Mixed Race Studies

Multiracial Recognition in the 2000 Census: A Personal Perpective

Perspectives
Winter 2003
pages 48-58

Ikeita Cantú Hinojosa, JD, MSW
National Women’s Law Center, Washington, D.C

The census classification scheme chosen for race and ethnicity has become a prominent social fact in its own right and involves serious political and cultural consequences beyond its explicit policy purposes. Thus, it is not surprising that fierce controversy surrounded the federal government’s decision to rescind its “check only one race” rule for the 2000 Census and implement a “mark one or more races” option in its place. The multirace option signals an official acknowledgment of a growing multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural population in the United States. As a black Chicana often required to select either the “black, non-Hispanic” or “Hispanic” option in answering demographic inquiries that mandate a single selection, I appreciate the opportunity to provide a more accurate description of myself by choosing both applicable categories; however, I question whether the scheme chosen to count race and ethnicity in the 2000 Census was the most appropriate approach to transition from the archaic “one drop of blood” conceptualization of race to a more fluid and complex understanding of the intersectionality of multiple identities. This paper provides a personal perspective on the recent 2000 Census racial and ethnic identity debate. I argue that the multirace option chosen, though not without fault, is preferable to both the retention of the old single-race classification and the creation of a new “Multiracial” category. The single-race option of the past reinforces a view of racial identity as exclusive and rigid, the proposed “Multiracial” category could cause a harsh blow to the progress made by the oppressed to date, and the multirace option implemented for the 2000 Census has the potential to blur psychological and sociological racial and ethnic lines without detracting from civil rights initiatives, signaling a new era in the social attitudes of Americans…

Read the entire article here.

Watson [Program] Will Allow Reid to Study Issues Multi-Racial People Face

Davidson University
Davidson, North Carolina
2007-04-02

Rachel Andoga

“When I went abroad to Strasbourg, France, I remember meeting everybody in my program on the plane, and this one girl said to me, ‘So, can we just get this out of the way—what are you?’”
 
Amy Reid, a senior biology major and dance team captain, has heard such questions about her ethnicity for years. Her light skin and curly black hair defy pigeon-holing her as white, black, Latino or somewhere in between. Realizing that she’s not alone in ethnic no-man’s land, she wrote a successful Watson Foundation proposal that will allow her to spend the coming year exploring the concept of ethnic identity in Brazil and Namibia.

Reid’s project seeks to compare and contrast multi-racial identity development within specific communities. She chose to visit Brazil and Namibia for their unique cultural heritages. “For a long time, people believed that there was no racism in Brazil since there is such extensive interracial mixing between the native groups, descendants of African slaves, and the Portuguese,” she said. “That’s no longer the popular belief.”…

Read the entire article here.

Free at Last: The secret of Esie Mae Washington Williams is out, but she still doesn’t have full control over her story

Bloomington Herald-Times
2004-02-14
Courtesy of: Black Film Center/Archive
Indiana University

Audrey T. McCluskey, Director Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center
Indiana University

After 78 years of harboring a less than well-kept secret, Essie Mae Washington-Williams proclaimed that by publicly naming South Carolina‘s Strom Thurmond, the once fiery segregationist senator and Dixiecrat presidential candidate as her father, for the first time she felt “completely free.” Her story garnered massive news coverage, not because the sexual exploitation of her 16-year-old black mother, Carrie Butler, by the 22-year-old Thurmond in whose household Butler worked as a maid was different from numerous other examples of lustful hypocrisy. The attention came because the late senator built his career on virulent racism, espousing the evils of race-mixing before moderating those views after he was well past his political prime. The kind of hateful rhetoric that Thurmond was good at caused many black men to lose their lives at the end of a rope, strung from a Poplar or Pecan or Live Oak tree. Their crime? It was to be accused of a liaison with a white woman or even of taking a wayward glance at one…

Read the entire article here.

Prejudice inspires filmmaker to discover Afro-German roots

Indiana Daily Student
Indiana University
2010-01-24

Abby Liebenthal, Staff Reporter

“It all started with a public threat on my life.”

Within the first few minutes of Mo Asumang’s documentary “Roots Germania,” students, faculty and Bloomington residents became part of a search for the director’s identity…

…Asumang said the journey to find her identity was driven by a desire to understand where racism toward Afro-Germans originated.

“It’s like a job to search for identity,” Asumang said. “It starts when you’re born in Germany – it’s not so easy to be part of that country.”

The film was triggered by a song, written by a Neo-Nazi band the “White Aryan Rebels,” that calls for Asumang’s murder. Lyrics in the song include “This bullet is for you, Mo Asumang.”…

Read the entire article here.

Caught Between Cultures: Women, Writing & Subjectivities

Rodopi
2002
152 pages
Hardback: 978-90-420-1378-0 / 90-420-1378-8
Paperback: 978-90-420-1368-1 / 90-420-1368-0

Edited by:

Elizabeth Russell, Professor of Womens Studies and British Literature
University Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona

The essays in this collection (on Canada, the USA, Australia and the UK) question and discuss the issues of cross-cultural identities and the crossing of boundaries, both geographical and conceptual. All of the authors have experienced cross-culturalism directly and are conscious that positions of ‘double vision’, which allow the / to participate positively in two or more cultures, are privileges that only a few can celebrate. Most women find themselves “caught between cultures”. They become involved in a day-to-day struggle, in an attempt to negotiate identities which can affirm the self and, at the same time, strengthen the ties which unites the self with others. Theoretical issues on cross-culturalism, therefore, can either liberate or constrict the /. The essays here illustrate how women’s writing negotiates this dualism through a colourful and complex weaving of words – thoughts and experiences both pleasurable and painful – into texts, quilts, rainbows. The metaphors abound. The connecting thread through their writing and, indeed, in these essays, is the concept of ‘belonging’, a theoretical/emotional composite of be-ing and longing. ‘Home’, too, assumes a variety of meanings; it is no longer a static geographical place, but many places. It is also a place elsewhere in the imagination, a mythic place of desire linked to origin.

Policies of multiculturalism can throw up more problems than they solve. In Canada, the difficulties surrounding the cross-cultural debate have given rise to a state of “messy imbroglio”. Notions of authenticity move dangerously close to essentialist identities. ‘Double vision’ is characteristic of peoples who have been uprooted and displaced, such as Australian Aboriginal writers of mixed race abducted during childhood. ‘Passing for’ black or white is full of complications, as in the case of Pauline Johnson, who passed as an authentic Indian. People with hyphenated citizenship (such as Japanese-Canadian) can be either free of national ties or trapped in subordination to the dominant culture; in these ‘visible minorities’, it is the status of being female (or coloured female) that is so often ultimately rendered invisible.

Examination of Canadian anthologies on cross-cultural writing by women reveals a crossing of boundaries of gender and genre, race and ethnicity, and, in some cases, national boundaries, in an attempt to connect with a diasporic consciousness. Cross-cultural women writers in the USA may stress experience and unique collective history, while others prefer to focus on aesthetic links and literary connections which ultimately silence difference. Journeying from the personal space of the / into the collective space of the we is exemplified in a reading of texts by June Jordan and Minnie Bruce Pratt. For these writers identity is in process. It is a painful negotiation but one which can transform knowledge into action.

Contributors
Isabel Carrera Suárez
Dolors Collellmir
Mary Eagleton
Teresa Gómez Reus
Aritha van Herk
Elizabeth Russell
María Socorro Suárez Lafuente

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• ELIZABETH RUSSELL: Introduction
• ARITHA VAN HERK: Cross-Dressed Writing in Canada
• ISABEL CARRERA SUÁREZ: Hyphens, Hybridities and Mixed-Race Identities: Gendered Readings in Contemporary Canadian Women’s Texts
• MARÍA SOCORRO SUÁREZ LAFUENTE: Creating Women’s Identity in Australian Civilization
• DOLORS COLLELLMIR: Australian Aboriginal Women Writers and the Process of Defining and Articulating Aboriginality
• ELIZABETH RUSSELL: Cross-Cultural Subjectivities: Indian Women Theorizing in the Diaspora
• TERESA GÓMEZ REUS: Weaving / Framing / Crossing Difference: Reflections on Gender and Ethnicity in American Literary and Art Practices
• MARY EAGLETON: Working Across Difference: Examples from Minnie Bruce Pratt and June Jordan
• List of Contributors

Dangerous Woman: Elizabeth Key’s Freedom Suit – Subjecthood and Racialized Identity in Seventeenth Century Colonial Virginia

Akron Law Review
University of Akron
Volume 41, Number 3 (2007-2008)
pages 799-837

Taunya Lovell Banks, Jacob A. France Professor of Equality Jurisprudence and Francis & Harriet Iglehart Research Professor of Law
University of Maryland School of Law

Elizabeth Key, an African-Anglo woman living in seventeenth century colonial Virginia sued for her freedom after being classified as a negro by the overseers of her late master’s estate. Her lawsuit is one of the earliest freedom suits in the English colonies filed by a person with some African ancestry. Elizabeth’s case also highlights those factors that distinguished indenture from life servitude – slavery in the mid seventeenth century. She succeeds in securing her freedom by crafting three interlinking legal arguments to demonstrate that she was a member of the colonial society in which she lived. Her evidence was her asserted ancestry – English; her religion, Christian; and the inability to be enslaved for life that stems from the first two statuses. These factors, I argue, determined who was the equivalent of white in seventeenth century Virginia.

I. Introduction

Elizabeth Key, an Afro-Anglo woman, was born around 1630 in the Virginia Colony. Twenty-five years later she sued for her freedom after the overseers of her late master’s estate classified her and her infant son as negroes (Africans or descendants of Africans) rather than as an indentured servant with a free-born child.  Unwilling to accept permanent servitude, Elizabeth sued for their freedom, and after protracted litigation she and her son were set free.

A few historians and legal scholars mention her case in passing as proof that by the mid seventeenth century people of African ancestry were held as slaves in Virginia.  Only feminist historian Kathleen Brown even mentions that Elizabeth’s lawsuit involved not only her freedom, but that of her son. To the rest of the historians she was simply a slave, her gender, son and mixed ancestry were irrelevant. None looked closely at the significance of her three interlinking legal arguments: (1) that she was a practicing Christian; (2) who was the daughter of a free Englishman; (3) who bound her out as an indentured servant for nine years which period had expired.

Arguably Elizabeth’s pleadings might be an early example of what Kenji Yoshino characterizes as “covering,” downplaying aspects of one’s identity. In crafting her legal argument around her father’s ancestry and subjecthood Elizabeth downplayed the African ancestry of her enslaved mother. Her argument also might be an example of “racial performance” where the extent one does things that English women and men did during the period becomes an important determinant of one’s legal status.  But as I explain in this article other cases decided during this period suggest otherwise…

Read the entire article here or here.

Meet the New Faculty: Jennifer Brody

Duke Today
The Duke Community’s Daily News and Information Resource
Duke University
2008-10-22

Andrea Fereshteh

Exploring the intersection of race, gender and art

Durham, North Carolina — From a very early age, Jennifer Brody was curious about the intersection of art, gender and race. She recalls a time as a young girl when she drew a picture of herself and colored her skin in brown.

“I told my mother that was the color I really was, even though she couldn’t see it,” says the fair-skinned Brody, the newest member of Duke’s African and African American Studies department. “As a young child, I had a conscious perception of how I might move through the world and what kinds of limitations and possibilities my specific location might engender.”…

Read the entire article here.

In the Mix: Issue of Mixed Race Stirs Controversy for Census [Interview with Ralina L. Joseph]

International Examiner
Volume 32, Number 2
2010-01-21

Yayoi Lena Winfrey

A highly anticipated event for mixed-race people takes place this year. Although it may seem officious and routine for most, the upcoming U.S. Census is actually an exciting undertaking for those considering themselves multiethnic. That’s because for only the second time in history, there will be an opportunity to select more than one race on Census forms. Those who don’t claim a multiracial identity may not get why that’s so important. But for anyone who’s ever been forced to pick only one parent’s ethnic heritage as her own, it’s a major feat.

Ralina L. Joseph’s interest in multiethnic identity began with her undergraduate studies at Brown University. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communications and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Departments of American Ethnic Studies and Women Studies at the University of Washington. Discovering that her own personal mixed race experience was what others were discussing as a collective experience, she began exploring the subject.

“I think that the first generation of scholarship, of literary and cultural production of activism on mixed race and trying to articulate a mixed race identity, is very much about a coming out moment; the naming and claiming of being mixed,” says Joseph.

But by the time she was ready to graduate, Joseph was “suspicious” of the way multiracial activism was pushing multiracial categories in the Census, and longed to produce work that looked at the multiracial experience in regard to other groups of color…

…Further, what constitutes a mixed race heritage is debatable. Recently, a group called Multi Generation Multiracials (MGM’s) challenged First Generation Multiracials (FGM’s). Although both groups have mixed ancestry, FGM’s have one white and one black parent while MGM’s may have two parents, or even grandparents, that are mixed. MGM’s, who aren’t able to ‘officially’ claim a biracial heritage, argue that they are often more mixed looking than FGM’s who, because of their parents’ visibility, can automatically declare a dual ethnicity….

Read the entire article here.

Also, see Dr. Joseph’s lecture series, Mixed Race in the United States running through 2010-03-03.

Mixed-Race Issues in the American and French Melodrama: An Analysis of the Imitation of Life Films (Stahl, USA, 1934; Sirk, USA, 1959) and Métisse (Kassovitz, France, 1993) In: Martin McLoone & Kevin Rockett, eds. Irish Films, Global Cinema, Studies in Irish Film 4.

Four Courts Press
2007
176 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-84682-081-6

Zélie Asava
University College Dublin

The chapter analyses the positionalities of the mixed-race female protagonists of each film and the visualisation of their mixed-race identity.  It considers aspects of their struggle for self-definition against the director’s visual clues about their ‘true’ racial space.  It also explores the possibility in these films for a representation of mixed identity that surpasses the stereotypes of the ‘tragic mulatto’ torn between black and white worlds (as represented by mothers in the American films and lovers/parents in the French film).  Finally the article – as with my thesis – considers the limitations of American cinema in transcending binaried representations of race and the alternatives which French cinema offers, in order to consider the possibility for a mixed-race representative model which would visualise the multiplicity and ‘Third Space’, as Homi K. Bhabha put it, of mixed-race identity.

Faculty Spotlight: Melissa Harris-Lacewell

CAAS News
Center for African American Studies
Princeton University
Spring 2008 Newsletter
Pages 6-7

Dara-Lyn Shrager

Melissa Harris-Lacewell smiles broadly when asked about Senator Barack Obama’s run for the democratic nomination for President. She is clearly a fan of both the man and his campaign.  As a former Chicagoan, who lived in the state while Obama was first a State Senator and then a US Senator, Harris-Lacewell considers herself an Obama supporter.  After just a few minutes spent chatting with Harris-Lacewell in her cozy Corwin Hall office, I realize how lucky Obama – or anyone for that matter – would be to find Harris-Lacewell on his side. She is a veritable storm of intelligent exuberance, possessing equal parts charm and determination. I left our meeting as a fan and supporter of Melissa Harris-Lacewell.

…Q. What do you make of the criticism that Obama is not really black?

R. It’s wrong. Americans are really stupid about race, partly because we live so far apart from each other. Black people have always been a mixed race but whites cannot say this about themselves.  Doubting his authenticity as a black candidate means that white people cannot feel good about supporting him because he’s not really black. That’s ridiculous.  It also discredits his ability to make claims on the black resistance movements and other important issues.  Obama has actively promoted himself as someone onto whom we can cast our own understandings. His race is something of a blank slate onto which we can project our own hopes, dreams and desires…

Read the entire interview here.