Mixed Race Studies

Multiracial People are Multiplying

brianbantum: theology, culture, teaching and life in-between
2011-03-31

Brian Bantum, Assistant Professor of Theology
Seattle Pacific University

The New York Times recently published a story highlighting the increase in numbers of multiracial children in the United States. The numbers of self identifying multiracial children has doubled in the United States to 2.9% of the entire population. With this data, coupled with a 2007 Pew Research Center report that interracial marriages represented 14% of all new marriages (up from 7% in 2000), we could begin to surmise an end to problematic racial distinctions and a truly new America, right?

Taken together these numbers indicate a movement towards greater acceptance of interracial/interethnic relationships as well as a greater freedom for multiracial children to claim this mixture as part of their identity. And perhaps this is the most significant aspect of these figures. While the idea of numbers doubling seems extraordinary, multiracial children still constitute only 2.9% of all children which means more often than not sexual desire and marriage is oriented towards similarity and homogeneity (it is also important to note how even mixed marriages follow patterns of desire away from African American women who marry outside of their race in the smallest numbers.)

In the midst of these numbers we must remember that multiracial identity is not confined to checking boxes. Interactions with friends, dating, interactions with co-workers do not begin with our self-assertions, but with a complicated set of markers and interpretations that the multiracial person is not entirely in control of.

The space to claim one’s “multi”ness is important, it is certainly important for myself and my children. At the same time, the existence of multiracial children does not diminish the realities of racial exclusion and economic oppression that are not only present, but becoming more vehement and stark in the wake of our first African American president. To put it a different way, we are not the future of America. Like all other people who are raised in a deeply racialized world, we are formed to resist certain notions of beauty, embrace or recoil from certain people…

…If we wish to celebrate the growth of multiracial children let us not pat ourselves on the back for a job well done, but begin to rage against the systemic realities that prevent these numbers from growing: mass incarceration of African American men, tragic inequities between white and black in access to education, anti-immigration legislation, perpetual wars that limit our economic options, images of beauty and health that implicitly deride dark bodies and work against white bodies, the perpetual differentiation, bullying and teasing that plants these seeds of difference in elementary age children…

Read the entire article here.

The Invisibility of Multiracial Students: An Emerging Majority by 2050

University of California, San Diego
January 2009
252 pages

Gina Acosta Potter

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Education in Educational Leadership

By the nature of their existence, multiracial people call to question deeply held notions of race and racial classification held tightly by Americans. To acknowledge a person as multiracial, or a blending of more than one race, defies the conventional social construct that delineates clear, discernible, and discrete races. Even as multiracial students become increasingly visible in our nation’s schools, multiracial identity is seldom recognized as a critical topic of diversity within the educational arena. By 2050, the multiracial population will surface as a majority group of people whose presence will require our nation to redefine our current constructs of race, racial identification, and racial classification (Anderson, 2002; Winters & DeBose, 2003). This qualitative research study seeks to address the primary research question: How and to what extent do public policy decisions regarding academic accountability affect educational outcomes for multiracial students in two states that differ in their multiracial categorization policies?

The purpose of this study is to illuminate racial subgroups identified within accountability systems, determine the degree to which multiracial students are rendered visible in the academic accountability movement, and examine the needs of multiracial students. The research design is a comparative case study of two state education agencies and the public policies they employ when monitoring the academic achievement of multiracial students.

The major findings of this study reveal: 1) a misalignment between federal and state accountability systems for racial classification; 2) a variance in how two state education agencies racially classify mixed race students; 3) a nonstandardized approach to school enrollment categorization of multiracial students; 4) controversy regarding the meaning of race and ethnicity; 5) various approaches taken by multiracial students when self-identifying 6) data methodology challenges; and 7) a more than ten year lapse in time before the federal Department of Education moved towards complying with the White House Office of Management and Budget regulations allowing multiracial individuals to identify as more than one race.

The implications of this research indicate a significant need for the United States’ educational system to face the challenge of recognizing and responding to the histories, experiences, and identities of multiracial students within our schools.

Read the entire dissertation here.

Ambiguity in Jean Toomer’s Cane

Berkely Undergraduate Journal
Volume 24, Issue 3 (2011)
pages 79-92

Amanda Licato
Department of English ’13
University of California, Berekely

When Jean Toomer’s modernist experimental novel Cane was published in 1923, both he and the text were taken to be representative voices of African American life, even though Toomer explicitly renounced these labels during Cane’s pre-publication promotion. The larger project of the Harlem Renaissance, during which Toomer lived and wrote Cane, was to validate and celebrate African American artists and their work. As a result, the author’s claims of racial ambiguity and multiracial identication, and their expression in his work, were poorly received. This paper looks at the tension between the aesthetically ambiguous qualities of the text as well as its role as a cultural artifact that can be explored and interpreted against different backdrops. Cane’s aesthetic elements work primarily through the text’s structural and linguistic ambiguity, a blurring of various themes that allow for readers to search for and conceive of their own meanings and experiences. To that end, I examine interpretations of racial identity in Cane during three signicant cultural periods: Cane’s initial publication in 1923 during the Harlem Renaissance, its re-publication at the cusp of the modern Civil Rights movement in 1951, and our current age of supposed “post-raciality” in which the modern reader first discovers the text.

Read the entire article here.

Spring 2008 Feature: Acting on a Dream

Farmington First: Alumni Magazine
University of Maine, Farmington
Spring 2008

Marc Glass

The stages of H’Nette DeTroy’s dramatic life include theater, dance and even commercial casting

Looking at H’Nette DeTroy’s resume, you might think she suffers from career wanderlust. Since graduating from UMF in 2006, she’s been a nurse, a cheerleader and a bus-commuting business executive—not to mention a disgruntled gas-station patron, a terminally ill hospital patient and a drunk-driving fatality. A southern Maine-based actor, DeTroy takes pride in her many professional personas—whether that means extolling the virtues of an alternative-fuel Mercedes Benz in a television commercial, playing a nurse in a hospital training video, dramatizing the perils of operating under the influence in an MTV-aired public service announcement or taking to the stage in a community theater production of Disney’s High School Musical.

“It’s a lot of fun to lose yourself in a role, creatively making it whatever you want it to be,” said DeTroy on a rare day of downtime away from auditions, teaching children’s dance lessons and rehearsing with the Portland-based hip-hop dance company Rhythm Factor. “When I’m acting, dancing or singing, I lose all concept of time and the trivial stuff in life. This is something I love. It’s what life is about for me.”…

…With what she calls her “multiracial” background (courtesy of a German father and Vietnamese mother), DeTroy has been slating of sorts for most of her life.

“People have always asked me ‘What are you?’ or ‘Are you Latina?’ My mom is as third-world as you can get. Growing up in as unforgiving and wealthy a place as Fairfield County makes you aware of your identity. I’m used to defining myself in the first three seconds,” she said. “I remember growing up and thinking ‘there’s no one on TV who looks like me.’ Seeing Jennifer Lopez in the film Selena, a minority actress actually making it, was very motivational.”…

Read the entire article here.

Louis Riel and the Creation of Modern Canada: Mythic Discourse and the Postcolonial State

University of Manitoba Press
November 2008
314 pages
6 × 9
Paper, ISBN: 978-0-88755-734-7

Jennifer Reid, Professor of Religion
University of Maine, Farmington

Politician, founder of Manitoba, and leader of the Métis, Louis Riel led two resistance movements against the Canadian government: the Red River Uprising of 1869–70, and the North-West Rebellion of 1885, in defense of Métis and other minority rights.

Against the backdrop of these legendary uprisings, Jennifer Reid examines Riel’s religious background, the mythic significance that has consciously been ascribed to him, and how these elements combined to influence Canada’s search for a national identity. Reid’s study provides a framework for rethinking the geopolitical significance of the modern Canadian state, the historic role of Confederation in establishing the country’s collective self-image, and the narrative space through which Riel’s voice speaks to these issues.

Table of Contents

• Foreword
• Chapter 1: Setting the Stage: The North-West to 1885
• Chapter 2: Canadian Myths and Canadian Identity
• Chapter 3: Nation-states and National Discourses
• Chapter 4: Violence and State Creation
• Chapter 5: Revolution, Identity, and Canada
• Chapter 6: Riel and the Canadian State
• Chapter 7: Heterogeneity and the Postcolonial State
• Conclusion
• Notes

Books: Black and white thinking

The Christian Century
2012-01-26

Edward P. Antonio, Associate Professor of Theology and Social Theory
Iliff School of Theology, Denver, Colorado

Brian Bantum. Redeeming Mulatto: A Theology of Race and Christian Hybridity. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2010. 260 pp. Hardcover ISBN: 9781602582934.

Redeeming Mulatto presents a complex argument about theology and race. It is impossible to do it justice in a short review. Brian Bantum persuasively challenges traditional ways of thinking about race in the United States by theologically retrieving interracial identity as an important category that has been unduly neglected. In this way he addresses the American tendency to understand race relations in terms of the binary opposition between black and white.

Bantum describes the historical experience of being mulatto/a by suggesting that race in the U.S. functions like religion or as a form of discipleship into which we are all recruited…

Read or purchase the article here.

The new black theology: Retrieving ancient sources to challenge racism

The Christian Century
2012-01-26

Jonathan Tran, Assistant Professor of Religion
Baylor University, Waco, Texas

Read Edward Antonio’s review of Brian Bantum’s Redeeming Mulatto (subscription required)

A couple years ago, when the Century asked some leading theologians to name five “essential theology books of the past 25 years,” J. Kameron Carter’s Race: A Theological Account (Oxford University Press, 2008) was one of the few books mentioned more than once and the only one that was published in the past five years. Last year, the Ameri­can Academy of Religion gave its Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion to Willie J. Jennings’s The Christian Imagi­nation: Theology and the Origins of Race (Yale University Press, 2010). These two influential works, together with Re­deeming Mulatto: A Theology of Race and Christian Hybridity (Baylor University Press, 2010), by Brian Bantum (who studied at Duke with both Carter and Jennings), represent a major theological shift that will—if  taken as seriously as it deserves—change the face not only of black theology but theology as a whole….

…In Redeeming Mulatto, Bantum makes his own use of patristic formulations about Christ in order to address the promises and challenges of interracial existence. He views mixed-race persons through the lens of “the hypostatic union,” the early church’s term for the union of divine and human in Christ. Amid the pains and confusions of what was once branded “mongrelization” stands the fullness of Christ’s joining of humanity and divinity. For Bantum, the mulatto “participates in” Christ’s fullness; biracial individuals “perform” the drama of redemption as scripted in the life, death and resurrection of Christ. In Christ’s person, one confronts not only the mystery of divinity but the “impossible possibility” of humanity joined to divinity. Jesus “was mulatto not solely because he was a ‘mixture,’ but because his very body confounds the boundaries of purity/impurity and humanity/divinity that seemed necessary for us to imagine who we thought we should be.”

Baptized into this body, the church in all of its differences offers the world a genuinely reconciled body of diverse persons, in contrast to political orders that exclude (the opposite of baptism) in the name of race, gender, nation, class, ethnicity and so on. According to Bantum, the church speaks the language attuned to this politics of difference: prayer. This is good news for each one of us who is “passing” through America’s complex racial heritage, and it is an indictment of those seeking racial purity and the banishment of racial difference.

When Bantum uses creedal affirmations of Christ’s humanity and divinity to uplift historically shamed biracial persons, he, like Carter and Jennings, speaks in terms that cannot be easily dismissed by white theologians. If Bantum is right about Christology, any Christian (white or otherwise) who affirms the Chalcedonian formula about Christ’s two natures must rethink mulatto life. And if he refuses such rethinking, he cannot blame Bantum’s alleged lack of orthodoxy…

Read the entire article here.

Episode 13: An ‘All-American’ Student Leader’s Search for Identity

Say Something: College Life. One Student at a Time.
The Chronicle of Higher Education
2011-03-25

Robin Wilson

“One assumes it’s very hard to be religious and still be gay.”
 
Ari Shroyer
Roosevelt University, Chicago, Illinois

In this episode, we hear from Ari Shroyer, a sophomore at Roosevelt University, who tells us what it’s like to be a gay, conservative, biracial student-body president—and explains how the university’s openly gay president has served as an inspiration.

Listen to the interview here.

Mulatto Machiavelli, Jean Pierre Boyer, and The Haiti of His Day

John Edward Baur

The Journal of Negro History
Volume 32, Number 3 (July, 1947)
pages 307-353

Toussaint Louverture opened the gate of Haitian liberty, but Jean Pierre Boyer kept it open. Toussaint, ” First of the Blacks,” may be called the Washington of Haiti, but Boyer was neither ”First of the Mulattoes” nor a Haitian Lincoln. He was a colored Machiavelli. Only a Machiavelli would have been ready, willing, and able to lead his country against the greatest obstacles any new nation hadfaced in modern times.

Hated by the Great Powers because she had been born of a slave revolt against France, Haiti was an outcast, almost an outlaw state. The new nation had been the battlefield of French Revolutionary commissioners, sent to stir up the slaves and the mulattoes against their royalist dominators. Santo Domingo had been devastated by a British invasion in the 1790’s and, later, by the brother-in-law of Napoleon, General Leclerc, who attempted to restore French control in the island in 1802. Added to these troubles was the racial war of mulattoes and Negroes for supremacy and, finally, a division of the new nation itself into two hostile states. The land was ruined agriculturally, commercially, politically, and spiritually. So it was from 1804 to 1818 when Boyer gained power. Even a Machiavelli, endowed with the best of human learning and wisdom, would have been befuddled on facing the bitter harvest of this, the New World’s bloodiest and most nearly complete revolution…

Purchase the article here. Read pages 307-349 article here.

Census releases data on American Indian population

Miami Herald
2012-01-25

Felicia Fonseca
Associated Press

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. — Almost half of American Indians and Alaska Natives identify with multiple races, representing a group that grew by 39 percent over a decade, according to U.S. Census data released Wednesday.

Of the 5.2 million people counted as Natives in 2010, nearly 2.3 million reported being Native in combination with one or more of six other race categories, showcasing a growing diversity among Natives. Those who added black, white or both as a personal identifier made up 84 percent of the multi-racial group.

Tribal officials and organizations look to Census data for funding, to plan communities, to foster solidarity among tribes and for accountability from federal agencies that have a trust responsibility with tribal members.

The bump in the multi-racial group from 1.6 million in 2000 to nearly 2.3 million in 2010 was higher than that of those who reported being solely of Native descent…

…The Blackfeet Nation in Montana had the highest proportion of people who reported being part of more than one racial group or tribe at 74 percent. Among Alaska Native groups, the Tlingit-Haida had the highest proportion of mixed-race Natives at 42 percent.

The number of Natives identifying with at least one other race increased in all but three states from 2000 to 2010, according to the Census…

Read the entire article here.