Mixed Race Studies

I’m a bit brown. But in America I’m white. Not for much longer

The Guardian
2017-03-21

Arwa Mahdawi

Colour coded … a large number of US citizens will have to check a new box on the census form if plans to redefine whiteness come to fruition. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

The US Census Bureau plans to redefine ‘white’ to exclude people with Middle Eastern and North African origins. It’s a reminder that the identity has always been fluid

We live in a weird time for whiteness. But, before I get into that, a small disclaimer. You may look at my name and worry that I am unqualified to speak about whiteness; I would like to set these doubts to rest and assure you that I myself am a white person. It’s true that, technically speaking, I’m a bit brown but, when it comes to my legal standing, I’m all white. Well, I’m white in America anyway. The US Census Bureau, you see, defines “white” as “a person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa”. Being half-Palestinian and half-English I fall squarely into that box.

But I may not be able to hang out in that box much longer. There are plans afoot to add a new “Middle East/North Africa” category to the US census. After 70-plus years of having to tick “white” or “other” on administrative documents, people originating from the Middle East and North Africa may soon have their own category.

Whether our very own check box is a privilege or petrifying is still to be decided. Middle Easterners aren’t exactly persona particularly grata in the US right now. Identifying ourselves more explicitly to the government might not be the smartest move – particularly considering that, during the second world war, the US government used census data to send more than 100,000 Japanese Americans to internment camps…

Read the entire article here.

Multi attends fourth annual Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference

The Occidental Weekly
Los Angeles, California
2017-03-14

Kristine White

For the first time, Multi, Occidental’s cultural club for multiracial and multicultural students, sent a group of eight members and nonmembers to the 2017 Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference at the University of Southern California from Feb. 24 to Feb. 26. The conference brought together scholars, activists and artists from around the globe to explore the field of critical race studies with over 50 panels, roundtables, caucus sessions and performances. In celebration of the 50-year anniversary of Loving v. Virginia, which declared interracial marriage legal, the theme of this year’s conference was “Explorations in Trans(gender, gressions, migrations, racial) Fifty Years After Loving v. Virginia.”

After last semester’s Multi Week, Oct. 23 to Oct. 28, Multi President Miki Konishi (junior) noticed that Multi garnered increased attention around campus from students. Konishi, Khloe Swanson (junior) and Eushrah Hossein created Multi three years ago in an effort to provide space for and discuss the experience of multiracial and multicultural identities. The club meets bimonthly to discuss issues that multiracial students face and to provide a safe space to discuss the various factors that affect their identity. Konishi explained that, before joining Multi, he attended other monocultural clubs on campus and found it necessary to provide a space for students who identify with multiple cultures…

Read the entire article here.

Two Halves Of A Whole: On Japan’s Habitual ‘Labeling’ Of Bicultural Kids

Savvy Tokyo
2017-03-15

Louise George Kittaka

Half Or Double, It’s About Time We Let Them Speak For Themselves

In Japan, Japanese are nihonjin and foreigners are gaikokujin and never the twain shall meet. But what does this mean for our bicultural offsprings?

The term hafu (literally, half) is commonly used in Japan for anyone who has one Japanese parent and one from another cultural background or nationality. The term grates on many foreign parents because it implies that the non-Japanese side of their background somehow renders them “incomplete.”

I certainly disliked the term when I became a mom for the first time following the birth of my son. I spent a lot of time and energy earnestly asking people, friends and strangers alike, to refer to my child as “daburu” or “double.” I even wrote an article for a bilingual magazine, entitled “Please Don’t Call My Baby a ‘Half’” and advocating for the use of the term “double” instead.

Looking back at the article now, I cringe inwardly. By the time the second of my two daughters arrived to complete my trio of kids, I was beginning to tire of the “what to call bicultural children” conversation. I began to think, “Why do we need to label them at all? They are kids who just happen to have parents from two different backgrounds. Get over it already!” Older and wiser, I now know that it isn’t that simple…

Read the entire article here.

Gender, race and prejudice

Skidmore College
Saratoga Springs, New York
2017-03-20

Leigh Wilton

“As an experimental social psychologist, I’m interested in how people see each other and how that affects their interactions,” says Leigh Wilton, who joined Skidmore’s psychology faculty last year. Her work focuses on race and gender. “People have expectations about gender and race,” she says, “but what happens when they encounter challenges to those beliefs, such as people who have mixed-race or nontraditional gender identities? What are the consequences, in terms of interpersonal and group relations, of the assumptions we hold?”

The essentialist school of thought holds that these identities are mostly in-born and immutable, rather than socially constructed and learned. But as Wilton points out, there’s no support for a scientific concept of race, and she asks, “If people see racial traits as genetically hard-wired, what do they think when they meet people of mixed-race parentage?

For Wilton, it’s more than academic. With a Latina mother and white father, she grew up with a natural curiosity about what social identities really mean and also with a drive to test ways of improving social interactions across difference…

Read the entire article here.

Louise Erdrich, Matthew Desmond Among Winners of National Book Critics Circle Awards

The New York Times
2017-03-16

Alexandra Alter, Publishing Reporter

Louise Erdrich outside her bookstore, Birchbark Books, in Minneapolis. Credit Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times

Louise Erdrich’s novel “LaRose,” which centers on two Native American families in North Dakota whose lives are upended by a horrific hunting accident that kills a 5-year-old boy, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction on Thursday.

Ms. Erdrich, who has published 15 novels, won in an especially competitive year for high-profile literary fiction, with Michael Chabon, Ann Patchett, Zadie Smith and Adam Haslett among the finalists.

“I’m among such dramatically wonderful novels that it didn’t seem that this was possible,” Ms. Erdrich said in her acceptance speech, before making a passionate plea about the importance of free expression and the need for writers and journalists to challenge falsehoods.

“The truth is being assaulted not only in our country but all over the world,” she said. “More than ever, we have to look into the truth.”…

Read the entire article here.

Beyond black and white: Color and mortality in post-reconstruction era North Carolina

Explorations in Economic History
Volume 50, Issue 1, January 2013
pages 148–159
DOI: 10.1016/j.eeh.2012.06.002

Tiffany L. Green, Assistant Professor
Department of Healthcare Policy and Research
Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia

Tod G. Hamilton, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Department of Sociology and Office of Population Research
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

A growing empirical literature in economics and sociology documents the existence of more favorable social and economic outcomes among mixed-race blacks compared to non-mixed race blacks. However, few researchers consider whether the advantages associated with mixed-race status extend to mortality. To address this gap in the literature, we employ unique data from the 1880 North Carolina Mortality Census records in conjunction with data from 1880 U.S. Census of Population for North Carolina to examine whether mulatto (mixed-race) blacks experienced mortality advantages over to their colored (non-mixed race) counterparts from June 1879 to May 1880. For men between the ages of 20 and 44, estimates demonstrate that all black males, both mulatto and colored, were more likely than whites to die during the survey period. Although our results indicate that there is no statistically significant difference in mortality between mulatto and colored black men, we find a substantial mortality advantage associated with mixed-race status among women.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Mixed Race Athlete’s ECG: Not So Black And White

Journal of the American College of Cardiology
Volume 69, Issue 11, Supplement
2017-03-21
pages 1416
DOI: 10.1016/S0735-1097(17)34805-2

Aneil Malhotra, Prashant Rao, Harshil Dhutia, Sabiha Gati, Tee Joo Yeo, Rajit Khosla, Vivek Prasad, Michael Papadakis, Sanjay Sharma
St. George’s University of London, London, United Kingdom

Non Invasive Imaging (Echocardiography, Nuclear, PET, MR and CT)

• Background: The past 2 decades has seen a huge rise in the number of mixed race athletes with one white and one black parent. In fact this is the largest growing ethnic group in both the USA and UK. Little is known on the mixed race athlete’s EKG. This is the first study to analyse the EKGs of mixed race athletes (MAs) and compare them to white (WAs) and black (BAs) athletes.
• Methods: The EKGs of 300 MAs professional soccer players were compared to 1,000 BA and 1,000 WA soccer players all of whom underwent mandatory preparticipation screening with EKG. All MAs had one white and one black parent. EKG characteristics were analysed independently by 2 cardiologists.
• Results: The mean age of all athletes was 16.7 years. 95% were male. MAs had a higher prevalence of bradycardia (67%) vs. both WAs (44%) and BAs (46%; table 1). MAs had more left ventricular hypertrophy (30%) vs. BAs (17%). MAs revealed more atrial enlargement and left axis deviation than WAs, but not BAs. T wave inversion (TWI) was 4 times more common in MAs (8%) than WAs (2.3%) though less common than BAs (10.9%).
• Conclusions: MAs demonstrate EKG changes similar to black athletes in terms of atrial enlargement and axis deviation which are borderline variants according to the refined criteria for EKG interpretation in athletes. MAs demonstrated a higher prevalence of TWI in all territories vs. WAs, though less than BAs. Mixed race athletes do indeed exhibit a “mixed” pattern of EKG characteristics though these tend to be more similar to black athletes’ EKG than white athletes.

Read the entire poster here.

The Shadow of Lynching in Nella Larsen’s Passing

Women’s Studies: An inter-disciplinary journal
Published online: 2017-02-22
pages 1-22
DOI: 10.1080/00497878.2017.1285767

Kangyl Ko
Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea

Since Deborah E. McDowell’s groundbreaking essay on the representation of black female sexuality in Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), many scholars have discussed how the intersectionality of race, class, gender, and sexuality unfolds throughout the novel. In her compelling reading of Passing, McDowell examines the hidden lesbian narratives beneath “the safe and familiar plot of racial passing” on which previous scholars have focused (xxx). McDowell’s excavation of the tale of sexual passing within the tale of racial passing has since inspired many scholars to further examine the novel’s exploration of black female sexuality, especially in terms of lesbian desire, and its appropriation and negotiation of the literary convention of the tragic mulatto—“the safe and familiar plot of racial passing,” as McDowell refers to it. The continuous trend in scholarship of Passing, whether it focuses on lesbian desire and/or the appropriation of the tragic mulatto narrative, links discussions of black female sexuality directly with racialized popular discourses about black female bodies in Jim Crow America. As a result, one of Larsen’s rhetorical and thematic threads that runs through her second novel has remained underexplored: lynching.

Following Grace Elizabeth Hale’s formulation of lynching as “cultural form” that “existed as both physical practice and as written and photographic representations” (360), I read Passing as a discursive platform where Larsen explores and challenges not only the dominant white lynching narrative, but also its counter-lynching narrative created by black male writers. As an iconic “cultural form” of Jim Crow America, lynching played a crucial role in defining and shaping interracial relations in the United States. Within criticism, lynching as a form of physical violence and a discourse has been addressed largely in terms of the black male body alone. However, black women were victims of lynching as well. They were “routinely lynched, burned, and summarily mutilated” (Wiegman 84)…

Malcolm Gladwell Wants to Make the World Safe for Mediocrity

Conversations with Tyler
Mercatus Center at George Mason University
2017-03-15

Tyler Cowen, Host and Professor of Economics
George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia

Credit: Caren Louise Photographs

Journalist, author, and podcaster Malcolm Gladwell joins Tyler for a conversation on Joyce Gladwell, Caribbean identity, satire as a weapon, Daniel Ellsberg and Edward Snowden, Harvard’s under-theorized endowment, why early childhood intervention is overrated, long-distance running, and Malcolm’s happy risk-averse career going from one “fur-lined rat hole to the next.”

Listen to the interview (01:32:11) here. Read the transcript here.

The Horror of Smug Liberals

The New York Times
2017-03-18

Frank Bruni

Ben Wiseman

Oh, those smooth-talking, self-congratulating white liberals. Listen to them moon over Barack Obama. Look at how widely they open their arms to a black visitor. Don’t be duped. They’re wolves in L. L. Bean clothing. There’s danger under the fleece.

That’s a principal theme in the most surprising movie hit of the year so far, “Get Out,” whose box office haul in America crossed the $100 million mark last weekend. Heck, that’s the premise.

The black protagonist heads with his white girlfriend from an apartment in the city to a house in the woods, where he’s gushingly welcomed by her parents. But their retreat is no colorblind Walden, not if you peek into the basement. I won’t say what’s down there. I don’t want to spoil the fun or sully the chill.

Besides, I’m less fascinated by the movie’s horrors than by its reception. The most ardent fans of “Get Out,” many of them millennials, don’t just recommend it. They urge it, framing it as a “woke” tribe’s message to the slumbering masses, a parable of the hypocrisy that white America harbors and the fear with which black Americans move through it…

…But the movie’s African-American writer and director, Jordan Peele, conceived and began developing it well before the possibility of a Donald Trump presidency came into focus. He wasn’t responding to stark examples of racism like that infamous tweet last week in which Representative Steve King, the Iowa Republican, warned against trying to “restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.” …

…“Get Out” is being categorized as a horror movie, though Peele prefers the neologism “social thriller,” and it’s more eerie than violent, with superb pacing that critics are rightly praising. It’s also a reminder that the best horror movies are intensely topical, putting a fantastical, grotesque spin on the tensions of their times…

Read the entire article here.