Mixed Race Studies

Obama and Race in America

The Huffington Post
2010-08-06

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

In his first major comment on race and race relations in our nation since his “A More Perfect Union Speech” on March 18, 2008, President Barack Obama called for frank discussion about race last week. In both a speech to the National Urban League and on the ABC daytime talk show “The View,” the president talked about race relations in the context of the political controversy over last month’s firing of long-time Agriculture Department employee Shirley Sherrod.

Obama agreed with those who have been calling for some sort of national conversation on race beyond CNN’s “Black in America” and “Latino in America.” He invited us to “look inward” and find the space to have “mature” dialogues about “the divides that still exist.” For Obama, these honest conversations should be based on our personal experiences and occur “around kitchen tables and water coolers and church basements.” However, many are left wondering whether Obama’s remarks represent a racial dialogue initiative or a post-racial accomplishment.

Here’s a question we might consider: Does Obama want us to talk about race while he effectively sidesteps the conversation himself?…

…Some might argue that statements like this one are clever attempts to use multiracial identity to sanitize the country’s history of chattel slavery and racist discrimination. After all, Obama made no mention of how black and white people got “all kinds of mixed up” in the first place. It follows that if we hear Obama from this perspective, then we may be hearing a call to transcend race without getting beyond racial inequalities. On the other hand, there are those who assert that Obama makes use of his multiracial identity to do precisely the opposite: to acknowledge racial division as well as its problems and awkwardness…

Read the entire article here.

Building the “Blue” Race: Miscegenation, Mysticism, and the Language of Cognitive Evolution in Jean Toomer’s “The Blue Meridian”

Texas Studies in Literature and Language
Volume 46, Number 2, Summer 2004
pages 149-180
E-ISSN: 1534-7303
Print ISSN: 0040-4691
DOI: 10.1353/tsl.2004.0008

Stephanie L. Hawkins, Assistant Professor of English
University of North Texas

Toomer’s vision of psychological evolution later realized and racialized in “The Blue Meridian” (1936) has its precursor in Cane’s closing chapter, the short drama “Kabnis,” and in the figure of Kabnis as a biracial subject struggling to find speech representative of his psychological experience. Kabnis’s ambivalence toward his black ancestry manifests in blood rhetoric that both highlights and undermines the purity of the plantation aristocracy that has contributed to his making. He declares, “My ancestors were Southern blue-bloods—”; “And black,” retorts Lewis, another educated black Northerner. Recognizing the pervasiveness of the one-drop rule for determining African descent—and the fact that Southerners frequently purged traces of black blood from their genealogical records—Kabnis argues that there “Aint much difference between blue and black” (108). There is a double recognition here: first, that black ancestry is inherent in the bodies of many who pass for white; and second, that as a…

Read or purchase the article here.

Stalking the Biracial Hidden Self in Henry James’s The Sense of the Past and “The Jolly Corner”

The Henry James Review
Volume 25, Number 3, Fall 2004
pages 276-284
E-ISSN: 1080-6555,
Print ISSN: 0273-0340
DOI: 10.1353/hjr.2004.0027

Stephanie L. Hawkins, Assistant Professor of English
University of North Texas

This essay argues that, for James, the visible face and body conceal some genetic “reality” or heritage, which he figures in both The Sense of the Past and “The Jolly Corner” as the specter of unacknowledged racial difference. In both works, James fuses evolutionary biology and the ghostly, thematizing turn-of-the-century anxieties regarding miscegenation. By transforming a narrative of time travel into one of racial passing, James both literalizes the psychological phenomenon of a “hidden self” and exposes the central paradox of double-consciousness: the simultaneous recognition and rejection of one’s “hidden” racial differences and sense of estrangement from the national family.

Read the entire article here.

Institutions, Inculcation, and Black Racial Identity: Pigmentocracy vs. the Rule of Hypodescent

Social Identities
Volume 14, Issue 5 (September 2008)
pages 567-585
DOI: 10.1080/13504630802343390

Richard T. Middleton IV, Associate Professor of Political Science
University of Missouri, St. Louis

This research paper investigates the effect political institutions have on black racial identity. In particular, I study individual inculcation in contexts where political institutions institutionalize either of two forms of racial social structures—a pigmentocracy (the Dominican Republic), or the rule of hypodescent (the US South), and the effect such inculcation has on black racial identity. I sampled 101 respondents from the Dominican Republic and 102 from the state of Mississippi, USA. Consistent with the basic assumptions of my hypotheses, respondents in the Dominican Republic study sites showed a weaker degree of identification with blackness vis—vis something ‘whiter’. Nevertheless, respondents in the Dominican Republic sites demonstrated a stronger identification with blackness than what most conventional observers would have anticipated. Respondents in the Mississippi study sites showed a stronger sense of identification with blackness. Surprisingly, however, Mississippi respondents demonstrated a larger degree of neutrality than expected in their belief of being of a mixed racial heritage rather than just a black African heritage.

Read or purchase the article here.

Dreaming with the Ancestors: Black Seminole Women in Texas and Mexico

University of Oklahoma Press
December 2010
400 pages
30 B&W Illus., 2 Maps
6.125″ x 9.25″
Hardcover ISBN: 9780806140537

Shirley Boteler Mock, Research Fellow
Mesoamerican Archaeological Research Laboratory, University of Texas, Austin

Explores a unique and eclectic culture rooted in African traditions

Indian freedmen and their descendants have garnered much public and scholarly attention, but women’s roles have largely been absent from that discussion. Now a scholar who gained an insider’s perspective into the Black Seminole community in Texas and Mexico offers a rare and vivid picture of these women and their contributions. In Dreaming with the Ancestors, Shirley Boteler Mock explores the role that Black Seminole women have played in shaping and perpetuating a culture born of African roots and shaped by southeastern Native American and Mexican influences.

Mock reveals a unique maroon culture, forged from an eclectic mixture of religious beliefs and social practices. At its core is an amalgam of African-derived traditions kept alive by women. The author interweaves documentary research with extensive interviews she conducted with leading Black Seminole women to uncover their remarkable history. She tells how these women nourished their families and held fast to their Afro-Seminole language—even as they fled slavery, endured relocation, and eventually sought new lives in new lands. Of key importance were the “warrior women”—keepers of dreams and visions that bring to life age-old African customs.

Featuring more than thirty illustrations and maps, including historic photographs never before published, Dreaming with the Ancestors combines scholarly analysis with human interest to open a new window on both African American and American Indian history and culture.

The Risks of Multiracial Identification

The Chronicle of Higher Education
2006-11-10

Naomi Schaefer Riley

The comment period has closed on proposed new guidelines from the U.S. Department of Education on how colleges should ask students about race. No longer, the guidelines say, should applicants simply be given the choice of black, white, Asian, American Indian (or Alaska Native), or native Hawaiian (or other Pacific Islander). Now they should be allowed to check off more than one box, as well as note whether they identify as Hispanic. Eugene L. Anderson, an associate director of the American Council on Education, told Diverse, a higher-education magazine, that he expected colleges would be pleased with the new guidelines: “They make sense; they respect peoples’ individual notion of racial identity, which is important.”

No doubt colleges also appreciate the department’s instructions for practical reasons. The proliferation of multiracial options on a variety of forms, including college applications, reflects the new demographic reality in America. On the 2000 census, nearly seven million Americans checked off two or more racial boxes. And a study last year by researchers at Cornell University found that the number of interracial marriages involving white people, black people, or Hispanics each year in the United States has jumped tenfold since the 1960s.

In a sense, these developments represent the realization of the dream of a melting pot. In 1963 Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, penned a controversial essay called “My Negro Problem—And Ours,” expressing despair about the chances for real racial integration in this country. That could not occur, he wrote, “unless color does in fact disappear: and that means not integration, it means assimilation, it means—let the brutal word come out—miscegenation.”…

…But even those mixed-race groups cannot satisfy some students. One told the Crimson that her acquaintances at Harvard’s Hapa group focused too much on East Asian identities, instead of South Asian ones. They went out, she complained, for dim sum, “which I enjoy, but don’t identify with culturally.” But she didn’t feel welcome in the regular South Asian group, either, because in a theatrical performance the group’s leaders cast her in the role of a white person.

The level of specificity that seems to be required for many young men and women to feel comfortable today is bordering on the absurd. Ultimately it’s sad. Advocates of diversity on college campuses insist that they are not just assembling faces of different colors for aesthetic purposes; they are trying to offer students a model of how to live in a multiracial, multiethnic society. But students do not seem to be learning to be more tolerant of people unlike them. They are demanding that they be surrounded and sheltered by people who are exactly like them.

Colleges have long experienced what sociologists refer to as the “lunch-table problem.” That tendency toward racial self-segregation may find its origins in students’ upbringings, but it is surely furthered by campus multiculturalists. Over the years, I have had many students I’ve interviewed tell me that they were never encouraged to identify themselves by their race so much as when they set foot on a college campus. Both administrators and student-run organizations often pressured them to engage in activities that put them in a particular racial box. So it’s not surprising that students now want activities that conform to every contour of their ancestry…

Read the entire article here.

Alien Land

Northeastern University Press
2006 (Originally published in 1949 by E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc.)
336 pages
1 illus. 5 1/2 x 8″
ISBN-13: 978-1-55553-657-2
ISBN-10: 1-55553-657-3

Willard Savoy (1916-1976)

Introduction by:
Robert Burns Stepto, Professor of African American Studies, English and American Studies
Yale University

Alien Land is the passionate and haunting story of a light-skinned black man who can pass as white in mid-twentieth-century America. As a spiritually tormented child and young adult caught between two worlds in a segregated society, Kern Roberts puzzles over racism and agonizes over “why he’s a nigger.” As a teenager studying at the exclusive Evans Academy in Vermont, Kern “passes” until a classmate maliciously exposes him. Anguished and resentful, he throws himself into working for the Freedom League in Washington, D.C., the civil rights organization of which his father, a prominent black attorney, is national president. In 1934 Kern starts college in an “alien land,” the Jim Crow South. Exposed to horrifying racially motivated crimes, prejudice, and contempt, Kern necessarily plays the submissive “nigger” until, terrorized, he renounces his race and his father, returning to Vermont to live as a white man with his white grandmother. Ultimately he comes to terms with his biracial identity, finds peace in his marriage to a white woman, and reconciles with his father.

Robert Burns Stepto’s keen introduction firmly situates Alien Land in the line of African American novels that treat the issue of identity through the motif of passing. Originally published in cloth in 1949 to national acclaim, the full text of this remarkable novel is finally available in paperback.

The C.O.W.S. [Context of White Supremacy] w/ Minkah Makalani – Jul 15, 2010

The C.O.W.S Radio Show
BlogTalkRadio
2010-07-15

Gus T. Renegade, Host

Minkah Makalani, Assistant Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies
University of Texas, Austin

Rutgers’ Minkah Makalani will share his views on the System of White Supremacy. Minkah Makalani is an assistant professor of history; his primary focus is black radicalism, nationalism, the African diaspora, and social movements. We’ll explore his research on “biracial identity” [non-white people with a White parent]. Professor Makalani has written two standout articles on this subject: Rejecting Blackness, Claiming Whiteness: Anti-Black Whiteness and the Creation of a Biracial Race and A Biracial Identity or a New Race? The Historical Limitations and Political Implications of a Biracial Identity. Much of Professor Makalani’s analysis reveals how non-white people with a White parent frequently make a conscious and/or unconscious effort to distance themselves from black people... in a word, they highlight their Whiteness. We’ll explore the ramifications of this in a System dominated by White Supremacy. PS—Professor Makalani has a White parent.

Interview begins at 00:01:23 and ends at 02:04:47.

A Biracial Identity or a New Race? The Historical Limitations and Political Implications of a Biracial Identity

Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society
Volume 3, Number 4 (Fall 2001)
pages 83-112

Minkah Makalani, Assistant Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies
University of Texas, Austin

Over the past fifteen years in the United States, there has emerged a concerted push to racially reclassify persons with one Black and one white parent as biracial.  Advocates of racial reclassification are calling for the establishment of a biracial identity that is both socially and officially recognized.  They are joined by a cohort of scholars, many of whom are themselves biracial identity advocates, who argue that such an identity is more appropriate for persons of mixed parentage than a Black one. Social scientist have dominated these discussions, concerned primarily with the experiences and identity of people of mixed parentage. They maintain that a biracial identity would better recognized the complete racial background of persons of mixed parentage and offer a more mentally healthy racial identity than a Black racial identity.  Moreover, the exalt a biracial identity as a positive step in moving society beyond issues of race and towards the realization of a color-blind society.

Focusing on the scholarship advocating a biracial identity for people with one Black and one white parent, I argue that such an identity has no historical basis, and would have a negative political impact on African Americans…

Read the entire article here.

More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order [Book Review: Christian]

The Western Journal of Black Studies
Volume 27, Number 4 (2003)
pages 279-280

Mark Christian, Professor & Chair of African & African American Studies
Lehman College, City University of New York

This book comes out the school of thought that advocates for the “multiracial identity” classification in the US. More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order offers a postmodern analysis of “race” and issues a call for the acknowledgement of what can be deemed the multifaceted racialized heritages of many Black peoples located in the African Diaspora. In this sense the book offers little other than what is largely akeady known. Indeed many peoples of African descent do have claim to other heritages. For example it is broadly accepted now that at least two-thirds of African Americans have some Native American and European heritage. However, it is erroneous to run away with this idea as if it is the sole criteria for establishing a “new racial order” based on what is in fact unlikely to have any impact on white supremacy and its continued dominance over the socially constructed “peoples of color.”…

Read or purchase the book review here.