Mixed Race Studies

Beyond Black and White: When Going Beyond May Take Us Out of Bounds

Journal of Black Studies
Volume 44, Number 2 (March 2013)
pages 158-181
DOI: 10.1177/0021934712471533

Katerina Deliovsky, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario

Tamari Kitossa, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario

This article examines a selection of the North American scholarly research that calls for “moving beyond” a “Black/White binary paradigm.” Some scholars suggest this paradigm limits or obscures a complex understanding of the historical record on race, racism, and racialization for Asian, Latina/o, Mexican, and Native Americans. On the face of it, the notion of a Black/White binary paradigm and the call to move beyond appears persuasive. The discourse of a Black/White binary paradigm, however, confuses, misnames, and simplifies the historical and contemporary experiences structured within what is, in fact, the racially incorporative matrix of a black/white Manicheanism. We assert this call sets up blackness and, by extension, people socially defined as “black” as impediments to multiracial coalition building. As a result, “moving beyond” is epistemologically faulty and politically harmful for African-descended people because it is based on “bad faith” toward blackness.

Read or purchase the article here.

‘Romance of Race’ reveals rich cultural history

BGSU News
Bowling Green, Ohio
Thursday, 2013-02-14

A new book by Dr. Jolie Sheffer is further confirmation that one should never doubt the power of the pen. “The Romance of Race: Incest, Miscegenation, and Multiculturalism in the United States, 1890-1930,” published in January by Rutgers University Press, explains the role of minority women writers and reformers in the creation of modern American multiculturalism.

Like their male counterparts Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo in Europe, these authors provided their largely middle-class, female readers an intimate and sympathetic look at people with whose lives they were otherwise unfamiliar. Through stories of romances between white men and minority women told in human terms, authors such as María Cristina Mena, Mourning Dove, Onoto Watanna and Pauline Hopkins created a vision of the United States as a mixed-race, even incestuous nation, says Sheffer, English and American culture studies…

Read the entire article here.

An evening wtih Lawrence Hill

Central YMCA
20 Grosvenor Street
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Thursday, 2013-02-21, 18:30-21:00 EST (Local Time)

RSVP Deadline: 2013-02-19

Join us for an evening celebrating Black History Month with renowned Canadian author, Lawrence Hill.

Lawrence Hill has written a number of award winning books including The Book of Negroes….

For more information, click here.

World Premier of Christmas in Hanoi

East West Players
120 Judge John Aiso Street
Los Angeles, California 90012
2013-02-07 through 2013-03-10

Tim Dang, Producing Artistict Director
Eddie Borey, Playwright
Jeff Liu, Director

East West Players Presents Christmas in Hanoi

A mixed-race family returns to Vietnam for the first time since the war. One year after the death of their strong-willed mother, siblings Winnie and Lou travel with their Irish Catholic father and Vietnamese grandfather to re-connect with their roots. Whether they embrace that past or reject it, they are haunted by their own family’s ghosts and by the phantoms of Vietnam’s long history.

Christmas in Hanoi is the Winner of the East West Players Face of the Future Playwriting Competition.

Featuring: Joseph Daugherty, Elyse Dinh, Michael Krawic, Elizabeth Liang, and Long Nguyen.

In association with Multiracial Americans of Southern California and Vietnamese American Arts & Letters Association.

For more information, click here.

A Little Too Much Is Enough

W. W. Norton & Company
November 1996
240 pages
5.4 × 8.1 in
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-393-31559-2

Kathleen Tyau

Filled with love and food, this story of the Hawaiian Wong family is an exuberant banquet of characters and stories.

Mahealani Wong was named for the full moon she was born under as her Chinese grandmother believed it would bring her good luck. She has a full helping of her fathers full Hawaiian lips and the rebellious heart of an American teenager. In this vibrant tale, Mahi tries to get more than the “little too much” that is enough for the loving and hard-to-let-go-of-one-another Wong family.

Crossing the Color Line: Race, Parenting, and Culture

Rutgers University Press
August 1994
215 pages
Cloth ISBN 0-8135-2105-X
Paperback ISBN 0-8135-2374-5

Maureen T. Reddy, Professor of English
Rhode Island College

Contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. On Lines and Bridges
• 2. Starting Out
• 3. “Why Do White People Have Vaginas?”
• 4. “One Drop of Black Blood”
• 5. The Fourth R
• 6. Mothers, Daughters, Sisters, Comrades
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

A Feather on the Breath of God: A Novel

Picador
2005 (Originally published in 1995)
192 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
Paperback ISBN: 9780312422738; ISBN10: 0312422733

Sigrid Nunez

A young woman looks back to the world of her immigrant parents: a Chinese-Panamanian father and a German mother. Growing up in a housing project in the 1950s and 1960s, she escapes into dreams inspired both by her parents’ stories and by her own reading and, for a time, into the otherworldly life of ballet. A yearning, homesick mother, a silent and withdrawn father, the ballet—these are the elements that shape the young woman’s imagination and her sexuality. It is a story about displacement and loss, and about the tangled nature of relationships between parents and children, between language and love.

Divided To The Vein: A Journey into Race and Family

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
1996
320 pages
Hardcover ISBN-10: 0151931070; ISBN-13: 978-0151931071

Scott Minerbrook

Scott Minerbrook’s parents hail from opposite ends of the cultural spectrum. His father was a pampered only child born into Chicago’s aspiring black bourgeoisie, while his mother was an idealistic girl from a large family of poor white Missouri farmers. Minerbrook grew up in the 1950s and ’60s, in a world that was fighting the grim realities of racial separatism and willful ignorance with the ideals of equality and integration. At home, his parents fought each other and a host of personal demons, even as they raised four boys, excelled in their careers, and moved from Chicago, to Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and finally to the leafy suburbs of Connecticut. Minerbrook completed his schooling at Harvard’s burgeoning African-American studies department and went on to raise a family of his own. But by the time he reached his late thirties, he was no longer satisfied with living an emotional half-life, rejecting and rejected by so much of his flesh and blood. He set out for his mother’s hometown in the Botheel of Missouri, determined to claim the white relatives who had refused to recognize his existence. Despite their desire to “keep things just as they are”, he knew that bringing down the daunting barrier called race was essential to his humanity and to theirs. In the course of his journey, Minerbrook takes a hard look at his upbringing and the lives of his parents. He digs deep to explore the meaning of family, the roots of identity, and the reasons why we lay so many basic human problems at the door of race. Lyrically written, painfully honest, psychologically and socially astute, this powerful memoir challenges us all to confront the divisive cult of race and to move beyond it.

The Dust of Life: America’s Children Abandoned in Vietnam

University of Washington Press
1999
160 pages
notes, glossary, bibliog., index
Paperback ISBN: 9780295978369

Robert S. McKelvey, M.D., Professor
Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
Oregon Health & Science University

The Dust of Life is a collection of vivid and devastating oral histories of Vietnamese Amerasians. Abandoned during the war by their American fathers, discriminated against by the victorious Communists, and ignored for many years by the American government, they endured life in impoverished Vietnam. Their stories are sad, sometimes tragic, but they are also testimonials to the strength of human resiliency.

Robert S. McKelvey is a former marine who served in Vietnam in the late 1960s. Now a child psychiatrist, he returned to Vietnam in 1990 to begin the long series of interviews that resulted in this book. While allowing his subjects to speak for themselves, McKelvey has organized their narratives around themes common to their lives: early maternal loss, the experience of prejudice and discrimination, coping with adversity, dealing with shattered hopes for the future, and, for some, adapting to the alien environment of the United States.

While unique in many respects, the Vietnamese Amerasian story also illustrates themes that are tragically universal: neglect of the human by-products of war, the destructiveness of prejudice and racism, the pain of abandonment, and the horrors of life amidst extreme poverty, hostility, and neglect.

Ten Thousand Sorrows

Bantam Books
2000
240 pages
Paperback ISBN-10: 0553812645; ISBN-13: 978-0553812640

Elizabeth Kim

‘I don’t know how old I was when I watched my mother’s murder, nor do I know how old I am today.’

The illegitimate daughter of a peasant and an American GI, Elizabeth Kim spent her early years as a social outcast in her village in the Korean countryside. Ostracized by their family and neighbours, she and her mother were regularly pelted with stones on their way home from the rice fields. Yet there was a tranquil happiness in the intense bond between mother and daughter. Until the day that Elizabeth’s grandfather and uncle came to punish her mother from the dishonour she had brought on the family, and executed her in front of her daughter.

Elizabeth was dumped in an orphanage in Seoul. After some time, she was lucky enough to be adopted by an American couple. But when she arrived in America she found herself once again surrounded by fanaticism and prejudice.

Elizabeth’s mother had always told her that life was made up of ten thousand joys as well as ten thousand sorrows, and, supported by her loving daughter, and by a return to her Buddhist faith, she finally found a way to savour those joys, as well as the courage to exorcise the demons of her past.