Mixed Race Studies

Racial Identity in Balance

The Chronicle of Higher Education
2004-01-07

Naomi J. Miller, Professor of English and the Study of Women and Gender; Director of Institutional Diversity and Assistant to the President
Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts

I consider myself multiracial. Technically, I am half Japanese, a quarter Czech, and a quarter English-Dutch. By definition, then, I am an “other” in American society. Or at least I am according to conventional definitions of race and ethnicity, which require people to check the box marked “other” when they don’t fit into one of the pre-established categories.

And yet, every day those of us who are multiracial live “outside the box,” as tired as that phrase may be. We are not “other” to ourselves. And we need not allow ourselves to be defined in contrast to, or in opposition to, an assumed standard of racial singularity. But we do need to educate those around us about the reality of feeling boxed in by definitions of racial identity that confront not only multiracial individuals, but every individual who checks a box whose category is not an adequate definition of his or her identity…

…I’m writing from where I live, as a multiracial parent in a “mixed-race marriage,” that has produced mega-multi-racial children. To me, these issues are not abstractions for a campus diversity report: they are, fundamentally, my responsibility and my life.

My husband is half black, half German-Jewish, and so my four children are a veritable rainbow coalition among themselves.  Interestingly enough, partly because we live in Arizona, some of the racial/ethnic identities that are not included in their background (such as Hispanic and Native American) are ones that are associated with their multiracial appearance…

Read the entire article here.

Theatrical Medicine: Aboriginal performance, ritual and commemoration

The Medicine Project
2008-03-25

Michelle La Flamme

Dr. Michelle La Flamme is an Afro-NDN performer, activist and educator who completed a Ph.D. at UBC [University of British Columbia] in English literature (May 2006). In her other life, she is an avid performer and has worked in film and video production. She tries her best to bridge the world of academia and her creative life and she is often asked to speak or perform at Canadian conferences addressing representations of race in contemporary Canadian art and literature. She was born and raised here on the “best Coast” and has had the good fortune of taking her ideas abroad as a guest lecturer in Germany, Spain and The Netherlands. These days she is particularly interested in Native/Black issues as her bloodlines encompass both sides of the 49th and include Métis, Creek and African-American strains. Currently, she teaches Canadian literature, Academic Writing, Introduction to Fiction and Introduction to Poetry at UBC. She makes the time to write, perform and be involved in community activism when she has the energy.

There are many different definitions of Medicine. As a woman of mixed heritage (Métis, African-Canadian and Creek) I have been exposed to many Aboriginal teachings and ceremonies. My own definition of medicine is based on the teachings of traditional elders who have shared their cultural insight with me regarding the power and meaning of medicine. There are Medicine Wheel ceremonies that involve respect for the four directions and the balance between the physical, mental, spiritual and emotional aspects of an individual. Medicine can be understood in a psychological or philosophical way whereby individuals go through a form of catharsis when they are guided by the teachings. There is medicine involved in seeking advice from elders by way of offering them tobacco. There is participatory medicine involved in being a witness or participant in talking circles, and there is medicine that is physical in the form of tobacco, sweet grass, sage and cedar. There is medicine in ceremony whether these be sweat lodge ceremonies, moon lodge ceremonies, naming ceremonies or longhouse ceremonies. There is medicine in the practice of creating art whether that be carving, weaving or painting. Some traditional languages do not have a word for theatrical performance, so they use the closest word, which is ceremony. These cultural beliefs about medicine and practices which are referred to as medicinal reflect a belief in the power of performance and the possibility of the performance being medicinal for any and all of these cultural associations with medicine. The performances and plays that I examine in this essay can be understood as medicine in that they bring balance to the witnesses through honouring the deceased by way of naming rituals, they bring balance to communities by showing the humanity of Aboriginal women and they provide a cathartic ritual or ceremony for the release of trauma…

Read the entire article here.

Race: Social Fact, Biological Fiction

Focus on Adoption
Volume 17, Number 3
June/July 2009
pages 16-17

Andrew Martindale, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
University of British Columbia

Andrew Martindale, an adoptive parent, and assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, explains that the concept of race is man-made and, though it holds enormous power, has no biological basis.

…Why races exist
If races are not biological divisions, why do they exist? The answer is complex and partly that races exist because people want to believe they exist.  Although race identities can lead to racism, they also have considerable value in social terms. People who have been marginalized historically, based on a flawed concept of race, find solidarity with people who share the same history. Ironically, the concept of race can have a positive role in repudiating racism. For this reason, the concept of race is not likely to disappear any time soon…

Read the entire article here.

PAGE ONE — No Biological Basis For Race, Scientists Say / Distinctions prove to be skin deep

San Fransisco Gate Chronicle
1998-02-23

Charles Petit, Chronicle Science Writer

This is one of a series of articles in “About Race,” a year-long public journalism project in which The Chronicle, KRON-TV, BayTV and KQED-FM are examining various aspects of race relations in the Bay Area.

The President’s Initiative on Race, designed to attack prejudice by bringing people of different races together to talk, may have overlooked something.

Namely, that the very concept of race is bogus and has no basis in biology, according to most scientists.

“This dialogue on race is driving me up the wall,” said Jefferson Fish, a psychologist at St. John’s University in New York who has written extensively about race in America. “Nobody is asking the question, ‘What is race?’ It is a biologically meaningless category. It is a cultural term that Americans use to describe what a person’s ancestry is…

…Despite this, many Americans still believe in three great racial groups, a system developed in Europe and North America in the 18th century…

…If anything, the president’s initiative should have been on racism, say the scientists. For, even without race, racism can exist as a belief that ancestry is a significant factor in cultural and behavioral differences among peoples…

…In years past, children of mixed marriages “were assigned the racial (and legal) status of the more subordinate parent,” said Faye Harrison, an anthropologist at the University of South Carolina [now University of Florida].

“That rule, called . . . the ‘one drop rule’ (for one drop of blood), has worked to classify me as African American, period,” said Harrison. “Despite the fact that I, like most other African Americans I know, have a mixed heritage and mixed ‘race’ genealogy. But that multicultural or multiracial reality is part of my extended family’s private transcript, not our public identity as blacks, as African Americans.”

Studies show that the ancestry of American blacks is about 70 percent African, with the rest European and American Indian….

Read the entire article here.

The politics of everyday hybridity: Zadie Smith’s White Teeth

Wasafiri: The Magazine Of International Contemporary Writing
Volume 18, Issue 39
Summer 2003
pages 11-17
DOI: 10.1080/02690050308589837

Laura Moss, Associate Professor of English
University of British Columbia

Read the entire article here.

A Reappraisal of the Constitutionality of Miscegenation Statutes

Cornell Law Quarterly
Volume 42, Issue 2 (Winter 1957)
pages 208-222

Andrew D. Weinberger, LL.B., D. HUM, Member of the New York Bar, New York City & Visiting Professor of Law
Nationzal University of Mexico

Today [in 1957], 21 States of the Union by statute forbid marriages on racial grounds. These statutes are neither uniform in the racial groups against whom the ban is applicable, nor in defining membership in the various ethnic groups. Thus, while in Utah white-Mongolian marriages are illegal and void, in North Carolina they are permitted. In Arkansas, where white-Negro marriages are void, a Negro is defined as “any person who has in his or her veins any Negro blood whatever.” In Florida, one ceases to be a Negro when he has less than “one-eighth of . . . African or Negro blood”; and in Oklahoma, anyone not of “African descent” is miraculously transmuted into a member of the white race.

The racial groups affected by such statutes include Mongolians, Malays, Hindus, Chinese, Japanese, Ethiopians, American Indians, Cherokees, Mestizos, Halfbreeds, and “the brown race.” The sole racial group (other than white persons) affected by all twenty-one statutes is the Negro…

Read the entire article here.

“The Caucasian Cloak”: Mexican Americans and the Politics of Whiteness in the Twentieth-Century Southwest

The Georgetown Law Journal
Volume 95, Issue 2
Pages 337-392

Ariela J. Gross, Professor of Law and History
University of Southern California Law School

The history of Mexican Americans and Jim Crow in the Southwest suggests the danger of allowing state actors or private entities to discriminate on the basis of language or cultural practice. Race in the Southwest was produced through the practices of Jim Crow, which were not based explicitly on race, but rather on language and culture inextricably tied to race. This Article looks at three sets of encounters between Mexican Americans and the state in mid-twentieth-century Texas and California—trials involving miscegenation, school desegregation, and jury exclusion—to see the way in which state actors used Mexican Americans’ nominal white identity under the law to create and protect Jim Crow practices. First, it argues that whiteness operated primarily as a “Caucasian cloak” to obscure the practices of Jim Crow and to make them appear benign, whether in the jury or school context. If Mexican Americans were white, then they were represented so long as whites were represented. Second, it demonstrates that Mexican-American civil rights leaders as well as ordinary individuals in the courtroom did not simply identify as white; some showed a more complex understanding of “Mexican” as a mestizo race, and others pointed to the idea of race as a status produced by racist practice. Mexicans were nonwhite if they were treated as nonwhite under Jim Crow. Finally, it argues that, at least in twentieth-century Texas and California, cultural discrimination was racial discrimination, and that continuing discrimination on the basis of language ability and other cultural attributes should be scrutinized carefully under antidiscrimination law…

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION
MEXICAN-AMERICAN WHITENESS BEFORE 1930
A. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
B. WHITE BY TREATY—IN RE RODRIGUEZ
C. SEX ACROSS RACIAL BORDERS: POPULAR AND LEGAL IDEAS OF THE “MEXICAN RACE”

II. THE POLITICS OF WHITENESS IN THE 1930S AND 1940S
A. JIM CROW IN THE SOUTHWEST
B. MEXICAN-AMERICAN ORGANIZATIONS AND POLITICS

III. LITIGATING MEXICAN-AMERICAN WHITENESS
A. THE 1930S SCHOOL AND JURY CASES
B. THE 1940S SCHOOL AND JURY CASES

IV. AFTER HERNANDEZ V. TEXAS: LIFTING THE CAUCASIAN CLOAK
A. FROM HERNANDEZ V. TEXAS TO CISNEROS
B. LA RAZA COSMICA

CONCLUSION

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Grad student explores questions of race through digital technology

News & Events
York Univeristy, Toronto, Ontario
2010-01-28

The technology to turn oneself into a mixed-race avatar might be confined to movies, but Brian Banton plays with racial manipulations of himself online, wrote the Toronto Star (online) Jan. 27 [2010] in a story that included five photos of him.

As a York graduate student, he explores questions of racial hybridity as related to corporate design. Much of the work is obscurely theoretical, Banton says. “But I also want to be playful. (Mixed race) is a serious issue but I don’t want to be heavy-handed.”..

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial Matrix: The Role of Race Ideology in the Enforcement of Anti-Discrimination Laws, a United States – Latin America Comparison

Cornell Law Review
Volume 87, Number 5 (July 2002)
Cornell University Law School

Tanya Katerí Hernández, Professor of Law
Fordham University

This Article examines the role of race ideology in the enforcement of antidiscrimination laws.  Professor Hernández demonstrates the ways in which the U.S. race ideology is slowly starting to resemble the race ideology of much of Latin America.  The evolving U.S. race ideology is a multiracial matrix made up of four precepts: (1) racial mixture and diverse racial demography will resolve racial problems; (2) fluid racial classification schemes are an indicator of racial progress and the colorblind abolition of racial classifications an indicator of absolute racial harmony; (3) racism is solely a phenomenon of aberrant racist individuals; and (4) focusing on race is itself racist.  Because the multiracial matrix parallels much Latin American race discourse, Professor Hernández conducts a comparative analysis between U.S. and Latin American anti-discrimination law enforcement practices.  Professor Hernández concludes that the new race ideology bolsters the maintenance of race hierarchy in a racially diverse population.  Consequently, an uncritical embrace of the new race ideology will hinder the enforcement of antidiscrimination law in the United States.  Professor Hernández proposes that a greater focus on racism as a global issue that treats race as a political identity formation will assist in the recognition of the civil rights dangers of a multiracial matrix.

Read the entire article here.

Students’ growing refusal to state a race on forms frustrates school officials

Sacramento Bee
2010-01-18

Stephen Magagnini

Sacramento, California — About half of the 37 students in teacher Jeanne Kirchofer’s Laguna Creek High School classroom, who span nearly every combination of race and ethnicity, have joined the growing number of California students who decline to state a race on official forms and tests…

“I’m not saying we’re going to forget where we came from, but we can all see similarities from different hardships,” Belcher said. By eliminating racial categories—and racial consciousness—”we can make racial hatred go away,” she said.

Eighteen classmates agreed. “If we were all one race, then there wouldn’t be any racism,” said Mike Obi, 14, whose roots are Italian and Nigerian. He said his parents declined to state his race on his school registration form.

“We shouldn’t be judged by our race,” said senior Jessica Mae Belcher, 17, whose roots are African and Cherokee. She prefers “none of the above” because “we’re all different, but we’re all the same, too.”..

…From 2006 to 2009, the number of Elk Grove Unified School District students whose parents listed their race as “multiple/no response” went from 500 to 6,200 — a twelve-fold jump in just three years, the California Department of Education says. About one of every 10 of the district’s students now list race as “multiple/no response.”

There’s also been a dramatic rise statewide. Data show the number of K-12 students listing their race as “multiple/no response” has jumped 70 percent, from 124,000 in 2006 to 210,000 last year…

…Senior Candice Renkin, 17,—who identifies herself as white/European American—said it’s important to close the achievement gap. “By ignoring racial categories, it makes the problem worse because people can be racist and there’s no way to quantify it.” …

Read the entire article here.