Mixed Race Studies

Marvel’s Mixed Race “Ultimate Spider-Man”

The Huffington Post
2011-08-03

Marcia Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

As a kid from Queens, NY it’s not hard to understand why Spider-Man has always been my favorite superhero. Aside from a shared geographical location Spider-Man reflected many of the qualities of urban youth. He came from a working class background. He lived with extended family. He was open-minded. Sometimes unsure of himself, he struggled to make sense of the bustling world around him and his place in it.

And now there’s a new chapter to the story. Today we meet Miles Morales, a younger multiracial and multiethnic Spidey. Morales, of mixed black and Latino descent, is described by TIME Magazine as a gangly teen “that fights crime and hurls spiderwebs, just like Peter Parker used to do.” The similarities between Morales and Parker don’t stop there. They share alliterative names and Miles was bitten by a powerful spider too. I guess that makes them both multiracial spider-men…

Read the entire article here.

The Arabs of Africa

Patterns of Prejudice
Volume 6, Issue 1 (1972)
pages 1-9
DOI: 10.1080/0031322X.1972.9969036

Ali Mazruia, Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities
State University of New York, Binghamton

The combination of acculturation and inter-mating between races might be called a process of biocultural assimilation Some degree of integration between groups is achieved by the process of mixing blood and fusing cultural patterns. There are two concepts here which need to be further refined. One is the concept of symmetrical acculturation and the other is the concept of symmetrical miscegenation. Symmetrical acculturation arises when a dominant group not only passes on its culture to the groups it dominates but is also significantly receptive to the cultural influence of its subjects or captives.

There have been occasions in history when acculturation has been asymmetrical, and yet the receiving group has been the politically dominant. The classical example is that of Greek influence on the Roman conquerors. A more common example is the kind of asymmetry in which the politically dominant culture transmits itself to its subjects and captives and receives little in return. The British cultural influence in much of Africa has been of the second category. We might call this descending asymmetry, and call the Greek-Roman example a model of ascending asymmetry.

As for symmetrical miscegenation, this would arise in a situation where two racial communities inter-marry and produce a comparable number of both men and women who crossed the racial boundary to seek partners from another community. In very isolated circumstances, and even there with some qualifications, such symmetry is conceivable, where one race or ethnic group is patrilineal and the other is matrilineal. The matrilineal group might not mind its women crossing the border and marrying men from the other country. The patrilineal group, in like manner, might permit the men to be exogamous. By the matrilineal race the child is regarded as sharing the race of its mother; while the patrilineal wing recognises the child’s racial affinity to its father. Tensions in such situations are conceivable, precisely in the duality of citizenship and the pulls of potentially conflicting loyalties. A much more prevalent phenomenon is that of asymmetrical miscegenation. In the great majority of cases where black people have inter-married with non-black people, a lack of symmetry has been a continuing characteristic. In this paper, we shall pay special attention to racial mixture as between the Arabs and black Africans. We are going to do this in a broad comparative perspective, relating the Afro-Arab experience to the different histories of racial mixture in the United States, in Latin America and in South Africa. These three, when combined with the Afro-Arab model, provide four distinct patterns of the relationship between miscegenation and social structure.

All four models of miscegenation are asymmetrical but In significantly different ways. In each case the dominant ethnic group has produced many more husbands in the racial mixture than wives. Over 70% of the so-called black population of the United States has white blood. But overwhelmingly the white blood has come through white males rather than white females…

Read the entire article here.

Daniel McNeil 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: #219-Daniel McNeil
When: Wednesday, 2011-08-03, 22:00Z (18:00 EDT, 17:00 CDT, 15:00 PDT)

Daniel McNeil, Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies
Newcastle University, United Kingdom

Daniel McNeil teaches Media and Cultural studies at Newcastle University, and is a Visiting Fellow of the Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation. His most recent book, Sex and Race in the Black Atlantic: Mulatto Devils and Multiracial Messiahs, documented the freedom dreams and self-fashioning of mixed-race individuals in the Black Atlantic, and he is currently writing a book about ‘Slimy Subjects’: White Liberals, Black freedom and the ethics of racial identity.

Listen to the episode here or download it here.

‘Queer magic’: Performing mixed-race on the Australian stage

Contemporary Theatre Review
Volume 16, Issue 2, 2006
pages 171-188
DOI: 10.1080/10486800600587138

Jacqueline Lo, Professor and Director of the ANU Centre for European Studies
Austrailian National University

Half-caste-woman, living a life apart.
What did your story begin?
Half-caste-woman, have you a secret heart
Waiting for someone to win?

Were you born of some queer magic
In your shimmering gown?
Is there something strange and tragic
Deep, deep down?…

(Noël Coward, Half-caste Woman, 1931)

Used variously to denote fusion, border crossing, miscegenation, transculturation, diaspora, cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism, hybridity as a term runs the risk of being so stretched that it ceases to have any critical purchase for meaningful analysis. It is my contention that despite the extensive range of analysis of hybridity in contemporary postcolonial studies, the body and processes of embodiment have been largely under explored. The focus of attention tends to be on cultural negotiations and performances of identity, Even when race and racism is invoked, the analysis tends to centre on the power mechanisms that produce specific subjectivities and types of bodies. There is very little attention given to how subjected bodies themselves respond somatically to this will to power, nor of how hybridity itself is embodied and performed The invisibility of the body in hybridity-talk is all the more surprising given the genealogy of the term and its association with miscegenation. In order to explain this lack, it is necessary to briefly trace the history of hybridity.

Robert Young points out in his seminal text, Colonial Desire that the English word ‘hybrid’ stems from the latin term hybrida meaning…

Read or purchase the article here.

Miscegenation’s ‘dusky human consequences’

Postcolonial Studies
Volume 5, Issue 3, 2002
pages 297-307
DOI: 10.1080/1368879022000032801

Jacqueline Lo, Professor and Director of the ANU Centre for European Studies
Austrailian National University

Race is defined not by its purity but rather by the impurity conferred upon it by a system of domination. Bastard and mixed-blood are the true names of race.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 1980

In recent years there has been a surge in academic endeavours to claim hybridity as a site of transgression, subversion and liberation. In particular, hybridity has been deployed as a strategy for the negotiating of difference which, according to Homi Bhabha, is ‘neither One nor the Other but something else besides, in-between‘. Within this transformative ‘third space’, boundaries are remade and fixities destabilised. In the hands of less careful scholars, however, hybridity runs the risk of being idealised and dehistoricised as the only ‘enlightened’ response to oppression. Despite the evidence for reading the colonial process as one of mutual transculturation. affecting both coloniser and colonised cultures, the celebratory discourses of hybridity tend to foreground the destabilising of the latter. The danger of this notion of  ‘enlightened hybridity’ as Anne McClintock points out, is that it rehearses the myth of colonialism as the progress and liberation of humanity from a state of deprivation to enlightened reason. Other critics including Jean Fisher have argued that hybridity as a concept is too deeply embedded within a discourse of biology, and as such cannot extricate us from an original dualism of self and other.’ While this does not preclude the potential for the concept to be liberated from its origins and strategically transformed,  there is a need to be more attentive to the ways in which this transformation is mobilised.

Hybridity has its origins in nineteenth-century racial science; whether used to describe physiological 0r cultural difference, hybridity has served as the primary metaphor for the dangerous consequences of cross-racial contact. This essay focuses on the ambivalent figure of the Eurasian within the Australian national imaginary in order to elaborate on the thorny issue of hybridity as a source of both desire and anxiety. The term ‘race’ is commonly associated with hereditary qualities that manifest in visible, phenotypical markers. The emphasis on somatic signifiers is important since the living product of cross-racial heterosexuality is primarily identified with and through the body. As my discussion goes on to demonstrate, the body of the racial hybrid is both the physical manifestation of cross-racial desire and the source of repulsion and fear. While race as a scientific category has long been disproven, it remains one of the most insidious aspects of our colonial heritage. The idea of race survives because the most consistent arguments about it have always been framed within cultural and aesthetic terms. Hence, in looking at the discourse of cross-racial desire. I am less interested in…

Read or purchase the article here.

Indian Voices Creates a Bureau of Black Indian Affairs

Indian Voices
July/August 2011

Rose Davis, Publisher
Indian Voices

At last a true Separate But Equal—For the Good of the People

The Dawes Rolls (a census, used by the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] to determine identity of Tribal members and citizens) came into existence in the 1890’s. It was a time of “Separate but Equal” and this “flawed U.S. policy” became the basis for the Full-Blood/By-Blood vs. Freedman (no Indian Blood counted) rating system for Tribal Membership. US Dawes Rolls Enumerators using Separate but Equal techniques left the Freedman with an identity crisis which continues to this day.

The policy of using Separate but Equal data gathering techniques negated the U.S governments requirement in the 1866 treaties that Blacks be treated as equal citizens.

No one other than Phil Fixico has aggressively championed the cause of addressing and reversing this issue. As a Seminole Maroon descendant he has written, lectured, networked and labored exhaustively to bring this issue into the social consciousness. The resulting Bureau of Black Indian Affairs is his “brain child.” He has generously offered the project to the collective consciousness of the Indigenous community and has stated that he will take no part in it’s operation or management. As a networking partner Indian Voices humbly takes on the task of launching the first Bureau of Black Indian Affairs in this July/August 2011 issue…

Read the entire article here.

Tune Your Engine – What is a New Zealander?

Afternoons with Jim Mora
Radio New Zealand National
2011-08-02, 03:10Z (15:10 NZT)

Jim Mora, Presenter

Zarine L. Rocha, Research Scholar in the Department of Sociology
National University of Singapore

Zarine Rocha is a research Scholar in the Department of Sociology at the National University of Singapore. She’s exploring the issues of mixed race and mixed ethnic identity in New Zealand and Singapore. (00:19:25)

Listen to the interview here in (MP3 or Ogg Vorbis format).

South Africa: Is the Sun Setting on Afrikaners?

International Business Times
2011-07-27

Palash R. Ghosh

The recent death of Magnus Malan, the feared former general and defense minister of South Africa, might have ended an era in a country once defined by strict racial separation.

Malan, who ferociously fought to maintain racial apartheid until the very end, was removed from his post by then-President F.W. de Klerk in the early 1990s under pressure from recently freed political prisoner Nelson Mandela.
 
Malan was part of the White Afrikaner community, the people most associated with establishing and rigidly maintaining the apartheid system for many decades.
 
The Afrikaners are the descendants of mostly Dutch (as well as German and French Huguenots) who arrived in South Africa in the middle of the seventeenth century (English speakers from Britain came in the following century).

Indeed, the Afrikaners have lived in South Africa so long that they regard themselves as “Africans” or “the white tribe of Africa.”
 
However, today, Afrikaners find themselves in a brand new, and perhaps for them, perilous, South Africa.
 
For one thing, their numbers are shrinking….

…One of the bittersweet ironies of Afrikaner culture and history is that—despite being intimately associated with the philosophy of white supremacy and white ‘purity’—they are themselves of mixed race.
 
This has to do with the fact that when the original Dutch settlers arrived in South Africa almost four-hundred years ago, they brought almost no women. Consequently, they had to marry and mate with local women, or with Malays and East Indians.
 
Thus, some the oldest and most revered Afrikaner families, including the Krugers, Van Riebeecks, Bruyns, Van Rensburgs, and Zaimans are likely the descendants of mixed-race couples.
 
[Professor A.M.] Grundlingh [of the History Department at Stellenbosch University] said according to estimates, about 6 percent of so-called “white” Afrikaners are actually of mixed blood.
 
Allegedly, one of the greatest of Afrikaner heroes, Andries Pretorius, the leader of the Great Voortrek, was himself descended from East Indian slave women on both his maternal and paternal sides.
 
This also helps to explains why many of the current “Coloured” of South Africa speak Afrikaans as their first language…

Read the entire article here.

I have the right to identify myself differently than strangers expect me to identify.
I have the right to identify myself differently than how my parents identify me.
I have the right to identify myself differently than my brothers and sisters.
I have the right to identify myself differently in different situations…

Fanshen Cox. “Mixed Minute: Bill of Rights for People of Mixed Heritage” (from Maria P. P. Root’s “Bill of Rights for People of Mixed Heritage”),” You Tube, February 27, 2009. 00:00:28-00:00:43. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZgELKdb8Ns.

He’s [SilverSpringSteve] is saying that [Barack] Obama says “he is a black man with a white mother.”

Yes… I think as we continue to speak that way… we will see though, the fallacy in saying that a “black man with a white mother” doesn’t work either. And that works for him now in this day and age, and the way he grew up and the way he had to grow up. But I don’t think it’s something we should applaud for the future or encourage for the future.

Fanshen Cox. “Episode 204: Mixed Bag,” Mixed Chicks Chat, May 5, 2011. 00:27:16-00:27:49. http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-34257/TS-482022.mp3.

The Invisible Line

Late Night Live
ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) Radio National
2011-06-13

Phillip Adams, Presenter

Kris Short, Story Researcher and Producer

Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law (and author of The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White)
Vanderbilt University

In America race has always been a potent issue—and it’s clear from some of the reactions to the Obama presidency that racial tension still simmers beneath the surface of the American body politic.

If you were to look at the legal history of race you would see an intricate process defining who is black and who is white in America, and you would assume that there is a strongly policed colour line, especially in the Southern States. But according to historian Daniel Sharfstein the boundaries of black and white are far more fluid than they seem at first glance. He says that racial ‘passing‘ is one of the great unspoken-of traditions in American history.

Listen to the interview here (00:28:01).