Mixed Race Studies

‘Mi negro’: Embracing my blackness as a Puerto Rican man

The Washington Post
2018-09-14

Ed Morales, Adjunct Professor
Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race
Columbia University, New York, New York

Several years ago, at the height of New York’s stop-and-frisk policing policy, two officers stopped me at West 125th Street and Broadway and insisted that I was carrying a knife. I was walking from Columbia University’s campus, where I’ve taught seminars on Latinx identity since 2010, after picking up a couple books at the library. Because I wasn’t teaching that day, I was wearing a backward baseball cap, worn-out jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt, attire that apparently made me look like a criminal suspect.

The officers were Latinx with complexions similar to mine, but in that moment, they made a racialized judgment about how I represented a culture of criminality often associated with black and Latinx people. They stared at me with insistent eyes, demanding that I hand over a weapon that I didn’t have. They had been signaled by my unkempt appearance and the furtive movement of my hand toward a keychain holder protruding from my right front pocket, a plastic Puerto Rican flag in the shape of an island. They were operating in the context of 125th Street, a dividing line between the largely white collegiate neighborhood of Morningside Heights and the predominantly black gentrifying neighborhood of Harlem.

The officers looked blankly at my university ID and reluctantly questioned me for several agonizing minutes, then decided I was not who they were looking for. But the experience reminded me that I can never escape my racial identity: In a society ruled by a binary perception of race, my complexion classifies me as “other,” but at any point in time, what I’m wearing, where I’m standing and how the sunlight hits my skin will color how I’m judged…

Read the entire article here.

Colorism: Raising A Dark Skinned Daughter As A Light Skinned Woman In America

Blavity
2018-10-11

Angela Dennis

“We are beautiful because of our blackness, not in spite of it.”

As a mother at times it is hard enough to get through the everyday struggles of parenting, and as a black single mother there comes a whole host of other obstacles we are challenged with. In society we often discuss black parenting in regards to race, but rarely do we talk about parenting in regards to colorism. Colorism is an issue that has been present within the black community for quite some time. It is a symptom of racism. To educate those that are unaware or unclear, it is prejudiced attitudes or discrimination based on the tone or shade of one’s skin complexion. Racism on the other hand, is prejudgment against people based on their perceived racial status. Colorism can also be a symptom of racism.

Slave owners engaged in colorism with the practice of separating and giving preference to slaves with lighter complexions. This included allowing them to work indoors and assigning them with less grueling work. Dark skinned slaves were treated much harsher and inferior to their lighter counterparts. Later on, the brown paper bag test would be implemented within our own community to determine admittance. If your skin was darker than the bag, you did not merit inclusion. Today, the paper bag test is gone but we see reminders of how colorism continues to affect black people everyday.

I myself, as a light skinned woman of color with bi-racial heritage have experienced it throughout my life…

Read the entire article here.

Edmonton Police Under Fire For Calling Teenage Girl ‘Mulatto’ In Amber Alert

The Huffington Post Canada
2018-10-07

Sima Shakeri, Associate Editor

Alberta Emergency Alert The Amber Alert sent out on Friday, with information about the alleged victim censored for her protection.

People who received the alert were shocked by the word choice.

Edmonton police issued an Amber Alert on Friday afternoon for a missing 14-year-old girl, who had allegedly been forcibly abducted.

The girl was found safe shortly after the call was sent out, and a suspect has been charged with several offences including kidnapping with a firearm, but what caught many people’s attention was the word choice in describing the teen.

The alert said the alleged victim was “mulatto,” an outdated term for a child with one white and one black parent…

Read the enter article here.

When Asian Women Are Harassed for Marrying Non-Asian Men

The Cut
2018-10-12

Celest Ng

Photo: Jade/Getty Images/Blend Images

The men who harass me know three things: I’m Chinese-American, my husband is white, and our son is multiracial. You hate Asian men, they insist; you hate your own child. You hate yourself. I once received 27 tweets — calling me everything from “irrelevant” to “liar” to “coward” to “neglectful gaslighting mother” — in 48 hours, from one person. I save these messages in a folder on my computer to document the abuse. Whenever I upgrade my laptop, I copy them over, little packets of poison I must keep and carry forever.

I’ve gotten messages like this for more than four years, ever since my first novel — featuring a family with an Asian father and a white mother — was published and my own mixed family became public knowledge. But this message arrived in August — #AsianAugust, some were calling it, because of the huge success of Asian-centered films like Crazy Rich Asians, Searching, and To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. It was a moment when Asian-Americans were celebrating as a community, yet here was a hate message plummeting out of the blue into my inbox. And like most of the harassing messages I receive, it came from an Asian man…

Read the entire article here.

The Chinese-African Kids And Identity Crisis

Shorthand Social
2016-02-08

Ilelah Balarabe Shehu

INTRODUCTION

As the number of Africans coming to China for business keeps jumping up by 20-30% annually since 2011, so also the number of intermarriages between Africans and Chinese. This inter racial marriages has resulted in giving a new face to what is hitherto known as Chinese faces. Now the emergence of what is known in China as chocolate kids, a mixture of Asian and African colors. With over 4000 of these kids in Guangzhou alone, the Chinese society is divided on accepting these kids as Chinese or not, while the kids themselves are struggling with their identity crisis. Most of them in a fool of confusion regarding to where they actually belong. But despite the identity crisis, most of the kids have a dream here in China.

As the economy of China continues to attract global attention with its increasing participation in global politics and its desire to be seen and recognized as a global power, this has come with an increase of economic migrants from all over the world. The ones from Africa are more visible especially in the southern city of Guangzhou where at the moment, arrangement has been completed to build an African town. According to Africansinchina.net, with an estimated population of over two hundred thousand Africans in Guangzhou, the city is by no doubt the largest city with Africans not only in China but in Asia. As such, this is the city where more inter marriages take place between Chinese women and African business men or even students. As a result of this fast growing community of Chinese African families, a new generation of kids from Chinese and African parents is growing rapidly not only in the city of Guangzhou, but also in almost all cities and towns in China. Towards the end of the year 2014, there were over 4000 African Chinese kids in Guangzhou alone, according to Information and Resources for Urban Entrepreneurs.

Read the entire article here.

Sharon H. Chang does a deep dive of her new memoir “Hapa Tales and Other Lies” with fellow Seattle writer Anne Liu Kellor

International Examiner
Seattle, Washington
2018-10-08

Anne Liu Kellor

Sharon H. Chang recently released a memoir called Hapa Tales and Other Lies: A Mixed Race Memoir about the Hawai’i I Never Knew. The book is an exploration of her Mixed Race Asian American identity through the lens of being a tourist in Hawai’i, a place with many Mixed Race Asians where Chang was indirectly told she could find a sense of racial belonging.

Different from the trips she took with her parents when she was a kid, Chang’s adult exploration of spaces like Pearl Harbor and the Polynesian Cultural Center tell her a more complicated history of Hawai’i and the indigenous culture – colonization, marginalization of Native Hawaiians, exploitation and appropriation. She spends significant time challenging the use of the term “hapa,” a word that originally referred to mixed Hawaiian natives, but that many Mixed Race Asians now use without any awareness of the word’s origins.

Seattle-based writer Anne Liu Kellor interviewed Chang about this exploration as they shared similar perspectives of being Mixed Race, Asian American women and mothers.

International Examiner: In Hapa Tales and Other Lies, you write that this book is a “chapter of your identity story” and “part of a larger, necessary story about the loneliness and challenge of self-defining that Mixed Race people generally face.” When did you start becoming more reflective about your Mixed Race identity, and how has this process of “self-defining” changed for you over time?

SHC: I started becoming more reflective about being Mixed Race when I met my husband (who is also Mixed) at the turn of the century. My husband had been recently politicized and the 2000 Census had just taken place where people could self-select more than one race box for the first time. When we met, he was in the process of reflecting deeply on where to step into the race conversation as a now recognized biracial person. I had never heard anyone talk about being Mixed Race like that, ever, and I was completely drawn in.

When my husband and I grew up no one talked about being biracial, multiracial, or mixed-race. That language didn’t really exist on a large scale. People like us were “half” this, “quarter” that, or you were expected to just “pick a side.” I began to see such concepts as harmfully self-divisive and wondered how things could be different. But what spurred me to go even deeper and actually begin writing on Mixed Race was the birth of my son in 2009…

Read the entire interview here.

Fluidity amidst structure: multi-racial identity constructions across the life course of Malaysians and Singaporeans

Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture
Published online: 2018-07-18
18 pages
DOI: 10.1080/13504630.2018.1499222

Geetha Reddy
Department of Sociology
University of Groningen, Groningen, the Netherlands

Multi-racial identity construction is understood to be fluid, contextual and dynamic. Yet the dynamics of multi-racial identity construction when racial identities are ascribed and formulated as static by governments is less explored in psychological studies of race. This paper examines the dynamics of racial identity construction among multi-racial Malaysians and Singaporeans in a qualitative study of 31 semi-structured interviews. Thematic analysis was used to identify the different private racial identity constructions of participants who were officially ascribed with single racial identities at birth. Participants reflected on the overwhelming influence of the state and significant Others in limiting their ability to express their multiple racial identities when they were in school, and highlighted their capacity to be agentic in their private racial identity constructions when they were older. This paper shows that across the life course multi-racial individuals possess (1) the ability to adopt different racial identity positions at different times, (2) the ability to hold multiple racial identity constructions at the same time when encounters with Others are dialogical, (3) the reflexivity of past identity positions in the present construction of identities.

Read the entire article here.

Shifting Racial Subjectivities and Ideologies in Brazil

Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World
First Published 2018-09-20
12 pages
DOI: 10.1177/2378023118797550

Stanley R. Bailey, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

Fabrício M. Fialho, Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Centre de Recherches Internationales, Sciences Po Paris, France

Census ethnoracial categories often reflect national ideologies and attendant subjectivities. Nonetheless, Brazilians frequently prefer the non-census terms moreno (brown) and negro (black), and both are core to antithetical ideologies: racial ambiguity versus racial affirmation. Their use may be in flux as Brazil recently adopted unprecedented race-targeted public policy. We examine propensities to self-classify as moreno and negro before and after the policy shift. Using regression modeling on national survey data from 1995 and 2008 that captured self-classification in open and closed formats, we find moreno is highly salient but increasingly constricted, while negro is restricted in use, though increasingly popular. Negro’s growth is mostly confined to the darker pole of Brazil’s color continuum. Education correlates in opposing directions: negative with moreno and positive with negro. Our findings proxy broad ideological shift from racial ambiguity to negro racial affirmation. They suggest race-targeted policy is transforming racial subjectivities and ideologies in Brazil.

Read the entire article here.

Naomi Osaka, a New Governor and Me

The New York Times
2018-10-06

Motoko Rich, Tokyo Bureau Chief

The Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun printed a special edition when Naomi Osaka won the United States Open tennis championship in September. Yomiuri Shimbun, via Associated Press

Is Japan becoming more welcoming to mixed-race people?

TOKYO — Just over 40 years ago, when my family moved from California to Tokyo, the fact that my mother was Japanese did not stop schoolchildren from pointing at me and yelling “Gaijin!” — the Japanese word for foreigner — as I walked down the street.

After seeing my red-haired, blue-eyed father, a shopkeeper in the suburb where we lived asked my mother what it was like to work as a nanny in the American’s house.

When we moved back to California two years later, I entered fourth grade and suddenly, I was the Asian kid. “Ching chong chang chong ching!” boys chanted on the playground, tugging at the corners of their eyes. Classmates scrunched their noses at the onigiri — rice balls wrapped in dried seaweed — that my mother packed in my lunch bag. When our teacher mentioned Japan during a social studies lesson, every head in the class swiveled to stare at me.

Now, back in Tokyo as a foreign correspondent for this newspaper, I am no longer pointed at by people on the street. But I am incontrovertibly regarded as a foreigner. When I hand over my business card, people look at my face and then ask in confusion how I got my first name. My Japanese-ness, it seems, barely registers.

In the past few weeks, covering local reaction to the tennis champion Naomi Osaka, the daughter of a Japanese mother and Haitian-American father, and Denny Tamaki, who is the son of a Japanese mother and a white American Marine and was elected governor of Okinawa last weekend, I have wondered whether Japanese attitudes toward identity are slowly starting to accommodate those of us with mixed heritages…

Read the entire article here.

“It Represents Me:” Tattooing Mixed-Race Identity

Sociological Spectrum
Published online: 2018-10-04
DOI: 10.1080/02732173.2018.1478351

Jennifer Patrice Sims, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Alabama, Huntsville

Research on tattoos reveals that desire for something to “mark their bodies with indelible symbols of what they see themselves to be” has become a main driver behind contemporary tattoo acquisitions (Sanders 1989:61). One identity that researchers have recently begun to investigate with regard to expression via tattoos is race; however, exploration considering those with multiple racial heritages, that is, mixed-race people, is lacking. This article begins to illuminate this lacuna by drawing on in-depth interviews with mixed-race people in the United States and United Kingdom to examine the practice and meaning behind their tattoos. Finding both similarities and differences, both between mixed- and single-heritage individuals and between mixed-race people of different heritages, this study adds to scholarly knowledge of the ways in which various identities are being expressed, or not, via tattooing.

Read or purchase the article here.