Mixed Race Studies

Passing: Intersections of Race, Gender, Sexuality and Class

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
2017-07-17
379 pages

Dana Christine Volk

Dissertation submitted to the faculty of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy In ASPECT: Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought

African American Literature in the 20th century engaged many social and racial issues that mainstream white America marginalized during the pre-civil rights era through the use of rhetoric, setting, plot, narrative, and characterization. The use of passing fostered an outlet for many light-skinned men and women for inclusion. This trope also allowed for a closer investigation of the racial division in the United States during the 20th century. These issues included questions of the color line, or more specifically, how light-skinned men and women passed as white to obtain elevated economic and social status. Secondary issues in these earlier passing novels included gender and sexuality, raising questions as to whether these too existed as fixed identities in society. As such, the phenomenon of passing illustrates not just issues associated with the color line, but also social, economic, and gender structure within society. Human beings exist in a matrix, and as such, passing is not plausible if viewed solely as a process occurring within only one of these social constructs, but, rather, insists upon a viewpoint of an intersectional construct of social fluidity itself. This paper will re-theorize passing from a description solely concerning racial movements into a theory that explores passing as an intersectional understanding of gender, sexuality, race, and class. This paper will focus on contemporary cultural products (e.g., novels) of passing that challenge the traditional notion of passing and focus on an intersectional linkage between race, gender, sexuality, and class.

Read the entire dissertation here.

Blood Will Tell: Native Americans and Assimilation Policy

University of Nebraska Press
2017-08-01
234 pages
5 illustrations, index
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8032-2543-5

Katherine Ellinghaus, Hansen Lectureship in History
School of Historical and Philosophical Studies
University of Melbourne

Blood Will Tell reveals the underlying centrality of “blood” that shaped official ideas about who was eligible to be defined as Indian by the General Allotment Act in the United States. Katherine Ellinghaus traces the idea of blood quantum and how the concept came to dominate Native identity and national status between 1887 and 1934 and how related exclusionary policies functioned to dispossess Native people of their land. The U.S. government’s unspoken assumption at the time was that Natives of mixed descent were undeserving of tribal status and benefits, notwithstanding that Native Americans of mixed descent played crucial roles in the national implementation of allotment policy.

Ellinghaus explores on-the-ground case studies of Anishinaabeg, Arapahos, Cherokees, Eastern Cherokees, Cheyennes, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, Lakotas, Lumbees, Ojibwes, Seminoles, and Virginia tribes. Documented in these cases, the history of blood quantum as a policy reveals assimilation’s implications and legacy. The role of blood quantum is integral to understanding how Native Americans came to be one of the most disadvantaged groups in the United States, and it remains a significant part of present-day debates about Indian identity and tribal membership. Blood Will Tell is an important and timely contribution to current political and scholarly debates.

We Wear The Mask: 15 Stories About Passing in America (edited by Brando Skyhorse & Lisa Page) [Review]

Kirkus Reviews
2017-07-24

Brando Skyhorse and Lisa Page (eds.), We Wear the Mask: 15 Stories about Passing in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017)

Writers explore how and why the phenomenon of “passing” both shocks and fascinates.

Skyhorse (English/Indiana Univ.; Take This Man, 2014, etc.) and Page (Creative Writing and English/George Washington Univ.) assemble a collection of 15 authentic narratives about how people attempt to “win access to the specific life they want, the ultimate form of assimilation, the pure embodiment of the American Dream,” by assuming to be a class or race they are inherently not. Both of the editors know this particular form of “reinvention” well and contribute their perspectives in highly personal essays. Skyhorse, who received his name from his mother “after my Mexican biological father abandoned us,” opens with reflections on how he, as a Mexican-American with the surname Ulloa, passed himself as an American Indian on his college applications. Page chronicles how her black great-grandmother passed for white in Mississippi in order to get a college education. The editors agree that “each of us sometimes employs misdirection to let someone jump to a different conclusion about who we are.” Racial passing also plays a key role in Achy Obejas’ tender recollection of how her Cuban-born father reinvented his “Third World soul” to create a better future for his family in America and in Marc Fitten’s excavation of his familial roots as an urgent preventative tool against diseases predisposed to Asian culture, which his great-grandfather went to great lengths to blur…

Read the entire review here.

Saga of biracial elite couple offers a fresh take on identity, race, and class

The Boston Globe
2017-07-28

Rebecca Steinitz, Globe Correspondent

Danzy Senna

Danzy Senna, New People, A Novel (New York: Riverhead, 2017)

It is 1996 in gentrifying Brooklyn, and Maria, the less-than-heroic heroine of “New People,’’ Danzy Senna’s sharp new novel, perches on the cusp of triumphant adulthood. Almost finished with her dissertation, “an ethnomusicology of the Peoples Temple” in Jonestown, Guyana, she is planning her Martha’s Vineyard wedding to aspiring Internet entrepreneur Khalil, her college boyfriend and perfect match: “She is the one he has been waiting for his whole life . . . He is the one she needs, the one who can repair her . . . Their skin is the same shade of beige.”

Products of “the Renaissance of Interracial Unions” at the end of the ’60s, the two are avatars of the “tangle of mud-colored New People who have come to carry the nation — blood-soaked, guilty of everything of which it has been accused — into the future,” so “perfect” they have been asked to star in “New People,’’ the documentary…

…Like Senna’s previous two novels “Caucasia’’ and “Symptomatic,’’ “New People’’ explores the fraught social and emotional world of the biracial elite. This is Senna’s world — “Caucasia’’ was built on the foundation of her 1970s Boston childhood, and Maria and Khalil attend Stanford in the early ’90s, as she did…

Read the entire review here.

New People, A Novel

Riverhead (an imprint of Penguin)
2017-08-01
240 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1594487095
Paperback ISBN: 978-0735219410

Danzy Senna

From the bestselling author of Caucasia, a subversive and engrossing novel of race, class and manners in contemporary America.

As the twentieth century draws to a close, Maria is at the start of a life she never thought possible. She and Khalil, her college sweetheart, are planning their wedding. They are the perfect couple, “King and Queen of the Racially Nebulous Prom.” Their skin is the same shade of beige. They live together in a black bohemian enclave in Brooklyn, where Khalil is riding the wave of the first dot-com boom and Maria is plugging away at her dissertation, on the Jonestown massacre. They’ve even landed a starring role in a documentary about “new people” like them, who are blurring the old boundaries as a brave new era dawns. Everything Maria knows she should want lies before her–yet she can’t stop daydreaming about another man, a poet she barely knows. As fantasy escalates to fixation, it dredges up secrets from the past and threatens to unravel not only Maria’s perfect new life but her very persona.

Heartbreaking and darkly comic, New People is a bold and unfettered page-turner that challenges our every assumption about how we define one another, and ourselves.

South Boston: Growing Up Southie

Detour
Boston, Massachusetts
2017-07-29

Narrators:

Jennifer J. Roberts

Pat Nee

Jennifer J. Roberts and ex-gangster Pat Nee take you to their ‘hood’ for a surprising story of growing up Black in Southie.

Southie – it’s got a bit of a reputation. Gangsters, busing desegregation; but most of all, the type of close knit Irish community that gave rise to it all. Although her family came here from Ireland in the 1800’s, Jennifer J. Roberts looked different from almost everyone in this neighborhood. Though she never knew him, her grandfather was black. In this Detour, Jennifer will show you Southie as only someone who knows it as both an insider and outsider can. She’ll take you to a diner that’s as quintessential Southie as it gets, and introduce you to the surrogate father who took her under his wing – the notorious criminal Irishman, Pat Nee. As she shows you the most poignant places of her youth, where navigating identity in the racially charged era of the Boston Busing Crisis was a constant, you’ll see how friends, enemies, and unlikely allies can be as much of a home as any house with a roof… Because people in Southie may seem a little rough around the edges, but they’re always willing to lend a hand if you get into any trouble. And by the end of your journey, you’ll come to see that like Jennifer herself, South Boston isn’t just one thing.

In Passing: Arab American Poetry and the Politics of Race

Ethnic Studies Review
Volume 28, Issue 2 (2005)
pages 17-36

Katherine Wardi-Zonna
Gannon University, Erie, Pennsylvania

Anissa Janine Wardi
Chatham College, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Racial passing has a long history in America. In fact, there are manifold reasons for passing, not the least of which is to reap benefits-social, economic and legal-routinely denied to people of color. Passing is conventionally understood to be a volitional act that either situationally or permanently allows members of marginalized groups to assimilate into a privileged culture. While it could be argued that those who choose to pass are, in a sense, race traitors, betraying familial, historical and cultural ties to personhood,¹ Wald provides another way of reading passing, or “crossing the line,” as a “practice that emerges from subjects’ desires to control the terms of their racial definition, rather than be subject to the definitions of white supremacy” (6). She further contends that racial distinction, itself, “is a basis of racial oppression and exploitation” (6).

Read the entire article here.

Twin Cities Artists And Organizers Host Conference On Mixed Race Identity

Press Release
For Immediate Release: June 26, 2016

Twin Cities Artists And Organizers Host Conference On Mixed Race Identity
Midwest Mixed Conference
Amherst H. Wilder Foundation
St. Paul, Minnesota
August 4-6, 2017

Minneapolis, MN – What began as a space for community dialogues about mixed race identities and experiences, has grown into a unique conference centered around art, community, and courageous conversation. From August 4th to 6th, 2017, artists and community organizers from the Twin Cities will host the first MidWest Mixed Conference, to explore themes connected to multiracial identities with art at the center. According to conference organizers “In a nation and a world with a growing number of people who identify as mixed race, we see the urgency of shining light on the diverse experiences of mixed people, youth, and families, as well as putting forward stories that can unite us, and deepen our analysis of racial issues.”

The conference will provide spaces to explore mixed and multiracial experiences through art, activities, presentations, and conversations. The call is currently open for conference presenters and registration will open at the end of June. In addition to conference presenters, featured speakers include Rebecca Polston and Ricardo Levins Morales. The conference will also include a screening of Mixed Match, an acclaimed animated film about mixed race blood cancer patients navigating ancestry and genetics as they search for bone marrow donors.

While many conversations and events around mixed and multiracial experiences happen in East Coast and West Coast cities, little attention has been paid to the unique experiences and histories of multiracial people and/or transracial adoptees across the Midwest. Multiracial individuals, transracial adoptees, and youth are all welcome.

ABOUT MIDWEST MIXED | As members of communities that are deeply polarized around race and other measures of identity, the goal of MWM is not to divide, but to provide safer spaces to move deeply into our authentic selves, both during and beyond the conference. We are a group of parents, youth, artists, teachers, community organizers, and friends all dedicated to courageous conversations. After two years of hosting a space known as “The Mixed Dialogues”, members of the group formed a committee to plan the first MidWest Mixed Conference, in hopes of reaching more people.

View the Press Kit here.

Media Contacts

Alissa Paris | MidWest Mixed, Co-founder
Lola Osunkoya | MMW Conference Organizer

Website | midwestmixed.com
E-Mail | midwestmixedconference@gmail.com

Documentary Team Covers the Mixed-Race Experience in “Mixed Up”

Westword
Denver, Colorado
2017-07-13

Laura Shunk, Food Critic

Filmmaker and librarian Rebekah Henderson will tackle mixed-race identity in her forthcoming documentary. Courtesy Rebekah Henderson

Rebekah Henderson works as a Ross-Cherry Creek librarian. Trish Tolentino makes movies and owns Stories Not Forgotten, a video production company that archives family memories. The two had never worked together before they partnered on “What Makes a Mother,” a short interview-driven documentary about the hills and valleys of motherhood, which was released this year. But they found that they collaborated well, and now they’ve regrouped to start work on a second film, “Mixed Up,” which will delve into the experience of being a mixed-race person in the United States.

After seeing another film about a mixed-race family that she says downplayed the challenges of navigating U.S. culture and systemic racism, Henderson, who is half black and half white and is married to a man who is also of mixed race, felt driven to share stories of others like herself, who may not fit any particular check-box of racial identity. She also felt compelled to share her experience with her son, who looks white. “It’s hard to say this publicly, but I was disappointed that my son turned out so white,” she says. “On one hand, I think it’s just that mom thing that you’re disappointed that he doesn’t look like you. But it brought up all these things. I’ve always identified as black, because I grew up in the ’80s: If I checked white, they would erase it and say, ‘No, you’re black.’ That was my experience growing up as mixed race. My husband is also mixed race, but he looks white, so he identifies as mixed race.”…

Read the entire article here.

Moreno, Negro, Indio: Explained

La Galería Magazine: Voices of the Dominican Diaspora
2015-05-29

Gerald Lopez

Una fiesta de Sarandunga en Bani Circa 1960s en La Vereda, de Bani. Photo taken from book Instrumentos Dominicanos by Fradique LIzardo.

Growing up in NYC and being in circles of proud Afro-descendant brothers and sisters, I noticed that Dominicans were seen as prime examples of self-hate, race deniers and would often go as far as calling themselves Indio (Native Americans). There is some truth to these claims and while others are simply misunderstandings, it is far more complicated than it seems. What do Dominicans of predominant African ancestry identify as? I’ve dug through history books, looked at geography, and at common language for this answer. It turns out that since very early on there were two words used to describe enslaved Africans in the Dominican Republic:

Negr@ (Black): This word was strongly associated with being enslaved and was part of the slave master’s denigrating lingo in which he reduced our humanity to a color, black. In doing this they disassociated us from our culture and history. There is no ethnic group in Africa that is called Negro. In Dominican society and history, the term Negro was associated with being property (a slave), while Moreno was associated with being a Free African. Often you will find both in Dominican history books, church baptisms, and slave transactions, the word Negro used for a slave. For example, this is from the ‘Archivos Reales de Bayaguana’ which can be found here.

Read the entire article here.