Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
The longstanding attempt to legislate Indigenous-Asian relations out of existence continues to cast its shadow today. Cathy Freeman is identified as Australia’s most famous Indigenous sportswoman, but she is also of Chinese descent. In the late 19th century, her great-great grandfather moved from China to northern Queensland, where he worked on sugarcane farms. In 2001 Freeman supported Beijing’s bid for the 2008 Olympic Games because of her Chinese heritage, but the English-language Australian media has entirely overlooked it. By contrast, in Chinese-language media inside and outside Australia, Freeman’s multicultural heritage is celebrated; many Chinese-Australians even hoped Freeman would win gold in the Sydney Olympics because of her Chinese descent. Is the suppression of Freeman’s heritage a sign that white Australia still wants to keep Asians and Aborigines apart?
Students of the first year module Understanding Race went on a walking tour this morning, led by the writer and historian Steve Martin.
Challenging the popular idea that race in Britain is a phenomenon of post-WW2 immigration, Steve gave us an insight into the longstanding presence of non-white people in London’s history, with a focus on people of African and African-Carribean heritage…
In the Q&A at the National Book Festival in Washington, DC, that followed, Erdrich – the author of Tracks, Love Medicine and The Round House and a key voice in contemporary American literature – offered insight into the worldview from which she writes, one heavily influenced by her own experiences as a mixed-race Native American.
“It is where I’m from; literally there’s no other way than this that I can write. I’m writing out of the mixture of cultures,” she said. “Knowing both sides of my family really infused my life with a sense that I lived in many times and in many places as many people. It was never just me. I was always filled with the stories, the humor, the loss. Because, of course, we are all part of this great loss that occurred.”…
G. Reginald Daniel, Editor in Chief and Professor of Sociology University of California, Santa Barbara
JCMRS encourages established and emerging scholars to submit articles in response to the annual call of papers. The journal is currently inviting submissions on the topic of global mixed race, particularly in terms of populations, experiences, and concerns outside the United States. Articles will be considered for publication based on their contribution to important and current discussions in critical mixed race studies, and their scholarly competence and originality. The primary criterion for selection will be the quality of the paper, not its connection to the CMRS conference theme.
The journal is transracial, transdisciplinary, and transnational in scope. It places the concept of mixed race at the critical center of focus such that multiracial individuals become subjects of historical, social, and cultural processes rather than simply objects of analysis. This involves the study of racial consciousness among racially mixed people, the world in which they live, and the ideological forces that inform their identity and experience.
JCMRS also stresses the critical analysis of the institutionalization of social, cultural, and political structures based on dominant conceptions of race. JCMRS acknowledges that the concept of race invokes biologically-based human characteristics, but the selection of specific human features for the purposes of racial signification is a constantly changing sociohistorical process. Accordingly, the journal emphasizes the constructed nature of race and the notion that racial categories are unstable and decentered structures of sociocultural meanings that are continuously being created, inhabited, contested, transformed, and destroyed. Finally, JCMRS underscores the mutability of race and the porosity of racial boundaries in order to critique local and global systemic injustices rooted in processes of racialization and social stratification based on race, as well as the interlocking nature of racial phenomena with sex, gender, sexuality, class, and other categories of difference.
Submission Deadline: Open
Submission Guidelines: Article manuscripts should range between 15-30 double-spaced pages, Times New Roman 12-point font, including notes and works cited, must follow the Chicago Manual of Style, and include an abstract (not to exceed 250 words). Papers will not be reviewed unless they follow the exact formatting of the submission guidelines.
JACKSON, Miss. — Only three people who had ever met this man, Robert Gray, knew that he was running in the primary for governor of Mississippi.
There were the two volunteers who took his $300 filing fee and qualifying papers several months ago at the state Democratic Party office and the candidate for agriculture commissioner who happened to be in the headquarters at the same time.
Otherwise, no one — not even Mr. Gray’s mother, with whom he lives.
At least she voted for him when she saw his name on the Aug. 4 ballot. Mr. Gray, 46, a round-faced, soft-spoken long-haul truck driver who lives on a quiet country road south of Jackson, was too busy working on his rig to vote himself. He would, nonetheless, go on to win, taking 79 out of Mississippi’s 82 counties.
Mr. Gray beat two other candidates, who unlike him spent money and campaigned. Democratic Party officials were stunned. The news media was stunned. Mr. Gray, now Mississippi’s Democratic nominee for governor, gave some interviews and then set off with a truck full of sweet potatoes for a potato chip factory in Pennsylvania…
…No one there had met Mr. Gray, but Gary Downing, who was getting a little off the ears, offered a thought on the state of politics: “Can’t do no worse than what we’ve got.”
This may be the central plank of the Gray campaign, such as it is. His campaign staff for now consists mostly of his sister, Angela Gray, 45, who works in real estate in Georgia, and Dwight Utz, 57, an engineer who moved here three years ago from Idaho. Mr. Utz, who is white, sees the campaign as the stirrings of a new civil rights movement.
Mr. Gray does not talk much about race. He cites no specific issue that prompted him to run for governor. He emphasizes a more general conviction that the state has been foundering for too long and that it could be thriving if only the governor would expand Medicaid and spend more on infrastructure and education…
Catherine Keyser, Associate Professor of English Language and Literature University of South Carolina
In an unpublished 1935 memoir, Jean Toomer reminisces about his job as a soda jerk in high school and exults in his hard-won expertise:
I got my white coat. Under my friends [sic] guidance I learned to work the fountain, draw sodas, pile sundaes, brew special concoctions. Of course, I had imprinted upon me indelibly what my fellow-men consider tasty thirst-quenching drinks. … I was a serious youth at first, in every way an eager, earnest student of the job. … I soon became familiar with the store’s stock, the patent medicines, the chemicals in jars. Sime [sic] times I watched the doctor compound prescriptions and I had a feeling of fascination and mystery as if there were some magic about this and I were in—not the prosaic back of a modern drug store but in the work shop of an alchemist.
Toomer’s verbs animate the process of intermixture and especially his active role in that process: “work,” “draw,” “pile,” “brew.” While popular taste renders the soda jerk passive, even textual (“I had imprinted upon me indelibly”), the model of the doctor compounding prescriptions promises active and expert authorship. In this combination, we can see an alter ego for the literary modernist, reformulating the materials of popular culture with expertise. The audience for the work is meant to imbibe its results, to incorporate the concoction in the body, and thus to experience the senses anew. The pharmacist models not only form (as formula) and bricolage (as compounds), but also the radical transformation of the consumer of this “magic.” This alchemical metaphor for modernist practice suits Toomer’s approach to race as well as his approach to art. Mark Whalan observes that Toomer uses technological metaphors in his masterwork Cane in order to imagine a “dynamic process” of racial transformation: “At the centre of this exists the figure of the artist, transforming through a process of mechanical efficiency material forms which degrade or oppress into forms which offer liberation and agency.”
The outside world encroaches on this idyllic magician’s workshop. Toomer’s longed-for imaginative transformation of racial categorization was not so easily performed in the segregated spaces of the Jim Crow era, and the anecdote in his memoir bears this out. His grandmother disapproves of his ambition to work at a soda fountain: “I could not bring myself to ask my grandmother. I could hear her exclaim, ‘My grandson a soda boy!’” Her hesitation (and his) is telling. A notoriously segregated city, Washington, D.C., had an anti-discrimination law on the books from 1872 stating that “keepers of ice-cream saloons or places where soda-water is kept for sale” would be fined for “refusing to sell or wait upon any respectable, well-behaved person, without regard to race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” but in practice, this statute was ignored. Is this a soda fountain for white patrons, where a black teenager could work behind the counter but not sit in front of it? Or is this a soda fountain for black patrons, a safe but lower-class space? It is not a surprise that Toomer, frustrated at what he elsewhere calls “color labels,” fails to mention the race of his friends, colleagues, or patrons in the soda fountain, but the fact that he does not do so draws attention to the racial politics that he tries to overlook. Soda fountains were a common symbol of segregation and racial tension. In 1918, James Weldon Johnson wrote that “the denial of the privilege of drinking ice cream soda in certain places on account of race or color is a phase of the denial of full citizenship and common democracy.” For many Harlem Renaissance writers, the soda fountain represented social barriers rather than chemical recombinations. In George Schuyler’sBlack No More (1931), his newly white protagonist learns about a local Klan rally at a soda fountain. In The Big Sea (1940), Langston Hughes recalls stopping in St. Louis during a train trip in 1918 and being turned away from “the soda fountain where cool drinks were being served” because he was “colored.” Hughes sardonically concludes the anecdote: “I knew I was home in…
Joe Feagin, Ella C. McFadden and Distinguished Professor of Sociology Texas A&M University
To understand the so-called “browning of America” and “coming white minority,” we should accent the larger societal context, the big-picture context including systemic racism. “Browning of America” issues have become important in the West mainly because whites are very worried about this demographic trend. Black-British scholar, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, has noted that whites are fearful
because for such a long time the world has been their own. . . . There is an underlying assumption that says white is right. . . . There is a white panic every time one part of their world seems to be passing over to anyone else. . . . There was this extraordinary assumption that white people could go and destroy peoples and it would have no consequence.
Let us consider a few reasonable, albeit speculative, extrapolations of current social science data to social changes from now to the 2050s:
(1) Dramatic demographic changes are coming: According to US Census projections this country will become much less white, with the greatest relative growth in the Latino, Asian, and multiracial populations. By 2050 it will be about 439 million people, with a majority of people of color (53 percent), the largest group being Latino (30 percent). Long before, a majority of students and younger workers will be of color. Over coming decades immigrant workers of color and their descendants will keep more cities from economic decline. Census data for 2050 indicate the oldest population cohort will be disproportionately white and younger cohorts will be disproportionately people of color–thereby overlaying a racial divide with a generational divide, probably generating racial-generational conflicts (See William Frey, The Diversity Explosion)…
…A Panoramic View: Brazilianization or South-Africanization?
In recent years numerous scholars and media analysts have suggested the idea of significantly greater racial intermediation coming as the U.S. becomes much less white. Taking a panoramic view, they suggest a future that involves a “Brazilianization” or “Latinization’ of the United States.
Brazil’s racialization process has distinguished large mixed-race, mostly lighter-skinned groups and placed them in a middling status between Brazilians of mostly African ancestry and those of heavily European ancestry. Middle groups are relatively more affluent, politically powerful, and acceptable to dominant white Brazilians, who still mostly rule powerfully at the top of the economy and politics. About half the population, darker-skinned Afro-Brazilians and indigenous Brazilians, remains very powerless economically and politically. Possibly, in the U.S. case by 2050, a developed tripartite Brazilian pattern—with increasing and large but white-positioned intermediate racial groups, such as lighter-skinned middle class groups among Asian Americans and Latinos, moving up with greater economic and socio-political power and providing a racial buffer between powerful “whites” and powerless “blacks” and other darker-skinned people of color. Even then, it seems likely that many in U.S. middle groups will find their white-framed immigration, citizenship positions, or other inferiorized status still negatively affecting additional mobility opportunities…
The heir to Longleat has revealed he has fallen out with his mother after she questioned his marriage to his half-Nigerian wife, claiming he was ruining ‘400 years of bloodline’.
Ceawlin Thynn, 41, said the row resulted in him banning his mother, the Marchioness of Bath, from attending his wedding to Emma McQuiston, 29, and from seeing the couple’s 11-month-old son.
The row erupted when Viscount Weymouth approached his mother in the drawing room of the Elizabethan country house at the sprawling estate in Wiltshire and informed her he planned to marry the daughter of a Nigerian oil tycoon…
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A judge Thursday dismissed a lawsuit filed by an Ohio woman against a west suburban sperm bank whose clerical error resulted in the birth of her mixed-race daughter.
DuPage County Judge Ronald Sutter tossed the suit after lawyers for Midwest Sperm Bank argued that the woman’s claims lacked legal merit. But the judge said Jennifer Cramblett of Uniontown, Ohio, could refile her lawsuit under a negligence claim.
Cramblett, who did not attend Thursday’s hearing, filed suit last year against the Downers Grove-based sperm bank alleging wrongful birth and breach of warranty following the birth of her daughter, who is of African-American ancestry.
Cramblett and her same-sex partner purchased sperm with the understanding that it was from a Caucasian donor, but later discovered that the sperm bank had sent material from an African-American donor. The mistake was caused by a clerical error, and the bank later issued an apology and a partial refund…
Celeste Ng is the author of the novel Everything I Never Told You, which was a New York Times bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book of 2014, Amazon’s #1 Best Book of 2014, and named a best book of the year by over a dozen publications. Everything I Never Told You was also the winner of the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature and the ALA’s Alex Award, and was a finalist for numerous awards, including the Ohioana Award, the John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger Award, the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the Massachusetts Book Award.
Celeste grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio, in a family of scientists. She attended Harvard University and earned an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she won the Hopwood Award. Her fiction and essays have appeared in One Story, TriQuarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, the Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere, and she is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize. Celeste and I first connected on Twitter after I read her book, and she graciously agreed to chat with me about the novel, her writing routine, being part of and writing about interracial families, how to address issues of race and representation without being pigeonholed, writing outside one’s own culture, what she’s working on now, and much more!…
…Apart from being caught up in the story and the beautifully drawn characters, your book was important to me personally because I’ve always been part of an interracial family — first through adoption and now through marriage as well. I so rarely read stories or see portrayals of families that look anything like mine. Why did you decide to make the family in your novel an interracial one, with biracial children? Was that always the plan for this story?
In the very early stages of the novel — when I was no more than about 15 or 20 pages in — I didn’t really think about the races of the characters at all. If anything, I thought of them as white because that’s so often the default mode for our culture. Then one of my advisors, Eileen Pollack, asked me about the characters’ ethnicity, and I started to realize that this was a racially mixed family: that tied into many of the issues they had to face and the concerns and misunderstandings they had with each other and with outsiders…
Francis Wardle Red Rocks Community College, Colorado
Early childhood educators continually adjust to families they serve. Educators must provide for children not living with their natural parents, children from abusive families, children who rarely see their parents, and children from single-parent homes. Early childhood educators are becoming increasingly aware of children living in single-father families (Briggs & Walters, 1985), as well as single-mother families. Now these professionals have an additional challenge: to be sensitive and supportive of the unique needs of interracial children and their families.
The number of interracial marriages has increased to more than 100,000 in the past decade. The 1983 census cites 632,000 interracial marriages in the United States; 125,000 are Black/White unions. These figures reflect only current interracial marriages; they do not include divorced parents or interracial unions not resulting in marriage (Shackford, 1984). Although there are no data on the number of interracial children in our society, because census forms do not include include an interracial or mixed category, it is clearly increasing and posing new challenges to all involved in raising children (Wardle, 1981). These new challenges include the interracial child with one Black and one White parent, and all other combinations of one parent of color and one White, including Asian American/White, Native American/White, and so on…
