Mixed Race Studies

Saving race

The Boston Phoenix
May 14-20, 2004

Tamara Wieder

With Symptomatic, the follow-up to her acclaimed debut novel Caucasia, Danzy Senna again delves into race in America — and defies second-book syndrome

IT’S EVERY YOUNG writer’s dream: to have a first novel achieve critical acclaim and monetary success. But a dream is usually all it is, and for Danzy Senna, it was no different. She certainly didn’t expect the attention and praise her debut novel, Caucasia (Riverhead Books, 1998), received; after all, the book was originally written as her graduate-school thesis.

Senna, the biracial daughter of poet Fanny Howe and activist and writer Carl Senna, was raised in Boston in the 1970s — not exactly a hotbed of tolerance for mixed-race families. Her experiences in Boston and beyond have helped mold her as a writer; Caucasia told the story of biracial sisters dealing with some of the same ugliness doled out to her own family. Senna has also written extensively on the frequent experience of being mistaken for white, and how it’s led to an uncomfortable exposure of prejudices and intolerance in those around her.

In her latest novel, Symptomatic (Riverhead Books), Senna again surveys a familiar racial landscape. Her narrator is a biracial young woman often mistaken for white; she develops a friendship with an older, similarly mixed-race woman that begins as an antidote to loneliness and alienation, but gradually grows into something both complicated and frightening.

Q: Tell me where the idea for Symptomatic came from, and how you ended up writing it.

A: I love thrillers, and I love the old Roman Polanski, Hitchcock thrillers, and I wanted to think about race and identity and use the kind of thriller plot. And I was interested in the sort of claustrophobia of race, and the claustrophobia of identity, and how you can sort of become trapped by it. But in this case it’s more literal. I was also interested in doubles, and that comfort that you initially feel when you have an identification with someone, and how that can kind of turn smothering. So racial identity, and then identity in general, sort of as something that can be comforting and terrifying and smothering, all at once…

…Q: You wrote in an essay that “in Boston circa 1975, mixed wasn’t really an option.” How did you deal with that?

A: I always identified as black. That was, I think, the only choice for me. The other choice wasn’t psychologically healthy for me, because my whole family didn’t have that option. So I think black was my identity, and in many ways still is, though I think of black and mixed as related in a complicated way. I think of myself as mixed, and I think of myself as part of a long history of African-American writers, so I don’t see them as so distinct as people do these days.

Q: Did you ever feel resentful that mixed wasn’t an option?

A: I didn’t desire that as an option. The black community was where I placed myself, and I felt actually sort of disparaging of people who identified as mixed; that seemed kind of tragic to me, because it seemed like they were avoiding the politics and the power relations that were really at the heart of race, to me. So a lot of my politics grew around this identity growing up, of identifying myself as black and seeing race as much more than a biological category. I think now I don’t worry so much about what I identify as; that just seems sort of simplistic, to suggest that there’s one answer to that. But I don’t feel badly that I didn’t…

Read the entire interview here.

Why Race Policy must include Multiracial Americans

Policy Press Blog at the University of Bristol
2016-01-27

Kathleen Odell Korgen, Professor of Sociology
William Paterson University, Wayne, New Jersey

Today’s guest blog by Kathleen Odell Korgen, whose book Race policy and multi-racial Americans published this month, examines the much overlooked issue of including multiracial Americans in policy making and explains why this oversight must stop.

Americans who identify as multiracial comprise approximately 7 percent of the U.S. population. With a growth rate three times that the rest of the population, this percentage will rise quickly (U.S. Census Bureau 2012; Frey 2014; Pew Research Center 2015).

One would never know this, however, by viewing the nation’s race policies. A look at policies across a variety of areas, including public school curricula, health policy, and prison regulations, reveals little trace of the existence of growing numbers of Americans who identify as multiracial…

Read the entire article here.

Race Policy and Multiracial Americans

Policy Press (Available in North America from University of Chicago Press)
2016-01-13
226 pages
234 x 156 mm
Hardback ISBN: 9781447316459
Paperback ISBN: 9781447316503

Edited by:

Kathleen Odell Korgen, Professor of Sociology
William Paterson University, Wayne, New Jersey

Race Policy and Multiracial Americans is the first book to look at the impact of multiracial people on race policies—where they lag behind the growing numbers of multiracial people in the U.S. and how they can be used to promote racial justice for multiracial Americans. Using a critical mixed race perspective, it covers such questions as: Which policies aimed at combating racial discrimination should cover multiracial Americans? Should all (or some) multiracial Americans benefit from affirmative action programmes? How can we better understand the education and health needs of multiracial Americans? This much-needed book is essential reading for sociology, political science and public policy students, policy makers, and anyone interested in race relations and social justice.

Contents

• Introduction ~ Kathleen Odell Korgen
• Multiracial Americans throughout the History of the U.S. ~ Tyrone Nagai
• National and Local Structures of Inequality: Multiracial Groups’ Profiles Across the United States ~ Mary E. Campbell and Jessica M. Barron
• Latinos and Multiracial America ~ Raúl Quiñones Rosado
• The Connections among Racial Identity, Social Class, and Public Policy? ~ Nikki Khanna
• Multiracial Americans and Racial Discrimination ~ Tina Fernandes Botts
• “Should All (or Some) Multiracial Americans Benefit from Affirmative Action Programs?”~ Daniel N. Lipson
• Multiracial Students and Educational Policy ~ Rhina Fernandes Williams and E. Namisi Chilungu
• Multiracial Americans in College ~ Marc P. Johnston and Kristen A. Renn
• Multiracial Americans, Health Patterns, and Health Policy: Assessment and Recommendations for Ways Forward ~ Jenifer L. Bratter and Chirsta Mason
• Racial Identity Among Multiracial Prisoners in the Color-Blind Era ~ Gennifer Furst and Kathleen Odell Korgen
• “Multiraciality and the Racial Order: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”~ Hephzibah V. Strmic-Pawl and David L. Brunsma
• Multiracial Identity and Monoracial Conflict: Toward a New Social Justice framework ~ Andrew Jolivette
• Conclusion: Policies for a Racially Just Society ~ Kathleen Odell Korgen

Identity and racial ambiguity in Danzy Senna’s Caucasia

North Carolina Central University
2015
82 pages

Carole Bonita Montgomery

Set in 1970s Boston, Danzy Senna’s novel, Caucasia (1998) centers around biracial Birdie Lee, whose racial identity is complex as she defines and redefines herself from her youth through young adulthood. Birdie and Cole Lee are daughters of Deck, an African American college professor, and Sandy Lee, a radical activist and educator who homeschools their daughters. The younger sister, Birdie, is very light-skinned, and people commonly mistake her for white, while Cole is often perceives as solely black. The girls do not notice this distinction until external forces, people, and institutions bring it to their attention. This thesis discusses Senna’s dramatization of Birdie Lee’s struggles with her own racial identity in 1970s America. As a first-person narrator, Birdie gives voice to Americans of her generation and younger who are able to be black, white, or both. The journey towards identity is a difficult for anyone; however, Senna highlights her convoluted path as this young biracial American detours from the conventional tragic mulatto’s outcome of self-destruction. Ultimately, Birdie embraces her double heritage and her skin tone, becoming a voice for the millennial mulatto.

Order a copy of the thesis thesis here.

Contested Identities: Racial Indeterminacy and Law in the American Novel, 1900-1942

University of Connecticut
2014-05-08

Rebecca S. Nisetich

In Contested Identities, I chart the path of the legal and literary discourses on racial identity, codified by the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision and culturally ascendant in the early decades of the twentieth century. In this period, a group of American writers produced fiction that implicitly challenged this legal and cultural discourse. My project explores the literary productions of Charles W. Chesnutt, Nella Larsen, and William Faulkner—three writers who undermine, question, and critique the legal and social practices that seek to define and contain individual identities in binary terms. Specifically, in Contested Identities I explore why Chesnutt, Larsen, and Faulkner create characters whose identities are not clearly articulated, defined, or knowable, and why they intentionally position these figures in relation to the law.

At the center of each of these texts there remains a void where racial information might be clearly articulated, defined, or corroborated, but isn’t. This enables Chesnutt, Larsen, and Faulkner to underscore an unresolved tension between what must be true and what cannot be known, a dynamic which throws into relief the maddening complexity of human experience in opposition to cut-and-dry legal and popular definitions of “race,” which operate under the assumption that blood proportions are easily known, and that specific blood proportions determine identity. I argue that it is racial indeterminacy that animates these writers’ explorations of identity, and that it is the fundamental theme that binds these characters and texts together. The law treats race as a matter of identity; my dissertation argues that the law is instead a crucial factor in the formation of the racial identity of individual characters.

Available for download here on or after 2024-05-01.

An Artist Stands Before Her Fun House Mirror

The New York Times
2016-01-06

Amanda Fortini

Genevieve Gaignard, “A Golden State of Mind” installation, 2015. Credit: Eric Minh Swenson, via The Cabin LA and Diane Rosenstein

LOS ANGELES — On a recent Friday afternoon, Genevieve Gaignard, a photographer, collagist and installation artist, was sitting on her bed in the room she rents in the Echo Park neighborhood. For the last year, Ms. Gaignard, who takes self-portraits costumed as various alter egos she imagines, then builds fictional domestic spaces for them, has lived in this nondescript, book-filled and thoroughly carpeted apartment with a professional couple in their late 20s, their chatty lime-green parrot and three cats.

Ms. Gaignard, who is 34, with strawberry-blond hair and long, acrylic nails painted the matte pastel colors of Jordan almonds, had decorated her bedroom with charmingly girlish touches, like a white net canopy befitting a fairy-tale princess and a Felix the Cat clock with a pendulum tail. On every surface were snowdrifts of stuff: piles of clothing, toiletries, plastic sunglasses. On her desk, a bra and a half-eaten granola bar shared space with an assortment of wigs. “This is what happens; this is how involved I get in the artmaking,” she said, waving a manicured hand around at the clutter. “Everything else sort of falls apart.”

A 2014 graduate of Yale’s photography M.F.A. program, Ms. Gaignard does work that reclaims everyday items: hair curlers, curling irons, plastic party favors, costume jewelry, towels. These she finds at thrift shops, dollar and beauty supply stores, or via her mother, who, she says with affection, “is kind of a hoarder.” A forest of Vanillaroma air fresheners dangles from a pair of yellow knee-high boots. A collage made to resemble the faux-wood paneling of a suburban basement is appended with miniature knickknacks. “It’s not like, ‘Hmm, can I make something out of nothing?’” Ms. Gaignard said. “It’s literally like, ‘What do I have access to?’”…

Her recent show, “Us Only,” at Shulamit Nazarian Gallery in the Venice neighborhood, featured a variety of pieces that blurred the lines between highbrow and vernacular, unraveling stereotypes of gender, race and class in the process. Her photos are often likened to those of Cindy Sherman, arguably our most famous costumed self-portraitist. But this comparison takes into account neither the animating impulses of her art — Ms. Gaignard is biracial, and her background forms an essential through line in her work — nor the decades of intervening culture since Ms. Sherman began taking pictures in the late 1970s. Third-wave feminism, online dating, even the ascent of the selfie: All are likely influences on a female artist photographing herself today. (Ms. Gaignard told me that Diane Arbus, not Ms. Sherman, was her seminal artistic inspiration, in part because she feels like “one of the people she photographed.”)…

…Sarah Lewis, a professor of history of art and architecture and African and African-American studies at Harvard, said that Ms. Gaignard’s art explores “the often undiscussed subject of racial indeterminacy.” It is, Professor Lewis notes, a topic well covered by 20th-century writers — Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Danzy Senna — but by few contemporary visual artists. Ms. Gaignard’s approach is not narrative, didactic or overtly political; she wittily employs symbols a viewer understands on a visceral level, even as a more explicit meaning remains elusive.

“Her work avoids any easy answers about race or identity,” said Gregory Crewdson, the director of graduate studies in photography at Yale. “I don’t think it’s in any conventional sense a critique. It’s more ambiguous than that. And that’s part of its power.”…

Read the entire article and view the photographs here.

The enduring function of caste: colonial and modern Haiti, Jamaica, and Brazil The economy of race, the social organization of caste, and the formulation of racial societies

Comparative American Studies
Volume 2, Issue 1 (01 March 2004)
pages 61-73
DOI: 10.1177/1477570004041288

Tekla Ali Johnson, Professional Public Historian
Southern Preservation Center in Charlotte, North Carolina

Modern day social hierarchies in Jamaica, Brazil and, to a degree, Haiti find their roots in the colonial context, where planters stratified laborers in order to maximize control. During slavery planters found artificial ways of influencing African identity, dividing enslaved Africans by their occupations and by skin color. These distinctions created divisions among workers and color proved a singularly powerful and enduring symbol of social and economic mobility. The American propensity for creating racial classifications for Africans and further divisions for ‘mixed-race’ offspring traditionally served economic interests. Their perpetuation into the present may signal the continued utility of dividing Africans into subgroups as a means of maintaining control of racial politics in the Americas.

Read or purchase the article here.

Mixed but not matched: Being mixed-race in America

The Daily Evergreen
Washington State University
Pullman, Washington
2016-01-21

Sophia Stephens, Evergreen columnist

The experience of being a mixed-race person in America can be described in one word – mixed.

Depending on how a mixed-race person looks and is perceived, the experience of being an ethnic or racially mixed person can vary the scope of a sociopolitical spectrum as broadly as one who identifies and is perceived as being mono-racial.

Race is a biological fantasy, but a social reality that affects the life experiences of millions of people every day in varying ways. There are some voices that dominate the conversation, some others that are beginning to gain traction, and others that are barely being heard at all or are being denied the opportunity to speak on their experiences…

…”For a long time I struggled with the fact that I wasn’t just one race,” said WSU junior Victoria-Pearl Young. “(I am) Native American (Choctaw and Comanche Nations), Chinese, French and black. This is incredibly difficult because my cultural experience as an Afro-Latina, specifically Afro-Boricua, living in America gets discredited simply because I don’t look like what people expect. I constantly have to prove myself racially and culturally. Here at WSU, most of my peers just assumed I was completely Black simply because of my appearance, and that really used to bother me until I learned more about my history as a black individual.”…

Read the entire article here.

Trans-racial Mothering: Double-Edged Privilege

Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless
Volume 17, Issue 1-2 (01 February 2008)
pages 8-36
DOI: 10.1179/sdh.2008.17.1-2.8

Martha Satz, Assistant Professor of English
Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas

In this essay, the white adoptive mother of two bi-racial children reflects upon her thirty year experience of parenting to make several philosophical claims. She argues that through the unique mother-child bond, trans-racial mothering may produce knowledge of others’ experience that crosses the racial divide. She claims that in this way trans-racial mothering produces epistemic and ethical privileges that may give the mother an advantaged position in public dialogue. Yet, paradoxically, in light of this epistemological transformation, highlighting the works of Black legal scholars and theoreticians, she argues against the general practice of trans-racial adoption of which she is the beneficiary.

Read or purchase the article here.

Jeff Chang in conversation with Adam Mansbach

Kepler’s Books
1010 El Camino Real
Menlo Park, California 94025-4349
Tuesday, 2015-01-26, 19:30 PST (Local Time)

It’s hard to express just how cool and important Who We Be is with words alone. Jeff seems to share this sentiment when it comes to a cultural history of the idea of racial progress because Who We Be remixes comic strips and contemporary art, campus protests and corporate marketing campaigns, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Trayvon Martin.

Now you can join the conversation too: How do Americans see race now? How has that changed – and not changed – over the half-century? After eras framed by words like “multicultural” and “post-racial,” do we see each other anymore clearly? Join us for a timely discussion with journalist, music critic, and Executive Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University, Jeff Chang. He will be interviewed by the author of Go the F**k to Sleep, Adam Mansbach, to celebrate the paperback release of Who We Be.

Jeff Chang co-founded and ran the indie hip hop label, then known as SoleSides, but now known as Quannum Projects, and helped launch the careers of DJ Shadow, Blackalicious, Lyrics Born, and Lateef the Truth Speaker. The anti-apartheid and the anti-racist movement at UC Berkeley politicized Chang and he worked as a community laborer and student organizer; Chang was an organizer of the inaugural National Hip-Hop Political Convention. In 2007 Chang interviewed Barack Obama, for the cover of Vibe Magazine. He’s the author of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop and has written for The Nation, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Believer, Foreign Policy, Salon, Slate, and Buzzfeed, among others.

Adam Mansbach is the author of Angry Black White Boy, a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2005 and The End of the Jews (for which he won the California Book Award for fiction in 2008). Mansbach was the founding editor of the 1990s hip-hop journal Elementary. He lives in Berkeley and co-hosts a radio show, “Father Figures.”…

For more information and to RSVP, click here.