Mixed Race Studies

In China, mixed marriages can be a labor of love

The Christian Science Monitor
2013-09-21

Yepoka Yeebo, Contributor

In one major Chinese city, marriages between Chinese and Africans are on the rise. In a country known for monoculture, it isn’t easy.

GUANGZHOU, China

The restaurant that Joey and Ugo Okonkwo own was packed on a recent Saturday night, with meal-time banter alternating between English, Cantonese Chinese, and Nigerian dialects among the mainly Nigerian patrons and the occasional Chinese girlfriend. In this bustling southern port city, it’s not an uncommon sight.

Nor is the sight of marriages like Joey and Ugo’s. In Guangzhou, just next door to Hong Kong, a growing number of African traders and immigrants are marrying Chinese women, and mixed families like Joey and Ugo are grappling with questions about race and nationality, in a country that is often proud to be monocultural and is known for sometimes harsh xenophobia.

Joey, who is native to Guangzhou, speaks English with a West African lilt, which she picked up from Ugo, who is from Anambra State in southeastern Nigeria. Joey, whose Chinese name is Li Jieyi, says people regularly look at her 2-year-old daughter Amanda and wonder about her origins.

“Foreigners say she looks like me, Chinese say she looks like her father. I don’t know why,” Joey says as she bustles around the restaurant…

Read the entire article here.

Lecture by Nayland Blake

California College of the Arts
Timken Lecture Hall, San Francisco Campus
Graduate Studies Lectue Series
2012-11-27, 19:00 PST

Nayland Blake’s mixed-media work in sculpture and installation has been variously described as disturbing, provocative, elusive, tormented, sinister, hysterical, brutal, and tender. Often incorporating themes of masochism, it also manifests two other major threads: his biracial heritage and what he calls his pansexuality.

Blake was included in the 1991 Whitney Biennial and the controversial Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1994. His work is in the collections of SFMOMA, the Whitney Museum, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. He chairs the International Photography Center —Bard MFA program, and he lives and works in Brooklyn.

Faculty-Alumnus David Huffman’s “Out of Bounds” at SFAC Gallery a “SHIFT” Toward Dialogue About Race in America

California College of the Arts
Featured News
2011-09-14

Jim Norrena

Alumnus David Huffman (MFA 1998), who is a recently tenured assistant professor in CCA’s undergraduate Painting/Drawing Program and Graduate Program in Fine Arts, is one of three featured artists in the current group exhibition SHIFT: Three Projects Constructing a New Dialogue About Race in America at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery (through December 10, 2011).

Shifting Demographics, Shifting Races

SHIFT is described as an exhibition that “pushes the public to think about our changing demographics and what role race plays in our post-millennial American circumstance.” Also featured are Bay Area artists Elizabeth Axtman [The Love Renegade #308: I Love You Keith Bardwell (Phase 1)] and Travis Somerville (Places I’ve Never Been), yet it is Huffman’s Out of Bounds, his first multimedia exhibition, that is positioned in the Main Gallery at 401 Van Ness Avenue.

“Diversity can be viewed as a social activism of inclusion,” says Huffman, who is mixed race, “to include various groups of people who are normally rejected by prejudice, regardless of their capabilities. Out of Bounds includes works that examine various perspectives — some of which might normally be rejected because of their racial affiliation. I think that diversity is also about broadening the spectrum of possibilities from a variety of capable peoples and ideas.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Essential Barack Obama

Random House
2008-03-10
Abridged Compact Disc
ISBN: 978-0-7393-7594-5

Barack Obama, President of the United States

A CD collection featuring the best-selling audiobooks, The Audacity of Hope and Dreams from My Father from Grammy^® award-winning author, Barack Obama.

The Audacity of Hope

In July 2004, Barack Obama electrified the Democratic National Convention with an address that spoke to Americans across the political spectrum. One phrase in particular anchored itself in listeners’ minds, a reminder that for all the discord and struggle to be found in our history as a nation, we have always been guided by a dogged optimism in the future, or what Senator Obama called “the audacity of hope.”

Now, in The Audacity of Hope, Senator Obama calls for a different brand of politics–a politics for those weary of bitter partisanship and alienated by the “endless clash of armies” we see in congress and on the campaign trail; a politics rooted in the faith, inclusiveness, and nobility of spirit at the heart of “our improbable experiment in democracy.” He explores those forces–from the fear of losing to the perpetual need to raise money to the power of the media–that can stifle even the best-intentioned politician. He also writes, with surprising intimacy and self-deprecating humor, about settling in as a senator, seeking to balance the demands of public service and family life, and his own deepening religious commitment.

At the heart of this book is Senator Obama’s vision of how we can move beyond our divisions to tackle concrete problems. He examines the growing economic insecurity of American families, the racial and religious tensions within the body politic, and the transnational threats–from terrorism to pandemic–that gather beyond our shores. And he grapples with the role that faith plays in a democracy–where it is vital and where it must never intrude. Underlying his stories about family, friends, members of the Senate, even the president, is a vigorous search for connection: the foundation for a radically hopeful political consensus.

A senator and a lawyer, a professor and a father, a Christian and a skeptic, and above all a student of history and human nature, Senator Obama has written a book of transforming power. Only by returning to the principles that gave birth to our Constitution, he says, can Americans repair a political process that is broken, and restore to working order a government that has fallen dangerously out of touch with millions of ordinary Americans. Those Americans are out there, he writes–“waiting for Republicans and Democrats to catch up with them.”

Dreams from My Father

In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father—a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man—has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey—first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance.

Race, Identity and Citizenship: A Reader

Wiley-Blackwell
June 1999
454 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-631-21021-4
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-631-21022-1

Edited by

Rodolfo D. Torres, Professor of Planning, Policy & Design and Political Science
University of California, Irvine

Louis F. Mirón
University of California, Irvine

Jonathan Xavier Inda, Associate Professor of Latina/Latino Studies and Criticism and Interpretive Theory
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

In recent years, race and ethnicity have been the focus of theoretical, political, and policy debates. This comprehensive and timely reader covers the range of topics that have been at the center of these debates including critical race theory, multiracial feminism, mixed race, whiteness, citizenship and globalization. Contributors include Angela Davis, Stuart Hall, Richard Delgado, Robert Miles, Michael Eric Dyson, Saskia Sassen, Étienne Balibar, Patricia Hill Collins, Renato Rosaldo, Stanley Aronowitz, and Collette Guillaumin.

Table of Contents

• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments/Copyright Information
• Introduction
• Part I: Mapping The Languages of Racism
  • 1. Does “Race” Matter? Transatlantic Perspectives on Racism after “Race Relations” Robert Miles and Rodolfo D. Torres
  • 2. “I Know it’s Not Nice, But. . . ” The Changing Face of “Race” Colette Guillaumin
  • 3. The Contours of Racialization: Structures, Representations and Resistance in the United States Stephen Small
  • 4. Marxism, Racism, and Ethnicity John Solomos and Les Back
  • 5. Postmodernism and the Politics of Racialized Identities Louis F. Mirón
• Part II: Critical Multiracial Feminism
  • 6. Theorizing Difference from Multiracial Feminism Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill
  • 7. Ethnicity, Gender Relations and Multiculturalism Nira Yuval-Davis
  • 8. What’s in a Name? Womanism, Black Feminism, and Beyond Patricia Hill Collins
• Part III: Fashioning Mixed Race
  • 9. The Colorblind Multiracial Dilemma: Racial Categories Reconsidered john a. powell
  • 10. Multiracial Asians: Models of Ethnic Identity Maria P. P. Root
  • 11. Cipherspace: Latino Identity Past and Present J. Jorge Klor de Alva
• Part IV: The Color(s) of Whiteness
  • 12. Establishing the Fact of Whiteness John Hartigan, Jr.
  • 13. Constructions of Whiteness in European and American Anti-Racism Alastair Bonnett
  • 14 The Labor of Whiteness, the Whiteness of Labor, and the Perils of Whitewishing Michael Eric Dyson
  • 15. The Trickster’s Play: Whiteness in the Subordination and Liberation Process Aida Hurtado
• Part V: Cultural Citizenship, Multiculturalism, And The State
  • 16. Citizenship Richard Delgado
  • 17. Cultural Citizenship, Inequality, and Multiculturalism Renato Rosaldo
  • 18. Cultural Citizenship as Subject Making: Immigrants Negotiate Racial and Cultural Boundaries in the United States Aihwa Ong
• Part VI: Locating Class
  • 19. The Site of Class Edna Bonacich
  • 20. Between Nationality and Class Stanley Aronowitz
  • 21. Class Racism Étienne Balibar
• Part VII: Globalized Futures And Racialized Identities
  • 22. Multiculturalism and Flexibility: Some New Directions in Global Capitalism Richard P. Appelbaum
  • 23. Analytic Borderlands: Race, Gender and Representation in the New City Saskia Sassen
  • 24. Globalization, the Racial Divide, and a New Citizenship Michael C. Dawson
• Part VIII: Critical Engagements
  • 25. Interview with Stuart Hall: Culture and Power Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal
  • 26. Angela Y. Davis: Reflections on Race, Class, and Gender in the USA Lisa Lowe
• Index

Call for Papers – ‘Skin Tone, “Colourism” and “Passing”’

University of Leeds
School of Sociology and Social Policy
Centre for Ethnicity and Racism Studies
Leeds, West Yorkshire, England
2013-09-11

Peter Edwards

The Race in the Americas (RITA) group, in partnership with the Centre for Ethnicity and Racism Studies (CERS), seeks abstract submissions on the theme of skin tone, ‘colourism’ and ‘passing’.

The seminar will be held on Saturday 8 March 2014, at the University of Leeds.

Submissions might include, but are not restricted to, research on the following topics:

• ‘Colourism’ as a prejudice within racial groups with regard to skin tone;
• The social implications of individuals passing as one race instead of another;
• The impact of ‘passing’ on the politics of representation and governance;
• The creation of space for a multi-ethnic identity: what is that space and does it exist? Are individuals forced to identify with one ethnicity over another?;
• Racial identity as a performance through clothing, speech and patterns of consumption;
• The proliferation of chemical products to lighten or darken skin tone and what this means for understandings of ‘race’;
• Cultural systems of caste classification and translations of skin tone into political structures;
• The role of skin tone in influencing confidence, and in determining social status within a power structure that privileges whiteness;

For more information, click here.

Purchasing Whiteness in Colonial Latin America

Not Even Past: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” —William Faulkner
Department of History
University of Texas at Austin
2013-09-18

Ann Twinam, Professor of History
University of Texas, Austin

The castas, or mixed race populations, suffered numerous forms of discrimination in colonial Latin America, but in practice pardos and mulatos could still achieve some social mobility.  A rare few, by the mid eighteenth century, were able to petition the Spanish crown through a process known as the gracias al sacar, to purchase whiteness…

Read the entire article here.

Mexico, From Mestizo to Multicultural

Vanderbilt University Press
2007-06-29
254 pages
7in x 10in
60 Illustrations
Paperback ISBN: 9780826515391
Hardback ISBN: 9780826515384

Carrie C. Chorba, Associate Professor of Spanish
Claremont McKenna College, Claremont, California

In Mexico, the confluence of the 1992 Quincentennial commemoration of Columbus’s voyages and the neo-liberal sexenio, or presidency, of Carlos Salinas de Gortari spurred artistic creations that capture the decade like no other source does. In the 1990s, Mexican artists produced an inordinate number of works that revise and rewrite the events of the sixteenth-century conquest and colonization. These works and their relationship to, indeed their mirroring of, the intellectual and cultural atmosphere in Mexico during the Salinas presidency are of paramount importance if we are to understand the subtle but deep shifts within Mexico’s national identity that took place at the end of the last century.

Throughout the twentieth century, the post-revolutionary Mexican State had used mestizaje as a symbol of national unity and social integration. By the end of the millennium, however, Mexico had gone from a PRI-dominated, economically protectionist nation to a more democratic, economically globalizing one. More importantly, the homogenizing, mestizophile national identity that pervaded Mexico throughout the past century had given way to official admission of Mexico’s ethnic and linguistic diversity–or ‘pluriculture’ according to President Salinas’s 1992 constitutional revision.

This book is the first interdisciplinary study of literary, cinematic, and graphic images of Mexican national identity in the 1980s and ’90s. Discussing, in depth, writings, films, and cartoons from a vast array of contemporary sources, Carrie C. Chorba creates a social history of this important shift.

Not Just Color: Whiteness, nation, and status in Latin America

Hispanic American Historical Review
Volume 93, Number 3 (August 2013)
pages 411-449
DOI: 10.1215/00182168-2210858

Edward Telles, Professor of Sociology
Princeton University

René Flores
Princeton University

In this study we use statistical analysis of nationally representative surveys from the 2010 AmericasBarometer to examine how color, nationality, and several individual characteristics are related to white identification in 17 Latin American countries. Unlike the common treatment of racial identification as a fixed and self-evident determinant of social status or behavior, we treat it as a flexible social outcome. We find that though white identification is largely shaped by skin color, it is also shaped by national context, social status, and age.

We discover that white identification is more common among persons of a brown skin color in Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, and Costa Rica than in the rest of Latin America, where such persons would generally identify as mestizo. This suggests that the whitening ideologies of these four countries have made whiteness a more capacious category. We find that younger Latin Americans are less likely to identify as white compared to their older conationals, suggesting a changing valorization of whiteness. Furthermore, college-educated persons are less likely to identify as white than their lower-educated counterparts, challenging ideas that “money whitens.” Findings for age and education may reflect a recent shift to multiculturalism. In addition, we find that white identification is predicted to change in response to the survey interviewer’s color, suggesting that choices about racial identification are relational.

The work of historians has been critical to understanding our findings for the contemporary period, and we suggest ways that sociological work like ours might inform historical work on race and ethnicity.

Read or purchase the article here. Read the entire original paper here.

Overseas adoptions rise — for black American children

Cable News Network (CNN)
2013-09-17

Sophie Brown

Editor’s note: In this series, CNN investigates international adoption, hearing from families, children and key experts on its decline, and whether the trend could — or should — be reversed.

(CNN) — Elisa van Meurs grew up with a Polish au pair, speaks fluent Dutch and English and loves horseback riding — her favorite horse is called Kiki but she also rides Pippi Longstocking, James Bond, and Robin Hood.

She plays tennis and ice hockey, and in the summer likes visiting her grandmother in the Swiss Alps.

“It’s really nice to go there because you can walk in the mountains and you can mountain bike … you can see Edelweiss sometimes,” said the 13-year-old, referring to the famous mountain flower that blooms above the tree line.

It’s a privileged life unlike that of her birth mother, a woman of African American descent from Indianapolis who had her first child at age 15. Her American family is “really nice but they don’t have a lot of money to do stuff,” said Elisa, who met her birth mother, and two siblings in 2011. “They were not so rich.”…

…Escape from racism

When Susan, a Florida resident, chose to place her son for adoption in 2006, the social worker gave her three binders with information about three prospective families. But she only needed to see the first binder of a couple from the Netherlands to make her decision. “If my mother had lived, she’d look just like (the prospective Dutch mother),” recalled the 37 year old, who asked that her last name not be used. Her own mother died when she was two months old.

Susan also wanted her son to grow up far away from the life she knew. She was a 30-year-old prostitute addicted to crack beginning a prison sentence when she learned she was pregnant. She did not know whether the child’s father was a man who raped her “for hours” or a drug dealer whom she “had done something with” one time, she said. But both men were African American, and she believed the child would face discrimination growing up in the United States.

“There’s too much prejudice over here. The white people are going to hate him because he’s half black, and the majority of black people are going to hate on him because he’s half white,” said Susan, who is Caucasian. “And then he’ll have to do extra things to prove what kind of a Negro he is, and extra things to prove what kind of a honky he is and I don’t want that. I did not want that for my kid.”

Even her own daughter, then aged 11, said “she would never accept that n***** child.”

Susan is not alone, says Adam Pertman, Executive Director of the Donaldson Adoption Institute and author of “Adoption Nation.” Many birth mothers have a perception that their black or mixed-race children will not face the same race issues in the Netherlands as in the United States.

“In the United States, as much as Americans want to believe it’s not true, we are still a country where there is a least some degree of racial prejudice. The birth mothers’ perception of Holland, in particular, was that the same was not true in Holland. There’s that feeling that maybe we can escape those issues if (the child is) somewhere else.”…

Read the entire article here.