Mixed Race Studies

Adults’ Attitudes Toward Multiracial Children

Journal of Black Psychology
Volume 29, Number 4 (November 2003)
pages 463-480
DOI: 10.1177/0095798403256888

Gayle L. Chesley
Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

William G. Wagner

A between-groups experimental design was used to examine adults’ attitudes toward multiracial children of African descent. The purpose was to determine if the races of the respondent,the child, and the child’ s friends are related to adults’ ratings of children’s self-perception and depressive symptoms. A total of 156 undergraduate students (African American = 78, European American = 78) read a vignette in which the race of the target child (European American, African American, or multiracial) and the child’s friends (European American or African American) were experimentally controlled. Participants assessed the child using a revision of Harter’s Self-Perception Profile for Children and a revised version of Kovacs’s Children’s Depression Inventory—Short Form. Ratings of the child’s global self-worth and depressive symptoms were negatively correlated. The results of a 2 × 2 × 3 MANOVA revealed a significant three-way interaction for the races of the child,the respondent, and the child’s friends on adults’ ratings of the child’s peer acceptance. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Read the entire article here.

Communicating With Children of Interracial/Interethnic Parentage

IUC Journal of Social Work Theory & Practice
Issue 4 (2001/2002)

Toyin Okitikpi

Children of interracial/interethnic parentage are increasing in number throughout Europe yet there has been a wall of silence about how to work with such children. In this discussion the aim is not only to encourage a dialogue about children of interracial/interethnic relationships but also to urge a development of a better understanding of the inner and outer world of such children. The aim is also to highlight and analyse the different issues that welfare professionals need to take into consideration when working with the children. I shall suggest that there is a need to give greater credence to the way people communicate with the children because what is communicated and how it is communicated could affect how the children relate to others, how they develop intellectually, emotionally and psychologically and how they develop their sense of identity. Children of interracial/interethnic parentage are increasing in number throughout Europe yet there has been a wall of silence about how to work with such children. In this discussion the aim is not only to encourage a dialogue about children of interracial/interethnic relationships but also to urge a development of a better understanding of the inner and outer world of such children. The aim is also to highlight and analyse the different issues that welfare professionals need to take into consideration when working with the children. I shall suggest that there is a need to give greater credence to the way people communicate with the children because what is communicated and how it is communicated could affect how the children relate to others, how they develop intellectually, emotionally and psychologically and how they develop their sense of identity.

Read the entire article here.

The House Behind the Cedars

Houghton, Mifflin and Company
1900
294 pages

Electronic Edition
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
1997
Text scanned (OCR) by Jamie Vacca
Text encoded by Natalia Smith and Don Sechler
Filesize: ca. 600KB

Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932)

The electronic edition is a part of the UNC-CH database “A Digitized Library of Southern Literature, Beginnings to 1920.”

• Any hyphens occurring in line breaks have been removed, and the trailing part of a word has been joined to the preceding line.
• All quotation marks and ampersand have been transcribed as entity references.
• All double right and left quotation marks are encoded as ” and ” respectively.
• All single right and left quotation marks are encoded as ‘ and ‘ respectively.
• Indentation in lines has not been preserved.
• Running titles have not been preserved.
• Spell-check and verification made against printed text using Author/Editor (SoftQuad) and Microsoft Word spell checkers.

Summary by Mary Alice Kirkpatrick from 2004:

Perhaps the most influential African American writer of fiction at the turn of the twentieth century, Charles Waddell Chesnutt was born June 20, 1858 to Andrew Jackson Chesnutt and Anna Maria Sampson, free African Americans living in Cleveland, Ohio. He moved with his family to Fayetteville, North Carolina in 1866. He first worked as a schoolteacher in Charlotte and Fayetteville, but, having grown frustrated by the limited opportunities he encountered as a mixed-race individual living in the South, he moved permanenly to Cleveland in the early 1880s. Chesnutt later opened a successful stenography business in Cleveland, having passed the Ohio bar exam in 1887. Eager to focus on his writing full time, Chesnutt closed his stenography firm in late September 1899; however, lagging book sales forced him to reopen the business in 1901.

Chesnutt published the bulk of his writing between 1899 and 1905, including his five book-length works of fiction: two collections of short stories and three novels. Notably, he was the first African American writer whose texts were published predominantly by leading periodicals such as the Atlantic Monthly and The Outlook and major publishers, including Houghton Mifflin and Doubleday. The popular and critical success of his short stories in The Conjure Woman (March 1899) and The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line (fall 1899) set the stage for the 1900 publication of his first novel, The House Behind the Cedars. His second novel, The Marrow of Tradition, was published a year later in 1901. Neither The Marrow of Tradition nor Chesnutt’s final novel, The Colonel’s Dream (1905), sold well. Consequently, his later publications were reduced to only the occasional short story. In 1928, Charles Chesnutt was awarded the Springarn Medal by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in recognition of his literary achievements.

Following numerous revisions throughout the 1890s, The House Behind the Cedars, beginning in August 1900, was serialized in Self-Culture Magazine; Houghton Mifflin later published its book form in October 1900. The House Behind the Cedars, which Chesnutt originally titled “Rena Walden,” scrutinizes the problems afflicting those on both sides of the color line. Highlighting the fluidity of race, Chesnutt focuses on passing, a social practice in which light-skinned African Americans would present themselves as white. Opening in Patesville (Fayetteville), North Carolina, the novel focuses primarily on two siblings, John and Rena Walden, who are African Americans of mixed-race ancestry. Having changed his last name to Warwick and married a white southerner, John works as a prominent attorney in Clarence, South Carolina as a white man. Following his wife’s death, John returns to Patesville, hoping to convince his mother, Miss Molly, to allow his younger sister to return with him and care for his infant son. Allowed to accompany her brother, Rena—under the name Rowena Warwick—seamlessly enters the white social sphere and is soon engaged to the dashing young aristocrat, George Tryon. However, when the truth of her Rena’s racial identity is revealed accidentally, Tryon rejects his betrothed and she falls gravely ill. Rena recovers and goes on to work toward uplifting her race. Nevertheless, Rena’s life ends tragically. Clearly drawing from the “tragic mulatto” tradition, The House Behind the Cedars has been critiqued for its seeming sentimentality; however, Chesnutt’s novel complicates these conventions. His sympathetic portrayal of passing illuminates racism’s pernicious and oppressive effects for both blacks and whites.

Read the entire book here in HTML or XML/TEI format.

Monsters, Messiahs, or Something Else? Mixed-Race in Science Fiction Movies

New York University
Jeffrey S. Gould Welcome Center
50 West 4th Street
New York, New York
2011-03-28, 18:00-19:30 EDT (Local TIme)

Eric Hamako
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Join BAMSA, The Center, and the A/P/A Institute for another installment of the Multiple Identity Speaker Series: Monsters, Messiahs, or Something Else? Mixed-Race in Science Fiction Movies—Eric Hamako’s presentation on mixed-race people in science fiction movies and the media. Popular movies are telling stories about Mixed-Race, but what are they saying? Will vigorous hybrid messiahs herald racial salvation? Will degenerate hybrid monsters cause a racial apocalypse? Are you prepared to talk about and talk back to the movies that students love? We’ll explore White Supremacist and Christian Supremacist ideas about mixed-race people prevalent in current science fiction movies like Harry Potter, Blade, and Underworld and why people shouldn’t believe the hype… or the hate.

This event is free and open to the public. Please RSVP at jimmy.suarez@nyu.edu.

Session 408: Haafu, mixed race studies and multicultural questions in Japan

AAS-ICAS Joint Conference
Association for Asian Studes (AAS)/International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS)
2011-03-31 through 2011-04-03
Hawai’i Convention Center
Honolulu, Hawaii

Session Location and Time:
Room 316C
Saturday, 2011-04-02, 07:30-09:30 HAST (Local Time)

Organizer and Chair:

Koichi Iwabuchi
Waseda University, Japan

Discussant:

Hsiao-Chuan Hsia
Shih Hsin University, Taiwan (R.O.C.)

Mixed race studies has developed primarily in Euro-American contexts. It productively draws attention anew to the strategic and creative negotiations/resistance against racialized marginalization by the persons concerned, while being cautious not to reproduce an underlying essentialist conception of race. This panel will examine how the issues regarding “mixed race”—as now most commonly called “haafu”(half)—are articulated in the Japanese context. While racial mixing has long been (mostly negatively) discussed in Japan, with the increase in migration and international marriage, it has recently become more visible and more positively perceived than before. With a brief introduction of the genealogy of the terms such as “konketsu” (mixed blood) and “haafu” that refer to “mixed race” in Japan, this panel will analyze through three different cases (would-be) celebrities’ strategic uses of cultural capital associated with racial mixing for self-empowerment, their reception by the public and the (im)possibilities of deconstructing an exclusive notion of “Japanese-ness”. The panel will discuss how the racialized politics of inclusion/exclusion is distinctively highlighted in Japan, how the postcolonial questions are underscored by the (non-)whiteness of haafu and how studies of haafu/mixed race enhance critical engagement with multicultural questions in Japan. This panel also aims to discuss how comparative studies of mixed race can be developed in East Asian contexts, offering new insights into mixed race studies and advancing a theoretical reconsideration of notions such as race, hybridity and national identity.

Covered Bridgings: Japanese Enka and its Mixed-Blood African American Star

Christine R. Yano, Professor of Anthropology
University of Hawaii, Manoa

Jerome Charles White (“Jero”), 28-year old mixed-blood African American from Pittsburgh, debuted in February 2008 as Japan’s first black singer of enka (nostalgized ballads most popular with older adults; characterized as expressive of the “heart/soul of Japanese”). The raised eyebrows generated by his debut stemmed not only from the fact that a mixed-blood African American male in hip-hop clothing with street dance moves was populating a Japanese music stage, but more specifically, that this was an enka stage. This paper analyzes the discursive negotiations surrounding this mixed-blood figure by the Japanese music industry and public. The racialized justification given for Jero’s legitimacy as an enka singer lies in his Japanese grandmother and her love of enka; indeed, Jero, like many African Americans, is of mixed blood. Jero’s in-betweeness enacts racial, national, cultural, and generational bridgings: simultaneously African American, Japanese, and mixed blood, he sings Japanese songs of an older generation. Indeed, Jero’s tears are painted an ambiguously tinged shade of black mixings. Armed with song, tears, and mixed-blood pedigree, Jero performs national inscriptions of displacement that crucially and ironically position him as nothing less than a prodigal grandson.

Becoming “Haafu”: Japanese Brazilian Female Migrants and Their Racialized Bodies in Japan

Tamaki Watarai
Aichi Prefectural University, Japan

For a discussion about mixed race issues in Japan, I take up Japanese Brazilian female models or those who wish to engage in this profession. Although it’s common to be a mixed race in Brazil, Japanese Brazilian women who come to Japan as return migrants realize that their being “mestiça”, which means mixed race female in Portuguese, now can be valorized as “haafu” in the Japanese printed media. Here I would like to address the following questions: To be successful as “haafu” models, how do Japanese Brazilian women perform, appreciate or contest this racialized image? Are there any differences between being haafu and being mestiça? In the end, what does “haafu” mean to Japanese Brazilians, especially in terms of their transnational lives? By analyzing interviews with the models and modeling agencies and observations of beauty pageants in Brazilian community, I will discuss the complexity and uniqueness of the conception of “haafu”.

Mixed Race Oiran?: A Critical Analysis of Discourses of (Non-) Japaneseness

Sayuri Arai
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Based on a popular manga, and with the twist of a focus on the contemporary world of girls, combined with psychedelic colors, a Japanese film, Sakuran (2007), directed by Mika Ninagawa, depicts the lives of oiran [Japanese prostitutes] in the Edo era (1600-1867). The protagonist, an oiran named Kiyoha, is played by white-Japanese, mixed race actor, Anna Tsuchiya. The casting of Tsuchiya as a “Japanese” oiran was controversial, because by putting a mixed race actor in the role, the film challenges the dominant notion of Japaneseness in Japan. By conceptualizing the theoretical concepts of Japaneseness, whiteness, and haafu [mixed race Japanese people] within a Japanese context, this essay explores the discourses of Japaneseness as they circulate and relate to the mixed race actor cast as an oiran in the film. By analyzing the Internet posts on one of the largest film review websites, this study aims to understand and critique the ways in which discourses of (non-) Japaneseness are narrated contemporarily, as well as explore the ways in which Japanese identities are negotiated and constructed within popular discourses.

For more information, click here.

Freedom on the Border: The Seminole Maroons in Florida, the Indian Territory, Coahuila, and Texas

Texas Tech University Press
2003
256 pages
8.9 x 6 x 0.6 inches
Paper ISBN-10: 0896725162, ISBN-13: 978-0896725164

Kevin Mulroy, Associate University Librarian
University of California, Los Angeles

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, black runaways braved an escape from slavery in an unprecedented alliance with Seminole Indians in Florida. This is the story of the maroons’ ethnogenesis in Florida, their removal to the West, their role in the Texas Indian Wars, and the fate of their long quest for liberty and self-determination along both sides of the Rio Grande. Their tale is rich, colorful, and epic, stretching from the swamps of the Southeast to the desert Southwest. From a borderlands mosaic of slave hunters, corrupt Indian agents, Texas filibusters, Mexican revolutionaries, French invaders, Apache and Comanche raiders, frontier outlaws, lawmen, and Buffalo Soldiers, emerges a saga of enslavement, flight, exile, and ultimately freedom.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Florida Maroons
2. Emigrants from Indian Territory
3. Los Mascogos
4. The Seminole Negro Indian Scouts
5. Classifying Seminole Blacks
6. In Search of Home
7. Either Side of a Border
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Interview with Daniel J. Sharfstein, author of “The Invisible Line”

The Christian Science Monitor
2011-02-23

Stacie Williams, Monitor Contributor

In “The Invisible Line,” law professor Daniel J. Sharfstein uses the stories of three families to explore the fluid nature of racial identity in America.

Race has never been an easy concept in this country; the rigid constructs by which people judge black and white have always left room for individuals who could move across either side of the line. Today, more Americans are choosing to identify as multiracial; that segment of the population has grown 35% since the 2000 Census.

Exhibit A: The president of the United States, who has a white mother, but chooses to identify himself as African American.

Vanderbilt University Associate Law Professor Daniel J. Sharfstein analyzes the constantly evolving perceptions and experience of race in his new book The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White. Sharfstein uses his legal background to fill in the shades of gray and highlight an American experience, which for many changed with the stroke of a pen, or with hair dye.

I recently had a chance to talk with Professor Sharfstein about his book and questions of racial identity in America….

…How key is the role of the Census in gauging how many more people are keeping their racial identities fluid?

As a country, we’re committed to principles of equality. The Census has an important function in figuring out how things are going—how well we’re living up to the principles of equality and anti-discrimination. On one level, how people self-identify is an interesting measure of how far we’ve come. On another level, it’s not completely related to larger societal issues we’ve made a commitment to overcome.

Have your opinions on racial constructs changed with Obama in the White House?

I think this country has changed a lot in the past couple decades and the way in which we understand the color line has been changed. As people have embraced multiracialism, its raised interesting questions about people who have been able to discover they have African Americans in their family history. I think these new ways of understanding identity are playing a role in how people are understanding their heritage. But I do think the election of Barack Obama is a major moment in the history of race. Race has never been about biology and blood. Plenty of white people have African blood. I’m looking at this history of migration across the color line and what do categories of black and white mean? These categories have been proxies for hierarchies and discrimination… for having a full set of rights as citizens.

Read the entire interview here.

A creolising South Africa? Mixing, hybridity, and creolisation: (re)imagining the South African experience

International Social Science Journal
Volume 58, Issue 187 (March 2006)
pages 165–176
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2451.2006.00600.x

Denis-Constant Martin [in French], Senior Research Fellow
Centre for International Research and Studies (CERI) of the National Foundation for Political Science (Paris)

The present state of South Africa’s society is the outcome of protracted processes of contacts and mixing, in the course of which people coming from different cultural areas blended and produced an original culture. More than three centuries of racism and apartheid have bequeathed representations in which South Africa is construed as an addition of different people, each with its own culture and language. Such representations do not take into account the interactions between them that produced what is today a mix that is impossible to disentangle. This article attempts to look at theories of métissage and creolisation that have been devised to analyse societies in South America and the West Indies and check whether they could contribute to producing a better understanding of the history of South Africa. Édouard Glissant’s [(1928-2011)] theories of métissage and creolisation, because they stress processes and relations, because they consider that creolisation is a continuous process, could be relevant to South Africa. However, the example of Brazil shows that re-imagining the past does not suffice to pacify memories of violence and segregation; it remains ineffective if it is not accompanied by economic and social policies aiming at redressing the inequalities inherited from this very past.

Read or purchase the article here.

Griqua Identity: A Bibliography

2010
47 pages

Allegra Louw, Librarian
African Studies Library
University of Cape Town

Introduction

Most scholars acknowledge that the origins of the Griqua people are rooted in the complex relationships between autochthonous KhoeSan, slaves, Africans and European settlers. Coupled with the intricacies that underpin the issue of Griqua identity—and often as equally contested—is the matter of terminology.

Christopher Saunders and Nicholas Southey describe the Griquas as

Pastoralists of Khoikhoi and mixed descent, initially known as Bastards or Basters, who left the Cape in the late 18th century under their first leader, Adam Kok 1 (c.1710-c.1795).

They explain the name “bastards” as

[The] term used in the 18th century for the offspring of mixed unions of whites with people of colour, most commonly Khoikhoi but also, less frequently, slaves.”

Even in the context of post-apartheid South Africa, issues of identity and ethnicity continue to dominate the literature of the Griqua people. As the South African social anthropologist, Linda Waldman, writes:

The Griqua comprise an extremely diverse category of South Africans. They are defined neither by geographical boundaries nor by cultural practices.

Waldman goes on to illustrate the complexities surrounding attempts to categorise the Griqua people by explaining how the Griqua have been described by some as a sub-category of the Coloured people, by others as either constituting a separate ethnic group, by others as not constituting a separate ethnic group, and by still others as a nation…

Read the entire bibliography here.

Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen

University of Iowa Press
1993
255 pages, 10 photos
Paper 0-87745-437-X, 978-0-87745-437-3

Charles R. Larson, Professor of Literature
American University

Invisible Darkness offers a striking interpretation of the tortured lives of the two major novelists of the Harlem Renaissance: Jean Toomer, author of Cane (1923), and Nella Larsen, author of Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929). Charles R. Larson examines the common belief that both writers “disappeared” after the Harlem Renaissance and died in obscurity; he dispels the misconception that they vanished into the white world and lived unproductive and unrewarding lives.

In clear, jargon-free language, Larson demonstrates the opposing views that both writers had about their work vis-à-vis the incipient black arts movement; he traces each writer’s troubled childhood and describes the unresolved questions of race that haunted Toomer and Larsen all of their lives. Larson follows Toomer through the wreckage of his personal life as well as the troubled years of his increasingly quirky spiritual quest until his death in a nursing home in 1967. Using previously unpublished letters and documents, Larson establishes for the first time the details of Larsen’s life, illustrating that virtually every published fact about her life is incorrect.

With an innovative chronology that breaks the conventions of the traditional biographical form, Larson narrates what happened to both of these writers during their supposed years of withdrawal. He demonstrates that Nella Larsen never really gave up her fight for creative and personal fulfillment and that Jean Toomer’s connection to the Harlem Renaissance—and the black world—is at best a dubious one. This strong revisionist interpretation of two major writers will have a major impact on African American literary studies.