Mixed Race Studies

Alien Land

Northeastern University Press
2006 (Originally published in 1949 by E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc.)
336 pages
1 illus. 5 1/2 x 8″
ISBN-13: 978-1-55553-657-2
ISBN-10: 1-55553-657-3

Willard Savoy (1916-1976)

Introduction by:
Robert Burns Stepto, Professor of African American Studies, English and American Studies
Yale University

Alien Land is the passionate and haunting story of a light-skinned black man who can pass as white in mid-twentieth-century America. As a spiritually tormented child and young adult caught between two worlds in a segregated society, Kern Roberts puzzles over racism and agonizes over “why he’s a nigger.” As a teenager studying at the exclusive Evans Academy in Vermont, Kern “passes” until a classmate maliciously exposes him. Anguished and resentful, he throws himself into working for the Freedom League in Washington, D.C., the civil rights organization of which his father, a prominent black attorney, is national president. In 1934 Kern starts college in an “alien land,” the Jim Crow South. Exposed to horrifying racially motivated crimes, prejudice, and contempt, Kern necessarily plays the submissive “nigger” until, terrorized, he renounces his race and his father, returning to Vermont to live as a white man with his white grandmother. Ultimately he comes to terms with his biracial identity, finds peace in his marriage to a white woman, and reconciles with his father.

Robert Burns Stepto’s keen introduction firmly situates Alien Land in the line of African American novels that treat the issue of identity through the motif of passing. Originally published in cloth in 1949 to national acclaim, the full text of this remarkable novel is finally available in paperback.

The C.O.W.S. [Context of White Supremacy] w/ Minkah Makalani – Jul 15, 2010

The C.O.W.S Radio Show
BlogTalkRadio
2010-07-15

Gus T. Renegade, Host

Minkah Makalani, Assistant Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies
University of Texas, Austin

Rutgers’ Minkah Makalani will share his views on the System of White Supremacy. Minkah Makalani is an assistant professor of history; his primary focus is black radicalism, nationalism, the African diaspora, and social movements. We’ll explore his research on “biracial identity” [non-white people with a White parent]. Professor Makalani has written two standout articles on this subject: Rejecting Blackness, Claiming Whiteness: Anti-Black Whiteness and the Creation of a Biracial Race and A Biracial Identity or a New Race? The Historical Limitations and Political Implications of a Biracial Identity. Much of Professor Makalani’s analysis reveals how non-white people with a White parent frequently make a conscious and/or unconscious effort to distance themselves from black people... in a word, they highlight their Whiteness. We’ll explore the ramifications of this in a System dominated by White Supremacy. PS—Professor Makalani has a White parent.

Interview begins at 00:01:23 and ends at 02:04:47.

A Biracial Identity or a New Race? The Historical Limitations and Political Implications of a Biracial Identity

Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society
Volume 3, Number 4 (Fall 2001)
pages 83-112

Minkah Makalani, Assistant Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies
University of Texas, Austin

Over the past fifteen years in the United States, there has emerged a concerted push to racially reclassify persons with one Black and one white parent as biracial.  Advocates of racial reclassification are calling for the establishment of a biracial identity that is both socially and officially recognized.  They are joined by a cohort of scholars, many of whom are themselves biracial identity advocates, who argue that such an identity is more appropriate for persons of mixed parentage than a Black one. Social scientist have dominated these discussions, concerned primarily with the experiences and identity of people of mixed parentage. They maintain that a biracial identity would better recognized the complete racial background of persons of mixed parentage and offer a more mentally healthy racial identity than a Black racial identity.  Moreover, the exalt a biracial identity as a positive step in moving society beyond issues of race and towards the realization of a color-blind society.

Focusing on the scholarship advocating a biracial identity for people with one Black and one white parent, I argue that such an identity has no historical basis, and would have a negative political impact on African Americans…

Read the entire article here.

More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order [Book Review: Christian]

The Western Journal of Black Studies
Volume 27, Number 4 (2003)
pages 279-280

Mark Christian, Professor & Chair of African & African American Studies
Lehman College, City University of New York

This book comes out the school of thought that advocates for the “multiracial identity” classification in the US. More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order offers a postmodern analysis of “race” and issues a call for the acknowledgement of what can be deemed the multifaceted racialized heritages of many Black peoples located in the African Diaspora. In this sense the book offers little other than what is largely akeady known. Indeed many peoples of African descent do have claim to other heritages. For example it is broadly accepted now that at least two-thirds of African Americans have some Native American and European heritage. However, it is erroneous to run away with this idea as if it is the sole criteria for establishing a “new racial order” based on what is in fact unlikely to have any impact on white supremacy and its continued dominance over the socially constructed “peoples of color.”…

Read or purchase the book review here.

Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths? By G. Reginald Daniel. [Book Review]

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 30, Number 6 (November 2007)
pages 1167-1181

Antonio Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães
Department of Sociology, University of Sao Paulo

In his recent comparative study G. Reginald Daniel looks at the convergence in race relations patterns between Brazil and the US with a reasonable amount of historical information extracted from an extensive literature, yet adds almost no empirical research. His narrative takes a descriptive, reading-notes-like mode as he passes over both countries’ history from colonial times to the present, following too closely different authors’ arguments. His metanarrative, the one that ties together his diverse sources, is a Gramscian–Marxist theory of hegemony and race formation borrowed mainly from Omi and Winant (1986), and Hanchard (1994)…

Read or purchase the article here.

Is there ‘a’ mixed race group in Britain? The diversity of multiracial identification and experience

Critical Social Policy
Volume 30, Number 3 (August 2010)
pages 337-358
DOI: 10.1177/0261018310367672

Miri Song, Professor of Sociology
University of Kent

In contemporary British society, references to ‘mixed race’ people and to various forms of mixing abound. But to what extent can we say that there is ‘a’ mixed race group in Britain today? If such a group exists, what commonalities underlie the experience of being mixed? In addressing this question, I draw on a study of the racial identifications of different types of mixed young people in Britain. I find that the meanings and significance of race and mixedness in these young people’s lives can vary considerably both across and within specific mixed groups. In conclusion, I argue that while there is evidence of a growing consciousness and interest in being mixed, we cannot (yet) speak of a coherent mixed group or experience in Britain.

Read or purchase the article here.

Black, White and Other… Worldwide

The Huffington Post
2010-07-27

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

Even though the 21st century is seeing an exponential increase in reports of multiracial ancestry worldwide, exactly what makes a person multiracial remains a puzzling concept. According to the Association of Multiethnic Americans and Project RACE, the definition of a multiracial/interracial person is either someone whose parents were of more than one race or racial background, or someone who had parents that were of different racial groups. But what about those who identify with more than one racial background, irrespective of their parents’ identities? Or, those who identify with a racial background completely different from those of their parents?

Case in point: Nmachi Ihegboro, a blond haired and blue-eyed white baby born earlier this month to proud black Nigerian parents Ben and Angela Ihegboro in London UK. Nmachi’s parents are somewhat mystified about how they could create a white child and they are not the only ones. According to the New York Post, genetics experts are also baffled. So far they have offered three theories: (1) Nmachi “is the result of a gene mutation unique to her. If that is the case, Nmachi would pass the gene to her children — and they, too, would likely be white. (2) She’s the product of long-dormant white genes… that might have been carried by” her ancestors “for generations without surfacing until now.” Genetics professor Sykes of Oxford University thinks that some form of mixed race ancestry would seem to be necessary, and notes that sometimes multiracial women can carry some genetic material for white children and some genetic material for black children. It is also conceivable that the same holds true for multiracial men. (3) “While doctors have said Nmachi is not an outright albino, or lacking in all pigment, they added that the child may have some kind of mutated version of the genetic condition — and that her skin could darken over time.”…

Read the entire article here.

More than a Metaphor: Blood as Boundary for Korean Biracial Identity

NCA 95th Annual Convention
Chicago Hilton & Towers
Chicago, Illinois
2009-11-11

Myra Washington
College of Media, Institute of Communications Research
University of Illinois

When Hines Ward was named MVP of Super Bowl XL, his Black and Korean biracial status became the touchstone for conversations about mixed-race people in Korea. His “homecoming” trip generated a frenzied discourse around the limits of Korean identity and the location of bi/multiracial individuals within it. Ward’s racial representation allows for the analysis of nationhood, citizenship, difference and race as imagined through blood metaphors.

Read the entire paper here.

Black and White, or Shades of Gray? Racial Labeling of Barack Obama Predicts Implicit Race Perception

Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy
Volume 10, Issue 1 (December 2010)
pages 207–222
DOI: 10.1111/j.1530-2415.2010.01213.x

Lori Wu Malahy
University of Washington

Mara Sedlins
University of Washington

Jason Plaks, Associate Professor of Psychology
University of Toronto

Yuichi Shoda, Professor of Psychology
University of Washington

The present research capitalized on the prominence and multiracial heritage of U.S. 2008 presidential election candidate Barack Obama to examine whether individual differences in classifying him as Black or as multiracial corresponded to differences in implicit perception of race. This research used a newly developed task (Sedlins, Malahy, & Shoda, 2010) with digitally morphed mixed-race faces to assess implicit race perception. Participants completed this task four times before and one time after the election. We found that people who labeled Obama as Black implicitly perceived race as more categorical than those who labeled Obama as multiracial. This finding adds to the growing literature on multiracial perception by demonstrating a relationship between the explicit use of multiracial and monoracial race classification and implicit race perception. The results suggest potential implications for governmental, educational, and judiciary usage of racial categories.

Read or purchase the article here.

Fluidity without Postmodernism: Michelle Cliff and the “Tragic Mulatta” Tradition

African American Review
Vol. 32, No. 4 (Winter, 1998)
pages 673-689

Suzanne Bost, Associate Professor of English
Loyola University

I am writing the story of my life as a statue… I wish they had carved me from the onyx of Elizabeth Catlett.  Or molded me from the dark clay of Augusta Savage.  Or cut me from mahogany or cast me in bronze.  I wish I were dark plaster like Meta Warrick Fuller’s Talking Skull.  But I appear more as Edmonia Lewis’s Hagar—wringing her hands in the wilderness—white marble figure of no homeland—her striations caught within.  (Cliff, Land 85)

In “The Laughing Mulatto (Formerly a Statue) Speaks,” Michelle Cliff invokes past stereotypes of the mulatto and the sculptors who remolded them. From Edmonia Lewis (1844-1909)—the half-black, half-Chippewasculpor who gained international fame with the help of abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Lydia Maria Child—to Augusta Savage (1892-1962)—the Harlem Renaissance artists who sculpted busts of W. E. B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, and Marcus Garvey—black artists have been reconstructing images of African Americans.  The speaker of “The Laughing Mulatto” identifies with racial “betweeenness,” yet she also subverts racist conventions that privilege the whiteness within biracial African Americans. She wishes that her skin were darker: onyx, mahogany, or bronze, not white marble (Cliff, Land 85).  Her wish implicitly compares race to workable materials, as if racial identity were something that could be chiseled and molded by an artist…

Read or purchase the article here.