Mixed Race Studies

Hypodescent: New Work by Gabriel Mejia

University of Wisconsin, Madison
George L. Mosse Humanities Building
7th Floor Gallery Room 7240
455 North Park Street
2010-12-11 through 2010-12-16

Gabriel Mejia

All events are free and open to the public.

Closing Reception: 2010-12-16, 19:00-21:00 CST (Local Time).

A meditation on identity and the social constructs of racial assignment. Featuring printmaking and video installations by 2nd year MFA graduate student, Gabriel Mejia.

For more information, click here.

Who’s White? Who’s Black? Who Knows?

Time Magazine: Healthland
Friday, 2010-12-10

Jeffrey Kluger, Senior Editor

Never mind what you’ve heard. Halle Berry was not the first black woman to win an Academy Award for Best Actress. She was actually the 74th white one. And never mind all this talk about America electing its first black President;  Barack Obama is actually the 44th white man to hold the job.

That, at any rate, is as fair a conclusion as any, given that Berry and Obama and millions like them are the products of one black parent and one white one. And yet it’s a conclusion that almost no one ever reaches. Part-black generally means all-black in Americans’ minds. Just as part-Asian or part-Hispanic or part-anything-else usually puts individuals in those minority-groups’ camps. Such a curious bias is as old as the nation itself, and a new study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology illustrates just how stubborn it is—and suggests just what may be behind it.

It was in 1662 that the colony of Virginia first tried to codify the legal definition of people whose racial pedigree was less than completely pure. To make things simple in a land in which plantation owners were already taking sexual liberties with their slaves, the lawmakers established what they called the “one-drop” rule—also known as hypodescent—declaring that any person with mixed blood who resulted from such a pairing would be assigned the race of the nonwhite parent…

…But this much can be said for the folks who wrote such nasty rules: They may have been no better than most other Americans, but they were no worse either, at least in their tendency to apply the hypodescent rule in their own minds, often unconcsiously. To test how this phenomenon applies today, a team of Harvard University psychologists led by Ph.D. student Arnold K. Ho gathered a sample group of black, white and Asian volunteers and showed them computer-generated images of individuals designed to look either black-white or Asian-white. They also showed them family trees that depicted various degrees of racial commingling…

Study Looks at Biracial Assignment

The Harvard Crimson
2010-12-13

Hana N. Rouse, Crimson Staff Writer

People classify biracial children as members of the minority parent group

People have the tendency to classify those of biracial descent as members of their minority parent group rather than as equal members of both races, according to a recent study published by Harvard psychologists.

The study, led by Harvard psychology graduate student Arnold K. Ho and co-authored by Harvard Professors James Sidanius and Mahzarin R. Banaji and Vanderbilt Professor Daniel T. Levin, employed computer generated faces of varying ethnicities and fictional family trees to test people’s intuitive racial classifications.

Study results suggest that participants classified half-white and half-minority persons as part of a minority. Researchers used computer generated faces of varying ethnicities and fictional family trees to test people’s preferences…

Read the entire article here.

Property Rites: The Rhinelander Trial, Passing, and the Protection of Whiteness (review)

Journal of Interdisciplinary History
Volume 41, Number 3, Winter 2010
E-ISSN: 1530-9169, Print ISSN: 0022-1953
pages 478-480

Adriane Lentz-Smith, Hunt Family Assistant Professor History
Duke Univeristy

In October 1924, Leonard Rhinelander, scion of a wealthy and well-established New York family, wed Alice Jones, domestic worker and daughter of a Caribbean-born coachman. Less good-looking than well-appointed, Leonard used his fashionable goods and family fortune to woo Alice—appearing, as one reporter stated, like “a weak-chinned version of the sheiks”. Alice fell for Leonard and the life that he promised, one vastly different from the sturdy working-class existence that she shared with her parents in New Rochelle. After a three-year courtship, they announced their marriage in the society pages, but within a month, the honeymoon ended. The Rhinelanders had initiated an annulment suit, claiming that Alice had defrauded Leonard by hiding her racial lineage. Alice, as their lawyer alleged and the New York press trumpeted, had fooled Leonard into making her his “colored bride”.

In Property Rites, Smith-Pryor uses the Rhinelander trial to weave a narrative of classification, confusion, and cultural dislocation in the Jazz Age. At once a period…

Read or purchase the review here.

Natasha Trethewey: 2010

Littoral: The Journal of Key West Literary Seminar
2010-03-17

Arlo Haskell

Natasha Trethewey is the author of three collections of poetry, including Native Guard, which won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize, Bellocq’s Ophelia, and Domestic Work, which won the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize. A native of Mississippi, a member of the Dark Room Collective, and the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry at Emory University, Trethewey’s work often shifts from the personal to the historical, confronting subjects that include the legacies of racism in America and her own experiences as a person of mixed race growing up in the deep South.

In this recording from the 2010 Key West Literary Seminar, Trethewey reads a selection of poems including “Limen,” “Genus Narcissus,” “Myth,” “Miscegenation,” “Taxonomy,” and “Knowledge: After a Chalk Drawing by J.H. Hasselhorst, 1864.”

From KWLS 2010: Clearing the Sill of the World (17:57) / 10.3 MB

French110s: From Haiti to New Orleans

John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute
Duke University
Fall 2010

Deborah Jenson

Haiti Lab: Undergraduate Opportunities

The first Humanities Laboratory at Duke, one of the key goals of the Haiti Lab is to bring innovative, interdisciplinary research more fully into the undergraduate experience at Duke and, indeed, to invite undergraduates to participate as researchers themselves.

The Haitian Revolution  (1791-1804) was a successful revolution against slavery, leading to the defeat of the French armies of Napoleon Bonaparte and the establishment of the first black republic in the New World. During the revolution, many Creole planters (white and of mixed race) and their households, including slaves, sought refuge elsewhere; by 1809, the population of New Orleans actually doubled with this “Haitian” influx. How did the culture and literature of nineteenth century New Orleans reflect Haitian influences? We will read fascinating Francophone New Orleans literature about the socio-racially complex cultures of slavery, the bourgeoisie, and the planters’ “aristocracy” in Louisiana. Did you know you could learn about the U.S. Civil War through French-language New Orleans novels that also integrate Creole poetry from colonial Saint-Domingue? Or that the first African-American short story was written in French, about Haiti? We will read about the drama of the historical Haitian maroon slave and poisoner Macandal, and about the Haiti-influenced libertine culture that bound together white men and women of color in the common law structure of plaçage. Students will do cultural research projects on subjects such as the cultural roots of Creole and Cajun cuisine, the Quadroon Balls, or the “voodoo queen” Marie Laveaux. In this course on French literature in our own historical and regional “backyard,” students will also explore the Haitian inspiration of Durham’s historic black “Hayti” neighborhood. Course taught in French.

For more information, click here.

“War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art”

Critical Ethnic Studies Association Conference
University of California, Riverside
Critical Ethnic Studies and the Future of Genocide: Settler Colonialism/Heteropatriarchy/White Supremacy
2011-03-10 through 2011-03-12

Laura Kina, Associate Professor of Art, Media, and Design and distinguished Vincent de Paul Professor
DePaul University

Wei Ming Dariotis, Associate Professor Asian American Studies
San Francisco State University

Gina Osterloh, Artist
Silverlens Gallery, Manila Philippines
François Ghebaly, Los Angeles

“War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art” investigates the construction of mixed race/mixed heritage Asian American (or, controversially, “Hapa”) identity in the United States. As an increasingly ethnically ambiguous Asian American generation is coming of age in an era of “optional identity,” “War Baby/Love Child” examines how, or even if, mixed Asian Americans are addressing their hybrid identities in their artwork.

For more information, click here.

ASNAMST 173S: Transcultural and Multiethnic Lives: Contexts, Controversies, and Challenges (AFRICAAM 173S, CSRE 173S)

Stanford University
Spring 2011

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu

Lived experience of people who dwell in the border world of race and nation where they negotiate transcultural and multiethnic identities and politics. Comparative, historical, and global contexts such as family and class. Controversies, such as representations of mixed race people in media and multicultural communities. What the lives of people like Tiger Woods and Barack Obama reveal about how the marginal is becoming mainstream.

For more information, click here.

The Browning and Yellowing of Whiteness

The Black Commentator
2005

Tamara K. Nopper, Adjunct Professor of Asian American Studies
University of Pennsylvania

Latino/as and Asians Americans do not necessarily reject dominant culture and ideology when it comes to racial politics.

A Review of Who is White?: Latinos, Asians, and the New Black/Nonblack Divide by George Yancey (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2003).

In 1903 the ever-forward looking W. E. B. DuBois declared, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.”  A century later, the relevance of DuBois’ observation is being contested by those preoccupied with the increasing ethnic and cultural diversification of the US.  Many argue that DuBois’ centralization of the boundary between the entangled black and white worlds is outdated, going so far as to propose that we now have “colorlines.”  Such gestures are more than semantic and instead imply that blackness as the definitive social boundary for US race relations is either less pronounced or completely erased by the significant presence of nonblack racial minorities such as Latino/as and Asian Americans.

This is precisely why George Yancey’s book Who is White?: Latinos, Asians, and the New Black/Nonblack Divide is such a necessary read.  Yancey, a sociologist at the University of North Texas, provides compelling evidence that supports the (unstated) hypothesis that the color line of the twentieth century will remain firmly entrenched in the twenty-first. Using as his point of departure the popular projection that whites will soon be a minority group, Yancey opens his book by arguing that whites will remain the majority despite the growing populations of Latino/as and Asian Americans.  How can the increase of Latino/as and Asian Americans enforce, rather than disrupt, the color line?  Simple.  By 2050, according to Yancey, most Latino/as and Asian Americans will be white…

…Overall, while some will surely dismiss Who is White? as “academic”—a practice many activists and even academics engage in when confronted with political conclusions that make them uncomfortable—Yancey’s research is extremely relevant for contemporary racial politics.  Most importantly, Yancey’s findings hint at possible inadequacies of current approaches to “multiracial” America, most of which emphasize a white/non-white paradigm that minimizes or outright dismisses the reality of antiblack racism as the structuring and generative ideology of US race relations and social inequality…

Read the entire article here.

Greg Carroll Draws Large Crowd for Talk on Melungeon Heritage

West Virginia Archives & History
West Virginia Division of Culture & History
Volume 11, Number 8 (October 2010)
page 2

Archives historian Greg Carroll drew a large crowd for his talk [2010-09-09] on groups of people in the Appalachian area and beyond commonly called Melungeon. To view photos of the evening, [click here]. If you were unable to attend and would like more information regarding Melungeon, mixed race, or tri-racial isolate groups, you may contact Carroll at (304) 558-0230 or greg.b.carroll@wv.gov.