Mixed Race Studies

Biracial Girls Will Be Fine If Their Dolls Don’t Look Like Them

The Root
2013-12-27

Jenée Desmond-Harris

Race Manners: A rainbow of toys is great, but how kids live is much more important than how they play.

“Hello. I’m wondering if you can offer some broad guidance before I head out to the malls for Christmas shopping. I have two beautiful nieces in a very diverse, melting pot family. My sisters and I are white, and one has a daughter who is half-Japanese, and my younger sister’s husband is half-African American. The two little ones are 4 and 6. Both are very much in the girly-girl phase, pink, purple, dolls, etc. and also great friends.

“I’m well aware that there are now, thankfully, dolls in many different ethnicities and even with different hair textures. But what’s the right choice for these two? The 4-year-old is Japanese and Caucasian but has light brown hair and essentially looks more like brunette white dolls. The 6-year-old who is half African American has fair skin and long dark hair and probably looks more like white dolls than African-American dolls. If I purchase dolls for them, should they receive the ones that reflect their nonwhite ethnicity or the way they look, or does it matter if they are at this point unaware of any color-related differences?” —Shopping Sensitively

Well, Christmas is over, but I decided to answer this anyway. After all, the relationship between little girls of color and dolls is by no means limited to the holiday season.

It’s why people were so ecstatic (seriously, what took so long?) when Natural Girls United’s line of dolls with realistic black hair came out and why it was so moving when the mom behind Chocolate Hair/Vanilla Care styled this doll’s hair so its braids (as well as its complexion and outfit) would match her daughter’s exactly.

Generally speaking, it sucks if little girls can’t access dolls that look like what they see in the mirror (that extends beyond race to body shape and size, etc). And when they can, everyone is happy. I think we can all agree on that.

Of course, when it comes to color, hair and background matching, your situation is extra complicated because you’re dealing with kids whose identity is up in the air (it’s anyone’s guess how they’ll see themselves 10 years from now when America’s demographics have changed even more), and who might not look anything like what a factory-made plastic representation of their particular racial mixtures would, even if those existed.

I just read—and can’t stop thinking about—Yaba Blay’s (1)ne Drop, which explores the way historical definitions of race help shape contemporary identities through a collection of individual stories and accompanying photos. Let’s just say there’s a lot of variation and very little predictability when it comes to people’s actual skin and hair color and how they identify. A doll manufacturer could spend the rest of the year producing all of the variations of complexion and features and textures chronicled in the project, and there would still be people who couldn’t find reflections of themselves…

Read the entire article here.

Why I see myself as a daughter of the Diaspora rather than mixed-race

Black Girl Dancing at Lughnasa
2013-02-12

Emma Dabiri, Teaching Fellow
Africa Department, School of African and Oriental Studies, London
Visual Sociology Ph.D. Researcher, Goldsmiths University of London

Why this ‘mixed’ girl rejects the ‘mixed-race’ label.

There is nothing like hearing the arguments of members of the multiracial movement and certain ‘mixed-race’ activists to make me want to distance myself from them as much as possible and exclusively identify as black! However, after all these years, I refuse to be pushed into making essentialist identity choices.

‘Mixed-race’ has been both pathologized and celebrated across time and space, often simultaneously.  Whether we are being positioned as the halfcaste underclass—Waynetta Slob’s ‘brown babies,’ endemic of a broken Britain populated by brown-skinned, hooded feral youth, or we are cast in the role as mixed-race messiahs; genetically superior, physically fitter, inheritors of a bright new, beautiful brown post-racial future—like all non-white people, we continue to be racialised.

Both constructions assign mixed race people a specific and limited identity based on their ‘race’, and continue the work of 18th century scientific racism ascribing particular physical and mental attributes to people based on so called racial difference. Further, the myth of a new, beautiful mixed race generation as the epitome of liberal, cool, race-less Britain, masks enduring structural racism and inequalities, which will be allowed to continue unchecked if we are seduced by it.

The media and social studies join forces to perpetuate a damaging and a-historical construction of being ‘mixed-race’, where mixedness is presented as something new. But black and white people have been having children since their first encounters with each other. This is a process that has been in place since the conquests of the Americas at least. The populations of the New World are largely mixed-race populations. Although they are popularly categorised as black or white, their origins are heterogeneous. In such a context, it seems nonsensical to categorise the child of one black Caribbean parent and one white European parent as suddenly and magically ‘mixed-race’, yet we continue to do so…

Read the entire article here.

Off-White Like Me

LA Weekly
Culver City, California
2008-03-26

David Ehrenstein

Biracial? Tell it to the hosts of Fox and Friends. Obama is black.

On a cross-country trip in the summer of 1957, my family stopped in Oklahoma City. There, my father asked a policeman for directions to the state capitol. The officer began to offer them, when I leaned forward from the back seat. Suddenly the policeman’s demeanor changed. A scowl crossed his face as he asked my parents what they were doing in town and how long they planned to stay. Not immediately sensing his hostility, they volunteered that they were tourists and were stopping overnight. He then brusquely ordered them to “move on!” without directing them to the capitol. My parents were flabbergasted. They had no idea what had inspired his shift in attitude. But I did. All 10 years of me had just discovered what it was like to have pure racism staring you in the face.

My father was white. My mother, half-black. She wore makeup to cover her light, rather blotchy complexion, so her race wasn’t always apparent. I was darker-hued, and, therefore, as I leaned up into the light of the car that day, unmistakable.

Race was rarely discussed in my family. Growing up in the New York suburb of Flushing, Queens, I had the luck to live in an integrated neighborhood. People of different religions and ethnicities co-existed all around me. My favorite movie was The Thief of Bagdad,whose star, Sabu, looked, I thought, quite a bit like me. And wasn’t that terrific? He rode a magic carpet. All the neighborhood kids liked him, and practically all of them liked me too. Should the N word be uttered by some pintsize lout, it was treated as evidence of “bad parents.” The cop in Oklahoma was a different story. His face, a threat and a promise of “more where that came from,” were attitudes held outside my becalmed suburban bubble. America does judge a book by its cover. “Biracial”? Tell it to that cop. I’m black…

…Anatole Broyard, book critic for The New York Times and one of the most-talked-about intellectuals of the post–World War II period, was born in 1920 and died in 1990. Upon his death, the long-whispered rumor that he was a black man passing for white burst forth as fact. The light-skinned issue of light-skinned parents, Broyard hid his lineage and became what black scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. called“a virtuoso of ambiguity and equivocation.”

In a piece he wrote for Commentary in 1950 titled “Portrait of the Inauthentic Negro,” Broyard said his subject “is not only estranged from whites, he is also estranged from his own group and from himself. Since his companions are a mirror in which he sees himself as ugly, he must reject them; and since his own self is mainly a tension between an accusation and a denial, he can hardly find it, much less live in it. . . He is adrift without a role in a world predicated on roles.”…

Read the entire article here.

Defying Categorization: The Work of Suzette Mayr

Canadian Woman Studies / Les Caheiers de la Femme
Volume 23, Number 2 (2004)
pages 71-75

Katie Petersen

Le corpus littéraire de Suzette Mayr examine les croisements raciaux, la sexualité marginalisée et la formation de l’identité personnelle dans des espaces indéfinis. Ses recueils de poemès et ses nouvelles ont tous remis en question la situation et le classement des populations. L’auteure a exploré et validé les espaces non explorés et non compartimentés qui sont présents dans les réalités traditionelles.

The literary corpus of Suzette Mayr examines racial mixing, marginalized sexuality and the formation of personal identity in undefined spaces. Her collections of poems and novels have questioned the status and the classification of the groups concerned. The author has explored and validated the unexplored spaces and those spaces not compartmentalized that are present in traditional realities.

In the afterword to her Master’s thesis “Chimaera Lips” (1992), the Calgary poet and novelist Suzette Mayr states that

a positive approach to categorization would not rely on having to distinguish oneself through comparison to another group, but would emphasize the whole or merged self, rather than the categorized self. (59)

In this work, Mayr explores “existence between ‘realities.'” She investigates and attempts to undermine the binary constructions surrounding race, sexuality and gender, by writing about, and presumably from within, what she terms “middle spaces;” spaces which exist between the starkly delineated realities commonly associated with various racial, sexual and gender categories (61). Mayr posits an absorption of “realities” by these in-between spaces, leading to an integrated system in which neither reality nor intermediate space dominates. The novels Mayr wrote following “Chimaera Lips,” Moon Honey (1995) and The Widows (1998), and her chapbook of poems, Zebra Talk (1991), all serve to challenge the ways in which people are necessarily located or categorized and to explore, expose, and validate uncharted, uncompartmentalized middle spaces…

Mayr’s chapbook, Zebra Talk, is a collection of poems of a relatively personal nature which describe Mayr’s own perceptions as a lesbian and a Canadian of mixed, Black-Caucasian, race. She explores issues of race and sexuality, identity and family, describing middle and hybrid spaces. Mayr treats her poetic subjects in much the same way as she does the characters in her novels; their appearances, actions and significances are described in unique, creative and at times ambiguous ways which emphasize the difficulty, if not impossibility, of categorizing individuals without that action being destructive and/or reductive.

Zebra Talk contains poems which discuss the idea of being a “zebra,” a person of mixed race. Mayr details the process of coming to terms with racial hybridity and of understand ing how a person of mixed race locates herself within a multiracial family setting and within the larger setting of a multiracial community or nation. Clearly, racial and cultural hybridity create new spaces. People of in-between colors and in-between cultures have to forge in-between identities and locations for themselves. However, what stands in the middle cannot be identified simply in relation to the poles it stands between.

Mayr’s use of the repetitive imagery of skin, invertebrates, volcanic insides, and people made of earth turns ordered family and romantic structures into a tempestuous and vividly multicolored mixture. In the first poem, the speaker describes her family:

The skin on a drum
The skin stretched over a moving rib cage
The skin stretched and bitten by two other heads on this
three-headed body
2 brothers 1 sister 3 heads and 1 body
plus 1 and 1 parents. (2)

The children, each different versions of the same mixture, form a three-headed being, sharing a body. The parents, “1 and 1,” remain separate. The skin to which Mayr refers appears thin but strong, stretched and fitted over skeleton and roiling core: “(Zebra pelt stretched over a hot and bloody centre)” (2). This particular mixture of heat and blood and guts is never given a clear meaning. It could be a reference, as George Elliott Clarke suggests in “Canadian Biraciality and Its ‘Zebra’ Poetics,” to “a volcanic core—a history of violence and death … O the same seething hurt,” an internal upheaval particular to people of mixed race (233). Or, Mayr could be pointing out that everyone, regardless of race, is, at the core, composed of the same unstable material, which cannot be classified or associated in any way with outside appearance…

Read the entire article here.

Four Simple Reasons Smart People Shouldn’t Believe in Races

Psychology Today
About Thinking: Questioning everything with a hopeful skeptic
2013-12-23

Guy P. Harrison

Today is a good day to wake up and join the human species.

Guess what I do almost every time race and racism are discussed in popular culture. I groan and turn away in discomfort. The curse of an anthropology education makes me painfully aware of how clueless politicians, writers, broadcasters, and virtually everyone else are on this topic. Whenever some celebrity utters the dreaded N-word or a person of one race does something horrible to a person of another race, the voices of authority take center stage and call for understanding, love and cooperation between races.

Blah, blah, blah.

Such reactions to race problems may feel nice and do some good but they are too shallow to be effective long-term. The problem is that they completely miss the core problem, which is race belief itself. Races are not naturally occurring subspecies of human beings. They are the artificial creations of our cultures. Therefore, attempting to solve the problem of racism by asking for tolerance between races is like turning up the air conditioner in a burning house because you don’t like the temperature. Overt racism and all other destructive but less obvious race problems are unlikely to ever go away no matter how much love and tolerance we pour on the fire. What is needed is a game-changer, an awakening to the reality of who we are as revealed by science.

The critical problem with biological races is the claim that we are all inherently limited or empowered based on our birth into a unique genetic group that contains millions of other similar people. Many good people who champion racial equality and would not be considered racists carry this destructive belief in their heads. But it can’t be true because the groups themselves are unnatural, inconsistent and illogical. The biological race group called “black people”, for example, makes no sense because of the deep genetic diversity within it. Two randomly selected “black” people from Africa, the Caribbean or elsewhere are likely to be more distantly related to one another than any one of them is to a typical “white” European…

…1. The police lineup in your head. By far, the most common objection I hear to the rejection of biological races comes from what I call the “mental police lineup”. It’s easy to imagine a dark-skinned African, a light-skinned European, and a typical Japanese or Chinese person all standing side-by-side. The visible contrast is so great, I’m often told, that races must be real. There is an easy answer to this popular defense of the race concept, however…

Read the entire article here.

Notes On A Theory Of Multi-Racial White Supremacist Patriarchy, aka MRWaSP

it’s her factory: pop culture and philosophy from a critical-race feminist perspective.
2013-11-29

Robin James, Associate Professor of Philosophy & Women’s & Gender Studies
University of North Carolina, Charlotte

Multi-Racial White Supremacist Patriarchy, or MRWaSP, is my term for early 21st-century globalized Western race/gender/sexuality/capitalist hegemony. I put a lower-case “a” in the acronym to both make the acronym something pronounceable to English speakers, and to echo the older acronym WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant). You say it like “Mr. Wasp”–emphasis on the “mister” shows that this is not just about white supremacy, it’s also about patriarchy.

MRWaSP is an upgrade on WASP. As critical theorists of race have been arguing, white supremacy has retooled itself to work more efficiently in and for globalized, neoliberal hegemonies. Not only are exclusion and border-patrolling resource-intensive, they’re also not the most efficient ways of promoting nationalist, capitalist, patriarchal interests. As Jared Sexton argues, contemporary multiculturalism/multiracialism is a “protest less against the genocidal objectives of Anglo white supremacy than the inefficiency of unrestrained violence as the means of its accomplishment” (Amalgamation Schemes [: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism], 200). You can extend this argument to patriarchy and other institutionalized forms of identity-based oppression. It is more cost-effective to include some formerly excluded/abjected groups in racial/gender/sexual supremacy, because this inclusion further reinforces both the supremacy of the hyperelites and the precarity of the most unruly groups (those who pose the greatest threat to MRWaSP hegemony)…

Read the entire article here.

Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego [Floyd Review]

The Journal of San Diego History
Volume 59, Number 4 (Fall 2013)
pages 291-292

Carlton Floyd, Associate Professor of English
University of San Diego

Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego. By Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012. Maps, photographs, tables, notes, and index. 256 pp. $25.95 paper.

Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego by Rudy P. Guevarra Jr. deftly explores his Filipino and Mexican familial history from its origins in Spanish colonialism to its current Mexipino configurations in San Diego. Addressing a subject that has received little extended critical attention, Guevarra argues that Spain’s sixteenth-century colonial enterprises brought Mexicans and Filipinos together in ways that facilitated their intimate interaction. First, they shared or, more aptly, endured enslavement and indentured servitude as well as the interest in surviving these perilous conditions. Second, Mexicans and Filipinos took on a common language and religion: Spanish and Catholicism. Third, they discovered themselves in possession of a similar sense of familial arrangements—in the notions of godparents and in the practice of coming-of-age ceremonies for young women, to cite two examples. These various conditions facilitated intimate interethnic relationships then, and foreshadowed similar intimate interactions centuries later, particularly in the western parts of the United States…

Read the entire review here.

Science in support of racial mixture: Charles-Augustin Vandermonde’s Enlightenment program for improving the health and beauty of the human species

Endeavor
Available online 2013-12-25 (Corrected Proof)
DOI: 10.1016/j.endeavour.2013.11.001

Clara Pinto-Correia
Instituto de Investigação Científica Bento da Rocha Cabral, Lisboa, Portugal
Centro de Estudos de História e Filosofia das Ciências, Évora, Portugal

João Lourenço Monteiro
Departamento de Ciências Sociais Aplicadas
Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal

In 1756, while he was regent of the Faculté de Médecine in Paris, Charles-Augustin Vandermonde published his Essai sur la Manière de Perfectionner l’Espèce Humaine. This treatise was situated within the French-led medical movement of meliorism, meant to increase public health by boosting the medical arrangement of marriages from all strata of society. What made Vandermonde different from his colleagues is that he was not just looking for a way to improve the health of society: he was also proposing a series of measures meant to increase the beauty of humankind. And, for the first time in the history of European medicine, he advocated mixed-race couplings as a means to obtain the best results. This latter development is so unexpected in the global setting of the Enlightenment that we could arguably hail Vandermonde as the founding father of what Michel Foucault later called ‘biopolitique’.

Read or purchase the article here.

De Blasio’s Daughter Reveals Substance Abuse

The New York Times
2013-12-24

Javier C. Hernandez and Michael M. Grynbaum

Chiara de Blasio, right, with her parents in September. Michael Appleton for The New York Times

Days before her father’s inauguration, the 19-year-old daughter of Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio disclosed a history of drug and alcohol abuse that his campaign had taken pains to shield throughout a candidacy that relied heavily on the image of a happy and tight-knit family from Brooklyn.

In a carefully crafted video distributed on Tuesday by her father’s staff, Chiara de Blasio spoke in candid terms about a battle with depression throughout her adolescence that led to drinking and drug use, habits that worsened when she was attending college in California last year.

“It didn’t start out as like a huge thing for me, but then it became a really huge thing for me,” Ms. de Blasio said in the five-minute video, in which she sat alone on screen, accompanied by soft piano music…

…Such is the celebrity of Mr. de Blasio’s children that Ms. de Blasio’s announcement on Tuesday was met with a statement from the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy at the White House, who praised her “tremendous bravery in speaking out about her recovery.”…

…Hank Sheinkopf, a political consultant, said the city had elected a family when it chose Mr. de Blasio in November, and that New Yorkers should expect his wife and children to continue to play a prominent role…

Read the entire article here.

Surprising New Face in Arabic Music

The New York Times
2013-12-03

Linsay Crouse

Jennifer Grout Sings Umm Kulthum Hits on ‘Arabs Got Talent’

The Arab world has an unlikely new star: an American who sings — but barely speaks — Arabic. Not only that, her genre is traditional Arab music.

Plucking her oud, an Arabic version of the lute, and singing with the undulating emotion of Umm Kulthum, the Arab world’s legendary diva, the 23-year-old Jennifer Grout has become a sensation across the Middle East as a contestant on the reality show “Arabs Got Talent.”

She will appear in the finals in Beirut, Lebanon, on Saturday, competing for viewer votes against an array of Arab performers, many of whom would be at home on a Western stage: comedians, hip-hop dancers and jugglers. The only performer of classical Arab music will be an American of European stock…

… “So many times I’ve heard the comment ‘It’s “Arabs Got Talent” — go back to America,’ ” Ms. Grout said in a recent phone interview from Marrakesh, Morocco, where she lives. “It’s like I’m starting an invasion, when really I just love singing Arabic music and desperately wanted a chance to perform it for an audience that would appreciate it.”

Her flair in doing so has also incited a wave of incredulity about her ethnicity: Ms. Grout, who is from Cambridge, Mass., describes her background as English, Scottish and Native American…

Read the entire article here.