Mixed Race Studies

Mixed race of Asian and Western: Asia’s new standard of beauty

The Independent Singapore
2019-02-06

Asian celebrities with mixed race. (Photo: Screengrab from YouTube)

It seems the old adage, “Beauty is relative” is not true anymore, as what is beautiful for the Asians nowadays are those who have a mixed race—Asian and Western.

Certainly, the new standard of beauty has changed over the years. Large, double-lidded eyes, small sharp nose, narrow face, tall figure, and white skin—these Western qualities make Asians sigh and admire.

In today’s generation, those with Western features have come to represent the beauty ideal in many parts of Asia. There is a long list of mixed race celebrities, actors, models, and beauty titlists in many parts of Asia…

…The notion of “mixed races” in Asia was invented during the era of European imperialism from the early 1800s. The mix of Eastern and Western is referred to as Eurasian or Pan-Asian. As a matter of fact, these terms are relatively new, with no agreed-upon definition of either.

According to Emma Teng, the T.T. and Wei Fong Chao Professor of Asian civilizations at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, intermarriage and intermixing among ethnic groups date back to antiquity.

“After the Portuguese and other European traders arrived in China, mixed families emerged across different sites where Europeans and Chinese commonly interacted,” she said…

…Regarding mixed race as the more beautiful can result in an issue of racism. As this heightened to changing one’s perspective about beauty, there is a need to examine the notions of racialised beauty standards…

Read the entire article here.

Episode 4

Shade Podcast: UK culture and news podcast focused on the mixed race experience
2019-02-15

Laura Hesketh, Co-Host
Liverpool, England

Lou Mensah, Co-Host
London, England

With special guest, Steven F. Riley, founder of MixedRaceStudies.org!

Neneh Cherry on being mixed race in the music industry, controversial new Netflix Show ‘Always a Witch’, Viola Davis and the Liam Neeson controversy, Queen Ifrica on colourism, Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America by IbI Zoboi, Grace Wales Bonner, plus more.

Listen to the episode (00:36:55) here. Download the episode here.

Backlash Over Ad Depicting Naomi Osaka With Light Skin Prompts Apology

The New York Times
2019-01-22

Daniel Victor

At left, a cartoon version of Naomi Osaka in an ad for Nissin, a Japanese instant-noodle brand; at right, the real Ms. Osaka at the Australian Open this month. Nissin; Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

Naomi Osaka, the half-Haitian, half-Japanese tennis champion, is the star of a new Japanese anime-style advertisement.

The problem? The cartoon Ms. Osaka bears little resemblance to her real, biracial self.

Her skin was unmistakably lightened, and her hair style changed — a depiction that has prompted criticism in Japan, where she has challenged a longstanding sense of cultural and racial homogeneity.

The ad — unveiled this month by Nissin, one of the world’s largest instant-noodle brands — features Ms. Osaka and Kei Nishikori, Japan’s top-ranked male tennis player, in a cartoon drawn by Takeshi Konomi, a well-known manga artist whose series “The Prince of Tennis” is popular in Japan…

Mr. Konomi and Ms. Osaka, who faces Elina Svitolina in an Australian Open quarterfinal match on Wednesday, have not publicly commented on the backlash to the ad…

Read the entire article here.

Born to Protest: Legal Trailblazer Pauli Murray Takes Her Rightful Place in History

Bitch Media
2018-12-20

Marisa Bate

Dr. Pauli Murray is finally reentering our public consciousness. (Associated Press)

In On the Basis of Sex, the forthcoming movie about Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s journey into law, RBG (played by Felicity Jones) holds a moot court in her apartment to prepare for Moritz v. Commissioner, her first big case and the beginning of her lifelong fight against sex discrimination. One of the moot court judges is Dr. Pauli Murray (Sharon Washington), an African American lawyer, activist, poet, and priest, who’s wearing a truly terrific pink pantsuit. “Pauli would have been upset about that pink suit,” Rosalind Rosenberg, Professor of History Emerita at Barnard College, and Murray’s biographer tells me. In fact, “Pauli never visited Ginsberg’s apartment and certainly did not serve on a moot court as a judge, but it’s a biopic, and I think it’s a visually defensible way into the picture. But [as] a historian, if this was a documentary, I would’ve protested because this never happened.”

I was thrilled to see Murray in On the Basis of Sex, even if the film rewrote some of history’s details. (The movie’s screenwriter is RBG’s nephew, Daniel Stiepleman, and a generous defense would suggest the inclusion is a tribute to those his aunt admired most.) I have been fascinated by Murray’s life, career, and why she’s been so overlooked and underknown since I stumbled across an article about her a few years ago. Anna Pauline “Pauli” Murray was born into a mixed-race family in Baltimore in 1910, orphaned at the age of 3, adopted by her aunt, and raised in the Episcopal church in Durham, North Carolina, before becoming an influential civil-rights lawyer. Despite her accomplishments, when I visited the movie’s IMDb.com page, I found neither Sharon Washington nor Murray’s names listed. “Guy #1” and “Guy #2,” however, are…

Read the entire article here.

Call for Papers: Representations of Afrolatinidad in Global Perspective Conference

Representations of Afrolatinidad in Global Perspective
University of Pittsburgh
2019-04-11 through 2019-11-13

Conference Convened by the Afro-Latin American and Afro-Latinx Studies Initiative

Contact: Dr. Michele Reid-Vazquez, University of Pittsburgh

Keynote Speakers:

Dr. Juliet Hooker, Professor of Political Science,
Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island

Dr. Nancy Mirabal, Associate Professor of American Studies; Director of the US Latina/o Studies Program
University of Maryland, College Park

The intersections of race, ethnicity, and representation have shaped historical and contemporary articulations of Afrolatinidad. As an expression of multivalent identity, both shared and unique, Afrolatinidad informs the experiences of over 150 million Afro-Latin Americans and millions more within diasporic communities in the United States, Canada, Europe, and beyond. The conference seeks to foster an international dialogue that addresses regional, national, and transnational links among the ways Afro-Latin Americans and Afro-Latinxs create, sustain, and transform meanings surrounding blackness in political, social, and cultural contexts.

This two-day symposium aims to engage multiple depictions of Afro-Latin Americans and Afro-Latinxs – whether self-fashioned or imposed. The varied portrayals in the past and present reflect the ongoing global realities, struggles, vibrancy, and resiliency of Afro-Latin diasporas throughout the Americas and elsewhere. The symposium will feature keynote addresses by Dr. Juliet Hooker, Professor of Political Science at Brown University, and Dr. Nancy Mirabal, Associate Professor of American Studies and Director of the U.S. Latina/o Studies Program at the University of Maryland-College Park. Their work on Afro-descendant politics in Latin America and Afro-Latinx discourses of race, gender, and territoriality, respectively, will spark broader exchanges around Afrolatinidad and representation among presenters and attendees.

We invite submissions that address aspects of Afrolatinidad, particularly through ethnicity/race, gender, history, technology, and expressive culture, such as music, dance and art. We are especially interested in papers that analyze these themes across a variety of conceptual frameworks, including Africana Studies, Anthropology, Caribbean Studies, Cultural Studies, History, Latin American Studies, Latinx Studies, Media Studies, Political Science, and Sociology.

Submissions need not be confined to these topics, but, if possible, please indicate at least two themes that correspond to your proposal.

Themes:

• Slavery and Its Legacies in Latin America
• Politics of Culture/Cultural Expression
• Visibility and Invisibility
• Theorizing Afro-Latinidad
• Race, Gender, and Migration
• Diaspora, Community, and Technology/Social Media…

For more information, click here.

Exploring mixed race identity in CGI influencers

Dazed Digital
2018-09-26

Stephanie Phillips
London, United Kingdom

From Lil Miquela to Lil Wavi, we look at why the majority of CGI influencers are being conceived as mixed race

Historically the It girls of the moment have reflected the true values of their time. 60s model Veruschka’s flowing blonde tresses and chiseled bone structure represented the decade’s youthful outlook. The 70s gave birth to the unconventional where powerhouse Grace Jones and avant-garde Donna Jordan came to life. Kate Moss started heroin chic in the 90s, and Brazilian Gisele Bündchen ended it. Today we have a new It girl to shape our confused and conflicted era.

With her constellation of freckles, millions of followers, and collection of side hustles that includes modelling and a pop career, 19-year-old Brazilian-American Lil Miquela, aka Miquela Sousa, could be your average beautiful, woke celeb crush except for one crucial fact; she’s not real. Created by the mysterious robotics company Brud, Miquela is one of a number of racially ambiguous CGI avatars taking over Instagram using a collage of mixed race identity…

Read the entire article here.

Another Hot Take on the Term ‘Latinx’

El Espace
The New York Times
2018-11-21

Concepción de León, digital staff writer for the Books desk

At the 11th Annual Trans Day of Action, in 2015, transgender and gender-nonconforming people rallied with allies to fight discrimination. Credit Joana Toro/Redux

This week in El Espace: gender-bending, big news for bookworms and more.

The paradox of working in media is that even as your mind expands, your world also shrinks a bit. Because of my job, I read a lot of news, then go on Twitter to read people’s hot takes, then listen to podcasts, you know, just to round out the picture. It’s extra, for sure. But while there’s no question that my understanding of topics like foreign relations, economics and the president’s taxes, to name a few, has gone from zero to at least 80 in the last few years, the overexposure has also distorted my perception about what “everyone” knows.

Fortunately our readers keep me accountable. In my last column, for example, I used the word “Latinx” as a broader term for the Latino community, to some people’s perplexity…

…Ed Morales, a Columbia University professor who wrote “Latinx: The New Force in American Politics and Culture,” agrees. In a recent conversation he said that “the X, which is so strange and is not Spanish, sort of marks this new hybrid idea.” The title of his book, similarly, was meant to be forward-looking. “I thought it was a futurist term,” he said, “imagining a future of more inclusion for people that don’t conform to the various kinds of rigid identities that exist in the United States.”…

Read the entire article here.

white girls reinventing themselves as black women on instagram has to stop

i-D
Vice
2018-11-20

Emma Dabiri

Instagram influencer Emma Halberg has been accused of altering her looks to appear black. She denies the accusations. Images via social media.

As a recent Twitter storm brought attention to social media blackface, Emma Dabiri looks at the cultural history of this racist practice and its links to black women being perceived as sexually available.

Last week a Twitter thread went viral for calling out white girls on Instagram and YouTube, some of them with huge followings, who are seemingly using various methods to transform their faces and bodies so they look “mixed-race” – though some have denied that’s what they’re doing, blaming their change on a propensity to deeply tan. Various media outlets are referring to this as “blackfishing”, but there is another name for it, which more clearly links this practice to its racist past. While “ni**erfishing” sounds like a sport from the good ole days when AMERICA WAS GREAT, when a picnic wasn’t a picnic without a black body swinging in the southern breeze, it is in fact a phenomenon all our own, from the year of our good lord 2018. N**erfishing is this cute lil trick whereby white girls literally reinvent themselves online, on Instagram and Youtube, as “mixed-race” or light-skinned black women. From our complexion to our lips and other facial features, to textured hair and the use of protective styles, weaves and braids — there is little to separate these white women visually from black women…

Read the entire article here.

Stop using mixed race people as symbols of interracial unity to ease your white guilt

Friktion
2018-05-09

Sophie Buzak-Achiam

Illustration: Mette Clante

Dutch beer company Heineken has recently faced backlash for its “lighter is better” ad, where a bartender with light skinned Latino appearance slides a beer past three dark skinned Black people towards an Eurasian woman, with whom he shares a wink, before the slogan “sometimes lighter is better” appears. As a mixed race person, who might be racialised in a similar way to the exotic yet safely light skinned woman in the ad, this ad struck a well-known chord. Spending a good half of my life in a white Danish environment, I have often found my ambiguous racial appearance used by white people as a symbol of a conforming, non-threatening otherness. Although still seen as a person of color, I also embody a whiteness that can make me come across as safe mediator to ease racial tensions and white guilt.

Considering the overwhelming whiteness in European advertisement in general, I don’t believe it to be a coincidence that Heineken, as a white owned company, chooses to use people of color and racially ambiguous people as the stars of this ad. In representing the “lighter is better” demographic, the two lighter skinned actors become pawns to the white system which uses them to mask its racism, that becomes perhaps more subtle with the acceptance of some people of color…

Read the entire article here.

Race In/For Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet

Works and Days
Volume 13, Numbers 1 & 2 (1995)
pages 181-193

Lisa Nakamura, Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor; Coordinator and Undergraduate Advisor for the Digital Studies Minor
University of Michigan

A cute cartoon dog sits in front of a computer, gazing at the monitor and typing away busily. The cartoon’s caption jubilantly proclaims, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog!” This image resonates with particular intensity for those members of a rapidly expanding subculture which congregates within the consensual hallucination defined as cyberspace. Users define their presence within this textual and graphical space through a variety of different activities‹commercial interaction, academic research, netsurfing, real time interaction and chatting with interlocutors who are similarly “connected”‹but all can see the humor in this image because it illustrates so graphically a common condition of being and self definition within this space. Users of the Internet represent themselves within it solely through the medium of keystrokes and mouse-clicks, and through this medium they can describe themselves and their physical bodies any way they like; they perform their bodies as text. On the Internet, nobody knows that you’re a dog; it is possible to “computer crossdress” (Stone 84) and represent yourself as a different gender, age, race, etc. The technology of the Internet offers its participants unprecedented possibilities for communicating with each other in real time, and for controlling the conditions of their own self-representations in ways impossible in face to face interaction. The cartoon seems to celebrate access to the Internet as a social leveler which permits even dogs to express freely themselves in discourse to their masters, who are deceived into thinking that they are their peers, rather than their property. The element of difference, in this cartoon the difference between species, is comically subverted in this image; in the medium of cyberspace, distinctions and imbalances in power between beings who perform themselves solely through writing seem to have deferred, if not effaced…

Read the entire article here or here.