Mixed Race Studies

Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview (Fourth Edition)

Westview Press
July 2011
400 pages
Trade paperback ISBN: 9780813345543

Audrey Smedley, Professor Emerita of Anthropology and African American Studies
Virginia Commonwealth University

Brian D. Smedley, Vice President and Director
Health Policy Institute
Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies

In a sweeping work that traces the idea of race for more than three centuries, Audrey Smedley shows that “race” is a cultural invention that has been used variously and opportunistically since the eighteenth century. Race, in its origin, was not a product of science but of a folk ideology reflecting a new form of social stratification and a rationalization for inequality among the peoples of North America.

New coauthor Brian Smedley joins Audrey Smedley in updating this renowned and groundbreaking text. The fourth edition includes a compelling new chapter on the health impacts of the racial worldview, as well as a thoroughly rewritten chapter that explores the election of Barack Obama and the evolving role of race in American political history. This edition also incorporates recent findings on the human genome and the implications of genomics. Drawing on new understandings of DNA expression, the authors scrutinize the positions of contemporary race scientists who maintain that race is a valid biological concept.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Some Theoretical Considerations
• 2. Etymology of the Term “Race”
• 3. Antecedents of the Racial Worldview
• 4. The Growth of the English Ideology about Human Differences in America
• 5. The Arrival of Africans and Descent into Slavery
• 6. Comparing Slave Systems: The Significance of “Racial” Servitude
• 7. Eighteenth-Century Thought and Crystallization of the Ideology of Race
• 8. Antislavery and the Entrenchment of a Racial Worldview
• 9. The Rise of Science and Scientific Racism
• 10. Growth of The Racial Worldview in 19th Century Science
• 11. Science and the Expansion of Race Ideology Beyond the US
• 12. Twentieth-Century Developments in Race Ideology
• 13. Changing Perspectives on Human Variation in Science
• 14. Dismantling the Folk Idea of Race: The Election of Barack Obama and the Transformations of an Ideology
• 15. The Health Consequences of the Racial Worldview
• References
• Index

Hapa-Palooza challenges mixed-race stereotypes

The Vancouver Sun
2011-09-07

Vivian Luk, Special To The Sun

‘We’re 100-per-cent whole, we’re Canadian,’ says filmmaker who faced identity struggles and discrimination while growing up

The nickname Super Nip – partly derived from a Second World War term to describe Japanese people – and racial jokes followed Jeff Chiba Stearns everywhere when he was growing up in Kelowna.

More common, however, was the question, “So, what are you anyway?” Back in elementary and high school, Stearns, now 32, would answer truthfully: He is half-Japanese (the other half being a mixture of English, Scottish, Russian and German).

His “monster truck-driving, redneck” friends would treat him like Fez, the fictional foreign exchange student from Fox Network’s That ’70s Show, whose country of origin was one of the series’ longest-running jokes.

Other times, given his slightly darker complexion, he would say for fun that he is Hawaiian or Tahitian.

But asked that question now, Stearns, an animated filmmaker, answers, “I’m hapa.”

“Hapa” is a Hawaiian term that describes someone of interracial descent. A new cultural festival in Vancouver this week will celebrate and raise awareness of people of mixedroots origins.

From today to Saturday, Hapa-Palooza will feature film, literature, dance and music produced by mixedrace artists, as well as panel discussions. While the festival is meant to foster dialogue about the identity struggles and discrimination that many mixed-race Canadians face, Stearns, whose documentary on growing up in a hapa family will be featured on Thursday, said the goal is also to challenge the idea that mixed people are only part Canadian.

“I don’t like that people refer to themselves as half because we’re not broken, we don’t need fixing,” he said. “I’ve grown to understand that we’re still 100-per-cent whole, we’re Canadian.”…

Read the entire article here.

A Snug Little Flock: The Social Origins of the Riel Resistance, 1869-70

Watson & Dwyer Publishing, Winnipeg, Manitoba
1991
290 pages
ISBN: 0-920486-48-7

Frits Pannekoek, President
Athabasca University, Athabasca, Alberta, Canada

Questions about the identities of the mixed-blood Indian-European peoples of Canada and the United States have puzzled historians and anthropologists in both countries. Who are the mixedbloods of North America? Why do they have a strong collective identity in Canada, and virtually none in the United States? Why is the collective identity in Canada largely French-Cree and Catholic? What happened to the English-speaking Protestant Halfbreeds? Why do the Protestant, English-speaking mixed-bloods no longer exist as a unique group either in Canada or in the United States, but identify themselves as White, Indian or Métis in Canada and Indian or White in the United States? While it has become commonplace to view mixed-blood peoples as products of the culture and economy of the fur trade, it is much more difficult to trace the roots of the process that created an identifiable Metis ‘nation’. It is even more difficult to determine why no strong mixed-blood identity emerged in the United States.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The Red River Setting
• 2 A Question of Leadership
• 3 The First Years
• 4 A Little Britain in the Wilderness
• 5 Free Trade and Social Fragmentation
• 6 A Strife of Blood
• 7 The Rev. G. O. Corbett and an Uprising of the People
• 8 The Halfbreeds and the Riel Protest
• 9 The Métis and the Riel Protest
• 10 Conclusion
• Historiographical Note
• Selected Bibliography
• End Notes
• Index

Read the entire book here.

‘Obama’s My Dad’: Mixed Race Suspects, Political Anxiety and the New Imperialism

thirdspace: a journal of feminist theory & culture
Volume 10, Number 1 (2011)

Rachel Gorman, Lecturer
Women and Gender Studies Institute
University of Toronto

In this article I will argue that the ideology of white supremacy is currently being reproduced as an ideology of political supremacy. I explore narratives of Obama and my father, and bring a transnational feminist framework to an examination of ontological and cultural ideologies of mixed race identity.

All my life I have encountered suspicion about my race. As a child in a working class neighbourhood of Toronto, Canada in the 1970s, my mixed race identity seemed to be an ontological threat to my European immigrant and white settler neighbours, and my ‘Mediterranean’ appearance rendered me unintelligible in relation to Blackness As a pre-teen transplanted to Muscat, Oman in the 1980s, I was intelligible as Arab, which, given Oman’s historical and geographical proximity to Eastern Africa, did not preclude African ancestry. While I was unremarkable at the national school, I was questioned by British ‘expats’ when I circulated in the international neighbourhood, despite (or perhaps because of) the presence of several mixed families. Back in Toronto during the aggressive intensification of war and occupation in the Middle East in the 2000s, my racial ambiguity has become suspicious in new ways. I am dating this shift from September 2000, the beginning of the second Intifada, not September 2001, when the New American Century went prime time. Much happened between the two Septembers–mass protests at the summit on the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas at Québec City in April 2001; the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa in August 2001. In the weeks following Durban, the global struggle to maintain white supremacy was recast as the will to reestablish American political supremacy. It was also during this time that, as an antiwar and anti-occupation organizer, my racial ambiguity was reconstituted through suspicions over whether I harbour dangerous worldviews…

…A phenomenology of race is useful to continue to dispel the illusions of white supremacists who argue that Obama’s presidency means we are living in a post-racist world. Indeed, there are many questions to be asked about how mixed race people are emerging as tropes of the triumph of a liberal brand of diversity—as Kimberley DaCosta argues, the identity ‘multiracial’ emerged in the US context in part through a struggle over racial categories on government forms, and in part through niche market recognition. In order to resist the tendency to analytically collapse antiracism into advocacy for market inclusion, we need a phenomenology of race that allows us to grasp both ontology and culture in relation to political consciousness…

Read the entire article here.

Mismatched racial identities, colourism, and health in Toronto and Vancouver

Social Science & Medicine
Volume 73, Issue 8, October 2011
pages 1152–1162
DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2011.07.030

Gerry Veenstra, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of British Columbia

Using original telephone survey data collected from adult residents of Toronto (n=685) and Vancouver (n=814) in 2009, I investigate associations between mental and physical health and variously conceived racial identities. An ‘expressed racial identity’ is a self-identification with a racial grouping that a person will readily express to others when asked to fit into official racial classifications presented by Census forms, survey researchers, insurance forms, and the like. Distinguishing between Asian, Black, South Asian, and White expressed racial identities, I find that survey respondents expressing Black identity are the most likely to report high blood pressure or hypertension, a risk that is slightly attenuated by socioeconomic status, and that respondents expressing Asian identity are the most likely to report poorer self-rated mental health and self-rated overall health, risks that are not explained by socioeconomic status. I also find that darker-skinned Black respondents are more likely than lighter-skinned Black respondents to report poor health outcomes, indicating that colourism, processes of discrimination which privilege lighter-skinned people of colour over their darker-skinned counterparts, exists and has implications for well-being in Canada as it does in the United States. Finally, ‘reflected racial identity’ refers to the racial identity that a person believes that others tend to perceive him or her to be. I find that expressed and reflected racial identities differ from one another for large proportions of self-expressed Black and South Asian respondents and relatively few self-expressed White and Asian respondents. I also find that mismatched racial identities correspond with relatively high risks of various poor health outcomes, especially for respondents who consider themselves White but believe that others tend to think they are something else. I conclude by presenting a framework for conceptualizing multifaceted suites of racial identities and relating their various components and inconsistencies between them to health outcomes.

Jordan Clarke: “Something In-between” @ Hang Man Gallery

Hang Man Gallery
756 Queen Street East
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Open Tuesday-Sunday, 12:00-17:00 ET (Local Time)

Exhibit Duration: 2011-09-06 through 2011-09-25
Opening Reception: 2011-09-08, 19:00-21:00 EDT (Local Time)

Jordan Clarke

Artist Jordan Clarke explores her mixed-race identity through paintings of self-portraiture. This series looks at being “in-between” as both a physical and psychological state for bi-racial women of the 21st century, where there is constant pressure to assume predetermined racial and gender roles created by society.
 
Clarke most recently received a grant from the Ontario Arts Council.  In 2008, she studied at the Academy of Realist Art in Toronto, completing the Drawing curriculum in 2009.  In 2007, she graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design, where she received a BFA majoring in Drawing and Painting.  While attending OCAD, she received the opportunity to participate in the off-campus studies program in Florence, Italy from 2005-2006.

For more information, click here.

Creating Frames and Crossing Borders: An Autobiographical Exploration of Race and Identity

University of New Brunswick
July 1998
131+ pages

Diane Ho-Fatt

This study is an exploration of the cultural constructions of race using theoretical perspectives of postmodernism through the methodology of autobiography. I explore the constructions of race and identity in my own life by deconstructing the stories of mixed-race that have been applied to me and posing an alternative to the construction of identity. The discourse of race, I argue, fits a modernist notion of self and identity which reduces and frames identity in terms of race. I propose a postmodern definition of identity which provokes difference rather than fixes it and which views identity as multiple and fluid, a notion which makes sense to me and my experiences. Important to this study is the dominance of whiteness in marginalizing others, like myself, who do not fit that norm. Racial discourse has silenced me as mixed-woman, and a critical notion underscores the need and the fruitfulness of self-empowerment and voice.

The study raises questions about deconstructing race, multiculturalism, identity, politics, curriculum and instruction, and the use of autobiography as a research methodology. It makes no claims to have definitive answers but hopefully provides some insight for parents, teachers, and others who are in pedagogical relationships in the context of a white world.

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Education in the Graduate Academic Unit of Curriculum and Instruction

Table of Contents

• 1. Breaking My Silence
• 2. Constructing Identity
  • The Dilemma of Difference
  • A Modernist Discourse Constructs Identity
  • Postmodern Discourse Constructs (and Deconstructs) Identity
  • Reading and Writing My Life
  • Politicizing The Personal
  • A Critical Narratology
• 3. Mixed Messages: What the Literature Says About Mixed-Race
  • A Name to Call Myself
  • Mixed Messages
  • The “Tragic Mulatto“
  • Hybrid Vigour and the “Tragic Mulatto”
  • Sexuality
  • The “Exotic”
  • “The Hope of the Future”: Do Mixed-Race Subjects Really Challenge Race?
  • The Politics of Representation
• 4. The Stories I Live By
  • Childhood
  • Pieces of the Past
    • Fragments: Memory and the Imagination
    • Constructing Reality: A Child Interprets
    • Grandma’s Shadow
    • Little China Girl
    • Growing up “Chinese”
    • Getting An Education: School Constructs Identity
  • Another World
    • Leaving Home
    • This Isn’t New England!: Whiteness
    • Making Friends: School/Community/Nationality Construct Identity
    • The Seduction of Whiteness
  • Higher Learning: My Education Continues
  • A Piece of the Puzzling: Finding Others Like Me
  • Having Many Homes
• 5. Crossing Borders
  • Frames of Identity
  • Recommendations
• Bibliography

Read the entire dissertation here.

Long Lance

National Film Board of Canada
1986
Running Time: 00:55:00

Bernie Dichek, Director

Was he a black man, a white man, or an Indian chief? This documentary looks at legendary and fascinating impostor Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance. In the early 1900s, he garnered international acclaim as a soldier, journalist, writer, photographer, bon vivant and movie star. But despite his very public life, his origins remain a mystery. Based on a book by Donald Smith, this film outlines Long Lance’s almost unbelievable life story.

For more information, click here.

Maroon – On the Trail of Creoles in North America

National Film Board of Canada
2005
Running Time: 01:15:08

André Gladu, Director

Colette Loumède, Producer

Louisiana’s Creole culture helped shape the New World and contributed to the emergence of jazz. But what remains of this unique, mixed-race society, with roots in France, Africa, the Caribbean, Spain and America? Maroon searches for the origins of this little-understood and endangered culture and show how it is doing today. In this second part of his La piste Amérique series, documentary filmmaker André Gladu continues his exploration of the Francophone presence in North America. Maroon is a vibrant travelogue that goes back into history in order to shed light on the present. In French with English subtitles.

For more information, click here.

Mothering Multiracial Children: Indicators of Effective Interracial Parenting

McGill University
1997
123 pages

Nicolette De Smit

A Thesis Submitted to The School of Social Work Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for The Master’s Degree in Social Work

The goal of this descriptive/exploratory study was to examine the behavior and attitudes of eleven white and five non-white mothers involved in raising multiracial, preschool-aged, biological children. A theoretical framework based on research carried out with multiracial individuals was used to define interracial parenting strategies that promoted strong racial and personal identities in their children. Through individual interviews, using a questionnaire, an opinion survey, and four vignettes that described racially complex situations, two areas of parenting were examined: contact maintained by mothers with the child’s minority background, and the mothers capacity to effectively problem-solve.
 
Little difference was found between the responses of white and non-white mothers. However, among white mothers, the younger, less educated mothers had considerably more contact with the minority culture than did the older, highly educated mothers. The latter, however, performed significantly better than their younger counterparts in providing responses that displayed more of the attitudes and parenting strategies recommended in previous research.

Read the entire thesis here.