Mixed Race Studies

Everyone Looks a Little Bit Asian

truthdig: drilling beneath the headlines
2010-10-27

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

Like many other Hispanics, I am a member of Generation E.A. (ethnically ambiguous). Over the years I’ve been mistaken for just about every racial or ethnic combination—from Eurasian to Afro-Irish to Arab-Native American.

This guessing game is something members of Generation E.A. are used to in discussions with acquaintances, classmates, co-workers and curious passersby. Sometimes it’s even educational. But this is never something one would expect to hear from a politician, particularly a politician addressing the Hispanic Student Union at Rancho High School in Las Vegas, Nev. Yet this is exactly what happened when Sharron Angle, the Republican candidate for Senate in Nevada, told a group of students that she did not know if the brown border crossers featured in her “Best Friend” commercial were all Hispanic because “some of you look a little more Asian to me.” She continued, “What we know, what we know about ourselves is that we are a melting pot in this country. My grandchildren are evidence of that. I’m evidence of that. I’ve been called the first Asian legislator in our Nevada State Assembly.”…

…But the most recent confusing remarks about race and ethnicity are different because they serve a unique purpose. They provide an opportunity to open dialogue in a campaign season that has been more focused on economics than on ethnicity. Could it be that the two are connected?

“The interesting thing about Angle’s version of racial and ethnic talk is that it is more focused on Hispanic issues than on the traditional black-white paradigm,” according to professor Ulli K. Ryder of Brown University’s Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America. “What’s happening here is that Hispanics and Asians are being compared and confused because they both equal foreign in the U.S. racial imagination.” So, Angle is saying that these two foreign groups can melt and look alike, but that they will never look like Americans...

Read the entire article here.

Thinking and living in, out, and beyond the box: Exploring Racial and Cultural Complexity in Identity among Adoptive Multiracial Families and Persons

Racial Identity and Cultural Factors in Treatment, Research, and Policy
The Ninth Annual Diversity Challenge
Institute for the Study and Promotion of Race and Culture
Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts
2009-10-23 through 2009-10-24

Gina Miranda Samuels, Associate Professor
School of Social Service Administration
University of Chicago

Under the direction of Dr. Janet E. Helms, the Institute for the Study and Promotion of Race and Culture (ISPRC) sponsored its 9th annual Diversity Challenge at Boston College October 23-24, 2009. This year’s focus was the integration of principles of racial identity and cultural theories in treatment, research, education, and policy. The conference drew over 300 participants and hosted more than 80 different sessions allowing scholars, practitioners, educators, community activists and policy makers a forum to extend the dialogue to address some of the unanswered questions from very different perspectives.

Read Dr. Samuel’s presentation here.

Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference

DePaul University, Lincoln Park Campus
DePaul University Student Center
2250 N. Sheffield
Chicago, Illinois USA 60614
2010-11-05 through 2010-11-06

Sponsored by DePaul University Asian American Studies and Latin American and Latino Studies and co-sponsored by the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University and the MAVIN Foundation.

“Emerging Paradigms in Critical Mixed Race Studies,” the first annual Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference, will be held at DePaul University in Chicago on November 5-6, 2010.

The CMRS conference brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines nationwide. Recognizing that the diverse disciplines that have nurtured Mixed Race Studies have reached a watershed moment, the 2010 CMRS conference is devoted to the general theme “Emerging Paradigms in Critical Mixed Race Studies.”

Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) is the transracial, transdisciplinary, and transnational critical analysis of the institutionalization of social, cultural, and political orders based on dominant conceptions of race. CMRS emphasizes the mutability of race and the porosity of racial boundaries in order to critique processes of racialization and social stratification based on race. CMRS addresses local and global systemic injustices rooted in systems of racialization.

Fanshen Cox, Tiffany Jones, and myself will participate in a Greg Carter (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee) moderated round-table discussion titled “Exploring the Mixed Experience in New Media” on 2010-11-05 from 10:15 to 12:15 CDT at the conference.

View the finalized schedule here.

Organizers:

Wei Ming Dariotis, Assistant Professor Asian American Studies
San Francisco State University, IPride Board
dariotis@sfsu.edu

Camilla Fojas, Associate Professor and Chair
Latin American and Latino Studies
DePaul University

Laura Kina, Associate Professor Art, Media and Design and Director Asian American Studies
DePaul University

The Measure of America: How a rebel anthropologist waged war on racism

The New Yorker
2004-03-08
18 pages

Claudia Roth Peierpont

Along with the Ferris wheel, the hamburger, Cracker Jack, Aunt Jemima, the zipper, Juicy Fruit, and the vertical file, the word “anthropology” was introduced to a vast number of Americans at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Marking the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America-and opening just a little late, in May, 1893, owing to the amount of construction required to turn a marshy wasteland on Lake Michigan into a neoclassical “White City,” as the fair was called-the six-month celebration put on display all that the nation had achieved and still hoped to become. Here proud Americans could view the table on which the Declaration of Independence had been signed, the manuscript of Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural address, and two full-scale replicas of the Liberty Bell-one executed entirely in grain, the other in oranges. As for the future, the fair was ablaze with work-reducing inventions, from the electric kitchen to the electric chair. But the most important promise of an American utopia was the extraordinary assembly of peoples. American Indians and native Africans, Germans, Egyptians, and Labrador Eskimos were just a few of those invited to take part in nearly a hundred “living exhibits”-whole villages were imported and exactingly rebuilt-with the purpose of expanding American minds: “broadening, opening, lighting up dark corners,” a contemporary magazine expounded, “bringing them in sympathy with their fellow men.”

No one was more devoted to this goal than a young anthropologist named Franz Boas, who had emigrated from Germany ten years before, staunch in the belief that America was “politically an ideal country.” Enthralled by the collections of the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, he had made his field of study the Indians of the Northwest Coast-the artistically accomplished Haida, Kwakiutl, and Bella Coola tribes-and, in the days leading up to the fair’s triumphal opening, he was busy supplying the final timbers for a pair of houses in which a Kwakiutl group would live, on the bank of a pond outside a small pavilion marked “Anthropology.” Inside was a spectacular array of masks and decorated tools, which Boas had spent two years assembling. His expectations for impressing visitors derived less from the works’ richly painted surfaces, however, than from their intellectual and imaginative content-what he described as the “wealth of thought” that was clearly visible if only people learned to look. The Indians had been asked to perform the rituals that would enable viewers to perceive this wealth, and had been assured that at the fair they would receive the respect that was their due, even if it had been no part of their experience in the old, demonstrably un-utopian New World.

In fact, the wretched history of Indian life in nineteenth-century America had long been justified by the claims of anthropology, a field that originated during debates over slavery and the right of settlers to seize the natives’ lands, and patriotically embraced such practices as part of the natural racial order. The chief means of establishing the racial order was to measure skulls-both the conveniently empty craniums acquired through a thriving graveyard market and the more resistant living models. Anthropologists presented their findings as objective science: elaborate measuring techniques yielded columns of figures that inevitably placed white intelligence at the top of the scale, red and yellow capacities farther down, and blacks at the wholly uncivilizable bottom. It was no coincidence that this science faithfully mirrored popular opinion: published studies were so open in their manipulation of evidence-a higher proportion of male skulls, for example, were employed when larger dimensions were desired-that they appear to have been not conscious attempts at deception but unwitting examples of delusion.

The effects of such studies, however, were painfully real. At mid-century, the anthropologist Samuel Morton asserted that whites and Negroes belonged to different species, while another anthropologist, Josiah Nott, popularized the view that slavery saved Negroes from reverting to their original barbaric state: these authoritative voices resounded in the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, of 1857, in which Chief Justice Roger Taney resolved that “the Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.” After Emancipation, theories of separate racial evolutions fuelled the case for black disenfranchisement, right up to the passing of the first Jim Crow laws, around the time of the Chicago fair…

Read the entire article here.

Passing For Horror: Race, Fear, and Elia Kazan’s “Pinky”

Genders: Presenting Innovative Work in the Arts, Humanities and Social Theories
Issue 40 (2004)

Miriam J. Petty, Assistant Professor of Visual and Performing Arts
Rutgers University, Newark

Film genres routinely mix and evolve over time in ways that change our expectations of them, and change the way that we as audiences read and receive them. At times, however, the mixing of genres can function to focus our attention on certain film texts, and certain critical moments within these texts. While work on genre by scholars such as Thomas Schatz, Charles Maland, and Steve Neale suggests that social problem films are “too various in their narratives and thematic characteristics to warrant the label ‘genre’” (Maland 307), John Hill, Peter Roffman, and Jim Purdy observe the way that social problem films typically employ “general conventions, especially those of narrative and realism” (Roffman, Purdy 222). In this essay, I use the 1949 Hollywood film Pinky to suggest the ways in which social problem films dealing with the phenomenon of racial “passing” (instances in which light-skinned black characters “pretend” to be whites) use themes and motifs commonly found in horror films.

A post-World War II offering from the Fox studio, Pinky represents part of what Christopher Jones calls the “culmination of the trend toward black realism in the American cinema of the forties” (110) in 1949. As Jones observes, this year saw the release of films like Lost Boundaries (also a cinematic account of a “black-as-white” passing story), Stanley Kramer’s post-war drama Home of the Brave, and the film adaptation of William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust. Pinky’s place as the most popular and critically acclaimed of these films dealing substantially with “blacks at home in the United States, enduring the problems of civilian life” (Jones 110-111) suggests the significance of examining the currents of fear and repression underlying its presentation of racial realities.

In his noted essay “Ideology, Genre, Auteur,” Robin Wood posits that “in the classical Hollywood cinema motifs cross repeatedly from genre to genre,” and continues by asserting that genres “represent different strategies for dealing with the same ideological tensions” (671). As one of Hollywood’s social problem films on the theme of race, Pinky indeed addresses the profound and lasting ideological tension created by the social construct of race, the taboo of interracial relationships and the children of such relations. Pinky also casts a white actress as a “mulatto” character light-skinned enough to “pass for white,” further complicating the film’s ideological function by making “white as black” passing acceptable, while simultaneously problematizing “black as white passing,” a paradox I will discuss more fully later.

Throughout this essay, I use the word “mulatto” or the phrase “mulatto figure” to reflect the function that such characters perform—one which disrupts the boundaries of traditional racial stratifications between blacks and whites. In fact, my analysis of Pinky frequently conflates the terms “black” and “mulatto” or “mixed-race,” identities and experiences that are not necessarily one in the same. Pinky itself conflates these terms in its storyline. What is more, historically, Hollywood films that feature the mulatto figure do not attend to such differences, but at once exploit the sensationalism in the issue of passing and use the mulatto as a generic cipher for “the race problem.” Pinky pays more attention to questions of intraracial color difference than most, but still limits Pinky’s experience to a series of problems of race that subside when she accedes to the status quo of segregation. The specificity of her ancestry only serves to give her story an unusual “angle.”…

Read the entire article here.

Picturizing Race: Hollywood’s Censorship of Miscegenation and Production of Racial Visibility through “Imitation of Life”

Genders: Presenting Innovative Work in the Arts, Humanities and Social Theories
Issue 27 (1998)

Susan Courtney, Associate Professor of English and Film Studies
University of South Carolina

“A Case Very Near the Borderline”

Hollywood’s Production Code explicitly banned “miscegenation” from the American screen for nearly thirty years. The files of the Production Code Administration (PCA) which document the interpretation of that ban, however, demonstrate the PCA censors’ utter confusion as to the meaning of the miscegenation clause they were charged to enforce. That confusion is nowhere more apparent than in the PCA’s file on Imitation of Life (1934), a project the PCA originally rejected on the grounds that it “violate[d] the Code clause covering miscegenation, in spirit, if not in fact.” What is strikingly odd about the PCA’s original ruling in this case, however, is that while the clause of the Code that forbade miscegenation defined it as a “sex relationship between the white and black races,” no such “sex relationship” was “in fact” at issue in Imitation of Life. Indeed, like Fannie Hurst’s best-selling novel on which the script was based, the melodrama was far more concerned with relationships among black and white women than with any heterosexual relationships. Specifically, the film’s plot follows the rise to fortune of a white widow on the profits of her black maid’s pancake recipe, and is primarily centered around the relationships among these two single mothers, Bea Pullman and Delilah, and their respective daughters, Jessie and Peola. While the film shows us no heterosexual “sex relationship” between whites and blacks, the considerable extent to which Bea and Delilah function as a couple might invite us to read the relationship between these women as a “sex relationship” of its own. Delilah cooks, cleans and rears Bea’s child during the day and rubs her feet at night—the latter prompting Bea to sigh with pleasure while Delilah lectures her about the joys of passion Bea has yet to find with a man: “You need some loving honey child!” Yet as significant as Bea and Delilah’s relationship is to an understanding of the film, a reading of it as “miscegenation” seems to have been well beyond the sensibilities of the PCA censors who, in my experience, never considered “sex relationship” in anything but the most decidedly heterosexual of terms. Nevertheless, in a letter to Universal that supported (without clarifying) PCA Director Joe Breen’s nebulous interpretation of miscegenation, Will Hays, Breen’s boss, expressed the PCA’s “considerable worry” on the subject and urged the studio to drop the project, lest it “develop into a case very near the borderline.”…

Read the entire article here.

Race-mixing and science in the United States

Endeavour
Volume 27, Number 4 (December 2003)
pages 166-170
DOI: 10.1016/j.endeavour.2003.08.007

Paul Farber, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History
Oregon State University

Scientific racism was widely used as a justification to oppose race-mixing in the United States. Historians have justly criticized this abuse of science, but have overlooked some of the important ways in which science was used in the 1930s and 1940s to overturn scientific racism and opposition to race-mixing. Of particular importance was the cultural anthropology of Franz Boas and the evolutionary biology of Theodosius Dobzhansky, which supplied arguments against racism and fundamentally altered the scientific understanding of race.

The history of scientific racism provides a cautionary tale about the abuse of science by scientists and policy makers, and the ease with which cultural assumptions penetrate our picture of nature. It, therefore, serves as a paradigm case of the relationship of scientific ideas to their social context. Historians have generally castigated the scientists who used and abused their science to justify racist social policy. It would be a mistake, however, if in the discussion of scientific racism we lost sight of the role that science itself played in transforming modern notions of race and in combating racism. Although scholars have generated a vast and complex historical literature on racism and the use of science to legitimate it, they have not paid as much attention to the positive role science played. The history of ideas on race-mixing in the US provides a convenient lens through which to focus on some of the central ideas concerning race and racism, and it is a story that can help make clearer the role science had in influencing the discussion.

A young couple in the 1960s most likely would not have consulted a biology book to help decide if their different racial backgrounds posed an obstacle to getting married and raising a mixed-race family. But, this is not to say that what went for scientific opinion would have been irrelevant to their decision. In many subtle, and some not-so subtle, ways, scientific judgements influence individual choice, social acceptance and legal constraints. Before 1967, 17 states had anti-miscegenation laws that prohibited marriages involving individuals of certain different races, and an extensive body of literature justified those laws by reference to science. In the three decades before the 1967 US Supreme Court ruled in Loving versus Virginia that such laws were unconstitutional, a shift in thinking occurred in the US concerning inter-racial marriage. In part, that shift reflected a new social landscape altered by World War II, the Civil Rights Movement and the 1960s cultural upheaval. But science also played an important, if generally unrecognized, role in that transformation. In particular the work done in anthropology by Franz Boas and his students, and by Theodosius Dobzhansky and others in formulating the modern theory of evolution were central to the contributions made by scientists to the understanding of race and race-mixing…

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial Identity Week at Brown University

Multiracial Identity Week
Brown Univeristy
2010-10-24 through 2010-10-31

Featured Event: Convocation with Rebecca Walker

Rebecca Walker, one of Time magazine’s 50 most influential leaders of her generation, will give the opening address for the Third World Center’s Multiracial Identity Week. The author of three anthologies and two memoirs, including Black, White, and Jewish: An Autobiography of a Shifting Self, Walker’s work offers new approaches to ideas about race, class, culture, and the evolution of the human family. Following the address, Walker will sign copies of her books. This event takes place at 7 p.m. in the Salomon Center for Learning, De Ciccio Family Auditorium.

For more information, click here.

Letter to the Editor: Multi-ethnic clubs benefit community

Daily Bruin
University of California, Los Angeles
2010-10-18

Thomas Lopez, Alumnus
University of California, Berkeley

What’s in a name?

Answering that question can be difficult for some multiracial students. So often throughout history, names have been given for us, many of them pejorative, that it becomes difficult for multiracial people to pick just one. I suppose it’s no wonder, then, that when we choose to name ourselves, or the organizations we form, that someone will take an affront to it.

Salim Zymet, in his article “UCLA needs more than just one multiethnic club” (Oct. 12), seems to be simultaneously lamenting the dearth of multiethnic/multiracial organizations as well as the proliferation of others. It is unclear what organizations he may be a member of, if any, although he does make it clear that he “would never fathom joining the Hapa Club because of the word’s association to Asian heritage.”

I have been active in the multiracial community for almost 20 years in various organizations. This community includes multiracial and multiethnic people, interracial couples and trans-racially adoptive families. I believe that the more awareness we raise about the multiracial community, the better society may become.

I may not have the solution to Mr. Zymet’s dilemma, but I can offer up this story. During the early ’90s I was an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley. I joined a student group there called the Multicultural Interracial Students Coalition (MISC) or “miscellaneous” for short. A little tongue-in-cheek, I know, but better than the original name Students of Interracial Descent…

Read the entire letter here.

Video From Angle Event Reopens Subject of Race

New York Times
2010-10-19

Susan Saulny, National Correspondent

Louie Gong, a 36-year-old Seattle resident who is a mix of American Indian, white and Chinese, is often mistaken for Latino.

“Most people don’t look at me and say ‘Chinese,’ ” he said. “Then I tell them what my heritage is, and they argue with me, saying, ‘No, you look Hispanic.’ That’s offensive on a whole other level—it’s like their sensibility of racial aesthetics trumps my 36 years of life experience, and the fact that my last name is Gong.” …

…Further complicating the role of race is that a growing number of Americans are identifying themselves as racial mixtures that can be difficult to categorize based on looks alone. Beyond that, some members of minorities are pushing back against anyone who wants to tell them what race they are, then stereotype them, whether Asian or Latino or black or some combination.

“We are more complex than our phenotype,” said Mr. Gong, the past president of Mavin, an advocacy group for mixed-race families, and the co-founder of the Mixed Race Heritage Center, an information clearinghouse. “People have the right to self-identify in this country, on the census or in personal actions.”…

Read the entire article here.