Mixed Race Studies

Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century

W. W. Norton and Company
April 2010
590 pages
6.2 × 9.3 in
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-393-93070-2

Hazel Rose Markus (Editor)
Stanford University

Paula M. L. Moya (Editor)
Stanford University

A collection of new essays, written by a team of interdisciplinary authors, that gives a comprehensive introduction to race and ethnicity.

In Doing Race, scholars from across the disciplines have written original essays on race and ethnicity aimed at an undergraduate audience. The book provides a practical response to the view, common in American debates, that race and ethnicity no longer matter, or that race and ethnicity should not be taken into account when deciding how to structure society and formulate public policy. It also answers the question of why race and ethnicity play such a large role in fueling violence around the globe.

Doing Race shows that race and ethnicity matter because they are important resources in answering the fundamental, even universal “Who am I?” and “Who are we?” questions. It demonstrates how understanding how identities are shaped by race and ethnicity is central to understanding individual and collective behavior in the United States and throughout the world.

Drawing on the latest science and scholarship, these original essays provide undergraduates with an effective framework for understanding the persistence of racial inequalities and problems in the 21st century.

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Doing Race

Hazel Rose Markus

and

Paula M. L. Moya

Part I: Inventing Race and Ethnicity

• Defining Race and Ethnicity: The Constitution, the Court, and the Census, C. Matthew Snipp, Sociology
• Models of American Ethnic Relations: Hierarchy, Assimilation, and Pluralism, George Fredrickson, History
• The Biology of Ancestry: DNA, Genomic Variation, and Race, Marcus W. Feldman, Biology
• Which Differences Make a Difference? Race, Health, and DNA, Barbara Koenig, Medical Anthropology

Part II: Racing Difference

• The Jew as the Original ‘Other’: Difference, Antisemitism, and Race, Aron Rodrigue, History
• Knowing the ‘Other’: Arabs, Islam, and the West, Joel Beinin, History
• Eternally Foreign: Asian Americans, History, and Race, Gordon H. Chang, History
• A Thoroughly Modern Concept: Ethnic Cleansing, Genocide, and the State, Norman M. Naimark, History

Part III: Institutionalizing Difference

• Race in the News: Stereotypes, Political Campaigns, and Market-Based Journalism, Shanto Iyengar, Communication and Political Science
• Going Back to Compton: Real Estate, Racial Politics, and Black-Brown Relations, Albert M. Camarillo, History
• Structured for Failure: Race, Resources, and Student Achievement, Linda Darling-Hammond, Education
• Racialized Mass Incarceration: Poverty, Prejudice, and Punishment, Lawrence D. Bobo and Victor Thompson, Sociology

Part IV: Racing Identity

• Who Am I? Race, Ethnicity, and Identity, Hazel Rose Markus, Psychology
• In the Air Between Us: Stereotypes, Identity, and Achievement, Claude M. Steele, Psychology
• Ways of Being White: Privilege, Stigma, and Transcendence, Monica McDermott, Sociology
• Blacks as Criminal, Blacks as Apes: Race, Representation, and Social Justice, Jennifer L. Eberhardt, Psychology
• We’re Honoring You Dude: Myths, Mascots, and American Indians, Stephanie Fryberg and Alisha Watts, Psychology

Part V: Re-presenting Reality

• Another Way to Be: Women of Color, Literature, and Myth, Paula M. L. Moya, English
• Hiphop and Race: Blackness, Language, and Creativity, Marcyliena Morgan and Dawn-Elissa Fischer, African and African American Studies and Africana Studies
• The ‘Ethno-Ambiguo Hostility Syndrome’: Mixed-Race, Identity, and Popular Culture, Michele Elam, English
• ‘We wear the mask’: Performance, Social Dramas, and Race, Harry Elam, Drama

ART & DESIGN FACULTY – Shelleen Greene awarded IRE Faculty Diversity Research Award

Peck School of The Arts News
University of Wisconsin, Madison
2010-06-15

The award will allow Assistant Professor Shelleen Greene to complete her book project, Equivocal Subjects: Mixed-Race Identity in the Italian Cinema. The book examines the representation of mixed-race subjects of Italian and African descent in the Italian cinema, arguing that the changing cultural representations of mixed-race identity reveal shifts in the country’s conceptual paradigms of race and nation. Greene’s work further contends that these representations of mixed-race identity inform African diasporic filmmakers seeking to “write” the history of post-colonial Italy as a means of narrating African disaporic identity formation in the present era of global migration…

Read the entire article here.

What’s at stake in claims of “post-racial” media?

FlowTV
Department of Radio, Television, and Film at the University of Texas at Austin
2010-06-03

Mary C. Beltrán, Associate Professor of Media Studies
University of Texas, Austin

Tracy Morgan, comedic actor best known for his role as comedic performer Tracy Jordan on the NBC series 30 Rock (2006+), trumpeted America’s supposed post-racial identity at the Golden Globe Awards in January 2009. When 30 Rock was awarded Best Musical or Comedy Television Series, he gleefully snatched the statuette from Tina Fey, creator and star of the series, quipping, “Tina Fey and I had an agreement that if Barack Obama won, I would speak for the show from now on.” He continued, “Welcome to post-racial America! I am the face of post-racial America. Deal with it, Cate Blanchett! We’d like to thank the Hollywood Foreign Press … especially me, ’cause a black man can’t get no love at the Emmys. I love you, Europe! That’s what’s up!”…

…Unsurprisingly, when used in description of media trends, post-racial has taken on differing meanings both for scholars and media professionals. For one, it’s been used as shorthand to describe purported progress in ethnic/racial inclusion in employment and casting, as appears to be at least part of what Morgan had in mind in his claim that he is the face of post-racial America. In fact, a fair number of television series and films now integrate a few characters of color into their casts (notably, this was described recently by the Hollywood Reporter as perhaps due in part to an “Obama effect”), and we’ve witnessed a growing number of non-white and mixed race stars. Important to note and study, a major catalyst of these shifts is a turn away from niche productions targeting African American or Latina/o audiences to media texts that aim instead to appeal to a broad, multicultural audience. Arguably this does not make these texts post-racial (Dale Hudson’s concept of “multicultural whiteness” comes closer to describing this trend in relation to the continuing centrism of whiteness), but does raise the need for new methodological tools and theoretical frameworks for studying ethnic and racial representation in this supposed post-racial era. Also important to take into consideration is the continuing and sometimes growing underrepresentation of creative professionals of color behind the screen in tandem with “post-racial” shifts.

There is a need in such study to also take note of the casting and portrayal of mixed-race actors and individuals in Hollywood media productions. I’ve noted in my own work that the rhetoric of post-race has followed in the wake of the rising vogue for mixed-race and racially ambiguous actors and models since the 1990s. The “raceless” or “ethnically ambiguous” aesthetic (as I and journalist Ruth La Ferla described this trend, respectively), particularly noticeable in contemporary tween programming and stardom, is an important strand of contemporary media formations that at times falls into descriptions of post-racial trends. Given that mixed-race representation does offer the potential to highlight the constructed nature of race and fissures in racial boundaries, as Camilla Fojas and I discuss in the introduction to Mixed Race Hollywood, this will be an important site of study in relation to the implications of contemporary trends in ethnic and racial representation…

Read the entire article here.

Home on the Range: Kids, Visual Culture, and Cognitive Equity

Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies
Volume 9, Number 2 (April 2009)
pages 141-148
DOI: 10.1177/1532708608326606

Lorna Roth, Associate Professor of Communication Studies
Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

This essay focuses on Binney and Smith’s creation and marketing of Crayola fleshtone art products from the late 1950s until the mid-1990s, analyzing the company’s shifting nomenclature—from “flesh” to “peach” to its multicultural collection. After reflecting on the significance of Crayola’s color adjustment for children’s sociocultural and aesthetic development and for teacher’s pedagogical repertoires around diversity issues, I introduce an original notion–cognitive equity. I propose this as a refined way of understanding racial and cultural equity issues that don’t just revolve around statistics and access to institutions, but also inscribes a new normative vision of skin color equity directly into technologies, products, and body representations in a range of visual media. At the very early stage of children’s cognitive development when stereotypes and racisms are being formed, this would be a particularly intelligent design strategy in which to reinforce multiculturalism and multiracialism in all aspects of their visual culture and the commodities that are available to them.

Read or purchase the article here.

Marcia Dawkins to be Featured Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

Mixed Chicks Chat (The only live weekly show about being racially and culturally mixed. Also, founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival) Hosted by Fanshen Cox and Heidi W. Durrow
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #153 – Marcia Dawkins
When: Wednesday, 2010-05-19 22:00Z (18:00 EDT, 15:00 PDT)

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Assistant Professor of Human Communication
California State University, Fullerton

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Ph.D., is a blogger, professor and communication researcher in Los Angeles. Her interests are mixed race identification, politics, popular culture and new media. Her new book, Clearly Invisible:  Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity, looks at racial passing as a viable form of communication. She lectures and consults on these issues at conferences worldwide.

Changing the stereotypes

The Daily
University of Washington
2010-02-25

Kristen Steenbeeke

Sophomores Gabbie Duncalf and Fitsum Misgano were taking a class about mixed race when they first learned about the organization Mixed.

After hearing that the group — which caters specifically to mixed-race students but is open to anyone — was lacking officers, they decided to join during spring quarter of last year. Since then, the club has been an outlet for them to discuss mixed-race topics as well as an opportunity to spend time with other students who identify as mixed.

“As a mixed person, I have always felt hesitant to join monoracial organizations,” said Duncalf, whose mother is Filipino and father is Caucasian. “I feel different, and I don’t know if I fit in there, so I like that with Mixed, I can talk about race in different ways … I can talk to people who feel the same way and who want to change the way we talk about race.”

Discussions about new perceptions of race are important, not only among students but in society as a whole. Ralina Joseph, a communications professor at the UW, has made it her goal to change the way we talk about race, especially by disregarding the idea that multiracialism is a separate entity and using it to “deconstruct notions of race.”

“I think that I would encourage multiracial students to not only identify themselves with a multiracial group, but also to see themselves as a part of their larger racial and ethnic communities,” Joseph said…

Read the entire article here.

The Politics of Biracialism [Issue]

The Black Scholar
Journal of Black Studies and Research
Fall 2009 (2009-09-22)
Volume 39, No. 3/4

Guest Editors:

Laura Chrisman, Professor of English
University of Washington

Habiba Ibrahim, Assistant Professor of English
University of Washington

Ralina Joseph, Assistant Professor of Communications
University of Washington

Why a biracial issue, and why now? As black Americans we have mixed ancestry; one might ask what is gained by giving this obvious fact the attention of a special issue. Rather than focus on this broad history, however, we instead highlight here the situations of first-generation biracial black people. Perhaps this does not simplify matters. Foregrounding their specific experiences, identities, and concerns may stir up the anger of those who feel judged “not black enough” and the anger of those who feel betrayed and devalued by self-identifying biracial individuals. The politics of biracialism, seen this way, are individualistic, diminishing our community’s cohesion. Yet we feel that the time is right for an exploration of the topic. Biracial or multiracial studies is fast-growing and itself extremely varied in its methods, disciplines, and orientation. Acknowledging the important and interesting work that has been produced in the last two decades, we provide a forum for such work. Another factor in our choice of topic is the emergence, in 2008, of Obama as a presidential candidate. Both his blackness and his first generation biracialism have prompted new consideration, within black communities and within the U.S. population as a whole, of the operations and meanings of race, nation, family and community within the U.S.A. This gives us additional incentive to explore biracialism in the present moment. Our moment differs from the fraught late 1990s when the multiracial social movement campaigned for recognition in the 2000 Census, and was opposed by influential black voices. The present adds some confidence and optimism: to profile biracialism now, we suggest, is not to jeopardize black collectivity so much as it is to recognize and join the healthy debates that are flourishing within and beyond black studies…

Table of Contents

• Introduction to “The Politics of Biracialism” / Laura Chrisman
• Interracial Intimacies, Barack Obama, and the Politics of Multiracialism / Kimberly McClain DaCosta
• Review Essay: Performing the Twenty-first Century Tragic Mulatto: Black, White, and Jewish: Autobioraphy of Shifting Self by Rebecca Walker / Ralina Joseph
• Toward Black and Multiracial “Kinship” After 1997, or How a Race Man Became “Cablinasian” / Habiba Ibrahim
• Poetry: “The Art of Loving” / Madeleine Clifford
• Baby janay and Naomi Pabst: Negotiating Race Mixing, Adoption, and Transnationality / Naomi Pabst
• Reframing the National Family: Race Mixing and Re-telling American History / Catherine Squires
• Race, Multiraciality, and Barack Obama: Toward a More Perfect Union? / G. Reginald Daniel
• Books Reviews
  • Amalgamation Schemes: Anti-blackness and the Critique of Multiracialism by Jared Sexton / LeiLani Nishime
  • Dispatches from the Color Line: The Press and Multiracial America  by Catherine R. Squires / Manoucheka Celeste
  • Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon by Jane Rhodes / Madhavi Murty
  • Mixed Race Hollywood Edited by Mary C. Beltrán and Camilla Fojas / Sarita Cannon

Post-Race on America’s Next Top Model

International Communication Association, TBA
2007 Conference
San Francisco, CA
2007-05-23

Ralina L. Joseph, Assistant Professor of Communications, American Ethnic Studies and Women Studies
University of Washington

African American supermodel Tyra Banks’s popular reality show for aspiring young models, America’s Next Top Model, both reflects and produces twenty-first century ideals of post-feminism, a “girl power” moment in which second-wave feminism is antiquated, and post-race, a post-Civil Rights moment in which race is relic. ANTM features a sizable number of women of color contestants who are led by an African American female leader. The show’s explicit message is that racialized and gendered identities are equalized in the “Top Model” space. However, all of the contestants, both women of color and white women, are disciplined so that they must signify hyper-raced, hyper-sexed and essentialized versions of “difference.” At the same time, the contestants must also perform as safe, genteel, and essentially white middle class “Cover Girls.”

In this paper I investigate performances of racial and gender masquerade in a 2004 episode of America’s Next Top Model. This episode features a confluence of race as costume, because the contestants “switch ethnicities” with the help of makeup and wigs, and gender as maternity, because the contestants don milk mustaches and three-year-old children as props. ANTM demonstrates that performances of post-ethnicity and post-feminism are always reliant upon racialized and gendered stereotypes and the logic of capitalism. While the mixed-race contestants are showcased as the most seamless transgressors of racialized and gendered identity, as all of the women slip on race and gender “costumes,” the show illustrates the seductive power of post-identity politics in the twenty first century United States.

…As a graduate student I worked on notions of contemporary mixed-race African-American representations as being particularly emblematic of a post-race and postfeminist excuse that was vital in constructing neo-conservative political measures like California’s 1996 anti-affirmative action measure prop 209 and 2003’s racial privacy initiative prop[osition] 54. Historically and into the new millennium hybridized Black female bodies have been represented as not only sexually available, but also complicit in their exploitation (one of my favorite examples is Halle Berry’s much lauded academy award winning turn in 2001’s Monster’s Ball where she screams out in her sex scene with her death row inmate husband’s prison guard/executioner Billy Bob Thornton, “make me feel good!”). What I’ve been working on post-grad school is how these connected ideologies of post-race and post-feminism operate in other popular culture where mixed-race functions more often as a metaphor. One cite I’ve been investigating is the celebrity of thirty-three year old African American supermodel turned media mogul Tyra Banks and the phenomenon of her reality television show, America’s Next Top Model…

Read the entire article here.

Dispatches from the Color Line: The Press and Multiracial America

State University of New York Press
July 2007
295 pages
Hardcover ISBN10: 0-7914-7099-7; ISBN13: 978-0-7914-7099-2
Paperback ISBN10: 0-7914-7100-4; ISBN13: 978-0-7914-7100-5

Catherine R. Squires, Cowles Professor of Journalism, Diversity and Equality
University of Minnesota

Explores contemporary news media coverage of multiracial people and identities.

When modern news media choose to focus attention on people of multiracial descent, how does this fit with broader contemporary and historical racial discourses? Do these news narratives complicate common understandings of race and race relations? Dispatches from the Color Line explores these issues by examining contemporary news media coverage of multiracial people and identities. Catherine R. Squires looks at how journalists utilize information from many sources—including politicians, bureaucrats, activists, scholars, demographers, and marketers—to link multiracial identity to particular racial norms, policy preferences, and cultural trends. She considers individuals who were accused (rightly or wrongly) of misrepresenting their racial identity to the public for personal gain, and also compares the new racial categories of Census 2000 as reported in Black owned, Asian American owned, and mainstream newspapers. These comparisons reveal how a new racial group is framed in mass media, and how different media sources reinforce or challenge long-standing assumptions about racial identity and belonging in the United States.

Multiracial Identity in the Post-Civil Rights Era

Social Identities
Volume 11, Issue 5 (September 2005)
pages 531-549
DOI: 10.1080/13504630500408164

Gino Michael Pellegrini, Adjunct Assistant Professor of English
Pierce College, Woodland Hills, California

This article, which utilizes personal experience as well as other perspectives and theories on race and mixed race, suggests that multiracial identity is a manifestation of recent date that differs from traditional conceptions and descriptions of mixed race that conform to the dichotomous and hierarchical logic of the binary racial system. As delineated in this article, the emergence of multiracial identity is properly understood in the context of the post-civil rights era and has been coextensive with multiculturalism, the proliferation of information technologies, and with the emergence of the multiracial political movement in the 1990s. Further, this article suggests that multiracial identity is also in part a by-product of multicultural American universities of the 1980s and 1990s. That is, multiracial identity has to a certain extent taken shape in reaction to the rigid ethnoracial boundaries and discourses that are imposed on mixed race students in the multicultural academy.

Read or purchase the article here.