Mixed Race Studies

Doubts Over Indigenous Identity in Academia Spark ‘Pretendian’ Claims

The New York Times
2022-10-15

Vjosa Isai

Some Canadian universities now require additional proof to back up Indigenous heritage, replacing self-declaration policies.

Since announcing discoveries of evidence last year that hundreds of Indigenous children were likely buried in unmarked graves at church-run residential school sites, Indigenous groups in Canada have captured more national attention.

So, too, has a growing group of Canadian public figures, mostly within academia, who have been accused of falsely claiming to be Indigenous.

Earlier this week, an investigation published by Canada’s national broadcaster, the C.B.C., found that the claims to Cree ancestry of a prominent scholar and former judge, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, did not align with historical records and interviews…

Read the entire article here.

University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) Special Research Collection

Library at University of California, Santa Barbara
2022-08-22

G. Reginal Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

G. Reginald Daniel, UCSB Professor of Sociology and member of the Advisory Board of MASC (Multiracial Americans of Southern California), and Paul Spickard, UCSB Professor of History, in coordination with Danelle Moon, Head of UCSB Library Special Research Collection, have been collecting primary documents from support and educational organizations involved in the multiracial movement, particularly from the late 1970s through the early 2000s. This period was the height of discussions surrounding changes in official data collection on race, as in the census, to make it possible for multiracial individuals to identify as such.

HISTORY

Beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, interracial families and multiracial adults became part of a multiracial movement that endeavored, among other concerns, to change official racial-data collection standards that required individuals to identify with only one racial background. Activists were unsuccessful in bringing about changes on the 1990 census. Yet their efforts intensified in the wake of the census. Consequently, by the 2000 census, for the first time, and largely through the activism of multiracial organizations, multiracial-identified individuals were allowed to self-enumerate by checking more than one racial box on the census.

On the 2000 census, multiracials (or the “more than more race” population) totaled 7 million or 2.4 percent of the population. Based on 2010 census data their numbers increased to 9 million people—or 2.9 percent of the population. Although multiracials still make up only a fraction of the total population, this is a growth rate of about 32 percent since 2000.

WHY CALIFORNIA, WHY SANTA BARBARA

The West Coast, particularly California and Hawaii, has the highest concentration of interracial couples and the largest number and highest proportion of multiracial-identified individuals. California, in particular, has been a major center of multiracial activism, as well as academic research and university courses on multiracial identity. The University of California, specifically the Berkeley and Santa Barbara campuses, has the longest-standing university courses on this topic in the United States.

The UCSB Library Special Research Collection currently holds documents from iPride (Interracial/Intercultural Pride) and MASC, which, along with IMAGE, the Amerasian League, and Hapa Issues Forum, are among the local support and educational organizations founded in California. The Association of MultiEthnic Americans (AMEA), which was a national umbrella organization for numerous local groups, as well as A Place for Us National (APUN), which was another national organization, originated and maintained headquarters in California. Project RACE (Reclassify All Children Equality) is an additional national organization with headquarters in California although it was originally located in Roswell, George. That said, iPride and MASC are the two oldest organizations founded in California as well as two of the oldest organizations nationally. Moreover, they were two of the organizations most actively involved in deliberations surrounding the collection of official data on race.

HOW TO CONNECT

The documents from iPride and MASC have been catalogued and are ready for public perusal by those interested in consulting primary documents on the multiracial movement. Currently, the items can only be viewed within the Special Research Collection reading room. Hopefully, the library will be able, at some point in the near future, to secure funding to make many, if not all, of the documents available online. A list of the library holdings can be found on the UCSB Library website (https://www.library.ucsb.edu) under the heading “Archives and Manuscripts” by entering “Multiracial” in the “Search” box. That will take clients to the individual iPride and MASC collections. Clients can download a pdf that contains the specific holdings for each organization after clicking on the red- highlighted organization titles. Go to the upper righthand corner and click “View entire collection guide.” Subsequent documents donated by other organizations will be similarly catalogued.

The Proud Portrait of Richard T. Greener

The Crimson
2020-09-17

Sophia S. Liang, Staff Writer

Greener’s rosy recollection of Harvard reflects a series of contradictions that characterized his life, both during and after college. Greener was a light-skinned Black man straddling racial divides in a segregated world. He received life-changing opportunities at a university where he struggled with loneliness and lacked faculty support. And despite his tremendous contributions in activism and public service, he remains relatively unknown to historians today.

In an 1881 speech at the Harvard Club of New York, Richard T. Greener, Class of 1870, lavished his alma mater with praise: “[Harvard] answered the rising spirit of independence and liberty by abolishing all distinctions founded upon color, blood, and rank,” he told an applauding audience. “There has been but one test for all. Ability, character, and merit — these are the sole passports to her favor.”

Such sentimental remarks may come as something of a surprise coming from the first Black graduate of Harvard College. The University, after all, had not been a friendly place to most who came before him and many who came after — nor, at times, to Greener. Indeed, the Harvard Club of Washington, D.C. would reject his own application four years later for no reason other than his race.

Greener’s rosy recollection of Harvard reflects a series of contradictions that characterized his life, both during and after college. Greener was a light-skinned Black man straddling racial divides in a segregated world. He received life-changing opportunities at a university where he struggled with loneliness and lacked faculty support. And despite his tremendous contributions in activism and public service, he remains relatively unknown to historians today…

Read the entire article here.

The Meaning of Multiraciality: A Racially Queer Exploration of Multiracial College Students’ Identity Production

Lexington Books (an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield)
June 2022
168 pages
Trim: 6 x 9
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-7936-1727-9
eBook ISBN: 978-1-7936-1728-6

Aurora Chang, Director of Faculty Development and Career Advancement
George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia

The Meaning of Multiraciality: A Racially Queer Exploration of Multiracial College Students’ Identity Production provides a comprehensive overview of Multiraciality as a term, experience, and identity using data from a study of Multiracial college students and well as the author’s own experiences as a Multiracial person. Utilizing a racially queer framework, they discuss what it means to be a Multiracial insider (being a Multiracial researcher studying Multiracial study participants), the counter-stories of Multiracial college students, the theorizing that has emerged as a result, and the educational consequences and impacts on Mulitracial students overall. The author explores the following questions: How do Multiracial students produce their identities? How do Multiracial students exercise their agency? How does the notion of Multiraciality perpetuate and disrupt notions of race? How can we expand theoretical understandings of race so that they take Multiracial people into account, specifically within educational settings? The author illustrates the agentic ways in which Multiracial college students come to understand and experience the complexity of their racialized identity production. Their counter-narratives reveal an otherwise invisible student population, providing an opportunity to broaden critical discourses around education and race.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Multiracial Me
• Chapter Two: The History and Complexity of the Term, Multiracial
• Chapter Three: Multiraciality and Critical Race Theory
• Chapter Four: Multiracial College Students’ Counter-Narratives
• Chapter Five: Multiracial Students and Educational Implications
• Chapter Six: Racial Queerness
• Epilogue
• References
• About the Author

Special Issue “Multiracial Identities and Experiences in/under White Supremacy”

Social Sciences
Volume 11, Number 2, Special Issue “Multiracial Identities and Experiences in/under White Supremacy”
Published 2022-02-21

Guest Editors:

David L. Brunsma, Professor of Sociology
Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia

Jennifer Sims, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Alabama, Huntsville

Dear Colleagues,

Social scientific scholarship on Multiracial experiences and processes of identity development have been the subject of social scientific scholarship for over three decades. During this time, scholars from a wide variety disciplines, such as sociology, psychology, geography, history, political science, and the humanities, along with the critical interdisciplinary work of women’s and gender studies, queer studies, Black studies, and others, have contributed to the present state of knowledge.

We now know that multiracial identities are dynamic and intersectional. We also know that mixed-race experiences are embedded within social institutions, social structures, political movements, histories, and stories. Processes like racialization and microaggressions, family and peer dynamics, and other important social, cultural, economic, historical, collective, and political realities are known to manifest in unique ways for mixed-race populations. Far from heralding an end to race and racism, we know that multiraciality is woven within structures of white supremacy across a broad range of social, political, and national contexts…

Read all of the nine (9) papers here.

A Canadian’s Perspective On The American Multiracial Experience

The Oberlin Review
Oberlin, Ohio
2022-03-04

Zach Bayfield

Before coming to Oberlin [College], my racial identity was something I rarely reflected on. My mother is a fifth-generation Canadian with entirely European ancestry. My father was born in Jamaica to an English father and a Jamaican mother. The Afro-Caribbean side of my ancestry was discussed comfortably in my family, and I felt no pressure to identify with one race over the other. Regardless of who I surrounded myself with or what activities I was engaging in, I felt like my identity was understood.

When I first came to Oberlin, my identity suddenly became more contentious. I remember my freshman year, I was eating lunch in Stevenson Dining Hall when one of my Black teammates asked me, “What are you?” I explained my genealogy in an abbreviated version of the previous paragraph, and his response was, “So you’re Black, right?” I was confused and taken aback by this statement. How could I identify as Black when I’ve never experienced racism directly? Why do I have to identify as a particular race? Why can’t I just be me?…

Read the entire article here.

All mixed up: Multiracial students at CVHS say they don’t fit in one box

The Upstream: The Student-Run News Site of Carnegie Vanguard High School
Houston, Texas

2022-02-02

Sofia Hegstrom, Contributing Writer

Noah Mohamed, Staff Writer

My eyebrows furrowed as I stared blankly at the question in front of me. My pencil hovered hesitantly over the scholarship form, which posed the question- What is your race?, followed by a bolded phrase: Please select one answer.

This is perhaps one of the most universal experiences for Multiracial Americans. After all, the official census only allowed checking more than one box in the year 2000. However, only recently has this become the norm. And while something like being forced to check the ‘other’ box on an occasional survey may seem trivial, it is indicative of the larger erasure and invalidation of Multiracial identity.

Junior Muna Jallad understood she was bi-racial when she was first asked to fill out school enrollment forms.

“In middle school when I was filling out forms and when they would say check only one race I’d be like, ‘What do I do here? Other? do I put White, do I put Asian?’ so I feel it kind of clicked then,” said Jallad.

Xen Villareal, who identifies as mixed-race indigenous and is one-quarter Black, also grew up confused about his race…

Read the entire article here.

ASU professor takes leadership of NEA

ASU News
Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona
2022-02-08

Mary Beth Faller, Reporter

Jackson sees opportunity in re-imagining the role of arts in creating healthy communities

An Arizona State University professor is taking over the nation’s top arts agency just as arts organizations are working to re-emerge from the pandemic.

Maria Rosario Jackson is the first African American and Mexican American to lead the National Endowment for the Arts. She was confirmed by the Senate in December.

Jackson is an Institute Professor in ASU’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts and holds an appointment in the Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions. She is on leave from ASU while she fulfills her term as the NEA’s 13th chair.

Read the entire news release here.

The best way to get ahead is now to lie

The UnHerd
2022-01-18

Blake Smith, Harper-Schmidt Fellow
University of Chicago

We can’t blame students for fabricating stories of hardship

University education was once sold to adolescents as a place where they might ‘find themselves’ through the liberal arts. In this fantasy, students could discover a more ‘authentic’ self as they learned, through the fearless and broad-ranging inquiry of impassioned conversations in and outside of seminars, to question received ideas. Academia today is certainly a place where people can themselves anew, if not more authentically.

Scholars like Jessica Krug or Carrie Bourassa, both white women, reimagined themselves as women of colour. Rhodes scholar Mackenzie Fierceton, also a white woman, was recently revealed to have constructed an elaborate persona as a ‘first-generation’ college student who had been passed through the foster system and suffered horrific physical abuse. She had in fact been privately educated and raised by her radiologist mother.

Such cases are only the most visible portion of the constant, ubiquitous deceit that is now built into the application process, which rewards candidates who can most convincingly tell stories — that is, who can lie…

Read the entire article here.

Preparing for Higher Education’s Mixed Race Future: Why Multiraciality Matters

Palgrave Macmillan
2022-02-09
237 pages
5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)
Hardcover ISBN: 9783030888206
eBook ISBN: ISBN: 978-3-030-88821-3

Edited by:

Marc P. Johnston-Guerrero, Associate Chair of the Department of Educational Studies; Associate Professor in the Higher Education and Student Affairs
Ohio State University

Lisa Delacruz Combs, Ph.D. Candidate
The Ohio State University

Victoria K. Malaney-Brown, Director of Academic Integrity
Columbia University

• Traces a multiracial trajectory to and through higher education – from pre-college adolescents to post-tenure faculty
• Complicates common constructs within higher education by examining them through a mixed race lens
• Critically advances multiraciality in alignment with larger anti-racist and social justice efforts

Increasing attention and representation of multiraciality in both the scholarly literature and popular culture warrants further nuancing of what is understood about multiracial people, particularly in the changing contexts of higher education. This book offers a way of Preparing Higher Education for its Mixed Race Future by examining Why Multiraciality Matters. In preparation, the book highlights recent contributions in scholarship – both empirical studies and scholarly syntheses – on multiracial students, staff, and faculty/scholars across three separate yet interrelated parts, which will help spur the continued evolution of multiraciality into the future.

Table of Contents

• Section I: Foundations of Multiracial Difference
  • Chapter 1. Coming of Age: Why Multiracial Adolescence Matters for Higher Education
  • Chapter 2. College Enrollment and Multiracial Backgrounds: An Exploration of Access and Choice
  • Chapter 3. Operationalizing Multiracial Consciousness: Disrupting Monoracism at a Historically White Institution
• Section II: Complex Identities Nuancing Multiraciality
  • Chapter 4. The “Hot Ho” and the Unwanted, Colored Male: Gendered Multiracial Subjectivities Hailed through Contemporary Racial Discourse
  • Chapter 5. In Pursuit of a Leadership Identity: Exploring the Role of Involvement in Cultivating a Multiracial Identity at a Hispanic Serving Institution
  • Chapter 6. The Complexity of Black Biracial Identity within the Contexts of Peer and Student Service Interactions at a Predominately White Institution
  • Chapter 7. I am Black and …: Complexities of Being a Marginalized Multiracial Higher Education Professional in Times of Heightened Racial Tensions
  • Chapter 8. Are We Enough? Exploring Multiracial Staff Identities through the Narratives of Mixed Filipinx Americans
• Section III: Nuancing Multiracial Engagement and Outcomes
  • Chapter 9. Sense of Belonging for Multiracial and Multiethnic College Students
  • Chapter 10. “Campus Feels Different to Me”: Comparing Climate Experiences of White vs. Non-White Multiracial College Students
  • Chapter 11. Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t: The Trials and Tribulations of Multiracial Student Activism
  • Chapter 12. Pedestaled or Pigeonholed? Multiracial Scholars Traversing Monoracial Academia
  • Chapter 13. Conclusion: What Difference Does Multiraciality Make? Reflections and Future Directions