Mixed Race Studies

A new mixed-raced generation is transforming the city: Will Toronto be the world’s first post-racial metropolis?

Toronto Life
2013-02-12

Nicholas Hune-Brown, Author

Kourosh Keshiri, Photography

Interviews by Jasmine Budak

I used to be the only biracial kid in the room. Now, my exponentially expanding cohort promises a future where everyone is mixed.

Last fall, I was in Amsterdam with my parents and sister on a family trip, our first in more than a decade. Because travelling with your family as an adult can be taxing on everyone involved, we had agreed we would split up in galleries, culturally enrich ourselves independently, and then reconvene later to resume fighting about how to read the map. I was in a dimly lit hall looking at a painting of yet another apple-cheeked peasant when my younger sister, Julia, tugged at my sleeve. “Mixie,” she whispered, gesturing down the hall.

“Mixie” is a sibling word, a term my sister and I adopted to describe people like ourselves—those indeterminately ethnic people whom, if you have an expert eye and a particular interest in these things, you can spot from across a crowded room. We used the word because as kids we didn’t know another one. By high school, it was a badge of honour, a term we would insist on when asked the unavoidable “Where are you from?” question that every mixed-race person is subjected to the moment a conversation with a new acquaintance reaches the very minimum level of familiarity. For the record, my current answer, at 30 years old, is: “My mom’s Chinese, but born in Canada, and my dad’s a white guy from England.” If I’m peeved for some reason—if the question comes too early or with too much “I have to ask” eagerness—the answer is “Toronto” followed by a dull stare…

…For today’s mixies, growing up multiracial has meant inner debates about which parent to identify with, how to explain one’s back­ground, and coping with the urge to blend in. Rema Tavares, a half-Jamaican 30-year-old with curly hair and light brown skin, says her looks have provoked strange responses in people. “I’ve had someone say to me, ‘Don’t say you’re black because you don’t have to be. You can get away with it!’ ” She was raised in a small town outside Ottawa and gradually moved to bigger and bigger cities. “I hated being the only person of colour on the bus in my hometown,” she told me. Another mixed-race woman, Alia Ziesman, grew up in Oakville and was so ashamed of her mother, an ethnically Indian woman from Trinidad, that she refused to walk on the same side of the street as her. Ziesman and Tavares and everyone else I spoke to agree that it is a pleasure to be in a city like Toronto today—a place where you’re guaranteed not to be the only coloured face on a city bus…

…Minelle Mahtani, a U of T associate professor, is one of the pre-eminent Canadian authorities in the field, and has just written a book on multiraciality in Canada. Mahtani has long, dark hair, a toothy smile and a collection of features that are impossible to place on a map. When she was growing up in Thornhill, people would guess at her background without ever hitting on the actual mix, Iranian and Indian. “As a kid, I was one of the few minorities in my neighbourhood, and there was pressure to acclimatize to whiteness” she says. When I met her in a café near U of T in December, she had recently come back from the second Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference at DePaul University in Chicago, a four-day exploration of race and racial boundaries that also acts as a place for mixed-race academics from across North America to hang out and share nerdy in-jokes about the successful 1967 challenge to Virginia’s anti-miscegenation laws…

…The reality of being mixed is far more complicated. The Pew study didn’t reveal a world where skin colour is irrelevant: a newlywed Hispanic-white couple will earn more than the average Hispanic couple, yes, but less than the average white couple. The same is true of black-white pairings. What’s also clear is that mixing doesn’t happen evenly. The success of Asian-white couples like my parents can be attributed to a number of things, but the fact that immigration laws often hand-pick the wealthiest, most educated, most outward-looking Asians is surely part of it. It’s easy to imagine a future in which upwardly mobile Asians and whites mix more frequently, while other minorities are left out of a trendy mixed-race future. Marriage across racial lines is increasingly possible, but mixing across class has always been tricky. And class, it goes without saying, remains stubbornly tied to skin colour…

Read the entire article here. View the photo-essay here.

François Hollande’s misguided move: taking ‘race’ out of the constitution

The Guardian
2013-02-12

Alana Lentin, Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Social Analysis
University of Western Sydney

Valérie Amiraux, Professor of Sociology
University of Montreal

Not talking about races does not lead naturally to the demise of ‘race thinking’ – it just obscures the persistent inequalities

It’s become something of a commonplace to speak of the US as having entered a post-racial age. Both the right and the left have heralded the end of race, either triumphantly or as a way of dismissing talk of racism as so much political correctness. However, in Europe, the debate about race – post- or otherwise – is virtually non-existent compared with North America, where race never really goes away as a topic no matter how much people wish it would. Which is why it is surprising that the issue has become a significant part of François Hollande’s term in office. During the French presidential elections last spring, the Socialist candidate pledged to remove the word “race” from the French constitution. Currently, it states that “France shall be an indivisible, secular, democratic and social republic. It guarantees equality before the law for all citizens without distinction of origin, race or religion.” He is promising to effect that change before the summer…

…If ending racism were as simple as banning the one word, racism would be a thing of the past in Europe where, following the Holocaust, “race” was rightly declared a scientifically bogus term and officially dismissed as adding nothing to the understanding of human difference. However, racism did not simply melt away, as the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose participation in the UNESCO anti-racist project which led the charge against race from the early 1950s, admitted later…

Read the entire article here.

The Presumption of Passing Among Multiracial Persons: Perceived Benefits and Associated Resentments

University of California, Santa Barbara
Race Matters Series
MultiCultural Center Lounge
2013-02-11, 18:30 PST (Local Time)

Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly, Professor of History

In her forthcoming book, By the Least Bit of Blood: The Allure of Blackness among Mixed-Race Americans of African Descent, 1862-1935, Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly has uncovered the uplift potential, in terms of social and political mobility, a mono-racial black identity afforded mixed-race people of African descent in nineteenth and early-twentieth century America. Dr. Dineen-Wimberly will lead a discussion regarding the implications of a similar phenomenon derived from a contemporary racial system, which both limits and benefits persons of color. The perception of benefits gained from claiming minority status on college applications, fellowships, scholarships, etc. has reinforced resentments from non-minority students, while it devalues the continued racism students of color face. All voices are welcome.

For more information, click here.

Critical Mixed Race Studies: Research and Teaching on the Margins in the Mainstream

University of California, Los Angeles
Haines Hall 279
Friday, 2013-02-15, 12:00-13:30 PST (Local Time)

G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

In the early 1980s, there emerged several important unpublished doctoral dissertations on multiraciality and the mixed race experience in the United States. Numerous scholarly works were published in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They composed part of the emerging field of Mixed Race Studies although that scholarship did not yet encompass a formally defined area of inquiry. What has changed is that there is now recognition that there is an entire field specifically devoted to the study of multiracial identity and the mixed race experience. Rather than being an abrupt shift or change in the field, that field, Mixed Race Studies, is now being formally defined at a time that beckons scholars to be more critical. That is, this moment calls upon scholars to look back and assess the merit of arguments over the last twenty years and their relevance for future research. This talk seeks to map out this critical turn in Mixed Race Studies and discusses to what extent Critical Mixed Race Studies diverges from previous explorations of the topic, thereby leading to the discovery of new terrain in the field.

Dr. Daniel is Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Barbara. He teaches courses exploring comparative race and ethnic relations and he has numerous publications that explore this topic. Some of his publications include the books entitled More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order (2002) and Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths? (2006), and Machado de Assis: Multiracial Identity and the Brazilian Novelist (2012).

View the flyer here.

Betwixt & Between~Multiracial Identity=A Denial of Blackness

Mixed Race Radio
2013-02-06, 17:00Z (12:00 EST)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology, teaches courses exploring comparative race and ethnic relations. Since 1989, he has taught “Betwixt and Between,” which is one of the first and longest-standing university courses to deal specifically with the question of multiracial identity comparing the U.S. with various parts of the world.

He has numerous publications that explore this topic including several books entitled More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order (2002) and Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths? (2006), Machado de Assis: Multiracial Identity and the Brazilian Novelist (2012), as well as the article “Race, Multiraciality, and Barack Obama: Toward a More Perfect Union?”, which appeared in the journal Black Scholar (2009), and a book chapter with a similar title “Race, Multiraciality, and the Election of Barack Obama: Toward a More Perfect Union?,” which was published in Andrew Jolivette’s edited volume Obama and the Biracial Factor: The Battle for a New American Majority (2012).

On June 16, 2012, Daniel received the Loving Prize at the 5th Annual Mixed Roots Film and Literary Festival in Los Angeles. Established in 2008, the prize is a commemoration of the June 12, 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision that removed the last laws prohibiting racial intermarriage. It is awarded annually to outstanding artists, storytellers, and community leaders for inspirational dedication to celebrating and illuminating the mixed racial and cultural experience. More recently, Daniel was interviewed on National Public Radio’s “Talk of the Nation” where he discussed his teaching on multiraciality and the significance of the Loving Prize.

The Race Conflict in Southern States: An Ethnological Study of the Original Types and the Effects of Hybridity

Savannah, Georgia
1899
4 pages
Source: Open Library OL23367995M

Jos. A. Roberts

Far back in the dim vista of ages, anterior to the current ideas of Noah or Adam, Egyptian records show that there were four great race types, or groups; and clear and distinct as they were orginally portrayed, so have they come down to this our day. Not one has ever been merged into another. Indeed, it seems to be a natural instinct, that like seeks like. Of these race types three have sent down to us their separate records, each in its special symbolic mode; and from these it appears that at some time each as held a ruling place among the races or nations. Of the fourth type (the negro) there is no record. Even at this late date he has not invented an alphabet; he has made no history, has discovered nothing, conquered nothing, invented nothing, produced nothing.

The only instance in which he has moved out of his original bounds is when he was forcibly (and let us admit, wickedly), carried off by other races and enslaved. And it is the only race that has ever submitted to permanent servitude, and that has never shown itself capable of ruling. In “darkest Africa” what has it done? In Hayti and Santo Domingo, abandoned to negro and hybrid domination, what has been the outcome? A retrogression into the original state of barbarism.   Such was and is the record of the negro, lowest of all other races.

The Anglo-Saxon variety of the original Japhetic or Aryan type is at present foremost among all the world’s people. In intelligence and enterprise it has no compeer. No other race has ever had dominion over it since the days of Caesar. The people of these United States, children of the Anglo-Saxon, came to this country to escape a rule of superstition and fanaticism. The Puritan, the Quaker and the Huguenot were all actuated by the same motive. Such was the original element in the settlement of North America, and such is today the ruling power over all this continent. Thus, we have the highest and the lowest of all the race types contrasted, and on this showing what claim has the negro to rule the Anglo-Saxon race? The one came here of his own volition to escape an odious rule; the other was brought here forcibly to be a slave. And now the slave sets up to rule the master. Is it not a case of “Physician, heal thyself” before attempting to control and lead others?

Of the Hybrid—that is a mixture of two or more of these original types—the record is worse than of the originals. The most striking example of this fact is to be found among those Autochthones upon whom the Spaniard, in his piratical, buccaneer-fashion, came. He seems to have had an especial proclivity for miscegenation, and wherever he went he left a debased breed behind him in every instance…

…The Mulatto (hybrid) is in thirty states of this union, an illegitimate product. And, to the honest student of ethnology, this restriction is a wise one, for it is in accordance with a great law of nature, which cannot be violated with impunity. The tendency of this hybrid is to run out unless crossed with the parent stock on either side, and there is high authority for a belief that “inter se” the mulattos are not fertile beyond the third generation. At best their children are less able to resist disease than those of either pure type. Thus, indeed, are the sins of the parent visited upon the children unto the third generation…

Read the entire book here.

The Race Talk: Multiracialism, White Hegemony, and Identity Politics

Information Age Publishing
2012-10-25
144 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-61735-912-5
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-61735-913-2
eBook ISBN: 978-1-61735-914-9

Pierre W. Orelus, Assistant Professor of Education
New Mexico State University

Drawing on critical race theory, this book critically examines race through a mosaic lens pointing out various issues directly connected to it, such as racial identity politics, racism, multiracialism, interracial relationships, and the hegemony of whiteness. This book goes further to analyze the manner in which socially constructed racial stereotypes contribute to and are used to justify the poor socio-economic situation and marginalization of People of Color, particularly the poor ones. Designed for a broad range of readers, this book aims to open up democratic spaces for genuine discussions about racial issues.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Race Talk
• 2. Asserting Multiracialism: Beyond the Hegemony of Whiteness
• 3. Racial Identity Politics and Class Divide in The Age of Obamerica
• 4. Unpacking [Inter] Racial Relationships between Whites and People of Color
• 5. Examining the Intricacies of Interracial Relationships
• 6. Being Blacks and Browns in the Twenty-First Century: Challenges and Possibilities
• 7. On Being a Professor of Color: Battling Invisibility and Microaggression
• 8. Black Skin Could Speak: Resistant Narratives for Racial Justice
• 9. The Sociopolitical Weight of Race: A Critical Analysis of President Obama, Professor Gates, and Sgt. Crowley’s Racial Controversy
• References
• About the Author
• Index

Land of the Cosmic Race: Race Mixture, Racism, and Blackness in Mexico

Oxford University Press
January 2013
256 pages
2 photographs; 6-1/8 x 9-1/4
Hardback ISBN13: 978-0-19-992548-3; ISBN10: 0-19-992548-8
Paperback ISBN13: 978-0-19-992550-6; ISBN10: 0-19-992550-X

Christina A. Sue, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Colorado, Boulder

Land of the Cosmic Race is a richly-detailed ethnographic account of the powerful role that race and color play in organizing the lives and thoughts of ordinary Mexicans. It presents a previously untold story of how individuals in contemporary urban Mexico construct their identities, attitudes, and practices in the context of a dominant national belief system. The book centers around Mexicans’ engagement with three racialized pillars of Mexican national ideology – the promotion of race mixture, the assertion of an absence of racism in the country, and the marginalization of blackness in Mexico.

The subjects of this book are mestizos—the mixed-race people of Mexico who are of Indigenous, African, and European ancestry and the intended consumers of this national ideology. Land of the Cosmic Race illustrates how Mexican mestizos navigate the sea of contradictions that arise when their everyday lived experiences conflict with the national stance and how they manage these paradoxes in a way that upholds, protects, and reproduces the national ideology. Drawing on a year of participant observation, over 110 interviews, and focus-groups from Veracruz, Mexico, Christina A. Sue offers rich insight into the relationship between race-based national ideology and the attitudes and behaviors of mixed-race Mexicans. Most importantly, she theorizes as to why elite-based ideology not only survives but actually thrives within the popular understandings and discourse of those over whom it is designed to govern.

Features

• The first serious study to address how race functions among Mexican mestizos

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Mapping the Veracruz Race-Color Terminological Terrain
• Chapter 3: Beneath the Surface of Mixed-Race Identities
• Chapter 4: Mestizos’ Attitudes on Race Mixture
• Chapter 5: Inter-Color Couples and Mixed-Color Families in a Mixed-Race Society
• Chapter 6: Situating Blackness in a Mestizo Nation
• Chapter 7: Silencing and Explaining Away Racial Discrimination
• Chapter 8: What’s at Stake? Racial Common Sense and Securing a Mexican National Identity
• Epilogue: The Turn of the Twenty-First Century: An Ideological Shift?
• Appendix
• References
• Index

Beyond Loving: Intimate Racework in Lesbian, Gay, and Straight Interracial Relationships

Oxford University Press
2012-08-07
240 pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4
ISBN13: 9780199743568; ISBN10: 0199743568

Amy C. Steinbugler, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania

Beyond Loving provides a critical examination of interracial intimacy in the beginning decades of the twenty-first century—an era rife with racial contradictions, where interracial relationships are increasingly seen as symbols of racial progress even as old stereotypes about illicit eroticism persist. Drawing on extensive qualitative research, Amy Steinbugler examines the racial dynamics of everyday life for lesbian, gay, and heterosexual Black/White couples. She disputes the notion that interracial partners are enlightened subjects who have somehow managed to “get beyond” race. Instead, for many partners, interracial intimacy represents not the end, but the beginning of a sustained process of negotiating racial differences. Her research reveals the ordinary challenges that partners frequently face and the myriad ways that race shapes their interactions with each other as well as with neighbors, family members, co-workers and strangers. Steinbugler analyzes the everyday actions and strategies through which individuals maintain close relationships in a society with deeply-rooted racial inequalities-what she calls “racework.” Beyond Loving reveals interracial intimacy as an ongoing process rather than a singular accomplishment. This analytic shift helps us reach a new understanding of how race “works” – not just in intimate spheres, but across all facets of contemporary social life.

Features

• Interviews with same-sex interracial couples–a topic on which there is very little research—allow Steinbugler to examine for the first time how everyday racial practices are shaped by sexuality and gender.
• Amy Steinbugler challenges the widespread assumption that interracial intimacy represents the ultimate erasure of racial differences.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Historical Roots of Lesbian, Gay, and Heterosexual Black/White Intimacy
• Chapter 2: Public Interraciality: Navigating Racially Homogeneous Social Spaces
• Chapter 3: Public Interraciality: Managing Visibility
• Chapter 4: Intimate Interactions: Racework as Emotional Labor
• Chapter 5: Interracial Identities: Racework as Boundary Work
• Chapter 6: White Racial Identities Through the Lens of Interracial Intimacy
• Conclusion: The Intimate Politics of Interraciality
• Appendix A. Research Methods
• Appendix B. Respondent Characteristics
• Table 1. Design of Interview Sample
• Table 2. Sample Details by Group

What does Martin Luther King mean to Latinos today?

Bentley IMPACT – The Power of Ideas
Bentley University, Waltham, Massachusetts
2013-01-17

Donna Maria Blancero, Associate Professor of Management

“I have a dream, that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

As we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2013, we must ask ourselves the question: has his dream become a reality for Latinos?

We know that Dr. King inspired many Latinos, including Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. Latinos, just like other Americans, consider Dr. King a great leader of the civil rights movement. If he were alive today, he likely would be working side by side with Latinos to address issues of inequality.

But what does his legacy mean for us today? Has his dream been achieved?…

…When I ask participants in my research to self-identify their race (they all self-identify as Latino), I am typically met with a range of responses. Some are angry at me and state that they are Mexican American or Puerto Rican and that I shouldn’t be asking about race—their race, they say, is Latino! Others have written in comments, such as “I checked off ‘white’ but don’t tell my family, they would be angry at me.” Many Latinos have mixed backgrounds that don’t easily fit into a box. More importantly, many of us don’t want to be put in a box, even if it is “multi-racial.’”…

Read the entire article here.