Mixed Race Studies

Searching for the authentic Red-Black self: Depictions of African-Native subjectivity in literature, visual art, and film

University of California, Berkeley
2005
235 pages
AAT 3186996
ISBN: 9780542292071

Sarita Nyasha Cannon, Associate Professor of English
San Francisco State University

In this dissertation, I explore representations of a largely invisible multiracial group: people of Native American and African-American descent. Relying upon the two theoretical frameworks of cultural studies and multiculturalism outlined in Chapter 1, I analyze texts from various genres in order to understand the construction of Black-Red subjectivity. In Chapter 2, I examine the 1848 slave narrative/native autobiography The Life of Dr. Okah Tubbee. Written by a mulatto who passed as the son of a Choctaw chief in order to escape the slavery, this text exemplifies the performative possibilities of autobiography as well as Tubbee’s simultaneous rejection of Blackness and embrace of stereotypical ideas of Indian-ness. In Chapter 3, I look at another figure that straddles African American and Native American cultures, the fictional character of Rayona in Michael Dorris’ 1988 novel A Yellow Raft in Blue Water. Like Tubbee, Rayona negotiates various identities. However, rather than being a somewhat tragic trickster figure who rejects Blackness as Tubbee does, Rayona is able to embrace her multiple subject positions in a variety of contexts. In Chapter 4, I focus on visual representations of African-Native Americans in the sculpture of African-Chippewa artist Edmonia Lewis and in the portraits of African-Choctaw photographer Valena Broussard Dismukes. I argue that despite Lewis’ familiarity with Native culture, she deploys stereotypes about American Indians in an attempt to gain a mainstream audience. Dismukes, on the other hand, creates portraits of contemporary Black Indians who can express their mixed heritage on their own terms. Finally, in Chapter 5, I explore two contemporary documentary films that reflect two opposite narratives of the history of Black-Native subjectivity. Steven Rich Heape’s film Black Indians celebrates people with African-Native heritage and elevates them to a special status. On the other hand, Long Lance, a documentary about a mixed-race man’s rejection of the one-drop rule and his fabrication of various Native American identities, emphasizes the tragic nature of “passing.” Implicit within my exploration of these cultural representations of Black Indians is the elusive quest for racial or cultural “authenticity,” a problematic goal that often unconsciously panders to an essentialized notion of identity. In their attempts to render authentic images of Blacks, Native Americans, and Black-Native Americans, these authors and artists often reinscribe stereotypes about these groups and thus reinforce the very racial and social hierarchies they intend to question.

Purchase the dissertation here.

Aren’t they just black kids? Biracial children in the child welfare system

Child & Family Social Work
Volume 15, Issue 4 (November 2010)
pages 441-45
DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2206.2010.00690.x

Rachel A. Fusco, Assistant Professor of Social Work
University of Pittsburgh

Mary E. Rauktis, Research Assistant Professor of Social Work
University of Pittsburgh

Julie S. McCrae, Research Scientist
Butler Institute for Families
University of Denver

Michael A. Cunningham, Research Specialist
University of Pittsburgh

Cynthia K. Bradley-King, Field Assistant Professor and Academic Coordinator, Child Welfare Education for Baccalaureates (CWEB)
University of Pittsburgh

In the USA, African-American children are overrepresented in the child welfare system. However, little is known about the child welfare system experiences of biracial children, who are predominately both White and African-American. To better understand this population, data from public child welfare in a US county were used to examine biracial children in the child welfare system. Results showed significant racial differences between children in the child welfare system. Despite the common belief that biracial children will have experiences similar to African-American children, the child welfare system seems to view them differently. Biracial children are more likely to be referred, rated as high risk and investigated compared with White or African-American children. Their mothers were younger, and were more often assessed as having physical, intellectual or emotional problems. These caregivers were also considered to have lower parenting skills and knowledge compared with White or African-American caregivers. Although the disproportionate representation of African-American children in the system has been well documented, this study provides evidence that biracial children are also overrepresented. Despite the fact that this is a rapidly growing population in the USA, there is little research available about biracial children and their families.

Read or purchase the article here.

Gothic Passages: Racial Ambiguity and the American Gothic

University of Iowa Press
2003
186 pages
Cloth ISBN: 0-87745-824-3, 978-0-87745-824-1
eBook ISBN: 1-58729-420-6 978-1-58729-420-4

Justin Edwards, Professor of English
Bangor University, Bangor, Wales

This groundbreaking study analyzes the development of American gothic literature alongside nineteenth-century discourses of passing and racial ambiguity.

By bringing together these areas of analysis, Justin Edwards considers the following questions. How are the categories of “race” and the rhetoric of racial difference tied to the language of gothicism? What can these discursive ties tell us about a range of social boundaries—gender, sexuality, class, race, etc.—during the nineteenth century? What can the construction and destabilization of these social boundaries tell us about the development of the U.S. gothic?

The sources used to address these questions are diverse, often literary and historical, fluidly moving between “representation” and “reality.” Works of gothic literature by Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Frances Harper, and Charles Chesnutt, among others, are placed in the contexts of nineteenth-century racial “science” and contemporary discourses about the formation of identity. Edwards then examines how nineteenth-century writers gothicized biracial and passing figures in order to frame them within the rubric of a “demonization of difference.” By charting such depictions in literature and popular science, he focuses on an obsession in antebellum and postbellum America over the threat of collapsing racial identities—threats that resonated strongly with fears of the transgression of the boundaries of sexuality and the social anxiety concerning the instabilities of gender, class, ethnicity, and nationality.

Gothic Passages not only builds upon the work of Americanists who uncover an underlying racial element in U.S. gothic literature but also sheds new light on the pervasiveness of gothic discourse in nineteenth-century representations of passing from both sides of the color line. This fascinating book will be of interest to scholars of American literature, cultural studies, and African American studies.

Black or Biracial? Who Gets to Decide?

The Huffington Post
2009-03-04

Abby L. Ferber, Associate Professor, Director of the Matrix Center and Co-Director of Women’s and Ethnic Studies
University of Colorado, Colorado Springs

Is Obama Black? Biracial? And why do we care so much? A new book by George Yancey and Richard Lewis, Jr., Interracial Families: Current Concepts and Controversies, is a nice primer on the subject, and argues that an historical context is necessary for understanding why questions of racial identity are so heated in the U.S.

I had the good fortune recently of sitting down and discussing the issue with two young, bi-racial women, both sociologists, who have had ample opportunity to reflect upon this issue both personally and intellectually. We can all learn from their experience and insight. Why is the issue so contentious? According to Chandra Waring “It is difficult for black and white people to understand that when they label black/white biracial people as black or as white, they are asking—no, telling—that person to deny, ignore or even disown one parent.”…

…Chandra, like Obama, has one black parent and one white parent. While she self-identifies as both black and white, she explains “people still see me as black and that is because society teaches us that black and white equals black (unless the biracial person can pass, then maybe, they can be white). President Obama is a prime example of this ridiculous racial mathematics. He is just as white as he is black, yet he is celebrated and overwhelmingly understood to be black. Obama illustrates how being biracial works—or does not work—because he was raised by his white mother and white grandparents, yet still is viewed as black. If a biracial American who was raised entirely by his white family is not acknowledged as half white, who will be?”…

Read the entire article here.

AAS 355. Biracial and Multiracial Identity

California State University, Northridge
Asian American Studies

Interdisciplinarily studies the socio-historical realities, identities, and political maintenance of people with multiple racial and ethnic heritages; examines the binary racial structure of the U.S., social and legal customs of racial designation and membership; focuses on multiracial populations such as Creoles, mulattos, mestizos, Black-Indians, Eurasians, Afroasians, Amerasians, etc.

Voices from the Gaps: Kym Ragusa

Voices from the Gaps
University of Minnesota
2007-04-24

Shalee Dettmann
Joey Grihalva
Jenna Fodness
Gaushia Thao

I don’t know where I was conceived, but I was made in Harlem. Its topography is mapped on my body: the borderlines between neighborhoods marked by streets that were forbidden to cross, the borderlines enforced by fear and anger, and transgressed by desire. The streets crossing east to west, north to south, like the web of veins beneath my skin.

 The Skin Between Us (26)

In the prologue of her acclaimed memoir, The Skin Between Us, Kym Ragusa writes of a journey she took in 1999 to her paternal ancestors’ home of Messina, Italy. A year after the death of her two grandmothers—the central figures in her personal life, each representing her Italian and African-American heritage respectively—Ragusa embarks on a search for clues about her identity. This journey is symbolic of her artistic work as she is constantly involved in the formulation and explication of what it means to be multicultural.

Kym Ragusa was born February of 1966 in Manhattan, NY. Ragusa comes from a mixed background: her mother is African American and her father is Italian. Ragusa’s ancestors on her mother’s side were brought to the United States as African slaves…

Read the entire article here.

The Ambiguous Meanings of the Racial/Ethnic Categories Routinely used in Human Genetics Research

Social Science & Medicine
Volume 66, Issue 2 (January 2008)
pages 349-361
DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2007.08.034

Linda M. Hunt, Professor of Anthropology
Michigan State University

Mary S. Megyesi, M.Sc.
Michigan State University

Many researchers are currently studying the distribution of genetic variations among diverse groups, with particular interest in explaining racial/ethnic health disparities. However, the use of racial/ethnic categories as variables in biological research is controversial. Just how racial/ethnic categories are conceptualized, operationalized, and interpreted is a key consideration in determining the legitimacy of their use, but has received little attention. We conducted semi-structured, open-ended interviews with 30 human genetics scientists from the US and Canada who use racial/ethnic variables in their research. They discussed the types of classifications they use, the criteria upon which they are based, and their methods for classifying individual samples and subjects. We found definitions of racial/ethnic variables were often lacking or unclear, the specific categories they used were inconsistent and context specific, and classification practices were often implicit and unexamined. We conclude that such conceptual and practical problems are inherent to routinely used racial/ethnic categories themselves, and that they lack sufficient rigor to be used as key variables in biological research. It is our position that it is unacceptable to persist in the constructing of scientific arguments based on these highly ambiguous variables.

…A number of serious problems with using race/ethnicity as a variable in genetics research have emerged in our analysis of our interviews with this group of genetic scientists. At the most basic level, the common racial/ethnic classifications they routinely use are of questionable value for delineating genetically related groups. The ubiquitous OMB categories in fact were designed for political and administrative purposes; they were not designed for use as scientific variables (Kertzer & Arel, 2002; Shields et al., 2005). These are notably ambiguous and arbitrary categories, based on strikingly diverse criteria such as skin color, language, or geographic location. They do not compose clear classifications, but instead are overlapping and not mutually exclusive. In the absence of clear principles for applying the labels, in practice, different aspects of an individual’s identity are arbitrarily prioritized, in order to fit individual cases into the schema.

A serious conceptual problem that reinforces the use of these questionable categories is that many of the researchers presume racial admixture is relatively rare and recent, and that specific geographically defined groups, such as Finnish or Japanese, can unproblematically be equated with broad socially designated racial/ethnic groups, such as white or Asian. However, this logic relies on several unsubstantiated assumptions: that historically there were pure racial types associated with particular geographic locations; that migrations were sporadic and relatively rare; and that racial/ethnic groups are primarily endogamous. (A recent study of the views of genetics journals editors reports similar findings: Outram & Ellison, 2006.) These assumptions are contrary to much of what is known about human population history. Genetic isolation among humans is in fact quite rare: human populations have always exchanged mates across broad geographic areas throughout time, producing clinal variation (gradual variation between places), rather than clearly distinct genetic stocks. Furthermore, racial admixture is not an exceptional event; indeed, there has been significant intermarriage between socially designated groups throughout history (Weiss, 1998; Harry & Marks, 1999; Race Ethnicity and Genetics Working Group, 2005). Compounding these conceptual problems is the practical fact that assigning these labels to individuals is often done in the absence of any specific knowledge of their actual familial migration histories.

Heavy reliance on self-identification, as reported by these researchers, further amplifies the imprecision to these variables. Despite its popularity, this method for classifying cases is extremely problematic. Racial/ethnic identities are inherently amorphous constructs; they are multiple and fluid, and may change as a person moves between social, economic and geographic contexts (Berry, 1993; Hunt, Schneider & Comer, 2004). There is no way to know what criteria an individual may apply when classifying their own racial/ethnic identity, and the criteria is likely to vary dramatically from person to person. Although some researchers collect additional information about parents and grandparents, this is only done for certain racial/ethnic groups, and never with others, and there appears to be no standard criteria for assigning group membership based on the additional information…

Read the entire article here.

Perceptions, Representation, and Identity Development of Multiracial Students in American Higher Education

Journal of Student Affairs at New York University
Volume VI, 2010
pages 1-6

Roberta Garbarini-Philippe
New York University

In my article I first examine some historical facts and policy issues related to multiracial individuals, giving a few examples of how this population has been perceived and stereotyped by institutions, the media, and American culture. I then look at some of the research on biracial identity development and show how one of the assumptions regarding people of mixed-race heritage, the inability to fit in any monoracial group, has been refuted by many studies that predict healthy and positive psychological outcomes for multiracial individuals. Finally, I discuss multiracial identity development in the higher education context and suggest some ways in which colleges and universities can create inclusive environments and utilize the potential of these border-defying students to introduce a new discourse on race.

Read the entire article here.

Transcending “The Box”: Multiracial Subjects as the New Face of Reality

CSW Update Newsletter
UCLA Center for the Study of Women
February 2008
pages 24-27

Kunti Dudakia

I hate it. I hate the feeling I get when I am forced in online surveys, job applications, or school admissions to check a box to identify my racial background. A feeling of confusion and uncertainty overwhelms me in an internal battle to check just one box.

I am not one box.

I am two. Maybe three or four if I want to be completely accurate. But I wonder: what is the purpose of “the box”? When we check a box, we are claiming a race, an ancestry, and even a status. Race as an organizing principle in society has been a source of hegemony and hierarchy for centuries. Its origins are unknown and unreliable. Historically dominant groups have used race as a basis to divide and distinguish themselves from “the other.” In the United States, the legal and scientific definition of race has continued to alter according to societal standards. In some ways we have moved forward from the “check one box only” of the 1850 census, which included three categories: white, black, and mulatto. However, we still attempt to check one box when many of us are biracial or multiracial. The reality in America is hybridity. In the definition that I use, hybridity means the blending of two or more cultures into a unified whole. Hybrids are chameleons adjusting to the shifting landscapes and isms that may reject nonconformity. Moreover, evidenced by the increasing amount of interracial marriages and ethnically ambiguous subjects is the realization that racial purity is a myth…

…Authenticity is constructed within the racial paradigm as both a marker and tool for inclusion and exclusion. We hear statements like “He isn’t really black” as assumptions based on essentialist ideas of race—usually and unfortunately reinforcing biases, stereotypes, and prejudices. Multiracial subjects are the ‘antithesis of authenticity’ inasmuch as they do not fit into one group or culture. This begs the question, are multiracial subjects changing the landscape of racial classification?…

Read the entire article here.

CRN 47519/47520-Mixed Race Asian Americans

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Fall 2008

Kent Ono, Professor of Asian American Studies, Communication, and Institute of Communications Research

Part of Asian American Ethnic Groups (AAS-450)

This course provides an introduction to the study of mixed race Asian Americans. From discussions of famous mixed race people, such as Tiger Woods, Keanu Reeves, Kristin Kreuk, Dean Cain, and Rob Schneider to research about interracial dating, interracial families, mixed race children, and multiracial activism, the course provides an understanding of theories of race, identity, and culture as they relate to biracial and multiracial Asian Americans. The course provides a theoretical understanding of racial identity formation, focusing at first on more general theories of race, and then moving to the more specific issues of multiracial identity and politics. Analysis of TV, film, and cyberspace images of mixed race Asian Americans will also lead to an understanding of the social context of our everyday experiences. Through readings, lectures, discussions, and course assignments, students will gain a broader understanding of race and its application to people of mixed racial heritage.