Mixed Race Studies

Jamette Carnival and Afro-Caribbean Influences on the Work of Jean Rhys

Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal
Volume 3, Issue 2 (Fall 2005)
22 paragraphs
ISSN 1547-7150

Cynthia Davis

Most art critics would agree that since the Universal Exhibition of 1900 in Paris, African aesthetics have profoundly influenced twentieth century sculpture and painting. Literary critics have paid less attention to ways in which West African culture and rhetorical patterns have shaped twentieth century writing. A case in point is the Dominican writer Jean Rhys (1890-1979) who has been located within the discursive spaces of formalism and feminism and, in the case of Wide Sargasso Sea, postcolonialism. Aside from Caribbeanists who, as Kamau Brathwaite points out in “A Post-Cautionary Tale,” bat Rhys back and forth as “The Helen of Our Wars,” critical response to Rhys’ work usually privileges its European modernism and concern with form over its Caribbean cultural context. Even though Ford Madox Ford trumpets her Antillean origin in the introduction to her first book, The Left Bank and Other Stories (1927), critics of Rhys’ first four novels rarely mention her West Indian identity. Such an oversight is puzzling, considering that every text, European setting notwithstanding, includes such identifiable Afrocentric elements as parody, satire, masquerade, hybridity, heteroglossia, and the rhetorical technique of call-and-response. Critics who do acknowledge the culture of the Black Atlantic in all of Rhys’ work include Kenneth Ramchand and Elaine Savory. Ramchand contextualizes her style, “essentially image and rhythm,” as part of the Negritude movement of the 1930’s (Ramchand 134), while Savory contends that Rhys’ texts “conduct important conversations between gender, national, racial and class positions” (198). Janette Martin further asserts that Afrocentric spirituality provides all of Rhys’ protagonists with an “alternative epistemology” (5), “to transcend or, more important, to transgress conventional modes of knowing and behaving” (4). It is surprising that even after the publication of her specifically West Indian novel, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), A. Alvarez hailed her as “the best living English novelist,” and Carole Angier, her British biographer, never visited Dominica as part of her research. Annette Gilson, however, maintains that Rhys’ Afrocentric identity is always present in her European texts, albeit coded and manifested as presence-as-absence (654).

Like Picasso and Modigliani, to whose art she alluded in her novels, Jean Rhys drew on African sources, mediated in her case through the culture of her Dominican homeland. Just as visual artists learned, from West African masks and sacred artifacts, to streamline and stylize form, so Rhys borrowed cultural and oral tropes from the Yoruba and other West African peoples. These cultural markers had crossed the Atlantic with the slave ships and evolved into the trickster tales, ghost stories, obeah spells, talismans, satirical calypso songs and carnival street performances of Dominica and the other Caribbean islands. In privileging Afro-Caribbean orality, heteroglossia, hybridity, and satire, Rhys stands as a foremother to Anglophone writers such as Olive Senior, Michelle Cliff, Rambai Espinet, Jamaica Kincaid, Pauline Melville, Velma Pollard, Erna Brodber, and Opal Palmer Adisa. Like the Martinican novelist Mayotte Capecia (Lucette Combette), Rhys writes against the racist travelogues of “local colorists” like Lafcadio Hearn and subverts the stereotype of the guiablesse (female demon) in both West Indian and European sites (Carter 446). Rhys’ protagonists, like Capecia’s, have been dismissed as apolitical and Eurocentric when in fact the reverse is true. Rhys’ interrogation of power relations across racial, sexual and economic lines is subversive, and she approaches her subject in the indirect, elliptical style of Afrocentric social criticism.

This paper contextualizes Rhys within Afro-Dominican culture and argues that the texts set in Paris and London are deeply informed by the culture, specifically by the rhetorical device of call-and-response and by the persona of the female carnival street performer, or jamette. Jamette is Trinidadian Creole, from the French diametre, the name given to the working class women who took part in carnival (Liverpool 3). The term is used in a broader sense here to include the transgressive, parodic style of the Dominican female street performers of Rhys’ childhood. I would argue that for Rhys, the jamette signifies an opposition to the legal and cultural “limitations … that seek to close women and to enclose [them] ‘safely’” (Fayad 451). Rhetorically, Rhys uses Afrocentric “forms of verbal artistry such as calypso that require economy and highly developed verbal play [and] permit a depth of signification without many words” (Savory 153). Rhys thus indirectly interrogates colonial and metropolitan power structures. In combining modernism and African aesthetics with the hybridity and heteroglossia of her own background, she shapes the satirical tone and parodic structure of her work.

…Rhys’ Afrocentric belief system may be grounded in her own ambiguous ethnicity. “Who’s white?” the Rhysian father expostulates whenever the question of people’s “colored blood” on Dominica comes up, “damn few!” (Rhys, “The Day They Burned the Books,” Short Stories 156). While Rhys’ father may have warned his family that the racial identity of all West Indians was suspect, he may also have encouraged his daughter to embrace her mixed heritage. Gilson writes that in the metropolis “she was subject to disparagement reserved by the English for West Indian colonials whose racial identity was suspect and whose social position was questionable at best” (636). In 1959, Francis Wyndham reported on the BBC that Rhys was “Welsh and Scottish.” She immediately wrote: “I am not a Scot at all. My father was Welsh … my mother’s family was Creole …As far as I know I am white but I have no country really…” (Rhys, Letters 172; my italics). Her great-grandfather Lockhart had married a “pretty Cuban countess … with dark curls and an intelligent face,” who never fully assimilated the language and mores of the British plantocracy. Lockhart was “jealous and suspicious not only of other men but of her possible attempts to get in touch with Catholicism again” (Rhys, Smile Please 26). In “Elsa” the narrator suspects that she is of mixed race: “my grandfather and his beautiful Spanish wife. Spanish. I wonder …” (Jean Rhys Collection [Series I, Box, 1, Folder 1a] McFarlin Library, The University of Tulsa). While one must be careful of conflating excessively, as Angier does, Rhys’ fiction and her history, Aunt Hester’s insinuations to Anna in Voyage that her mother is racially mixed and that her father was pressured into the marriage may be grounded in Rees Williams’ family history. Rhys recalls that Aunt Clarice, the “real” Hester, made similar remarks. Clarice claimed that her brother was “continually brooding over his exile in a small Caribbean island … ‘Poor Willy,’ she would say meaningfully, ‘poor, poor Willy’” (Rhys, Smile Please 55).

Although Rhys was considered white in Dominica, English people, including her biographer, routinely questioned her race. Adrian Allinson, a painter for whom Rhys once modeled and on whom she in turn based Marston in “Till September, Petronella,” criticized her “drawling” West Indian voice and suggested that she was of mixed race (Dorothy Miller Richardson Collection [Series II, Box 1, Folder 11] McFarlin Library, The University of Tulsa). Ford Madox Ford and his common-law wife Stella Bowen both claimed that Rhys was passing for white (Angier 656), and described her as such in their books. Bowen justified her complicity in “l’affaire Ford” by othering Rhys as “savage” and “cannibal,” while asserting her own “superior” Anglo-Saxon values (Thomas 4). The sinister Lola Porter (read “Ella Lenglet,” Rhys’ name at the time) in Ford’s turgid potboiler When the Wicked Man (1931)is modeled on Rhys. Lola is a Creole from the West Indies and, like Rhys, is tall and thin. Lola has a “soft, stealthy voice” and “gipsy blood” (Ford 157). She is “a seductive blackamoor”(249); her breath “pours in and out of her large nostrils”(Ford 183). Lola frequents Harlem nightclubs, is an expert on “Negro music,” and tells “fantastic and horrible details of obi and the voodoo practices of the coloured people of her childhood home” (Ford 175). The scenes in which Lola alternates between kissing the protagonist’s hands “continuously, as if she had been a slave” (162) and threatening him with death by obeah (259), are very similar to Rhys’ description of Marya’s behavior toward Heidler (Ford) in Quartet. A milder version of Rhys inspires another character in Ford’s novel. Henrietta Faulkner Felise is an American, of Spanish descent. Henrietta is from the “Deep South” (“Missouri or Tennessee” as Ford puts it) and has “a slightly dusky accent” (Ford 78). Like Rhys, Henrietta has an unusual intonation and the protagonist “experience(s) a singular revulsion … at her voice” (78). Henrietta is ostensibly white but Ford makes a Carib/cannibal association with her necklace of pink coral, her sharp little white teeth, her “very full and pouted lips,” high cheek bones, and “extremely large-pupilled eyes” (78). Like Rhys, both Lola and Henrietta are expert horsewomen and “spent their childhood on horseback”(Ford 183). Lola, dressed in riding clothes, inspires lurid dominatrix fantasies in the hapless protagonist. Although Rhys and Ford both said their novels, Quartet and When the Wicked Man, were not autobiographical, there are remarkable similarities in the racial othering of the Lola/Marya/Henrietta characters…

Read the entire article here.

The term “race,” the way it is defined in forms, does not exist; the term “racism” is a reality

University of Memphis
Colloge of Arts & Sciences Archive (from an article in La Prensa Latina)
2004-03-08

Marcela Mendoza, Adjunct Instructor & Courtesy Research Associate
Department of Anthropology
University of Oregon

The term “race” as defined in the administrative forms, in reality has no existence; however, the term “racism” as notion of “race” is powerful in society. Those of us, who were born in Latin America, find it very strange to have to indicate “race” on […] any form where one is required to show proof of identity. We find this strange because people in Latin American countries are not asked to classify themselves in a race; this is not an important issue and moreover, we all know that we are from a mixed heredity; (everyone has an indigenous, European, African or Asian ancestor). Nevertheless, for Hispanic Americans the “racial” issue is more natural because they were born and raised in the contradictions of this social system.

Racial classifications are a legacy of the colonial expansion. Colonial empires used them to differentiate the new nations they conquered. For example, Anglo Saxons classified the “Native Americans” (indigenous) in separate categories from the slaves they brought from Africa, and as a result they created the two categories of “Native American” and “Black”…

…The truth is that “race” as a concept has no biological foundation because people have been of mixed heredity since the existence of mankind. The only thing that racial classification shows is the genetic continuation among individuals born in the same geographic region. However, the social consequences (discrimination) of using racial classifications to divide the population of a nation are huge…

Read the entire article here.

Gouldtown: A Very Remarkable Settlement of Ancient Date

J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia (Digitized by Google)
1913
237 pages

William Steward, A.M.

Rev. Theophilus G. Stweard, D.D., Chaplain, U.S. Army, Retired

Studies of some sturdy examples of the simple live, toghether with sketches of early colonial history of Cumberland county and Southern New Jersey and some early genealogical records.

CHAPTER I: Gouldtown; its tradition; its people; its general History.

In Judge Lucius Q. C. Elmer’s history of Cumberland County, New Jersey, written in 1865, occurs this statement:

“Gouldtown—partly in the Northern part of Fairfield, and partly in Bridgeton Townships—although never more than a settlement of mulattoes, principally bearing the names of Gould and Pierce, scattered over a considerable territory, is of quite ancient date. The tradition is that they are descendants of Fenwick.”

Judge Elmer, a distinguished Supreme Court Jurist of New Jersey, was the son of General Ebenezer Elmer, of New Jersey, who was an officer in the Revolutionary Army, first as an ensign, and shortly after as lieutenant in a company, and later, being a physician, serving as a surgeon; he served, in all, during the war of the Revolution, a period of seven years and eight months. In 1814, he commanded a brigade of militia called out for the defence of Philadelphia against the British, and was ever after that known as General Elmer. Judge Elmer was born soon after the close of the Revolution in 1798, and had ample opportunity and ability for research in his native county. He died in 1888.

Much interest has always been taken in the community of Gouldtown by the neighboring communities, and this was always of a friendly character; in early times because of its traditional descent, and later because of the ethnological features recognizable.

General Elmer and his son were accustomed, on Sunday afternoons to meet in a schoolhouse and catechize the children of Gouldtown, in the neighborhood, in the years following the Revolution. These children and youth would not all be mulattoes (the term “mulattoes” is used in this book in its general significance, applying to the people of color of mixed blood) however, for in the community were pure white families—as for instance the Woodruff’s, the Luptons, the Fullers, the Seeleys, and the Whites, and others; traces of whom are to be found only in the farms they left, which were known by their names as the “Fuller Fields,” the “hite Fields,” the “Jay Fields “; the names remaining a century or more after their owners had vanished. Only one of these names has been perpetuated in a village, and that of recent date and several miles distant from the original location. This is Woodruffs, about three or four miles northward from Gouldtown. It is a wealthy farming settlement on the line of the Central Railroad, and has a Methodist Church and a schoolhouse and post-office.

Gouldtown is comprised in two sections—following the two family names of Gould and Pierce, which were always known by their separate names, Gouldtown and Piercetown, but both known comprehensively as Gouldtown. It is remarkable in that it has perpetuated its family name in its locality for nearly two hundred years; also because it is a community of mulattoes who, contrary to the pet theory of some astute ethnological scientists, have perpetuated themselves generation after generation for almost two centuries; remarkable, too, for the known longevity of its people, who do not begin to grow old, as is often said, until they come to three-score years, and a number of whom have reached the century mark, one of whom (Ebenezer Pierce Bishop) is still living, at this writing, who is one hundred and six years old, and one of whom (Mrs. Lydia Gould Sheppard) was buried in the year nineteen hundred and eleven, at the age of one hundred and two, in the Gouldtown Cemetery, and a number of others who are still living at ages between seventy and ninety-five years…

Read the entire book here.

Multiracial Identity Development: Understanding Choice of Racial Identity in Asian-White College Students

Journal of the Indiana University Student Personnel Association
2011
pages 38-45

Ashley Viager
Higher Education and Student Affairs Program
Indiana University

Asian-White individuals will have greater representation in higher education in coming years, and student affairs professionals must learn how these students make meaning of their racial identities in order to best serve the needs of this group. Analyzing Poston’s (1990) and Root’s (2003) theories of multiracial identity development, this paper examines the experiences unique to this population to demonstrate that Asian-White individuals have the ability to choose from multiple racial identity outcomes.

In 2000, the United States government conducted a census in which multiracial individuals could self-identify with more than one racial category. Multiracial individuals are those whose parents are of two or more different and distinct federally recognized racial groups (Chapman-Huls, 2009). Previously, multiracial individuals had not been formally recognized in the United States. Instead, multiracial individuals who had one White parent were primarily classified according to their parent of color (Zack, 2001). This system of racial classification, also known as “hypodescent,” originated in the eighteenth century as a way to “maintain White racial purity and to deny mixed race people access to privilege,” (Renn, 2004, p. 4) and reinforced rigid categories of race. The 2000 census formally challenged these previous notions of essentialist racial categories by recognizing those who blurred the boundaries.

One of the main purposes in the revision of the census was to reflect the growing prevalence of interracial marriage in American society (Perlmann & Waters, 2002). The multiracial population is one of the fastest growing minority groups in the United States (Shih & Sanchez, 2009), and by the year 2050, one in five Americans could self-identify as multiracial (Farley, 2001). Of any racial minority group in the United States, Asians, both native and U.S. born, register one of the highest rates of marriages outside their race, and marriages to Whites are the most prevalent (Lee & Bean, 2004; Qian, 1997). This growing trend means the population of young mixed race Asian Americans, specifically those who claim Asian and White descent, will increase (Min, 2006). As a result, Asian-White individuals will have significantly greater representation in higher education in the coming years. Because the Asian-White student population is growing, student affairs professionals must learn how these students make meaning of their racial identities. While few studies have explored the racial identity formation specific to Asian-White individuals (Khanna, 2004), current research on multiracial identity development can help student affairs professionals understand the Asian-White experience.

Acceptance or rejection from a racial group can significantly impact how a multiracial student chooses to identify. Multiracial identity theories rely on the notion that individuals “must make choices about their racial identification, navigate validation or invalidation around their choice, and resolve their in-between status while traveling pathways shaped by acceptance and/or denial” (Rockquemore & Laszloffy, 2005). Multiracial students often feel caught between their racial components, unable to fully identify with White students or with monoracial students of color (Renn, 1998). It is important to note, however, that multiracial students experience varying levels of dissonance based on factors that impact the way they identify, and current multiracial identity development models are too general to be applied to any one specific multiracial subpopulation. Asian-White individuals share similar experiences that make their process of racial identity development different from any other multiracial group, thus necessitating a theory that outlines the Asian-White racial identity developmental process. This paper will examine Poston’s (1990) and Root’s (2003) multiracial identity development theories to provide an overview of how various factors influence the racial identity outcomes of multiracial individuals. These theories will then be integrated with current literature regarding the experiences of Asian and Asian- White groups in American society to provide an understanding of the fluidity in racial identity choice for Asian-White individuals…

Read the entire article here.

Exploring the “Tragic Mulatto” Stereotype Through Film History

National Social Science Journal
National Social Science Associaton
Volume 28, Number 1 (2007)
pages 88-91

Robert W. Pineda-Volk, Professor of Sociology
Shippensburg University, Shippensburg, Pennsylvania

Considerable attention has been given to the prevalence and persistence of black stereotypes in U. S. culture. Yet one of these identified stereotypes, the “tragic mulatto,” has received relatively cursory attention from scholars and social critics of film and popular culture. In a society historically bent in maintaining rigid social boundaries, this omission is highly problematic. This paper begins to address this shortcoming by examining the construction of this image in popular film and analyzing its political functions and sociological impact in terms of race, gender, and class.

Article Outline

• The Birth of a Nation and the Rise of the Cinematic Society
• The Social Construction of the Tragic Mulatto
• Making the “Tragic Mulatto” Mulatto
• Making the “Tragic Mulatto” Female
• Making the “Tragic Mulatto” Tragic
• Discussion
  • The Gaze, the Look, and the Other
  • Tragic Mulattoes and Contemporary Cinema
• Reference

Read the entire article here.

Martin de Porres

Wikipedia

Martin de Porres (December 9, 1579 – November 3, 1639) was a lay brother of the Dominican Order who was beatified in 1837 by Pope Gregory XVI and canonized in 1962 by Pope John XXIII. He is the patron saint of mixed-race people and all those seeking interracial harmony.
 
He was noted for work on behalf of the poor, establishing an orphanage and a children’s hospital. He maintained an austere lifestyle, which included fasting and abstaining from meat. Among the many miracles attributed to him were those of levitation, bilocation, miraculous knowledge, instantaneous cures, and an ability to communicate with animals.

Account of his life

Juan Martin de Porres was born in the city of Lima, in the Viceroyalty of Peru, on December 9, 1579, the illegitimate son of a Spanish nobleman and a black former slave who was born in Panama. He had a sister named Juana, born three years later in 1581. He grew up in poverty; when his mother could not support him and his sister, Martin was confided to a primary school for two years, then placed with a barber/surgeon to learn the medical arts. This caused him great joy, though he was only ten years old, for he could exercise charity to his neighbor while earning his living. Already he was spending hours of the night in prayer, a practice which increased rather than diminished as he grew older….

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Jean Toomer and the Politics and Poetics of National Identity

Contributions in Black Studies
A Journal of African and Afro-American Studies
Volume 7, Number 1 (1985-01-01)
Article 3
24 pages

Onita Estes-Hicks
State University of New York, Old Westbury

Jean Toomer’s place in thew world of letters rests on Cane, the author’s profound statement on the quest for African-American identity. Published in 1923, Cane was composed during a year of intense creativity which followed Toomer’s three-month stay in Sparta, Georgia in 1921, during which time he served as Acting Principal in an industrial and agricultural school. As had happened to Du Bois in rural Tennessee, in backwards, poverty-ridden, oppressive Georgia, Toomer touched base with the deep roots of Black culture under conditions which recalled the slave past. The writer celebrated that return to the foundations of Black life in Cane, charting his own adventures on southern soil, contrasting the conditions of Blacks in the North, and positing cultural/geographical tradeoffs in search of a whole, healthy Black identity. Compressed yet exhaustive, Cane would be the author’s main creative statement on African American identity. That splendid work justly merits the acclaim it received at the time of its publication and the place it now occupies in the literary canon. An experimenter in life and in letters, Cane’s author realized that Cane need not and could not be duplicated; he next focused his energies on mastering the poetics of national identity, a project which had captivated his imagination during his apprentice years. Little attention has been given to this aspect of Jean Toomer’s literary and personal life, although the author’s earliest excursions into writing centered on the challenges of national identity or what he called “the new world soul.” Additionally, Toomer intermittently wrestled with the composition of a work on national identity for over fifteen years, ultimately achieving a sterling measure of success in his magnum opus, “Blue Meridian,” published in 1936.

Even before he began composing Cane, the Washingtonian explored the poetics of national identity in a poem entitled “The First American.” This Whitmanesque fragment assayed the possibility and process of constructing an inclusive national character by merging the best racial characteristics of America’s three racial groupings-Black, Red, White. This achievement would eventuate in “The First American”-a being free of the conditions of class and color, moving American nationality from theory to fact, from ideality to actuality.

Toomer’s deep interest in the question of national identity stemmed not only from his own multi-racial heritage, but also from his early life in turn-of-the century Washington, D.C., where he was reared among a significant mulatto population, some of whom-such as the Grimkes-maintained family ties across the color line. Toomer’s grandfather, Reconstruction politician, P. B. S. Pinchback, was himself the offspring of a long and stable Black-White relationship between a wealthy southern planter, Major William Pinchback, and his emancipated slave-mistress, Eliza Benton Stewart, a woman of Indian, Caucasian, and African descent. The Pinchbacks maintained ties for over eighteen years in two different states. They had eight children, two of whom, P. B. S. Pinchback and Napoleon, were sent by the father to Gilmore Academy, a private school in Cincinnati, famed for educating the mixed children of wealthy white men and African-American women. In addition to the Pinchbacks, Jean Toomer’s racial lineage consisted of other Black-White families, a condition which prompted his concern with national identity. Caucasian in appearance, Nathan Toomer, the writer’s father, lived on both sides of the color line, while listed alternately as Black and mulatto in census data. Prior to marrying Nina Pinchback, Jean’s mother, Nathan had been married to Amanda Dickson of Augusta, Georgia. The latter was the “natural” daughter of one of the wealthiest white men in the South, David Dickson, who claimed Amanda as his child in a deathbed confession, leaving her the major portion of his considerable wealth. Following the breakup of the Nathan Toomer-Nina Pinchback marriage, Nina’s second husband was Archibald Combes, of New Jersey’s famed and historic mulatto colony, Gouldtown, which had been settled by the descendants of a seventeenth-century African named Gold or Gould and the granddaughter of the Englishman Walt Fenwick, founder of southwestern New Jersey and friend of William Penn. Either by the clerk’s perception or by their own statements, both Archibald and Nina were listed as “white” on their marriage certificate.

Toomer’s complex racial background left him sceptical of racial labels and suspicious of a social system which designated people who were palpably “white” as “black.” Like Richard Wright, who similarly could not understand why a woman of his grandmother’s “white” complexion was labeled “colored,” Toomer early in his life began seeing through the social construction of reality. Race, Toomer was convinced, was a cultural, not a biological issue. Like many light-skinned Washingtonians of his time, Jean Toomer lived on both sides of the color line, as he so chose, exploiting his own biology to subvert the caprices of color. In Washington “functional passing“-to obtain jobs, to attend educational institutions, to secure entrance to entertainment facilities-had been raised to a fine art. Jean knew many Washingtonians who passed during the day to maintain jobs and who rode “uptown to the respite of a Negro home” at the end of the day, the situation faced by Vera, the central character in the author’s short story “Withered Skin of Berries.” Mary Church Terrell, a friend of the Pinchbacks, whose daughters grew up with young Jean, reported that her daughters often utilized their white skin to purchase tickets for their “darker brothers.” Questions about race and nationality never came up at the University of Wisconsin. But before going off to college, the student had prepared himself to adopt the strategy of “functional passing,” a resource which Gunnar Myrdal noted was historically called upon by numerous light-skinned students in pre-integration America to avoid the added tensions of racial problems in university life. In New York in the twenties, Toomer, Gorham Munson recalled, gained luncheon accommodations for Charles Johnson and Alain Locke by a functional pass. Moving easily across the color line, the writer, like Lear and Cordelia, regarded himself as one of “God’s spies,” garnering data on the human condition as race distorted it. Like another famous Shakesperian character, Jean Toomer often felt “what fools these mortals be.” Seeing beyond race, he felt the nation and saw it off balance and off guard and culled his own sense of nation and national identity from hardcore experience…

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6th Critical Multicultural Counselling & Psychotherapy Conference: Metissage, Mestizaje, Mixed “Race”, and Beyond

Centre for Diversity in Counselling & Psychotherapy
University of Toronto
2011-06-07 through 2011-06-08

Keynote Presentation: Contemporary Multiple Heritage Couples, Individuals, and Families: A Generation with Diverse Views and Varied Experiences.

Mark Kenney, Adjunct Professor
Chestnut Place College, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Kelley Kenney, Professor of Counseling & Human Services
Kutztown University, Kutztown, Pennsylvania

The five conference themes are as follows:

1. Mixed “race”/multiracial identities and their development: current research (trends, methodological issues, etc.) and suggestions for future research
2. Intersection of mixed “race” and other socially constructed identities (class, gender, sexual orientation, etc.)
3. Counselling practice with interracial couples: current research; clinical issues; therapeutic issues surrounding counsellor attitudes, beliefs, knowledge, and skill sets; current counselling practice; suggestions for future research and practice.
4. Counselling practice with mixed “race”/multiracial individuals (including children, adolescents, adults, and the elderly): current research; clinical issues; therapeutic issues surrounding counsellor attitudes, beliefs, knowledge, and skill sets; current counselling practice; suggestions for future research and practice.
5. Counselling practice with mixed “race” families (including extended families of interracial couples and families that adopt transracially): current research; clinical issues; therapeutic issues surrounding counsellor attitudes, beliefs, knowledge, and skill sets; current counselling practice; suggestions for future research and practice.

For more information, click here.

Blending together

The Stanford Daily
Stanford University
2011-05-05

Ashley Menzies

These students are part of the growing country-wide phenomenon of individuals who identify themselves as “mixed race.” The number of people who check both the black and white boxes has increased by 134 percent to 1.8 million since the 2000 census, the first time it allowed such an option. Among American children, the multiracial population has increased nearly 50 percent to 4.2 million since 2000.

“The growth of this population is clearly a trend that will surely increase every decade into the 21st century,” wrote history professor Al Camarillo in an email to The Daily.

At Stanford, this rise in the mixed-race population may finally create a multicultural community in which mixed-race students feel they can belong.

Multiracial associations have in recent years been popping up on college campuses all around the country. These organizations aim to promote multicultural awareness and provide students with a safe environment to discuss multiracial issues. Many Stanford students were surprised that an organization for mixed-race students does not exist on campus…

…Assistant professor of English Vaughn Rasberry also observed a change in norms concerning racial identity. In Rasberry’s opinion, the increase of individuals in America identifying themselves as mixed race is not just the result of a sociological trend, but “also registers some dissatisfaction with conventional racial or ethnic categories.”…

Read the entire article here.

Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking

Princeton University Press
2011
248 pages
6 x 9 | 7 color illus. 16 halftones
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-691-14031-5

Michael Keevak, Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages
National Taiwan University

In their earliest encounters with Asia, Europeans almost uniformly characterized the people of China and Japan as white. This was a means of describing their wealth and sophistication, their willingness to trade with the West, and their presumed capacity to become Christianized. But by the end of the seventeenth century the category of whiteness was reserved for Europeans only. When and how did Asians become “yellow” in the Western imagination? Looking at the history of racial thinking, Becoming Yellow explores the notion of yellowness and shows that this label originated not in early travel texts or objective descriptions, but in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientific discourses on race.

From the walls of an ancient Egyptian tomb, which depicted people of varying skin tones including yellow, to the phrase “yellow peril” at the beginning of the twentieth century in Europe and America, Michael Keevak follows the development of perceptions about race and human difference. He indicates that the conceptual relationship between East Asians and yellow skin did not begin in Chinese culture or Western readings of East Asian cultural symbols, but in anthropological and medical records that described variations in skin color. Eighteenth-century taxonomers such as Carl Linnaeus, as well as Victorian scientists and early anthropologists, assigned colors to all racial groups, and once East Asians were lumped with members of the Mongolian race, they began to be considered yellow.

Demonstrating how a racial distinction took root in Europe and traveled internationally, Becoming Yellow weaves together multiple narratives to tell the complex history of a problematic term.

Read the introduction here.