Mixed Race Studies

Born Along the Racial Fault Line

The New York Times
2011-11-06

Janet Maslin

My Long Trip Home: A Family Memoir By Mark Whitaker. Illustrated. 357 pages. Simon & Schuster.

As a social studies major in his junior year at Harvard, Mark Whitaker attended a debate on the subject of ethnicity. One participant was the chairman of the department. Mr. Whitaker stood up to raise some questions.

“What would you tell someone who didn’t have a clear ethnic identity?” he asked. “For example, what would you tell someone who had one parent who was black and another who was white? Who had one parent who was American and another who was European? Who had moved dozens of times as a child and didn’t have a specific place to call home?” Everyone in the room knew that Mr. Whitaker was talking about himself.

“I guess I would say that that’s too bad,” the professor answered. “In the future I hope we don’t have too many more people like you.”

Mr. Whitaker recounts this story in “My Long Trip Home,” a book filled with as much family tumult as Jeannette Walls described in “The Glass Castle” and a racial factor to boot. It’s a story that registers not only for its shock value but also for the perspective and wisdom with which it can now be told…

Read the entire review here.

Obama and the complexities of identity

The San Diego Union-Tribune
2008-06-19

Bey-Ling Sha, Professor of Journalism and Media Studies
San Diego State University

In a recent commentary titled “What He Overcame,” Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson described Barack Obama as a “young, black, first-term senator.” In her campaign-suspension speech, Hillary Clinton said, “Could an African-American really be our president? . . . Sen. Obama has answered that one.” These descriptions of Obama are typical of many others offered by and reported in the news media.

What’s wrong with these descriptions of Obama as being black or African-American? As others have already noted, these descriptions reify the supposedly outdated “one-drop rule,” whereby any individual with even “one drop” of African heritage was considered black.

A second, related problem is that these descriptions are instances of identity ascription, whereby one person assigns an identity to another person, usually based on physical characteristics. Thus, someone with blond hair and blue eyes is usually called “white,” even if that person has African, Asian or Native American heritage somewhere in his or her background…

Read the entire article here.

Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil

Duke University Press
1999
232 pages
9 tables
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-2272-6
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-2252-8

Edited by

Michael Hanchard, Professor of Political Science and African American Studies
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland

Bringing together U.S. and Brazilian scholars, as well as Afro-Brazilian political activists, Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil represents a significant advance in understanding the complexities of racial difference in contemporary Brazilian society. While previous scholarship on this subject has been largely confined to quantitative and statistical research, editor Michael Hanchard presents a qualitative perspective from a variety of disciplines, including history, sociology, political science, and cultural theory.

The contributors to Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil examine such topics as the legacy of slavery and its abolition, the historical impact of social movements, race-related violence, and the role of Afro-Brazilian activists in negotiating the cultural politics surrounding the issue of Brazilian national identity. These essays also provide comparisons of racial discrimination in the United States and Brazil, as well as an analysis of residential segregation in urban centers and its affect on the mobilization of blacks and browns. With a focus on racialized constructions of class and gender and sexuality, Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil reorients the direction of Brazilian studies, providing new insights into Brazilian culture, politics, and race relations.

This volume will be of importance to a wide cross section of scholars engaged with Brazil in particular, and Latin American studies in general. It will also appeal to those invested in the larger issues of political and social movements centered on the issue of race.

Table of Contents

• Introduction / Michael Hanchard
• Free African Brazilians and the State in Slavery Times / Richard Graham
• Black Cinderella? Race and the Public Sphere in Brazil / Michael Hanchard
• Ethnic Boundaries and Political Mobilization among African Brazilians: Comparisons with the U.S. Case / Edward E. Telles
• Racial Democracy and Racial Identity: Comparing the United States and Brazil / Howard Winant
• Miguel Reale and the Impact of Conservative Modernization on Brazilian Race Relations / Michael Mitchell
• Women and Racial Inequality at Work in Brazil / Peggy A. Lovell
• Notes on Racial and Political Inequality in Brazil / Carlos Hasenbalg and Nelson do Valle Silva
• The Black Movement and Political Parties: A Challenging Alliance / Benedita da Silva
• My Conscience, My Struggle / Thereza Santos
• Blacks and Political Power / Ivanir dos Santos
• Contributors
• Index

Psychology Major Publishes Analysis of Racial Dynamics in the Wizarding World

James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Virginia
Department of Psychology
2011-10-20

Jordan Pye

When a fan asked her about the political allegories in her book series, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling said, “I wanted Harry to leave our world and find exactly the same problems in the wizarding world.”

By exploring this idea, one senior psychology student, Christina Thai, put her love for Harry Potter to use in a comparison of how societies perceive people of mixed racial backgrounds. Her work will be published in “A Wizard of Their Age: Critical Essays from the Harry Potter Generation,” a compilation by students who applied concepts in the series to their own fields of study. Thai’s chapter is called “Harry Potter and Blood Status: A Psychological Look at Blood Stratification in the Wizarding World,” which she compares the racial dynamics in Harry Potter’s wizarding world to the historical relationship between European Americans and African Americans in the United States…

…Thai, a native of Fairfax, Va. with a second major in biology, found inspiration for the topic during her first semester of research in the Cultural and Racial Diversity Studies lab with Dr. Matthew Lee. After studying racial identity and discrimination, Thai built upon alumnus Candace Vanderpoel’s honors thesis research on hypodescent among African Americans and Asians. This concept is the belief that a bi-racial person has both minority and majority race heritage, but their minority identity overshadows their majority status, so their community considers them a minority.

Thai translated this idea to social hierarchy in the Harry Potter series, where witches and wizards of “pure blood” descent have a higher status than Muggles, who have no magical heritage, and the “mudbloods,” who have a mix of wizard and Muggle parents. Harry himself had a wizard father and a witch mother who was born a Muggle. Thai mainly focused on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the last book in the series where Voldemort assumes power of the Ministry of Magic and enacts laws that promote pure blood status and discriminate against Muggles and mudbloods…

Read the entire article here.

Multicultural ‘obsession’ drives new Parliamentary Poet Laureate

The Globe and Mail
Toronto, Canada
2011-12-21

Jane Taber, Senior Political Writer

Fred Wah is a little more familiar with the outside of Parliament than the inside, having from time to time protested on its sweeping lawn as part of the Writers’ Union of Canada.

But that’s about to change. Tuesday, the award-winning scribe was appointed the country’s new Parliamentary Poet Laureate. As such, the 72-year-old Saskatchewan-born Vancouverite is not required to be reciting poetry on the floor of the Commons or the Senate, but is hoping to at some point unleash his pen on the country’s political institutions…

…Although he sees his appointment as “a symbolic gesture,” he’s got some ideas about what he wants to do, including the “possibility of developing some educational aspects” into the post. “I think there is a great need to get some our poetry and some of our Canadian literature into our schools,” he said.

Characterizing himself as a “Heinz 57,” Mr. Wah’s father was half-Chinese, his mother Swedish and he grew up “in my father’s Chinese-Canadian restaurant.” That has helped to fuel his “obsession” to the issue of race and multiculturalism. “And I’m very interested in the whole notion of hybridity and how we negotiate that in our culture,” he added.

He points to his book of short prose fiction, Diamond Grill, as a example of that. In it, he looks at family and identity. He is also proud of his 1985 book of poetry, Waiting for Saskatchewan, for which he won the Governor-General’s Literary Award…

Read the entire article here.

Irish and ‘brown’ – Mixed ‘race’ Irish women’s identity and the problem of belonging

Women’s Movement: Migrant Women Transforming Ireland
Selection of papers from a conference held in
Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
2003-03-20 through 2003-03-21
pages 86-90

Angeline Morrison
Falmouth College of Arts

People are beginning to talk about the ‘invisibility’ of Whiteness. I am referring in particular to Richard Dyer’s project to ‘make Whiteness strange’, to hold it up for inspection and to question the tacit association of ‘Whiteness’ with ‘the human condition’ (Dyer 1997) I want to talk about another kind of Whiteness that has almost total invisibility—this is the Whiteness of the Mixed Race subject. I use the term ‘Mixed Race’ mindfully, aware that the term is contested and that some find its reference to the unscientific non-sense of ‘Race’ offensive (Harker 2000). For now, I want to define ‘Mixed Race’ people as the offspring of one White and one non-White parent. Such people have, inscribed on their bodies, evidence of migration somewhere along the line. Such people have, also, traditionally had problems at the tricky task of belonging. Although visually combining a phenotypic mixture of both White and Black features, the Mixed Race subject in a White, racialised society has, overwhelmingly, tended to be read by that society as, simply, ‘Black’. I am interested in also considering the Whiteness of the Mixed Race subject, particularly since this is something that both Black and White racialised societies alike – and by ‘racialised’ I mean operating according to what Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe has referred to as the ‘popular folk concept’ of ‘race’–have tended to deny. (Ifekwunigwe 2001:42).

So, the Mixed Race subject as I define her here, inhabits Blackness and Whiteness equally–but in a racialised society, she inhabits Whiteness invisibly. Her whiteness is like a deep stratum; present and felt, but rendered invisible by society. Whilst scholars have written about the cultural or behavioural Whiteness of Mixed Race subjects, I am so far unaware of any work that specifically foregrounds or makes visible the actual, lived, and (usually) ignored Whiteness that the brown-skinned subject of Mixed Race may claim as a birthright, should she so desire…

Read the paper here.

A White Woman From Kansas

The New York Times
2011-06-02

Roger Cohen

LONDON—For a long time Barack Obama’s mother was little more than the “white woman from Wichita” mentioned in an early Los Angeles Times profile of the future president. She was the pale Kansan silhouette against whom Obama drew the vivid Kenyan figure of his absent Dad in his Bildungsroman of discovered black identity, “Dreams from My Father.”

Now, thanks to Janny Scott’s remarkable “A Singular Woman,” absence has become presence. Stanley Ann Dunham, the parent who raised Obama, emerges from romanticized vagueness into contours as original as her name. Far from “floating through foreign things,” as one colleague in Indonesia observes, “She was as type A as anybody on the team.”

That may seem a far-fetched description of a woman who was not good with money, had no fixed abode and did not see life through ambition’s narrow prism. It was the journey not the destination that mattered to Dunham. She was, in her daughter Maya Soetoro-Ng’s words, “fascinated with life’s gorgeous minutiae.” To her son the president, “idealism and naïveté” were “embedded” in her.

Yet she was also a pioneering advocate of microcredit in the rural communities of the developing world, an unrivaled authority on Javanese blacksmithing, and a firm voice for female empowerment in an Indonesia “of ‘smiling’ or gentle oppression” toward women, as she wrote in one memo for the Ford Foundation…

…I found myself liking Dunham—the nonjudgmental irreverence; the determination to live what she loved; the humor (after a stomach-turning surfeit of peanuts, she notes, “Yes, peanuts do have faces—smirky, nasty little faces, in fact”); the frankness with friends—“I don’t like you in your arrogant bitch mode.” Her 52 years were rich.

She missed her son. The decision to send him to get educated in America was brave—and has changed the world in that Obama would not otherwise have become a black American. This is a central conundrum of a book that makes Obama’s white parent palpable for the first time.

In an affecting passage one colleague, Don Johnston, describes how Dunham “felt a little bit wistful or sad that Barack had essentially moved to Chicago and chosen to take on a really strongly identified black identity” that had “not really been part of who he was when he was growing up.” She felt that “he was distancing himself from her” in a “professional choice.”

Was it political calculation, love of Michelle Robinson, dreams of his father, or irritation with a dreamer-mother that made Obama black? After all, he was raised white. He chose black. Or perhaps he had no choice. Being biracial in the America Obama grew up in was not much of an option…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

My Experience on the Indian-Negro Color Line

Indian Country Today
2011-12-27

Julianne Jennings
Arizona State University

Growing-up on the Indian-Negro color line (I am the daughter of a European mother and a black and Indian father), I lived with mixed signals and coded information by the dominant culture. It had determined that white European culture and people were superior in contrast to those who were generally classified as darker, “primitive” and “uncivilized.” Applying the adage “write what you know,” my master’s thesis was titled “Blood, Race and Sovereignty: The Politics of Indian Identity.” This work would not have been possible without the professors in the Department of Anthropology at Rhode Island College (RIC). They taught me how to challenge racial paradigms and stereotypes that Western society has about Indians; and how to brave racial orthodoxy and search new ways of thinking about our country’s seemingly insoluble problems with race.

Classroom discussions about race motivated me, at the age of 46, to reclaim my Indian ancestry by having my birth certificate changed from “Negro” to “American Indian.” The experience was emotionally overwhelming as I had been denied my birthright as an E. Pequot–Nottoway. Changing my birth certificate was not because I was ashamed of my multiracial identity; it was an affirmation of my survival as an Indian and an act of self-determination in a country that has gone so far to erase my ancestry from history. I assert my tri-racial identity, but most of America’s forms, like birth certificates, at present allow listing only one race. To employ biological over cultural definitions of American Indians reflects a fundamental ignorance of American history and its unprocessed shame of slavery and American Indian traditions. Thus, issues about race are especially important to me, as “mixed-blood” Indians are not considered “authentic” by mainstream society. We have to dress in buckskin; feathers and beads to be taken seriously, yet those with European ancestry do not have to wear tall black hats or buckled shoes to convince others of their ancestry…

Read the entire article here.

Between Cultural Lines

Collide
Azusa Pacific University, Azusa, California
Student Magazine
2011-12-07

Chelsey Barmore, Staff Writer

For some, finding their identities as biracial or multiracial individuals can bring forth challenges. Someone born with blended ethnicities may experience the frequent question of, “What are you?” Mistaken for one race and not recognized for the other may at times create an identity crisis. There’s a pull to identify with one group or another, and sometimes, between multiple ethnicities simultaneously.
 
This is the case for Stephen Gephart, who is German, English, and Hispanic. Gephart, a sophomore applied health major says he’s proud of his Hispanic heritage. He grew up in a Catholic household and was raised by a Spanish-speaking mother. Cooking tamales for Christmas with his family became a memorable time for him. Even though his Hispanic heritage was dominant in his home, Gephart still accepted his English and German nationalities…

…Benjamin Bailey, contributor of the book “Multiracial Americans and Social Class” and an associate professor of communication at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, explained that several factors could influence the acceptance of personal ethnic identity: physical features, social interactions, and communities.
 
“I think now there are a lot of people in the United States who, with large-scale immigration, don’t fit the traditional categories so there’s more flexibility now,” said Bailey. “At one point, someone could say, ‘I don’t care who you are; you’re black to me.’”
 
Bailey explained that in the past a “one drop rule” was enforced. This rule claimed that any individual with “one drop” of African ancestry was to be considered fully African-American. Today, individuals cannot be fully defined by one ethnicity over another. Even the way a person acts can affect the way one is identified, according to Bailey…

Read the entire article here.

Michelle Cliff and the Authority of Identity

The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association
Volume 28, Number 1, Identities (Spring, 1995)
pages 56-70

Sally O’Driscoll, Associate Professor of English
Fairfield University, Fairfield, Connecticut

Michelle Cliff has gained critical acclaim as a novelist in the United States and England; her position as an expatriate Jamaican writer is not called into question. Yet when she is read against the background of Caribbean literary criticism, her authorial identity moves into the foreground. In this perspective, Cliff, as author, becomes problematic as soon as we try to define what she “is” as a Caribbean writer: a very light-skinned woman who identifies herself as black, a product of the Jamaican upper class (she came from a family of landowners with slave owners in their past), an expatriate (who has lived in Europe and the United States since 1975), a lesbian, a feminist, and an academic. The reception of her work indicates that Cliff herself-her embodiment as an author-has been an important factor in the evaluation and classification of her writing. As author, Cliff stands at the point of connection-or rupture-between two major non-congruent constructions of identity: third-world postcolonialist and first-world postmodern. Also relevant are debates about “race” as social construction (and its different operations in an American or a Jamaican context), and about gender and sexuality as constituent components of identity.

It is not only Cliff’s authorial embodiment, of course, that raises these questions. Her work has always been overtly concerned with questions of identity, from the 1980 Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise, through essays, short stories, poetry, and criticism, and three novels: the partly autobiographical Abeng (1984); No Telephone to Heaven (1987); and Free Enterprise (1993). In this essay I shall focus on No Telephone to Heaven as a site where familiar notions of identity based in race, class, gender, and sexuality are questoined; it is in critiques of this novel that we can examine how Cliff’s authorial self is implicated in evaluations of her work.

The authority of identity is a central issue for a writer who straddles first world and third world, colonizer and colonized, the postmodern and the postcolonial—the word “postcoloniai” itself being a symbol of disagreement between the two worlds. The tension arises because western post-…