Mixed Race Studies

Claiming the (n)either/(n)or of ‘third space’: (re)presenting hybrid identity and the embodiment of mixed race

Journal of Intercultural Studies
Volume 25, Issue 1 (April 2004)
pages 75 – 85
DOI: 10.1080/07256860410001687036

Torika Bolatagici, Associate Lecturer
School of Communication & Creative Arts
Deakin University, Melbourne, Austrailia

As a multiracial artist, I am interested in how people of mixed race have been represented in popular culture and how mixed race image-makers can redress popular representation and facilitate a movement beyond the dichotomy, which seeks to reduce us to the sum of our parts. In the footsteps of Evelyn Alsultany I advocate the creation of a new cartography—a space that is inclusive and beyond existing notions of race. To this end I embarked on a project of exploration of the representation of multiracial identity, drawing from Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of Third Space.

Read or purchase the article here.

Triracial isolates represent some two hundred communities scattered throughout the eastern United States, particularly in the southeast, of varying combinations and degrees of European American, Native American, and African American descent.

The triracial isolates are known by a wide variety of names. New York is the home of the Van Guilders, the Clappers, the Shinnecock, the Poospatuck, the Montauk, the Mantinecock, and the Jackson Whites.  In Pennsylvania, they are called Pools; in Delaware, Nanticokes; in Rhode Island, Narragansetts; in Massachusetts, Gay Heads and Mashpees; in Ohio, Carmelites. Maryland has its Wesorts; West Virginia its Guineas; and Tennessee its Melungeons.  There are the Ramps, Issues, and Chickhominy in Virginia; the Lumbees, Haliwas, Waccamaws, and Smilings in North Carolina; Chavises, Creels, Brass Ankles, Redbones, Redlegs, Buckheads, and Yellowhammers, all in South Carolina.  Louisiana is the home of a host of triracial communities.

G. Reginald Daniel, More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, December, 2001) 68-69.

The more things change, the more they stay the same

Thinking Twice: RACE
The Stanford Review
2009-01-29

C. Matthew Snipp, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity
Stanford University

Last week, we inaugurated our first African American president, and coincidentally our first mixed race president, and our first Hawaiian president. The first of these three events captured the public imagination while the other two have passed with barely a comment, and for good reason. Few Americans know the sordid history behind the acquisition of Hawaii. Fewer still have parsed what it means to be multiracial in America. But most Americans are well aware of the travails of African Americans, from slavery to Jim Crow to the Civil Rights movement.

Trolling the news outlets since the November elections yields two seemingly dissonant messages. One is that Obama’s election signals a new era in race relations—that we are living in a “post-civil rights” era, an era of “color blindness.” The New York Times recently published a glowing story about an interracial couple who suddenly have found it less awkward to have to conversations with their friends about racial differences. In contrast, others are quick to point out that racism is alive and well in America, and that Obama’s election will mean little for changing the racial partition that has existed in this country since its inception….

Read the entire article here.

Why Obama is Black Again

Thinking Twice: RACE
The Stanford Review
2009-01-29

Michele Elam, Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor of English and Olivier Nomellini Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education
Stanford University

Barack Obama’s inauguration was for so many an awe-inspiring, historic and transnational event: It was full of grand pageantry and a good-humored pomp and circumstance that made D.C. the place to be. People were called together in many ways, and one of the more important ways they were asked to unite was over the contentious matter of race.

But it is worthwhile noting that this unlikely racial consensus was achieved through a strategic kind of absenting: Gone from the inaugural coverage were all the hand-wringing equivocations preceding the Democratic nomination about whether Obama’s person and politics went “beyond race” (and if that was a good thing or not), whether he even met the minimum standards for blackness (it was never clear who got to wield this racial measuring stick), or whether he was capitalizing on what novelist Danzy Senna calls the “mulatto millennium” of mixed-race celebrities…

Read the entire article here.

Identity in Education: Future of Minority Studies

Palgrave Macmillan
May 2009
296 pages
ISBN: 978-0-230-60917-4, ISBN10: 0-230-60917-1
6 1/8 x 9-1/4 inches, 296 pages, 

Edited by

Susan Sánchez-Casal, Director
Tufts University / Skidmore College, Madrid

Amie A. Macdonald, Associate Professor of Philosophy
John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York

This edited volume explores the impact of social identity (race, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion and so on) on teaching and learning.  Operating within a realist framework, the contributors to this volume (all of whom are minority scholars) consider ways to productively engage identity in the classroom and at the institutional level, as a means of working toward racial democracy in higher education.  As realists, all authors in the volume hold the theoretical position that identities are both real and constructed, and that identities are always epistemically salient.  Thus the book argues–from diverse disciplinary and educational contexts–that mobilizing identities in academia is a necessary part of progressive (antiracist, feminist, anticolonial) educators’ efforts to transform knowledge-making, to establishcritical access for minority students to higher education, and to create a more just and democratic society.

Introduction—Amie A. Macdonald and Susan Sánchez-Casal

PART I: CRITICAL ACCESS AND PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION
Identity, Realist Pedagogy, and Racial Democracy in Higher Education—Susan Sánchez-Casal and Amie A. Macdonald
What’s Identity Go to Do With It?: Mobilizing Identities in the Multicultural Classroom—Paula M. L. Moya
Fostering Cross-Racial Mentoring: White Faculty and African American Students at Harvard College—Richard Reddick

PART II: CURRICULUM AND IDENTITY
Which America Is Ours?: Martí’s “Truth” and the Foundations of “American Literature”—Michael Hames-García
The Mis-Education of Mixed Race—Michele Elam
Ethnic Studies Requirements and the “White” Dominated Classroom—Kay Yandell
Historicizing difference in The English Patient: The Politics of Identity and (Mis)Recognition—Paulo Lemos Horta

PART III: REALIST PEDAGOGICAL STRATEGIES
Teaching Disclosure: Overcoming the Invisibility of Whiteness in the American Indian Studies Classroom—Sean Kiccumah Teuton
Religious Identities and Communities of Meaning in the Realist Classroom—William Wilkerson
Postethnic America? A Multicultural Training Camp for Americanists and Future EFL teachers—Barbara Bucheneau, Paula Moya, Carola Hecke, J. Nicole Shelton
The Uses of Error: Toward a Realist Methodology of Student Evaluation—John Su

Questions for Maya Soetoro-Ng: All in the Family

The New York Times
2008-01-20

Deborah Solomon

Q: Let’s talk about the Democratic presidential caucuses taking place on Feb. 19, in Hawaii, where Barack Obama was born. Will you be campaigning for your brother?
Yes, of course. I have taken time off from my various teaching jobs in Honolulu and just got back from two months of campaigning. I have a bumper sticker on my car that says: “1-20-09. End of an Error.”…

Do you think of your brother as black?
Yes, because that is how he has named himself. Each of us has a right to name ourselves as we will.

Do you think of yourself as white?
No. I’m half white, half Asian. I think of myself as hybrid. People usually think I’m Latina when they meet me. That’s what made me learn Spanish.

That sort of culturally mixed identity was seen as an anomaly when you were growing up.
Of course, there was a time when that felt like unsteady terrain, and it made me feel vulnerable…

Read the entire interview here.

Research Project on Mixed Race Identity

Are you of a mixed racial background? Do you identify as ‘mixed’ or ‘mixed race’? Do you identify with a mixed racial identity?

This project is being conducted for a Master’s thesis in the Department of Sociology at the University of Alberta.

The purpose of the project is to explore a whole range of perspectives and experiences, and the multiple ways that ‘mixed race’ can be understood.

Male and female participants between 20-30 years of age, who are of ‘mixed racial’ parentage and who grew up in Canada, and who live or have lived in the Edmonton, Alberta area are being recruited.

Interviews will be conducted with participants, and will take approximately one hour.

If you would like to be part of this study, please contact Jillian Paragg at paragg@ualberta.ca or if you know of someone who may be interested in participating, please pass this message on to them.

Seeking Race Transcenders to Participate in Racial Identity Study

Carlos Hoyt, a Ph.D. student at Simmons College in Boston, is currently seeking individuals who are commonly identified as black or African American (including biracial or black-multiethnic), but who do not define themselves according to the social construct of race. Hoyt’s study will give race transcenders the opportunity to describe the factors and paths that led to a sense of self beyond black, bi- or multiracial identity and to an identity orientation that is non-racial.

Race transcenders are aware that society racializes them as black or African American and they are well aware of the effects of race and racism in society, but they do not subscribe to racial categorization or racial identity as part of their sense of self.  This is analogous to someone raised in a religious faith who, at some point, chooses to renounce religion altogether.  Others might know this person as a member of a family or community in a particular religious category, but the individual chooses an identity that does not include such categorization; she or he has become non-religious. The following quotation gives a clear illustration of the race transcendent orientation.

“My journey has taken me past constructions of race, past constructions of mixed race, and into an understanding of human difference that does not include race as a meaningful category (Spencer in Penn, 2002, p.10).”

If you feel that you are a race transcender and would like to share the story of how you arrived at that sense of self, please contact Carlos at hoyt.carlos@gmail.com and/or visit www.RaceTranscenders.com for more information.

Obama’s Mixology

The Root
2008-10-30

Michele Elam, Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor of English and Olivier Nomellini Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education
Stanford University

Give Obama credit for not trying to use his biracial background as an appeal to white working-class voters.

Mix’ology: noun. The art and science of mixings

In these final days of this presidential campaign, John McCain and his supporters have been trying desperately to raise doubts about Barack Obama’s identity. They have called him a terrorist sympathizer, a socialist, an unrepentant liberal. For weeks, their tagline has been “Who is Barack Obama?” The McCain campaign hopes that the question will resonate with the part of the electorate that Obama had putatively most alienated: the white, working class.

For different reasons, this same identity question has also had some traction with people of color, many of whom worry that Obama will usher in what Danzy Senna calls the “mulatto millennium,” especially if it implies that, as some of Obama’s supporters chanted earlier this year, “race doesn’t matter.”…

…But Obama has rejected post-racialism, certainly to the extent it meant identifying as “mixed” rather than “black.” His position was evident as early as 2005, when he told representatives from the MAVIN Foundation, one of the nation’s largest mixed-race advocacy organizations, who had clearly hoped he would be both an icon and legislative whip on their behalf: “I am always cautious about…persons of mixed race focusing so narrowly on their own unique experiences that they are detached from larger struggles, and I think it’s important to try to avoid that sense of exclusivity, and feeling that you’re special in some way.”

As his Indonesian-Caucasian sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, noted, Obama identifies as black not because he is conscripted by the one-drop rule, but because he actively chooses it. He belongs to the black community not only because, historically, mixed people have always belonged, and because black has never been pure; he belongs also, his sister suggests, because of personal commitment and responsibility. The issue may appear moot since race is part choice, part social ascription, and Obama could not simply opt out of the race even if he woke up some morning and chose to. But it remains important that he does not bill himself as “mixed” or “other” even when it might appear politically convenient or grant him cultural glam…

Read the entire article here.

ENGLISH 261E: Mixed Race Literature in the U.S. and South Africa (seminar)

Stanford University
Department of English
Winter Quarter, 2010-2011

Michele Elam, Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor of English and Olivier Nomellini Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education

Grant Parker, Associate Professor of Classics
Stanford Univeristy

As scholar Werner Sollors recently suggested, novels, poems, stories about interracial contacts and mixed race constitute “an orphan literature belonging to no clear ethnic or national tradition.” Yet the theme of mixed race is at the center of many national self-definitions, even in our U.S. post-Civil Rights and South Africa’s post-Apartheid era. This course examines aesthetic engagements with mixed race politics in these trans- and post-national dialogues, beginning in the 1700s and focusing on the 20th and 21st centuries.