Mixed Race Studies

Interview with PhD Student Karla Lucht: Children’s Literature about Mixed-Race Asian Americans/Canadians

The Center for Children’s Books
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
February 2013

Tad Andracki, CCB Outreach Coordinator

“Everyone deserves to see themselves represented in a book. And a good book at that.”

GSLIS doctoral student Karla Lucht visited the School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies at the University of British Columbia as part of the iSchool Doctoral Student Exchange Program in November 2012. The CCB decided to meet with Karla to discuss her trip and her research. Lucht describes her research as looking at the representations of mixed-race Asian Americans and Canadians in youth literature with a critical race theory lens.

Why do you see your research as important to the field of youth services and children’s literature? Why is it important?

To start with, there’s a gap in this research with lots of underrepresented groups, but with mixed-race people especially. Everyone deserves to see themselves represented in a book… and a good book at that. In the past, we’ve seen some books about mixed-race people, but a lot of them weren’t good. I’m trying to fill in those gaps.

What are some challenges you see in your particular field of research? What are some opportunities?

One primary challenge is just finding titles, especially using subject headings. The Library of Congress Subject Heading that’s closest to my work is Racially Mixed People–Fiction, which isn’t very descriptive. I’ve been sifting through books with that heading. I’m also trying other keywords—adoption, immigration, multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural–and then looking at the books to see if they have the content I’m interested in.

Another problem is that, especially in the late 1980s and the 90s, a lot of the YA books on this topic are a bit problematic and poorly written. You find books that really invest in Othering a character’s Asian side and putting whiteness on a pedestal. In those books, the character vists the Asian side of the family, and it’s always a big problem–the Asianness is “too weird” or something…

Read the entire interview here.

Mixed feelings

NOW.
2012-06-30

NOW is the online source for news, features, analysis and much more, covering Lebanon, the Lebanese diaspora and the Middle East.

“The people photographed are so beautiful they make you feel like having mixed race babies,” said Kevork Baboyan, one of many attendees at Wednesday’s opening of the photography exhibition, Mixed Feelings.

Over the years, racism has slowly but steadily started to raise eyebrows in Lebanon, a country that is infamous for abusing migrant domestic workers and discriminating against refugees and other groups of society. Rarely, however, has anyone addressed racism between Lebanese until Lebanese-Nigerian activist Nisreen Kaj sought – in collaboration with Beirut-based Polish photographer Marta Bogdanska — to explore the concepts of race and identity.

“Living in Beirut as a black Lebanese has [clearly highlighted] the hierarchy of skin color and ethnicity in the country,” Kaj told NOW Extra. “This reality has gotten under my skin, which is only a figure of speech, for it is in fact about the surface, about the skin, about the way we perceive identity, race, and ethnicity.”

Opening at Hamra’s Dar al-Musawwir, the launch combined images and interviews of some 30 Lebanese from African and Asian descent and was produced in cooperation with the Heinrich Böll Foundation, Middle East Office…

…When asked whether racism was more prevalent in Lebanon as compared to other Arab nations, Khoury said it was “particularly [widespread] here, but this is exhibit is a start.”

“They see my car keys and can’t believe I own a car… so [people at the supermarket] follow me to see whether or not it’s actually possible,” said Khoury’s mother laughingly, recounting the incident with equal humor and frustration…

Read the entire article here.

Possibilities Abound in a Nation That Is Diverse, CNN Journalist Says

Yale News
2009-11-20

Susan Gonzalez

When CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien was growing up, her mother in­structed her never to let anyone tell her that she wasn’t black or Hispanic because of her mixed ethnic and racial heritage.

So, when she was asked to identify her race on official forms, O’Brien — the daughter of a black Cuban mother and an Irish-Australian father — refused to check just one box, even when making a single selection was required, she told a packed auditorium in the Law School’s Levinson Auditorium during her Poynter Fellowship Lecture on Nov. 10.

America’s value lies in its diversity, O’Brien said, and that mixture of races and ethnicities should never be viewed as a “problem.”…

…Likewise, when O’Brien — also a Harvard graduate — was first applying for jobs as a journalist, one news director told her that there was only one spot open for a black person but that she wasn’t dark enough to qualify. Another news director asked if she would consider changing her name because it was too difficult to pronounce. On both occasions, her mother pointed out that these were jobs her daughter wouldn’t want anyway.

O’Brien said that her parents served as examples of perseverance who encouraged their children to look beyond challenges and focus on possibilities, instilling in them this message: “Dream and do what you want; push and achieve what you want; go and get what you want.”

Her own children, the journalist said, have become so used to diversity in their lives that they were shocked to discover that Barack Obama is America’s first black president.

“Diversity to me is an opportunity to think differently and to see differently,” she told her audience…

Read the entire article here.

It’s all in the mix

NOW
2009-05-22

NOW is the online source for news, features, analysis and much more, covering Lebanon, the Lebanese diaspora and the Middle East.

“I am apartment hunting with Hala who looks like a cheap whore,” read the text message that Hala’s friend accidently sent to her while they were walking together.  Hala, who is 27 and has a Nigerian mother and a Lebanese father, was shocked and ended up giving this “friend,” who is gay, a two-hour lecture. “For someone who is gay, who goes on saying Lebanon is not accommodating gay people, you’re just a typical Lebanese in the end,” she told him.
 
Ever since Hala’s decision to move from Nigeria to Lebanon for her studies at the American University of Science and Technology (AUST), each day has been a battle. The color of her skin is the reason why.
 
Most African women in Lebanon come from Ethiopia. According to Tsega Berhan, who works at the Ethiopian Consulate in Lebanon, an estimated 55,000 Ethiopian domestic workers live in Lebanon, and their brown skin resembles Hala’s. Ethiopians are often seen as either maids or prostitutes – the two occupations most looked down on in Lebanon – and for this reason, Hala faces racism and harassment on a day-to-day basis.

While Hala is constantly hurt by people’s words, she believes that coming to Lebanon at the age of 20 helped her to cope. She did not try to change herself for the sake of others’ perceptions, but instead started to surround herself with circles of trusted friends who accept her as she is. However, Hala’s strategy only goes so far…

…Hala’s skin has colored her love life as well. While she had dated Lebanese men before, it never developed into anything serious. “I have a lot of guy friends, but at the same time, it’s so funny because none of my guy friends would ever date a black girl. They’re not racist, but because they have racist families, they don’t want the headache.”

When she went to a guy friend’s house, his mother looked at her with a suspicious eye and asked her neighbor, who was sitting next to her, her opinion of Hala. The neighbor told Hala to turn her face, scrutinized her from head to toe, and then commented in Arabic, “She would look better if she washes the dirt off her body.” Hala caught the comment and never went to the house again. After this and other similar incidents, Hala learned that her father would have never married her mother had they met in Lebanon.
 
Taking it day by day
 
“I do feel Lebanese but it’s not in a typical way. You’re more aware of your differences. In Lebanon, I have to mention that I’m half-Filipino, but when I’m in the Philippines… I have to tell [relatives] I am half-Lebanese… People pick out the differences before they look at the similarities,” says Gaby, who is 19. He spent most of his life in Lebanon with a loving, stable family composed of a Filipina mother, a Lebanese father and three brothers. His parents met in Saudi Arabia more than 20 years ago, when his mother was working as a nurse there and his father was on a business trip.

For Gaby, growing up in Lebanon and dealing with racism has never been as dramatic as it was for Hala. He says he never really experienced confusion about his identity as a child or adolescent, even when he was made fun of for being different. “As a person, you don’t really analyze your situation so much and say you’re confused. What am I going to do? You just sort of live normally,” he says, adding that having three brothers also helped.

Perhaps because he doesn’t get sexually harassed as women of color do, Gaby views Lebanese as “respectful” of diversity and sees their racist comments as coming “offhand,” rather than intentionally. Nonetheless, he knows how his Filipina mother, who comes from a country that has over 30,000 nationals working as live-in maids in Lebanon, “gets a lot of crap.”

“Sometimes, someone would come over to the house, selling something or whatever, and my mom would answer the door. And then they’d ask to see the Madame.” Gaby has also grown up seeing his father defend his mother when confronted with racist comments. His parents never directly told him, but seeing this, he says, “I realized in a subtle way that you should fight back. But you don’t let it get to you….You can take [being mixed] as a disability, but I don’t think I ever took it as that.”…

Read the entire article here.

US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey on the legacy of the Civil War

The Washington Post
2013-01-30

Ron Charles

One hundred and fifty years later, Americans are still fighting the Civil War, US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey said at the Library of Congress on Wednesday. The field of battle is now historical memory, and gatling guns have been replaced by symbols, but the contest over what sort of nation this will be — and was — continues, according to the 46-year-old poet.

Before a standing-room-only crowd of 300 people, Trethewey focused her remarks on Walt Whitman’s complicated response to black soldiers. Her lecture — in association with the Library’s “Civil War in America” exhibit — elegantly blended scholarship, cultural criticism and poetry…

…When she toured historic sites in her native Mississippi, where “the dead stand up in stone,” she found the same act of erasure still being carried out by memorials, plaques and even tour guides working for the Park Service. The record is “rife with omission and embellishment” that keeps “blacks relegated to the margins of historical memory,” she said. The Daughters of the Confederacy worked diligently to make sure that Americans remember the Civil War “only in terms of states’ rights, not in terms of slavery.”

Trethewey’s lecture this week was a kind of homecoming. Ten years ago, she conducted research on black soldiers in the Library of Congress and composed parts of her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, “Native Guard,” in the Main Reading Room. Her most recent collection, “Thrall,” explores her life as the daughter of an African American woman and a white man, the poet Eric Trethewey…

Read the entire article here.

Beyond Black and White: When Going Beyond May Take Us Out of Bounds

Journal of Black Studies
Volume 44, Number 2 (March 2013)
pages 158-181
DOI: 10.1177/0021934712471533

Katerina Deliovsky, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario

Tamari Kitossa, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario

This article examines a selection of the North American scholarly research that calls for “moving beyond” a “Black/White binary paradigm.” Some scholars suggest this paradigm limits or obscures a complex understanding of the historical record on race, racism, and racialization for Asian, Latina/o, Mexican, and Native Americans. On the face of it, the notion of a Black/White binary paradigm and the call to move beyond appears persuasive. The discourse of a Black/White binary paradigm, however, confuses, misnames, and simplifies the historical and contemporary experiences structured within what is, in fact, the racially incorporative matrix of a black/white Manicheanism. We assert this call sets up blackness and, by extension, people socially defined as “black” as impediments to multiracial coalition building. As a result, “moving beyond” is epistemologically faulty and politically harmful for African-descended people because it is based on “bad faith” toward blackness.

Read or purchase the article here.

‘Romance of Race’ reveals rich cultural history

BGSU News
Bowling Green, Ohio
Thursday, 2013-02-14

A new book by Dr. Jolie Sheffer is further confirmation that one should never doubt the power of the pen. “The Romance of Race: Incest, Miscegenation, and Multiculturalism in the United States, 1890-1930,” published in January by Rutgers University Press, explains the role of minority women writers and reformers in the creation of modern American multiculturalism.

Like their male counterparts Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo in Europe, these authors provided their largely middle-class, female readers an intimate and sympathetic look at people with whose lives they were otherwise unfamiliar. Through stories of romances between white men and minority women told in human terms, authors such as María Cristina Mena, Mourning Dove, Onoto Watanna and Pauline Hopkins created a vision of the United States as a mixed-race, even incestuous nation, says Sheffer, English and American culture studies…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed-Race Studies: Misstep or the next step for Ethnic Studies in a blending nation?

Portland State University McNair Research Journal
Volume 7, 2013
25 pages

Jennifer E. Robe
Portland State University

In January of 2011, The New York Times reported that 2010 U.S. Census data shows that younger generations are self-reporting their racial identity as multiracial or mixed-race in higher numbers than ever before1. Classes in higher education that engage with race and ethnicity, often but not always as part of Ethnic Studies programs in universities, discuss and critique the categorizations of race and ethnicity. However, there is a social, political and economic power and privilege that groups have in being recognized as part of a categorized racial and/or ethnic group that mixed-race or multiracial identified individuals do not have when their identity is underrepresented or unrepresented. There is a very small number (under ten) universities in the U.S. that offer courses or programs that focus their study on a mixed-race identity. The potential problem in this change is a growing mixed-race identified population is the possibility that a growing number of students in classes that will not find a curriculum that centers on their racial experiences. That is the question I will address – are the racial experiences and understandings of mixed-race identified people being addressed in classes that engage with and critique race? I survey a small sample of students currently enrolled in classes which engage with race and ethnicity at Oregon universities about their racial experiences to find out if they see mixed-race studies as having a place in the future of “Ethnic Studies” classes in higher education.

Introduction

Race is not as simple as checking a box or a category on a form. Race is an identity, a lifetime of experiences; it is complex, fluid and a piece of one‘s self that holds many contradictions. I am writing from the standpoint that racism is real, and I will not be constructing an argument which seeks to support nor challenge the existence of institutional racism in the United States and globally. However, in the pursuit of knowledge, which is ideally a fundamental piece of higher education, it is my intention to analyze the examination of race in university classrooms where the curriculum centers upon the discussion and critique of race and ethnicity. In this essay I will first explain how racial categorizations came into use, the history that surrounds those parameters of race, the institutional inequity that has accompanied racial categorizations and the fluctuation of those categories up until the present time. I argue that racial categorizations do not accurately document racial identities and experiences and also that higher education is the platform by which we can effectively critique ongoing racial and ethnic categorization. Ideally it is also a place where space is created for students to learn and explain their own racial experiences and histories.

Despite the ambiguity of racial and ethnic identifications (which I discuss in detail later on) many academic programs have been set up to teach the experiences and histories of groups of people, such as Black and African-American Studies, Chicano/Latino Studies, Native and Indigenous Nations Studies, Asian Studies etc. Currently there are some (very few) universities that are beginning to include classes on Mixed-Race Studies as well. My field research is a survey with 49 students in Oregon universities currently enrolled in classes that critically engage with the subject of race and ethnicity.

What I explore in my research is if students view these classes (where curriculum centers on a mixed-race or multiracial identity) as having a place in higher education and whether or not the study would be helpful or counterproductive in the debate around the usefulness of racial and ethnic categorizations. Radical political, racially-based movements of the 1950s through the 1970s fought to create visibility of racial groups in efforts to discuss the very real oppression and racial inequality they were experiencing because of their race. One of the things they shared was a demand for the right to an education that taught their own racial histories and experiences. In her book Ethnic Options, Mary Waters argues that ethnic categories do not encompass the experience of ethnicity and ethnic identity for all people. From her own research into census data on self-reported ancestry, she writes:

One thing that became clear from the data was that there was an awful lot of flux going on among these later-generation Americans—intermarriage was high, parents were not giving the same ancestry for their children as for themselves, and re-interview studies indicated that some people were changing their minds about their ancestry from survey to survey.

I agree with Waters assertions although my research examines those who are not necessarily able to categorize their identity and experiences in a nation where we are still required to categorize ourselves. In looking at the experiences of mixed-race and multiracial identified people and the experience of occupying that middle-place between categorizations. I will argue later on that people do experience privilege by having a place in the categorization of race. If we were to agree with Waters‘ argument that categorizations of ancestry do not work, then we are ignoring the experience of gaining privilege and access to communities and resources through “passing” and/or being able to choose a category to fit into. As Margaret Hunter writes in “The Beauty Queue: Advantages of Light Skin” [in Race, Gender, and the Politics of Skin Tone], “In the United States, color, more than any other physical characteristic, signifies race. But  “color” is also an attribute of individuals—human skin tone varies within and across ‘race’ categories.” What Hunter is arguing is that beauty, privilege and power are associated with light skin even within communities of color, and color creates a rift within communities based on a narrative which effectively oppresses all people of color. Skin color has the ability to determine if an individual experiences empowerment and/or ostracism within their own community as well as within the narrative of the dominant (in this case White) group. The issue of race difference and color difference are inextricably linked to systemic inequality. Although being able to “pass” as part of a marginalized community may allow for a person to have visibility, “passing” as part of the dominant community associates one with the position of the oppressor. This position of negotiating ones identity in order to gain or lose visibility and access to resources is an experience that some mixed-race people encounter; which are unique experiences that differ from being part of a recognized racial group.

The question I asked in my field research is—do mixed-race students feel that their experiences are being adequately engaged with in their education—I explore their responses for an answer to whether or not mixed-race studies, a study based on a new racial category can and whether or not they should have a place in the future of higher education…

…The criminalization of interracial sex was in place to prevent racial mixing that ultimately, as [Paul] Finkelman describes, “stemmed from the creation of slavery.” But miscegenation laws were not ruled unconstitutional until over one hundred years after legal slavery ended in the United States. A mixed-race person in the context of this history was viewed as a product of sexual transgression rooted in the fear of Black and White interracial sexual relationships. But as Rainier Spencer argues in Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix some view a mixed-race identity as a bridge of multiculturalism to deconstruct the Black/White dichotomy. However, as he writes,

As is the case with so much of multiracial ideology, the claim of racial bridging is merely stated without the least bit of critical backing, while no one inside the movement, and precious few outside it, care to point out the inconsistency. It is no more than an unproven desire, a case of wishful thinking, based on a supposed alterity of multiracial people that harks back to the marginal man.

The “marginal man” that Spencer refers to was a fictional archetype character created by Sociologist Robert Ezra Parks that was meant to embody a person whose occupied two opposing racial or ethnic groups. So Rainier [Spencer] critiques the viability of this ideology of mixed-race people being a “bridge” or a carrier of racial understanding. By adding another category of race, we are unable to break down the current constructions of race as we are still lacking the objectivity or neutrality to do so in our discourse on race.

Read the entire article here.

Oysters made Hampton man wealthy

Daily Press
Newport News, Virginia
2013-02-17

Mark St. John Erickson, Columnist

Even before the Civil War, Hampton’s busy waterfront boasted many free blacks who made their living as pilots, fishermen and boatmen.

Living side by side with whites who worked in the same maritime trades, they included such figures as Revolutionary War hero Cesar Tarrant, whose stand-out navigational skills and coolness under fire led the General Assembly to buy his freedom as a reward for “meritorious service.”

Tarrant was long dead when a light-skinned African-American boy named John Mallory Phillips came to Hampton in the 1860s. But the enterprise and independence he represented lived on in the tide of free blacks and ex-slaves who saw the opportunity to determine their own fates by taking to the water…

…Uncommon roots

Little was known about Phillips’ origins until his great-granddaughter Josephine C. Williams, a retired educator, began looking into her family’s past more than 15 years ago.

Scouring federal Census records, she found him listed first in 1860 as a 4-year-old child living in the York County household of a free black woman named Rachel Banks.

A decade later, Phillips shows up in the Hampton household of his uncle — a black oysterman named Cary Hopson — who owned his own home and reported several other oystermen from the Banks family living in his dwelling.

With his light skin and straight hair, Phillip’s appearance reflected the heritage of his father, a white York County farmer named John Phillips, and his light-skinned mother, whose mixed-race family reached far back into the colonial period, Williams says.

Whether Phillips was also related to white Hampton attorney, planter and Confederate officer Charles King Mallory — whose runaway slaves prompted Union Maj. Gen. Benjamin F. Butler to give blacks refuge as “contraband of war” at nearby Fort Monroe — is debatable, she adds.

She also disputes the rumored link between the young freeman and Elizabeth City County planter Jefferson Curle Phillips, who commanded the local militiamen who burned Hampton in August 1861 to keep its buildings from being used by Union troops and the fast-growing population of fugitive slaves.

“I think it’s a coincidence,” Williams says, citing her Census documents as well as family lore.

“I don’t think there’s any relationship at all.”…

Read the entire article here.

More Thoughts on The Magic Mulatto Myth

The Magic Mulatto: Bringing the fine art of Race Talk straight to the people
2013-01-29

Brett Russell Coleman

Elsewhere on this blog I have described the trope or myth of the magic mulatto (see the “about” page, for example, or this post about Frank Schaeffer). To my surprise, some people have asked me to expand on this myth (that is, I’m surprised that anyone reads any of this, but glad you do). Far be it from me to shirk my duty to my loyal readers, so expand I shall.

One of the ways in which this myth gets perpetuated is through research, scholarship, and sometimes everyday talk about mixed-race identity. In these discourses, you will often hear some clap-trap about mixed people being peculiarly skilled at “cultural adaptation” or “boundary spanning”, even “cognitive flexibility” (I’ve been guilty of this myself, I must admit, which is why I feel so free to criticize). It is clap-trap not because it isn’t or couldn’t be true (it may very well be true for some mixed-race people, under some circumstances), but because it could not possibly be true for all mixed-race people, or even some of them all of the time. It is especially ridiculous because it implies (perhaps inadvertently) that there is something magical about the intermingling of gene pools that predisposes one for cultural adaptation, as opposed to opportunities or demands of the sociocultural situation. More importantly, it implies that a “mixed-race” person would have an advantage over a “mono-racial” person in a similar sociocultural situation which demands the ability to “adapt” or “code-switch” or change like a “chameleon.” I suppose one could argue that familiarity with two or more racial or ethnic groups, plus a racially ambiguous appearance, might socialize one for this special ability in a way that is unlikely for a mono-racial person. I would argue that such an argument is absurd, but I suspect that neither you nor I am are temperamentally equipped for the conceptual and methodological nightmare that such a study would entail. So lets leave it at the level of argument for now. My argument is this: there is no good reason to believe that any given mixed-race person would be more adept at cultural adaptation, code switching, etcetera, than any given mono-racial person, given similar socializing conditions for both. That is to say, if the situation demands that the mono-racial person make some sort of psychological or behavioral leap across the racial or cultural boundary, he or she will be just as able to make that leap as the mixed-race person would be. To argue otherwise is to uphold the belief in “race” as something essential to the human “personality” and puts unfair demands on mixed-race people to do the hard work of bridging the racial divide that the majority of humanity are unwilling to do. Put another way, if you’re so interested in bridging the racial divide, do it yourself…

Read the entire article here.