Mixed Race Studies

The Election of Barack Obama and the Politics of Interracial and Same-Sex Marriage

History News Network
2009-02-23

Peggy Pascoe, Beekman Professor of Northwest and Pacific History
University of Oregon

Peggy Pascoe is the author of “What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America”, (winner of 5 literary prizes).

The election (and now the inauguration) of Barack Obama has inspired a widespread sense of awe at the scope and scale of change in race relations in America—and more than a hint of self-congratulation.

The news media just can’t seem to resist trumpeting the example of interracial marriage. When Barack Obama’s white mother married his black father in 1961, reporters remind us, their marriage would have been illegal in more than a dozen states. See how far we’ve come, they enthuse, falling into the trap of assuming that the legality of interracial marriage is proof that racism and white supremacy have disappeared into thin air and a colorblind utopia is on the way.

As someone who has spent nearly two decades studying the history of interracial marriage in America, I want to suggest that at a moment when talk of change seems to be everywhere, we could use a bit less celebration—and a lot more reflection…

…It does not, however, follow that interracial marriage is synonymous with colorblindness or that the end of racism is at hand. Generations of lawyers had to fight to make interracial marriage a legal right. Many of them thought colorblindness was a wonderful idea, but few were naive enough to believe it actually existed. Today the assertion that America is a colorblind nation is so commonplace that even the most conservative of Supreme Court justices are eager to wrap themselves in its mantle. Yet forty years after the Supreme Court’s decision in Loving v. Virginia, marriages between blacks and whites are still the rarest form of interracial marriage, and interracial couples still face a host of challenges, from stares on the street to confusion on the faces of their children’s teachers and playmates. And in yet another example of racism’s shape-shifting power, America’s prisons, police, schools, and housing markets offer daily evidence of how easy it is for claims of colorblindness to co-exist with, and even enable, new forms of white entitlement…

Read the entire article here.

Fall 2010 Honors Colloquium: RACE

University of Rhode Island
Tuesday evenings, 19:00 ET (Local Time); (23:00Z through November; 00:00Z on Wednesday after November 9).
2010-09-14 through 2010-12-07
Edwards Auditorium, URI Kingston Campus

A series of public programs at the University of Rhode Island presented by the URI Honors Program

Join us! The public is invited to attend this series of free events.

Perceptions about race shape everyday experiences, public policies, opportunities for individual achievement, and relations across racial and ethnic lines. In this colloquium we will explore key issues of race, showing how race still matters.

You will be able to watch the Colloquium live by clicking here or watching below. This link will only work in real time, while the presentation is going on.

Note: the live feed is only active during live events.

Includes noted scholars (Times and dates below are in UTC.  Please read carefully!):

2010-10-05, 23:00Z
Race, Identity, and Medical Genomics in the Obama Age
Duana Fullwiley, Assistant Professor of African and African American studies and of Medical Anthropology
Harvard University

2010-10-12, 23:00Z
The Invisible Weight of Whiteness: The Racial Grammar of Everyday Life in Contemporary America
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Professor of Sociology
Duke University

2010-11-31, 00:00Z
How Black Women’s Stories Complicate Race and Gender Politics
Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Associate Professor of Politics and African American Studies
Princeton University

For more information, click here.

HAFU: a film about the experiences of mixed-race people living in Japan

Hafu Film Sneak Preview in Kyoto
Institut Franco-Japonais du Kansai, Kyoto, Japan
Saturday, 2010-10-23. 19:30 – 22:00 (Local Time)

Filmmakers

Lara Perez Takagi
and
Megumi Nishikura

David Yano (29). David was born in a small village in Ghana, to a Ghanaian mother and a Japanese father. His father, an architect, was in Ghana to build the Noguchi Hideo Memorial when he met David’s mother. After spending 6 years in Ghana, they moved to Tokyo. However due to difficulty of adjusting to their new life in Japan, his parents filed for divorce when he was 10. The next 8 years were spent in an orphanage school in Japan with his two brothers. There he discovered his greatest passion: music and performance. He started modeling when he was a university student and now works as a multitalented TV presenter. Due to his dark complexion, David is regarded by default as a gaijin (foreigner) when people meet him for the first time. However, having spent much of his life in Japan, he feels he acts and identifies as Japanese more than anything else. Despite this claim David, has returned to Ghana once a year since the age of 20. Seeing the dramatic difference between the two countries, David felt the call to use his talents to benefit the people of Ghana. He has set an ambitious goal of raising $30,000 over the course of 8 months in order to build kindergarten back in Ghana. Audiences will watch him as he organizes various fundraisers and events has he struggles to attain his goal.

With an ever increasing movement of people between places in this transnational age, there is a mounting number of mixed-race people in Japan, some visible others not. “Hafu” is the unfolding journey of discovery into the intricacies of mixed-race Japanese and their multicultural experience in modern day Japan. The film follows the lives of five “hafus”—the Japanese term for people who are half-Japanese—and by virtue of the fact that living in Japan, they are forced to explore what it means to be multiracial and multicultural in a nation that once proudly proclaimed itself as the mono-ethnic nation. For some of these hafus Japan is the only home they know, for some living in Japan is an entirely new experience, and others are caught somewhere between two different worlds.

For more information, click here.

Multidisciplinary considerations for clinical work with the multiracial identity: a project based upon an independent investigation

Smith College School for Social Work
Northampton, Massachusetts
2010
76 pages

Kate Lee Esther De Soto

A project based upon an independent investigation, submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Social Work.

This project was conducted with the intentions of broadening the discussion that is occurring in clinical fields regarding the multiracial identity. Much of the discussion that occurs is treated as though racial dynamics are fixed (Leary, 2000). This theoretical paper aims to exemplify the nuance of the multiracial identity by combining clinical theory with a more culturally grounded analysis of racial discourse. Intersubjectivity theory is used in this paper to exemplify the value of using a clinical theory when conceptualizing racial issues, while cultural studies provides a deeper understanding of the system of race in the United States. The use of the intersubjectivity theory and the writings of cultural studies as applied to the phenomenon of the multiracial identity is exemplified through the use of a case study. This paper concludes with a proposal for a set of principles and considerations for practice with multiracial individuals that is rooted in a historically and politically aware, socially based approach to working intersubjectively with multiracial individuals.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I INTRODUCTION
II CONCEPTUALIZATION AND METHODOLOGY
III PHENOMENON
IV INTERSUBJECTIVITY THEORY
V CULTURAL STUDIES
VI DISCUSSION
REFERENCES

Read the entire project here.