Mixed Race Studies

Chineke! Europe’s first professional orchestra of black and minority ethnic musicians launches

The Independent
2015-09-02

Jessica Duchen

Its founder double-bassist Chi-chi Nwanoku talks to Jessica Duchen

When the Chineke! Orchestra steps on to the Queen Elizabeth Hall platform on 13 September, the audience should notice something unusual. One of those uncomfortable truths about classical music is that most symphony orchestras in Europe still consist mostly of white and white-Asian people. Chineke, the brainchild of the double-bassist Chi-chi Nwanoku, is Europe’s first professional orchestra made up entirely of black and minority ethnic musicians.

The idea is to bring together and showcase the wealth of talent among these under-represented performers. “It is about raising awareness, trying to level the playing field, altering the status quo a little bit and changing perceptions,” says Nwanoku.

Born in London to a Nigerian father and Irish mother, Nwanoku has been mulling over these issues for years, from her vantage point as a founder member of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, a popular media commentator and broadcaster, and a professor at the Royal Academy of Music. Her recent programmes for BBC Radio 4, In Search of the Black Mozart, about the 18th-century violin virtuoso and composer the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, sparked wide interest in historical musicians of colour…

Read the entire article here.

Barack Obama and the Third Wave: the syntaxes of whiteness and articulating difference in the post-identity era

Politics, Groups, and Identities
Volume 2, Issue 4, 2014
pages 573-588
DOI: 10.1080/21565503.2014.969739

Melanye T. Price, Assistant Professor
Africana Studies and Political Science Departments
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Emerging critiques of Third Wave Feminism and its employment of grammars of whiteness provide a framework for analyzing racial discourses emerging in the same social context. Like Third Wave Feminists, Barack Obama’s political ascendancy happens in a post-identity (post-racial, post-feminist) moment where members of ascriptive categories having achieved significant civil rights gains begin to assert their rights to live unconstrained by racialized and gendered histories and norms. Using the syntaxes of whiteness outlined previously by Rebecca Clark Mane, I critically analyze Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech. I argue that Obama does the following: he provides a racial analysis that is disconnected from historical context, suggests that prevailing isms are primarily relegated to the past, conflates oppositional racial experiences, and relies too heavily on his own personal narrative to justify claims. These discursive practices have damaging effects for our broader understanding of contemporary racial politics. Moreover, reliance on Obama’s perspective on American race relations makes it more difficult to argue and demonstrate that material inequalities are produced by structural injustice that continues to over-determine the lives of certain groups. Additionally, advocates and activists who continue to make identity-based claims are viewed as either holding on too tightly to the past or failing to understand the present.

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Victoria Bynum to speak on the “Free State of Jones” at the Lauren Rogers Museum

“Civil War Era Drawings from the Becker Collection” (2015-09-06 through 2015-11-15)
Lauren Rogers Museum of Art
565 N. Fifth Avenue
Laurel, Mississippi 39440
2015-09-10, 17:30 CDT (Local Time)

Vikki Bynum, Emeritus Professor of History
Texas State University, San Marcos

I’m pleased to announce that on September 10, 2015, I’ll be speaking on The Free State of Jones at the Lauren Rogers Museum in Laurel, Mississippi. The talk begins at 5:30 p.m.; open to the public, admission is free. Donations are accepted.

My talk is part of the museum’s exciting new exhibition, Civil War Era Drawings from the Becker Collection (see description below), which will run from September 6 through November 15, 2015. Hope to see you there!…

For more information, click here.

Four-country newspaper framing of Barack Obama’s multiracial identity in the 2008 US presidential election

Ecquid Novi: African Journalism Studies
Volume 35, Issue 3, 2014
pages 23-38
DOI: 10.1080/02560054.2014.955867

Kioko Ireri, Assistant Professor of Journalism & Mass Communication
United States International University-Africa, Nairobi, Kenya

Though Barack Obama was the first African American presidential nominee for a major party in the history of the US presidential election, his multiracial identity put him under intense scrutiny during the 2008 election – more than any other previous black aspirants for the White House. Using quantitative content analysis of election stories in the newspapers of four countries (New York Times – US; Times – Britain; China Daily – China and Daily Nation – Kenya), this comparative study examines the prevalence of four racial frames associated with Obama’s multilayered racial identity: ‘African American’, ‘black’, ‘Kenyan roots’ and ‘white roots’. In addition, the study investigates the four newspapers’ valence coverage of the four racial frames in relation to Obama’s candidacy. The findings indicate that ‘Kenyan roots’ was the racial frame which occurred most frequently, followed by the ‘black’ frame. Overall, Obama received more positive coverage than negative across the racial frames depicted in the four newspapers.

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Redefining Racial Categories: The Dynamics of Identity Among Brazilian-Americans

Immigrants & Minorities: Historical Studies in Ethnicity, Migration and Diaspora
Volume 33, Issue 1, 2015
pages 45-65
DOI: 10.1080/02619288.2014.909732

Catarina Fritz
Department of Sociology and Corrections
Minnesota State University, Mankato

Research based on a sample of Brazilian youth living in Massachusetts reveals a variety of responses to racialisation of their phenotypes. Caught between the fluid patterns of colour categories found in Brazilian society and the more rigid racial stratification that characterises the USA, Brazilian-Americans have followed a variety of strategies to adapt to this situation. By exploring the reactions of these young adults of different appearance along the colour continuum to the constraints of the dominant society, questions concerning the future dynamics of race relations in the USA are raised against a background of the continuing post-racialism debate.

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Adolescent Racial Identity: Self-Identification of Multiple and “Other” Race/Ethnicities

Urban Education
Published online before print: 2015-03-18
DOI: 10.1177/0042085915574527

Bryn Harris, Assistant Professor of Psychology
University of Colorado, Denver

Russell D. Ravert, Associate Professor
Department of Human Development & Family Studies
University of Missouri, Columbia

Amanda L. Sullivan, Associate Professor of Psychology
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

This mixed methods study focused on adolescents who rejected conventional singular racial/ethnic categorization by selecting multiple race/ethnicities or writing descriptions of “Other” racial/ethnic identities in response to a survey item asking them to identify their race/ethnicity. Written responses reflected eight distinct categories ranging from elaborative descriptions of conventional race categories to responses refusing the construct of race/ethnicity. Students’ endorsement of multiple or “Other” ethnicities, and the resultant categories, differed by gender, grade, school type, and school compositions. Findings support scholars’ concern that common conceptualizations of race may not capture the complexity of self-identified racial categories among youth.

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Locating queer-mixed experiences: Narratives of geography and migration

Qualitative Social Work
Volume 14, Number 5 (September 2015)
pages 651-669
DOI: 10.1177/1473325014561250

Kimberly D. Hudson
School of Social Work
University of Washington

Gita R. Mehrotra, Assistant Professor of Social Work
Portland State University, Portland, Oregon

Social work scholarship concerned with mixed-race and queer identities is growing and ever-changing, yet often treats race and sexuality as separate experiences independent from context and environment. In addition, in studies of mixed-race people, the legacy of the Black-White/US-based multiracial paradigm and the history of such research using race as the only or primary analytic has left a dearth of studies that seek to understand mixed-race experiences within geographical, transnational and intersectional contexts. In this paper, we extend previous work focused on situational and contextual multiracial identities through an interview-based study of a sample of 12 queer and mixed-race individuals. We employ a narrative analysis to explore how emergent themes of geography and migration are salient to self-making processes of participants. Findings include: (1) diverse geographic and migration histories among participants; (2) interviewees’ use of discursive strategies that draw upon experiences of geography and migration within the narrative structure; and (3) the critical role of geography and migration in expanding and changing participants’ identity discourses and in shaping individuals’ identity and sense of community. Ultimately, this work serves as a call for on-going attention to how geography and migration, as well as intersectional and transnational perspectives, add depth and texture to studies of queer-mixed people while also offering specificity to social work’s broader commitment to context and environment.

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Does ‘Half Chinese, Half Jewish’ Condemn Me To Being Neither?

Forward
2015-08-21

Rachel E. Gross

When I was four years old, my father introduced me to his colleague, Jing. “Are you Chinese?” I asked, eyeing her shrewdly. “Yes,” she replied. “So am I,” I said. “And shoe-ish, too!”

My father likes to tell this story, I think, because it illustrates my self-assurance: Even at that young age, I knew exactly who I was.

What I didn’t anticipate was that others might have opinions, too. That hit home recently when I wrote a NPR column on being “half-Chinese, half-Jewish.” Suddenly, people on the Internet were dictating my identity to me. “The author is not half Jewish,” one wrote in the comments, citing Orthodox halacha that deems you Jewish only if your mother is. “She is not Jewish at all.” How did he know which of my parents was Jewish? “I Googled her,” he wrote…

Read the entire article here.

Politics, Opinion and Reality in Black and White: Conceptualizing Postracialism at the Beginning of the 21st Century

Revue de Recherche en Civilisation Américaine
Number 3 (March 2012): Post-racial America?

Lisa Veroni-Paccher, MCF, Civilisation américaine
Université Bordeaux Montaigne

With the election of the first black president, commentators and pundits said that Americans could now believe that African Americans had achieved racial equality, or at least that they would achieve it in their lifetimes. As Barack Obama used a universalist message and adopted a racially transcendent strategy which might seem at odds with his self-definition as an African American, he came to be defined as a postracial candidate, in a postracial America. The promise of an electoral victory indeed called for a strategy that would avoid race-specific issues, while at the same time reassured voters that their interests would be best served. This article argues that postracialism can thus be understood and used as an effective electoral strategy aiming at downplaying the individual and collective roles race and racism play in structuring group hierarchy and interaction, so that black or other nonwhite candidates can appeal to white voters. Using recent public opinion data, this paper will then attempt to understand how the contemporary political environment transforms the use of race as a political and/or social construction and whether it matches the evolution of black public opinion as it relates to understandings of race and racism.

Contents

• I. Postracial Politics: Deracialized Electoral Strategies as Necessity
• II. Race, Racism, Racial Equality and Public Opinion: Postracial America as Desire
• III. Postracialism Real or Dreamed? Beyond the black/white dichotomy
• Conclusion

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Mixed Messages: The Role of the Multiracial Character in Children’s Literature

theracetoread: Children’s Literature and Issues of Race
2015-08-20

Karen Sands-O’Connor, Professor
English Department
Buffalo State, The State University of New York, Buffalo, New York

In 19th and early 20th century children’s literature, the multiracial character generally evoked one of two responses: fear, or pity. Tom Sawyer’s Injun Joe, for example, was much feared by Tom and his gang, Tom even having nightmares about the character coming to get him. In Caddie Woodlawn, the children of an Indian mother and white father are “half savage” and the recipient of Caddie’s attempts to “civilize” them by paying for new clothes. Other examples can be found in British Empire literature—the “ugly mulatto” being a stock character of fear in books by G.A. Henty, H. Rider Haggard, and others; and the pitiable female “half-breed” or “mulatto” who cannot ultimately be saved by the white hero also figures in the works of these authors.

After World War II, as civil rights in the US and changing immigration patterns in Britain meant increasing, often hostile, interaction between racial groups, the multiracial character in children’s literature nearly disappeared for a time. But a generation later, many things had changed. More and more children were born who had parents of different races, but it was unclear where they would fit in to a post-civil rights society. Both American and British authors produced books dealing with this issue, but for this blog, I’m just going to look at two from Britain: Anthony Masters’ Streetwise (London: Methuen, 1987), and Jacqueline Roy’s Soul Daddy (London: Collins, 1990)…

Read the entire article here.