Mixed Race Studies

Colleges or universities with monoracial cultural centers pose a challenge for biracial and multiracial students. While we know that challenge is an important feature of the student development process, we must still think deeply about the challenges we present through the messages sent by our programs and services. Is this level of challenge harmful or helpful? Are we asking students to choose which part of themselves they are going to identify with during their time at the college or university? Are we asking students to deny a part of themselves in order to identify with another part? Are we allowing biracial students to be their whole selves? How does this current design for the delivery of cultural programs and services help with the students’ identity development? This is a critical period in which students learn about themselves and their identity… What are biracial students learning through monoracial cultural centers, and what are we teaching students about our view of the world?

Larry D. Roper and Kimberly McAloney, “Is the Design for Our Cultural Programs Ethical?,” Journal of College & Character, Volume 11, Number 4, (2010): 3 pages, doi:10.2202/1940-1639.1743.

The contrast between the multigenerational and first-generation experiences is further underscored by the fact that the latter is frequently viewed as a more legitimate basis for multiracial identity. The reasons for this are related to the repeal of anti-miscegenation laws in 1967 and the liberalization of social attitudes on race over the past three decades. Moreover, the first-generation experience originates in the context of interracial marriage and thus includes an element of choice. Marriages confer equal legal status on both parties and, by extension, equal legitimacy on both parents’ identities. The one-drop rule, therefore, has been less consistently enforced, both in theory and in practice, in the case of their offspring. This is particularly true of policies at the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) and to a lesser extent of the Census Bureau. Before the 1980s, the NCHS ciassified racially blended children in terms of the “minority” parent, while the Census Bureau classified them in terms of the father’s racial or ethnic identity. Since the 1980s both agencies have based the children’s race on the racial identity of the mother. Many multiracial  children of European American mothers have therefore been designated as “white” rather than as “biracial.” Since the mid-1960s, however, adoption agencies have tended to describe blended children as “racially mixed” or “biracial” in order to attract white adoptive parents by appealing to their Eurocentric bias.

Such flexibility has not been extended so readily to multi generational individuals. Their experience carries with it the implicit stigma of concubinage, rape, and illegitimacy; and the parents and families of these individuals have typically been seen as African American. Attitudes toward Native Americans and Latinos—two other populations that have experienced significant miscegenation with European Americans—provide a point of contrast. The European American, as well as the Native American and Latino communities, have more openly acknowledged multiple racial and cultural backgrounds in the discourse on identity. In these populations as well, however, the same divisive and pernicious “colorism” that has infected African-descent Americans has arisen, with the result that  lighter-skinned and otherwise more European-appearing Latinos and Native Americans are  treated preferentially within and outside their communities. Nevertheless,  greater openness among these groups to multiracialism has mitigated the generational differences as the primary factor determining the legitimacy of multiracial identity. Multigenerational individuals of European American and African American decent, therefore, find themselves at odds not only with the larger society and the African American community, but often with first-generation individuals as well. Since most African-descent Americans have some European American ancestry in their genealogy but identify themselves as black, blacks often accuse multigenerational individuals of trying to escape the stigma attached to “blackness.”  Some first-generation individuals contend that their own biracial experience is the legitimate starting point for a blended identity…

Daniel, G. Reginald. More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002). 104-105.

Jean Toomer and the History of Passing

Reviews in American History
Volume 41, Number 1, March 2013
pages 113-121
DOI: 10.1353/rah.2013.0016

Matthew Pratt Guterl, Professor of Africana Studies and American Studies
Brown University

Jean Toomer. Cane. With a new afterword by Rudolph B. Byrd, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011. 472 pp.(paper).

In 2011, Rudolph Byrd and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., issued a new Norton Critical edition of Jean Toomer’s 1923 novel, Cane, a work widely seen as one of the finest expressions of black culture in the twentieth century. Both men have written on Toomer, on race, and on literature. Byrd, recently deceased, was the author of the finely wrought Jean Toomer’s Years With Gurdjieff (1990). Gates is a famous scholar of African American studies. In op-eds for the Chronicle of Higher Education, in the pages of the New York Times, and on the radio stream of NPR, the editors, drumming up attention, accused Toomer of “passing” for white, a provocation rooted, they felt, in the evidence, but also sure to guarantee book sales and critical attention. “He was running away from a cultural identity that he had inherited,” Gates said to Felicia Lee in one of these paratextual interviews; “He never, ever wrote anything remotely approaching the originality and genius of Cane. I believe it’s because he spent so much time running away from his identity.” Gates then added, “I feel sorry for him.”

This damning conclusion that Toomer engaged in racial subterfuge is somewhat off-putting because it runs counter to just about everything written about Toomer since the 1980s. It also pushes back against the foundational assumptions of the “bi-racial” and “mixed-race” movements—both of which prioritize self-identification and self-fashioning outside of official categories—and challenges recent histories of race and passing. Still, because of the unique editorial authority of this pair, the new edition of Cane will surely become a consumer triumph.

“Jean Toomer may have been a bit of a cad and a man who had a fondness for the company of white women,” wrote Sharon Toomer, the author’s great granddaughter, in response to an interview with Gates in the New York Times, “but to say . . . that he decidedly passed for white is an explosive accusation that demands nothing short of evidence—€”not interpretation.” She continued: “In countless documents, Toomer said he wanted to be identified as an American. That is different from deciding to pass for white.” But how is it different? And what is that evidence? And what, finally, is that interpretation? Answering these questions brings us to the far edge of African American studies, African American history, and African American literature; indeed, it carries us across a threshold where, as Kenneth Warren recently suggested, the future of these robust and important fields is decidedly uncertain. Answering them also clarifies the purpose of this new edition of Cane, which appears designed to rewrite the past and redirect the future.

Every American historian should be familiar with Cane because the work captures so many themes and plot points of the post-WWI era. Uniquely structured even in an era of formal experimentation, Cane was a revolutionary text when first published, and it remains an object of extraordinary debate today. The loosely organized, scattershot novella gathers up familiar plot points of post-emancipation African American history and rearranges them into discrete vignettes, capturing a race increasingly adrift in an age of traumatic transformations: from rural to urban, from the violent medieval to the depersonalized modern, from locally grounded to wandering and migratory. Each little piece was saturated with symbolic or metaphorical detail. And the book, slender and enigmatically titled, looked different, too, with cryptic arcs and half-circles appearing in no discernable sequence, marking major thematic breaks. Readers of Cane knew they held in their hands something special and exciting, even if they weren’t entirely certain what to make of it.

Toomer believed firmly and consistently that he was neither white nor black, but both and much more. The tall, lanky descendent of P. B. S. Pinchback—€”the Reconstruction-era governor of Louisiana (a whimsical man who occasionally enjoyed playing at white)—€”Jean Toomer was, in the years prior to the publication of Cane, a questing soul in search of a racial identity outside of contemporary realities, hoping…

The JCMRS inaugural issue will be released on Summer, 2013

Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies
c/o Department of Sociology
SSMS Room 3005
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, California  93106-9430
E-Mail: socjcmrs@soc.ucsb.edu
2012-10-10

The Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies (JCMRS) is a peer-reviewed online journal dedicated to developing the field of Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) through rigorous scholarship. Launched in 2011, it is the first academic journal explicitly focused on Critical Mixed Race Studies.

JCMRS is transracial, transdisciplinary, and transnational in focus and emphasizes the critical analysis of the institutionalization of social, cultural, and political orders based on dominant conceptions and constructions of ‘race.’ JCMRS emphasizes the constructed nature and thus mutability of race and the porosity of racial boundaries in order to critique processes of racialization and social stratification based on race. JCMRS addresses local and global systemic injustices rooted in systems of racialization.

Sponsored by University of California, Santa Barbara’s Sociology Department, JCMRS is hosted on the eScholarship Repository, which is part of the eScholarship initiative of the California Digital Library. JCMRS functions as an open-access forum for critical mixed race studies scholars and will be available without cost to anyone with access to the Internet.

Volume 1, Issue 1, Spring 2013 will include:

• “Editor’s Note”—G. Reginald Daniel
• “Emerging Paradigms in Critical Mixed Race Studies”—Laura Kina, Wei Ming Dariotis, G. Reginald Daniel, and Camilla Fojas

Articles

1. “Historical Origins of the One-Drop Racial Rule in the United States”—Winthrop Jordan edited by Paul Spickard
2. “Retheorizing the Relationship Between New Mestizaje and New Multiraciality as Mixed Race Identity Models”—Jessie Turner
3. “Critical Mixed Race Studies: New Directions in the Politics of Race and Representation,” Keynote Address presented at the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference, November 5, 2010, DePaul University—Andrew Jolivétte
4. “Only the News We Want to Print”—Rainier Spencer
5. “The Current State of Multiracial Discourse”—Molly McKibbin
6. “Slimy Subjects and Neoliberal Goods”—Daniel McNeil

Editorial Board

Founding Editors: G. Reginald Daniel, Wei Ming Dariotis, Laura Kina, Maria P. P. Root, and Paul Spickard

Editor-in-Chief: G. Reginald Daniel

Managing Editors: Wei Ming Dariotis and Laura Kina

Editorial Review Board: Stanley R. Bailey, Mary C. Beltrán, David Brunsma, Greg Carter, Kimberly McClain DaCosta, Michele Elam, Camilla Fojas, Peter Fry, Kip Fulbeck, Rudy Guevarra, Velina Hasu Houston, Kevin R. Johnson, Andrew Jolivette, Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain, Laura A. Lewis, Kristen A. Renn, Maria P. P. Root, Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, Gary B. Nash, Kent A. Ono, Rita Simon, Miri Song, Rainier Spencer, Michael Thornton, Peter Wade, France Winddance Twine, Teresa Williams-León, and Naomi Zack

For more information, click here.

Kiss Me, I’m 1/16 Irish: African-, Irish-, and the Hyphenated-Americans

The Huffington Post
2013-03-15

Theodore Johnson, Op-Ed Columnist, 2012 White House Fellow

Years ago, I spent Saint Patrick’s Day in an Irish pub singing ditties with a restaurant full of my newest friends—and left feeling a little green with envy. The Irish-American traditions and fare were in full swing and exposed me to a culture I’d never really considered while growing up in a sleepy North Carolina suburb. This year I find myself brewing a homemade dark beer and casually searching the Internet for “Kiss me, I’m 1/16 Irish” buttons. As an African-American, this feels a bit weird.

I’m pretty sure my Irish great-great grandfather would not be thrilled about this. A discreet encounter—either an isolated incident or part of an ongoing relationship, the family lore is unclear—led to the hazel-eyed and blonde-haired African-Americans present at my family cookouts today. It’s in moments like these that I wonder about the utility of what President Theodore Roosevelt once called “hyphenated Americanism.”

The plights of the Irish and blacks in America are extremely different, but share some similarities. In the 19th century, particularly after slavery, both were considered to be the lowest rungs of society. Irish were sometimes thought of as black people “turned inside out,” and blacks as “smoked Irish.” Historians have written that the indigent, chattel state of the two groups led to such a high number of interracial marriages that the term “mulatto’s” first official use was to record this phenomenon in the 1850 Census. In the earliest 20th century, the Irish and blacks all along the eastern seaboard continued to compete for work and live in close proximity, until the race divide became the chasm that even class could not bridge…

Read the entire article here.

Diversity triumph in 2010 Rose of Tralee

The African Voice: Ireland’s No. 1 African Community Newspaper
2010-09-05

Zélie Asava

Dr. Zélie Asava considers the contest’s celebration of the ‘new Irish’

2010 marks the year that the Rose of Tralee was won by a woman of Irish and Indian heritage. Clare Kambamettu, a mixed-race psychologist, took the title as the London rose, making it the 2nd year a London Rose has won the competition. There have been few mixed-race Roses to date. Luzveminda O’Sullivan was the 1998 rose of Tralee (whose name is mysteriously misspelt or replaced by another on many websites listing the history of the Roses). Though O’Sullivan hails from Mayo she was the Phillippines Rose, reflecting her Irish-Filipino identity. 2004’s Philadelphia Rose, Sinead De Roiste, was the first Irish-African American contestant in the history of the Rose of Tralee.

The fact that a mixed-race Rose can now be included in the competition, and even go on to win it, as a representative of Irish women and culture, is a wonderful example of diversity working in this country. Interestingly though, Kambamettu’s heritage has not been mentioned by much of the national media, with journalists preferring to describe her as “stunning” or refer to her father’s mildly exotic name, Ravi, as a signifier of her Otherness, rather than state her as mixed-race…

Read the entire article here.

Seeking Interviewees for Research on Mixed Heritage Asian American Mothers

2013-03-17

Brian DeGuzman
San Francisco State University

I am an Asian American Studies M.A. student at San Francisco State University and I am looking for interviewees for my research on mixed heritage Asian American mothers. I am specifically looking for mixed Asian American mothers who have adult children who are at least 18 years of age or older. I would also like to interview these adult children.

I think an interesting conversation can be made about how mixed mothers raise their children, so if you have questions or would like to participate, please contact me at bdeguz@gmail.com or at my Google Voice phone number which is 415-496-5947.

The Mulatto to His Critics

Eugenical News
Volume VII (7), Number 8 (August, 1922)
page 100

Joseph S. Cotter, Jr., gives this answer to the critics of the mulatto:

“Ashamed of my race?
And of what race am I?
I am many in one.
Through my veins there flows the blood
Of Red Man, Black Man, Briton, Celt, and Scot,
In warring clash and tumultuous riot.
I welcome all,
But love the blood of the kindly race
That swarths my skin, crinkles my hair,
And puts sweet music into my soul.”

Your Morning Cry: Leonard Nimoy’s Touching 1968 Advice Column Answers Teen Biracial Girl

Jezebel
2013-03-16

Anna Breslaw, Editor

While the William Shatner era of Star Trek isn’t exactly the first thing that springs to mind as a predecessor of the “It Gets Better” anti-bullying movement, Buzzfeed’s got an excerpt from the advice pages of a 1968 teen magazine called FaVE displays Leonard Nimoy’s sensitivity to the plight of one particular young woman. What would Spock do? she asks. And damn if he doesn’t answer her perfectly.

Last month FaVE RaVEs published this letter:

Dear Mr. Spock,

I am not very good at writing letters so I will make this short. I know that you are half Vulcan and half human and you have suffered because of this. My mother is Negro and my father is white and I am told this makes me a half-breed. In some ways I am persecuted even more than the Negro. The Negroes don’t like me because I don’t look like them. The white kids don’t like me because I don’t exactly look like one of them either. I guess I’ll ever have any friends.

F.C.
Los Angeles, Calif…

Leonard became so interested in this girl’s situation, FaVE offered him this chance to tell everyone what Mr. Spock did when he faced this problem.

“As you may know, only Spock’s mother was human. His father was a Vulcan. Spock grew up among Vulcan children and, because he was different, he had to face the problem of not being accepted. This is because people, especially young people it seems, and Vulcans, too, tend to form into groups, kind of like wolf packs. They often demand that you be just like them or you will not be accepted. And the Vulcans were no different than humans are when it comes to prejudice.”…

Read the entire article here.

Eugenics in South America

Eugenical News
Volume 7, Number 3 (March, 1922)
pages 17-42

Reginald G. Harris

Ever since the rediscovery of Mendel’s laws of inheritance plant and animal breeders have been occupied with conducting experiments on a large number of widely varying types of organisms. These experiments hare brought to light the method of inheritance of may unit characters (single traits). In some cases even the location of the factors or genes which influence the development of the unit characters has been graphically pictured. Among many animals, fowl, rats, mice, guineapigs. rabbits, vinegar-flies, etc., as well as among many plants, experiments have been conducted to ascertain the laws governing heredity.

There are many human traits which are governed in their inheritance by laws similar to those which have been discovered among the lower forms of life. Unfortunately these laws may be applied only in their most general sense. The fact that a unit character, vermillion eye in Drosophila, for example, is a “recessive allelomorph” of the wild type red eye, does not prove that blue eye in human individuals is the allelomorph of, or is recessive to, brown eye; it merely shows that unit characters may be allelomorphic and that one is dominant over the other. If one wished to know the relationship of various eye colors to each other in other animals than human beings he would carry on breeding experiments, and from observations  on the resulting offspring conclude in what way the several unit characters acted upon each other.

But such an experimental procedure in the case of man is obviously impracticable. The eugenicist welcomes in the absence of controlled laboratory experiments natural, more or less controlled, crosses of human races. Such crosses have no doubt been infrequent, though two notable examples are well known. One is the case of the colony of Pitcairn Island, and later of Norfolk Island. In these islands at the present time there are nearly one thousand individuals all descendants of a cross between English men and Tahiti women. The original crosses, in this case, occurred about a century ago. The second experiment occurred when a few Boers and Hottentots intermarried and continued to intermarry for some time without crossing with neighboring tribes. These two examples of human racial crossing are of unique interest to the eugenist because they afford him an opportunity of observing the resultant hybrid offspring uncontaminated with other genetic factors than those originally given by the two parent strains.

Study of eugenics in South America offers the observer a no less fascinating, though no doubt more complex situation, than those presented in the foregoing cases. The observations which I shall present at this time are the result of facts which came to my notice, and impressions which I received during a recent excursion through South America with the Cornell University Entomological Expedition of 1919-1920. For this discussion, then, the term South America will designate those countries which were visited, namely, Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, Bolivia, and Peru. In such a large number of nations, and even within the nations themselves, wide differences of race and environment may exist, hence the great danger of hasty generalization, and the need for extreme care in making and interpreting statements concerning the inhabitants of South America either present or past.

The problem of ascertaining the result of the interbreeding of the widely divergent human races in South America can not be solved by a superficial glance at the data which may be drawn from a study of European, Aboriginal, and Negro parent stock, and the resulting offspring. Given the parents and the hybrids, the effect of crossing is not at once apparent, for the parent stocks are widely variable, and the environment furnishes modifying influences the scope of which is only a subject of conjecture. But to say that there is a new people because an unusual crossing of races exists is wholly insufficient. The parent stock and resultant offspring must be carefully studied.

If sterility and the chemistry of blood are true indicators of the limits of a species, man includes but one species. Thus far crosses between even the widest morphologically divergent types have failed to produce sterility in the offspring. In this respect human beings are similar to horses, cattle, dogs, fowl, etc., where there exists a striking variety of form and color within the same species. It is generally believed that crosses between human races of extremely different physical and mental traits produce offspring which are intermediate between the two parent types, that is to say, the hybrids show that friending Inheritance has occurred. An indiscriminate crossing of human races is considered unwise, not only on account of possible great psychic differences, but more especially because of the conflict of social inheritance which often results. Every biologist is aware of the snail-like progress of organic evolution. Morphological and other physical changes in existing organisms ore infrequent. To the sociologist the importance of social inheritance as a method of rapidly bettering the human race is apparent. The eugenicist, however, is equally interested in thebiological inheritance of the individual, for he sees, in encouraging crossing and fecundity among the higher types of human beings, and discouraging mating and the production of numerous offspring in the lower groups, an opportunity for permanent racial advancement. It is natural, then, that the eugenicist should turn with keen interest to South America, where racial crossing has been taking place, practically unchecked, for four centuries.

There are in South America three widely different human races existing side by side: (1) the native peoples, all members of the Indian race: (2) the conquerors nnd early colonists of the continent, men of the white race from the Iberian peninsula; (3) representatives of the Negro race who were imported by the conquerors and colonists, especially in Brazil, as slaves. That these several races should continue to mingle with each other in none other than social and business relationships would form a sufficient basis for a study of unusual interest to the sociologist. But their juxtaposition has not been limited to social and commercial dealings. There has been an interchange of the blood of these several races.

The ease and rapidity with which interbreeding has occurred is almost unparalleled. At the outset there existed a relationship between the aborigines and the conquerors quite different from that which occurred in the northern continent. Indians and whites (Latins from Southern Europe) crossed freely during the early periods of conquest and colonization, while later Negroes, Teutonic Europeans, and Asiatics were added to the “melting pot.”…

Read the entire article here.