Mixed Race Studies

Bringing together our collective stories

The African Courier: The International Magazine Published in Germany
October/November 2012

Gyavira Lasana

The second annual convention of the Black German Cultural Society of New Jersey took place at Barnard College in New York City recently. Our New York-based contributing editor Gyavira Lasana reports on the convention, which focused on the theme of “What Is the Black German Experience?”

“Black German studies did not come from academia,” insisted Peggy Piesche, “but from young people who wanted to know their own history.” Professor Piesche, who was born and raised in the former East Germany and who now teaches at Hamilton College in New York, asserted her observation during an early-morning panel discussion on “Teaching the Black German Experience” at the second conference of the Black German Cultural Society (BGCS) held recently at Barnard College in New York City.

Piesche’s words echoed a decided difference between Black Americans and Black Germans on the study and teaching of the Black German experience, a difference that would reverberate throughout the conference. The panel also included Noah Sow, the German poet/writer and music performer who was the keynote speaker at the first BGCS conference last year in Washington DC. Sow suggested that the term Afro-German be replaced by Afro-Deutsch, which is surely more German. All in all, the panel noted that Afro-Deutsch studies continue to fascinate students in the US, and are thriving and growing. That is questionable.

Here in America, Black professors of German are reaching retirement age, and they are not being replaced. Black American students are following the global trend and pursuing Asian studies – Chinese, Japanese and Korean. German lies quite low on the list of options for study. Still, the Black professors of German maintain a high degree of enthusiasm, fuelled mostly by the emerging focus on the history and culture of Blacks in Germany…

…These highly personal stories reflect the heartache, confusion and repeated dysfunction of many (but not all) biracial children growing up in the American milieu. Their quest is often identity: Am I Black or White (in this case German)? Or something in between? Is a mixed-race identity desirable/acceptable?

There is a growing discourse and body of literature on these topics in the US, but they tend to be marginalised by the journey of Blacks born and raised in Germany who more often cite systemic and day-to-day racism. For example, during an earlier panel discussion on “Claiming the Black German Experience”, Lara-Sophie Milagro, a Black German actress and founder of Label Noir, a Berlin-based Black theatre company, stated that “what I had considered to be my personal struggle is really the struggle of all people of colour in Germany, and what I had regarded as my personal problem and failure – not to be a real German and full-value human being – was really the problem and failure of a privileged and ignorant White majority.”…

Read the entire article here.

ES 3434: Mixed Race Identities

California State University, East Bay
2012-2013

Examination of mixed race peoples—their legal and social status, U.S. Census designations, and identities from the one-drop rule to President Obama and beyond. The social science complement to ES 3430, Interracial Sex and Marriage.

Boa Aparência (Good Appearance): How Colorism Plays Out in Latin America

50shadesofblack.com | Fueling Conversation
2012-10-08

Dash Harris
In.a.Dash.Media

“Go to the banks and you’ll see how racist, this country is.” This was a sentiment expressed ad nauseam in my interviews about how colorism drives societal treatment. Interviewees in every country I visited for the docu-series always cited airports, banks and TV shows as representations of the aesthetic their particular country strives for:
 
Whitewashed.
 
It was true, I only saw one tanned bank teller throughout my travels, in Honduras. For any of the others jobs that were pointed out, the standard was homogenous, light skin and straight hair. This preference is blatant even within advertisements and postings for jobs…

…White supremacy and the aspiration to be the closest you possibly can is rooted in the idea of ‘mejorando la raza’ or improving or bettering the race by marrying white, if not white then light. Almost all of my interviewees have heard this phrase from a family member or friend as advice in the dating and marrying game. One Honduran, whom her friends call her ‘negra’ because she is dark skinned said her family said she hit the jackpot when she started dating her current boyfriend, a redhead very pale skinned Honduran. On the other hand when someone who is light or pale chooses to date ‘dark,’ families insist they are ruining or damaging the race. To preserve the privilege of being light, some have even resorted to marrying within their own family, like actress Michelle Rodriguez found out about her kissing cousins. Many of my interviewees came from mixed family backgrounds where their parents different colors caused a lot of fighting, drama, discontent, and familial problems that still persist to present day. The most common, was a dark skinned father and light skinned mother…

Read the entire article here.

Hue & Phenotype: Colorism… Even More Complex

50shadesofblack.com | Fueling Conversation
2012-09-21

Dash Harris
In.a.Dash.Media

I have interviewed over 100 people for this docu-series and recently I’ve come across more and more interviewees who ask me about my background. I’ve had a handful of Caribbeans ask me if I were ‘dougla,’ a person of Indian or indigenous and African ancestry and when I was in Honduras I was called a mulatta, which means the same. Usually someone who identifies as a mulatto is of european and african ancestry but that’s not how it was used in Honduras among the people who described me as such. I asked the reasons for these assumptions and people pointed out that my skin wasn’t “very dark” and my hair was curly and my eyes were “different.” I found that interesting because I consider myself a chocolate brown, my hair has gone days without a comb being ran through it because of the wrangling that it calls for and I see my eyes as any other person’s eyes can be. One Garifuna young man said I wasn’t ‘black enough’ and I could remedy that by getting a ‘super black boyfriend,’ he graciously volunteered himself. All courting aside, I thought he and many others were just pointing out the phenotypes that guide perception and categorization of ancestry in Latin America and the Caribbean. It is important to note that the U.S. is the only country that followed the one drop rule of hypo-descent, where you were considered ‘Black’ no matter what other ancestry you had. This did not exist in Latin America so it gave way to many ways to describe someone based on skin tone, hair color, hair texture, size of nose, lips, eyes. These all decide what category you’ll fit into. Your desciptors may also vary just based on individual perception. In Brazil there are 134 color descriptors. In the Dominican Republic ‘javao’ describes someone who is of pale of light complexion with “African features,” the list below shows more…

Read the entire article here.

Dr. Marcia Dawkins Discusses Her Book, Clearly Invisible

Mixed Race Radio
2012-09-21, 17:00Z (12:00 EST, 09:00 PST)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

Marcia Dawkins, Clinical Assistant Professor of Communications
University of Southern California, Annenberg

Marcia is an award-winning writer, speaker, educator and visiting scholar at Brown University. She is the author of Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity (Baylor UP, 2012) and Eminem: The Real Slim Shady (Praeger, 2013).

Marcia writes about racial passing, mixed race identities, media, religion, pop culture and politics for a variety of high-profile publications. Her expert opinion has been sought out by NPR, WABC-TV Boston, The New York Times and TIME Magazine. She earned her PhD in communication from USC Annenberg, her master’s degrees in humanities from USC and NYU and her bachelor’s degrees in communication arts and honors from Villanova.

Clearly Invisible (Baylor University Press, 2012), is the first to connect racial passing and classical rhetoric to issues of disability, gender-neutral parenting, human trafficking, hacktivism, identity theft, racial privacy, media typecasting and violent extremism.

By applying fresh eyes to landmark historical cases and benchmark popular culture moments in the history of passing Dawkins also rethinks the representational character and civic purpose of multiracial identities. In the process she provides powerful insights called “passwords” that help readers tackle the tough questions of who we are and how we can relate to one another and the world.

Who is Black in America? A Soledad O’Brien Report

Cable News Network
2012-12-09, 20:00 EST

Soledad O’Brien, Host

Black in America is a documentary series reported by CNN’s Soledad O’Brien.

In its fifth year, CNN’s Black in America takes a look at “Who is Black in America?” Soledad O’Brien follows two 17-year-olds, Becca Khalil and Nayo Jones, on their journeys to find their racial identities.

Left of Black S3:E10 | Who is Black in Multiracial America?

Left of Black
John Hope Franklin Center
Duke University
2012-11-19

Mark Anthony Neal, Host and Professor of African & African American Studies
Duke University

Habiba Ibrahim, Associate Professor of English
University of Washington

Yaba Blay, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies
Drexel University

Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.

American racial history was long framed by the notion of the “one drop” rule, which within a political economy of race and difference, was a blatant attempt to embolden Whiteness and the privilege that derived from it.  Scholar Yaba Blay offers a different view of the “one drop” rule with her multi-media project (1)ne Drop which “seeks to challenge narrow, yet popular perceptions of what Blackness is and what Blackness looks like.”

Blay, a Visiting Professor of Africana Studies at Drexel University and contributing producer to CNN’s Black in America 5, which was inspired by the (1)ne Drop project, joins Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal on the November 19th episode of Left of Black to talk about the complexities of Black identity.  Neal is also joined by University of Washington Professor Habiba Ibrahim for part two of an interview about her new book Troubling the Family: The Promise of Personhood and the Rise of Multiracialism (University of Minnesota Press).

The New Colored People: The Mixed Race Movement in America (Book Review)

Mixed American Life
2012-11-15

Charles T. Franklin

The New Colored People: The Mixed Race Movement in America by Jon Michael Spencer (1997) makes the argument that the US multi-cultural movement, like other movements in the past, is something that we need to pay attention for two reasons. Spencer cites the first reason to pay attention is due to the increasing numbers of people who are born with or have become more comfortable expressing their “mixed-race”heritage. The second reason Spencer gives is his assertion that our society as whole is not particularly ready to deal with the potential social, legal, and cultural consequences that could happen as a result. In other words, the multi-racial movement is more than just the right to check multiple ethnicities or the “Other” section for race on an application. Spencer’s interest in the growing multicultural movement of the US is not for its own sake (though he believes it worth studying) , but to compare this movement with similar movements in South Africa and use that comparison to predict the impact of the multicultural movement in the future. Spencer conducts a comprehensive analysis on the subject; however his primary audience and the target of his study is the impact of the mixed-race movement on the African-American community…

Read the entire review here.

Human Migration and the Marginal Man

The American Journal of Sociology
Volume 33, Number 6 (May 1928)
pages 881-893

Robert E. Park (1864-1944), Professor of Sociology
University of Chicago

Migrations, with all the incidental collision, conflicts, and fusions of peoples and of cultures which they occasion, have been accounted among the decisive forces in history. Every advance in culture, it has been said, commences with a new period of migration and movement of populations. Present tendencies indicate that while the mobility of individuals has increased, the migration of peoples has relatively decreased. The consequences, however, of migration and mobility seem, on the whole, to be the same. In both cases the “cake of custom” is broken and the individual is freed for new enterprises and for new associations. One of the consequences of migration is to create a situation in which the same individual—who may or may not be a mixed blood—finds himself striving to live in two diverse cultural groups. The effect is to produce an unstable character—a personality type with characteristic forms of behavior. This is the “marginal man.” It is in the mind of the marginal man that the conflicting cultures meet and fuse. It is, therefore, in the mind of the marginal man that the process of civilization is visibly going on, and it is in the mind of the marginal man that the process of civilization may best be studied.

Read the entire article here.

HCOL 86 E: D1: Mixed: Multiracialism in U.S. Culture

University of Vermont
The Honors College
Spring 2013

John Gennari, Associate Professor of English

This seminar will examine the theme of multiracial identity and culture in the United States. We’ll consider how U.S. concepts and ideologies of race have developed historically, and why within that history multiracial people and culture have been considered both a problem (e.g. the “tragic mulatto” figure in pre-1960s fiction and film) and a solution (e.g. the vaunted racial pluralism of jazz, the reformist rhetoric and ideology of post-civil rights era multiculturalism). We’ll consider how mixed-race identity and experience challenge and complicate racial classification schemes that govern U.S. institutional life, public policy, popular perception, and private imagination. We’ll reckon with the myriad ways multiracial people and culture point up the massive confusion of American thinking about race—a confusion perhaps best typified by the heralding of a so-called “post-racial” order upon the election of a mixed-raced President, only immediately to see Barack Obama’s racial and national identity become a source of lurid obsession. Course materials include historical and theoretical literature, personal essays and narratives, film, music, and other forms of popular culture. In addition to participating actively in class discussions, students will engage in regular informal and formal writing (in-class free writing, short essays, a longer final paper) and will stage a group presentation.