Mixed Race Studies

White Mothers of Black Biracial Children: Mixed Race as the New Mulatto

Colorado State University
Summer 2016
101 pages

Erin Halcyon Bell

In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the Degree of Masters of Arts

This research explores how White women perceive their roles as parents to “mixed” race or biracial Black children. This qualitative project analyzes data from in person interviews, photographs and comments posted on Internet blogs, Facebook fan pages of mixed race children. Core elements of grounded theory are used as methodology to explore how White women understand themselves in relation to the role they play in pursuing their desire to create a mixed race or biracial child. Emerging themes from this research include: Objectification of Mixed Race Children, “We are going to get designer babies!” Displacing Black Women, and “I have mixed kids, so I can’t be racist.”

Read the entire thesis here.

Our Kids, Their Fears, Our President?

Literary Hub
2016-11-07

Mira Jacob and Emily Raboteau on Raising Children of Color in Trump’s America

Writers Mira Jacob and Emily Raboteau conducted this conversation via email during the week before the election, at night after getting their kids to bed.

Emily Raboteau: Mira, Lit Hub has invited us to converse about the election and this historical moment as mothers, so I think jumping off from something about how our kids are handling the election (their fears, our fears, the way their fears mirror ours) and how we answer their tough questions might be a good entry point. I am a mother of two—G is five, and D is three. He will be a ninja for Halloween (a bad one, he insists, not a good one) and D will be a skeleton. G is interested in and seduced by bad guys, horror, the nature of evil, the power of evil embodied by Darth Vader, wolves in fairy tales, dark gods in myths, the power of natural disasters, tornadoes, hurricanes, gods attached to natural disasters, superhero villains, and the like, and so has an understanding of Trump as a real-life bad guy—a force to battle. He intuits that we are frightened of him, and so, is frightened of him. I think he considers the election a battle between good and evil. He asked me the other day whether it would be ok/appropriate for us to kill Trump if/when he shows up at our apartment door. I wonder if your son has asked you questions about Trump, Clinton, the election. And how you have fielded those questions? How old is he now?

Mira Jacob: Wow. I read this and thought, ok, so we’re all just in it now. I hate to be relieved by that, but I am. Your son is that scared of a potential presidential candidate. Last month, my son Z, who just turned eight, said, “But Trump doesn’t like brown boys like me. If he’s president, does that mean the government won’t like me? The army? What about the police?” This, as he is falling asleep.

I find myself giving answers that feel much too complex for an eight-year-old, but how else can I modulate what he hears about—pussy grabbing, nasty women, Mexican rapists, Muslim terrorists, and whatever this week will hold? How do I explain, after he has just seen a TV clip of people of color being beaten and pushed out of Trump rallies—that even though his grandparents from his father’s side support Trump, they still love him dearly? I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel sad about that. I have no idea what to do with that sadness in myself. It feels like a broken bone. But they love my son, they love my husband, and they are wonderful parents and grandparents to both of them. I don’t want my family falling apart over this nightmare…

Read the entire conversation here.

I’m Not the Nanny: Multiracial Families and Colorism

Book Review
The New York Times
2016-11-03

Allyson Hobbs, Associate Professor of History
Stanford University

SAME FAMILY, DIFFERENT COLORS: Confronting Colorism in America’s Diverse Families
By Lori L. Tharps
203 pp. Beacon Press. $25.95.

In Danzy Senna’s 1998 novel “Caucasia,” two sisters — Cole and Birdie — share a bond so intimate that they create a language only they can understand. Engulfed in the racial chaos of Boston in the mid-70s, the sisters nestle themselves away in the cozy world they have created in their attic bedroom. Their lives are forever changed when their mother, a liberal white New Englander, and their father, a black man with radical political leanings, decide to divorce. The sisters are divided: Birdie lives with her mother and essentially passes for white, while Cole, who looks black, moves in with her father and his black girlfriend. In a city as racially divided and explosive as Boston in the 1970s, this separation by skin color strikes the reader as a chillingly rational decision.

Forty years later, America is no longer the bipolar racial regime of black and white that set Birdie and Cole on such different paths. Not only have personal attitudes changed, but the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 — which upended American immigration policy by abolishing the quota system based on national origins — has also transformed the country’s demographic character. The landmark Loving v. Virginia case of 1967 prohibited legal restrictions on interracial marriages. Federal racial classifications now recognize mixed-race identities. But neither Cole nor Birdie would have been widely understood as mixed-race in the 1970s. As Danzy Senna, who is mixed-race, has written of her own experiences during that tumultuous decade: “Mixed wasn’t an option. . . . No halvsies. No in between.”

Lori L. Tharps’s new book, “Same Family, Different Colors: Confronting Colorism in America’s Diverse Families,” is an urgent and honest unveiling of how generations of American families have lived with these changes. Tharps focuses on “colorism,” which she notes is not an official word, but has been defined by Alice Walker as “prejudicial or preferential treatment of same-race people based solely on their color.”…

Read the entire review here.

What Loving Can Show Us About Multiracial Parenting

TIME
2016-10-31

Lise Ragbir, Public Voices Fellow and Director of the Warfield Center Gallery
University of Texas, Austin

Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton in Loving. (Focus Features)

‘Let’s stop assuming all families are one color’

America has come a long way since Mildred and Richard Loving took their case to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967 to fight and win the right for a black woman to marry a white man. But have we come far enough?

Now the subject of a major motion picture debuting Nov. 4, Loving, that interracial couple went on to have three children. Given their then-unconventional family, I wonder what they faced when they went out in public as a family. As a black spouse in an interracial union today, I can tell you. My daughter was 6-months-old the first time I got the question: “Is that your baby?”…

Read the entire article here.

Colluding, Colliding, and Contending with Norms of Whiteness

Information Age Publising
2016
210 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9781681236919
Hardcover ISBN: 9781681236926
eBook ISBN: 9781681236933

Jennifer L. S. Chandler, Lecturer in Leadership and Interdisciplinary Studies
Arizona State University

Analyzing experiences of White mothers of daughters and sons of color across the U. S., Chandler provides an insider’s view of the complex ways in which Whiteness norms appear and operate. Through uncovering and analyzing Whiteness norms occurring across motherhood stages, Chandler has developed a model of three common ways of interacting with the norms of Whiteness: colluding, colliding, and contending. Chandler’s results suggest that collisions with Whiteness norms are a necessary step to increasing one’s racial literacy which is essential for effective contentions with norms of Whiteness. She proposes steps for applying her model in education settings, which can also be applied in other organizational contexts.

CONTENTS

• Introduction
• CHAPTER I: Model and Supporting Theories
• CHAPTER II: Becoming a Mother
• CHAPTER III: Mothers and Schools
• CHAPTER IV: As Sons and Daughters Mature
• CHAPTER V: Conclusions
• CHAPTER VI: Recommendations
• Appendix A – The Study
• Appendix B – Virginia 1691, ACT XVI
• Appendix C – Notes Regarding Trans racial Adoption
• References

From the Foreword:

In Colluding, Colliding, Contending with Norms of Whiteness, Jennifer Chandler takes on the difficult task of unpacking Whiteness within interracial family structures. Although it is more indirectly related to urban education, she translates her findings into a thoughtful argument about the ways in which White teachers embrace and resist race and racism. Chandler reaches past an analysis of identity tropes and personality dispositions to address the structural and societal factors that make it easier for White women to ignore race, and disobedient for White women to address issues of race. Chandler also problematizes White homogenous communities where race is never perceived as an “their” problem. Members of these communities do not welcome disruptions to the common sense rhetoric that keep these spaces disaffected by racism.

The balance, and often imbalances of how people relate to race become painfully apparent as Chandler carefully constructs her narratives about a diverse set of women. She is both empathetic and critical, generous and harsh, and insider and outsider in her task to portray the myriad experiences of White women who knowingly or ignorantly enter into hostile racial contexts in their families, neighborhoods, and schools. Chandler’s book opens the door for further conversations about how educators can support White female teachers to address their complicity with racism as a step toward becoming better teachers and advocates for students of color in their classrooms.

I Loved My Bigoted Uncle, and He Loved Us

The Daily Beast
2016-10-09

Goldie Taylor, Editor-at-Large

My late Uncle Buster, a barrel-chested white man raised in the woody bowels of Louisiana and a self-professed bigot, opened his life, his home and his heart to me. Wendell “Buster” Carson was ours by marriage but, even as he rests in his grave, our bond remains as indelible as the etchings on his marble tombstone.

Buster never hid his views on race from me or anybody else. He saw it as an anathema born of economic tension at our nation’s founding. But, it was my uncle who taught me about the strictures of race, gender and class. Over plates of skillet-fried venison backstrap, smothered in flour gravy made with the grease drippings, he altered the way I saw myself and the world.

A plainspoken man, who had raised my now former husband as his own and who I met for the first time nearly three years into our marriage, Buster taught me that water is sometimes thicker than blood and that, despite the complexities of ethnic heritage, deeply rooted family ties grow and strengthen where you least expect them…

Read the entire article here.

Same Family, Different Colors: Confronting Colorism in America’s Diverse Families

Beacon Press
2016-10-04
216 pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-080707678-1

Lori L. Tharps, Assistant Professor of Journalism
Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Weaving together personal stories, history, and analysis, Same Family, Different Colors explores the myriad ways skin-color politics affect family dynamics in the United States.

Colorism and color bias—the preference for or presumed superiority of people based on the lighter color of their skin—is a pervasive but rarely openly discussed phenomenon, one that is centuries old and continues today. In Same Family, Different Colors, journalist Lori Tharps, the mother of three mixed-race children with three distinct skin colors, uses her own family as a starting point to explore how skin-color difference is dealt with in African American, Latino, Asian American, and mixed-race families and communities. Along with intimate and revealing stories and anecdotes from dozens of diverse people from across the United States, Tharps adds a historical overview and a contemporary cultural critique. Same Family, Different Colors is a solution-seeking journey to the heart of identity politics, so this more subtle “cousin to racism,” in the author’s words, will be acknowledged, understood, and debated.

How do multiracial Asian people fit into discussions around race?

The Record
KUOW.org 94.9 FM | Seattle News & Information
2016-09-29

Caroline Chamberlain, Acquisitions Producer

Bill Radke, Host

Bill Radke sits down with Sharon H. Chang, author of “Raising Mixed Race: Multiracial Asian Children in a Post-Racial World.”

She explains why it’s important to study the experiences of mixed race people and how it relates to our broader history of race in this country.

Listen to the interview (00:12:32) here.

Intermarriage and Mixed Parenting, Promoting Mental Health and Wellbeing: Crossover Love

Palgrave Macmillan
2015
262 pages
eBook ISBN: 978-1-137-39078-3
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-137-39077-6
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-349-48271-9
DOI: 10.1057/9781137390783

Rashmi Singla, Associate Professor
Department of Psychology and Educational Research
Roskilde University, Denmark

Marriages across ethnic borders are increasing in frequency, yet little is known of how discourses of ‘normal’ families, ethnicity, race, migration, globalisation affect couples and children involved in these mixed marriages. This book explores mixed marriage though intimate stories drawn from the real lives of visibly different couples.

‘Raising Mixed Race’: An Evening with Sharon H. Chang and Tangerine

The Seattle Public Library
Central Library
Level 1 – Microsoft Auditorium
1000 Fourth Avenue
Seattle, Washington 98104-1109
Thursday, 2016-09-29, 19:00-21:00 PDT (Local Time)

Join us for an author talk, and live music by Seattle band Tangerine, to celebrate the final stop of Sharon H. Chang’s “Raising Mixed Race: Multiracial Asian Children in a Post-Racial World” book tour.

Drawn from extensive research and interviews with sixty-eight parents of multiracial children, “Raising Mixed Race: Multiracial Asian Children in a Post-Racial World” examines the complex task of supporting our youngest around being “two or more races” and Asian while living amongst post-racial ideologies. “Racist America” author Joe R. Feagin hailed Chang’s work as “one of the best field interview studies of multiracial issues yet to be done,” one which captures “the gritty realities of being mixed-race in this country.”

Following an interview with Sharon H. Chang about their experiences as multiracial musicians, Seattle indie band Tangerine will perform a live set with songs from their latest EP, Sugar Teeth…

For more information, click here.