Mixed Race Studies

New book highlights the needs of Mixed Parentage children

London South Bank University
News
2005-06-02

Dr Toyin Okitikpi with his challenging new book [Working with Children of Mixed Parentage]

Proportionately a higher percentage of mixed parentage children end up in care and in Britain we only statistically classify mixed parentage for children where one parent is black and the other white. The new book argues this totally misses the children who for example may be of Asian Chinese descent and when it comes to documents such as the National Census the best we can do is offer them the classification of ‘other’ and ask them to specify.

Toyin explains that there are problems with this form of pigeon holing. He explains, “We are expecting these children to be forced into one classification or another and there is confusion about the children’s identity and their sense of self”…

Read the entire article here.

Young Single White Mothers with Black Children in Therapy

Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry
1996
Vol. 1, No. 1
pages 19-28
DOI: 10.1177/1359104596011003

N. J. Banks
Department of Social Policy and Social Work, University of Birmingham

This article describes the treatment of 16 single, white women aged 17-23 years with black mixed-parentage children within an integrative psychodynamic and cognitive-behavioural therapy model. Issues of loss, isolation and familial rejection are discussed. The mothers’ abilities to cope with their children’s ethnic identities in the context of absent fathers are examined, as are the mother-child relationships. Suggestions are made for enabling therapy.

White Mothers, Mixed-Parentage Children and Child Welfare

British Journal of Social Work
Volume 29, Number 2 (1999)
pages 269-284

Ravinder Barn, Professor of Social Policy and Social Work
Royal Holloway, University of London

It is now well documented that the majority of mixed-parentage children who enter the public care system in Britain have a white biological mother and a black African Caribbean father. This paper explores some of the underlying factors which increase the vulnerability of mixed-parentage children. The situation of white single mothers is examined in the context of ‘race’, class, gender and location in British society. Empirical findings from two recent research studies provide a profile of white single mothers and their children in receipt of social work help and assistance. Areas for further discussion are raised within this framework.

Eurocentrism in Social Work Education: From Race to Identity Across the Lifespan as Biracial Alternative

Journal of Social Work
Volume 5, Number 1 (April 2005)
pages 101-114
DOI: 10.1177/1468017305051238

Ronald E. Hall, Professor of Social Work
Michigan State University, East Lansing

• Summary: Consequent to Eurocentric hegemony, race has been erroneously validated as the standard identity construct by social work education as well as much of Western science. For example, the approach utilized in this study includes reference to the literature of biologists and medical personnel who contend that race is scientifically meaningless.
• Findings: The findings suggest that for those who are biracial, living in the midst of race constructionists encourages a life of identity conflict. That conflict is more often irrelevant to monorace subjects who by skin color are assigned to a single race category. This is an important notion for those, such as social workers, working in the human services.
• Applications: The application proposes a human development across the lifespan construct to serve as an ecological alternative to the pathologizing influences of race. Although race and other Eurocentric constructs may have had their place at one time, the rapidly changing demographic dynamics of Western populations, including Britain, Europe and the Americas, and the inconceivable pace at which diversity is becoming the norm necessitate a commensurate change in policy, practice and theory. Identity across the lifespan in preparation of social workers for the 21st century is a viable alternative.

Read or purchase the article here.

The University of Iowa – Be Remarkable: Courtney Parker

University of Iowa
2009-06-08

Po Li Loo

Inspired by her multicultural background, a 2008 grad set out to connect campus groups and redefine diversity.

Courtney Parker came to The University of Iowa because of the renowned Writers’ Workshop. But in her time here, she discovered other passions.  Instead of penning poetry, the 2008 graduate found herself resurrecting the UI Black Student Union (BSU) and cultivating cross-cultural partnerships across campus…

…Parker has developed leadership skills at the UI, but her time here has also taught her how to be comfortable in her own skin. She grew up in a predominantly white, upper middle-class area in Connecticut, and had felt insecure about her mixed heritage. She sees herself first as an African American, but she also has English, Jewish, and Native American roots.

“It’s interesting that most people don’t look at me and recognize me as being African American,” she says. “But you can’t really spend much time with me without knowing that I’m black, without knowing that I’m Jewish.”

Her commitment to helping students transcends the UI. She was accepted by Teach for America and headed to North Carolina after graduation. The organization recruits recent graduates to teach for two years in rural and urban schools around the country…

Read the entire article here.

An Inter-Racial Love Story in Fact and Fiction: William and Mary King Allen’s Marriage and Louisa May Alcott’s Tale, ‘M.L.’

History Workshop Journal
2002
Volume 53, Number 1
pages 17-42
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/53.1.17

Sarah Elbert, Professor Emerita of History
The State University of New York, Binghamton

William G. Allen, the child of a free mulatto mother and a white father, was born about 1820, raised by a free black family,and taught probably by ‘educated foreigners’; among the Federal Troops stationed in Fortress Monroe. In 1838 a New York clergyman accepted Allen in his newly-opened school and then recommended his pupil to Gerrit Smith, a prominent New York abolitionist who supported black students at Oneida Institute in upstate New York.  There Allen developed close ties to leaders of the black abolitionist movement. Allen taught fugitive slaves in Canada and co-edited the National Watchman, an abolitionist newspaper in Troy, New York. By 1847 Allen was in Boston clerking for Ellis Gray Loring, an abolitionist lawyer, and also lecturing, writing, and agitating for immediate abolition, racial equality, ‘amalgamation’, and Africa’s importance in the history of world civilization.  Appointed a professor of Greek Language and Literature at New York Central College in McGrawville, upstate New York, he was among pioneers in coeducation and inter-racial education. Allen courted Mary E. King, a white student there. The couple first met little opposition from her family but their toleration quickly vanished when the couple’s engagement prompted an anti-abolitionist and certainly an anti-‘amalgamation’ mob of 500 ‘gentlemen of property and standing’ who prepared to tar and feather Allen and roll him in a nail-studied barrel.  Allen fled to Syracuse, New York, where Jeremiah Loguen and the Reverend Samuel J. May (uncle of Louisa May Alcott) we reactive radical abolitionists and conductors for slaves escaping on the ‘Underground Railway’.  King and Allen then married in New York City and fled to England. Allen lectured in Leeds, Bradford, and Newcastle in 1853 and he wrote their story in ‘The American Prejudice against Color’ and ‘A Personal Narrative’. The pamphlets published in Dublin and London were sent to Samuel J. May and Louisa May Alcott was visiting the May family during the months of the Allen-King incident and its sensationalist treatment in the local papers. Alcott fictionalized the King-Allen romance in her story ‘M.L.’, (now reprinted in Louisa May Alcott on Race, Sex and Slavery, Northeastern University Press, 1998).  Professor R. J. M. Blackett traced the Allens’ years in England and Ireland but found no record of the couple or their children after 1878, when they were living in Notting Hill, London, impoverished and dependent upon friends for support.  Both were dedicated teachers, devoted to the education of poor boys and girls. Allen was the principal of the Caledonian Training School in Islington1863, but Englishmen too were not lacking in racism and his school was resented by competitors who drove him out. (See Blackett,’William G. Allen: the Forgotten Professor’, Civil War History26:2, pp. 39–51). This article brings together Alcott’s tale and the events upon which it was based, in the context of abolitionist culture and activity in upstate New York and New England, and of Alcott’s life, politics, and writing.

Read or purchase the entire article here.

Demystifying the “Tragic Mulatta”: the Biracial Woman as Spectacle

Stanford Black Arts Quarterly
Stanford University
2.3 (Summer/Spring 1997)
Pages 12-14

Stafanie Dunning, Associate Professor and Director of Literature Program
Miami University, Ohio

“You know redbone girls got a problem.” —Cassandra Wilson, Blue Light ‘Til Dawn

“Indigenous like corn, like corn the mestiza is a product of crossbreeding, designed for preservation under a variety of conditions. Like an ear of corn, a female seed-bearing organ—the mestiza is tenacious, tightly wrapped in the husks of her culture.  Like kernels she clings to the cob; with thick stalks and strong brace roots, she holds tight to the earth—she will survive the crossroads.” — Anzaldua, Gloria. “La conciencia de la mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness.” in Making Face, Making Soul, Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1990.

“They had splendid eyes, dark, luminous and languishing; lovely complexions and magnificent hair. — Harper, Francis. Iola Leroy. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988) p. 48.

 

To talk about the complexities of subjectivity is to enter into a discussion which necessarily locates itself at the intersection of race, clans, gender and sexuality. When thinking about my own subjective position, I am confronted by constructions that simultaneously identify, name, abridge and abstract me. Sometimes they help guide my thoughts about myself; at other times, they limit my thinking, reducing me to general categories of color, class, and desire. My present task, interrogation of a biracial subject position, is as much a gender discussion as it is a racial one. My investments in this discussion are deep; I am writing theoretically and distantly about myself— looking for truths about biraciality that I recognize in the words of other theorists, hoping to trace for myself and my audience one thread within a complex, unraveling cultural text. I am not interested here with how biracial subjects manage their subjectivites; such an approach inherently positions biraciality as problematic, the historical consideration of which falls beyond the scope of this project. Instead I will explore the way biracial subjectivity is gendered through its construction.

Women are the primary signifiers of miscegenation in literature and film. Likewise, the critical discourse on biraciality foregrounds the “tragic mulatta.” Yet, theorists regularly circumvent the issue of gender and theories lack interrogation of the point at which race and gender meet to sign biraciality. Visibility, i.e. what biracial people “look” like, makes up a significant part of biracial women’s experiences with uniracial onlookers. Moreover, visibility informs biracial women’s response to the uniracial “gaze.”  This paper posits that biraciality is read differently “along gender lines.” While discourses about “mulattos” efface biracial men, biracial women are discursively foregrounded as “exotic.” Effectively, biraciality is inscribed with a specifically female status: the desire of ‘uniracial’ onlookers to exoticize biracial women inform the “gaze” which casts biracial women, “spectacle.”…

Read the entire article here.

Chameleon’s Fate: Transnational Mixed-Race Vietnamese Identities

Amerasia Journal
University of Califonia, Los Angeles Asian American Studies Center Press
ISSN: 0044-7471
2005
Issue Volume 31, Number 2
Pages 51-62

Fiona I. B. Ngô, Assistant Professor, Asian American Studies & Gender and Women’s Studies
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

The chameleon’s fate is an apt metaphor for the lives of mixed-race Vietnamese children, many of whom were born of these kind of brutal cultural contact. In the aftermath of the U.S. war in Southeast Asia, a number of mixed-race children told the story of the war. Though the story of the war is physically signified by these individuals, the meanings produced through mixed-race identity are multiple and unfixed. The fluidity of meaning comes partially through shifting historical and geographical contextualizations of transnational mixed-race identities.

Conversation with Rev. Dr. Frederick J. Streets

The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition
Yale University
1990-02-02

Frederick J. Streets, University Chaplain and Senior Pastor
Church of Christ, Yale University

A conversation with Rev. Dr. Frederick J. Streets, University Chaplain and Senior Pastor of the Church of Christ, Yale University.

Dr. Streets spoke about race in America. He discussed the resistance to thinking about shared history that black and white Americans might feel. He suggested several reasons for the resistance…

…On mixed racial heritage:

(Dr. Streets is an African American of mixed heritage.)

I grew up identifying with African Americans by color while learning the Polish traditions of my maternal grandmother.

I think that acknowledging one’s mixed heritage is a rebuttal to two ideas about race. One is the linking of mixed heritage to slavery. The second is the idea of racial purity.

African Americans reject their white heritage as the story of slavery. White Americans believe that their heritage carries no genes of color. The great divide between black and white Americans is mythical and destructive.

Neither groups wants to acknowledge their mixed ancestry because a mixed racial heritage furthers the destruction of separate racial identity. As blacks begin to examine their roots, they find a confusion of identity…

Read the entire article here.

An Unexpected Blackness

Transition: An International Review
Feb 2009
No. 100
Pages 112-132

Naomi Pabst, Assistant Professor of African American Studies and American Studies
Yale University

What does it mean to be of African descent while residing in Canada, where the hypodescent rule does not hold sway?  Naomi Pabst reflects upon the complexity of life for people of color regarded as neither, nor.