Mixed Race Studies

Trans/formative identities: narrations of decolonization in mixed-race and transgender lives

University of Victoria
2007
114 pages

Sarah E. Hunt

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Interdisciplinary in the Department of Women’s Studies and the Department of Anthropology

This interdisciplinary research paper explores story and metaphor of “trans/formative identities” as a basis for challenging normative racial and gender categories. Autoethnography is used as a method for weaving the author’s own experience as a mixed-race Indigenous person with academic research and theory. The discussion is contextualized by an analysis of institutionalized colonial relationships framing Indigenous knowledge in academia and the role of Indian status in defining Indigenous identity. Six mixed-race and transgender or genderqueer people in Victoria and Vancouver, British Columbia are interviewed and the themes from their shared experiences are used as the basis for further understanding trans/formative identities. These themes are: irony; contradiction and impossibility; stories of home and family; naming and language; embodied negotiations, contextual selves, and; artistic visions.

Table of Contents

• ABSTRACT
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• DEDICATION
• SECTION One: Introduction
• Section Two: Impacts of colonial deconstruction of indigenous knowledge and emerging indigenous research methods
  • Indigenous knowledge in academia: historical and personal contexts
  • Methodological approaches to thesis research
  • Situating myself as an Indigenous researcher
  • Working in my own community contexts
  • Morality and narrative: collaboration and dialogue
  • Film as a tool of representation
  • Alto ethnography and identity in relation
• Section Three: Representations of indigenous identity and emerging discussions of trans/formative subjectivities
  • Assigned identities and their representations
  • Empowering subjects: emerging discussions of racial and gender identities
  • Trans/formative representations of the symbolic domain
• Section four: themes of trans/formative identities
  • Understanding metaphor: themes and stories
  • Thematic exploration of interview dialogue
• NOTES ABOUT THE VIDEO
• REFLECTING BACK: LESSONS LEARNED AND LINGERING QUESTIONS
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• APPENDIX A: INTERVIEW QUESTIONS
• APPENDIX B: ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS FOR VIDEO DISTRIBUTION

Read the entire thesis here.

Brass Ankles Speak

Essays by Alice Dunbar-Nelson
circa 1929

Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935)

Prefatory Note by Gloria T. Hull

Entitled “Brass Ankles Speaks” (Vol. 2, WADN), it is an outspoken denunciation of darker skinned black people’s prejudice against light-skinned blacks told by a “brass ankles,” a black person “white enough to pass for white, but with a darker family background, a real love for the mother race, and no desire to be numbered among the white race.” This brass ankles recalls her “miserable” childhood in “a far Southern city” where other schoolchildren taunted and plagued her because she was a “light nigger, with straight hair!” This kind of rebuff and persecution continued into a Northern college and her first teaching job:

Small wonder, then, that the few lighter persons in the community drew together; we were literally thrown upon each other, whether we liked or not. But when we began going about together and spending time in each other’s society, a howl went up. We were organizing a “blue vein” society. We were mistresses of white men. We were Lesbians. We hated black folk and plotted against them. As a matter of fact, we had no other recourse but to cling together.

And she states further that “To complain would be only to bring upon themselves another storm of abuse and fury.”

This essay was as close as Dunbar-Nelson ever got to revealing feelings about her own racial status as a “yaller nigger.” She tried to publish it, but would not or could not do so under her own name, and the magazine editor refused to print it pseudonymously.

Brass Ankles Speaks (circa 1929)

The “Race” question is paramount. A cloud of books, articles and pronunciamentos on the subject of the white man or girl who “passes” over to the other side of the racial fence, and either entirely forsakes his or her own race, to live in terror or misery all their days, or else come crawling back to do uplift work among their own people, hovers on the literary horizon. On the other hand, there is an increasing interest and sentimentality concerning the poor, pitiful black girl, whose life is a torment among her own people, because of their “blue vein” proclivities. It seems but fair and just now for some of the neglected light-skinned colored people, who have not “passed” to rise and speak a word in self-defense.

I am of the latter class, what E. C. Adams in “Nigger to Nigger” immortalizes in the poem, “Brass Ankles.” White enough to pass for white, but with a darker family background, a real love for the mother race, and no desire to be numbered among the white race.

My earliest recollections are miserable ones. I was born in a far Southern city, where complexion did, in a manner of speaking, determine one’s social status. However, the family being poor, I was sent to the public school. It was a heterogeneous mass of children which greeted my frightened eyes on that fateful morning in September, when I timidly took my place in the first grade. There were not enough seats for all the squirming mass of little ones, so the harassed young, teacher—I have reason to believe now that this was her first school—put me on the platform at her feet. I was so little and scared and homesick that it made no impression on me at the time. But at the luncheon hour I was assailed with shouts of derision—“Yah! Teacher’s pet! Yah! Just cause she’s yaller!” Thus at once was I initiated into the class of the disgraced, which has haunted and tormented my whole life— “Light nigger, with straight hair!”

This was the beginning of what was for nearly six years a life of terror, horror and torment. For in this monster public school, which daily disgorged about 2,500 children, there were all shades and tints and degrees of complexions from velvet black to blonde white. And the line of demarcation was rigidly drawn—not by the fairer children, but by the darker ones. I had no color sense. In my family we never spoke of it. Indian browns and cafe au laits, were mingled with pale bronze and blonde yellows all in one group of cousins and uncles and aunts and brothers and sisters. For so peculiarly does the Mendelian law work in mixed bloods, that four children of two parents may show four different degrees of mixture, brown, yellow, tan, blonde.

In the school, therefore, I felt at first the same freedom concerning color. So I essayed friendship with Esther. Esther was velvet dark, with great liquid eyes. She could sing, knew lots of forbidden lore, and brought lovely cakes for luncheon. Therefore I loved Esther, and would have been an intimate friend of hers. But she repulsed me with ribald laughter—“Half white nigger! Go on wid ya kind!”, and drew up a solid phalanx of little dark girls, who thumbed noses at me and chased me away from their ring game on the school playground…

Read the entire essay here.

Kelly Jackson: Faculty spotlight

Arizona State University
College of Public Programs
2011-01-14

Dr. Kelly Jackson is an Assistant Professor in Social Work in the College of Public Programs.

Before coming to the College four years ago, she earned her Masters in Social Work from the University at Albany, and her PhD in Social Welfare from the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.

Kelly’s research focuses on the cultural identity development of persons of mixed racial and ethnic heritage. She is also interested in developing and evaluating strength-based interventions for at-risk multiracial and multicultural youth.

She says her work is very personal to her.  “As a social worker and a person of mixed race heritage, I am committed to expanding the current knowledge base of multiracial identity development by conducting and disseminating empirical research that utilizes ecological and strength-based conceptualizations of the multiracial experience.”…

Read the entire article here.

Blacks and Native Americans have deep ties

Our Weekly: Our Truth, Our Voice
Los Angeles, California
2010-11-18

Manny Otiko, Our Weekly Contributor

November is Native Heritage month

There is an old joke in the Black community about women attributing long hair to having “Indian blood” in their family. But like all jokes, there is an element of truth in this statement. There are deep ties between Native Americans, America’s first residents, and Black Americans, America’s first sizable minority group.

Los Angeles resident Phil Wilkes Fixico claims both Native American and African American roots on both sides of his family. Fixico, a performance artist and activist for Black Indian culture, says that he first started exploring his genealogy, when he got into his 50s.

Fixico said he has been on an 11-year journey to identify with his Native American roots. This has included reaching out to relatives in Oklahoma, producing a DVD about the Black-Indian experience and doing presentations about Native American culture around Los Angeles…

…Fixico said that he grew up a troubled youth, who was in an out of the juvenile system. After a stint in a correctional institution, he finally turned his life around. He received help from people of all races to do this.

Fixico attributes much of his problems to an identity crisis caused by lack of knowledge about his history. At 52, he decided to start investigating his background. He knew his mother, who raised him alone, was of Creek, White and African descent, but he later learned that his biological father was also part Seminole.

Fixico discovered that his ancestors were Seminole Maroons, slaves who opted to escape captivity and form alliances with the Seminole Indians in Florida…

Read the entire article here.

Phil Wilkes Fixico — a True Native Son

L. A. Watts Times
2010-03-11

Darlene Donloe, Contributing Writer

Phil Wilkes Fixico’s life is more dramatic than virtually any soap opera.

It took him about 52 years to find out who he was after growing up in what he calls a “web of lies.”

His intriguing story is part of the Smithsonian Institution’s “IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas,” a book and exhibit that will tour the country for five years and make its Los Angeles debut at the California African American Museum, tentatively in March 2011. The book speaks to the challenges and triumphs of dual African American and Native American heritage.

A “home-grown” kid who grew up in the Nickerson Gardens housing project in Watts, Fixico, 62, came up hard. His mother not only hid the identity of his biological father, but as a kid he was in and out of four juvenile institutions, experienced rejection, used drugs, committed crimes and witnessed domestic violence, said Fixico, who lives in Inglewood.

Fixico, a member of the Los Angeles Chapter of the Buffalo Soldiers 9th and 10th Horse Cavalry, and the “Seminole Negro Indian Scouts,” said he “grew up as a troubled youth because I kept bumping into the truth and half-truth.

“I knew there was more than what I was being told, but I didn’t know what it was. I certainly didn’t know it was this.”

What he discovered 10 years ago rocked his core: He is a “Seminole–Maroon descendant.” He now describes it as an “identity crisis.”

By appearance, Fixico looks like a black man to some, but he doesn’t think of himself that way; instead, he describes himself as a “Seminole-Maroon descendant.”…

…To understand why he calls himself a Seminole-Maroon descendant is a long story that he pieced together through research.

“I don’t call myself black,” said Fixico, who is one-eighth Seminole Indian, one-fourth Cherokee Freedman, one-fourth Seminole Freedman, one-fourth mulatto and one-eighth Creek Freedman, according to a Smithsonian researcher. “The reason I don’t say black is because that doesn’t really describe the nuances of who I am. I’m a shade of black, a flavor of black.

“When someone asks, ‘Are you black?’ it gives me pause. I can’t take the same credit as someone coming out of Africa who is pure. I can’t take their same degree of blackness.”

To be clear, Fixico doesn’t have a problem with being called black or with black people.

“It’s not that I don’t want to be black,” said Fixico, who explained his mother was African and Cherokee and his father African and Seminole. “I’ve been the product of a mixture. The one-drop rule says I’m black as anybody.

“Under America’s concept of black, I’m black. But when I look at it as my own sense of self, I’m a flavor of black.”…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Race in the Seminole Nation

Ethnohistory
Volume 58, Number 1 (Winter 2011)
pages 113-141
DOI: 10.1215/00141801-2010-066

Kevin Mulroy, Associate University Librarian
University of California, Los Angeles

Phil Wilkes Fixico

This is a story of two hidden identities. It focuses on the family history of Phil Wilkes Fixico (aka Philip Vincent Wilkes and Pompey Bruner Fixico), a contemporary Seminole maroon descendant of mixed race who lives in Los Angeles. Phil is one-eighth Seminole Indian, one-quarter Seminole freedman, one-eighth Creek freedman, one-quarter Cherokee-freedman, and one-quarter African-American-white. His family history records that his paternal grandfather was the offspring of a Seminole Indian woman and a Seminole freedman, but that this “intermarriage” was kept secret from the Dawes Commission and the boy was enrolled as a “fullblood” Indian. This one union and the subsequent history of the family tell us a great deal about relations between Seminoles and freedmen in the Indian Territory and Oklahoma and about status and identity issues among individuals of mixed race within American society. With tragic irony, Phil’s parents also hid the identity of his biological father, echoing the story of his grandfather. Sensing family secrets and lies, young Phil experienced an identity crisis. Eventually discovering his father’s identity and his family history, Phil turned his life around. He has embraced his mixed-race heritage, connected with the Seminole maroon communities in Oklahoma, Texas, and Mexico, and become a creative and energetic tribal historian.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Other Hafu of Japan

Rafu Shimpo: Los Angeles Japanses Daily News
2011-01-14

Brett Fujioka, Rafu Intern

A new documentary examines the lives of racially mixed individuals as they explore their own identities.

Is a ship the same if you take it apart piece by piece and replace its frame? No simple answer exists, as anyone who has tackled this philosophical Rubik’s cube knows.

The ethno-national equivalent to this riddle grows exceedingly more complicated with the swelling number of international unions each year. Statistics in 2004 chart that 1 in 15 marriages in Japan were international and that 1 in 30 children born there possesses a parent of non-Japanese descent. Japan’s ethnic constituency is rapidly changing and its people may need to rethink what it means to be Japanese in a country where blood and national identity are considered one and the same.

The same applies for the hafu (mixed Japanese) community. The lives for each individual half-Japanese vary from person to person and the filmmakers for the upcoming documentary, “Hafu,” and their subjects best represent this.

“Hafu” is the tentative title for an upcoming documentary in Japan following the lives of several half-Japanese individuals as they explore their identities.

Both Megumi Nishikura and Lara Perez Takagi spent most of their lives away from Japan. Takagi is half Spanish and stayed in Madrid, Sydney, Washington D.C., and Ottowa due to her diplomat father’s itinerant career. She eventually completed her higher education at the Francisco de Vitoria, Complutense and Waseda Universities before finally returning to Japan.

Nishikura, likewise, lived her childhood spread throughout the world. She stayed in Beijing, Manila, Honolulu, DC, Berlin, London, and Los Angeles and graduated from New York University.

“Lara and I have unusual stories and come from international backgrounds,” said Nishikura in an interview with the Rafu. “I don’t know if that’s representative of a lot of the mixed Japanese community.”

There’s a reason why they’re so hesitant to pinpoint a grand narrative for the hafu experience. There is no all-encompassing hafu story and the eclectic subjects of the documentary are indicative of this…

Read the entire article here.

Oreo

Northeastern University Press (now University Press of New England)
2000 (Originially published in 1974.)
224 pages
6 x 9″

Fran Ross

Forward by Harryette Mullen

This uproariously funny satire about relations between African Americans and Jews is as fresh and outrageous today as when it was first published in 1974.

Born to a Jewish father and black mother who divorce before she is two, Oreo grows up in Philadelphia with her maternal grandparents while her mother tours with a theatrical troupe. Soon after puberty, Oreo heads for New York with a pack on her back to search for her father; but in the big city she discovers that there are dozens of Sam Schwartzes in the phone book, and Oreo’s mission turns into a wickedly humorous picaresque quest. The ambitious and playful narrative challenges accepted notions of race, ethnicity, culture, and even the novelistic form itself.

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

Crown an Imprint of Random House
July 1995
464 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-307-38341-9 (0-307-38341-5)

Barack Obama, President of the United States

Nine years before the Senate campaign that made him one of the most influential and compelling voices in American politics, Barack Obama published this lyrical, unsentimental, and powerfully affecting memoir, which became a #1 New York Times bestseller when it was reissued in 2004. Dreams from My Father tells the story of Obama’s struggle to understand the forces that shaped him as the son of a black African father and white American mother—a struggle that takes him from the American heartland to the ancestral home of his great-aunt in the tiny African village of Alego.

Obama opens his story in New York, where he hears that his father—a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man—has died in a car accident. The news triggers a chain of memories as Barack retraces his family’s unusual history: the migration of his mother’s family from small-town Kansas to the Hawaiian islands; the love that develops between his mother and a promising young Kenyan student, a love nurtured by youthful innocence and the integrationist spirit of the early sixties; his father’s departure from Hawaii when Barack was two, as the realities of race and power reassert themselves; and Barack’s own awakening to the fears and doubts that exist not just between the larger black and white worlds but within himself.

Propelled by a desire to understand both the forces that shaped him and his father’s legacy, Barack moves to Chicago to work as a community organizer. There, against the backdrop of tumultuous political and racial conflict, he works to turn back the mounting despair of the inner city. His story becomes one with those of the people he works with as he learns about the value of community, the necessity of healing old wounds, and the possibility of faith in the midst of adversity.

Barack’s journey comes full circle in Kenya, where he finally meets the African side of his family and confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life. Traveling through a country racked by brutal poverty and tribal conflict, but whose people are sustained by a spirit of endurance and hope, Barack discovers that he is inescapably bound to brothers and sisters living an ocean away—and that by embracing their common struggles he can finally reconcile his divided inheritance.

A searching meditation on the meaning of identity in America, Dreams from My Father might be the most revealing portrait we have of a major American leader—a man who is playing, and will play, an increasingly prominent role in healing a fractious and fragmented nation.

Nowhere People

Penguin Books Australia
January 2005
300 pages
Paperback ISBN-13:9780143001911

Henry Reynolds, Emeritus Associate Professor of History and Politics
James Cook University, Australia

‘That’s how at six at night on 11 May 1928 I stopped being a Yanyuwa child and became a nowhere person… Motherless, cultureless and stuck in a government institution because my mother was Aboriginal and my father was not. I ceased to be an Aboriginal but I would never be white. I was not something bad, shameful, called a half-caste.’—Hilda Jarman Muir

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, people of mixed Aboriginal and European ancestry—half-castes—were commonly assumed to be morally and physically defective, unstable and degenerate. They bore the brunt of society’s contempt, and the remobal of their children created Australia’s stolen generations.

Nowhere People is a history of beliefs about people of mixed race, both in Australia and overseas. It explores the concept of racial purity, eugenics, and the threat posed by miscegenation. Award-winning author Henry Reynolds also tells for the first time of his own family’s search for the truth about his father’s ancestry, and gives a poignant account of the contemporary predicament facing people of mixed heritage.