Mixed Race Studies

The Multiracial Option: A Step in the White Direction

California Law Review
Volume 105, Issue 6 (2018)
pages 1853-1878
DOI: 10.15779/Z38H98ZD1S

Alynia Phillips

It is estimated that within fifty years, the white race will lose its stronghold as the majority racial group in the United States. In recent years, this prediction has induced anxiety in everyone from lay citizens to conservative politicians. But this prediction may not come to fruition if the definition of whiteness expands as needed. Parallel to this mounting racial anxiety runs a social movement aimed at promoting the classification of mixed race individuals as “multiracial.” Though on its face this classification appears harmless, the reliance on “multiracial” indicates an implicit deracialization of mixed race individuals, and a tacit devaluation of minority heritage. This Note argues that based on the history of racial classifications in the United States and existing motivations to maintain the white majority, the push for a multiracial category functions as a means by which mixed race individuals can join the ranks of whiteness. With mixed race individuals comprising the fastest growing population in the United States, their acceptance into the white race could secure the white majority for decades to come.

Contents

• Introduction
• I. Relevant Terminology Explained
• II. Unmasking the Players in Today’s Multiracial Movement
  • A.  White Mothers as Racial Ventriloquists
  • B.  Republicans as Multiracial Crusaders
• III. An Evolutionary History of White America
  • A.  Bacon’s Rebellion and the Invention of Whiteness
  • B.  Conceptual Frameworks for American Assimilation
  • C.  Subscribing to Superiority
• IV. Multiracial Exceptionalism and the “Other” Within
• Conclusion

Read the entire article here.

Colin Kaepernick Wins Amnesty International’s Highest Honor

TIME
2018-04-21

Sean Gregory

Colin Kaepernick may not have a job on the football field, but much of the world is still cheering for him.

Amnesty International, the global human rights organization, gave Kaepernick its highest honor — the 2018 Ambassador of Conscience Award — in Amsterdam on Saturday. Past winners of the award, which “celebrates individuals and groups who speak out for justice,” include former South Africa president Nelson Mandela, Malala Yousafzai, the education activist from Pakistan who survived an assassination attempt by the Taliban, and rock group U2.

The organization recognized Kaepernick for his protest against police violence: his action, kneeling during the national anthem before NFL games, sparked a movement replicated across America and the world, starting a debate about free speech and patriotism that was inflamed by the President of the United States, one of Kaepernick’s most relentless critics…

Read the entire article here.

Artist At Work: Mequitta Ahuja Wins A Guggenheim

BmoreArt
Baltimore, Maryland
2018-04-16

Cara Ober, Founding Editor

An Interview with Mequitta Ahuja About Success, Heartbreak, and a Recent Guggenheim Award by Cara Ober

The July 24, 2017 issue of the New Yorker described Mequitta Ahuja‘s work, then on view at the Asia Society Museum, as “whip-smart and languorous.” According to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, where she was just named a 2018 Fellow, Mequitta Ahuja’s works have been widely exhibited, including venues such as the Brooklyn Museum, Studio Museum in Harlem, Saatchi Gallery, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Crystal Bridges, Baltimore Museum of Art and Grand Rapids Art Museum. Ahuja, a Baltimore-based artist whose parents hail from Cincinnati and New Delhi, has long employed her own image to challenge historic traditions of portrait painting.

I caught up with the artist to ask about her momentous Guggenheim award, announced April 5, 2018, and to discuss the new opportunities and ideas abounding in her studio…

Read the entire interview here.

When Your Medical Treatment Depends On Your Race

The Establishment
2018-04-11

Cici Zhang

Human red bone marrow Jill Doughtie

Why do minority patients have a much harder time finding a match for bone marrow transplants?

It’s not easy to look for a specific boy among hundreds of first graders, especially when they swarm into lines for cupcakes and cotton candy. On this fall bake-sale day, the cafeteria of Public School 106 in the Parkchester section of the Bronx is buzzing with energy and children’s happy shrieks. A few teachers shout across the hall to keep things from spinning out of control. And when I finally spot 6-year-old Asaya Bullock, he seems to be well in hand.

“Ready for your green soup?” Charline, his mother, takes out a thermos with a Spider-Man design on the side.

The green soup is one of the only three things Asaya has ever been able to eat. He drinks it for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner; he drank it for the whole trip that his family took to the Caribbean to visit his mom’s relatives. Luckily, with broccoli, kale, green beans, and some minced meat, Asaya’s soup is at least healthy — and better than the small bowl of potato chips used as comfort food after his bi-weekly belly infusion. The recurring medical procedure helps keep him alive…

Read the entire article here.

A Standing Ovation for One Drop of Love

The Pilot Light: Official Blog of Naropa University
Boulder, Colorado
2018-04-19

Heather Hendrie, MA Transpersonal Wilderness Therapy student

Fanshen Cox Digiovanni Photo by David DeVine

It is my belief that the real magic in art arises in the space where the personal masterfully meets the universal. And mastery is what Fanshen Cox Digiovanni brought to us yesterday over the lunch hour at Naropa University with her one-woman show, “One Drop of Love”.

Fanshen Cox Digiovanni, an award-winning actor, producer, playwright, educator, and activist, was on campus performing as part of this year’s annual Bayard & John Cobb Peace Lecture. She wrote her show as her MFA thesis. In answer to the question, “How long did it take you to create this beautiful piece?” she laughs and says, “Oh, about 48 years!”

Using pieces from her father’s memoir and real images and recordings of conversations with family members, Fanshen created a masterpiece. She has performed the show across the country over the past five years. “One Drop of Love” is an interactive multimedia show that explores the intersections of race, class, and gender in pursuit of truth, justice, and love…

Read the entire article here.

In Black and White: A Hermeneutic Argument against “Transracialism”

Res Philosophica
Volume 95, Issue 2, April 2018
Pages 303-329

Tina Fernandes Botts, Professor of Philosophy
California State University, Fresno

Transracialism, defined as both experiencing oneself as, and being, a race other than the race assigned to one by society, does not exist. Translated into hermeneutics, transracialism is an unintelligible phenomenon in the specific sociocultural context of the United States in the early twenty-first century. Within this context, race is a function of ancestry, and is therefore defined in terms of something that is external to the self and unchangeable. Since transracialism does not exist, the question of whether transracialism would be ethically advisable if it did exist is inapposite. Nonetheless, at a minimum we can say that racial transition (defined as attempting to change one’s race through artificial and/or associative changes, and living life as a race other than the race assigned to one by society, etc.) is possible, but is very likely unethical, since it is the same as racial passing.

Read or purchase the article here.

A Visit to the 2018 Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference

Pacific Citizen: The National Newspaper of the JACL
Los Angeles, California
2018-03-28

Rob Buscher, Contributor

Ken Tanabe, left, and Jeff Chiba Stearns lead the Community Caucus at CMRS. (Photo: Rob Buscher)

Leaders in the multiracial movement gather to ‘Resist, Reclaim, Reimagine’ – a direct call to action amidst the current political climate faced by historically underrepresented communities in the U.S.

Over the past few decades, the Japanese American community has become increasingly inclusive of multiracial and multiethnic individuals. However, for those of us who appear less phenotypically Japanese, it is sometimes difficult explaining our connection to people who are less familiar with interracial marriage and mixed-race children.

Multiracial Japanese Americans are in many ways the direct result of institutionalized racism that stigmatized Japanese-ness in the 20th century. From the Alien Land Laws to the mass incarceration during World War II, the very existence of our Japanese immigrant ancestors was deemed objectionable. Is it any wonder that so many of our parents and grandparents would choose intermarriage with partners from other ethnic and racial communities?

Yet, despite the growing prevalence of mixed-race Japanese Americans, there are many outside our community who do not acknowledge the legitimacy of our existence within the spectrum of Japanese American identity.

This is why it was so empowering to attend an event like the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference, where nearly every one of the 200-plus participants were mixed race. While each individual has a totally different experience being mixed race (even within the same mixed community) the fact that multiracial folks were a super majority in this space meant that everyone had at least a basic understanding of the shared complexities surrounding our mixed identities.

Hosted at the University of Maryland on March 1-3, the 2018 conference’s theme was “Resist, Reclaim, Reimagine” — titled with a direct call to action amidst the current political climate faced by historically underrepresented communities in the United States…

Read the entire article here.

Interracial Intimacies Symposium

University of Chicago
5733 South University Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60637
2018-04-18 through 2018-04-19

Please join us for a two-day symposium examining the history of interracial intimacies in comparative and transnational perspective. This symposium offers emerging and established scholars an opportunity to come together to discuss issues of interracial intimacies broadly construed.

Doris L. Garraway, Associate Professor of French at Northwestern University, and Sarah Kovner, Senior Research Scholar in the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University, will be the keynote speakers.

For more information, click here.

Passing as Post-Racial: Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, Political Correctness, and the Post-Racial Passing Narrative

Contemporary Literature
Volume 58, Number 2, Summer 2017
pages 233-261

Mollie Godfrey, Assistant Professor of English
James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Virginia

In March 2016, Robert Folsom published an article in The Socionomist declaring that the rise of Donald Trump as a viable presidential candidate marked “the violent death of political correctness” (1). Folsom argued that while “[t]he conventional narrative on Trump is that he has succeeded despite his rejection of political correctness,” the “truth is that he has in large part succeeded because of it” (4). Indeed, the past few years have seen the rise of vigorous, mainstream opposition to many multiculturalist policies associated with political correctness at all levels and from all directions: from the Supreme Court’s back and forth on voting rights and affirmative action, to the 2015 spate of articles that derided trigger warnings as an attack on free speech, to the crowds of voters like Steve Crouse cheering Trump for speaking his mind and “saying a lot of the things that I think we’re all thinking” (Proskow). These recent events have renewed a debate that began in the 1960s and 1970s, when Civil Rights and Black Power activists and second-wave feminists sparred with traditionalists over the diversity and inclusivity of university curricula, faculty, student bodies, and standards of academic excellence. By the culture wars of the mid–1980s, traditionalists had begun to use the phrase “political correctness” in order to deride these demands for inclusivity.¹ Teresa Brennan argues that the phrase “political correctness” was especially useful to its critics because it enabled the rebranding of demands for inclusive language as a violation of the American principle of the freedom of speech: “[t]he campaign against political correctness has been so successful because it has portrayed the attempt to uphold the rights of disadvantaged groups as the infringement of individual rights” (x). Now, criticism of political correctness has gone mainstream: a poll conducted in October 2015 by Fairleigh Dickinson University found that 68% of Americans and 81% of Republicans agreed with the statement “[a] big problem this country has is being politically correct” (Lalami 12).

The year 2000, which Folsom describes as the turning point in American public discourse over the value of liberal multiculturalism and its much caricatured cousin, political correctness, was also the year that Philip Roth’s highly acclaimed novel The Human Stain was published. The Human Stain made waves among critics and scholars as a racial passing novel for the new millennium, one that was especially surprising because the passing genre focuses on a social practice that Jet magazine had once optimistically declared would “pass out” with the end of Jim Crow (“Passing Out”).² In The Human Stain, the light-skinned African American protagonist, Coleman Silk, decides to pass as Jewish during the 1940s, gaining as a Jewish American in the post–World War II era many of the privileges of whiteness.³ He marries a Jewish woman and rises to prominence as a professor of classics and the first Jewish dean of faculty at Athena College, a small liberal arts school in New England with a mostly white faculty and student body. Near the end of the novel, Coleman’s sister affirms that his black-to-Jewish-to-white passing is out of place in the post-Jim Crow era of liberal multiculturalism and affirmative action: “Today, if you’re a middle-class intelligent Negro and you want your kids to go to the best schools, and on full scholarship if you need it, you wouldn’t dream of saying that you’re not colored. That would be the last thing you’d do” (326). Her claim that passing is no longer profitable in contemporary America is also arguably affirmed by the twist in Coleman’s plot: near retirement, he uses the word “spooks” to refer to two students who have been absent from his class all semester; the students turn out to be black, Coleman is accused of racism by his politically correct colleagues, and he resigns amid the ensuing scandal. This plot twist seems to turn Coleman’s racial passing plot into an ironic tragedy about the shifting…

Review: With ‘Dougla,’ Dance Theater of Harlem Recalls Past Glory

The New York Times
2018-04-08

Brian Seibert

Alicia Mae Holloway, center, and fellow members of Dance Theater of Harlem performing in “Dougla.” Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

The enthusiastic applause for Dance Theater of Harlem’s revival of “Dougla,” at the New York City Center on Friday, started as soon as the curtain rose. The opening image was of a stage full of proudly posed men and women, all in floor-length skirts decorated with little red pom-poms. More of those pom-poms crowned their heads like rooster combs.

Geoffrey Holder, who choreographed “Dougla” in 1974 (and died in 2014), also designed its costumes, and the dance is largely a costume pageant. But it wasn’t just the spectacle that people were cheering.

Long a staple of Dance Theater of Harlem’s repertory, “Dougla” has not been performed by the company since 2004. That year, debt forced the troupe into hiatus, and when the company re-emerged in 2013, its roster had shrunk by more than half…

…“Dougla” is a rather old-fashioned work. The title is a word used, especially in Mr. Holder’s native Trinidad, to label people of mixed South Asian and African descent. As part of its representation of such people, the choreography indulges in a kind of cartoon imitation of Indian dance. While wood blocks crack, heads nod and wobble like the tops of bobblehead dolls. The motion is theatrically effective — that’s why it’s repeated even during the bows — but close to caricature…

Read the entire review here.