Mixed Race Studies

Danzy Senna

The Southeast Review
2010-05-01

The Southeast Review is published by Florida State University’s Creative Writing Program.

Interviewed by Janeen Price

Danzy Senna is the author of two novels, a memoir, numerous essays and works of short fiction. Her debut novel, Caucasia, a coming-of-age story, was named the Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. It also won the Book-of-the-Month Club’s Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the American Library Association’s Alex Award. Her latest book, Where Did You Sleep Last Night?: A Personal History, is a memoir of her journey to solve the enigma of her father’s family history.

Q: Where Did You Sleep Last Night? is your first memoir. What compelled you to write and publish this personal narrative?

A: I was intrigued by this mystery of my father’s mother, a black woman from the South who was educated and ambitious in her youth down South, then gave it all up and became the modest, retiring woman we knew in Boston. There were so many gaps in her story—so much mystery surrounding her. The book began as an investigation into her, and I didn’t think of it as a memoir. But as it progressed, I realized that my relationship to my father—the contradictions in it, the pain and also the love there—was central to the story. So the personal material sort of snuck up on me as I tried to find and tell this other, more historically distant tale. I still consider myself first and foremost a fiction writer…

…Q: You are biracial, the protagonists of your two novels are biracial, and issues of racial identity loom large in all three of your books. How has your exploration of racial identity evolved from one book to the next?

A: That’s a good question, but not one I feel I can really answer. I think my readers could answer that better than I could. But it does lead me to another related thought. Readers have at times over the years asked me, “Are you ever going to write about people who aren’t mixed?” I always feel there is an implicit criticism in the question—as if maybe I should be writing about a white man, or a Chinese woman, to prove my universality. But I never hear white writers being asked, “Are you ever going to write about characters that aren’t white?” And I don’t even hear the question being thrown at black writers who write about black life and black characters. It has made me wonder if the question has more to do with a discomfort with my racial ambiguity. I think people are comfortable with black people writing about black people (and maybe uncomfortable with black people not writing about black people). And I think people assume the universality of white characters, especially if they are male. But they can’t quite wrap their finger around what they see me as. Maybe they see me as white, because that’s what my features read, and can’t really understand why race and blackness would persist as a theme in my work.

So for me I’ve had to really ignore all those questions about subject matter and race, etc., because I think it doesn’t really have to do with my work, the real issues I’m writing about, which I hope are about more than racial identity. Racial identity is there, of course, but to me other questions loom larger. Did Raymond Carver write about white people? Yes, in a way, but in another way, no, that wasn’t his subject. I write books set in multiracial worlds, and from the perspective of multiracial characters. Maybe I won’t always write from that perspective, but I see nothing limiting about it. In writing, the universal is found in the specific. And I have learned that you really have to just write about your obsessions and from a place of truth, and ignore the rest…

Read the entire interview here.

Diversity triumph in 2010 Rose of Tralee

The African Voice: Ireland’s No. 1 African Community Newspaper
2010-09-05

Zélie Asava

Dr. Zélie Asava considers the contest’s celebration of the ‘new Irish’

2010 marks the year that the Rose of Tralee was won by a woman of Irish and Indian heritage. Clare Kambamettu, a mixed-race psychologist, took the title as the London rose, making it the 2nd year a London Rose has won the competition. There have been few mixed-race Roses to date. Luzveminda O’Sullivan was the 1998 rose of Tralee (whose name is mysteriously misspelt or replaced by another on many websites listing the history of the Roses). Though O’Sullivan hails from Mayo she was the Phillippines Rose, reflecting her Irish-Filipino identity. 2004’s Philadelphia Rose, Sinead De Roiste, was the first Irish-African American contestant in the history of the Rose of Tralee.

The fact that a mixed-race Rose can now be included in the competition, and even go on to win it, as a representative of Irish women and culture, is a wonderful example of diversity working in this country. Interestingly though, Kambamettu’s heritage has not been mentioned by much of the national media, with journalists preferring to describe her as “stunning” or refer to her father’s mildly exotic name, Ravi, as a signifier of her Otherness, rather than state her as mixed-race…

Read the entire article here.

Seeking Interviewees for Research on Mixed Heritage Asian American Mothers

2013-03-17

Brian DeGuzman
San Francisco State University

I am an Asian American Studies M.A. student at San Francisco State University and I am looking for interviewees for my research on mixed heritage Asian American mothers. I am specifically looking for mixed Asian American mothers who have adult children who are at least 18 years of age or older. I would also like to interview these adult children.

I think an interesting conversation can be made about how mixed mothers raise their children, so if you have questions or would like to participate, please contact me at bdeguz@gmail.com or at my Google Voice phone number which is 415-496-5947.

Being a Eurasian Australian

Yemaya: Sydney University Law Society’s annual interdisciplinary Women’s journal
Yemaya 2010 (2011-04-17)
Theme: “Intersextions”
pages 34-36

Lyn Dickens

Lyn Dickens relates her experiences of being a young Eurasian woman in Australia

Being a Eurasian Australian is a strange thing. Don’t get me wrong, my mixed-race heritage has never been a source of inner-conflict, nor have I ever had an ‘identity crisis’ about having Anglo-Celtic and Peranakan parentage. Unfortunately, I can’t say that everyone else is always so comfortable with my ethnicity.

When I was fifteen, I was at my local shopping centre when a strange man loomed into my path and demanded, “What are you?” Stunned, I avoided his bemused gaze and kept walking. What did he mean? was my initial reaction. Then I thought, with slow-mounting anger, what kind of question is that? I was not a thing—a “what” could not encompass who I was. But even in my racially naïve teenage brain, I realised that his question was about my not-quite-white appearance. It was not the first time that I had been confronted by a stranger about my racial heritage. The question “Where are you from?” was a disturbingly common occurrence during my teenage years. Funnily enough, while my Asian friends were sometimes quizzed about their origins by acquaintances, they didn’t seem to attract strangers on the street the way my sister and I did.

Were we freaks? Back then, the thought occasionally crossed my mind. It wasn’t until I reached university and actually met a few other Eurasian women that I realised they had all had similar experiences, and that these experiences would keep coming. Even today, meeting someone new all but guarantees a discussion of my race and, inevitably, everyone sees something different. At a conference recently, a woman assumed I was Chinese and when I informed her of my heritage she responded in an offended tone, “but you don’t look Eurasian”. On another occasion I was at a dinner party and the majority of the guests assumed I was half white and half ‘something’. The exact type of ‘something’ which made up this half became a topic of conversation. Was I half-Japanese, half-Singaporean, half-Burmese?

Compared to many other young, Eurasian Australian women, my experiences could have been worse. My friend Serena—twenty-nine, fun, friendly and Eurasian—went to a trendy Sydney nightclub recently. While she was dancing with a group of friends, a Caucasian man grabbed her and bit her on the shoulder. Shocked, she could only stare in amazement when he said, “You wanted that, didn’t you? Girls like you always do.”

“Girls like what?” I exclaimed, slightly scandalised, when she told me. She gave me a wry smile and shrugged.

“Girls like us”, she replied. “Eurasians”…

Read the entire essay here.

Passing and the Problematic of Multiracial Pride (or, Why One Mixed Girl Still Answers to Black)

by Danzy Senna

Chapter in: Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture
University of Michigan Press
2005
416 pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-472-09840-8
Paper ISBN: 978-0-472-06840-1
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-472-02545-9

Edited By:

Harry J. Elam, Jr., Olive H. Palmer Professor in Humanities and Professor of Drama
Stanford University

Kennell Jackson (1941-2005), Associate Professor of History
Stanford University

I have never had the comfort zone of a given racial identity. My mother is a Bostonian white woman of WASP heritage. My father is a Louisiana black man of mixed African and Mexican heritage. Unlike people who are automatically classified as black or white, I have always been up for debate. I am forever having to explain to people why it is that I look so white for a black girl, why it is that my features don’t reveal my heritage. It’s not something I should have to explain, but in America, at least, people are obsessed with this dissonance between my face and my race. White Americans in particular have a difficult time understanding why somebody of my background would choose blackness. With Tiger Woods proclaiming himself a Cablinasian, multiracial activists demanding new categories, and Newsweek declaring it hip to be mixed, it strikes most people as odd that I would call myself a black girl.

But my racial identity developed when I was growing up in Boston in the 1970s, where there were only two choices for me: black and white. For my sister, a year older than me, with curly hair and more African features, there weren’t even these choices. There was only black. And my parents, smitten with the black power politics of the time, taught my siblings and me, in no uncertain terms, that we were all black. They saw this identity as armor against the racism beyond our front door. They also knew that my sister didn’t have a choice, and to define us differently would be damaging to us as a family unit. The tact that the world saw each of us as different (my sister as light-skinned black, my brother as Puerto Rican, and me as Italian) raised complications, but didn’t change the fact that we were all one tribe…

Read the entire chapter here. (pages 83-87)

Being Mixed Race: What are the identity politics of the million-strong ‘Jessica Ennis generation’?

Women of the World Festival
Southbank Centre
2013-03-06 through 2013-03-10

Sunday, 2013-03-10, 12:00-13:00Z
Level 5 Function Room
Royal Festival Hall

Panelists:

Emma Dabiri, Teaching Fellow
Africa Department, School of African and Oriental Studies, London
Visual Sociology Ph.D. Researcher, Goldsmiths University of London

Reya El-Salahi, Radio broadcaster, television presenter, writer and journalist

Kay Montano, Make-up Artist

Chair:

Emine Saner, Feature Writer
The Guardian

In the 2011 census over a million people in the UK classed themselves as ‘mixed race’—but for some, the label is meaningless.

So what are the identity politics of the ‘Jessica Ennis generation’?

Join broadcaster Reya El-Salahi, celebrity make-up artist Kay Montano, and Irish-Nigerian visual sociologist Emma Dabiri as they discuss the joys and challenges of being a dual heritage woman in modern-day Britain.

For more information, click here. Listen to the panel here.

Mixed Race in Britain

Kneeshaw Consulting
2013-03-11

In the 2011 census over a million people in the UK classed themselves as ‘mixed race’ – but for some, the label is unhelpful. The identity politics of the ‘Jessica Ennis generation’ was the subject of a workshop at the Women of the World Festival yesterday at London’s Southbank Centre. The latest data shows that 2.2% of the population are mixed race compared to 1.2% in 2001. Mixed-race is the fastest-growing minority in the UK. With this in mind four young British women of dual heritage talked about their experiences and debated whether having the box of ‘mixed race’ to tick offered them a sense of power or a meaningless classification, no better than ticking the ‘other’ box. Emma Dabiri, an Irish-Nigerian visual sociologist and writer, argued that race does not provide a stable or static concept of identity, but is a social construct. She talked about historical racialisation of identity, and stressed that race mixing does not eliminate racism. She gave examples of the media using images of mixed race people to promote an idea of a hip, cool generation, when in fact the experience of mixed race people, in the wider context of race relations in modern Britain, is complex and brings many challenges…

Read the entire article here.

The experience of race in the lives of Jewish birth mothers of children from black/white interracial and inter-religious relationships: a Canadian perspective

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Published online: 2013-01-14
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2013.752099

Channa C. Verbian, BSW, M.Ed., RSW, OASW, OCSWSSW
Toronto, Canada

In this paper, I discuss my life history study on experiences of race in the lives of Jewish-Canadian and Jewish-American birth mothers of children from black/white interracial, inter-religious relationships. Opening with a reflection on my personal experience and what compelled me to undertake this research, I then provide a short introduction to attitudes about interracial/inter-religious relationships found in the literature, followed by an introduction to my research methodology. Finally, I compare and contrast the experiences of three Jewish-American mothers, excerpted from their published narratives, and the experiences of two Jewish-Canadian mothers from two recorded interviews, with my own experience. I conclude this paper with a brief summary of the emerging themes in my research and how they add to our understanding of mothering across racialized boundaries.

Background

As a Jewish-Canadian mother of children from a black/white interracial, inter-religious relationship. I wanted to be proactive about my children’s social and psychological development. Consulting the literature on interracial children and racial-identity formation. I became increasingly curious about the experiences of white mothers and how everyday racism and racial discourses might affect their…

Read or purchase the article here.

Researching white mothers of mixed-parentage children: the significance of investigating whiteness

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Published online: 2013-01-14
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2013.752101

Joanne Britton, Lecturer in Applied Sociology
University of Sheffield

This article takes as its starting point the increasing number of research studies that pay specific attention to family relationships when investigating mixedness. It draws on the critical study of whiteness to illustrate the significance of examining, in more detail than is usual, white mothers’ racialized identity in studies of mixed-parentage families. It is argued that by doing so, understanding of the identity development and sense of belonging of children and young people in mixed-parentage families can be enhanced, as well as understanding of these issues in mixed-parentage families generally. The article explains how kinship relationships and wider social networks are two related areas of investigation that can help to shed light on what happens to whiteness in mixed-parentage families. Both encourage a specific focus on the identity and sense of belonging of mothers, without marginalizing the identities of other family members.

Read or purchase the article here.

Social capital and the informal support networks of lone white mothers of mixed-parentage children

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Published online: 2013-02-06
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2013.752100

Vicki Harman, Lecturer in the Centre for Criminology and Sociology
Royal Holloway, University of London

This article takes as its starting point the increasing number of research studies that pay specific attention to family relationships when investigating mixedness. It draws on the critical study of whiteness to illustrate the significance of examining, in more detail than is usual, white mothers’ racialized identity in studies of mixed-parentage families. It is argued that by doing so, understanding of the identity development and sense of belonging of children and young people in mixed-parentage families can be enhanced, as well as understanding of these issues in mixed-parentage families generally. The article explains how kinship relationships and wider social networks are two related areas of investigation that can help to shed light on what happens to whiteness in mixed-parentage families. Both encourage a specific focus on the identity and sense of belonging of mothers, without marginalizing the identities of other family members.

Read or purchase the article here.