Mixed Race Studies

English 49, “Whiteness” and Racial Difference

Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania
Spring 1997

Peter Schmidt, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English Literature

A look at the conflicted ways in which “racial” identities and differences have been constructed in past and contemporary cultures, especially in the U.S. Topics given emphasis in the syllabus include why saying “race doesn’t matter” is not enough; how a new debates about the history of race have changed American Studies and feminist studies; how European immigrants to the U.S. became “white” and with what benefits and what costs; how popular culture can both resist and perpetuate racist culture; and an introduction to issues of “passing,” multi-racial identity, and recovering a multiracial past. The format of the class will include both lecture and student-led discussion.

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EN-255 Passing Narratives

Juniata College, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania
Fall Semester

Passing narratives investigate how the boundaries of identity can be reimagined. Most often depicting racial passing (when a person “passes for” someone of another race), these narratives also can be about performing another gender or sexual identity. In this course, we will examine a variety of texts that treat different forms of passing. Beginning with a slave narrative in which a black woman “passes” as a white man to escape slavery, we will trace the evolution of this trope through American literature and film. From traditional passing novels that use the form to protest racial injustice to recent texts that challenge continued discrimination against of other marginalized groups in contemporary culture, we will explore topics such as biological essentialism vs. the social construction of identity; authenticity and performance; social and legal forms of identity categorization and boundary maintenance; the role of literature in social reform; and many others. We will examine these topics through frequent in-class close reading and response writing in addition to formal essays, and presentations meant to deepen your understanding of selected texts.

241F Performances of Passing, Performances of Resistance

Hamilton College, Clinton, New York
Spring 2014

Yumi Pak, Ph.D., Visiting Assistant Professor of Africana Studies

An examination of the historical practice of passing in the United States. While the practice has most commonly referred to the history of racial passing for light-skinned African Americans in the early 20th century, this course will situate acts of passing as acts of resistance through close readings of literature, film and performance studies. Scholars and authors include Soyica Diggs Colbert, Fred Moten, Dael Orlandersmith and Suzan-Lori Parks. We will consider how performances of passing have the potential to challenge institutional power. (Same as English and Creative Writing 241.)

BSt 335U The Multi-Racial Experience

Portland State University
Portland, Oregon
2014-2015

Explores what it means to identify oneself or be identified as multiracial/ethnic. Considers how social class, gender, race and other factors shape the multiracial experience. In addition, explores interracial relationship and the representation of multiracials in the media.

Advanced Topics in Asian American Studies; The Multiracial Experience in the US (AAST498Y)

University of Maryland
Fall 2014

Lawrence Davis

Course will focus on multiracial (“mixed race”) identity and how the experiences of multiracial people contribute to our broader understanding of racial identity and formation. Course draws on literature and research produced by and about multiracial people. In addition, students will access the topic through comment boards, live chat sessions, podcasts, and multimedia. Readings and other course materials have been selected to challenge and grow students’ understandings of race and mixed race. Also offered as AMST418W.

CNST 419 – The Metis People of Canada

University of Calgary
Fall 2013

An interdisciplinary study of the Metis people of Canada, with special emphasis on the social, economic, and political factors influencing their emergence and continued survival as a distinct indigenous group in Canada. (formerly Canadian Studies 401.04)

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English 4640G: Construction of Racial Identity in Post Civil War America

Huron University College at Western University
London, Ontario, Canada
Winter 2013

Neil Brooks, Associate Professor, English

Course Description: Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination argues that the canonical American literary tradition can only be understood after recognizing the presence of an often silenced, but almost ubiquitous Africanist persona. This persona served as a negative stereotype against which the dominant American identity could define itself. However, even Morrison’s groundbreaking work re-inscribes the binary between Black and White in America and fails to theorize adequately the ways in which bi-racial and multi-racial identity have complicated the ideologies she discusses. This course will begin with Morrison’s analysis and then look at several novels and stories which the explore the instability of any color line between Black and White in America.

Course Objectives: This course addresses the examination of how racial identity, particularly mixed race identity, is constructed in America through close engagement with selected literary works written by Americans since the end of the Civil War. By the end of the course students should have improved their critical reading and writing in ways which will enable their success in a wide variety of University courses. Further, students will have learned American historical background, feminist literary theory, patterns of racial construction, theories of performativity, and skills in analyzing artistic achievement within the works. Finally, the course aims to provide the framework for applying these skills and knowledge in engaging with the narratives students will encounter and create outside the classroom.

Course Material:

• Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison
• Pudd’nhead Wilson, Mark Twain
• The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, James Weldon Johnson
• Quicksand, Nella Larsen
• Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
• Tar Baby, Toni Morrison
• Caucasia, Danzy Senna

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477A Race Mixing in U.S.A. History

California State University, Fullerton
2013-2015

History of racial mixing in the United States. Experiences of interracial families and especially their mixed race progeny. Complicates understanding of racial categories and hierarchies over time.

Race and Medicine

Princeton University
AAS 403 / ANT 403 (EM)
Spring 2013-2014

Carolyn M. Rouse, Professor of Anthropology

In 1998, then-President Clinton set a national goal that by the year 2010 race, ethnic, and gender disparities in six disease categories would be eliminated. While the agenda, called Healthy People 2010, was a noble effort, many of the goals were not met. This course examines what went wrong. For a final project, students will be asked to propose their own solutions for eliminating health disparities.

Sample reading list:

• Brian Smedley, ed., Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial & Ethnic Disparities
• Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid:The Dark History of Medical Experimentation
• Agustin Fuentes, Race, Monogamy and Other Lies They Told Me
• Troy Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics
• Jonathan Kahn, Race in a Bottle: Racialized Medicine in a Post-Genomic Age
• Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

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79-173 Freshman Seminar: Barack Obama and the History of Race in America

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Department of History
2013-2014

Well before he was elected the forty-fourth President of the United States, Barack Obama challenged Americans to think anew about the history of race in this country. In this course, we will examine President Obama’s life, writings, and speeches as the foundation for a larger investigation into the history of race and, in particular, the struggle to achieve racial equality within the United States. We will read President Obama’s first biography and several of his key speeches as well as a recent history of the Civil Rights Movement. Our goal will be not only to probe the life and ideas of President Obama but to examine the larger history of race in America. Topics will include the geographic and temporal diversity of the Civil Rights Movement, the shifting meanings of “mixed-race,” race and American foreign policy, the history of racial inequality in housing, education, and employment, affirmative action, and race and immigration.