Mixed Race Studies

What Are You? The Changing Face of America with Kip Fulbeck

National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS)
2010 Annual Conference
Dates: 2010-02-24 through 2010-02-26
Moscone Convention Center West
San Francisco, California, USA
Adapt, Survive, Thrive: Unleashing the Superpowers Within

Kip Fulbeck, Professor of Performative Studies, Video
University of California, Santa Barbara

Friday, 2010-02-26
13:30 – 14:30 PDT (Local Time)

A seminal artist exploring multiracial identity, Kip Fulbeck captivates audiences with his videos, performances, and writings. His words and artwork have received a landslide of attention from media as diverse as MTV and CNN. On stage his uniquely personal monologues and multimedia shows combine stand-up comedy with a powerful and politically charged edge, leading audiences to honestly consider Who Am I? Using his own Cantonese, English, Irish, and Welsh background as a springboard, Fulbeck confronts media imagery of Asian men, interracial dating patterns, and icons of race and sex in the U.S., constantly questioning where Hapas “fit in” in a country that ignores multiracial identity. His work invites and inspires viewers to explore how ethnic stereotypes and opinions on interracial dating, gender roles, and personal identity are formed. A professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Fulbeck has performed and exhibited across the U.S. and in more than 20 countries. He has twice keynoted the National Conference on Race in Higher Education to standing ovations; directed 13 independent videos; and authored the critically acclaimed books Paper Bullets: A Fictional Autobiography and Part Asian, 100% Hapa, featuring portraits of multiracials of Asian/Pacific Islander descent, with an introduction by Sean Lennon.

The House at the End of the Road: The Story of Three Generations of an Interracial Family in the American South

HarperCollins
Imprint: Smithsonian
2009-05-19
224 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780061375736; ISBN10: 006137573X
On Sale: 2009-05-19

W. Ralph Eubanks, Bernard Schwartz Fellow
New America Foundation

In 1914, in defiance of his middle-class landowning family, a young white man named James Morgan Richardson married a light-skinned black woman named Edna Howell. Over more than twenty years of marriage, they formed a strong family and built a house at the end of a winding sandy road in South Alabama, a place where their safety from the hostile world around them was assured, and where they developed a unique racial and cultural identity. Jim and Edna Richardson were Ralph Eubanks’s grandparents.

Part personal journey, part cultural biography, The House at the End of the Road examines a little-known piece of this country’s past: interracial families that survived and prevailed despite Jim Crow laws, including those prohibiting mixed-race marriage. As he did in his acclaimed 2003 memoir, Ever Is a Long Time, Eubanks uses interviews, oral history, and archival research to tell a story about race in American life that few readers have experienced. Using the Richardson family as a microcosm of American views on race and identity, The House at the End of the Road examines why ideas about racial identity rooted in the eighteenth century persist today. In lyrical, evocative prose, this extraordinary book pierces the heart of issues of race and racial identity, leaving us ultimately hopeful about the world as our children might see it.

Browse the contents of the book here.

Black, White or Mixed Race? Race and Racism in the Lives of Young People of Mixed Parentage, 2nd Edition

Routledge an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
2001-11-22
272 pages
ISBN: 978-0-415-25982-8 Binding: Paperback (also available in Hardback)
Trim Size: 216 x 138

Ann Phoenix, Professor and Co-Director of the Thomas Coram Research Unit
University of London, Institute of Education

Barbara Tizard, Professor Emeritus
University of London, Institute of Education

The number of people in racially mixed relationships has grown steadily over the last thirty years, yet these people often feel stigmatised and unhappy about their identities.

The first edition of Black, White or Mixed Race? was a ground-breaking study: this revised edition uses new literature to consider what is now known about racialised identities and changes in the official use of ‘mixed’ categories. All new developments are placed in a historical framework and in the context of up-to-date literature on mixed parentage in Britain and the USA.

Based on research with young people from a range of social backgrounds the book examines their attitudes to black and white people; their identity; their cultural origins; their friendships; their experiences of racism. This was the first study to concentrate on adolescents of black and white parentage and it continues to provide unique insights into their identities. It is a valuable resource for all those concerned with social work and policy.

Table of Contents

1. Setting the Scene
2. People of Mixed Black and White Parentage in Britain: A Brief History
3. Identity and Mixed Parentage: Theory, Policy and Research
4. The ‘Transracial Adoption’/’same race’ Placement Debate
5. How the Research Was Carried Out
6. The Radicalised Identities of Young People of Mixed Parentage Today
7. Friendships and Allegiances
8. Experiencing Racism
9. Dealing with Racism
10. Some Parents’ Accounts
11. But What About the Children? An Overview, With Some Comments

Race Mixture in Nineteenth-Century U.S. and Spanish American Fictions: Gender, Culture, and Nation Building

University of North Carolina Press
October 2004
192 pages
5.5 x 8.5, notes, bibl., index
Paper ISBN:  978-0-8078-5564-5

Debra J. Rosenthal, Associate Professor of English
John Carroll University

Race mixture has played a formative role in the history of the Americas, from the western expansion of the United States to the political consolidation of emerging nations in Latin America. Debra J. Rosenthal examines nineteenth-century authors in the United States and Spanish America who struggled to give voice to these contemporary dilemmas about interracial sexual and cultural mixing.

Rosenthal argues that many literary representations of intimacy or sex took on political dimensions, whether advocating assimilation or miscegenation or defending the status quo. She also examines the degree to which novelists reacted to beliefs about skin differences, blood taboos, incest, desire, or inheritance laws. Rosenthal discusses U.S. authors such as James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Walt Whitman, William Dean Howells, and Lydia Maria Child as well as contemporary novelists from Cuba, Peru, and Ecuador, such as Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Clorinda Matto de Turner, and Juan León Mera. With her multinational approach, Rosenthal explores the significance of racial hybridity to national and literary identity and participates in the wider scholarly effort to broaden critical discussions about America to include the Americas.

Mixing It Up: Multiracial Subjects

University of Texas Press
2004
6 x 9 in.
225 pages
ISBN: 978-0-292-74345-8
Print-on-demand title

Edited by:

SanSan Kwan, Associate Professor of Dance, Performance Studies
University of California, Berkeley

and

Kenneth Speirs (1964-2013), Professor of English
University of California, Berkeley

Foreword by

Naomi Zack, Professor of Philosophy
University of Oregon

The United States Census 2000 presents a twenty-first century America in which mixed-race marriages, cross-race adoption, and multiracial families in general are challenging the ethnic definitions by which the nation has historically categorized its population. Addressing a wide spectrum of questions raised by this rich new cultural landscape, Mixing It Up brings together the observations of ten noted voices who have experienced multiracialism first-hand.

From Naomi Zack’s “American Mixed Race: The United States 2000 Census and Related Issues” to Cathy Irwin and Sean Metzger’s “Keeping Up Appearances: Ethnic Alien-Nation in Female Solo Performance,” this diverse collection spans the realities of multiculturalism in compelling new analysis. Arguing that society’s discomfort with multiracialism has been institutionalized throughout history, whether through the “one drop” rule or media depictions, SanSan Kwan and Kenneth Speirs reflect on the means by which the monoracial lens is slowly being replaced.

Itself a hybrid of memoir, history, and sociological theory, Mixing It Up makes it clear why the identity politics of previous decades have little relevance to the fluid new face of contemporary humanity.

Table of Contents

• Preface (Naomi Zack)
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction (SanSan Kwan and Kenneth Speirs)
• I. Issues and Trends
  • 1. American Mixed Race: The United States 2000 Census and Related Issues (Naomi Zack)
  • 2. Misceg-narrations (Raquel Scherr Salgado)
• II. Multiracial Subjects
  • 3. A Passionate Occupant of the Transnational Transit Lounge (Adrian Carton)
  • 4. Miscegenation and Me (Richard Guzman)
  • 5. “What Is She Anyway?”: Rearranging Bodily Mythologies (Orathai Northern)
  • 6. Resemblance (Alice White)
  • 7. “Brown Like Me”: Explorations of a Shifting Self (Stefanie Dunning)
  • 8. Toward a Multiethnic Cartography: Multiethnic Identity, Monoracial Cultural Logic, and Popular Culture (Evelyn Alsultany)
  • 9. Keeping Up Appearances: Ethnic Alien-Nation in Female Solo Performance (Cathy Irwin and Sean Metzger)
  • 10. Against Erasure: The Multiracial Voice in Cherríe Moraga’s Loving in the War Years (Carole DeSouza)
• About the Contributors

Queer in Black and White: Interraciality, Same Sex Desire, and Contemporary African American Culture

Indiana University Press
2009-04-21
152 pages
5 b&w photos, 5.5 x 8.25
ISBN-13: 978-0-253-22109-4

Stefanie K. Dunning, Associate Professor
Miami University, Oxford, Ohio

This book analyzes representative works of African American fiction, film, and music in which interracial desire appears in the context of same sex desire. In close readings of these “texts,” Stefanie K. Dunning explores the ways in which the interracial intersects with queerness, blackness, whiteness, class, and black national identity. She shows that representations of interracial desire do not follow the logic of racial exclusion. Instead they are metaphorical and anti-biological. Rather than diluting race, interracial desire makes race visible. By invoking the interracial, black gay and lesbian artists can remake our conception of blackness.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. “Ironic Soil”: Recuperative Rhythms and Negotiated Nationalism
• 2. “No Tender Mercy”: Same-Sex Desire, Interraciality, and the Black Nation
• 3. (Not) Loving Her: A Locus of Contradictions
• 4. “She’s a B*(u)tch”: Centering Blackness in The Watermelon Woman
• Epilogue: Reading Robert Reid-Pharr
• Notes
• Index

The Historical Problematization of ‘Mixed Race’ in Psychological and Human-Scientific Discourses

Defining difference: Race and Racism in the History of Psychology
2004
Edited by Andrew Winston
pages pp. 79-108
American Psychological Association

Thomas Teo, Associate Professor
Department of Psychology
York University

This paper reconstructs techniques of problematization regarding “mixed race” from Enlightenment inspired anthropological discourses to the North-American psychological discourses of the present time. Two central techniques of problematization are discussed. The conceptual technique of problematization, used in bio-psychological discourse at the beginning of the 20th century, transformed a lack of evidence into invoking metaphysical concepts such as disharmony. Sociological and social-psychological discourses changed problems of society with hybridity into problems of individuals. The empirical technique of problematization refers to the repeated testing of the inferiority of hybrid groups, for example of the “mulatto hypothesis.” Finally, it is shown how multiracial academics in the contemporary discourse shifted the discourse by focusing on problems that biracial people experience within society. It is suggested that the reconstruction of hybridity illustrates the epistemological and ethical shortcomings of a paradigm that considers humans as objects and not as subjects of research.

Read the entire chapter here.

Our Problems with Race: Addressing Biological Versus Social Definitions

Appalachian State University
Blue Ridge Ballroom PSU
Wednesday, 2009-10-28 19:00 EDT (Local Time)                                   

Joseph L. Graves, Jr, Dean of University Studies and Professor of Biological Sciences
North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University

What does evolution tell us about race and what are we taught to believe about race? What are the implications for how we view, group, and value others?  Using his research background in evolutionary biology, Dr. Joseph L. Graves, Jr. explains how most Americans still believe that there is some biological legitimacy to our socially constructed racial categories despite the modern scientific evidence that discredits all of our social stereotypes. Dr. Graves has written two books that address the myths and theories of race in American society. He has published over 50 papers and book chapters and has appeared in six documentary films and numerous television interviews on these general topics.

Crimes of ‘Blood’: A comparative analysis of South Africa’s Immorality Act (1927 & 1950) and Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949), and Miscegenation Laws in North America

W.E.B. DuBois Insitute for African and African American Research at Harvard University
Date: Spring 2010

Zimitri Erasmus, Senior Lecturer in Sociology
University of Cape Town

This study compares the effects of Miscegenation Laws in 20th century North America with those of apartheid South Africa’s Immorality (1927 & 1950) and Prohibition of Mixed Marriages (1949) Acts. It draws on three sets of primary data: a) law reports of cases tried and sent for appeal – under various versions of the Immorality Act – before 1948 under the government of the Union of South Africa and after 1948, under the Apartheid government; b) House of Assembly and Senate Debates of the South African Parliament, under both the Union and Apartheid governments; and c) related Government Commission Reports. It also draws on already existing analyses of similar data from the North American experience to produce a comparative analysis of relevant laws in South Africa and North America.

The project examines the logic, procedures and socio-political effects of these key laws of Grand Apartheid. I ask four broad questions:

• What can we learn from the North American body of knowledge on the administration of ‘interracial’ sex and marriage that might be of relevance to such administration in colonial and apartheid South Africa?
• What is different about the South African case?
• How does this difference contribute to knowledge in this field?
• What does this comparative analysis offer in support of a critical literacy for the use of ‘race’?

Different prejudices toward different types of interracial couples: Examining alternative explanations

SPSP 2010
The Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology
2010-01-28 through 2010-01-30
Las Vegas, Nevada

Stephen A. Mistler
Arizona State University

Angela G. Pirlott
Arizona State University

Steven L. Neuberg
Arizona State University

Between 1992 and 2000, the prevalence of interracial marriage in the United States more than doubled, increasing from 2.2% to 4.9%. How do people feel about such relationships, and what accounts for these feelings? Undergraduate students rated relationships of Asian, Black, and White men with Asian, Black, and White women; each participant answered the same questions for all nine possible heterosexual pairings of the above groups, as well as items designed to assess, for each race-gender type (e.g., Asian female), beliefs about their long-term mate value, short-term mate value, and scarcity as potential mates. Given issues of sample size, we report only findings from White participants. In general, White participants expressed more prejudice against interracial couples than same-race couples, even for couplings not involving members of their own race. This apparently simple bias, however, masks a more complex psychology based on interactions of specific race-gender pairings with perceiver gender. As one example, White participants were less accepting of White women with minority men than of White men with minority women, and reacted particularly negatively to the pairing of White women with Black men than to the pairing of White women with Asian men; these patterns of antipathy were especially strong for White male participants. We assess the broader range of findings in light of frameworks suggesting that negative reactions toward interracial couples arise from concerns with “race-mixing,” from concerns about potential lost resources for one’s group, and from assessments of valuable reproductive opportunities potentially gained and lost.