Mixed Race Studies

Mixed Chicks Chat with Professor Rudy Guevarra

Mixed Chicks Chat (Founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival)
Hosted by Fanshen Cox, Heidi W. Durrow and Jennifer Frappier
Episode: #261: Rudy Guevarra
When: Wednesday, 2012-06-20, 21:00Z (17:00 EDT, 14:00 PDT)

Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr., Assistant Professor, Asian Pacific American Studies, School of Social Transformation, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Arizona State University, Tempe

[This is the final episode of Mixed Chicks Chat.]

Rudy P. Guevarra Jr. is an assistant professor of Asian Pacific American Studies at Arizona State University. He is the author of Filipinos in San Diego: Images of America Series, and coeditor of Transnational Crossroads: Remapping the Americas and the Pacific and Crossing Lines: Race and Mixed Race Across the Geohistorical Divide.

His new book, Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego, is a social-historical interpretation of two ethnic groups, one Mexican, the other Filipino, whose paths led both groups to San Diego, California. Rudy P. Guevarra Jr. traces the earliest interactions of both groups with Spanish colonialism to illustrate how these historical ties and cultural bonds laid the foundation for what would become close interethnic relationships and communities in twentieth-century California and the Pacific West Coast. Through racially restrictive covenants, both groups were confined to segregated living spaces along with African Americans, other Asian groups, and a few European immigrant clusters. Within these urban multiracial spaces, Mexicans and Filipinos coalesced to build a world of their own. Mexipino children, living simultaneously in two cultures, have forged a new identity for themselves and their lives are the lens through which these two communities are examined. Using archival sources, oral histories, newspapers, and personal collections and photographs, Guevarra defines the niche that this particular group carved out for itself.

Listen to the episode (00:33:22) here. Download the episode here.

Racism, White Supremacy and Biracial/Multiraciality (2011)

Tim Wise, Antiracist Essayist, Author and Educator
September 2011

Tim Wise

From my September 2011 talk at Spalding University in Louisville, KY. In this snippet, I respond to a question about how we should understand or think about biracial and multiracial folks’ experiences in a system of racism/white supremacy.

[Transcribed by Steven F. Riley]

I think it would be wise for people who are biracial and multiracial to never forget that this is a system of formal historical and institutional white supremacy. And I’m afraid sometimes, there are a lot incentives that the culture puts out there to biracial and multiracial people to forget that. Right. Because they’re not quite as Black or they’re not quite as Brown. And so there is a tendency for people to think that they really escape that system. Right. That they’re not really in that system. And look, and I think that every person ought to be able to claim whatever parts of and all parts of their identity. So if… look, if you’re Tiger Woods and you want to call yourself “Cablinasian,” which is what he did back in the early part of his career. He called himself Cablinasian because he wanted to honor Caucasian part, the Asian part, the Black part, the Native American part. Okay, here’s the deal… He was Cablinasian. He instited on that. He was not Black!

Okay. And then… when Tiger Woods did what Tiger Woods did… repeatedly, apparently, I went on the chat boards—sports chat boards, not political chat boards–sports chat boards. [Be]cause you can tell a lot about the culture based on the annonymous comments that folks post on sports boards. Forget politics, just read any post after a NBA game, after a NFL game, hell, read the comments after a storm goes through your community. Any story at all, folks will bring up race… with an “Anonymous,” just “Anonymous.” They never put their name and they have no avatar, it’s just that shadow-head and “Anonymous” and they put some nonsense. And so, I went on the chatboard after this Tiger Woods thing broke. And it was funny, everyone who had stuff to say about him, none of them said, “You know, this is just what Cablinasian men do.” [laughter] “What do you expect from a Cablinasian.” [laughter].

That’s not what they said, he was Black… as midnight, as soon as he did something that reminded the dominate group of the stereotype they had come to believe. So, multiracial, biracial folks: claim all of, claim every piece of it. Do not forget where one still sits on the trajectory of white supremacy. Because when once you forget that, there is real danger, real danger.

Listen to the clip here (00:02:14). Download the clip here (395 KB).

“The One and Only Cheerios”~ The “NEW” American Family?

Mixed Race Radio
Blog Talk Radio
2013-07-10, 16:00Z (12:00 EDT)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

Join us on Wednesday July 10th, 2013 as we explore the newest General Mills Cheerios commercial that recently debuted. We will discuss the backlash and speak with an all-star guest line-up while exploring what many of us have known for years: The “NEW” American family is mixed, blended, and splendid!

Listen to the episode here.

Earnest Harris Declares: NO MORE RACE

Mixed Race Radio
Blog Talk Radio
2013-07-03, 16:00Z (12:00 EDT)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

Earnest Harris, Producer/Director/Talent Manager/Writer
No More Race

Earnest Harris has written extensively on matters related to race relations, especially focused on moving beyond “racial” concepts and getting our society to a place where color and cultural differences might play less of  volatile role in how we work, play and deal with one another. His study and focus on this issue comes from seeing the unfortunate ways in which so many of our societal dealings, whether it be politics, dating, religion, neighborhoods and education are impacted by “racial” influencers. It has been his mission for most of those years as a journalist and writer to help bring people together and get beyond these superficial ways of living our lives.

An award-winning journalist, Earnest has written on this topic for New York Newsday, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Dallas Morning News, The Riverfront Times (St. Louis), National Review magazine, Politico, The Huffington  Post, Hispanic magazine and many others. He has also been a political columnist with the daily paper, The Austin American-Statesman, the editor-in-chief of a weekly newspaper in Washington, D.C., The American Weekly News, and the host of his own talk radio shows in Austin, Texas and St. Louis, Missouri.

Earnest has also directed and produced one feature film that was nationally distributed, “A Simple Promise,” and is currently working on several other films at the moment. Earnest also oversees Harris Management, a talent management company in Los Angeles, where he manages actors, directors and recording artists. Additionally, Harris taught communications for two sessions at the famed Lyndon Baines Johnson Graduate School for Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin as a Woodrow Wilson Program Instructor.

He is married and has two children.

Listen to the episode here.

‘Americanah’ Author Explains ‘Learning’ To Be Black In The U.S.

Fresh Air from WHYY
National Public Radio
2013-06-27

Terry Gross, Host

When the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was growing up in Nigeria she was not used to being identified by the color of her skin. That changed when she arrived in the United States for college. As a black African in America, Adichie was suddenly confronted with what it meant to be a person of color in the United States. Race as an idea became something that she had to navigate and learn.

The learning process took some time and was episodic. Adichie recalls, for example, an undergraduate class in which the subject of watermelon came up. A student had said something about watermelon to an African-American classmate, who was offended by the comment.

“I remember sitting there thinking, ‘But what’s so bad about watermelons? Because I quite like watermelons,’ ” Adichie tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross.

She felt that her African-American classmate was annoyed with her because Adichie didn’t share her anger — but she didn’t have the context to understand why. The history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade was not taught to students in Nigeria. Adichie had yet to learn fully about the history of slavery — and its continuing reverberations — in the U.S.

“Race is such a strange construct,” says Adichie, “because you have to learn what it means to be black in America. So you have to learn that watermelon is supposed to be offensive.”

Adichie is a MacArthur Fellowship winner and author of the novels Purple Hibiscus and Half of A Yellow Sun. Her new novel, Americanah, explores this question of what it means to be black in the U.S., and tells the story of a young Nigerian couple, one of whom leaves for England and the other of whom leaves for America.

The title, she says, is a Nigerian word for those who have been to the U.S. and return with American affectations.

“It’s often used,” she says, “in the context of a kind of gentle mockery.”…

Read the transcript here. Listen to the interview here. Download the interview here.

Podcast interview with Paisley Rekdal, poet and 2013 UNT Rilke Prize winner

University of North Texas, Denton, Texas
2013-04-29

Julie K. West, Publications Specialist
Office of Research and Economic Development

Poet Paisley Rekdal is the 2013 recipient of the University of North Texas Rilke Prize. The $10,000 award, named for the great German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, recognizes a book written by a mid-career poet and published in the preceding year that demonstrates exceptional artistry and vision. Paisley visited the UNT Department of English in April 2013 to accept the award for her prize-winning collection of poetry, “Animal Eye,” published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. She joins Julie West, publications specialist with the UNT Office of Research, in an audio podcast interview to discuss her poetry and the creative writing process.

…JW: But yet that does seem to be somewhat of a theme running not only through this work but you, yourself, as a Chinese-American with Norwegian ancestry … surely you are used to switching lens …

PR: doubled

JW: … and having that doubled perspective, and I’m just now thinking of that, even, as I hear you read this last poem.

PR: I think that’s very true. I think that’s a really good point. What’s funny though, is the doubled-ness of my vision is not cultural because I grew up in America. So, to a certain extent, the doubled-ness of my vision is something that’s been placed on me. The ways in which — depending on who’s looking at me — I’m either potentially Chinese, or White, or a mixture of both … when people are interested in my ancestry and they’ll ask me questions about that. For me I feel like there’s a real — even though any self contains multiplicities and complexities — I feel like there’s a real unity to my vision. But the experience of being biracial in America means that I do recognize how I can appear two ways and what I mean can mean multiple things. So the willingness and the interest in playing with multiple perspectives — moving in and out of different bodies — I think reflects that, for sure, what you’re just pointing out — that experience of being biracial. But it doesn’t actually reflect my own identity, if that makes any sense. How biracialism exists outside of me, even though I, myself, am biracial…

Listen to the podcast here. Read the transcript here.

Professor Dorothy Roberts — Challenging Concepts of Race

Mixed Race Radio
Blog Talk Radio
2013-06-26, 16:00Z (12:00 EDT)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

Dorothy E. Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology; Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania

Dorothy Roberts is the fourteenth Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, George A. Weiss University Professor, and the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at University of Pennsylvania, where she holds appointments in the Law School and Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology. An internationally recognized scholar, public intellectual, and social justice advocate, she has written and lectured extensively on the interplay of gender, race, and class in legal issues and has been a leader in transforming public thinking and policy on reproductive health, child welfare, and bioethics.

Professor Roberts is the author of the award-winning books Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Random House/Pantheon, 1997) and Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books/Civitas, 2002), as well as co-editor of six books on constitutional law and gender. She has also published more than eighty articles and essays in books and scholarly journals, including Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, and Stanford Law Review.  Her latest book, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century, was published by the New Press in July 2011.

For more information, click here.

CREE w/ Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, PhD

Counter-Racist Evolving Engineer (CREE)
Blog Talk Radio
2013-06-16

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Professor of Sociology
Duke University

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, PhD,  is a professor of sociology and a council member of Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Duke University.  He is the author of several books including the acclaimed Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America.  He is also the author and co-author of numerous other books and papers. Most interestingly for this program, Dr. Bonilla-Silva co-authored a chapter in Changing Terrain of Race and Ethnicity: Theory, Methods and Public Policy entitled “‘We are all Americans!’: The Latin Americanization of Race Relations in the USA”.

The center question of this discussion will be the functionality of the term “non-black people” in eliminating the global system of racism (white/light domination).

Listen to the episode here. Download the episode here.

Dr. J .T. Mills: Helping Students Explore Concepts of Race

Mixed Race Radio
Blog Talk Radio
2013-06-19, 16:00Z (12:00 EDT)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

John T. Mills, Assistant Director of Multicultural Affairs
Rowan University, Glassboro, New Jersery

Legitimate knowledge regarding the construction of race in America is absent in today’s youth and college aged students. It is imperative to have an understanding of the fluidity of race in America and its context to the systems that perpetuate the ongoing racial divisions in communities and disparities in health care, economic prosperity, and everyday interactions, for example.

Such clarity for these issues is overshadowed by the notion of post racialism in this society that teaches us to avoid or suppress such discussions in the axiom of “political correctness.”  One only needs to look to the President of the United States who is described as the first African American/Black man to hold that office when he is in reality bi-racial. Moreover, the complexity of race in the United States can further be interrogated in his self identification because he is aware of the social, political, and global lenses that identify him as a man of color over his White ancestry.

It is in this context that Dr. Mills works to create environments and opportunities for students to explore the nuances of race and race relations in America in the hopes of creating an awareness that would bring about greater understanding among and between all people.

These discussions then must begin with analyzing why and how race came about in this country during the 17th and 18th centuries during the economic development of the United States when there was much more cross racial cooperation and even harmony at one point than our history books tell us. Blacks, Whites, and Native American Indians intermingled to create a nation and have had more historical commonalities that is being taught and that needs to be addressed to expose the modern forms of raced based oppression that exists today.

For more information, click here.

More Talk Radio on 06/17/13 [with Professor Greg Carter]

More Talk Radio
KBOO Community Radio
Portland, Oregon
2013-06-17, 15:00-16:00Z, 08:00-09:00 PDT (Local Time)

The United States of the United Races: A Utopian History of Racial Mixing

Hosts Celeste Carey and Cecil Prescod interview Greg Carter about his new book “The United States of the United Races: A Utopian History of Racial Mixing.”

Barack Obama’s historic presidency has re-inserted mixed race into the national conversation. While the troubled and pejorative history of racial amalgamation throughout U.S. history is a familiar story, Greg Carter asks us to reconsider an understudied optimist tradition, one which has praised mixture as a means to create a new people, bring equality to all, and fulfill an American destiny. He re-envisions racial mixture as a vehicle for pride and a way for citizens to examine mixed America as a better America.

Greg Carter is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

In “The United States of the United Races: A Utopian History of Racial Mixing” Greg Carter explores a broad range of documents and moments, unearthing a new narrative that locates hope in racial mixture.

Download the episode here.