of power lives as a hybrid in a state of liminality, and tries to dismiss the worldview of colonialism and the postcolonial nationalism of South Africa and reconstruct her shattered identity in the ‘Third Space’ of Motabeng. Elizabeth’s hybridity and her iconoclastic condition are intensified by rampant liminal elements in the novel. The essay follows the intricate interrelationships of hybrid elements in terms of Elizabeth’s multi-faceted character, her garden, and the borders she crosses in the course of the novel. Hybridity here is by no means a mere inter-racial issue, the attempt here is to relate this concept to the anti-conventional and iconoclastic; the things that are liminal and indefinable within established epistemology.

Read or purchase the article here.

Study investigates marks of racism in “interracial families”

Agência FAPESP
São Paulo Research Foundation
2017-06-14

José Tadeu Arantes
Agência FAPESP

Society’s racial hierarchies are reproduced in families and interact with feelings, researcher says (photo: Wikimedia)

One hundred and twenty-nine years after the abolition of slavery in Brazil, and despite the myth of racial democracy, race-based prejudice is still widespread in Brazilian society – so much so that it can be found even in “interracial families”. This is the conclusion of a study by social psychologist Lia Vainer Schucman.

Schucman undertook the study during her postdoctoral research at the University of São Paulo (USP) with FAPESP’s support and in collaboration with Felipe Fachim. Her supervisor was Belinda Mandelbaum, who heads the Family Studies Laboratory at the university’s Psychology Institute (IP-USP).

“We set out to discover whether and how society’s racial hierarchies are reproduced in families whose members classify themselves differently with regard to ‘race’ – as ‘white’, ‘black’ or ‘mixed-race’ – and how these hierarchies coexist and interact with their emotions or feelings,” Schucman told Agência FAPESP.

In addition to performing an exhaustive review of the specialized literature, which took three years, Schucman personally interviewed 13 families from different regions of Brazil. She has written a book about her findings: Famílias Inter-raciais: tensões entre cor e amor (“Interracial Families: Tensions between Color and Love”). The book will be available later in 2017.

“My interest in researching the topic arose initially from my interaction with people from these families, people who experienced ‘racial contradictions’ in their own skins, as it were,” Schucman said. “It happened when I was finishing up my PhD research, which was on ‘whiteness’. Because of my research, I started to be invited to give lectures quite frequently, and after the lectures, people would often come up to tell me about cases of suffering due to racism in their own families. This happened many times. These conversations led me to realize that families could be a key to understanding ‘interracial’ relationships in the wider context of society.”

Schucman’s starting-point was the conviction that “race” is not a biological given but a social construct. It is a construct based on phenotypes, she argues, which engenders and sustains profound material and symbolic inequality in society and which affects the daily lives of millions of people…

Read the entire article here.

Think race and ethnicity are permanent? Think again

N-IUSSP: IUSSP’s online news magazine
International Union for the Scientific Study of Population
2017-06-26

Editorial Committee

Add something else to the list of things that seem simple but are actually complicated – the way someone reports their race or ethnicity. In a recently-published research article (Liebler et al. 2017), we used a large, unique linked dataset from two U.S. Censuses (2000 and 2010) to study who had the same race/ethnicity response in both years and whose response changed from one year to the next. With over 160 million cases covering all U.S. race and ethnicity groups we found that 6.1% of people in the (not-nationally-representative) data had a different race or ethnic response in 2010 than they did in 2000.

These response changes represent changes between the federally-defined major race groups (multiple responses allowed in both years): white, black or African American (“black” here), American Indian or Alaska Native (“American Indian”), Asian, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander (“Pacific Islander”), or the residual category of Some Other Race. Or they were changes between the two defined ethnicity groups: Hispanic/Latino and non-Hispanic/Latino (“Hispanic” and “non-Hispanic”).We used strict case selection to assure that responses were given by the person or a household member (not allocated, imputed, gathered from a potentially unreliable source, or signaling an incorrect match)…

Read the entire article here.

America’s Churning Races: Race and Ethnicity Response Changes Between Census 2000 and the 2010 Census

Demography
February 2017, Volume 54, Issue 1
pages 259–284
DOI: 10.1007/s13524-016-0544-0

Carolyn A. Liebler, Professor of Sociology
University of Minnesota

Sonya R. Porter
Center for Administrative Records Research and Applications
U.S. Census Bureau, Suitland, Maryland

Leticia E. Fernandez
Center for Administrative Records Research and Applications
U.S. Census Bureau, Suitland, Maryland

James M. Noon, Survey Statistician
Center for Administrative Records Research and Applications
U.S. Census Bureau, Suitland, Maryland

Sharon R. Ennis, Statistician
Center for Administrative Records Research and Applications
U.S. Census Bureau, Suitland, Maryland

A person’s racial or ethnic self-identification can change over time and across contexts, which is a component of population change not usually considered in studies that use race and ethnicity as variables. To facilitate incorporation of this aspect of population change, we show patterns and directions of individual-level race and Hispanic response change throughout the United States and among all federally recognized race/ethnic groups. We use internal U.S. Census Bureau data from the 2000 and 2010 censuses in which responses have been linked at the individual level (N = 162 million). Approximately 9.8 million people (6.1%) in our data have a different race and/or Hispanic-origin response in 2010 than they did in 2000. Race response change was especially common among those reported as American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, Other Pacific Islander, in a multiple-race response group, or Hispanic. People reported as non-Hispanic white, black, or Asian in 2000 usually had the same response in 2010 (3%, 6%, and 9% of responses changed, respectively). Hispanic/non-Hispanic ethnicity responses were also usually consistent (13% and 1%, respectively, changed). We found a variety of response change patterns, which we detail. In many race/Hispanic response groups, we see population churn in the form of large countervailing flows of response changes that are hidden in cross-sectional data. We find that response changes happen across ages, sexes, regions, and response modes, with interesting variation across racial/ethnic categories. Researchers should address the implications of race and Hispanic-origin response change when designing analyses and interpreting results.

Read or purchase the article here.

NYU Guesses Racial, Ethnic Identity of Some Employees

Washington Square News
2017-04-17

Sayer Devlin, Deputy News Editor

Jessica Francis Because NYU receives federal funding, the university’s office of human resources is required to guess the racial and ethnic identities of employees who do not self-report that information.

An NYU professor, who is a person of color, told WSN that he had a very brief meeting — less than five minutes — with the university’s human resources department, which he believes was used to guess his ethnicity.

The practice of determining the race and ethnicity of employees through post-employment records and visual observations is explicitly legal according to a directive by the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs. However, the practice of assigning an employee’s race based on their appearance raises ethical questions.

NYU is required to collect data on the race, ethnicity, gender, veteran status and disability status of all their employees — though employees are not required to disclose this information — because the university receives federal funding.

“Self-identification will remain the preferred method for compiling information about the sex, race or ethnicity of applicants and employees,” the directive reads. “A contractor’s invitation to self-identify race or ethnicity should state that the submission of such information is voluntary. However, contractors may use post-employment records or visual observation when an individual declines to self-identify his or her race or ethnicity.”

NYU Spokesperson John Beckman said in an email that he could not comment on this incident regarding the aforementioned professor…

…CAS Associate Professor of Sociology Ann Morning serves on one of the U.S. Census Bureau Committees, the National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic and Other Populations, which advises the racial categories used in the census. Morning said that guessing the racial identities of faculty might be the best way to to collect that information…

Read the entire article here.

Unsettling intersectional identities: historicizing embodied boundaries and border crossings

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 40, Issue 8 (2017)
pages 1312-1319
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2017.1303171

Ann Phoenix, Professor of Psychosocial Studies
University College London, United Kingdom

At a time when the pace of global change has led to unprecedented shifts in, and unsettling of, identities, Brubaker brings “trans/gender” and “trans/racial” creatively into conversation to theorize the historical location of identity claims and to examine the question of whether identities are optional, self-consciously chosen and subject to political claims rather than biologically pre-given. His main argument is that the distinction between sex and gender allows us to construct gender identity as personal, individual and separate from the (biologically) sexed body. In contrast, other people always have a stake in allowing or challenging identity claims to racial identity. Brubaker’s argument is persuasive. However, he treats both race and sex/gender as solipsistic and neglects the wider social context that has produced the conditions of possibility for the entrenched differences he records. An intersectional approach would have deepened his discussion of the place of categories in “trans” arguments.

Read or purchase the article here.

A Mysterious Heart: ‘Passing’ and the Narrative Enigma in Faulkner’s “Light in August” and “Absalom, Absalom!”

Amerikastudien / American Studies
Volume 58, Number 1, 2013
pages 51-78

Marta Puxan-Oliva
Department of Modern Language and Literatures and English Studies
University of Barcelona , Barcelona, Spain

This essay argues that William Faulkner’s Light in August and Absalom, Absalom! use the device of the narrative enigma to effectively tell stories in which the cultural practice of ‘passing for white‘ in the United States under the Jim Crow system is strongly suggested. The secret is the essential feature of the social practice of passing, which makes the construction of the plot around a narrative enigma especially suitable. By not resolving the narrative enigma, the novels not only preserve the secret of the supposed ‘passers,’ but construct a narrative that departs from the most important conventions of the so-called genre of the passing novel. The truly modernist narrative strategy of placing an unresolved mystery to drive the plot even allows Faulkner to go a step further: the narrative can portray the Southern white fear of passing with even more significance than the actual act of passing itself. It is precisely the fact that the main characters, Joe Christmas and Charles Bon, have uncertain blood origins that allows and even urges the white community of Jefferson to build a story set only upon conjecture along established racial patterns. Therefore, the effect of the narrative enigma is twofold: it retains the racialization of the story and preserves the secret of the passers, while ambiguously uncovering the false grounds upon which the fear of miscegenation constructs and maintains racial boundaries.

He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten. unforgiven, and excessively romantic.
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

Sometimes literature illuminates in a striking way the emotional and historical effects that contemporary social practices—no longer operative today—had in the past, providing an understanding that an analysis from the viewpoint of our transformed, contemporary societies cannot offer. This is the case with the practice of ‘passing’ in the United States, and with the series of novels that constitute what has been labeled the passing novel genre. Joel Williamson defines ‘passing’ as “crossing the race line and winning acceptance as white in the white world” (100). Movement in the opposite direction is less common. Even though the practice survives—broadened to include gender passing, but still primarily denoting racial or ethnic mobility—the force and historical function that passing for white had during the Jim Crow period, which peaks in the late nineteenth century and the interwar period, perished with the end of segregation. Viewed as a genre, the…