Mixed Race Studies

Race representation in this year’s Common Book

University of Washington News Laboratory
Department of Communication
December 2009

Kaetlyn Cordingley
UW News Lab

Each year, First Year Programs chooses a book as a means to bind the incoming freshman class together. This year’s book was Barack Obama’s “Dreams from My Father.”

Coincidentally, on the same evening that President Obama addressed a sea of gray-clad cadets at Westpoint, three members of the UW faculty discussed Obama’s candor and his struggles with multiraciality in his autobiography with hundreds of UW freshmen who had read the book.

The book demands introspection from its readers and frames the “freshman experience” in a whole new way, said University of Washington faculty member Ralina Joseph Dec. 1.

Panelists were Communication Professor Dr. Joseph and Drs. Luis Fraga and Christopher Parker, of the Political Science Department.

The professors spoke candidly about their own experiences with multiculturalism and minority identification…

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial no longer boxed in by the Census

USA Today
2010-03-02

Haya El Nasser

Jennifer Harvey was raised by her white mother and white stepfather in what she calls “a Caucasian world.” Harvey never met her father but she knew he was black and Cuban. That made her Hispanic, white and black.

“Blacks think I’m black,” she says. “Hispanics think I’m Hispanic. Honestly, I don’t identify with either bucket wholeheartedly — Caucasian, black or Hispanic.”…

…When Barack Obama was elected the nation’s first black president in 2008, some academics and political analysts suggested the watershed event could represent the dawning of a post-racial era in a land that has struggled over race relations for four centuries.

At the same time, growing ethnic and racial diversity fueled by record immigration and rates of interracial marriages have made the USA’s demographics far more complex. By 2050, there will be no racial or ethnic majority as the share of non-Hispanic whites slips below 50%, according to Census projections.

“It’s showing that tomorrow’s children and their children will in fact be multiracial, leading to a potential post-racial society,” says William Frey, demographer at the Brookings Institution.

“The issue isn’t just multirace,” says Census historian Margo Anderson, professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. “It’s the blurring of the very traditional black vs. white. Categories that held until about 1980 are shifting in large numbers. … The clarity is breaking down.”…

…Why does the government ask about race and ethnicity?

Federal agencies need the information to monitor compliance with anti-discrimination laws such as the Voting Right Act and the Civil Rights Act, fair employment practices and affirmative action mandates…

…”For some, the multirace response option represented an opportunity to acknowledge both parents,” says Roderick Harrison, a demographer at Howard University and the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington. “But for a lot of others, it’s like, ‘OK, are you going to turn your back on the rest of us?’ … A lot of the racial and ethnic politics of the Census are that we want the biggest numbers possible for our groups.”..

Read the entire article here.
View the photo gallery from the article here.

Lewis Explores Race During Unity Month

The Emory Wheel
Volume 91, Number 22
2009-11-13
page 3

Pooja Dhruv, Staff Writer

Elliott Lewis, former television news reporter and author of Fade: My Journeys in Multiracial America, discussed current American racial issues during his keynote address for Unity Month on Wednesday.

According to College sophomores Yan Chen and Melissa Mair, who both helped head the event, Lewis was chosen to speak because of his research on race and the growing multiracial identity in America.

…“For example, even though both my parents were half black and half white, they only identified as being black; but I identify as being both,” he said…

…Lewis said most multiracial people go through a period in their lives when they question how to racially or ethnically identify themselves.

“That period of doubt might last 10 minutes or 10 hours, but all multiracial people go through it; I now identify as biracial, half white and half black but, I also went through that period of doubt,” he said…

Read the entire article here.

CU professor helps author come alive: New [Ralph] Ellison book on sale

CU Independent
University of Colorado
2010-02-07

Kaely Moore

Adam Bradley, a CU associate professor of English, and John Callahan, a professor of humanities at Lewis and Clark College, have come together after author Ralph Ellison’s death to produce unpublished work.

Ellison’s novel “Invisible Man” became a literary success after its release in 1952. From the time of its publication, to Ellison’s death in 1994, the author worked on putting out a second novel that he never finished…

…Bradley, who has a black father and a white mother, said that he didn’t have much of a connection with the black side of his family while growing up.

“When I read this book in college, it had a clarifying influence on me,” Bradley said. “I saw parts of myself in it in the search for identity, in the search for a father figure and all these sorts of things that are really quite personal, played out in a public work of fiction. It inspired me to understand what exactly my multiracial identity means.”…

…Bradley said the book centers around the relationship between two characters. One is a black jazzman turned preacher and the other is a child of indeterminate race whom the preacher raises as his own. The two travel around the country as a part of a revival sermon until the child strikes out on his own and disappears for years, emerging decades later as a white, racist senator.

The central plot of the book is about an attempt upon the senator’s life by the hands of his own estranged son, Bradley said, as the preacher races to Washington to try to save the man he knew years before…

Read the entire article here.

The Race Against Race [Book review of “What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America”]

The New Republic
2010-01-29

Richard Posner

“What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America” by Peggy Pascoe
“Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell” by Paul A. Lombardo

Peggy Pascoe, a historian, has written what might seem to be an uncannily timely history of laws against miscegenation—interracial marriage or procreation—in the United States. In 2008, after all, the nation elected its first president who had parents of different races. A nice coincidence for Pascoe, but not much more. Presidential candidates with an unusual background are elected only when their background has ceased to be problematic: the first Catholic when people stopped worrying that a Catholic president would be the Pope’s puppet; the first divorced person when divorce had become too common to be stigmatized; and now the first person of mixed race, when “miscegenation” has ceased to have any public significance and indeed has vanished from most people’s vocabulary. Black-white marriages remain rare, and many parents of whites do not want their children to marry blacks, and vice versa—but such aversions raise only personal issues, not social or political ones. So Pascoe’s book will tell us nothing about Obama’s presidency, but it is a good book that recounts a fascinating history and bears at least obliquely on one contemporary political issue—that of gay marriage.

Laws against mixed marriage have been surprisingly rare outside the United States. Nazi Germany forbade marriage between a German and any member of a non-Aryan “race,” thus including Jews, along with blacks, Slavs, and members of a host of other racial and nonracial groups. And South Africa in the apartheid era forbade interracial marriage. Because the regulation of marriage was considered a state rather than a federal prerogative, there was never a nationwide ban on mixed marriage in the United States.

The American laws forbidding black-white marriage date to colonial times. They were found in northern as well as southern colonies and states. But they had little significance in the North because there were not many blacks, as there were in the South, where the laws reflected and ratified the inferior status of blacks. Not all Southern blacks were slaves, but not even free blacks had the rights of citizens. Oddly, in light of the later eugenic concern with interracial procreation, the taboo against interracial marriage coexisted with a high rate of procreative sexual intercourse between white men and black women (condoned by the authorities despite laws against non-marital sex), combined with a fierce determination to prevent sex between black men and white women. This odd pattern made a certain economic sense. It increased the range of sexual opportunities for white men, and since the child of a black slave woman was a slave, the children of such relationships were not an economic burden. White men retained a monopoly of white women, while black men had to share black women with white men. White men dominated government, so it is not surprising that the laws were formulated and enforced in such a way as to maximize their sexual freedom, although they could not marry black women…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed-race Americans face wage discrimination

New Scientist
Magazine issue 2696
Science in Society
2009-02-22

Luckily for Barack Obama, the US president’s salary doesn’t depend on who gets elected. A study of racial discrimination in the US workplace suggests that mixed-race Americans  are discriminated against just as much as black people in terms of salary.

Economist Robert Fairlie at the University of California at Santa Cruz examined the US census for 2000 – the first to include the “mixed race” option for ethnicity. The census also questioned people about their earnings…

Read the entire article here.

The Bluest Eye [Review of The Girl Who Fell from the Sky]

The New York Times
2010-02-25

Louisa Thomas, Contributing Editor
Newsweek Magazine

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky. By Heidi W. Durrow. (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Algonquin Books, 2010. 264 pages. Cloth ISBN-13: 9781565126800)

There’s a reason many great social justice novels are written as historical fiction or contain elements of fantasy or allegory: This builds a certain crucial distance into their storytelling. Heidi W. Durrow is the daughter of an ­African-American serviceman and a white Danish mother, and her first novel was, according to her publisher, “inspired by true events.” On the face of it, the story of a biracial girl growing up in 1980s America, grappling with confusion over both her identity and a complicated, mysterious family history, couldn’t be more timely or important. But in the moments when Durrow’s novel seems to tackle its big themes most self-consciously — when it appears written for the Age of Obama — it can be predictable, even dull. It’s when it approaches the questions of identity and community more subtly and indirectly that “The Girl Who Fell From the Sky” can actually fly…

Read the entire review here.

Deterritorialised Blackness: (Re)making coloured identities in South Africa

postamble
Volume 2, Number 1
2006

Janette Yarwood, Doctoral Candidate
Department of Anthropology
City University of New York

“When I was a kid in the early eighties, this music [hip-hop] was the first I’d heard that I could relate to. You know, ‘Fuck da Police’, and all that shit, that’s what I was feeling.”
Shamel X interview

“Black is not a question of pigmentation. The Black I’m talking about is a historical category, a political category, a cultural category…  Black was created as a political category in a certain historical moment.”2

During the summer of 2003 I took my first pre-dissertation trip to South Africa to develop my dissertation topic on coloured identities in post-apartheid South Africa. Although it is no secret that hip-hop as both a musical genre and a defined lifestyle has gained recognition and popularity around the globe, I was not quite prepared for what I experienced in South Africa. I encountered cars blasting Jay-Z, Sean Paul and P. Diddy among others; people wearing Sean John, Avirex or United States sports team jerseys; and cell phones ringing to the tunes of the latest 50 Cent or R. Kelly songs. I found that as a black person of Caribbean and American descent, I felt a common blackness with the coloured people I interacted with not because of a common African heritage but mainly because of black popular culture and hip-hop culture specifically. This led me to ask: What does it mean to be black in today’s world? Is there a transnational or globalised notion of blackness?…

Read the entire article here.

Dominic Mhiripiri ’12: Please. Mr. Obama is not black

The Brown Daily Herald
2010-02-03

Dominic Mhiripiri, Opinions Columnist

Recently, the United States marked the first anniversary of Barack Obama’s historic ascent to the apex of American politics. For a candidate who electrified a whole generation of American youth and whose promise gave the whole world great expectations, the man’s image borders on the divine. At least, it did one year ago. Since then, America has basked in some sort of self-congratulatory-slash-too-good-to-be-true euphoria. It’s because Obama’s election comes in a different context — namely, a very historic one. It’s because he is the first black president of the United States.

Wait. Really? Black?…

…In an understandable but nevertheless misplaced assertion, the U.S. is trying to convince itself, primarily through Obama’s election, that it has attained the cherished ideal that Martin Luther King Jr. and many others fought for in their illustrious civil rights movement: a post-racial America…

Read the entire article here.

Blood-Lines That Waver South: Hybridity, the “South,” and American Bodies

Southern Quarterly
Volume 41, Number 1 (Fall 2003)
pages 39-52

Tace Hedrick, Associate Professor of English
University of Florida

In the paper I investigate a certain kind of imaginative response, especially on the part of mixed-race artists, to the prevalence of racialized discourses of modernity and nationalism in the Americas. Such discourses often dominated public thought in the Americas in general; more specifically for my purposes, I will be looking at the work of two artists, in Harlem and Mexico City, between the 1920s and the 1940s. In negotiating their own sense of a particularly mixed-race and thoroughly modern American nationalism, the United States mulatto writer Jean Toomer (1895-1967) and the Mexican mestiza painter Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) each would try to imagine an organic fusion-one which saw the fusion presumably inherent in race-mixing as a practice of hybridization and/ or grafting. Such a fusion was, further, imagined as a coming together of a (largely imaginary) time and space of primitive energies with the energies of modernity. As William Carlos Williams conceived it, to hybridize or to marry, as he put it in his 1925 In the American Grain, would be the only “moral” way to “fertilize . . . to create, to hybridize, to crosspollenize” (121). For artists and intellectuals in the United States who saw that the 1920s presented a crossroads in how the US would define itself as “American,” people like Williams, the writer Waldo Frank, and even many intellectuals of color such as Toomer felt indeed that cultural, if not also racial, fusion might be the “crosspollenizing” way out of the seeming sterility of an ever-deepening divide along the color line. For Mexican artists and intellectuals at a time of intense nation building, given that race and cultural mixing in Mexico were already an unavoidable fact, the idea of hybridity, that is mestizaje (Indo-Hispanic mixing), of necessity became the watchword for a new and unified Mexican nation. At a time when eugenics science generally characterized race-mixing as productive only of degenerate or sterile offspring, Kahlo and Toomer, and others like them, would effect this imaginative unification, fusion, and cross-pollenization by means of a eugenic counter-discourse which privileged race (and cultural) mixing as productive of hybrid, and therefore stronger, cultures and, ultimately, nations. If we remember the fascination that genetic, eugenic, and evolutionary theories held for both North and South Americans in the earlier part of the twentieth century, it begins to make sense that such an idea of cultural and racial hybridity ultimately would give rise to a very general notion that North must fuse in some way with South, given the tendency to divide the United States and Mexico into “North” and “South,” a division which often imaginatively paralleled the industrial/agricultural divide assigned to these same regions in the United States itself. For Toomer in the United States, this fusion would involve a literally organic connection between the urban North and the agrarian South. For Kahlo and her husband, the artist and muralist Diego Rivera, the fusion would often be envisioned in terms of an agrarian Mexico (South) with an industrial United States (North)…

Read the entire article here.