Mixed Race Studies

Miscegenation and Race: A Roundtable on Peggy Pascoe’s What Comes Naturally [A Tribute]

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies
Volume 31, Number 3, 2010
pages 1-5
E-ISSN: 1536-0334, Print ISSN: 0160-9009

Estelle B. Freedman, Edgar E. Robinson Professor of History
Stanford University

The following papers pay tribute to Peggy Pascoe’s [1954-2010] extraordinary book What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America, published in 2009 by Oxford University Press. They originated at a session held at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA) in January 2010 to explore the implications of Pascoe’s work for current histories of race and gender. Sitting in the audience, I enjoyed not only the roundtable but also the deep pleasure evident on Pascoe’s face as she listened to the presentations and to the discussion of the influence of her book on our scholarship and our teaching. Peggy Pascoe always makes us think harder, in her gentle and affirming ways. This session gave her a taste of the rewards sown by her latest scholarly achievement. I could sense that day that I shared with others in attendance a sense of pride and vicarious gratification that so treasured a colleague should be recognized in this way.

Both sweeping and detailed, What Comes Naturally constructs the dual histories of the criminalization of interracial marriage and the resistance to that process by individuals and social movements, spanning the century between the 1860s and the 1960s. Since its publication in 2009 the book has been widely honored. It has received both the Hawley Prize and the Levine Award from the Organization of American Historians, both the Dunning and the Kelly Prizes from the American Historical Association, and the Hurst Prize from the Law and Society Association. The range of subjects covered by these awards is telling: economy, politics, or institutions; cultural history; women’s history or feminist theory; American history; sociolegal history. In short, this is a book that has already had a profound effect on the profession across its many specializations…

Articles

Legal Fictions Exposed
pages 6-14

Eileen Boris, Eileen Boris Hull Professor and Chair of Feminist Studies
University of California, Santa Barbara

What Comes Naturally: A Racially Inclusive Look at Miscegenation Law
pages 15-21

Jacki Thompson Rand, Associate Professor of History; American Indian and Native Studies
University of Iowa

“The Relics of Slavery”: Interracial Sex and Manumission in the American South
pages 22-30

Jessica Millward, Assistant Professor of History
University of California, Irvine

Nikki Sawada Bridges Flynn and “What Comes Naturally”
pages 31-40

Valerie J. Matsumoto, Professor of History
University of California, Los Angeles

Therapeutic Culture and Marriage Equality: What Comes Naturally and Contemporary Dialogues about Marriage
pages 41-48

Kristin Celello, Assistant Professor of History
City University of New York, Queens College

Social Movements, the Rise of Colorblind Conservativism, and “What Comes Naturally”
pages 49-59

Matt Garcia, Associate Professor of American Civilization, Ethnic Studies and History
Brown University

Between boxes

the Burr
Kent State University
Fall 2005
pages 50-55

Story by Jessica Rothschuh
Photo illustration by Clarissa Westmeyer
Photos by Lauren Arendt

For some multiracial students, college becomes a time to discover their heritages and shape their identities

HER DARK HAIR IS PULLED BACK IN BRAIDS, LEAVING HER FACE OPEN, TWO large, dark eyes peering out from long eyelashes. Her skin is a warm almond color. Her ethnicity is hard to put a finger on. She could pass as Hispanic or Native American.

Jalayna Nadal, freshman Latin American studies major from Edinboro, Pa., is both. Her father is black and Cherokee, and her mother is Puerto Rican and white.

Developing her multicultural identity has been a lifelong process for Nadal, and college is a time to further explore her multiple heritages, shaping her cultural identity as she learns more about herself and her roots.

For biracial and multiracial students like Nadal, college may prove both exciting and difficult. Mixed-race students in particular can experience an intense desire to discover their heritages and create their racial identities, but they also can feel pressure to define themselves. For the first time, students are searching for identities outside the environment in which they were raised, without the constant support of family…

…College is another step away from his culture, Isaacs says. “Because I’m not around my father as much, I don’t assert my Hawaiian identity as much.” Here, he hasn’t found a place he really fits in, and when he returns to Hawaii, it is hard to feel he still belongs there, either. “You’re just stuck in limbo,” Isaacs says. “You have to be kind of like a cultural chameleon in a sense.” Isaacs says he adapts his identity to those around him, and it is easy for him to blend in because he looks white.

For some biracial students, however, being a chameleon is hard. “The problem that they face saying, ‘I am biracial,’ is other people saying, ‘No, you’ve got to choose,’ ” says Angela Neal-Barnett, associate professor and research psychologist. “With biracial adolescents, you get two things happening: They choose to identify with one race or they choose to develop a biracial identity.”

For more than five years, Neal-Barnett has been studying the phenomenon of “white acting” in minority adolescents. Through her research, she has talked with biracial youth, most of whom are primarily black and white. “One’s skin color can run the gamut, and one’s hair color and texture can run the gamut. You have students who look white, but their racial identity is black or biracial,” she says. In fact, the biracial adolescents Neal-Barnett has spoken with almost always choose to identify as black or biracial. Very few identify as white…

Read the entire article here.

World Premiere of “Family Portrait in Black and White” at 2011 Sundance Film Festival

Family Portrait in Black and White
2011
Interfilm Productions, Inc.
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Directed by: Julia Ivanova
Producted by Boris Ivanov

OLGA NENYA is a foster mother to SIXTEEN BLACK ORPHANS in Ukraine—where 99.9% of the population is white and where race DOES matter. Forced to constantly defend themselves from racist neighbors and skinheads, these children have to be on guard against the world that surrounds them.

No one is related by blood in this family, but everyone is connected by the color of their skin and by the woman who chose to be their foster mother. Olga is a loving mother but she is not Mother Teresa; she bears much more resemblance to a platoon leader. Some kids have learned to manipulate her, some obey, and only one constantly battles with her. Kiril, a 16-year-old boy nicknamed ‘Mr. President’ for his intelligence and effortless aristocracy, is the one who dares to openly argue with Olga—and pays dearly for it. The modern world is interconnected: not only did the British Charity buy the house for the family, but these kids from a tiny place in Ukraine have been spending summers with host families in France and Italy year after year. When European families offer to adopt the kids, Olga refuses despite being aware of what awaits a black Ukrainian beyond the protective shield of her family. For her, these children already have a family and, as she says, “The bird should only have one nest”. This film is a multi-dimensional portrait of one family, the country they live in, and the bigger world they are a part of.

For more information, click here.

2010-12-01
Park City, Utah

PARK CITY, UT – Sundance Institute announced today the lineup of films selected to screen in the U.S. and World Cinema Dramatic and Documentary Competitions for the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. In addition to the four Competition Categories, the Festival presents films in six out-of-competition sections to be announced on December 2. The 2011 Sundance Film Festival runs January 20-30 in Park City, Salt Lake City, Ogden and Sundance, Utah. The complete list of films is available at www.sundance.org/festival…

…World Cinema Documentary Competition

This year’s 12 films were selected from 796 international documentary submissions.

Family Portrait in Black and White / Canada (Director: Julia Ivanova) – In a small Ukrainian town, Olga Nenya, raises 16 black orphans amidst a population of Slavic blue-eyed blondes. Their stories expose the harsh realities of growing up as a bi-racial child in Eastern Europe. World Premiere

From Manenberg to Soweto: race and coloured identity in the black consciousness poetry of James Matthews 

African Studies
Volume 62, Issue 2 (December 2003)
pages 171-186
DOI: 10.1080/0002018032000148740

Mohamed Adhikari, Associate Professor of Historical Studies,
University of Cape Town

The Black Consciousness poetry of James Matthews, internationally recognised Coloured writer from the Cape Flats, reflects the growing popularisation amongst politicised Coloured people during the 1970s of the idea that racial distinctions in general, and Coloured identity in particular, had historically been used by the white supremacist establishment to divide and rule the black majority. This insight, by no means novel, provided the main thrust to the popular rejection of Coloured identity in the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s. Coloured rejectionism had, however, originated within a small section of the Coloured intelligentsia, in particular amongst those active within the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM) in the early 1960s (Adhikari 2002: 186-87, 213-14, 243-48) and grew into a significant movement by the time it peaked at the end of the 1980s. Though confined to a politicised minority within the Coloured community itself, and observed mainly in public discourse or for pragmatic reasons, the disavowal of Coloured identity had by the early 1980s nevertheless become a politically correct orthodoxy within the anti-apartheid movement, especially in the Western Cape. In response to the overt racism of apartheid, the democratic movement embraced non-racism as a cornerstone of its philosophy and any recognition of Coloured identity was condemned as a concession to apartheid thinking. This tendency was, however, reversed during the four-year transition to democratic rule as radical changes to the political landscape in the first half of the 1990s once again made the espousal of Coloured identity acceptable in left-wing and “progressive” circles (Adhikari 2000: 349; 2002: 23-24, 281-87). 

Read or purchase the article here.

The whole story on being ‘hafu’

CNN International
CNN Go
2010-11-29

Daniel Krieger

The movie ‘Hafu’ explores the limbo world of people who are half-Japanese and half something else, as they try to find their place in society

What does it mean to be half-Japanese in 21st-century Japan?

This is what filmmakers Megumi Nishikura and Lara Takagi set out to explore in their documentary film, “Hafu,” of which they showed a preview screening last month at the Kansai Franco-Japanese Institute in Kyoto.

The film, which is not yet completed, is an offshoot of the Hafu Project, which was set up in London two years ago by sociologist Marcia Yume Lise and photographer Natalie Maya Willer, both half-Japanese.

The project profiles hafus with photos and interviews that shed light on the experience of living between two cultures.

“We wanted to create an opportunity to discuss contemporary Japan through the lens of half Japanese,” says Lise…

Read the entire article here.

Biracial Youth and Families in Therapy: Issues and Interventions

Journal of Marital and Family Therapy
Volume 26, Issue 3 (July 2000)
pages 305–315
DOI: 10.1111/j.1752-0606.2000.tb00300.x

Stephanie Milan, Assistant Professor of Psychology
University of Connecticut

Margaret K. Keiley, Professor Director of Clinical Research
Center for Children, Youth, and Families
Auburn University

Empirical research and clinical resources focusing specifically on minority youth and families have increased tremendously in the last 2 decades. Despite this trend, certain groups continue to be relatively neglected. In particular, very few resources exist for understanding the unique challenges that often face biracial youth and their families. In this article, we use a nationally representative database to compare functioning in biracial youth to white adolescents and other minority adolescents. Results suggest that biracial/biethnic youth are a particularly vulnerable group in terms of self-reported delinquency, school problems, internalizing symptoms, and self-regard. As a group, they are also more likely to receive some form of psychological intervention. Given these findings and the shortcoming of clinical resources for work with this population, we provide an in-depth discussion of why biracial youth may be particularly vulnerable from a social-constructionist framework and offer several strategies based on narrative family therapy for working with biracial youngsters and their families.

Read or purchase the article here.

Characterizing the Admixed African Ancestry of African Americans

Genome Biology
Volume 10, Issue 12 (2009)
R141
DOI: 10.1186/gb-2009-10-12-r141

Fouad Zakharia
Department of Genetics
Stanford University School of Medicine

Analabha Basu
Institute for Human Genetics
University of California, San Francisco

Devin Absher
HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, Huntsville, Alabama

Themistocles L. Assimes
Division of Cardiovascular Medicine
Stanford University School of Medicine

Alan S. Go
Division of Research
Kaiser Permanente, Oakland, California

Mark A. Hlatky
Department of Health, Research and Policy
Stanford University School of Medicine

Carlos Iribarren
Division of Research
Kaiser Permanente, Oakland, California

Joshua W. Knowles
Division of Cardiovascular Medicine
Stanford University School of Medicine

Jun Li
Department of Human Genetics
University of Michigan

Balasubramanian Narasimhan
Department of Health, Research and Policy
Stanford University School of Medicine

Steven Sidney
Division of Research
Kaiser Permanente, Oakland, California

Audrey Southwick
Department of Infectious Diseases
Stanford University School of Medicine

Richard M. Myers
HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, Huntsville, Alabama

Thomas Quertermous
Division of Cardiovascular Medicine
Stanford University School of Medicine

Neil Risch
Institute for Human Genetics
University of California, San Francisco

Division of Research
Kaiser Permanente, Oakland, California

Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics
University of California, San Francisco

Hua Tang
Department of Genetics
Stanford University School of Medicine

Background: Accurate, high-throughput genotyping allows the fine characterization of genetic ancestry. Here we applied recently developed statistical and computational techniques to the question of African ancestry in African Americans by using data on more than 450,000 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) genotyped in 94 Africans of diverse geographic origins included in the HGDP, as well as 136 African Americans and 38 European Americans participating in the Atherosclerotic Disease Vascular Function and Genetic Epidemiology (ADVANCE) study. To focus on African ancestry, we reduced the data to include only those genotypes in each African American determined statistically to be African in origin.

Results: From cluster analysis, we found that all the African Americans are admixed in their African components of ancestry, with the majority contributions being from West and West-Central Africa, and only modest variation in these African-ancestry proportions among individuals. Furthermore, by principal components analysis, we found little evidence of genetic structure within the African component of ancestry in African Americans.

Conclusions: These results are consistent with historic mating patterns among African Americans that are largely uncorrelated to African ancestral origins, and they cast doubt on the general utility of mtDNA or Y-chromosome markers alone to delineate the full African ancestry of African Americans. Our results also indicate that the genetic architecture of African Americans is distinct from that of Africans, and that the greatest source of potential genetic stratification bias in case-control studies of African Americans derives from the proportion of European ancestry.

…Although much attention has been paid in the genetics literature to the continental admixture underlying the genetic makeup of African Americans, less attention has been paid to the within-continental contribution to African Americans, in particular from the continent of Africa. Studies have focused primarily on the matrilineally inherited mitochondrial DNA(mtDNA) and patrilineally inherited Y chromosome. These two DNA sources have gained wide prominence owing, in part, to their use by ancestry-testing companies to identify the regional and ethnic origins of their subscribers. Yet these two sources provide a very narrow perspective in delineating only two of possibly thousands of ancestral lineages in an individual.

The majority of African Americans derive their African ancestry from the approximately 500,000 to 650,000 Africans that were forcibly brought to British North America as slaves during the Middle Passage. These individuals were deported primarily from various geographic regions of Western Africa, ranging from Senegal to Nigeria to Angola. Thus, it has been estimated that the majority of African Americans derive ancestry from these geographic regions, although more central and eastern locations also have contributed.  Recent studies of African and African-American mtDNA haplotypes and autosomal microsatellite markers also confirmed a broad range of Western Africa as the likely roots of most African Americans…

Read the entire article here.

Will there ever be a rainbow Japan?

CNN International
CNN Go
2010-12-01

Tracy Slater

Government statistics suggest multiculturalism is on the rise, but social organizations for mixed-race Japanese say ‘hafus’ still face challenges

Japan, which closed its borders from 1639 to 1854 and later colonized its neighbors, has an uneasy history with foreigners, national identity, and multiculturalism.

Yet government statistics and grassroots organizations say multiculturalism in the famously insular country is now on the rise…
Japan: The new melting pot?

Japan’s national government recently announced it is turning to travelers in a foreigner-friendly mission to boost diversity — at least in tourist spots — by paying them to provide feedback on how to increase accessibility for non-Japanese speakers.

David Askew, associate professor of law at Kyoto’s Ritsumeikan University, identifies more profound changes.

In 1965, a mere 1 in 250 of all marriages in Japan were international, he notes. By 2004, the number had climbed to 1 in 15 across the nation and 1 in 10 in Tokyo…

Celebrating diversity

A handful of new organizations are tied, at least in part, to the increase in multicultural marriages.

Groups such as Mixed Roots Japan and Hapa Japan, founded by children of mixed-Japanese couples, aim to celebrate the broadening scope of Japanese identity, both nationally and globally.

“There is a real need now to recognize that Japan is getting more multiracial,” says Mixed Roots founder Edward Sumoto, a self-described “hafu” of Japanese/Venezuelan ethnicity. “The Japanese citizen is not simply a traditional Japanese person with Japanese nationality anymore.”

The issue of the identity of hafu is also being explored in a new film titled “Hafu,” currently under production by the Hafu Project.

In support of multiracial families, Mixed Roots holds Halloween and Christmas parties, picnics and beach days…

Read the entire article here.

Cross ’12, Castagno ’12 Participate in Mixed Race Conference

The Wesleyan Connecton
Welyean University’s Newsletter
2010-12-02

Olivia Drake

Rachel Cross ’12 and Alicia Castagno ’12 participated as panel members in a session of the Critical Mixed Race Conference sponsored by dePaul University in Chicago Nov. 5-6 [2010].

The conference was attended by academicians and students (primarily graduate students) from across the country. Cross and Castagno co-taught a Wesleyan student forum on mixed race last year and were on a panel discussing the development and teaching of this topic as students. In the question and answer period someone asked how many student-taught classes on mixed race there were in the country. A member of the University of Washington group said that as far as they could find out, only the UW and Wesleyan had student-taught classes…

Read the entire article here.

The Re-Emergence of Race as a Biological Category: The Societal Implications—Reaffirmation of Race

The Iowa Law Review
Volume 94, Number 5 (July 2009)
pages 1547-1587

Alex M. Johnson, Jr., Perre Bowen Professor of Law; Thomas F. Bergin Teaching Professor of Law and Director, Center for the Study of Race and Law
University of Virginia

Table of Contents

• I. INTRODUCTION
• II. PLACING RACE IN CONTEXT: DEFINING THE ISSUE
  • A. AN HISTORICAL ANALYSIS
  • B. REALISTS AND ANTIREALISTS—COMPETING CONSTRUCTIONS OF RACE IN THE LEGAL COMMUNITY
• III. THE SOCIETAL COSTS OF USING RACE IN BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH
• IV. ETHNICITY VERSUS RACE: DEVELOPING A NEW, SOFTER PARADIGM
• V. CONCLUSION

As the Dean of the University of Minnesota Law School in 2005, I was privileged to host and attend a conference at the Law School entitled, “Proposals for the Responsible Use of Racial and Ethnic Categories in Biomedical Research: Where Do We Go from Here?”1 To say the least, it was a fascinating conference replete with interesting speakers engaged with topical and controversial issues. The papers presented and discussed were proof of the success of the conference and the relevance of issues addressed.2 Professor Susan Wolf prepared a concise summary of those articles for Nature Genetics, and the reader is encouraged to review that summary before continuing with this Article.

Although the conference quite appropriately focused on the topic at hand—the use of racial categories in biomedical research—my thoughts kept drifting to a related, and perhaps more important, issue: the re-emergence of race as a biological category rather than as a social construct. I also pondered the implications of that development in a society in which race continues to be the most prominent social issue, even though an African-American was recently sworn in as President of the United States.6 I kept returning to this thought because of the topics addressed during the conference, topics which were not new to me.

As a scholar who has written several articles about “race” and its place in in legal scholarship, have given a lot of thought as to how “race” impacts every significant facet of American society and how this society’s history is inextricably tied to its legacy of slavery and the vestiges (for example, “separate but equal” comes to mind) of that awful chapter in American history. I have gone so far as to advocate, in two separate articles, the destabilization of racial categories as a vehicle to eliminate “race” and, ultimately, the effects of race (i.e., racism and racialism) in American society.

As a result, during the twenty-plus years I have been researching, writing, and thinking about race and race-related issues, I have always been puzzled by an event that happens regularly: the release of medical reports and studies that report differential results, findings, or outcomes based on the race of the test subjects. It is fairly common for some reporter to quote a statistic indicating that African-Americans have a higher rate of, say, hypertension than whites…

Read the entire article here.