Mixed Race Studies

HIST 1133-Mongrel America: Miscegenation, Passing, and the Myth of Racial Purity

Cornell University
Fall 2012

Racial divisions have served as potent tools for consolidating power, upholding unjust practices, and shaping the American historical imagination. Whether in the form of slavery, segregation, extralegal violence, or the one-drop rule, the insistence on preserving racial distinctions reflects a desire among some Americans to cling to a myth of racial purity. Despite persistent efforts to enforce these boundaries, other Americans have consistently blurred, transgressed, and undermined these seemingly rigid racial categories. Drawing on texts by Thomas Jefferson, Nella Larsen, James Baldwin, and others, this class will explore the quixotic desire for white racial purity, the reality of ‘amalgamation,’ and the relationship between the two. Ultimately, students will analyze the impact of ‘Mongrel America’ on the ways in which Americans understand citizenship and their history.

Two Classes, Divided by ‘I Do’

The New York Times
2012-07-15

Jason Deparle

Also see the video, “Single and Unequal” by Shayla Harris here.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Jessica Schairer has so much in common with her boss, Chris Faulkner, that a visitor to the day care center they run might get them confused.

They are both friendly white women from modest Midwestern backgrounds who left for college with conventional hopes of marriage, motherhood and career. They both have children in elementary school. They pass their days in similar ways: juggling toddlers, coaching teachers and swapping small secrets that mark them as friends. They even got tattoos together. Though Ms. Faulkner, as the boss, earns more money, the difference is a gap, not a chasm.

But a friendship that evokes parity by day becomes a study of inequality at night and a testament to the way family structure deepens class divides. Ms. Faulkner is married and living on two paychecks, while Ms. Schairer is raising her children by herself. That gives the Faulkner family a profound advantage in income and nurturing time, and makes their children statistically more likely to finish college, find good jobs and form stable marriages…

Read the entire article here. Watch the video by Shayla Harris  here.

Destiny’s Child: Obama and Election ’08

boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture
Volume 39, Number 2 (Summer 2012)
pages 3-32
DOI: 10.1215/01903659-1597871

Hortense Spillers, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English
Vanderbilt University

“Destiny’s Child: Obama and Election ’08” interrogates the election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States as a historically ordained event. This essay not only addresses the question of whether we might plausibly read it as the fulfillment of telos but also examines the implications of our having already done so.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Miracle and the Defects [Chapter]

Chapter in:

The Constantinos Kararnanlis Institute for Democracy Yearbook 2009
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-00621-0

pages 73-77
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-00621-0_11

Edited by:

Constantine Arvanitopoulos, Professor of European and International Studies
Panteion University, Athens, Greece

Konstantina E. Botsiou, Associate Professor of Political Science
University of Peloponnisos, Korinthos, Greece

Chapter Author:

George Th. Mavrogordatos, Professor of Political Science
University of Athens

In most of the world, the election of the 44th President of the United States was justly celebrated as an event of historic significance. It proved the irrepressible vitality of the American Dream, precisely at a time when American capitalism appeared to be crumbling. It also confirmed the unique adaptability of an admirable political system, which never ceases to evolve, even though it is based on the oldest written Constitution.

Fear of repetition or banality must not hinder the exploration and evaluation of the manifold significance that the Obama victory has on several different levels, beyond race as such. He is indeed the first African-American president, and his election was regarded as finally laying to rest a painful legacy of slavery, civil war, and discrimination. But he is also a person of mixed blood, who belongs more to the present and the future than to the past, thanks to his multiracial and multicultural background. He had to persuade not only whites, but also many blacks who understandably did not recognise him immediately as one of their own.

Moreover, he is an intellectual educated at the most elite institutions, yet capable of rousing and mobilising the poor and uneducated, without concessions at the expense of his cultured rhetorical style or his cool rationalism. Change is just as impressive in this respect, after many years of Republican disdain of the intellect and intellectuals.

How did such an unusual person, in such a short time, become President of the United States? The easy answer would be to classify him immediately as a ‘charismatic leader’ in the Weberian (not the journalistic) sense. Although it is a scientific term that should be used sparingly, many Obama supporters clearly do believe (as required by Max Weber’s definition) that he is endowed with ‘specifically exceptional powers or qualities, not accessible to the ordinary person’ or, more precisely, the ordinary politician. There were even references to ‘magic’ and to a ‘miracle.’…

Fostering Mixed-Race Children in Ukraine: ‘Family Portrait in Black and White’

The New York Times
2012-07-13

Neil Genzlinger, Television Critic

“Family Portrait in Black and White,” a documentary by Julia Ivanova, leaves a lot of questions unanswered, which is frustrating, but it gets high marks for honesty.

It would have been easy for this film, which is about a woman in Ukraine and the more than 20 adopted and foster children she has taken in, to be a hagiography, but instead it’s a portrait of an imperfect solution in a country that seems to have a lot that needs solving.

The woman’s name is Olga Nenya, and she has made it her particular mission to provide a home for mixed-race children who have been abandoned by their parents. That is a brave thing for her to do because such children are shunned by many in Ukraine, which has a virulent skinhead movement. We don’t learn much about Ms. Nenya, like why she got into this work or what financial resources she is drawing on to put food in all those hungry mouths…

Read the entire review here.

Mixed Blessing

The New York Times
2008-06-18

Francis Wilkinson, Executive Editor
The Week

Being from an interracial marriage has shaped Obama’s political stance.

Far from the storied hollows of Appalachia, and well before the Rev. Jeremiah Wright lit up the cable news channels or the “elitist” label was fixed to Barack Obama’s lapel right where his flag pin ought to have been, a group of older white voters drew a firm line on his candidacy. On Feb. 5, Mr. Obama prevailed by just 10,000 votes in Missouri, a general election swing state. His victory margin was cramped by the fact that he lost white voters over age 60 by nearly 40 percentage points, 67 percent to 28 percent. And it had nothing to do with bowling.

It’s possible that older white people just don’t know where Barack Obama is coming from. Then again, perhaps the problem is they do. One useful gauge of racial tolerance over the years has been the percentage of Americans who approve of interracial marriage. In 1961, when Mr. Obama’s African father and white mother were married, they joined an exceedingly small and extremely unpopular minority. According to the 1960 census, of more than 40 million married couples living in the United States that year, a mere 51,000, or 0.1 percent, consisted of a black and a white. A Gallup poll from 1958, just three years before Mr. Obama was born, found that only 4 percent of white people approved of such marriages, one point greater than the poll’s margin of error.

Both racial attitudes and the frequency of interracial marriage have changed significantly since then. But approval is far from universal. A 2007 Gallup poll found that among whites over age 50, less than two thirds, or 64 percent, approve of marriage between a black person and a white person. Subtract a few points for those who were reluctant to appear intolerant on the survey, and you wind up with roughly 4 in 10 white people over age 50 refusing to support interracial marriage. It hardly seems far-fetched that voters who oppose black-white unions in the first place might have some difficulty supporting the product of such a union as their president…

As a young man, Mr. Obama recognized that he would have difficulty functioning as half white, half black in a racially polarized society. He made a choice, one predetermined to a significant degree by the color of his skin. If the wounds from that painful process and from his racially complicated youth seem to have magically healed, it’s not because he has rolled away the heavy stone of prejudice and ushered in a post-racial morning in America. It’s because Mr. Obama views public denial of his own life experience as a political imperative. To succeed, he has trained his formidable will not just on changing the future, but the past.

Read the entire essay here.

Double Native: A moving memoir about living across two cultures

University of Queensland Press
2012-01-03
304 pages
ISBN: 978 0 7022 3917 5

Fiona Wirrer-George Oochunyung

Growing up ‘on country’ on the west coast of Queensland’s Cape York Peninsula in the 1970s and ’80s, Fiona Wirrer-George Oochunyung had an idyllic traditional life. At the age of 16, she decided to pursue her dream of performing and moved to Sydney to attend the NAISDA Dance College. There she studied with the legendary Page brothers before they founded Bangarra Dance Theatre and met her future husband and father of her three daughters.

But the missing piece of her life was her father. As a young woman, she finds her father and carves out a fragile relationship with him. This inspires her to better understand her Austrian ancestry and how it meshes with her Indigenous identity.

Fiona Wirrer-George Oochunyung is the model of a modern woman: mother and professional; performer and creator; teacher and student, urban dweller and remote community inhabitant. As such she shares the joys and challenges that come with growing up in a divided community and carving out a career as a solo parent.

Double Native is a powerful and candid memoir that offers a rare insight into the burgeoning years of the contemporary Indigenous dance movement and what it means to straddle two cultures.