Mixed Race Studies

The 10 Percenter

The New York Times
2011-10-13

Robert S. Boyton

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is having lunch at New York’s Union Square Cafe, hoping Danny Meyer’s chicken soup will soothe his allergies. He has just returned from Newark, where he interviewed Mayor Cory Booker for his new PBS series, “Finding Your Roots.” After lunch he’s catching a flight to Martha’s Vineyard for Bill Clinton’s birthday party. Author of 14 books, editor in chief of the online publication The Root, documentary producer and presenter, Gates, 61, is a one-man multimedia industry.

“I have no plans to slow down,” he says cheerfully.

A clear line runs through Gates’s myriad projects. “I want to get into the educational DNA of American culture,” he says. “I want 10 percent of the common culture, more or less, to be black.” Gates’s love of technology has been a boon in this regard. He is always thinking about new ways to circulate his ideas. “The Norton Anthology of African-American Literature” (1996) included a CD of oral literature with recordings of poets like Langston Hughes reading their work. He followed up “Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African American Experience” (1999) with Microsoft’s Encarta Africana on CD-ROM. The success of The Huffington Post inspired him to start The Root, The Washington Post’s online African-American publication. “I’m a tech geek. Whenever I read about something new, I think to myself, How can I take this and make it black?”…

…Gates is a member of the Personal Genome Project at Harvard Medical School, and he and his late father (who died at age 97 on Christmas Eve, 2010) were the first African-Americans to have their entire genomes sequenced. The tests showed that Gates Jr. has 50 percent European ancestry and descends from John Redman, a free African-American who fought in the Revolutionary War. In 2006, Gates was inducted into the Sons of the American Revolution. “When I do a black person’s DNA, there are never any people who are 100 percent black, no matter how dark they are,” he says…

Read the entire article here.

Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical by Todd Decker (review)

Theatre Journal
Volume 65, Number 3, October 2013
pages 447-448
DOI: 10.1353/tj.2013.0077

Bethany Wood

Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical. By Todd Decker. Broadway Legacy series. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 238.

Todd Decker’s Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical examines representations of race in the creation and evolution of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s iconic musical by tracing the impact of particular performers on numerous stage, sound, and film productions. Using the “dynamic of the color line” as his “vantage point” (4), Decker places the original musical in conversation with subsequent interpretations in order to analyze the enduring influence of Show Boat on representations of race in American musical theatre. Through his systematic examination, Decker addresses the broader issue of “the performed distinction between black and white [that serves] as an essential and constructive element of the American musical in its totality” and argues for interracial histories of musical theatre, a field “largely written along divided racial lines” (5).

He presents his analysis in two parts: “Making,” which focuses on Show Boat’s 1927 debut; and “Remaking,” which examines the versions created from 1928 to 1998. Each section employs extensive archival research in its account of how race has been staged in key productions. Chapter 1 centers on the major themes established by the musical’s source material, Edna Ferber’s 1926 novel. This chapter, along with chapter 2, situates Show Boat’s central focus on race and music within 1920s popular culture. The analysis in this chapter follows the pattern in Show Boat theatre scholarship of faulting Ferber for failing to approach the narrative’s themes in the same manner that Hammerstein would later employ for the musical. Decker criticizes Ferber’s cursory attention to the issues of music and race, and, in the following chapters, demonstrates Hammerstein’s efforts to foreground these themes by making Show Boat “an object lesson in the power of black music and a celebration of a moment in popular culture history when black music and musicians were breaking into mainstream white culture with undeniable force” (52).

Chapters 2 and 3 address the influence of Paul Robeson and Helen Morgan on Hammerstein’s interpretive vision and provide detailed context concerning their careers. Chapter 2 details Kern and Hammerstein’s initial plan to cast Robeson as Joe in order to highlight the themes of race and music in the initial script, as well as the complications that resulted when Robeson decided not to join the original Broadway cast. Chapter 3 considers Morgan’s influence on the creation of Show Boat , as Hammer-stein adapted act 2 to showcase her talents as a torch singer and exploit her reputation for dissipation. Hammerstein’s efforts and Morgan’s performance worked to establish Julie as a tragic figure, expressing herself through Morgan’s “thoroughly white” (65) singing style.

In chapter 4, Decker argues that the musical choices for the characters of Ravenal and Magnolia “whitened” Show Boat’s central couple by making Ravenal an operatic tenor, a style associated with white singers, and aligning Magnolia’s voice with white culture through her performance of “After the Ball,” a Victorian parlor waltz. Show Boat was one of the first Broadway musicals to use both black and white performers in large numbers, and chapter 5 explores the musical’s use of both a black and a white chorus. Along with chapter 2, this section adds a much-needed look at contemporary responses to Show Boat in the black press.

Part 2 investigates the reworking of racial representations in productions of Show Boat that followed its premiere. Chapter 6 looks at several “remakings” between 1928 and 1940 that featured Robeson, who eventually accepted and became associated with the role of Joe in several landmark productions. Decker discusses how Robeson’s powerful performances and offstage persona enhanced Joe’s role, which Hammerstein expanded for the 1936 film in order to capitalize on Robeson’s talents and appeal. As in his examination of the 1927 production, Decker analyzes several deleted scenes in order to illustrate Hammerstein’s continued, yet unrealized plan to use Show Boat as a history lesson of black influence on popular music. Chapter 7 centers on several productions during and shortly after World War II, including the 1946 Broadway revival and the 1951 film starring Ava Gardner as Julie. Decker’s analysis of the impact that…

Rearticulating Black Mixed-Race in the Era of Globalization: Hines Ward and the struggle for Koreanness in contemporary South Korean media

Cultural Studies
Volume 28, Issue 3, 2014
pages 391-417
DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2013.840665

Ji-Hyun Ahn
University of Texas, Austin

Since the mid-2000s, the term multiculturalism has entered the Korean lexicon as migration has become more and more prevalent due to globalization. The cornerstone of this multicultural explosion was a 2006 visit by American football star Hines Ward, born to an African-American father and a Korean mother. As a black mixed-race sports celebrity, he suddenly became an emblematic media figure in the Korean televisual landscape, signifying a broader racial reconfiguration in Korean society. This media event – what I shall call ‘the Hines Ward moment’ – created and opened the discursive space for racial politics and multicultural issues in Korean society. Hence, this article aims to look at what this discursive explosion of multiculturalism and mixed-race means in the context of globalization. Reading the Hines Ward moment as a symbolic media text, the paper examines how the media discourse on Hines Ward articulates the issues of national identity and racial politics in contemporary Korean society. For analysis, newspaper articles, television programmes and television commercials that deal with the Hines Ward case are examined. By analyzing the modes of articulation of the Hines Ward moment, this study deconstructs the image of a ‘global, multicultural Korea’ shaped by the Korean media and examines the struggle for Koreanness in the televisual area of contemporary Korean media.

Introduction: imagining a multicultural, global Korea?

There has been a common belief that South Korea (hereafter, Korea) has always been a racially homogeneous country because of the strong myth of ‘one people one nation’ (hankyoreh hanminjok) (Shin 2006, G.-S. Han 2007). However, this common myth no longer seems as effective as it was in the past…

Read or purchase the article here.

Holding Onto The Other Half Of ‘Mixed-Race’

the race card project: six word essays
Morning Edition
National Public Radio
2013-10-14

Steve Inskeep, Host

NPR continues a series of conversations about The Race Card Project, where thousands of people have submitted their thoughts on race and cultural identity in six words. Every so often NPR Host/Special Correspondent Michele Norris will dip into those six-word stories to explore issues surrounding race and cultural identity for Morning Edition.

Again and again, The Race Card Project receives submissions dealing with mixed-race identity; from a child of a mixed-race union, from a parent of mixed-race children or from someone who is trying to figure out how to identify a mixed-race student or colleague, for example.

Those kinds of stories are the largest single category of six-word submissions the Race Card Project receives, says Michele Norris, who curates the project. Many of these entries have a lot to do with labels and identity.

Wilma Stordahl, a Seattle resident who’s an account manager for a national landscape company, offered one such submission: “Norwegian with Nappy Hair Doesn’t Fit.“…

Read the article here. Listen to the story here. Read the transcript here.

Identity Production in Figured Worlds: How Some Multiracial Students Become Racial Atravesados/as

The Urban Review
June 2013

Aurora Chang

Using Holland et al.’s (Identity and agency in cultural worlds, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1998) theory of identity and their concept of figured worlds, this article provides an overview of how twenty-five undergraduates of color came to produce a Multiracial identity. Using Critical Race Theory methodology with ethnographic interviewing as the primary method, I specifically focus on the ways in which Multiracial figured worlds operate within a racial borderland (Anzaldúa in Borderlands: La Frontera—The New Mestiza, Aunt Lute Books, San Francisco, 1987), an alternate, marginal world where improvisational play (Holland et al. in Identity and agency in cultural worlds, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1998) and facultad became critical elements of survival. Participants exercised their agency by perforating monoracial storylines and developed a complex process of identity production that informed their behaviors by a multifaceted negotiation of positionalities. I end by focusing on implications for urban education that can be drawn from this study.

Read or purchase the article here.

Transcending blackness: from the new millennium mulatta to the exceptional multiracial [Aspinall Review]

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 37, Issue 5, 2014
pages 850-851
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2013.831934

Peter J. Aspinall, Emeritus Reader in Population Health
University of Kent, UK

Transcending blackness: from the new millennium mulatta to the exceptional multiracial, by Ralina L. Joseph. Durham and London. Duke University Press. 2013.
xx+ 226 pp., (paperback). ISBN 978-0-8223-5292-1

This book is concerned with representations of mixed-race African American women, notably, the two categories into which fall the mainstream images of mixed-race blackness: the new millennium mulatta. exceedingly tragic, always divided, alone, and uncomfortable, and the exceptional multiracial, unifying, strikingly successful post-racial ideal. The analysed texts which form the main body of the book belong to the 1998-2008 era (following the debates about capture of the multiracial population in the 2000 US Census), a period during which representations crystallized into this two-sided stereotype. Both are rooted in a condemnation of blackness which is either implicit as where blackness is stigmatized through the presentation of tragic mulatta inevitability or explicit, where discarding the burden of blackness means arriving at a safely post-racial state. Both representations take place in the context of gendered and sexualized as well as racialized performances.

An in-depth approach is adopted in which four representative works are examined with regard to the textual nuances that construct the two stereotypes. Part 1 explores the new millennium mulatlas: the bad race girl’ in Jennifer Beals’s portrayal of Bette Porter on the cable television drama The L Word (2004-2008), in which Bette is mired in the tragic misfortune and destiny of the mulatta: and the ‘sad race girl’ in Danzy Senna’s novel ‘Caucasia‘ (1998), which investigates how Senna reinterprets the tragic mulatta heroine in her production of a new millennium mulatta representation. Race and gender arc the drivers that torture the protagonists who are unable to achieve the states of post-race and post-feminism. In part II, ‘The Exceptional Multiracial’. Joseph interrogates representations that develop the character of the racial-transforming mixed-race title character in Alison Swan’s independent film ‘Mixing Nia‘ (1998) and the racial-switching mixed-race contestant in an episode of Tyra Banks’s reality television show ‘America’s Next Top Model‘ (2005). These representations portray blackness as an irrelevant entity for the multiracial, something that can and should be transcended through racialized performances. Blackness, the cause of sadness and pain for the multiracial African American, must be erased or surpassed in order to reach a state of health or success.

These particular works were chosen by Joseph as they were ‘representations of this particular time period and particular subgenre of multiracial African American representations’ and are not isolated representations of mixed-race African Americans but representative texts. Indeed, she contends that contemporary black-white representations do not go beyond this binary, the idea that blackness is a deficit that black and multiracial people must overcome…

Read or purchase the review here.

New faculty: Amy Non links health disparities to genetics and environment

Research News @ Vanderbilt
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee
2012-11-30

Liz Entman, (615) 322-NEWS

For decades, researchers have struggled to identify the root causes behind racial disparities in health. Amy Non, assistant professor of anthropology, takes a multidisciplinary approach.

A molecular anthropologist specializing in epigenetics, the study of how environment and behavior affect the expression of genes, her work integrates genetics, anthropology and public health.

For example, why are African Americans at greater risk for many chronic diseases? “We don’t really know what’s causing it—whether it’s their genetic ancestry or whether it’s something about their social or cultural environment,” Non said. She has found no evidence that African genetic ancestry plays a role and is now trying to identify psychosocial mechanisms—such as stress—that may contribute to these disparities.

Stress triggers a release of hormones that can lead to inflammation or dysregulation of other biological processes, she said. Prolonged exposure to stress can permanently interfere with the genes that regulate these hormones, which can have long-term consequences on a person’s health.

Read the entire article here.

Education, Genetic Ancestry, and Blood Pressure in African Americans and Whites

American Journal of Public Health
August 2012, Volume 102, Number 8
pages 1559-1565
DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2011.300448

Amy L. Non, Assistant Professor of Anthropology,
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee

Clarence C. Gravlee, Associate Professor of Anthropology;  affiliate appointments in the Department of Behavioral Science and Community Health
University of Florida, Gainesville

Connie J. Mulligan, Professor of Anthropology; Associate Director, University of Florida Genetics Institute
University of Florida, Gainesville

• Objectives. We assessed the relative roles of education and genetic ancestry in predicting blood pressure (BP) within African Americans and explored the association between education and BP across racial groups.
• Methods. We used t tests and linear regressions to examine the associations of genetic ancestry, estimated from a genomewide set of autosomal markers, and education with BP variation among African Americans in the Family Blood Pressure Program. We also performed linear regressions in self-identified African Americans and Whites to explore the association of education with BP across racial groups.
• Results. Education, but not genetic ancestry, significantly predicted BP variation in the African American subsample (b = –0.51 mm Hg per year additional education; P = .001). Although education was inversely associated with BP in the total population, within-group analyses showed that education remained a significant predictor of BP only among the African Americans. We found a significant interaction (b = 3.20; P = .006) between education and self-identified race in predicting BP.
• Conclusions. Racial disparities in BP may be better explained by differences in education than by genetic ancestry. Future studies of ancestry and disease should include measures of the social environment. (Am J Public Health. 2012; 102:1559–1565. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2011.300448)

In recent decades, researchers have struggled to determine the causes of racial disparities in health. Many biomedical researchers have speculated that underlying genetic differences between races may contribute to these disparities. With the increasing availability of high-throughput genotyping platforms, a wealth of genomic data is now available to help address this issue. One consequence is that more researchers are estimating genetic ancestry to capture a presumed genetic basis of racial disparities in health. However, any associations found between genetic ancestry and disease could alternatively be explained by unmeasured environmental factors that are also associated with African genetic ancestry and contribute to health disparities, such as socioeconomic status (SES), neighborhood environment, and psychosocial factors including perceived stress or discrimination. Therefore, to avoid unwarranted inferences about the magnitude of genetic influences on health disparities, it is critical for any analysis of ancestry and disease to include appropriate social–environmental variables.

Social–environmental factors may be especially important when one is studying a complex disease such as hypertension. Complex diseases, by definition, involve multiple environmental and genetic causes, as well as interactions within and between them. Many studies have identified important social–environmental influences on racial inequalities in hypertension, such as SES, psychosocial stressors, and neighborhood environment, whereas other studies have begun to identify relevant genetic variants, such as those in the rennin–angiotensin–aldosterone axis and the adrenergic system. Few studies, however, have examined genetic and environmental factors simultaneously. The limited scope of this research to date has slowed progress toward explaining racial inequalities in hypertension and other complex diseases.

To address the relevance of both genetic and environmental factors in racial inequalities in hypertension, we tested associations between genetic ancestry, education, and blood pressure (BP) among Whites and African Americans in the Family Blood Pressure Program (FBPP) study. A previous analysis of this data set by Tang et al. found no evidence of a statistically significant association between African genetic ancestry and blood pressure. They concluded nonetheless that the results were “suggestive of genetic differences between Africans and non-Africans that influence blood pressure, but such effects are likely to be modest compared to environmental ones.” No environmental variables were included in their study, however. Here we reexamine the FBPP data set to test how the addition of education affects the association between ancestry and BP in African Americans. We also explored the association between education and blood pressure across racial groups. We hypothesized that education would show a greater association with BP than would African ancestry among African Americans, and that the association between education and BP may vary by racial and gender groups…

Read the entire article here.

Purple Boots, Silver Stars … and White Parents

The New York Times
2013-10-13

Frank Ligtvoet, Founder
Adoptive Families With Children of African Heritage and Their Friends, New York, New York

“WHEN I wear my cap backwards, don’t copy me,” our 8-year-old son says to his 7-year-old sister. “O.K.,” she answers, “I will put it on sideways.”

Recently our African-American daughter, Rosa, had gone with an older black friend to Fulton Mall, a crowded commercial area in our Brooklyn neighborhood, where the shoppers are mostly black. Fulton Mall is not only about shopping, it’s also a place to flirt, talk, laugh and argue, and to listen in passing to gospel, soul, hip-hop and R & B.

Rosa had seen some purple canvas boots with silver stars and lost herself in an all-consuming desire to have them. Immediately. I bought them, a bit later. A day later. And to be “fair,” I bought our son, Joshua, who is also African-American, a pair of black and yellow basketball shorts. Pretty cool as well.

The next day they want to show off their new stuff and, somewhat to my surprise, they decide to do so at Fulton Mall. I am their white adoptive dad, and by now, at their age, they see the racial difference between us clearly and are not always comfortable with it in public. But they know they are too young to go alone to the mall. Before we leave, Rosa, who had always seemed indifferent to fashion, changes into tight jeans and a black short-sleeve T-shirt. Joshua twists his head to see how he looks from behind. He pushes his new shorts a bit lower over his hips, but doesn’t dare to go all the way saggy. And then — after they have their cap conversation — we go.

They walk ahead. I am kept at a distance, a distance that grows as we get closer to the mall. I respect that; I grin and play stranger.

Joshua walks with the wide, tentative yet supple steps he sees black teenage boys make, steps he has practiced at home in the mirror. I realize that this is the first time in their lives they are asserting their blackness in a black environment, maybe not in opposition to but in conscious separation from the whiteness of my male partner and me. And we are a bit proud of their budding racial independence, since it comes after years of their having expressed feelings that ranged from “I don’t want to be black” to “I hate white people.” Being black with us was safe now. Being black at Fulton Mall was sort of a test of how safe it was out there in the world. I take a picture with my phone to catch this moment, which they hate. Of course…

…In the case of transracial adoption, there is the force of horizontal identity, where the child looks for others with the same experience of being adopted, but the vertical identity is complicated as well. When we wake them up in the morning, our kids don’t see parents who look like them. For many young transracial adoptees, every time they look in the mirror it’s a shock to see that they are black or Asian and not white like their parents. (In most transracial families, the parents are white.) The children have to grow out of their internalized whiteness into their own racial identity. Some fail and suffer tremendously…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Identity issues

Harvard Gazette
2011-01-28

Stephanie Schorow, Harvard Correspondent

‘Black in Latin America’ examines perceptions of race

There were laughs of recognition as Silvio Torres-Saillant, professor of English and humanities at Syracuse University, told a story that underscored a major point of the “Black in Latin America” conference, which kicked off on Jan. 27 at Harvard.

Torres-Saillant, a former director of the Syracuse Latino-Latin American Studies Program, described being approached about joining a black campus caucus some years ago. A representative asked the carefully considered question: “Do you consider yourself more Hispanic or more black?”

His bemused silence may have been seen as an answer by the representative, but it reveals the false dichotomy that, for far too long, has been applied to the study of people of African descent who hail from South, Central, or North America and the Caribbean.

In what many participants called a “historic moment,” scholars from around the world gathered for three days at Harvard to explore issues of race, racial identity, and racism in countries as diverse as Haiti, Brazil, Mexico, and Peru. Of the estimated 12.5 million Africans shipped to the New World during the Middle Passage of the slave trade, the vast majority were taken to the Caribbean and Latin America.

“This is not just about Africa; this is not just about Latin America; this is how it all comes together,” said Caroline Elkins, Harvard history professor…

…In the first session of the conference, which focused on racial identity in the Dominican Republic, anthropologist Juan Rodriguez examined how Dominicans emphasize their European ancestry and distinguish themselves from Haitians who are perceived as the darker “other” or even as “foreigners,” even though the two countries share the same land mass.

Yet, Rodriguez said, examination of DNA from maternal lines of Dominicans finds that 85 percent have African ancestors, 9.4 Indian, and less than .08 European. DNA from paternal lines found 58 percent from European ancestors, 36 from African, and 1 percent Indian, he said. This emphasizes the abusive role played by the European male in relation to enslaved native and African women, he said.

In his humorous, yet poignant, remarks, Rodriguez discussed the use of race on Dominican national identification cards, rattling off some of the 12 classifications of skin color from the early 1970s, including white, black, ashen, discolored, so pale as to appear sick, light with freckles or moles, and purple. He also cited the 15 kinds of hair texture that ranged on a spectrum from “bueno” (good) for straight hair to “malo” (bad) for kinky hair.

Frank Moya Pons, a professor of Latin America and a former minister in the Dominican government, discussed his research into census data that reveals just how reluctant Dominicans have been over the decades to call themselves “mulatto,” preferring to identify themselves as Indians or the native people of the region. “We are in the presence of a mulatto population that calls itself Indian, which gives us much food for thought,” he said…

Read the entire article here.