Mixed Race Studies

High Yella: A Modern Family Memoir

University of Georgia Press
2021-10-01
280 pages
Trim size: 5.500in x 8.500in
Hardcover ISBN: 9-780-8203-6031-7

Steve Majors

They called him “pale faced or mixed race.” They called him “light, bright, almost white.” But most of the time his family called him “high yella.” Steve Majors was the white passing, youngest son growing up in an all-Black family that struggled with poverty, abuse, and generational trauma. High Yella is the poignant account of how he tried to leave his troubled childhood and family behind to create a new identity, only to discover he ultimately needed to return home to truly find himself. And after he and his husband adopt two Black daughters, he must set them on their own path to finding their place in the world by understanding the importance of where they come from.

In his remarkable and moving memoir, Majors gathers the shards of a broken past to piece together a portrait of a man on an extraordinary journey toward Blackness, queerness, and parenthood. High Yella delivers its hard-won lessons on love, life, and family with exceptional grace.

Why Did Two People So Poorly Matched Stay Together So Long?

The New York Times
2021-09-06

Eleanor Henderson

Christopher Sorrentino’s parents, Gilbert and Vicki, circa 1972. Sorrentino examines their confounding marriage in his memoir, “Now Beacon, Now Sea.” via Christopher Sorrentino

Christopher Sorrentino, Now Beacon, Now Sea: A Son’s Memoir (Catapult, 2021)

As I was reading Christopher Sorrentino’s “Now Beacon, Now Sea,” I heard Rodrigo Garcia, son of Gabriel García Márquez, on the radio, talking about his new memoir, “A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes.” Garcia’s book is a loving chronicle of the last days of his larger-than-life father and loyal mother. Sorrentino’s book, too, is about his novelist father and his parents’ deaths. Both have the subtitle “A Son’s Memoir.” But “Now Beacon, Now Sea” is no tender tribute. Listening to Garcia speak, I realized that Sorrentino was working in a decidedly different genre: His “son’s memoir” is more autopsy than eulogy.

Sorrentino’s father, Gilbert, was an avant-gardist more prolific than famous, who died in an under-resourced hospital in Brooklyn as his son was en route; his wife, Vicki, who is the real subject of this book and a truly fascinating one, died under even grimmer circumstances. Her decaying body, discovered by her son in her Bay Ridge apartment, is the striking opening image of the book. An autopsy was never ordered…

Read the entire review here.

Now Beacon, Now Sea: A Son’s Memoir

Catapult
2021-09-07
304 pages
6.33 x 1.07 x 9.27 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9781646220427

Christopher Sorrentino

A wrenching debut memoir of familial grief by a National Book Award finalist—and a defining account of what it means to love and lose a difficult parent, for readers of Joan Didion and Dani Shapiro.

When Christopher Sorrentino’s mother died in 2017, it marked the end of a journey that had begun eighty years earlier in the South Bronx. Victoria’s life took her to the heart of New York’s vibrant mid-century downtown artistic scene, to the sedate campus of Stanford, and finally back to Brooklyn—a journey witnessed by a son who watched, helpless, as she grew more and more isolated, distancing herself from everyone and everything she’d ever loved.

In examining the mystery of his mother’s life, from her dysfunctional marriage to his heedless father, the writer Gilbert Sorrentino, to her ultimate withdrawal from the world, Christopher excavates his own memories and family folklore in an effort to discover her dreams, understand her disappointments, and peel back the ways in which she seemed forever trapped between two identities: the Puerto Rican girl identified on her birth certificate as Black, and the white woman she had seemingly decided to become. Meanwhile Christopher experiences his own transformation, emerging from under his father’s shadow and his mother’s thumb to establish his identity as a writer and individual—one who would soon make his own missteps and mistakes.

Unfolding against the captivating backdrop of a vanished New York, a city of cheap bohemian enclaves and a thriving avant-garde—a dangerous, decaying, but liberated and potentially liberating place—Now Beacon, Now Sea is a matchless portrait of the beautiful, painful messiness of life, and the transformative power of even conflicted grief.

Choosing Blackness

The Philadelphia Inquirer
2021-09-15

Elizabeth Wellington, Staff Columnist

Columnist Elizabeth Wellington poses for a photograph with her mother Margaret outside of the family home in New York. MONICA HERNDON / Staff Photographer

Black identity is usually wrapped up in not having choice. My family used their light-skinned privilege to flip that choice and turned Blackness into a celebration of pride and identity and love.

I thought my mother was a white woman until I was about five years old.

So I will never forget the day she told me she was Black. The conversation started simple enough: I described someone on television as white, like she was.

If um, hell to the no was a person, she would have been Margaret Wellington in that moment.

My mother is so fair that whether she styled her hair in a Pam Grier-esque, mega Afro or a blonde-streaked press and curl, she was sometimes mistaken for a white woman. I’m sure she wasn’t surprised by my question given my milk chocolate hue. But she wasn’t angry. She settled into her rocking chair and motioned for me to sit next to her. We were wearing matching green cardigans. I may have been darker, but to her, I was still her toddler-sized replica. She took my chubby little hand into her slender one, and looking me in the eye said, “Beth, I’m Black.”

Clearly I looked confused. Because she said it again. This time with more soul. “I AM BLACK. I do not have the same pretty brown skin that you have. But I AM BLACK. And I am YOUR MOTHER.”

My 5-year-old self was relieved….

Read the entire article here.

Making Mixed Race Matter

People In Harmony
2021-08-31

People in Harmony, PIH, is hosting the first event of the Mixed Race Research Network via Zoom with a workshop and studies.
With an increasing interest and the need for Research of Mixed Race Experiences PIH is establishing a network of researchers to share information and findings.

The first event is online at 1:00pm – 4:00pm (12:00-15:00Z, 13:00-16:00 BST, 08:00-11:00 EDT) Saturday 16th October 2021 with –

• An exploration of Black and Minority Ethnic Inter Racial Couples experiences of Race and Ethnicity constructs: their lived experiences as a Multi Ethnic Family by Mala McFarlane.
• The mixed race war babies of black GIs and British women by Dr Lucy Bland, Professor of Cultural History at Anglia Ruskin University.
• Opportunities to share, hear and discuss your experiences and data, of studying our field of work…

For more information, click here.

Multiracial identities and resilience to racism: The role of families

Medical News Today
2021-09-14

Annabelle Atkin, Assistant Professor
Department of Human Development and Family Studies
Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana

What challenges do Multiracial people face, and how do these challenges affect their well-being? Dr. Annabelle Atkin explains in this feature. Liliya Rodnikova/Stocksy

In this opinion feature, Dr. Annabelle Atkin — an assistant professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN — explores the unique challenges that Multiracial people face in attaining and maintaining well-being and offers suggestions on how to mitigate those challenges.

“I thought you were full Asian,” a professor of color once told me. “I didn’t know you were Asian!” a native Korean friend had told me a couple of years before.

Being Multiracial is often complicated for people to understand. This is especially the case in the context of the United States, where the dominant White group has fought to establish and maintain a clear color line throughout history to justify the oppression of People of Color.

The racial groups we know today are not biological. They were created, or socially constructed. And they are always changing. Just take a look at how the U.S. Census categories have shifted across the decades.

To protect the racial power structure in the U.S., Multiracial people have been erased throughout its history. One of the most well-known examples of this is the one-drop rule, which was created to ensure that anyone with a single drop of “Black blood” be considered Black to justify enslavement and, later, Jim Crow segregation.

As a result, our Multiraciality is often overlooked, and many people still struggle with accepting and acknowledging Multiracial individuals because to do so challenges their Monoracial understanding of the world…

Read the entire article here.

The Boundaries of Mixedness: A Global Perspective

Routledge
2020-10-12
164 pages
Hardback ISBN: 9780367522926
eBook ISBN: 9781003057338

Edited by:

Erica Chito Childs, Professor of Sociology
Hunter College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York

The Boundaries of Mixedness tackles the burgeoning field of critical mixed race studies, bringing together research that spans five continents and more than ten countries. Research on mixedness is growing, yet there is still much debate over what exactly mixed race means, and whether it is a useful term. Despite a growing focus on and celebration of mixedness globally, particularly in the media, societies around the world are grappling with how and why crossing socially constructed boundaries of race, ethnicity and other markers of difference matter when considering those who date, marry, raise families, or navigate their identities across these boundaries. What we find collectively through the ten studies in this book is that in every context there is a hierarchy of mixedness, both in terms of intimacy and identity. This hierarchy of intimacy renders certain groups as more or less marriable, socially constructed around race, ethnicity, caste, religion, skin color and/or region. Relatedly, there is also a hierarchy of identities where certain races, languages, ethnicities and religions are privileged and valued differently. These differences emerge out of particular local histories and contemporary contexts yet there are also global realities that transcend place and space.

The Boundaries of Mixedness is a significant new contribution to mixed race studies for academics, researchers, and advanced students of Ethnic and Racial Studies, Sociology, History and Public Policy.

Table of Contents

• 1. Critical Mixed Race in Global Perspective: An Introduction / Erica Chito Childs
• Hierarchies of Mixing: Navigations and Negotiations
  • 2. An Unwanted Weed: Children of Cross-region Unions Confront Intergenerational Stigma of Caste, Ethnicity and Religion / Reena Kukreja
  • 3. Mixed Race Families in South Africa: Naming and Claiming a Location / Heather Dalmage
  • 4. Negotiating the (Non)Negotiable: Connecting ‘Mixed-Race’ Identities to ‘Mixed-Race’ Families / Mengxi Pang
• Hierarchies of Mixedness: Choices and Challenges
  • 5. Linguistic Cultural Capital Among Descendants of Mixed Couples in Catalonia, Spain: Realities and Inequalities / Dan Rodriguez-Garcia
  • 6. ‘There is Nothing Wrong with Being a Mulatto’: Structural Discrimination and Racialized Belonging in Denmark / Mira Skadegaard
  • 7. Exceptionalism with Non-Validation: The Social Inconsistencies of Being Mixed Race in Australia / Stephanie Guy
• Mixed Matters Through a Wider Lens
  • 8. Recognising Selves in Others: Situating Dougla Manoeuverability as Shared Mixed-Race Ontology / Susan Barratt and Aleah Ranjitsingh
  • 9. What’s Love Got To Do With It? Emotional Authority and State Regulation of Interracial/National Couples in Ireland / Rebecca King-O’Riain
  • 10. Re-viewing Race and Mixedness: Mixed Race in Asia and the Pacific / Zarine Rocha

Episode 154: Boundaries of Love: Interracial Marriages and the Meaning of Race

Black and Highly Dangerous
2020-12-13

Tyrell Connor, Co-host and Assistant Professor of Sociology
State University of New York, New Paltz

Daphne Michelle, Visiting fellow in Education
Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Science

For today’s episode, we explore how interracial couples navigate racial boundaries by interviewing Dr. Chinyere Osuji, an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University-Camden and author of Boundaries of Love: Interracial Marriage and the Meaning of Race. During the conversation, we discuss her motivation for writing the book (43:10), her decision to conduct research in the U.S. and Brazil (45:50), and the notion of interracial marriage as a potential solution to racism (48:28). We also explore how her identity as a Black woman shaped her conversations with couples about interracial dating (52:25), trends related to why people pursued interracial relationships (55:30), how couples navigated public life and boundary policing (1:04:15), how interracial couples think about their children’s racial identity (1:11:00), and how couples navigate discussions about race (1:16:02). We close the interview by discussing her upcoming project (1:19:50).

Listen to the interview here.

Social Representations of Art in Public Places: A Study of Everyday Explanations of the Statue of ‘A Real Birmingham Family’

Genealogy
Volume 5, Issue 3
pages 59-74
First Published 2021-06-22
DOI: 10.3390/genealogy5030059

Peter J. Aspinall, Emeritus Reader
Centre for Health Services Studies
University of Kent, Canterbury, United Kingdom

Figure 1. ‘A Real Birmingham Family’, 2014. Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ commons/2/27/Real_Birmingham_Family_statue_-_Library_of_Birmingham_(15119604114).jpg, accessed on 1 May 2021.

This article focuses on the social/cultural representations of the statue of A Real Birmingham Family cast in bronze and unveiled in Britain’s second city in October 2014. It reveals a family comprising two local mixed-race sisters, both single mothers, and their sons, unanimously chosen from 372 families. Three of the four families shortlisted for the statue were ‘mixed-race’ families. The artwork came about through a partnership between the sculptress, Gillian Wearing, and the city’s Ikon Gallery. A number of different lay representations of the artwork have been identified, notably, that it is a ‘normal family with no fathers’ and that it is not a ‘typical family’. These are at variance with a representation based on an interpretation of the artwork and materials associated with its creation: that a nuclear family is one reality amongst many and that what constitutes a family should not be fixed. This representation destabilizes our notion of the family and redefines it as empirical, experiential, and first-hand, families being brought into recognition by those in the wider society who choose to nominate themselves as such. The work of Ian Hacking, Richard Jenkins, and others is drawn upon to contest the concept of ‘normality’. Further, statistical data are presented that show that there is now a plurality of family types with no one type dominating or meriting the title of ‘normal’. Finally, Wearing’s statues of families in Trentino and Copenhagen comprise an evolving body of cross-national public art that provides further context and meaning for this representation.

Read the entire article in HTML or PDF format.

Validation of the Multiracial Youth Socialization (MY-Soc) Scale among racially diverse multiracial emerging adults.

Journal of Family Psychology
Published online: 2021-05-31
DOI: 10.1037/fam0000879

Annabelle L. Atkin, PhD, Postdoctoral Scholar
T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics
Arizona State University

Hyung Chol Yoo, Associate Professor of Psychology
Arizona State University

Rebecca M. B. White, Associate Professor of Family and Human Development
Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics
Arizona State University

Alisia G. T. T. Tran, Assistant Professor in the Counseling and Counseling Psychology Program
Arizona State University

Kelly F. Jackson, Associate Professor of Social Work
Arizona State University

Multiracial children are the largest demographic group in the United States among individuals under the age of 18 (Pew Research Center, 2015), but their developmental processes are understudied. Parents and caregivers play an important role in preparing youth to navigate racialized society by teaching them to understand what it means to be a member of a racial-ethnic group (Hughes et al., 2006). However, this process is more complex in multiracial families, where youth belong to multiple racial-ethnic groups. Thus, the purpose of the present study was to develop and validate the first measure of racial-ethnic socialization for Multiracial youth, the Multiracial Youth Socialization (MY-Soc) Scale, to assess the unique messages that are communicated in multiracial families regarding topics of race, ethnicity, and culture. Using a sample of 901 Multiracial emerging adults (m_age = 22.43), we separately captured the socialization practices of two of the youths’ primary caregivers from the youths’ perspective. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses supported a 62-item scale measuring eight types of socialization: Navigating Multiple Heritages Socialization, Multiracial Identity Socialization, Preparation for Monoracism Socialization, Negative Socialization, Colorblind Socialization, Diversity Appreciation Socialization, Race-Conscious Socialization, and Silent Socialization. The MY-Soc Scale was also supported by validity and reliability tests. This study contributes an important tool for scholars and practitioners to learn which racial-ethnic socialization messages are promotive for Multiracial youth development in different contexts.

Read or purchase the article here.