Mixed Race Studies

Blended Nation: A Portrait of Mixed-Race America

Yes! Magazine
2010-02-10

The fear and xenophobia in the aftermath of 9/11 got Mike Tauber and Pamela Singh thinking about how race and ethnicity are based on visual cues.

They began photographing a network of mixed-race friends in the spring of 2002, eventually working with organizations like Swirl, a national, multiracial organization that challenges notions of race; and the Mavin Foundation, an organization that raises awareness about the experiences of multiracial people.

Read the entire article here.
To view a photo essay that samples the book, click here.

Mixed Race Americans Picture A ‘Blended Nation’

Weekend Edition Sunday
National Public Radio
2009-11-08

Liane Hansen, Host

The 2000 U.S. census was the first to give Americans the option to check more than one box for race. Nearly 7 million people declared themselves to be multiracial that year, a number that’s expected to shoot up in the 2010 count. As more of the nation’s population identifies itself as being of mixed race, the authors of a new book say Americans’ traditional ideas of racial identity are in for a challenge.

In the book Blended Nation, photographer Mike Tauber and producer Pamela Singh combine portraits of mixed-race Americans with stories of living beyond the sometimes rigid notions of race. The husband-and-wife team tell host Liane Hansen they wanted to highlight the personal experiences of life between categories.

“We really wanted to know what it was like for somebody who checks more than one box to exist in that realm,” Tauber says…

Read the entire story here.
Listen to the story here.

Generation Mixed: Breaking the Race Barrier

Yes! Magazine
2010-03-04

Adrienne Maree Brown

“I have to be a healer… my ancestral colonizer’s blood runs through my veins.”
—Cara Page

I’ve never been into identity politics. I’ve long felt that people spent too much time analyzing the labels of past generations and too little time feeling part of the mystery and miracle of humanity.

I’m sure this is, in no small part, because I am biracial. My first experiences of race were of people asking me to choose a side, choose a parent. People telling me that in spite of the love, joy, and wholeness of my family, I didn’t fit, or offering me unsolicited judgment about who they thought my parents must be. These people showed no interest in my actual experience.

My parents fell in love in South Carolina in the 1970s, in a way that surprised both of them. Their experiences were poles apart—poverty versus wealth, black versus white, outgoing versus shy. My mother was disowned by her family for some time after she and my father eloped, and they faced deep racism throughout their lives. But they are still in love today—visible, stable, solid, sweet, dedicated love.

I spent most of my childhood in Germany on military bases, as an army brat surrounded by a lot of other racially and culturally mixed kids. By the time I arrived at a Southern middle school, where the kids segregated themselves into white and black, I didn’t feel beholden to any labels.

This isn’t a universal experience for mixed people…

Read the entire article here.

How Will Barack Obama Fill Out His Census Form?: The Future of “Miscegenation” in America

FSB Media
2009

Rich Benjamin

The President says publicly that he is “African-American.”But will he check “black” or “two or more races” on his 2010 Census form?

My parents, two dark-skinned blacks, married in 1967, a year when miscegenation — interracial marriage, cohabitation or sex — was a criminal offense in sixteen states. But now, like the Obamas, my family descends from and lives across three continents and about a dozen nations. My cousins, nieces, and nephews have complexions reminiscent of a Ben & Jerry’s menu ranging from Karamel Sutra to Chocolate Fudge Brownie.

Given America’s growing and intermixed minority populations, controversy broils about how Uncle Sam categorizes, then counts, ethnicity and race (more vociferously from minorities than from whites). Black civil rights advocates strong-arm those with traces of African ancestry to identify as “black,” so as not to dilute blacks’ 2010 census numbers and future political power. Defining and counting mixed-race people in America has historically been riddled with conceptual and practical challenges. Now as much as ever. President Obama says publicly that he is “African-American.” But will he check “black” or “two or more races” on his 2010 Census form?…

Read the entire article here.

Malaga Island’s place in Maine history preserved

The Times Record
Published: 2009-08-18, 18:08Z

Seth Koenig, Times Record Staff

PHIPPSBURG — The site of perhaps the most striking case of racial injustice in Maine history was the focus of a Saturday ceremony aimed at preserving the land and its lessons for future generations.

Malaga Island, off the coast of Phippsburg, has never been a lavish resort community. But that was what state leaders envisioned as a future for the island in 1911 and 1912, when they set forth a calculated plan to forcibly displace a community of poor, largely black or mixed-race people who lived there.

On Saturday, representatives of Maine Freedom Trails Inc., the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Maine Coast Heritage Trust joined archaeologists, historians and descendants of evicted island residents to announce that the 41-acre island has been added to the Maine Freedom Trails’ list of significant places…

Read the entire article here.

Malaga Island: A Story Best Left Untold

WMPG-FM (Portland, Maine) and The Salt Institute
2009

Rob Rosenthal, Radio Producer

Kate Philbrick, Photographer

WMPG-FM, in collaboration with the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, announces the premier of “Malaga Island: A Story Best Left Untold”, a radio and photo documentary recounting this infamous event and its impact on several generations of descendants. The documentary is produced by Kate Philbrick, photographer, and Rob Rosenthal, radio producer.

On July 1st, 1912, George Pease took a short boat ride over to Malaga Island, just off the coast of Phippsburg, Maine. Pease landed the boat then probably stood on the shell-covered beach at the north end of the island. What he found may have surprised him.

Pease went to Malaga that day as an agent of the state of Maine. It was his job to carry out the final steps of a state-sponsored eviction. Pease was there to clean out the island – to make sure everyone who lived there was gone and to burn down their houses. But there was no one there. Malaga was empty.

Malaga is a small island, about 40 acres. It’s covered with tall pine and spruce trees, the shores are rocky – it’s really a “textbook” Maine island. No one lives on Malaga today but, in 1912, there was a village of about 45 people. A few of the families had lived on the island for decades raising children and scraping a living from the ocean. Malaga was home.

The settlement was poor and families struggled – like most fishing communities on the Maine coast one hundred years ago. What made Malaga different was the people. Black, white, and mixed-race families lived on the island. And that set them apart. Far apart…

…And, descendants of the evicted islanders have largely remained silent, too. The local stigma of mixed-blood and “feeblemindedness” attached to the island and descendents is still present – even today. In fact, some say Malaga is a story best left untold…

Read the entire article here.
View a short video here.

A Question of Blood, Race, and Politics

Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences
Volume 61, Number 4 (2006)
pages 456-491
DOI: 10.1093/jhmas/jrl003

Michael G. Kenny, Professor of Sociology and Anthropology
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia

This article explores the political and intellectual context of a controversy arising from a proposal made at the 1959 meetings of the American Society of Blood Banks to divide the blood supply by race. The authors, a group of blood-bankers and surgeons in New York, outlined difficulties in finding compatible blood for transfusion during open-heart surgery, which they attributed to prior sensitization of their patient, a Caucasian, by a previous transfusion from an African American donor. Examining the statistical distribution of blood-group antigens among the various races, they concluded that risk of adverse hemolytic reactions and the cost of testing could be reduced by establishing separate donor pools. The media reported the suggestion, which, given the political climate of the day, rapidly became a public issue involving geneticists, blood-bankers, physical anthropologists, and the African American medical community. Liberals condemned it, whereas eugenically inclined segregationists used the finding to support their views concerning evolutionary distance between the races and the dangers of miscegenation. Here we examine the contribution of comparative racial serology to this affair, the arguments and background of the main players, and the relevance of the debate to discussions about the role of “race” in post-genomic medicine.

Read or purchase the article here.

Two or Three Spectacular Mulatas and the Queer Pleasures of Overidentification

Camera Obscura
Volume 23, Number 1 67 (2008)
pages 113-143
DOI: 10.1215/02705346-2007-026

Hiram Perez, Assistant professor of English
Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York

Building on feminist and queer scholarship on the relationship of film spectatorship to subjectivity, this essay conjectures subaltern spectatorships of the two US film adaptations of Fannie Hurst‘s 1933 novel Imitation of Life as a means of tracing the impossibly entangled discourses of race and sexuality, as well as of formulating “queer of color” as a kind of critical modality. Much like Harriet Beecher Stowe‘s Uncle Tom’s Cabin functions, according to Sigmund Freud, as a cultural artifact prized in the form of an idealized beating fantasy by the Victorian (white) child, Imitation of Life stages for black and queer of color spectators originary traumas, in particular the formative (and compounded) experiences of racial and sexual shame. This essay seeks to reconcile the dissonant emotions evoked by Imitation of Life by reading the overidentifications of subaltern spectators with the figure of the tragic mulatto as instances of queer pleasure, both self-shattering and subject forming. In so doing, the essay pays tribute to that tragic mulatto as a spectacular mulata and diva. The spectacular mulata diva summons queer subjectivities; furthermore, she betrays larger national and colonial secrets, locating the racially hybrid genealogies of the classic diva and the universalized subject of psychoanalysis, heretofore presumably white (European).

Read or purchase the article here.

Mixed-ethnic girls and boys as similarly powerless and powerful: embodiment of attractiveness and grotesqueness

Discourse Studies
Volume 11, Number 3 (June 2009)
pages 329-352
DOI: 10.1177/1461445609102447

Laurel D. Kamada
Tohoku University, Japan

An ongoing study examining the discursive negotiation of ethnic and gendered embodied identities of adolescent girls in Japan with Japanese and `white’ mixed-parentage is extended to also investigate and compare boys . This study draws on Feminist Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis which views women and girls as `simultaneously positioned as relatively powerless within a range of dominant discourses on gender, but as relatively powerful within alternative and competing social discourses’ (Baxter, 2003: 39). Here, this is taken further by also giving voice to boys. Furthermore, ethnic discourses are examined alongside of gender discourses. Not only girls constructed the `idealized Other’, within discourses of femininity, but boys similarly viewed their bodies against a model of idealized masculinity within discourses of masculinities. The boys revealed a feminized, narcissistic body consciousness where they struggled to resist a `discourse of foreign grotesqueness’ and instead worked to embody themselves within a positive `discourse of foreign attractiveness’, as did the girls.

 Read or purchase the article here.

Social Work Practice and Lone White Mothers of Mixed-Parentage Children

British Journal of Social Work
Volume 40, Number 2
pages 391-406
DOI:10.1093/bjsw/bcn164

Vicki Harman, Lecturer in Social Policy and Social Work
Royal Holloway, University of London

This paper reports on empirical research involving focus groups with social workers in order to provide insight into their experiences of working with lone white mothers of mixed-parentage children in England. Social workers’ understandings of key areas of families’ lives are explored, including experiences of racism and adequacy of social support networks. The analysis highlights the need for a greater awareness of racism and social disapproval experienced by mothers, and how this impacts upon their support networks. The contested areas of identity and social and political identification for mixed-parentage children are discussed and key questions are asked about the use of terminology and how this influences social work practice. This paper also considers how social workers felt services could be improved and highlights the need for further training.

Read or purchase the article here.