Mixed Race Studies

Biologically, We Are All Far More Alike Than Different

Beacon Broadside: A Project of Beacon Press
Boston, Massachusetts
2019-06-04

Christian Coleman, Associate Digital Marketing Manager

A Q&A with Angela Saini

Why are we seeing a resurgence of race science in the twenty-first century? Weren’t we supposed to be over this after World War II? The notion of “race” has been debunked in the world of science and is understood to be a social construct, but the idea of research-based racial differences is still with us—and has been with us since The Enlightenment. Science journalist Angela Saini tells this disturbing history in Superior: The Return of Race Science. Our blog editor Christian Coleman caught up with her to ask her about her book, the inspiration for it, and how to recognize the subtle signs of race science today.

Christian Coleman: Tell us a little bit about the inspiration behind writing Superior.

Angela Saini: For me, this is a book that has been bubbling since I was a child. I became a journalist in the first place because I became involved in antiracism movements at university while studying Engineering. But the time for this book was now, with the rise of the far-right and ethnic nationalism around the world. I wanted to put the rise of intellectual racism in historical and scientific context…

…CC: What are some subtle examples of how we buy into the belief of biological racial differences today?

AS: I think it happens most clearly in medicine and DNA ancestry testing. When doctors tell us that certain groups are more susceptible to certain illnesses, without making clear that this may sometimes just be for cultural or socioeconomic reasons, it suggests we are biologically different. When firms say they can tell us where we are from by analysing our spit, without explaining how they do this or what it actually means, they also reinforce the idea of biological race…

Read the entire interview here.

New Academic Minor in Critical Mixed Race Studies

San Francisco State University
College of Ethnic Studies
1600 Holloway Avenue
San Francisco, California 94132-4100

2019-06-05

Professors Wei Ming Dariotis and Nicole Leopardo have founded a new academic minor in Critical Mixed Race Studies (in the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University. This is the first degree-granting program in the field of mixed race studies in the United States!

Critical Mixed Race Studies emphasizes the mutability of race and the porosity of racial boundaries to critique processes of racialization and social stratification based on race. Critical Mixed Race Studies addresses local and global systemic injustice rooted in systems of racialization.

Total Units for Minor: 18
Introductory Course (3 units)

• ETHS 110: Critical Thinking in the Ethnic Studies Experience^*

Ethnic Focus (9 units)
Choose three courses, no more than one from each of the sections A through D)^*

• Section A: Asian American Studies
  • AAS 301: Asian Americans of Mixed Heritage
  • AAS 330: Nikkei in the United States
• Section B: American Indian Studies
  • American Indian Studies 350/AFRS 350/LTNS 355: Black-Indians in the US
• Section C: Latina/Latino Studies
  • LTNS 380 Afro/Latina/o Diasporas^* (has not been taught in the last 5 years)
  • LTNS 278: History of Latinos in the U.S.
• Section D: Africana
  • AFRS 401: Pan African Black Psychology: A North American, South American and Caribbean Comparison

Comparative/Elective (3 units)
Choose one course from the following)

• RRS 625: Mixed Race Studies⁺
• AAS 522: Transracial Adoptee Experience⁺

Applied Courses (at least 3 units; choose one from below; must be with CMRS Faculty)

• ETHS 685: Projects in Teaching Critical Mixed Race Studies (must be for one of the courses listed above or any course with a; repeatable for 1-4 units)
• ETHS 697: Field Research or Internship in Critical Mixed Race Studies (repeatable for 1-6 units)
• ETHS 699: Special Study^*

Key: ^*Required Course ⁺Elective Course

For more information, click here.

The Singular Power of Writing: A Conversation with Thomas Chatterton Williams

Los Angeles Review of Books
2019-04-12

Otis Houston
Portland, Oregon

Otis Houston interviews Thomas Chatterton Williams

THOMAS CHATTERTON WILLIAMS is the author of Losing My Cool, a memoir chronicling his experiences growing up in New Jersey as the son of a black father and a white mother and constructing an identity in the space between his love for hip-hop and for literature. His new book, Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race, forthcoming from Norton in October, explores a further complication in the author’s already fraught self-conception, and the often-contradictory ways in which society views and reifies racial categorization.

The author spoke to me by Skype from his home in Paris, France, where he lives with his wife and two children.

OTIS HOUSTON: You’ve been critical of the ways in which writers conceptualize their identity on the page, and about different ways of thinking about identity in relation to society. I thought we could start by talking about some of these themes in your upcoming book, Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race, which questions some of the metrics by which we understand race in the 21st century.

THOMAS CHATTERTON WILLIAMS: The book started for me in 2013 when my daughter, Marlow, was born. Prior to that, in 2012, I had written an op-ed in The New York Times kind of glibly and really confidently making the case that my kids would be black no matter what they looked like because it’s a kind of political stance more than a genetic identity.

My wife is French and she’s white, and it occurred to me that perhaps our kids would be kind of white-looking. But the reality of our daughter’s birth really struck me, and I realized that I couldn’t just send her out into the world with this antiquated logic of hypo-descent, which is really the slave master’s logic and reinforces some really bad stuff if you think about it for a minute, even though it has allowed the black community to have a lot of solidarity when they needed it.

We had this very Scandinavian-looking child, and for the first time in my life what I now call the fiction of race was thrust into my consciousness. It’s an experience that most people, black or white, don’t have to have because most people don’t live on the racial margins and don’t see how ridiculous it is to say something like, “My father is black, and my daughter is white, but they have the same smile.” And my daughter is blond-haired and has blue eyes and white skin, but she’s of 20 percent West African descent. Most people don’t actually have these kinds of contradictions. So, her birth really set me down this path. I wrote an essay about it for the Virginia Quarterly Review called “Black and Blue and Blond” about questioning and reassessing things I’d taken for granted, and Jonathan Franzen was kind enough to include it in the Best American Essays, which he edited in 2016…

Read the entire interview here.

Racially-Mixed Personal Identity Equality

Law, Culture and the Humanities
First published online: 2017-03-24
DOI: 10.1177/1743872117699894

Tanya Katerí Hernández, Archibald R. Murray Professor of Law
Fordham University School of Law, New York, New York

A growing number of commentators view discrimination against multiracial (racially-mixed) people as a distinctive challenge to racial equality. This perspective is based on the belief that multiracial-identified persons experience racial discrimination in a manner that makes it necessary to reconsider civil rights law. This article disputes that premise and deconstructs its Personal Identity Equality approach to anti-discrimination law and demonstrates its ill effects reflected in Supreme Court affirmative action litigation.

Read or purchase the article here.

When There Is Not Enough to Go Around: How Black People’s Perceptions of Competition for Black Mates Affects Forced Black Identity Ascriptions of Black/White Multiracial People

Identity: An International Journal of Theory and Research
Published online: 2019-05-28
DOI: 10.1080/15283488.2019.1621757

Marisa G. Franco, Assistant Professor of Psychology
Georgia State University

Olivia L. Holmes, Assistant Professor of Psychology
Tennessee State University

Darren Agboh, Social Psychology Ph.D. Candidate
City University of New York

Using a resource scarcity framework, the current study investigated whether Black people’s perceptions of competition for Black mates related to ascribing a Black identity onto Black/White Multiracial people. Participants took online questionnaires that assessed competition for Black mates, likelihood of forcing a Black identity onto a self-identified Black/White Multiracial person, essentialism, and contact with Multiracial people. Results indicated that increased perceptions of competition for Black mates was related to increased forced Black identity onto self-identified Black/White Multiracial people, above and beyond levels of essentialism and contact. This relationship was stronger for sexual minorities. The current research supports the proposition that scarcity of resources (i.e., mates) affects ideologies regarding Black/White Multiracial people’s identities.

Read or purchase the article here.

Do Women Have Superpowers? Gugu Mbatha-Raw Says Yes

The New York Times
2019-05-10

Kathryn Shattuck

Emily Berl for The New York Times

When Gugu Mbatha-Raw signed up to be a superhero, little did she know she’d be squaring off against Iron Man, Thor, Captain America and the rest of the Marvel universe.

But two years later, “Fast Color” has found itself in theaters at the same time as “Avengers: Endgame” — and heralded as the antidote to men destroying the world to save it.

“It’s quite an interesting journey that it’s being compared and contrasted to a huge Marvel juggernaut, which was never our intention,” she said. “But I have to say I’m interested in the conversation. I haven’t always seen myself represented in those kinds of movies, as a lot of people haven’t.”

Mbatha-Raw is herself a fighter: In 2014, she broke through with Amma Asante’s “Belle,” about the mixed-race daughter of an 18th-century British naval captain raised among the white aristocracy — a role she pursued for eight years. Months later, she transformed herself into a flailing pop superstar who divines peace through the music of Nina Simone in Gina Prince-Bythewood’s “Beyond the Lights.”…

Read the entire interview here.

Rethinking Transracialism: Ariana Grande and Racial Ambiguity

Cult Plastic: Dance And Culture In The Plastic Age
2019-02-19

Anh Vo

Ariana Grande from the 2018 Billboard Woman of the Year Cover Shoot

This article revisits, revises, and expands on the arguments I make in Blackface and Pop Princesses: A Brief Genealogy. Previously, I wrote three brief paragraphs on Ariana Grande, trying to position her donning of black and brown visuality (i.e. blackface/brownface) alongside similar practices of other pop princesses such as Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Miley Cyrus. However, I no longer think blackface as a phenomenon can quite account for how Grande is manipulating the racial ambiguity of her image. Even though she certainly inherits the history of pop princesses borrowing the cultural signification of blackness/brownness to shed their young and innocent facades and sell their more sexually dangerous personas, Grande also departs from this “tradition” radically. She does not borrow; she becomes black, becomes brown, becomes something not quite black or brown, yet not quite white either. She becomes transracial.

At stake here is not the matter of people simply being confused about Grande’s racial identity. Confusion is almost always inevitable when it comes to race, because the colonial fantasy of racial purity, and even of race itself, always falls apart as it tries to categorize the unruliness of the body to create a hierarchy of humanity (with whiteness at its apex). What so disturbing, then, is the fact that Grande successfully mobilizes, amplifies, and capitalizes on this (trans)racial confusion, and gets away with crossing into non-whiteness the way Rachel Dolezal cannot. My goals in writing this essay are two-fold: (1) to articulate Ariana Grande’s image transformation not as an act of racial passing, but as a gradual racial transitioning from whiteness into ambiguity (2) to redirect the discourse on transracialism away from the monopoly of Dolezal, who, together with her transracial “identity” of blackness, has been too easily brushed off as a joke, a lie, or at best an individual anomaly…

Read the entire article here.

Interraciality in Early Twentieth Century Britain: Challenging Traditional Conceptualisations through Accounts of ‘Ordinariness’

geneology
Volume 3, Number 2
24 pages
DOI: 10.3390/genealogy3020021

Chamion Caballero, Visiting Senior Fellow
London School of Economics

Unknown Anglo-Chinese family, Liverpool, c.1930s. Image courtesy of Yvonne Foley. Foley has campaigned for greater recognition of the brutal repatriation of Chinese seaman by the British government in 1945–1946, many of whom were consequently forced to leave their white wives and children behind. See http://www.halfandhalf.org.uk/.

The popular conception of interraciality in Britain is one that frequently casts mixed racial relationships, people and families as being a modern phenomenon. Yet, as scholars are increasingly discussing, interraciality in Britain has much deeper and diverse roots, with racial mixing and mixedness now a substantively documented presence at least as far back as the Tudor era. While much of this history has been told through the perspectives of outsiders and frequently in the negative terms of the assumed ‘orthodoxy of the interracial experience’—marginality, conflict, rejection and confusion—first-hand accounts challenging these perceptions allow a contrasting picture to emerge. This article contributes to the foregrounding of this more complex history through focusing on accounts of interracial ‘ordinariness’—both presence and experiences—throughout the early decades of the twentieth century, a time when official concern about racial mixing featured prominently in public debate. In doing so, a more multidimensional picture of interracial family life than has frequently been assumed is depicted, one which challenges mainstream attitudes about conceptualisations of racial mixing both then and now.

Read the entire article in HTML or PDF format.

Tia Mowry Talks Adjusting To The Racism She Experiences With Her Black Husband Vs Growing Up With A White Father

MadameNoire
2019-05-31

Veronica Wells, Culture Editor

I don’t think it’s any secret that Tia Mowry (and Tamera) are biracial. While it was a minute before we saw their parents, their mother, Darlene Mowry, is Black and their father, Timothy Mowry, is White. You might imagine that growing up in that household was a bit different than living in the household she does now. And it is. On her YouTube channel, Tia Mowry’s Quick Fix, she shared the racism her parents experienced when they were initially dating, the racism her mother experienced that her father didn’t, and how it’s different having a White father vs. a Black husband in terms of racial treatment.

See what Tia had to say about all of this below…

Read the entire article here.

Mulattoes Cannot Vote Under the “Grandfather Clause.”

The Progressive Farmer
Winston, North Carolina
Tuesday, 1902-09-30
page 5, column 4
Source: Chronicling America (ISSN 2475-2703), Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

The Observer is in receipt of the following from a friend at Carthage:

“A question which is having some discussion here is: Can a mulatto whose father was a white man register under the ‘grandfather clause?’”

“Now it is a generally accepted fact that most mulattoes are such from the fact that their fathers and not their mothers were white. Would this general application be sufficient grounds for a general mulatto registration? If not, could a mulatto whose mother was a negro but whose father is unknown register according to law? Is the burden upon the applicant for registration to prove that his father was a white man and could vote prior to 1867?”

“Your subscribers would be pleased to have you give some editorial answers and explanations to the above questions. I am certain such would be of interest to many people throughout the State at this time and the independence of your paper renders it the logical medium through which such information can do the most good.”

Assuming that the mulatto was the illegitimate son of a white man (which must be assumed, as marriages between whites and blacks is and was unlawful) the mulatto could not vote, as the law does not recognize that an illegitimate has any father and unless the said mulatto is otherwise qualified he cannot get in under the “grandfather clause.”

As nearly all negroes were slaves prior to their emancipation the presumption is that the grandfather of any mulatto was disqualified from voting prior to 1868, and the burden rests upon him to show to the contrary before he shall be entitled to register or vote. —Charlotte Observer.