Mixed Race Studies

The enduring function of caste: colonial and modern Haiti, Jamaica, and Brazil The economy of race, the social organization of caste, and the formulation of racial societies

Comparative American Studies
Volume 2, Issue 1 (01 March 2004)
pages 61-73
DOI: 10.1177/1477570004041288

Tekla Ali Johnson, Professional Public Historian
Southern Preservation Center in Charlotte, North Carolina

Modern day social hierarchies in Jamaica, Brazil and, to a degree, Haiti find their roots in the colonial context, where planters stratified laborers in order to maximize control. During slavery planters found artificial ways of influencing African identity, dividing enslaved Africans by their occupations and by skin color. These distinctions created divisions among workers and color proved a singularly powerful and enduring symbol of social and economic mobility. The American propensity for creating racial classifications for Africans and further divisions for ‘mixed-race’ offspring traditionally served economic interests. Their perpetuation into the present may signal the continued utility of dividing Africans into subgroups as a means of maintaining control of racial politics in the Americas.

Read or purchase the article here.

Mixed but not matched: Being mixed-race in America

The Daily Evergreen
Washington State University
Pullman, Washington
2016-01-21

Sophia Stephens, Evergreen columnist

The experience of being a mixed-race person in America can be described in one word – mixed.

Depending on how a mixed-race person looks and is perceived, the experience of being an ethnic or racially mixed person can vary the scope of a sociopolitical spectrum as broadly as one who identifies and is perceived as being mono-racial.

Race is a biological fantasy, but a social reality that affects the life experiences of millions of people every day in varying ways. There are some voices that dominate the conversation, some others that are beginning to gain traction, and others that are barely being heard at all or are being denied the opportunity to speak on their experiences…

…”For a long time I struggled with the fact that I wasn’t just one race,” said WSU junior Victoria-Pearl Young. “(I am) Native American (Choctaw and Comanche Nations), Chinese, French and black. This is incredibly difficult because my cultural experience as an Afro-Latina, specifically Afro-Boricua, living in America gets discredited simply because I don’t look like what people expect. I constantly have to prove myself racially and culturally. Here at WSU, most of my peers just assumed I was completely Black simply because of my appearance, and that really used to bother me until I learned more about my history as a black individual.”…

Read the entire article here.

Trans-racial Mothering: Double-Edged Privilege

Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless
Volume 17, Issue 1-2 (01 February 2008)
pages 8-36
DOI: 10.1179/sdh.2008.17.1-2.8

Martha Satz, Assistant Professor of English
Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas

In this essay, the white adoptive mother of two bi-racial children reflects upon her thirty year experience of parenting to make several philosophical claims. She argues that through the unique mother-child bond, trans-racial mothering may produce knowledge of others’ experience that crosses the racial divide. She claims that in this way trans-racial mothering produces epistemic and ethical privileges that may give the mother an advantaged position in public dialogue. Yet, paradoxically, in light of this epistemological transformation, highlighting the works of Black legal scholars and theoreticians, she argues against the general practice of trans-racial adoption of which she is the beneficiary.

Read or purchase the article here.

What is the Defining Divide? False Post-Racial Dogmas and the Biblical Affirmation of “Race”

Black Theology
Volume 13, Issue 2 (August, 2015)
pages 166-188
DOI: 10.1179/1476994815Z.00000000054

Kumar Rajagopalan
London Baptist Association, London, United Kingdom

This essay offers a critical reflection on the challenges of addressing the concept of “race,” and whether there is a post-racial era in which we are presently living. The essay demonstrates the interconnected nature of “race,” as forming the destructive underpinning for the oppressive frameworks that have given rise to slavery, colonialism, caste discrimination, and economic exploitation. The essay proposes an interdisciplinary, practical theological approach to uncovering the often concealed ways in which racism and White privilege function in many Western democratic societies and within the Church.

Read or purchase the article here.

Obama as Text: The Crisis of Double-Consciousness

Comparative American Studies
Volume 10, Issue 2/3 (August 2012)
pages 211-225
DOI: 10.1179/1477570012Z.00000000016

Simon Gikandi, Robert Schirmer Professor of English
Princeton University

The argument of this essay is that given the unique circumstances of his life, including his location in multiple spaces of cultural identity, Obama is an indeterminate signifier. To textualize Obama, we must account for how the narrative of his life is structured by need and demand as he tries to comprehend his own location and dislocation in American culture and to give meaning to the gap between the idea of what he is and what others assume him to be. In this regard, Obama is probably the quintessential subject of what W. E. B. Du Bois famously described as ‘double-consciousness’.

Read or purchase the article here.

Law is still black & white, not multiracial, Fordham prof says

University Times: The Faculty & Staff Newspaper Since 1968
University of Pittsburgh
2016-01-07

Marty Levine

Despite the fact that more people are identifying themselves as multiracial on the U.S. census, decisions in discrimination cases involving multiracial defendants still are primarily based on the presence of anti-black prejudice, and there is no need to change civil rights laws.

That was the message of Tanya Hernandez, professor of law at Fordham University, who delivered the final fall Buchanan, Ingersoll & Rooney lecture in the School of Social Work’s Center on Race and Social Problems last month.

Hernandez, author of “Racial Subordination in Latin America,” spoke on the topic “Multiracial in the Workplace: A New Kind of Discrimination?” She is studying mixed-race identity and discrimination law in the United States in preparation for her next book…

Read the entire article here.

A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia, by Richard Dunn

The English Historical Review
Volume 130, Issue 547, December 2015
pages 1575-1577
DOI: 10.1093/ehr/cev299

Trevor Burnard, Professor of History
University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria, Australia

A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia, by Richard Dunn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U.P., 2014; pp. 540. £29.95).

When Richard Dunn wrote a preliminary essay, published in a major journal, comparing the lives of enslaved people working on a large sugar plantation called Mesopotamia in western Jamaica between 1762 and 1834 with the lives of slaves on a large tidewater grain-producing estate in Virginia between 1808 and 1865, he concluded that the experience of slaves in Virginia was better than that of slaves in Jamaica. To his chagrin, a local newspaper summarised his article as if the competition somehow validated Virginian slavery as being not that bad, considering how it was in Jamaica.

That was nearly forty years ago. Since then Dunn has moderated those early opinions so that he now has a much more nuanced view of slave life in the English-speaking Americas. As he says, with characteristic dry humour, taking forty years to write a book is ‘not a recommended modus operandi for historians’ (p. 1). The result, however, is a magnificent and deeply humane evocation of two deeply disturbing worlds of slavery, neither of which exceeded the other in dreadfulness, and in both of which man’s inhumanity to man is ever present. One great advantage of the length of time taken..

Read or purchase the review here.

When Skin Privilege and Racial Belonging Collide

(not) Mixed (up): A Biracial Swirl in a Black and White World
2016-01-25

Shannon Luders-Manuel

I’ve been thinking a lot about color / race privilege and why it’s such a hot button issue for the biracial community. In a Facebook group that I moderate, for mixed race women of African-American or African descent, members have been arguing about issues related to color privilege and mulitiracial privilege: a) whether these are separate privileges, b) whether monoracial people also have privilege, c) whether the biracial / mixed race community should shoulder privileges even though we didn’t ask for them, d) whether the black community uses color privilege and multiracial privilege as a way to silence multiracial voices.

For anyone not familiar with the recent discussion around privileges, most noticeably white privilege, this vlog is an excellent place to start…

…So why is it so hard for us in the multiracial community, and those with light-skinned privilege, to accept these realities without feeling defensive? Are we just reacting the same way some people do when confronted with white privilege, or does it go deeper?…

Read the entire article here.

Artist Phoebe Boswell explores what ‘home’ is, migration, family and Kenya’s troubled past

True Africa
2015-11-05

Phoebe Boswell is one of the most exciting young artists working today. Her moving-image installation, The Matter of Memory, was exhibited at Carroll / Fletcher Gallery in London in 2014 alongside John Akomfrah and Rashaad Newsome. She is involved in Paul Goodwin’s African Diaspora Artists of the 21st Century project and is currently collaborating with Binyavanga Wainaina on a digital literary project called Since Everything Suddens in the Hurricane.

Her work mainly focuses on ‘transient middle points and passages of migration’, hardly surprising given her upbringing. She was born in Kenya, she spent most of her childhood in the Middle East before coming to London where she now lives and works. She took some time to tell us about her exhibition at the Gothenburg Biennale where she recreated her grandmother’s living room and what’s next for her.

Could you tell us about the Gothenburg Biennale and your piece?

The theme of GIBCA this year is A Story Within a Story, a title allows us as artists the opportunity to really play with the construction of storytelling. Elvira Dyangani Ose is at the curatorial helm of GIBCA and has offered us this title with the aim of contesting history, of rewriting it from new and perhaps previously silenced vantage points.

Curatorially, she has brought together works that seek to re-examine and possibly debunk predetermined histories, histories constructed in stuffy seats of power in order to control the collective memory of who we are, where we are, why we are, and how we came to be. The question she and the Biennale are asking the audience is: ‘If you could rewrite history, what would you do?’ It’s a very participatory experience. It’s a Biennale full of works which demand the audience to be active.

The Matter of Memory Courtesy of GIBCA ©Hendrik Zeitler

My piece in it is an immersive installation called The Matter of Memory. Within the Hasselblad Centre of the Gothenburg Art Museum, I have recreated my grandmother’s living room and filled the fabric of it – its wallpaper, teacups, milk pots, lamps, mantelpiece etc – with drawings, props, sculptures, sound and animated projections based on stories my Kikuyu mother and fourth generation British Kenyan father told me of their childhood memories of ‘home’…

Read the entire interview here.

Review ‘Democracy in Black’ is a bracing call to action for African Americans

The Los Angeles Times
2016-01-21

Kiese Laymon, Professor of English
Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York

Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul (New York: Crown, 2016)

“We laud our democratic virtues to others and represent ourselves to the world as a place of freedom and equality,” Eddie Glaude writes of the U.S. in his unflinching new book, “Democracy in Black,” “all while our way of life makes possible choices that reproduce so much evil, and we don’t see it happening — or worse, we don’t want to know about it.”

Glaude’s “Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul” is as narratively unrelenting as it is thematically percussive, calling for black Americans to take dramatic action in our lives, voting booths and on the streets to contend with a “value gap” that has left African Americans behind socially and economically.

On Jan. 13, Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States, delivered a boastful State of the Union rooted in American exceptionalism, the importance of political cooperation and predictably, what we have, will, and can do to our enemies with our big American guns. Eight days earlier, Obama had held a press conference during which he cried over the murders of 30 American children and countless others victims of citizens wielding small American guns.

I watched both political spectacles, knowing that while the violent, often racist American weight on President’s Obama’s back has been so terrifyingly heavy, the violent, exceptional American weight that he and all American presidents must abusively wield is heavier. “Democracy in Black,” one of the most imaginative, daring books of the 21st century, effectively argues that this weight — rooted in American exceptionalism — impedes a national reckoning of how the racial “value gap” in our nation sanctions black Americans terror while providing systemic unearned value to white Americans.

The book asks us to reconsider not simply what presidential tears for systemic violence initiated and condoned by our nation might look like, but what can a revolution fueled by politically active black Americans wholly disinterested in presidential tears, speeches or “post-racial” policy actually accomplish. In this way, the book is not just post-Obama; it is post-presidential…

Read the entire review here.