Mixed Race Studies

‘Mixed’ [Watson Review]

Inside Higher Ed
2014-01-31

Andrea Watson

Garrod, Andrew, Christina Gómez, Robert Kilkenny, Mixed: Multiracial College Students Tell Their Life Stories (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013). 208 pages.

Mixed (Cornell University Press) is a collection of 12 autobiographical essays written by college students who identify as multiracial. Unlike most books that focus on children with white and black parents, this one is by and about young adults with multiple racial backgrounds. Each chapter is written by a different author, who starts with family history and moves along from early years to college years. All of the contributors are Dartmouth students.

Thomas Lane is one of the authors. In his chapter, “The Development of a Happa,” he describes what it was like growing up with a Japanese mother and a white father. He discusses how he felt stuck between two worlds, but associated more with the white side until college. “Before college I knew I was ethnically Asian, but I refused to accept the Asian culture. Since coming to Dartmouth, however, I have learned to appreciate all aspects of being Japanese.”

“In My World 1+1=3,” by Yuki Kondo-Shah, is by a young woman who has a Japanese mother and a Bangladeshi father. She writes that she identified as Japanese when she lived in Japan, but when she moved to the United States, at 7, she had to figure out where she fit in. The author says growing up, she always felt stuck between her two identities and could never fully identify with one or the other. “While I spent most of my childhood being Japanese and my college years identifying as a mixed-race minority, I began my professional career as an Asian American.”

Ana Sofia De Brito wrote the “Good Hair” chapter. As a Cape Verdean, she says her father would always push her to date lighter-skinned men over dark-skinned men, because she would “destroy the race” if she married one. “Although I have never had a strong preference for any particular type and have dated boys from various backgrounds and races, at college my preference has focused on men with darker skin.” Within her family, De Brito is considered white because of her European features, but she writes that she identifies as black because society pressures her to choose; she can’t be “other.”…

Read the entire review and interview with editor Andrew Garrod here.

Mixed: Multiracial College Students Tell Their Life Stories

Cornell University Press
2013-12-17
208 pages
6 x 9 in.
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8014-5251-2
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8014-7914-4

Edited by:

Andrew Garrod, Professor Emeritus of Education
Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire

Christina Gómez, Professor of Sociology and Latino & Latin American Studies
Northeastern Illinois University

Robert Kilkenny, Executive Director; Clinical Associate
Alliance for Inclusion and Prevention
School of Social Work
Simmons College, Boston, Massachusetts

Mixed presents engaging and incisive first-person experiences of what it is like to be multiracial in what is supposedly a postracial world. Bringing together twelve essays by college students who identify themselves as multiracial, this book considers what this identity means in a reality that occasionally resembles the post-racial dream of some and at other times recalls a familiar world of racial and ethnic prejudice.

Exploring a wide range of concerns and anxieties, aspirations and ambitions, these young writers, who all attended Dartmouth College, come from a variety of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Unlike individuals who define themselves as having one racial identity, these students have lived the complexity of their identity from a very young age. In Mixed, a book that will benefit educators, students, and their families, they eloquently and often passionately reveal how they experience their multiracial identity, how their parents’ race or ethnicity shaped their childhoods, and how perceptions of their race have affected their relationships.

Contents

• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I. Who Am I?
  • 1. Good Hair / Ana Sofia De Brito
  • 2. So, What Are You? / Chris Collado
  • 3. In My World 1+1 = 3 / Yuki Kondo-Shah
  • 4. A Sort of Hybrid / Allison Bates
• Part II. In-Betweenness
  • 5. Seeking to Be Whole / Shannon Joyce Prince
  • 6. The Development of a Happa / Thomas Lane
  • 7. A Little Plot of No-Man’s-Land / Ki Mae Ponniah Heussner
  • 8. Finding Blackness / Samiir Bolsten
• Part III. A Different Perspective
  • 9. Chow Mein Kampf / Taica Hsu
  • 10. A Work in Progress / Anise Vance
  • 11. We Aren’t That Different / Dean O’Brien
  • 12. Finding Zion / Lola Shannon
• About the Editors

12 Beautiful Portraits Of Black Identity Challenging the “One-Drop” Rule

PolicyMic
New York, New York
2014-02-06

Amirah Mercer

What are you?” they’d ask, head tilted and eyes squinted.

“Black,” I’d reply.

“No … but like, what else are you? I know it’s not all black.”

So went a typical interrogation by my peers as a kid. With skin lighter than even some who identify as White, and hair that streaks blond in the sun, I’ve never been offended by the question, although I have since changed my response. To the more politically correct question that I’m asked in adulthood — “Where are you from?” — I would recite my ethnic makeup, followed by a definitive, “But I identify as Black.” (If I feel like being a wise ass, I’ll simply reply with “New Jersey.”)

How do you define a racial identity? Can “blackness” be defined simply by a person’s skin tone, hair texture and facial features? Can we define it by the way someone walks or the way they talk? Can it be a product of someone’s cultural affinities, regardless of what she looks like?

These are the questions that Dr. Yaba Blay and photographer Noelle Théard encourage us to wrestle with in (1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race. Featuring the perspectives of 58 people who identify as part of the larger “racial, cultural, and social group generally referred to and known as Black,” the book combines candid memoirs and striking portraits to explore the complexities of Black identity and celebrate an individual’s right to self-identify.

(1)ne Drop’s title derives from the “one-drop rule” — a (successful) attempt to define blackness in America as one drop, or at least 1/32, of Black ancestry for the economic, social, and political purposes of distinguishing a Black person from a White person. I say “successful,” because the one-drop rule still holds cultural weight today, especially with regard to how we value light and dark skin. For this reason, Dr. Blay aims to “challenge narrow yet popular perceptions of what Blackness is and what Blackness looks like.”

“I think the context that we live in shapes the way you identify yourself, and the way others identify you,” says Dr. Blay. And therein lies the power of (1)ne Drop. From Zun Lee, a man who has always identified as Black despite being phenotypically Asian, to Sembene McFarland, a woman whose vitiligo bizarrely blurs other people’s perception of her race, to James Bartlett, a man who is mistaken for Italian, Arab or Hispanic depending on what U.S. city he’s in, (1)ne Drop narrates a story of blackness that is not bound by looks, but that is fluid and empowered by the act of self-identification.

Below are 12 portraits of participants, including their self-identification and a piece of their personal story from (1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race:…

Read the entire article and view the portraits here.

The Young White Faces of Slavery

The New York Times
2014-01-30

Mary Niall Mitchell, Joseph Tregle Professor of Early American History
University of New Orleans

For Northern readers scanning the Jan. 30, 1864, issue of Harper’s Weekly for news from the South, a large engraving on page 69 brought the war home in an unexpected way. Drawn from a photograph, it featured eight recently freed slaves from Union-occupied New Orleans. At the back of the portrait stood three adults, Wilson Chinn, Mary Johnson and Robert Whitehead. In the foreground were five children — Charles Taylor, Rebecca Huger, Rosa Downs, Augusta Broujey and Isaac White — ranging in age from 7 to 11. Their gaze was trained on the camera, but in the context of the magazine, the effect was that they all seemed to be looking at the reader.

Instead of the coarse garments worn by most enslaved people in the South, they were well dressed, the men and boys in suits and Mary Johnson and the girls in dresses and petticoats. But it was not their attire that confounded readers. Rather, the pale skin and smooth hair of four of the children — Charles, Augusta, Rebecca and Rosa — overturned a different set of Northern expectations about the appearance of people enslaved in the South: that a person’s African-American heritage would always, somehow, be visible and that only “negroes” could be slaves. The caption beneath the group, like the portrait itself, was meant to provoke the armchair viewer’s unease: “Emancipated Slaves” it proclaimed, “White and Colored.”

It was no accident that the young “white” slaves resembled the children of the magazine’s white middle-class readership, which is to say Northern children who were far removed from the threat of enslavement, or so their parents liked to think. The sponsors of the group from New Orleans anticipated precisely the kind of effect such children might have on Northern middle-class readers. As “the offspring of white fathers through two or three generations,” the Harper’s Weekly editors explained, “they are as white, as intelligent, as docile, as most of our own children.”…

…Not surprisingly, the lightest-skinned children caused the most stir among Northern editors and audiences. The two lightest-skinned girls, Rebecca and Rosa, seemed to have the greatest appeal, judging from the large number of cartes de visite that survive of them. About Rebecca, Harper’s Weekly wrote: “to all appearance, she is perfectly white. Her complexion, hair, and features show not the slightest trace of negro blood.” With their fair skin and elegant dress, Rebecca and Rosa evoked for most viewers the “fancy girls” sold in the New Orleans slave market. The fate that awaited these girls as concubines to white men was clear to most viewers at the time. Their tender youth compelled Northerners to renew their commitment to the war and rescue girls like these…

Read the entire article here.

Lecture: Evolutionary Versus Racial Medicine: Why It Matters

Wake Forest University
Broyhill Auditorium in Farrell Hall
1834 Wake Forest Road
Winston-Salem, North Carolina 27106
Thursday, 2014-02-06, 19:00 EST (Local Time)

Dr. Joseph L. Graves Jr., Associate Dean for Research, Joint School of Nanoscience & Nanoengineering, North Carolina A&T State University & UNC-Greensboro, will discuss the biological and social definitions of race. He will explain how these differ and why conflating the two has had disastrous consequences for biomedical research and clinical practice. Graves will also discuss why understanding basic evolutionary mechanisms are indispensable for comprehending human biological variation and how these in turn may be applied to addressing ongoing health disparities.

For more information, click here.

Barack Hussein Obama, or, The Name of the Father

The Scholar & Feminist Online
Barnard Center for Research on Women
Barnard College, New York, New York
Issue 7.2 (Spring 2009)

Tavia Nyong’o, Associate Professor of Performance Studies
New York University

To name, to give names that it will on occasion be forbidden to pronounce, such is the originary violence of language which consists in inscribing within a difference, in classifying, in suspending the vocative absolute. —Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology

But this is amazing, you know, the first black president. I know you’re bi-racial, but, the first black president. You’re proud to be able to say that: “The first black president.” That is, unless you screw up. And then it’s gonna be “What’s up with the half-white guy? Who voted for the mulatto?” —Wanda Sykes, White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, May 2009

I.

While many commentators have held forth on the possibility that Barack Obama might be our first “post-racial” president, and while others have subjected this notion to a perhaps deserved derision, few have been as interested in contemplating another, equally likely prospect: Obama would be, and now is, our first post-colonial president. This silence bespeaks the degree to which “empire” remains a name that is still, on most public occasions, forbidden to pronounce. And isn’t the difficulty with registering Obama’s relationship to the colonial-modern obvious, in the way that is so often the case with things conspicuous, yet hard to hold in one’s vision, like the nose on one’s face? Barack Hussein Obama has a Swahili first name, a Luo surname, and that notorious middle name. He was born in Hawai’i and raised there and in Indonesia. Only the best political image-making team money could buy could have convinced a critical percentage of the voting public to actively disattend—or remain sufficiently ignorant of—the postcoloniality of his blackness long enough to select him as their surrogate to redeem the national crimes of slavery, segregation, and anti-black racism. But now that American presidentialism has finally secured to itself the black male body that has so long served as its abject, generative foil, how is this interstice between the national and non-national to be navigated?

The “irony” of the first black president being born of a white mother and a black Kenyan father has been pointed out so often that one starts to suspect that said irony is really something else: a point de capiton, Lacan’s term for the anchoring point in discourse “by which the signifier stops the otherwise indefinite sliding of  signification.”[1]  The repeated national assertions that Obama’s mixed-race birth is an irony subject to anxious and jokey allusion is one such anchoring point for the national imaginary. That is to say, as exemplified in the joke Wanda Sykes told before the gathered press, political and celebrity corps (see epigraph), American mixed-race discourse as a point de capiton gathers up the other amorphous discourses circulating around Obama’s nativity, and halts the ceaseless spread of their signification just before they spill over onto non-national, postcolonial  terrain.[2]  Sykes’ comic repetition of the phrase “first black president” deliberately taunts any who imagine they do black people any favors by looking “beyond” race, including, presumptively, those who fix such a gaze on a transnational horizon. Equally telling is Sykes’ half-serious joke to revoke Obama’s “firstness” should he disappoint. With this declaration, Sykes evokes a powerful, historically symbolic archetype in black feminist discourse: the black woman with the public capacity to name. Is it possible, I ask in this essay, to articulate this black feminist discourse within and against a U.S. national formation, with a discourse that does justice to the postcolonial trajectory that produced an outer-national figure like Obama?…

Read the entire article here.

New Orleans After the Civil War: Race, Politics, and a New Birth of Freedom by Justin A. Nystrom (review)

Register of the Kentucky Historical Society
Volume 111, Number 4, Autumn 2013
pages 617-619
DOI: 10.1353/khs.2014.0023

Aaron Astor, Associate professor of History
Maryville College, Maryville, Tennessee

Nystrom, Justin A., New Orleans after the Civil War: Race, Politics, and a New Birth of Freedom (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).

The narrative arc between the birth of Radical Reconstruction and its final death in Jim Crow is bookended by two events in the city of New Orleans. The infamous “Riot of 1866” showcased for the nation the unwillingness of defeated Confederates to concede any political power to the black masses of the South emerging from slavery. The massacre of black Republicans at the Mechanics’ Institute would play a key role in undermining Johnsonian Reconstruction in the congressional elections of that year. Thirty years later, a mixed-race New Orleanian named Homer Plessy would challenge the Louisiana Separate Car Act, only to have the United States Supreme Court enshrine the “separate but equal” doctrine for the nation at large. But between these tragic moments of racial oppression and humiliation was a remarkably complex, multifaceted, and highly contingent struggle between myriad ethnoracial, class, regional, and partisan forces that complicated any teleological understanding of the rise and fall of Reconstruction.

Justin A. Nystrom’s lucid and colorful account of New Orleans after the Civil War explores this remarkable and ongoing battle for power and dignity among the various forces converging on the streets and in the local and state legislative halls. Nystrom’s portrait of nineteenth-century New Orleans reveals the webs of kinship that seamlessly crossed the color line and lent the city caste system a distinctive three-class character—whites, black slaves, and mixed-race Afro-Creoles. The delicate balance of New Orleans society, further complicated by sizable white ethnic immigrant populations pouring into the city in the 1850s, would explode as early as April 1862 when the Union navy captured the city with hardly a fight.

Nystrom’s study follows the interconnected lives of southern white elites like Ezekiel John Ellis and Frederick Nash Ogden, Afro-Creoles like Charles St. Albin Sauvinet and Louise Drouet, white Creoles like Arthur Toledano and Aristee Louis Tissot, white and black “carpetbaggers” like Algernon Sydney Badger, Henry Clay Warmoth, and Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, and ex-slaves like Peter Joseph. The intersection of these colorfully named characters produced an entropic political culture with self-serving factions vying for power in the city, the state, and the region. Nystrom expends considerable effort detailing epic street clashes like the “Battle of Liberty Place” in 1874, when a new Democratic White League movement briefly wrested control of the city from its Republican Customs House–based leadership. Added to the paramilitary violence were competing Mardi Gras floats with explicitly political messages that inscribed new and competing racial discourses that undermined the legitimacy of the mixed-race political order. Nystrom’s analysis reveals a tumultuous era of intraparty factionalism that simultaneously complicated revisionist accounts of postwar Republicanism, while also showcasing the difficulty that “Redeemer” factions faced in shaping a white supremacist order long after 1877.

This is an important book for understanding postwar urban politics in the largest city in the South. It is deeply researched, splendidly written, and well contextualized within the larger historiography of Reconstruction. There are some limitations to the personality and kin-based methodology, however. The two infamous bookending moments—the 1866 riot and the Plessy case—ironically receive only cursory treatment in this book. Nystrom’s central characters were mostly bystanders to these events, which meant that they appeared only in the narrative shadows despite their national significance. Another problem, of course, is the exceptionalism of New Orleans itself. For several obvious reasons, New Orleans was (and is) simply atypical as a southern locale. As such, a study of the city is going to have limited implications for understanding the national drama of Reconstruction. Still, Nystrom manages to extrapolate from the complex and contingent history of New Orleans to make the convincing case that the racial politics of the post–Civil War South was much more unpredictable and contested than even post–Foner historians have appreciated…

Cheerios revisits mixed-race family for Super Bowl spot

Today
2014-01-29

Ben Popken, Senior Staff Writer/Editor

For its first ever Super Bowl ad, Cheerios is telling racists to “stick a spoon in it.”

General Mills is portraying in its big game spot the same mixed-race family that drew so many hateful remarks on YouTube last May that the manufacturer had to disable comments on the video. The bigot backlash itself provoked a bigger backlash by Americans who supported the video. The clip ended up racking up over 5 million views.

In the new ad, a black father uses pieces of the cereal on the kitchen table to represent the members of the family and explain to his young bi-racial daughter Gracie how she’s getting a baby brother. Her white, pregnant mother looks on and makes a surprised face when the father assents after Gracie uses the cereal to bargain for a new puppy…

Read the entire article here.

Even though they lived under Jim Crow, they thrived: A Community of Free People—The Winton Triangle

Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum
1901 Fort Place, Southeast
Washington, D.C., 20020
202-633-4820
Saturday, 2014-02-01, 14:00-16:00 EST (Local Time)

Marvin T. Jones, Executive Director
Chowan Discovery Group

For over 260 years, the Winton Triangle’s mixed-race landowning community successfully navigated slavery, discrimination laws, the backlash from the Nat Turner Rebellion, the Civil War and Jim Crow. Winton Triangle native Marvin T. Jones explains in words, images and documents a very different history of the rural South.

New Orleans after the Civil War: Race, Politics, and a New Birth of Freedom

Johns Hopkins University Press
2010
344 pages
Hardback ISBN: 0801894344, 9780801894343

Justin A. Nystrom, Assistant Professor of History
Loyola University, New Orleans, Louisiana

We often think of Reconstruction as an unfinished revolution. Justin A. Nystrom’s original study of the aftermath of emancipation in New Orleans takes a different perspective, arguing that the politics of the era were less of a binary struggle over political supremacy and morality than they were about a quest for stability in a world rendered uncertain and unfamiliar by the collapse of slavery.

Commercially vibrant and racially unique before the Civil War, New Orleans after secession and following Appomattox provides an especially interesting case study in political and social adjustment. Taking a generational view and using longitudinal studies of some of the major political players of the era, Nystrom asks fundamentally new questions about life in the post–Civil War South: Who would emerge as leaders in the prostrate but economically ambitious city? How would whites who differed over secession come together over postwar policy? Where would the mixed-race middle class and newly freed slaves fit in the new order? Nystrom follows not only the period’s broad contours and occasional bloody conflicts but also the coalition building and the often surprising liaisons that formed to address these and related issues. His unusual approach breaks free from the worn stereotypes of Reconstruction to explore the uncertainty, self-doubt, and moral complexity that haunted Southerners after the war.

This probing look at a generation of New Orleanians and how they redefined a society shattered by the Civil War engages historical actors on their own terms and makes real the human dimension of life during this difficult period in American history.