Mixed Race Studies

Equally Multiracial? A Study of Asian/Whites and Black/Whites

American Sociological Association Annual Meeting
Hilton Atlanta and Atlanta Marriott Marquis
Atlanta, Georgia
2010-08-13
19 pages

Hephzibah Strmic-Pawl
University of Virginia

In a study with 28 individuals with either Asian/White or Black/White descent I find that all the participants prefer some variation of a multiracial identity. However, when investigating how class and gender intersect with race to affect one’s racial identity, I find that Asian/Whites have more positive experiences of their multiracial identity than Black/Whites. This discrepancy is largely due to persistent stereotypical and racist depictions of Blacks and of Asians.

…The Asian/White women in this study spoke of their mixed race identity with pride and ownership, which was often connected to beauty ideals. Their “exotic” look got them attention, most often to White men. One woman, Nancy, 29 years old and a graduate student is often asked “what are you?” When I asked her if that question bothered her, she said:

Uh, honestly I don‘t take offense. I think its kinda cool cause I have people stop me on the streets sometimes or in the elevator or something or when I go to work and meeting new people and they‘ll say,—I‘m sorry, I have to ask you, “what are you?” I always find it intriguing that people can look at me and be like she stands out—she‘s unique. I‘ve been told that I‘m beautiful, that I‘m exotic because I stand out. I actually don‘t mind, I love people questioning.

This woman repeatedly noted that she liked being seen as pretty and that her mixed-race identity did not lead to uncomfortable situations or discrimination. Instead, it was a positive experience for her. All of the Asian/White women noted having predominantly or all White partners (as well as White friends), revealing, I argue that their beauty is acceptable by the standards of the dominant White society. None of them remarked on having problems with dating or finding a partner; in fact one Asian/White woman, Kelly, 22 years old, and an artist, actually remarked that she often found men that have an “Asian fetish” men that were particularly attracted to the cultures and physical looks associated with Asian. This woman also noted that she enjoyed being “ethnically ambiguous” and that others were attracted to this feature; she notes:

I actually kind of take pride in being biracial because it… I kind of get a lot of attention as a result and I think being one or the other doesn‘t give you as much as attention, is that weird? I‘m so conceited. No, I‘m not saying that I love attention all the time but it does, it‘s more gratifying to say that you‘re biracial than to say that you‘re one, it makes you more special.

In this case, she clearly receives positive attention from being biracial and from appearing mixed race. She is attractive both because she is Asian and because she is “ethnically ambiguous” her identity serves her overall in a positive capacity.

In contrast to those of Asian/White descent, women of Black/White descent spoke to more distressing experiences related to their gender. In their case, although their biraciality likewise lent to a more unique look, it also was a point of contention when developing potential friendships with Black women, when having mostly all White friends, and when navigating relationships with men. Many of the women commented on how interactions with other Black women were problematic, teasing about skin color and hair texture were common experiences. Ashley, 24 years old, and a senior in college, noted that she continues to feel some animosity from Black women. In this passage she talks about how she goes to a bar that is often frequented by Black women, she says:

Again, love the music so I‘m going to keep going there but it was like, the Black girls were like, and I get there is this hair thing in the Black community so it‘s like my hair is always a dead give away for them to want to not like me or something like that… then I would assume that… Black people are kind of like ―oh, she‘s the mixed girl, she thinks she‘s better than us…

Read the entire paper here.

100% Multiracial

UrbanFaith.com
2010-06-11

Kyle Waalen

The latest Census estimates show that multiracial people are the fastest growing demographic group in the United States. Yet many still struggle with the question of how many boxes to check. Two Christian women share about the tension and joy of being young and multiracial in America.

Kristy McDonald and Alicia Edison have a lot in common. They are both 27, both Christian women, and they are both children of an African American father and Caucasian mother. If we’re living in a multiracial world, as current demographic trends reveal, then Kristy and Alicia reflect the new face of American society. But is America ready?

The 2010 U.S. Census has reignited the debate about how society pressures multiracial people to choose one race over the other. In fact, President Obama made headlines when he selected “Black” on his census form rather than checking multiple boxes. The boxes we choose indicate more than just the color of our skin. For many reasons, racial identity still matters in America.

UrbanFaith’s Kyle Waalen asked Kristy, a caregiver at a group home for adults with disabilities in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Alicia, a Ph.D. student in sociology at the University of North Texas, to offer their personal perspectives on the challenges of being a mixed-race person in a multiracial society that hasn’t yet figured out how to be multiracial…

…Do ever feel that, as a multiracial person, you fall between the cracks when it comes to racial labels?

KRISTY: First of all, I am multiracial, but my skin tone is very light. When I was younger, I was part of a club at my local YMCA. It was designed to help African American girls make good choices about going to college and doing well in school. When guest speakers came to talk to us, they didn’t know what to think about my skin color. All the other girls at the club where dark-skinned, but I was not.

ALICIA: A multiracial person may fall through the cracks if they choose not to define themselves within the categories that society assigns. On most forms, we are given an alternative of choosing “other.” “Other” is not okay. It is not sufficient. “Other” means that we will continue to be marginalized and that we don’t count. We should be given the option to name ourselves when and how we choose…

Read the entire article here.

Righteous Fathers, Vulnerable Old Men and Degraded Creatures: Southern Justices on Miscegenation in the Antebellum Will Contest

Tulsa Law Review
Volume 40 (2005)
pages 699-

Bernie D. Jones, Associate Professor of Law
Suffolk University

Although scholars have long addressed the role of legislators and local elites in policing the color line between black and white, antebellum jurists hearing will contests also played a special role, different from the roles they played in miscegenation prosecutions, but just as effective, nonetheless. State court justices, who heard cases involving bequests to the putative slave children of slaveholding elite men, exercised their power to police by deciding when the color line had been breached. In those cases, miscegenation between white men and slave women or free women of color was not the problem, however. Instead, the color line was breached in those cases when white men recognized and accorded slave women and their mixed-race children status through manumission and property. Official recognition by white relatives meant access to whiteness. Black personal freedom, combined with access to money and land, were threats to the social order of slavery and white supremacy. Free blacks were deemed uncontrollable and arrogant, particularly when they had money. They were perceived as a bad influence upon the bonded. In the eyes of many jurists, wealthy free black status was to be denied at all costs, for the benefit of the white social order, and the white relatives or creditors seeking to establish their claim to the decedent’s estate.

In this article, I explore the attitudes of antebellum jurists towards slavery, miscegenation, and the transfer of property from elite white men to black slave women, free women of color, and their mixed-race children, as found in antebellum will contests. This article is a historical study, in which I do a case-by-case analysis and categorization of the language used by state high court justices of the South in describing the white men who left wills that gave property to black women and their children. Although these cases have been studied by historians and legal scholars in other contexts, reading these cases for the purpose of discovering judicial narratives on miscegenation has not been the focus on inquiry. As a result, scholarship on the full flavor of judicial responses to slavery is missing.

Read the entire article here.

Soul Search

The Post
Cork, Ireland
2010-09-05

Nadine O’Regan

When poet and novelist Jackie Kay started the search for her birth parents, she didn’t realise how traumatic a journey it would be, though she doesn’t regret doing it.

Jackie Kay met her birth father for the first time in a hotel room in Abuja, Nigeria, in 2003. Then in her early 40s,Kay was expectant, excited and nervous. She had brought him a present, an expensive watch.

However, before they could talk, her father, a born-again Christian, said there was something he had to do. For more than an hour, he prayed, frantically whirling, wild-eyed, like a dervish around the room, asking the Lord to cleanse the sin before him.

In her new memoir, Red Dust Road, which paints a vivid portrait of her search for her birth parents, Kay, an atheist, describes how her tears began to flood down her face as she understood that the sin being referred to was herself. ‘‘I realise with a fresh horror that Jonathan is seeing me as the sin, me as impure, me the bastard, illegitimate.”…

…Assembled in a kind of jigsaw manner – with events nipping back and forth across the years – Red Dust Road combines a compelling search story with a vivid portrait of struggling to deal with issues of race and roots. Long-term fans of Kay’s work will spy occasional references to her break-up with her lover of 15 years, British poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, and get a sense of her current life: living in a terraced house in Chorlton, Manchester, teaching part time at the University of Newcastle and bringing up a university-age son…

…Born in 1961 to a Scottish nurse and a Nigerian student, Kay was adopted at the age of five months, and grew up as the daughter of two colourful, outspoken, lifelong socialists: her adoptive father was a member of the Communist Party and her mother was the Scottish secretary of CND…

…Absorbing the fact of her adoption wasn’t the only issue Kay had to face during her childhood. She was also mixed race in 1970s Glasgow – ‘‘Being black in a white country makes you a stranger to yourself’’ – and gay at a time when nobody was allowed to be.

‘‘We live in a society where people have civil partnerships and people understand what the word ‘homophobia’ means and gay people have children openly,” she says. ‘‘But when I told my mum, that was really unusual, and she was really quite shocked.”

Kay began writing poetry at the age of 12, as a response to the racist names she was called and the beatings she received. ‘‘I found writing to be a sanctuary. I’d write a little poem as revenge.”…

Read the entire article here.

Davidson Welcomes New Professors into the Fold

Davidson College
Davidson, North Carolina
2007-08-30

Rachel Andoga

Davidson welcomes five new assistant professors into tenure-track positions this semester. Here are  profiles of their careers and academic interests.

Caroline Beschea-Fache, a native of northern France, joins the French Department as a specialist in Métissage, the study of biracialism, multiracialism, and diversity as applied to literature, social studies, and political science. Her research and teaching interests also include modern Francophone literature, cinema, and the construction of identity in France for immigrants. Beschea-Fache holds a master’s degree in movie translation from the University of Lille, where she also completed her undergraduate work. In 2000, she began her pursuit of a master’s degree in French at Indiana University, where she wrote her dissertation on the representation of biracial characters in Francophone literature…

Read the entire article here.

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.

Francophone Women: Between Visibility and Invisibility

Peter Lang Publishing Group
2010
146 pages
Hardback ISBN 978-1-4331-0803-7

Edited by

Cybelle H. McFadden, Assistant Professor of French
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

Sandrine F. Teixidor, Assistant Professor of French Studies
Randolph-Macon College, Ashland, Virginia

Francophone Women: Between Visibility and Invisibility underscores the writing of authors who foreground the female body and who write across geographical borders, as part of a global literary movement that has the French language as its common denominator. This edited collection exposes how female authors portray the tensions that exist between visibility and invisibility, public and private, presence and absence, and excess and restraint when it is linked to femininity and the female body.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Preface

1. Corporeal Performance and Visible Gender Position in Colette’s The Pure and the Impure. Marion Krauthaker
2. After-Images of Muslim Women: Vision, Voice, and Resistance in the Work of Assia Djebar. Mary Ellen Wolf
3. The Gaze beneath the Veil: Portrait of Women in Algeria and Morocco. Sandrine F. Teixidor
4. Vision, Voice, and the Female Body: Nina Bouraoui’s Sites/Sights of Resistance. Adrienne Angelo
5. The Métis Body: Double Mirror. Caroline Beschea-Fache
6. The Body, Sexuality, and the Photo in L’Usage de la photo. Cybelle H. McFadden

Contributors
Index

From: The Métis Body: Double Mirror

DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM? I AM THE ONE YOU CAN’T LEAVE ALONE.  The one who puzzles you, intrigues you.  I am the original definition of “exotic.” Acceptable in many ways, the cafe au lait of life, more palatable because I am diluted…  They call me white, they call me black… they’ve called me everything in between.
Camille Hernandez-Ramdwar

In their novels Garçon manqué (2000) and 53cm (1999), Nina Bouraoui and Sandrine Bessora, respectively, portray characters born of parents belonging to different racialized groups and raise the issues defining métissage.  As they form corporeal representation of the concept, they describe the métis experience in the Francophone context.  The complexity of defining the concept of métissage involves examining both races, since they shape the perception of the métis by the Other and by the subject itself; it also entails discussing the racial tensions that play out in corporeal ways.  Using the work of Bouraoui and Bessora, I will analyze how the conception of a world based on dichotomies and binary oppositions, reinforced by racial categorization, affects and disturbs the construction of métis identities in the texts…

“A gallant heart to the empire.” Autoethnography and Imperial identity in Mary Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures

Philological Quarterly
Volume 83, Number 2, Spring, 2004

Sarah Salih, Professor of English
University of Toronto

A portrait of Mary Seacole in oils, c. 1869, by the obscure London artist Albert Charles Challen (1847–81). The original was discovered in 2003 by historian Helen Rappaport, and acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2008.

It seems fitting that the bi-centenary year of Mary Seacole’s birth has been marked by a spate of discoveries and publications about the author of Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (1857). In January 2005 a “lost” portrait of Seacole, painted in 1879 by an obscure London artist named Albert Challen, was placed on view in the National Portrait Gallery. Coincidentally, Jane Robinson’s rather clumsily-titled biography, Mary Seacole: The Charismatic Black Nurse Who Became a Heroine of the Crimea, was published only weeks later, and in the same month the Home Office named one of its new buildings after Mary Seacole. (1) To round off these events, a Channel 4 documentary screened in April 2005 revealed the identity of Seacole’s husband Horace (hitherto unknown), and Wonderful Adventures was published as a Penguin Classic at the beginning of that year. (2) Assuredly, Seacole is enjoying a second heyday (albeit a posthumous one), having already taken her place amidst a burgeoning group of “Great Black Britons” whose achievements are receiving belated recognition. (3) This is not to imply that Seacole has been rescued from obscurity: between her death in 1881 and Alexander and Dewjee’s edition of Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands almost a century later, a steady trickle of articles and publications concerning Seacole appeared both in Britain and Jamaica. Moreover, since 1984, Seacole has received increasing academic attention, and she has long been installed as a figurehead for a number of different groups including Jamaicans, black British people and nurses.

Still, it does seem to be the case that during the last decade or two, “Seacole” has become something of a brand name for Caribbean nurses, so-called “ethnic minorities” in Britain, and Jamaicans both patriate and expatriate. There are already numerous buildings called “Mary Seacole” in Britain and Jamaica, and a Mary Seacole Street almost came into existence in London during the 1990s. (4) It is not only Seacole’s name that is being invoked; people are also reading her text, or sections of it, since it is widely available in its entirety (Wonderful Adventures has been issued at least three times since Alexander and Dewjee’s 1984 edition) and in excerpted form. Moreover, there is a growing canon of critical literature about Seacole and her autobiography, and well-known scholars such as Moira Ferguson and Simon Gikandi have tackled the thorny question of Seacole’s national, cultural and racial identifications–a question on which I wish to focus here. Certainly, Seacole has been adopted by different groups both inside and outside the academy, and she has been made to stand for (not always complementary) national, racial and cultural causes. Is there something about Seacole’s text that lends itself to these multiple interpretations? Why does “Seacole” mean so many different things to so many different people? Both in the country of her birth (Jamaica) and the country she adopted (Britain), Seacole is a national heroine, and yet sometimes it does seem as though the Seacole text (by which I mean Wonderful Adventures, as well as reconstructions of “Mary Seacole” by different generations of critics) is being pulled in quite different directions. Can Seacole be “black,” “British,” and “Jamaican” at the same time? If these ontological vectors are in fact compatible, then is it important for contemporary readers and critics to take into account how Seacole constructed herself; or how she was constructed by her nineteenth-century contemporaries?…

…Reading Wonderful Adventures as a transcultural autoethnography in conjunction with the responses of Seacole’s nineteenth-century critics to both author and text will yield broader insights into the construction and representation of “mixed race” women, both now and in Seacole’s era. My analysis of Wonderful Adventures will accordingly draw on the growing cluster of paratexts that has surrounded Seacole’s autobiography since the time of its publication. In particular, I wish to dwell on how Jamaican and British newspaper articles featuring Seacole exemplify Benedict Anderson’s idea of national identity as an imagined, textual community that is linguistically, rather than consanguineously, constructed. It is my hope that such a discussion will contribute to a more wide-ranging investigation into the naming, representation and construction of the “mixed race” female subject in imperial contexts….

Purchase the entire article here.

The Silence of Miss Lambe: Sanditon and Fictions of ‘Race’ in the Abolition Era

Eighteenth-Century Fiction
Volume 18, Issue 3 (Spring 2006)
pages 329-353

Sarah Salih, Professor of English
University of Toronto

Although it would be difficult to argue that Sanditon (1817) is “historical” in any immediately obvious sense, it is nonetheless clear that the social history of England is central to Jane Austen’s last, unfinished text. Critics appear to agree that the novel, which, as Warren Roberts points out, was written during a period of social turbulence in England, reflects anxieties about the shift from one socio-economic structure to another. Once a fishing village and agricultural community, Sanditon has been “perverted” into a resort, a “sandy town,” where the sea is an exploitable resource and invalidism is a social activity engaged in by characters who are “urban, rootless, irresponsible and self-indulgent.” As Tony Tanner puts it, “[Sanditon is] a little parable of change—supersession, supplanting, and substitution.” These are certainly accurate characterizations, and yet the majority of the novel’s commentators overlook what Edward Said would call its “geographical problematic,” the fact that the seaside resort is dependent on economic resources from outside—from other areas of England, and, it seems, from England’s Caribbean colonies. I am referring to Miss Lambe, Austen’s only “brown” character—so briefly invoked and so tantalizingly incomplete. Certainly, Miss Lambe does not take up much of Sanditon’s eleven and a half chapters, and as my title suggests, she never utters a word. All the same, the characters’ allusions to the “West India” contingent, along with Miss Lambe’s presence in the text, certainly warrant closer critical attention than they have hitherto received.

Read the entire article here.

Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral

Beacon Press
Published in 1929
408 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-080700919-2
Size: 5-3/8″ X 8″ Inches

Jessie Redmon Fauset

Written in 1929 at the height of the Harlem Renaissance by one of the movement’s most important and prolific authors, Plum Bun is the story of Angela Murray, a young black girl who discovers she can pass for white. After the death of her parents, Angela moves to New York to escape the racism she believes is her only obstacle to opportunity. What she soon discovers is that being a woman has its own burdens that don’t fade with the color of one’s skin, and that love and marriage might not offer her salvation.