Mixed Race Studies

Identity for mixed-race kids? ‘Eurasian’ already exists

The Straits Times
Singapore
Forum Letters
2013-03-30

Michael Ang York Poon

I am baffled by Mr Peter Wadeley’s letter (“S’porean identity must include mixed-race kids“; March 16).

What he is calling for already exists – that is, Eurasians, who are one of Singapore’s four main racial groups.

In the first four decades of Singapore’s independence, immigration was not as common as it is now, and the number of migrants relatively insignificant. Hence, it would have been absurd to even wonder if Eurasian youngsters were non-native…

Read the entire letter here.

S’porean identity must include mixed-race kids

The Straits Times
Singapore
Forum Letters
2013-03-16

Peter Wadeley

MRS MARIETTA Koh Ai-meng (“Citizens have every right to expect privileges”; last Saturday) claims that rising consciousness of what it means to be Singaporean should not be decried as chauvinistic or jingoistic.

Last year, former president S R Nathan said that a clear Singaporean identity has yet to develop (“Building a S’porean culture takes time, says ex-president”; March 18, 2012).

Whenever such an identity is formed, it must be broad enough to include all Singaporeans, without distinction of race.

My children are Singaporean, have lived here their whole lives, and speak Singlish and Chinese. Most importantly, they identify themselves as Singaporean.

But as they are “only” half Chinese and look different from other children, they are, regrettably, treated accordingly…

Read the entire letter here.

Won’t Somebody Think of the Children

Slate
2013-03-27

Brian Palmer, Slate’s Chief Explainer

Do opponents of marriage equality always claim that they’re merely worried about the kids?

During yesterday’s oral arguments over the constitutionality of California’s ban on gay marriage, Justice Antonin Scalia claimed that there is “considerable disagreement among sociologists” as to whether being raised by a same-sex couple is “harmful to the child.” The lawyers arguing the case repeatedly brought up the landmark 1967 decision Loving v. Virginia, which struck down interracial marriage bans. Did supporters of the ban argue that interracial marriage was harmful to children in that case, too?

Absolutely. The state of Virginia presented two arguments in support of its interracial marriage ban in 1967. The first was that the authors of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution explicitly stated that they did not intend to strike down anti-miscegenation laws, which were common in the 19th century. The second argument was that interracial marriages were uniquely prone to divorce and placed undue psychological stress on children…

Read the entire article here.

Focus on Research: Emma J. Teng F’06 on the Hidden Histories of Mixed Race Families

American Council of Learned Societies
ACLS News
2012-10-01

ACLS asked its fellows to describe their research: the knowledge it creates and how this knowledge benefits our understanding of the world. We are pleased to present this response from Emma J. Teng, T.T. and Wei Fong Chao Professor of Asian Civilizations at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In June 1914, a young American woman with a small baby boarded a ship bound for China. Although she was white, she traveled in accommodations meant “for Asiatic passengers only.” Why? Mae Watkins Franking, a native of Ann Arbor, Michigan, was traveling to China to reunite with her Chinese husband, whom she had met as a student at the University of Michigan. Due to the Marital Expatriation Act of 1907, which stripped U.S. citizenship from all American women who married foreign nationals, Mae had taken Chinese nationality, and thus, in an age of segregated travel, she journeyed to Shanghai under this status. Mae might have felt apprehensive moving to China, for although racial intermarriage was legal in Michigan at the time of the Frankings’ wedding, the Chinese government prohibited the intermarriage of overseas students with foreign women. (Merchants and laborers were allowed to intermarry.) The Frankings had three children: Nelson, born in the U.S., was an American citizen by right of birth; while Alason and Cecile, born in China, were considered by the U.S. government to be “aliens ineligible for naturalization.” Although the family returned to the United States in 1918, Alason and Cecile would have to wait until 1943 to gain the right of naturalization—despite the fact that their ancestors had fought in the American Revolution. These are just a few examples of the legal injustices faced by mixed (and in this case transnational) families up through the first half of the twentieth century.

Supported by a grant from the ACLS, in 2007 I set out to write a book that would bridge China studies and Asian American studies by comparing ideas concerning Euro-Chinese intermixing, or hybridity, in the U.S. and China between 1842, when China was opened to Western trade, and WW II. As the writing took shape, I realized that this was a story not only about the history of ideas, but also about mixed families and individuals whose lives were shaped by these ideas, and the laws and social proscriptions they informed. I thus went back and did more research: a rare luxury in the academic world. As a result, the manuscript that subsequently evolved also takes up the subject of how mixed families, who faced discrimination from both sides, negotiated their own identities within the constraints and opportunities of their social environments. In keeping with the comparative spirit that first inspired my project, I decided to juxtapose the lived experiences of Eurasians in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, three sites where the “Eurasian problem” became a topic of public discourse…

…Why does it matter for us to gain a more nuanced, less monolithic understanding of the intellectual genealogy of ideas concerning mixed race? The subject of mixed race is particularly germane today with increasing rates of intermarriage in our society. These intermarriages suggest that the old taboos against intermarriage and the barriers between races have diminished in the years since 1967, when the Supreme Court struck down the last of the anti-miscegenation laws. Yet, some of the old presumptions remain. First of all, the very notion of “mixed race,” so frequently celebrated in the contemporary media, entertainment, and advertising industries, relies on the presumption that there are “pure races” to begin with. My research aims to debunk this presumption by adding to the growing scholarship showing intermarriage and intermixing as age-old phenomena, challenging the commonplace certainty by which many feel they can identify those who are “pure Chinese” or “pure white.” Understanding histories of migration, cross-cultural contact, and interracial mixing allows us to see that, in fact, no such groups exist, other than as social and legal constructions, which may vary from country to country, time period to time period…

Read the entire article here.

Authentic, Transformational Leadership: A Phenomenological Study of the Experiences of Black/White Biracial Leaders

University of Nebraska, Lincoln
May 2013
182 pages

Carmen R. Zafft

Presented to the Faculty of The Graduate College at the University of Nebraska In Partial Fulfillment of Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Major: Human Sciences (Leadership Studies)

This phenomenological study described the racial identity and leadership experiences of eight community, education, and business Black/White biracial leaders. Four central themes emerged relating to the participants’ racial identity choices: (a) family discourse, (b) social networks, (c) appearance, and (d) identity work. Three central themes emerged relating to the participants’ leadership experiences: (a) cultural agility: “Blessed to be flexible”, (b) perceived representation: “I look like them”, and (c) transformational leadership: “I lead so others can grow.” Because the participants were conscious of their identity development experience, all demonstrated a strong sense of self which influenced how they experienced leadership. As a result, the essence of experiencing leadership as a biracial leader was to be authentic and transformational.

Chapter One: Introduction

In an interview for CBS news in 2007, Presidential candidate Barack Obama was asked, “How important is race in defining yourself?” to which he responded, “I am rooted in the African-American community, but I’m not defined by it. I am comfortable in my racial identity, but that’s not all I am” (Kroft, 2007). Historically, a presidential candidate’s racial identity has not to this degree been questioned. This question was due, in part, to his identification as a Black American yet his racial lineage consists of a White, Midwest-American mother and a Black, Kenyan father. Walters (2007) brought attention to the conflict surrounding President Obama’s racial and cultural heritage:

He appeared to be of African descent, but the cultural markers to which traditional American Blacks were exposed presented him as someone born of a White American mother and a Kenyan father and raised in Hawaii. Also, the fact that he had lived for a while in Indonesia complicated the matter further. In short, his identity omitted many of the cultural markers with which Blacks are more familiar to the extent that it has promoted a curiosity of ‘cultural fit’ that in turn has become an issue of political trust. (p. 13)

These “cultural markers” influence how Black Americans make sense of and fit in the world around them. Essentially, these markers have traditionally defined Blackness in America. Though Obama identified as a Black American, his racial heritage and social influences did not fit the cultural markers typical of a Black American male leader. This caused voters, Black and White, to question whose interests Barack Obama was committed to and if they could follow him. For these reasons, Obama’s racial lineage, his cultural influences, his racial identification, and his post-racial rhetoric communicated a welcomed, albeit “mixed message” to the American public.

Despite this mixed message, President Obama’s election signified substantial racial gains for African Americans. Of equal significance is the special attention his biracial parentage brings to this growing population. His election led me to consider how a biracial leaders’ racial identity influences their leadership experiences.

The purpose of this phenomenological study is to describe how biracial leaders identify racially and how they experience leadership. Biracial leaders are defined as an individual with a Black biological parent and a White biological parent who exercises leadership in an organization or group…

Read the entire dissertation here.

Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity

Baylor University Press
2012-08-01
285 pages
9in x 6in
5 b/w images
Hardback ISBN: 9781602583122

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Clinical Assistant Professor of Communications and Journalism
University of Southern California

Everybody passes. Not just racial minorities. As Marcia Dawkins explains, passing has been occurring for millennia, since intercultural and interracial contact began. And with this profound new study, she explores its old limits and new possibilities: from women passing as men and able-bodied persons passing as disabled to black classics professors passing as Jewish and white supremacists passing as white.

Clearly Invisible journeys to sometimes uncomfortable but unfailingly enlightening places as Dawkins retells the contemporary expressions and historical experiences of individuals called passers. Along the way these passers become people—people whose stories sound familiar but take subtle turns to reveal racial and other tensions lurking beneath the surface, people who ultimately expose as much about our culture and society as they conceal about themselves.

Both an updated take on the history of passing and a practical account of passing’s effects on the rhetoric of multiracial identities, Clearly Invisible traces passing’s legal, political, and literary manifestations, questioning whether passing can be a form of empowerment (even while implying secrecy) and suggesting that passing could be one of the first expressions of multiracial identity in the U.S. as it seeks its own social standing.

Certain to be hailed as a pioneering work in the study of race and culture, Clearly Invisible offers powerful testimony to the fact that individual identities are never fully self-determined—and that race is far more a matter of sociology than of biology.

Contents

• Preface
• Introduction: Passing as Passé?
• 1. Passing as Persuasion
• 2. Passing as Power
• 3. Passing as Property
• 4. Passing as Principle
• 5. Passing as Pastime
• 6. Passing as Paradox
• Conclusion: Passing as Progress?
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Revising Freedom: Law, Literature, & the Racial Imaginary

Center for Race & Gender
University of California, Berkeley
691 Barrows
2013-03-21, 16:00-17:30 PDT (Local Time)

“Blurring the Lines of Race and Freedom: Mulattoes in the Early-Nineteenth-Century United States”
A. B. Wilkinson, History

This presentation will combine elements from the last two chapters of my current dissertation, which generally focuses on the lives of mulattoes (people of mixed African, European, and sometimes Native American descent) in English colonial North America and the early United States Republic.  This section of my work reveals how the rights of a number of mulattoes were being retracted in the first decades of the nineteenth century at the state level, even as concessions were still extended to certain people of mixed heritage both in slavery and in freedom at more local levels.  Mulattoes successfully used legislative petitions at the county and state levels in order to maneuver around increasing restrictions set in motion by the explosion of cotton production and plantation slavery in the early nineteenth century.  This included larger constraints placed on slaves and free people of color, many of whom were mulattoes.  As politicians at the state level constricted access to legal manumission, those of mixed-heritage with strong connections to European American heritage and patronage gained freedom more easily than people of full African heredity.  These slaves experienced varying degrees of mulatto privilege.  This mulatto or light-skinned privilege also existed among free people of color, who sometimes claimed access to rights as they established themselves within their own communities.  Even as widespread rights were diminishing, mulattoes retained a general advantage over their fully African brethren in terms of emancipation and other benefits.

The second section finishes with a discussion of the deteriorating rights of free people of color, many of whom were mulattoes, up through the first three decades of the nineteenth century.  The labor requirements of the cotton plantation economy required that slaves be increasingly kept in bondage and that free people of color be neutralized as a possible threat to the labor system. Elites in the U.S. Southeast had long associated free people of mixed ancestry with their African lineage, and though many mulattoes did not share this view, this characterization increasingly informed restrictive legal statutes at the state level.  As the rights of free people of color were stripped away, mulattoes were disproportionately affected because they made up a high segment of the free population of African descent.  In this manner, mulattoes were routinely pushed towards only being identified by their African ancestry.  Arguably, this early nineteenth century process moves U.S. mixed-race ideology to a more strict line of hypodescent that will later be solidified under the one-drop rule.

“Why Our Post-Race Society Still Has A Race Problem: How Race and Freedom Go Hand-in-Hand”
Michael McGee, African American Studies

Since the late 19th century, freedom for African Americans has been directly associated with resolving what has been commonly regarded as the race problem.  In this way, race has functioned as the primary barrier to freedom as equality, the guarantee and protection full citizenship rights, and complete participation in American rights, duties, and privileges.  Between the late 19th and mid-20th centuries, the race problem became metonymical for race itself, establishing an antithetical relationship between race and freedom.  This presentation considers the different positions taken by leading African American writers during this time period to arrive at an understanding of freedom in America that resolves the race problem.  Reading several writers such as ranging from W.E.B. DuBois to Ralph Ellison, and positions on race ranging from impediment to gift to the basis for a separate nation, this presentation reassesses exactly how and for whom race is a problem, particularly in relation to the different ways in which freedom is imagined.  Through this reevaluation of freedom and the race problem, this presentation argues that race is an integral part of freedom in America so much so that freedom itself is in jeopardy when America makes claims to be post-race.

Talkin’ Race with Laura and Wei Ming

The Magic Mulatto: Bringing the fine art of Race Talk straight to the people
2013-03-26

Brett Russell Coleman, Doctoral Student of Community & Prevention Research
University of Illinois, Chicago

“In 1969, we weren’t at war with China.”

If that sentence leaves you perplexed in any way, you need to do two things. First listen to the audio of the conversation I had with Laura Kina and Wei Ming Dariotis…

…The second thing you need to do is check out their project, War Baby / Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art, which investigates constructions of mixed heritage Asian American identity in the United States. This is a “multi-platform project (book, traveling art exhibition, website and blog) that examines how, or even if, mixed heritage Asian Americans address hybrid identities in their artwork, as well as how perspectives from critical mixed race studies illuminate intersections of racialization, war and imperialism, gender and sexuality, and citizenship and nationality.”…

Read the article and listen to the interview here.

Multiracial Identity: An International Perspective

Palgrave Macmillan
September 2000
186 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
ISBN: 978-0-312-23219-1
ISBN10: 0-312-23219-5

Mark Christian, Professor of African & African American Studies
Lehman College, City University of New York

Multiracial Identity provides an accessible account of the social construction of racialized groups. Using both primary (in-depth interviews) and secondary data, four nations are examined: the UK, US, South Africa, and Jamaica. The author discusses how little attention has been traditionally been given to theorizing multiracial identity in the context of white supremacist thought and practice.

Table of Contents

• Foreword–Diedre L. Badejo
• Part I: Theorizing Multiracial Identity
  • Toward a Definition of Identity
  • Multiracial Identity as a Term in the 1990s
  • Historical Theories of ‘Mixed Race’ Persons
  • Contemporary US Theories in Multiracial Identity
  • Contemporary UK Theories in Multiracial Identity
• Part II: Speaking forThemselves (I)
  • How the Liverpool, UK Respondents Define Themselves in a Racial Sense
  • Parental Influence in the Construction of a Racialized Identity
• Part III: Speaking for Themselves (II) Shades of Blackness
  • Is Wanting to Change One’s Physical Appearance an Issue?
• Part IV: South Africa and Jamaica: “Other” Multiracial Case Studies
  • South Africa and the Social Construction of “Coloureds”
  • Jamaica in Context
• Part V: Assessing Multiracial Identity White Supremacy and Multiracial Identity
  • Social Status and Multiracial Identity
  • Nomenclature Default and Multiracial Terminology

Mixed Race Identities

Palgrave Macmillan
2013-08-02
224 pages
Hardback ISBN: 9780230275041

Peter J. Aspinall, Emeritus Reader in Population Health
University of Kent, UK

Miri Song, Professor of Sociology
University of Kent, UK

In recent years, Britain has witnessed a significant growth in the ‘mixed race’ population. However, we still know remarkably little about this diverse population. How do young mixed race people think about and experience their multiracial status? What kinds of ethnic options do mixed race people possess, and how may these options vary across different types of ‘mixes’? How important are their ethnic and racial identities, in relation to other bases of identification and belonging? This book investigates the ethnic and racial options exercised by young mixed race people in higher education in Britain, and it is the first to explore the identifications and experiences of various types of mixed race individuals. It reveals the diverse ways in which these young people identify and experience their mixed status, the complex and contingent nature of such identities, and the rise of other identity strands, such as religion, which are now challenging race and ethnicity as a dominant identity.

Contents

1. Exploring ‘Mixed Race’ in Britain
2. Racial Identification: Multiplicity and Fluidity
3. Differential Ethnic Options?
4. Does Racial Mismatch in Identification Matter?
5. Are Mixed Race People Racially Disadvantaged?
6. How Central is ‘Race’ to Mixed Race People?
7. Rethinking Ethnic and Racial Classifications
8. Conclusion: What is the Future of ‘Mixed Race’ Britain?