Mixed Race Studies

Danbury’s multiracial students to star in film

The Connecticut Post
2010-04-02

Eileen FitzGerald, Staff Writer

Danbury, Connecticut—The three boys wore jeans and long-sleeve T-shirts. The two girls each wore a dozen bracelets and necklaces. They looked like typical students in the library media center at Broadview Middle School.

It was their differences, however, that brought them together Monday. They’re subjects in a documentary in which Western Connecticut State University professor Marsha Daria is examining the identity and social relationships of multiracial children.

Daria is interviewing elementary, middle and high school students to help educators and teacher training programs consider multiracial students in the curriculum and school issues…

Read the entire article here.

Towards a Dialogic Understanding

Politics And Culture
2003-07-08

Victor Kulkosky

Good morning. I’m talking today about a work in progress, so you’ll get more questions than answers this time around. Maybe you’ll get the answers at the next CSA conference, if there is one. I think most of us here agree that one of the main missions of cultural studies is to tell or listen to amplify the untold or undertold story. So for me, that brings up this question: How to tell an emerging story that’s still in search of the language for telling it?

People in interracial or multiracial families find themselves facing this challenge. I find myself in this situation. I’m married to a Black woman, who has a half-sister many people assume is white, who in turn has among her children two girls with red hair and blue eyes and two boys many people would label black. Our little Rainbow Coalition claims African, Lithuanian, German, Irish, Cherokee, English and Dutch descent, and we share genes. What are we?

Heather Dalmage, in her book Tripping on the Color Line, (1999) observes: “Because they do not fit into the historically created, officially named, and socially recognized categories, members of multiracial families are constantly fighting to identify themselves for themselves. A difficulty they face is the lack of language available to address their experiences.” Dvora Yanow (2003), in her study of the relationship between racial/ethnic category making and government policy, writes: “Individuals who cannot find their identity in available categories become invisible, in a sense: without a label, without a vocabulary, their stories are untellable and they themselves are unnarratable.”

…A lot of law and discourse and violence have gone into policing America’s racial borders. White supremacy in the U.S. depends on certainty about who is and who isn’t White. Omi and Winant (1994) refer to the continuing efforts to draw and police racial borders as racial formation, which is carried out through a series of what they call racial projects. They define race as: “a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies.” They make this major point, “we should think of race as an element of social structure rather than an irregularity within it; we should see race as a dimension of human representation rather than an illusion.” So I would add that it’s not a question of whether we can and should become color blind – it’s neither possible nor desirable — but about what we see when we see color. Omi and Winant see the concept of race evolving through racial formation, “the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed and destroyed.” They tell us that, “racial formation is a process of historically situated projects in which human bodies and social structures are represented and organized.”…

Read the entire article here.

Colonial Proximities: Crossracial Encounters and Juridical Truths in British Columbia, 1871–1921 (review)

Canadian Journal of Law and Society
Volume 25, Number 1, 2010
E-ISSN: 1911-0227 Print ISSN: 0829-3201
DOI: 10.1353/jls.0.0104

Eve Darian-Smith, Professor of Law and Society
University of California, Santa Barbara

Colonial Proximities is a scholarly, innovative, and illuminating exploration of law, race, and society in the British Columbian colonial periphery. It makes a significant contribution to postcolonial studies in its exploration of the complexities of British settler societies’ engagement with racial differences and of the managing of such differences through a range of laws, strategies of governance, and bio-political techniques. Its singular contribution is to bring together colonial histories of European–Native contact and European dealings with the increasing presence of Chinese immigrant populations, along with the growing and unruly classes of “half-breeds.” Because the author links Native studies with migrant studies and reads these two sites of racial engagement as interconnected and mutually constitutive, the analysis presented is rich and deep, filled with the narratives, constructions, and often conflicting ambiguities of race that preoccupied colonial administrators, missionaries, and legal agents in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Building upon Mary Louise Pratt’s conceptualization of the “contact zone,” where peoples geographically and historically separated are brought into the same social space and forced to confront their mutual relations, Renisa Mawani underscores the interracial and cross-racial dimensions of the contact zone in British Columbia.

Read or purchase the article here.

Good Question: Is Obama The First Black President?

WCCO-TV
Good Question
2008-11-05

Jason Derush, Reporter

You can’t turn on television or read a newspaper without seeing a reference to Sen. Barack Obama, the first black President. But wait a minute, said Naomi Banks, if Obama has a white mother, “My question is… why isn’t he the first biracial American President?” asked Banks.

“I think it’s more representative of reality,” she added. “It represents our country and how it’s changing with demographics.”

Banks said she has a special interest in the question, because she considers herself to be multiracial.

“My mother is Caucasian, my father is Native American and African-American,” she explained. “I’m proud of all aspects of my heritage,” said Banks, who said she couldn’t imagine leaving part of it out.

“I think of him as being an African-American of multiracial ancestry,” said Enid Logan, Ph.D., an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota.

Logan’s team has been interviewing University of Minnesota students about their racial attitudes in relation to the candidacy of President-Elect Obama…

…”Is the black/white binary still the primary axis around which races relations in the U.S. revolve?” asked Logan. “I think for the most part it absolutely is.”

Logan said that people feel a need to label others in terms of race, because along with gender, race is one way that American society has been historically organized. It’s a shortcut.

“It’s a society that sees itself as colorblind, but race is important. And people feel disoriented if they can’t figure out what race other people are, they don’t know how to interact with them,” explained Logan…

Read the entire article here.

The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War [Book Review]

H-Net Reviews
2002-01-23

Ethan S. Rafuse, Associate Professor of Military History
United States Military Academy

Victoria E. Bynum.“The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War”.  The Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies.  Chapel Hill & London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001.  xvi + 316 pp. Tables, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. (hardcover).  ISBN 0-878-2636-7.

Race, Gender, and the Contested Memory of the Free State of Jones

In her new book, Victoria E. Bynum demonstrates that our knowledge of Mississippi’s legendary Free State of Jones, like so much else associated with the Civil War that has inspired contention and controversy, has been shaped as much by the agenda of those who have attempted to tell the story as by actual events.  This much is known: in the fall of 1863, in the Piney Woods region of southern Mississippi, Confederate deserters led by Newton Knight organized an anti-Confederate guerrilla band that eventually dominated its community and, according to legend, proclaimed Jones County’s independence from the Confederacy.  To deal with the Jones County rebellion, Confederate authorities dispatched two cavalry expeditions into the region that launched devastating attacks upon, but were unable to completely quell, Knight’s band of deserters.  After the war, members of the Knight Company participated in Reconstruction politics and a mixed-race community emerged with Captain Knight as the focal point…

Read the entire review here.

“It’s a Kind of Destiny″: The Cultural Mulatto in the “New Black Aesthetic” and ‘Sarah Phillips’

The Humanities Review
A Publication of St. John’s University English Department, Jamaica, New York
Volume 6.1 (Fall 2007)
pages 21-28

Habiba Ibrahim, Assistant Professor of English
University of Washington

An Essay

IN “THE NEW BLACK AESTHETIC,” published in Callaloo in 1989, Trey Ellis identifies a rupture between the black aesthetics of previous generations, and the “new” aesthetics of black artists who came of age in a post-integration era. These younger artists, unfettered by concerns over racial authenticity or, more pertinently, black cultural traditions, borrow as easily from white culture as from black, and are therefore what Ellis refers to as “cultural mulattoes.” He writes, “Just as a genetic mulatto is a black person of mixed parents who can often get along fine with his white grandparents, a cultural mulatto, educated by a multi-racial mix of cultures, can also navigate easily in the white world” (235). This easy navigation between black and white worlds is the key distinction between a “new” black aesthetic-which, according to Ellis, encompasses such varied forms as the comedy of Eddie Murphy and Chris Rock, the films of Spike Lee, the jazz of Wynton Marsalis-and older black aesthetic movements, most notably the Black Arts Movement, which often focused on delineating an essential blackness through art and meaning. Ellis proposes that the young black artists who came of age after integration form a black arts movement that constantly challenges what blackness “is.”..

Read the entire article here.

2007 URO Spotlight: Noel Voltz – History and African American Studies

Undergraduate Research Office
The Ohio State University

Noel Voltz is finishing her degree in African American and African Studies. She is currently writing her Honors Thesis and plans on continuing her research and pursuing a PhD in History.

…What specifically have you researched, and what projects are you currently working on?

My research project/honors thesis is entitled “Black Female Agency and Sexual Exploitation: Quadroon Balls and Plaçage Relationships” and I have been working on it for the past two years.  I am conducting historical research that focuses on New Orleans from 1805 to 1860.  More specifically, I am studying the relationship choices made by some of these free women of color.  It appears that some of these women chose to enter into sexual relationships with white men as a mean of gaining social standing, protection, and money.  Until recently, historians have overlooked the lives of Louisiana’s free women of color during the colonial and antebellum eras.  This research, therefore, expands historical knowledge about the unique social institution of Quadroon Balls and plaçage relationships in order to give greater breadth to our understanding of free women of color’s sexual and economic choices. Ultimately, I plan to continue this project as my graduate dissertation…

Read the entire article here.

Telling “Forgotten” Métis Histories through Family, Community, and Individuals [Book Review]

H-Net Reviews
October 2009

Camie Augustus
University of Saskatchewan

David McNab, Ute Lischke, eds. The Long Journey of a Forgotten People: Métis Identities and Family Histories. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007. viii + 386 pp. (paper), ISBN 978-0-88920-523-9.

“We are still here.” This opening line from The Long Journey of a Forgotten People is fitting for a collection of essays on Métis identity. Although they are, as the editors tell us, “no longer Canada’s forgotten people,” a pre-1980s historiographical tradition in Canada had, indeed, forgotten them by confining them to a secondary role in Canada’s national story. If we were to take our cue from this historiography, the Métis did not survive very long into the twentieth century, and had no history outside the political and economic contributions they made to Canada’s founding—particularly through their involvement in the fur trade and in the creation of Manitoba. The Riel-centrism which subsequently dominated in the literature, at least up to the 1980s, only confirmed the illusion that Métis history was one-dimensional and event-based. Consequently, so many of the stories, histories, and cultural practices of the Métis remained (and still remain) relatively unknown in academic literature. However, more recent changes in both focus and methodology have resulted in a new approach to Métis history. The Long Journey of a Forgotten People, edited by Ute Lischke and David T. McNab, contributes to this growing field with a volume of essays that shifts the perspective from the national and political to the local and cultural by creating history through kinship, genealogy, and biography…

Read the entire review here.

Ethical Considerations in Social Work Research with Multiracial Individuals

Journal of Social Work Values and Ethics
Volume 7, Number 1 (2010)
10 pages

Kelly F. Jackson, MSW, PhD, Assistant Professor of Social Work
Arizona State University

Growing diversity in the U.S. has prioritized social work’s ethical obligation to develop specialized knowledge and understanding of culture and its function in human behavior and society. One ethnic minority group that is receiving growing attention in the social sciences is multiracial persons, or persons who identify with more than one race or ethnic group. This population represents one of the fastest growing ethnic minority groups in the United States.  The growing presence and visibility of multiracial persons in the US demands that social work researchers critically examine and understand the complexity of identity as it applies to people who identify with more than one race. This article will discuss both past and present conceptualizations of multiracial identity, and the methodological challenges specific to investigations with multiracial participants. This article will conclude with recommended strategies for ensuring ethically responsible and culturally sensitive research with multiracial persons.

Read the entire article here.

Mixed-Race Women and Epistemologies of Belonging

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies
Volume 31, Number 1, 2010
Pages 142-165
E-ISSN: 1536-0334
Print ISSN: 0160-9009
DOI: 10.5250/fronjwomestud.31.1.142

Silvia Cristina Bettez, Associate Professor
Department of Educational Leadership and Cultural Foundations
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

How is it that people know when they belong and to what they belong? This question, about the epistemology of belonging, carries a particular complexity for mixed-race women. How is it that mixed-race women create a sense of identification with others? What are the unities and disjunctures? What can we understand about epistemologies of belonging through examining how mixed-race women create belonging? Through qualitative work based on the life stories of women of mixed heritage, in this paper I examine how the navigation of hybridity, as it is experienced in the lives of six “hybrid” mixed-race women, illuminates the complexities of identity construction and epistemologies of belonging. I use the term epistemology to signify the nature of knowledge, how we come to know things, in this case knowledge, or knowing, related to belonging. Belonging in human relations is connected to identity, both self-identification and identification with others…

Read or purchase the article here.