Mixed Race Studies

Black, Red and Proud: An Interview with Radmilla Cody

The Root
2011-02-22

Cynthia Gordy

Radmilla Cody’s crowning as Miss Navajo Nation in 1997 triggered an outcry and a conversation about what it means to be Native American. Now she’s featured in a museum exhibit showing the rarely told history of African-Native Americans.

In a 1920 edition of the Journal of Negro History, Carter G. Woodson observed, “One of the longest unwritten chapters in the history of the United States is that treating of the relations of the Negroes and the Indians.” [See: C. G. Woodson, “Negroes and Indians in Massachusetts,” Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, Number 1 (January 1920).]

“Red/Black: Related Through History,” a new exhibit at Indianapolis’ Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, illuminates this rarely told story. Since the first arrival of enslaved Africans in North America, the relationships between African Americans and Native Americans have encompassed alliances and adversaries, as well as the indivisible blending of customs and culture.

“It’s not received a lot of attention because it’s not the dominant culture’s story, although it’s very important to the dominant culture’s bigger view of the past,” says James Nottage, curator of the exhibit, which includes narratives of enslaved blacks who traveled the Trail of Tears with their Native owners; slaves who intermarried into Native tribes as an escape from bondage; and the largely African-featured members of the Shinnecock tribe of New York, as well as shared traditions in food, dress and music…

…Cody, also the subject of a 2010 documentary, Hearing Radmilla, talked to The Root about growing up both black and Navajo, and how she handles frequent “Wow, you don’t look Indian” comments.

The Root: The experience of having your Miss Navajo Nation reign challenged calls to mind the debate over the Cherokee Freedmen. Is this a common issue across the Native community, of African-Native Americans having trouble finding acceptance?

Radmilla Cody: I grew up having to deal with racism and prejudices on both the Navajo and the black sides, and when I ran for Miss Navajo Nation, that especially brought out a lot of curiosity in people. It’s something that we’re still having to address as black Natives, still having to prove ourselves in some way or another, because at the end of the day, it all falls back to what people think a Native American should look like.

But there’s been many times when people have said to me, “Oh, my great-great-grandmother was an Indian.” I’ll ask them if they know what tribe, and they don’t. It’s very important because in order to be acknowledged as a tribal member, you have to be enrolled. So I can see where Native people are protective about defining who’s a tribal member, and are questioning of people claiming Native ancestry…

…TR: What does that preparation entail, exactly? I understand it’s not a typical pageant.

RC: Basically you’re tested on your knowledge of the Navajo government, the culture, the stories, the songs and the Navajo philosophy of life. You’re tested on butchering a sheep and making fry bread and other traditional foods of the Navajo people. It usually lasts about a week. What separates our pageant from the Miss USA pageant is the bikini—we don’t have a swimsuit category!…

Read the entire article here.

Seven Hours To Burn

Women Make Movies
USA/Canada, 1999
9 minutes
Color/BW, VHS/16mm
Order No. W01699

Shanti Thakur

“A visually expressive personal documentary that explores a family’s history. Filmmaker Thakur mixes richly abstract filmmaking with disturbing archival war footage to narrate the story of her Danish mother’s and Indian father’s experiences. Her mother survives Nazi-occupied Denmark while her father experiences the devastating civil war in India between Hindus and Muslims. Both émigrés to Canada, they meet and marry, linking two parallel wars. Their daughter lyrically turns these two separate histories into a visually rich poem linking past and present in a new singular identity.” Doubletake Documentary Film Festival Catalogue

View the trailer here.

Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America [Review: Daniel]

Contemporary Sociology
Volume 22, Number 3 (May 1993)
pages 381-382

Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America, by Paul R. Spickard. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. 532 pp. cloth ISBN: 0-299-12110-0. paper ISBN: 0-299-12114-3.

G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California at Santa Barbara

As an ethnohistory conversant with sociological discourse, Paul Spickard’s Mixed Blood is not only a valuable resource for both historians and sociologists specializing in race and ethnic relations but also a welcome change from traditional social science litera- ture on this topic. These previous studies, by seeking to construct generalizable models from quantitative data, unfortunately have not taken into account the nuances of personal experience and subtleties of space and time. In Spickard’s study, however, intermarriage emerges as a multivariate historical process of attitudes and behavior which are derivative of not only intergroup, but also interpersonal, dynamics, as illustrated by the author’s rich anecdotal sources.

The main portion of Mixed Blood is devoted to a comparative study of the intermarriage patterns of Jewish, Japanese, and African Americans. This choice allows Spickard to highlight important contemporary variations in the strength of pluralism and integration, that is, the persistence and permeability of boundaries of gender, race, culture, ethnicity, and class as they relate to the pretwentieth century history of each of the three groups. Spickard’s analysis of the intergenerational increase in out-marriage by Jewish Americans, for example, clearly indicates that the boundary which formerly might have marked an intermarriage is less distinct than it had been among European- Americans from different ethnocultural backgrounds…

Read or purchase the review here.

Race after Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America

Princeton University Press
2005
288 pages
6 x 9, 17 halftones, 1 line illustration, 2 maps
ISBN13: 978-0-691-13379-9

Heide Fehrenbach, Presidential Research Professor of History
Northern Illinois University

When American victors entered Germany in the spring of 1945, they came armed not only with a commitment to democracy but also to Jim Crow practices. Race after Hitler tells the story of how troubled race relations among American occupation soldiers, and black-white mixing within Germany, unexpectedly shaped German notions of race after 1945. Biracial occupation children became objects of intense scrutiny and politicking by postwar Germans into the 1960s, resulting in a shift away from official antisemitism to a focus on color and blackness.

Beginning with black GIs’ unexpected feelings of liberation in postfascist Germany, Fehrenbach investigates reactions to their relations with white German women and to the few thousand babies born of these unions. Drawing on social welfare and other official reports, scientific studies, and media portrayals from both sides of the Atlantic, Fehrenbach reconstructs social policy debates regarding black occupation children, such as whether they should be integrated into German society or adopted to African American or other families abroad. Ultimately, a consciously liberal discourse of race emerged in response to the children among Germans who prided themselves on—and were lauded by the black American press for—rejecting the hateful practices of National Socialism and the segregationist United States.

Fehrenbach charts her story against a longer history of German racism extending from nineteenth-century colonialism through National Socialism to contemporary debates about multiculturalism. An important and provocative work, Race after Hitler explores how racial ideologies are altered through transnational contact accompanying war and regime change, even and especially in the most intimate areas of sex and reproduction.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Democratizing the Racial State: Toward a Transnational History
• Chapter One: Contact Zones: American Military Occupation and the Politics of Race
• Chapter Two: Flaccid Fatherland: Rape, Sex, and the Reproductive Consequences of Defeat
• Chapter Three: “Mischlingskinder” and the Postwar Taxonomy of Race
• Chapter Four: Reconstruction in Black and White: The Toxi Films
• Chapter Five: Whose Children, Theirs or Ours? Intercountry Adoptions and Debates about Belonging
• Chapter Six: Legacies: Race and the Postwar Nation
• Abbreviations of Archives Consulted
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index

THE MILITARY occupation of Germany by American troops elicited two striking responses that were organized around irony and issues of race. One came from Germans, who noted with incredulity and derision that they were being democratized by a nation with a Jim Crow army and a host of anti-miscegenation laws at home. The second came from African American GIs who, in their interactions with Germans, were stunned by the apparent absence of racism in the formerly fascist land and, comparing their reception with treatment by white Americans, experienced their stay there as unexpectedly liberatory. Both responses criticized the glaring gap between democratic American principles and practices; both exposed as false the universalist language employed by the United States government to celebrate and propagate its political system and social values at home and abroad. Yet both also suggested the centrality of intercultural observation and exchange for contemporaries’ experience and understanding of postwar processes of democratization…

Read Chapter One in HTML or PDF.

Multiracial: Border Crosser: Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu navigates nations, cultures and academia

Nichi Bei: A mixed plate of Japanses American News & Culture
2010-05-20

Akemi Johnson

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu is looking again toward Japan.

A psychotherapist, writer and academic, Murphy-Shigematsu has lived in Palo Alto, Calif. the past eight years, teaching at Stanford University and running an independent multicultural consulting practice. Life in the Bay Area, he says, is easy for someone like him, the son of an Irish American man and Japanese woman. Conflict—tensions associated with being mixed race—is rare.

This wasn’t always the case. Early in his career, Murphy-Shigematsu, who was born in Tokyo in 1952 and raised in Massachusetts, faced questions about his legitimacy working in Asian American studies. In 1984 he began an internship at the National Asian American Psychology Training Center. One of the first people who welcomed him there said, “So, you’re interested in working with Asian Americans?”

“That really threw me,” Murphy-Shigematsu said. The other man saw him as an outsider to the workshop, whereas Murphy-Shigematsu viewed himself as an insider, a fellow Asian American.

Or there was the time in the late ’80s when Murphy-Shigematsu spoke to an Asian American studies class at San Francisco State University.

“Are you Asian?” the students asked.

“Why do you ask?” Murphy-Shigematsu replied.

“Because you don’t look Asian,” they said.

At academic conferences, Murphy-Shigematsu would stand out physically, and some people would regard him with an attitude of “Why are you here?”

An influential figure for Murphy-Shigematsu during that time was Lane Hirabayashi. Hirabayashi, a noted mixed-race Japanese American scholar, had advocated using the word “hapa,” and claiming the right to self-define, instead of being labeled by well-intentioned others. Impressed with this, Murphy-Shigematsu sought out Hirabayashi…

Read the entire article here.

Between Black and Brown: Blaxican (Black-Mexican) Multiracial Identity in California

Journal of Black Studies
Published online before print on: 2011-02-22
DOI: 10.1177/0021934710376172

Rebecca Romo
University of California, Santa Barbara

This article explores the racial/ethnic identities of multiracial Black-Mexicans or “Blaxicans.” In-depth interviews with 12 Blaxican individuals in California reveal how they negotiate distinct cultural systems to accomplish multiracial identities. I argue that choosing, accomplishing, and asserting a Blaxican identity challenges the dominant monoracial discourse in the United States,in particular among African American and Chicana/o communities. That is, Blaxican respondents are held accountable by African Americans and Chicanas/os/Mexicans to monoracial notions of “authenticity.” The process whereby Blaxicans move between these monoracial spaces to create multiracial identities illustrates crucial aspects of the social construction of race/ethnicity in the United States and the influence of social interactions in shaping how Blaxicans develop their multiracial identities.

Read or purchase the article here.

Civil War Fires Up Literary Shootout

The New York Times
2009-07-29

Michael Cieply

LOS ANGELES — History repeats itself. But sometimes it needs a little polishing up from Hollywood.

Over the last few weeks, the writers of a pair of Civil War-era histories about the anti-Confederate inhabitants of Jones County, Miss., have been trading barbs in an unusual public spat. It began when the author of one book, rights to which had been sold to Universal Pictures and the filmmaker Gary Ross, discovered that Mr. Ross had spurred the publication of a new and somewhat sexier work on the same subject.

The encounter has created unexpected bad blood over incidents that occurred—or not—more than 100 years ago. And it offers a glimpse of the way that show business and its values have become entwined with the academic book world and its decision-making process.

On June 23 Doubleday published “The State of Jones: The Small Southern County That Seceded From the Confederacy,” a narrative history by the Harvard scholar John Stauffer and the Washington Post writer Sally Jenkins. The book, which on Monday was ranked No. 83 on Amazon’s best-seller list, presented Newton Knight, the leader of the renegade county, as a morally driven hero in the mold of John Brown—but whose appeal was enhanced by his romance with an ex-slave who, in the book’s account, became the love of his life as relations with his white wife cooled.

In the book’s acknowledgments, the authors thanked Mr. Ross, who they said had brought the idea to their editor, Phyllis Grann at Doubleday, and whose screenplay had served as “our impetus and our inspiration.”

This all came as a surprise to Victoria Bynum, a history professor at Texas State University, San Marcos. Her own book on the subject—“The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War”—had been published eight years earlier by the University of North Carolina Press, which sold the film rights to Universal as material for Mr. Ross’s project in 2007…

Read the entire article here.

Blurring the color line: the new America

The Tufts Daily
Medford, Massachusetts
2011-02-22

Sylvia Avila

Students identify as multiracial more than ever before

Once considered a black and white issue, racial identity is hazier than ever.

According to findings released in June 2010 by the Pew Research Center, the current generation of American college students is the most multi−racial in history. One out of every 19 children born in the United States is the product of parents of different races or ethnicities and one out of every seven marriages today is between people of different races or ethnicities—a particularly noteworthy statistic considering interracial unions were illegal in some states as recently as 1967.

But the marked expansion in numbers brings unique complexities to the lives of mixed−race Americans. Issues can range from the trivial—indicating racial background on documents—to the critical, such as why and how to self−classify one’s race. President Barack Obama, perhaps the most prominent individual of mixed descent in the world, considers himself African−American rather than biracial.

Senior Jeewon Kim said that he doesn’t face a dilemma when asked about his race on paperwork.

“Nowadays you can always do multiple ones, so I always put ‘Caucasian/White’ and ‘Asian−American,’ and specifically ‘Korean’ if it lets me,” he said.

Kim explained that he has been at peace with his dual identity since high school…

…According to Lecturer in Anthropology Cathy Stanton, the reversal of the stigmatization of multiracial identity has been a long time coming.

“It seems like social thinking about this has finally come around to reflecting that fact and a lot of people are just saying, race doesn’t work for me as a category to capture who I am,” Stanton said.

Kim sees the potential for greater awareness of the distinctions and similarities both within and between racial groups.

“I hope that it means that there will be less ignorance… The question of ‘who are you?’ is more complicated than guessing it by sight and you would actually have to stop and learn something about that person,” he said.

Stanton, however, is less optimistic.

“If we’re in a moment where socially people are saying, ‘I don’t need the construct of race anymore to describe who I am politically and in a broader social context,’ are we at a point where we can stop talking about it?” she said. “Probably not, because of the historical injustices and divisions and hierarchies are still in place and their effects are still in place.”

Professor of Sociology Susan Ostrander expanded upon these inequalities.

“Research shows that individuals who are perceived to be black or Latino (whether they actually are or not) get fewer call−backs on job interviews, are arrested more often, have shorter life expectancies, are less likely to go to college,” Ostrander said in an e−mail to the Daily. “You can’t stop any of those events by shouting, ‘But I’m not really black. I’m half−white!'”…

Read the entire article here.

Containing Multitudes

Mixed Dreams: towards a radical multiracial/ethnic movement
2011-02-21

Nicole Asong Nfonoyim

“Communities had to be created, fought for, tended like gardens. They expanded or contracted with the dreams of men– and in the civil rights movement those dreams had seemed large. In the sit-ins, the marches, the jailhouse songs, I saw the African-American community becoming more than just the place where you’d been born or the house where you’d been raised. Through organizing, through shared sacrifice, membership had been earned. And because membership was earned–because this community I imagined was still in the making, built on the promise that the larger American community, black, white, and brown, could somehow redefine itself—I believed that it might over time, admit the uniqueness of my own life.”

Barack Obama from Dreams From My Father

Alright, I know, I know, talking about Obama and multiraciality is like beating a dead horse. But, I swear, I have a really good point (or two) to make!

Point 1: NO IDENTITY IS MONOLITHIC

It sounds simple enough: Race is not biological, it’s a social construct. Identities are fluid, they change and even expand over time. But most of U.S. society hasn’t caught on yet. And ultimately we need to ask, who gains from keeping these strict boundaries around identities?

In the U.S. we’ve gotten pretty good at essentializing identities into strictly defined, carefully bound, digestible boxes. The black American community, in particular, has long been seen as a monolith—a static and unassimilable one at that—and yet nothing could be further from the truth. I recently watched the Kobina Aidoo documentary film The Neo African-Americans.  The film aims to explore issues facing Caribbean and continental African immigrant communities and their descendants in the U.S. Though, it was at best an introduction to some very deeply rooted issues concerning black people in the Diaspora, the film definitely brings up some provocative points around identity, authenticity and community. The film got me thinking about the (often invisible) multitudes racial and ethnic identities contain and how crucial and yet limiting the process of “self-naming” can be for historically marginalized groups. As people of color, many of us live on the “hyphen”—as hyphen “Americans” in a way that members of white ethnic groups do not.

Indeed, many of the issues faced by mixed people, mirror those faced by many “monoracial” people of color, especially as our society becomes increasingly defined by it’s heterogeneity while migration, gender, socioeconomic class and sexuality further shape and shift our identities over time. We’re all struggling to define and (re)define who we are as individuals and as collectives. Thus, crises of authenticity, legitimacy, community, progress and belonging are not the sole domain of one particular ethnic or racial group. In significant ways, we can say that they have become woven into the very fabric of our racial inheritance in this country and as such we are all implicated:  black, brown and (perhaps especially) white in tackling these issues head on…

Read the entire essay here.

The Racial Identification of Biracial Children with One Asian Parent: Evidence from the 1990 Census

No. 96-370
Population Studies Center Research Report Series
Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan
August 1996

Yu Xie, Otis Dudley Duncan Distinguished University Professor of Sociology
University of Michigan

Kimberly A. Goyette, Associate Professor of Sociology
Temple University

This paper examines the socioeconomic and demographic correlates that are associated with whether biracial children with an Asian parent are racially identified with their Asian parent or with their non-Asian parent. With data extracted from the 5 percent Public Use Microdata Sample of the 1990 Census, we take into account explanatory variables at three levels: child’s characteristics, parents’ characteristics, and locale’s racial composition. Our results indicate that the racial identification of biracial children with an Asian parent is to a large extent an arbitrary option within today’s prevailing racial classification scheme. We find empirical evidence in support of the theoretical proposition that both assimilation and awareness of Asian heritage affect the racial identification of biracial children with an Asian parent. Of particular interest is our new finding that the Asian parent’s education increases the likelihood of Asian identification only for third-generation children. In general, we find demographic factors, such as the Asian parent’s ethnicity, to play a far more important role than socioeconomic factors approximating assimilation and awareness processes. In light of these results, we advance the thesis that, like ethnic options among whites, racial options are available for the racial identification of biracial children with an Asian parent.

Read the entire report here.