Mixed Race Studies

How Is Biracialism Changing America – And The Jewish community?

RepairLabs: Resources and strategies for volunteer engagement and Jewish Service-Learning
2012-02-10

Diane Tobin, President
Institute for Jewish & Community Research

As the parent of a Black Jewish child, I want my son to feel at home in the Jewish community. It seems to me that it is in our self interest to welcome everyone with open arms, yet it occurs to me that we may need to be sensitive to what Alvin Toffler described in the 70’s as “Future Shock”—the stress and disorientation of too much change in too short a time. I wonder how much time is too short? And, what role does race and ethnicity play in being Jewish in America.
 
Jews are part of American life and are affected by social trends. Taboos around interracial and LGBT unions are diminishing, transracial adoption is increasing, and people see being Jewish as one of many identities…

Read the entire article here.

Welcome! Please Check Your Identity at the Door

RJ.org: News & Views of Reform Jews
2012-06-27

Lacey Schwartz, National Outreach/New York Regional Director
Be’chol Lashon

I just got off the phone with a friend of mine who was planning on enrolling her daughter in a local Hebrew school, a decision she is now reconsidering. Why? After meeting with the school’s principal and expressing her concerns about the unique challenges of race in this setting, the principal smiled and earnestly told her not to worry, “We have had African-American kids before. We are truly a colorblind school.” A nice gesture, but most thoughtful people know color blindness to be negative—and not just for traffic lights and fashion choices. Though well intentioned, dismissing students’ racial identities does not signify acceptance. Yet, in the world of synagogues and Jewish camps, color blindness is often touted as plus.
 
I can appreciate the desire for racial neutrality that motivates people who claim not to see race. To them, it speaks to a vision of a world where the color of one’s skin does not matter. But, as a Black Jewish woman in America, I know this to be wishful thinking. Even if I wanted to discard my racial identity, I can’t. Moreover, I don’t want—nor should I have to—leave a part of my identity at the door when I walk into a JCC or synagogue. I want to be fully present. For me, Jewish peoplehood means including race in the conversation, not pretending it doesn’t exist…

Read the entire article here.

“Mixed-Race in the Bible (“Chino-Chicano” Part II)

Jesus for Revolutionaries: A Blog About Race, Social Justice, and Christianity
2013-01-09

Robert Chao Romero, Associate Professor of Chicana/o Studies and Asian American Studies
University of California, Los Angeles

As an expression of my multiracial struggles, I used to wrestle a lot with the issue of marriage. I used to say to myself: “If I marry someone who’s Mexican, then my kids will be 75% Mexican. They’ll have a solidified racial identity. If I marry someone who is Chinese, then they’ll be 75% Chinese, probably look mostly Asian, and then they might have some identity problems. If I marry someone who’s Anglo, then my kids will probably look Latino, even though they’ll be only 25% Mexican. But they’ll have the last name Romero, so they’ll probably just pass as Latino.” I can’t believe I used to think this way!

In my heart I knew that this was not the right way to be thinking about marriage. Every time I went down this path of reasoning I would end up deeply frustrated, practically to the point of tears. This is led me, one day in law school to cry out to God and say, “God, please help me to understand the topic of race from Your perspective!” The answer to that prayer is what I hope to share with you in the next several blog posts.

After many years of wrestling with my mixed race identity, I feel that God has given me peace, healing, and a deep security in my unique identity. I have discovered a biblically-grounded understanding of race and ethnicity which allows me to be a whole-human being, and which allows me to understand, celebrate, and accept all of who I am. Thank You God. I hope that I might be able to share this understanding with you now, and that what I share might help bring healing to many individuals who have gone through, or are going through, the same struggles I have experienced as a mixed race individual…

Read the entire article here.

Family of Freedom: Presidents and African Americans in the White House

Paradigm Publishers
February 2011
288 pages
6″ x 9″
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-59451-833-1
EBook ISBN: 978-1-61205-000-3

Kenneth T. Walsh

This book examines the intertwined relationships between the presidents and the African Americans who have been an integral part of the White House since the beginning of the Republic. The book discusses the racial attitudes and policies of the presidents and shows how African Americans helped to shape those attitudes and policies over the years. The analysis starts with the early presidents who had slaves and tells the compelling stories of their interactions, with an emphasis on how these slaves dealt with bondage in the supposed citadel of American freedom and independence. The book moves through the era of Abraham Lincoln, whose views on emancipation were greatly influenced by the African Americans around him, especially by White House seamstress Elizabeth Keckley and valet William Slade. The book covers the Jim Crow era and proceeds through the political and cultural breakthroughs on civil rights accomplished by Lyndon Johnson in partnership with the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. The book ends with an insightful analysis of the rise, election, and administration of Barack Obama, the first African American president, including an exclusive interview with Obama.

Census Bureau Names Eric Hamako to National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic and Other Populations

United States Census Bureau
News Release
CB12-R.33
2012-10-12

The U.S. Census Bureau announced today the establishment of the National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic and Other Populations and has named Eric Hamako as a member of the committee.
 
The National Advisory Committee will advise the Census Bureau on a wide range of variables that affect the cost, accuracy and implementation of the Census Bureau“s programs and surveys, including the once-a-decade census. The committee, which is comprised of 32 members from multiple disciplines, will advise the Census Bureau on topics such as housing, children, youth, poverty, privacy, race and ethnicity, as well as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and other populations…

…Eric Hamako has been involved in mixed-race student and community organizing since 2000. Currently completing his doctorate in social justice education at the University of Massachusetts, Hamako studies how community education can support mixed-race people’s political movements and ways to incorporate stronger anti-racist frameworks into those educational efforts. Hamako has taught undergraduate and graduate courses at Stanford University, the University of Massachusetts, Ithaca College, and the Smith College School for Social Work. As an independent trainer and consultant, Hamako has presented on multiraciality and other social justice issues to universities, professional associations and community organizations across the United States.

Read the entire press release here.

Hall of Fame Has Always Made Room for Infamy

The New York Times
2013-01-08

Bill Pennington

The Baseball Hall of Fame, the most august fraternity of its kind in American sports, unveils its latest induction class Wednesday. For the first time this year, balloters must weigh the fate of two eminent stars, Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, who are also the most celebrated poster boys for the game’s disgraced steroid era.

Players linked to steroid use have been resoundingly rejected by Hall of Fame voters in recent years, shunned as synthetically enhanced frauds. But drawing an integrity line in the sand is a tenuous stance at a Hall of Fame with a membership that already includes multiple virulent racists, drunks, cheats, brawlers, drug users and at least one acknowledged sex addict.

In the spirit of Groucho Marx, who refused to join any club that would have him as a member, would not baseball’s 77-year-old gallery of rogues be the perfect fit for Bonds and Clemens?

Robert W. Cohen, who wrote the 2009 book “Baseball Hall of Fame — or Hall of Shame?”, readily recalled a catalog of reprehensible acts by Hall of Fame inductees.

“Baseball has always had some form of hypocrisy when it comes to its exalted heroes,” he said. “In theory, when it comes to these kinds of votes, it’s true that character should matter, but once you’ve already let in Ty Cobb, how can you exclude anyone else?”…

…“Cap Anson helped make sure baseball’s color line was established in the 1880s,” Thorn said of the Chicago Cubs first baseman and manager who was enshrined in the Hall of Fame the year it opened in Cooperstown, N.Y., in 1939. “He was relentless in that cause.”

Anson repeatedly refused to take the field if the opposing roster included black players. Anson had plenty of co-conspirators. The Chicago White Sox owner Charles Comiskey, also a member of the Hall of Fame class of 1939, “outed” the African-American infielder Charlie Grant, who was posing as a Cherokee on the preseason exhibition roster of the Baltimore Orioles team led by John McGraw (Hall of Fame class of 1937).

Overseeing baseball’s segregationist policy in three decades was Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis (Hall of Fame class of 1944). When Landis died in 1944, an initiative was begun to break the color barrier, an effort that culminated with Jackie Robinson’s Brooklyn Dodgers debut in the spring of 1947…

Read the entire article here.

Tragic No More: Mixed Race Women and the Nexus of Sex and Celebrity

University of Massachusetts Press
December 2012
176 pages
6 x9; 6 illustrations
ISBN (paper): 978-1-55849-985-0
ISBN (cloth): 978-1-55849-984-3

Caroline A. Streeter, Associate Professor of English
University of California, Los Angeles

A timely exploration of gender and mixed race in American culture

This book examines popular representations of biracial women of black and white descent in the United States, focusing on novels, television, music, and film. Although the emphasis is on the 1990s, the historical arc of the study begins in the 1930s. Caroline A. Streeter explores the encounter between what she sees as two dominant narratives that frame the perception of mixed race in America. The first is based on the long-standing historical experience of white supremacy and black subjugation. The second is more recent and involves the post–Civil Rights expansion of interracial marriage and mixed race identities. Streeter analyzes the collision of these two narratives, the cultural anxieties they have triggered, and the role of black/white women in the simultaneous creation and undoing of racial categories—a charged, ambiguous cycle in American culture.

Streeter’s subjects include concert pianist Philippa Schuyler, Dorothy West’s novel The Wedding (in print and on screen), Danzy Senna’s novels Caucasia and Symptomatic, and celebrity performing artists Mariah Carey, Alicia Keys, and Halle Berry. She opens with a chapter that examines the layered media response to Essie Mae Washington-Williams, Senator Strom Thurmond’s biracial daughter. Throughout the book, Streeter engages the work of feminist critics and others who have written on interracial sexuality and marriage, biracial identity, the multiracial movement, and mixed race in cultural studies.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Essie Mae Washington-Williams’s Secrets and Strom Thurmond’s Lies
• 2. The Wedding’s Black/White Women in Prime Time
• 3. Sex and Femininity in Danzy Senna’s Novels
• 4. Faking the Funk? Mariah Carey, Alicia Keys, and the Politics of Passing
• 5. From Tragedy to Triumph: Dorothy Dandridge, Halle Berry, and the Search for a Black Screen Goddess
• 6. High (Mulatto) Hopes: The Rise and Fall of Philippa Schuyler
• Afterword
• Notes
• Index

Being Mixed and Black: The Socialization of Mixed-Race Identity

University of Chicago
2012-12-13
92 pages

Brett R. Coleman

Submitted as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Psychology in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Chicago, 2012

This study examined the relationship between parental racial-ethnic socialization and racial-ethnic identity development from the perspective of biracial young adults. Despite the recent advances in theory regarding mixed-race identity development, few studies have examined how parents’ attitudes about race and ethnicity influence the identities of mixed-race youth. Similarly, racial-ethnic socialization theory is largely based on the assumption that individuals identify with single racial-ethnic groups that are discrete and mutually exclusive. Participants were eight biracial young adults with one Black and one White parent. Through semi-structured, in-depth interviews, participants revealed that the socialization of their racial-ethnic identities involved balancing discrete and overlapping, mixed and Black identities. The relationship between socialization and identity development was subject to various ecological influences associated with living in a racialized society in which races are historically thought to be discrete groups with impermeable boundaries. Results are discussed in relation to ecological models of mixed-race identity development.

Read the entire thesis here.

“What Are You?”: Racial Ambiguity and the Social Construction of Race in the U.S.

University of North Texas
May 2012
165 pages

Starita Smith

Dissertation Prepared for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

This dissertation is a qualitative study of racially ambiguous people and their life experiences. Racially ambiguous people are individuals who are frequently misidentified racially by others because they do not resemble the phenotype associated with the racial group to which they belong or because they belong to racial/ethnic groups originating in different parts of the world that resemble each other. The racial/ethnic population of the United States is constantly changing because of variations in the birth rates among the racial/ethnic groups that comprise those populations and immigration from around the world. Although much research has been done that documents the existence of racial/ethnic mixing in the history of the United States and the world, this multiracial history is seldom acknowledged in the social, work, and other spheres of interaction among people in the U.S., instead a racialized system based on the perception of individuals as mono-racial thus easily identified through (skin tone, hair texture, facial features, etc.). This is research was done using life experience interviews with 24 racially ambiguous individuals to determine how race/ethnicity has affected their lives and how they negotiate the minefield of race.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES
• CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION
  • Research Questions
• CHAPTER 2 REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE
  • Changing Definitions of Race
  • Race under European Domination
  • The One-Drop Rule or Hypo-Descent
  • Color Stratification among Blacks
  • Passing as White
  • Challenge to the One-Drop Rule
  • Biracial Identity
  • Racial Classifications have Porous Borders
  • Race as a Sorting Mechanism
  • Tri-Racial Isolate Groups
  • The Case of the Mississippi Choctaw Rejected
  • Racial Misclassification and Native Americans
  • Mixed Race Individuals and Kinship Networks
  • Racial Fusion and the Hispanics
  • The U.S. Census and the Social Construction of Race
• CHAPTER 3 THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES
  • Racial Formation Theory
  • Assimilation Theory
  • The Latin Americanization Thesis
  • Theoretical Perspectives: Discussion
• CHAPTER 4 METHODS
  • Recruitment
  • Data-Gathering Instruments
  • Interview Locations
  • The Interviewees
  • The Interview Script
  • Reflexivity
• CHAPTER 5 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF RACE ENDURES IN A “COLORBLIND SOCIETY”
  • Race in Work and School
  • Family life
  • Romantic and Spousal Relationships
• CHAPTER 6 CONSTANT OBJECTIFICATION
  • Objectification of Native Americans
  • Being Constantly Doubted
• CHAPTER 7 STUBBORN STEREOTYPES
• CHAPTER 8 DEVELOPING AN ADULT CORE RACIAL IDENTITY
  • “We’re All the Same in God’s Eyes, Then How Come I Don’t Look Like You?”
  • Black is Bad
  • Making up Your own Racial Identity
• CHAPTER 9 NAVIGATING THE RACIAL LANDSCAPE: THE MULTIFOCAL RACIAL IDENTITY
  • Pride in Minority Identity
  • Learning to be Resilient
  • Being Flexible under Globalization
• CHAPTER 10 HURTFUL LIVES
• CHAPTER 11 THEORY REVISITED
• CHAPTER 12 CONCLUSION
• APPENDIX A CONSENT FORM
• APPENDIX B INTERVIEWEE PHOTO INSTRUMENT
• REFERENCE LIST

LIST OF TABLES

1. Interviewee Demographic Data
2. Thematic Codingg
3. Sample of Thematic Coding for Indira

LIST OF FIGURES

1. Racialized society
2. Objectification of racially ambiguous people
3. Adult core racial identity

Read the entire dissertation here.

A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic (review)

Civil War History
Volume 52, Number 2, June 2006
pages 180-182
DOI: 10.1353/cwh.2006.0034

Michael A. Morrison, Associate Professor of History
Purdue University

A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic. By Bruce Dain. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. Pp. 321.)