Mixed Race Studies

The New Multiracial Student: Where Do We Start?

The Vermont Connection
Volume 31 (2010)
pages 128-135

Jackie Hyman
University of Vermont

Jackie Hyman earned her Bachelor of Arts from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2008, and is anticipating her graduation from HESA in 2010. Having gone through periods of doubt and confusion throughout her graduate career in identifying as Biracial, she is now more confident than ever in her racial identity. Because of her experiences at University of Maryland and University of Vermont, she has committed herself to creating a Multiracial student group at UVM, as well as creating potential spaces for Multiracial students at her next institution, wherever that may be. Without a doubt, a passion has been ignited that will guide her research and involvement on college campuses for years to come.

In 2004, one in 40 persons in the United States self-identified as Multiracial. By the year 2050, it is projected that as many as one in five Americans will claim a Multiracial background, and in turn, a Multiracial or Biracial identity (Lee & Bean, 2004). With racial lines becoming more blurred, it is increasingly important for practitioners in higher education to address the issues surrounding identity development in Multiracial college students. By looking at a personal narrative of a Biracial woman, recent studies of Multiracial identity development, and the daily challenges that Multiracial and Biracial students face concerning their identity, student affairs practitioners can begin to create more inclusive spaces for this growing population of students.

Read the entire article here.

“What is black, white and yellow all over?”: An analysis of the racial experiences of people of Asian/white and Asian/black heritage

University of Southern California
May 2007
208 pages

Bruce Calvin Hoskins

Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Southern California In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy (Sociology)

It has been argued that the increase of people of multiracial heritage in our society represents the fulfillment of the assimilation process. People of Asian/white and Asian/black heritage have been singled out in multiple works as posing a direct challenge to how race is understood in the United States and that this group’s assertion of their multiracial identity will ultimately lead to a raceless society (Williams-Leon and Nakashima 2001; Root 1996; Hollinger 1995; Root 1992). Therefore, this research uses in-depth interviews of thirty-two (32) people of Asian/white and Asian/black heritage and six (6) sets of interracial Asian and white and Asian and black parents to critically analyze to what degree their lived experiences are consistent with a society that has assimilated people of different racial categories.

In order to determine levels of assimilation for these groups, this research will use a racial formations framework to examine how racial categories are constructed through “racial logic” and how race is given meaning within the lives of multiracial people and through parents of multiracial children. This will be done by showing situations where society will ascribe a race onto a person of multiracial heritage, how the person of multiracial heritage will use their “biology” to support or refute these claims, and how that same multiracial person might develop a racial identity that may or may not be consistent with how they look or their actual racial heritage.

Demonstrating how race is socially constructed will reveal how being mixed with white is fundamentally different than being mixed with black. This will be shown by demonstrating that Asian/white people have more identity options than Asian/black people, how families socially enforce to their children which races are considered acceptable marriage partners, and how society uses a universal anti-black context to discriminate against people of Asian/black heritage.

Table of Contents

• Dedication
• Abstract
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2
  • Literature Review
  • Chapter Endnotes
• Chapter 3
  • Methodology
  • Chapter Endnotes
• Chapter 4: “What Are You?”
  • How Multiracial People Construct an Internal Racial Identity
  • Chapter Endnotes
• Chapter 5: “What are you?” Part II
  • The creation of external and expressed racial identity
• Chapter 6: “Can’t We All Just Get Along?”
  • The External Context of Racial Identity Formation
• Chapter 7: All in the Family
  • Learning Racial Hierarchy from the Ones You Love
  • Chapter Endnotes
• Chapter 8: Conclusions
  • From the Beginning to the End then Back to the Beginning
• Bibliography
• Appendices
  • Appendix A: Questions for Multiracial Person
  • Appendix B: Questions for Interracial Parents

Read the entire dissertation here.

 Mixed Dreams: A Symposium on Multiracial Identities in the United States

2010-10-15 through 2010-10-20
Oberlin College
Oberlin, Ohio

At its root, Mixed Dreams: A Symposium on Multiracial Identities in the U.S. aims to create a space to discuss and interrogate historical and contemporary perspectives on multiraciality and the “multiracial experiences” of people identifying as bi-racial, mixed, and/or transracial/transnational adoptees in the United States. Through public lectures and panels it will explore current trends and dilemmas in understanding multiraciality historically, socially and politically as well as the growing narratives and spaces being created to express these “mixed” subjectivities. Featured guests will be Paul Spickard, Eric Hamako, Debra Yepa-Pappan, Alicia Arrizón and a video conference discussion with G.Reginald Daniel.

For more information, click here.

UCLA needs more than just one multiethnic club

Daily Bruin
University of California, Los Angeles
2010-10-11

Salim Zymet

Only one student group promoting multiracialism is not enough for a campus as diverse as ours

Where are you from?

Answering that question can be difficult for some multiracial students. Perhaps you’re inclined to believe that despite your ethnic background, you’re simply an American, born and raised. Maybe you introduce yourself with all of your ethnic background included. Uncertainty may still plague your ethnic and cultural identity.

Enter the Hapa Club at UCLA. Hapa is a Hawaiian word traditionally meaning someone of mixed Asian or Pacific Islander descent – but the club aims to be a place where all multiracial students can come together. As the only club which represents all mixed ethnic backgrounds, it has large shoes to fill, even more so when you take into account that there are over 70 clubs, fraternities and sororities on campus devoted to various Asian ethnicities. I don’t take issue with the existence of these clubs, merely the staggering volume of them…

…If we are to be part of a truly diverse campus, more multiracial groups are going to have to be part of the solution…

…As an American of Indian, Syrian and Polish descent, I hope that next year’s incoming mixed students can be greeted by a more diverse group of ethnic clubs. As it stands now, if they want to join a club they are forced to either “choose” one of their backgrounds to identify as or join Hapa Club…

Read the entire article here.

New multiracial category has effects nationally, few at Smith

The Smith College Sophian
Northampton, Massachusetts
2010-09-30

Gina Charusombat

While Smith students speculate about the lack of diversity across disciplines of study, colleges and universities across the U.S. continue to track diversity on their campuses. On Sept. 19, the Chronicle of Higher Education revealed that the U.S. Department of Education now requires colleges to report students who check the “two or more races” category. Previously, reports listed “race unknown” for students who marked more than one category.

Students who mark several race categories in addition to “two or more races” are only counted in the multiracial category. However, there is one exception: if a student marks “two or more races” and marks Hispanic/Latino/Latina, the student is counted within that one category.

“[The multiracial category] is set against the politics of how we define or don’t define race,” said Dean of Enrollment Audrey Smith…

Read the entire article here.

The Invisible Weight of Whiteness: The Racial Grammar of Everyday Life in Contemporary America (Lecture by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva)

Fall 2010 Honors Colloquium: RACE
University of Rhode Island
Edwards Auditorium, URI Kingston Campus
Tuesday, 2010-10-12, 19:00 ET (Local Time); (23:00Z)

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Professor of Sociology
Duke University

A series of public programs at the University of Rhode Island presented by the URI Honors Program

Join us! The public is invited to attend this series of free events.

Perceptions about race shape everyday experiences, public policies, opportunities for individual achievement, and relations across racial and ethnic lines. In this colloquium we will explore key issues of race, showing how race still matters.

Other works by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva:

• “More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order by G. Reginald Daniel [Book Review]”
• “Opting for White: choice, fluidity and racial identity construction in post civil-rights America”
• “From bi-racial to tri-racial: Towards a new system of racial stratification in the USA”
• “Black, Honorary White, White: The Future of Race in the United States?” in Mixed Messages: Multiracial Identities in the “Color-Blind” Era (with David G. Embrick)

The Melungeon Identity Movement and the Construction of Appalachian Whiteness

Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
Volume 11, Issue 1 (June 2001)
pages 131-146
DOI: 10.1525/jlin.2001.11.1.131

Anita Puckett, Associate Professor of Appalachian Studies
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

How this binary system is discursively constituted depends upon the ways in which elements of a repertoire interconnect to distribute or consolidate power and privilege across discursive contexts. Circulation of the revitalized lexeme Melungeon as a valued “object” within Appalachian discourse reveals linguistic processes by which white racial privilege is constructed and expanded, mixed-race classification excluded, and nonwhite disenfranchisement reproduced.

Read the entire article here.

Ethnic Studies 064: Mixed Race Descent in the Americas

Mills College, Oakland, California
Fall 2010

Melinda Micco, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies

This is an introductory course that examines the historical and theoretical development of identities and of communities of multiracial and multiethnic people. In the academy, in government, and in popular culture, the lives and experiences of racially mixed people, and how others perceive them, have become topics of intense debate and scrutiny since the late-1990s. Mostly recently, newly elected President Barack Obama’s racial and ethnic identity highlighted the issues and played a significant role in the 2008 presidential elections.

This course will examine the historical evolution of such terms as the “marginal man” and the “150% man” to understand the present concerns of racial and ethnic stereotyping. We will engage questions such as: Who are “mixed-race” people in the US? How are they perceived, described, and treated in various communities? What are the effects of various federal and state policies, such as anti-miscegenation laws, American Indian “relocation,” immigration, and Japanese American internment? What is the legacy of race-based chattel slavery on both African-American and non-African-American communities? What are racial and color hierarchies and how do they affect mixed-race people? What are real lived experiences of mixed-race people in the US?

Required Text

• Gaskins, P. F. (1999). What are you?: Voices of Mixed-Race Young People. New York: Macmillan.
• Ifekwunigwe, J. O. (Ed.) (2004). Mixed Race Studies: A Reader. New York: Routledge.
• Spickard, P. R., & Burroughs, W. J. (Eds.) (2000). We Are A People: Narrative and Multiplicity in Constructing Ethnic Identity. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

For more information, click here.

Artist Ellen Gallagher humbled by new honor

The Providence Journal
2010-02-21

Bill Van Siclen, Journal Arts Writer

The first time her work appeared in a Whitney Biennial, the every-other-year exhibit that aims to take the pulse of contemporary art, Ellen Gallagher was just one of many up-and-coming artists vying for attention.

That was back in 1995, when Gallagher, a Providence-born painter and printmaker whose interests range from carpentry and scrimshaw to African-American history and culture, was barely out of art school.

Fifteen years later, Gallagher is Biennial-bound once again.

This time, however, she’s returning as a certified art star — someone whose work is avidly collected by major museums, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art and London’s Tate Museum, and whose name is regularly mentioned alongside the likes of Kara Walker, Cindy Sherman and Matthew Barney. Even the Whitney Museum, which organizes the Whitney Biennial (and where the show’s 2010 edition opens Thursday), has several of her works in its permanent collection…

…WHILE MANY ARTISTS draw inspiration from a variety of sources, Gallagher’s reference points — everything from slavery to sea creatures to Sun Ra — seem particularly wide ranging. Then again, so is her background.

Born in 1965, Gallagher grew up in a biracial household headed by her father, an American-born Cape Verdean who traced his roots back to 19th-century whalers and who did odd jobs to support the family, including occasional stints as a professional boxer.

When he left suddenly, the burden of raising Gallagher fell on her mother, a white Irish Catholic who eventually saved enough money to buy a house in Providence’s Washington Park neighborhood…

Read the entire article here.

Scratching the surface: Artist Laylah Ali explores the social dynamics that lie beyond appearances

Boston Globe
2008-08-29

Cate McQuaid, Globe Correspondent

WILLIAMSTOWN – Laylah Ali doesn’t let many people into her studio.

“It’s a private space,” the artist says, welcoming a visitor. “It’s like being in my brain. I’m inviting you into my private brain space – the chaos and the mess.”

As far as chaos goes, this isn’t bad. In the basement of a building on the outskirts of the Williams College campus, where Ali teaches art, an airy studio is filled with white illustrator’s tables. Colored pencils and squat bottles of ink clutter the tables. But what catches the eye are the drawings Ali has tacked to the white walls with pushpins: Portraits, made in her signature cartoon style, of haunted figures with garish headdresses, scarification, and false beards, and smaller drawings that feature ruminative lists with oddly adorned figures drawn over them…

…Growing up in Buffalo as the daughter of an African-American father and a white mother, Ali attuned herself early to social dynamics and covert aggression. The family lived in an all-white neighborhood.

“I was the only black kid in my school,” Ali says. “I’ve been able to negotiate different social places because of that. . . . More people are seeing this now because of Barack Obama, but there have always been biracial people in the US, with the ability to move between these worlds and notice what’s different and what’s not different.

“I developed heightened powers of observation not just from curiosity,” she adds, “but for survival.”

As a child, the artist saw implicit judgment many places, and it wasn’t always black and white.

“It’s not just race. It’s also class,” Ali points out. “My mom’s family had come from some money. It was gone, but they still had the idea of what it’s like to have nice silver, a nice oriental rug. They had an aspiration from what they had lost.

“Dad’s family was from the farming Mississippi South. He grew up working the land. I keep asking him questions and finding out more things. He walked five miles to school and had no electricity at home.”

“My family is very American,” she sums up…

Read the entire article here.