Mixed Race Studies

Race in a Bottle

Scientific American
Volume 297 (January 1, 2007)
pages 40-45

Jonathan D. Kahn, Professor of Law
Hamline University, Saint Paul, Minnesota

Drugmakers are eager to develop medicines targeted at ethnic groups, but so far they have made poor choices based on unsound science. This article focuses on the drug, BiDil – a drug that combats congestive heart failure by dilating the arteries and veins of African American patients. The author expounds that there is no solid evidence that the drug should targeted towards only one ethnic group. The author includes the history of BiDil including its inception and then its reappearance with a race-based focus.

Read the entire article here.

Is Elizabeth Warren an Indian?

The Aporetic
2012-09-27

Mike O’Malley

The ques­tion posed above is extremely hard to answer. She doesn’t “look like an indian.” But what do Indians look like?

Just to recap: Elizabeth Warren is run­ning for the Sen­ate in Massachusetts. She’s been widely mocked for claiming herself as “native Ameri­can” at var­i­ous points in her career. Warren grew up in what’s now Oklahoma, a vast region which the US government had originally reserved for Indian tribes relocated from the East…

…The racial past of Americans is far more complicated and ambiguous than Americans generally realize. My favorite example is very personal. According to Virginia, the state in which I now reside, I am a black man. Had my family stayed in VA, my father could not have attended white schools and my parents would not have been allowed to marry. It’s absurd, and ridiculous: I’m as white as any white man you’d ever imagine, and no one in my family even knew of this history till about a decade ago. But there it is, a mat­ter of record.

The man responsible, Walter Ashby Plecker, was convinced there were no “real” indians in VA. Instead, he argued, there lived a mongrel race of intermmarried people, the “WIN” tribe (White, Indian, Negro). If you listed yourself as “Indian” on official documents, Plecker would rewrite them, and change “indian” to “colored,” because there were no “real” indians. Had Warren grown up in VA, she would have been unable to prove any connec­tion to Indian ancestors, because Plecker destroyed the records. And yet, the descendants of Indians still live in Virginia today…

Read the entire article here.

Obama struggles to balance African Americans’ hopes with country’s as a whole

The Washington Post
2012-10-28

Peter Wallsten

Barack Obama stood at the lectern, trying to figure out what to say — or at least how to say it. He started speaking, then stopped, then started again, each time searching for the right tone, the right cadence, the right words.

The audience was a small group of advisers, including two African American scholars who were counseling him on how to get his message across most effectively with black voters. Obama, whose memoir years earlier had explored his mixed-race background and search for racial identity, wanted to connect with African Americans but remain true to his own style and voice.

“I can’t sound like Martin,” Obama said at one point, according to the scholars. “I can’t sound like Jesse.”

Obama was still more than a year away from becoming America’s first black president, but already he was parsing that identity in his mind…

…Obama rarely discusses his innermost feelings about being the first African American to occupy the Oval Office, according to friends and associates, preferring to keep his thoughts closely held, shared with only a select few. He has shown himself to be drawn to the symbolic, or even aspirational, aspect of his presidency.

One of the iconic images of his tenure is a 2009 photograph of Obama leaning down to let a 5-year-old black boy, Jacob Philadelphia, touch his hair. The boy wanted to see if his hair felt like the president’s. The image, captured by White House photographer Pete Souza, has been on display ever since, just outside the Oval Office in a hallway that Obama passes through regularly…

…If the election of four years ago put to rest the notion that the United States was not ready to elect a black president, this year poses a new question: Can an African American president, after four years as a fixture in Americans’ lives, win reelection?…

Read the entire article here.

“Incestuous Sheets” and “Adulterate Beasts”: Incest and Miscegenation in Early Modern Drama

University of Michigan
2011
199 pages

Kentston D. Bauman

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature)

This dissertation explores the centrality of incest and miscegenation in the early modern cultural imaginary. Incest, which occurs with surprising frequency in the drama of the period but with equally surprising scarcity in everyday social life, is frequently invoked in conjunction with miscegenation in all of its various forms (social, religious, ethnic/cultural/racial). As boundary phenomena – the two extreme ends of the spectrum of sexual alliance – incest and miscegenation served as powerful and surprisingly flexible dramatic tropes, providing a useful means of interrogating the social processes that create, instill, and redefine acceptable choices in sexual and social partners. I divide the project into two sections. In the first, I investigate the interplay among incest, social miscegenation, and social mobility. Looking at Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, I explore how these issues become filtered through the figure of the incestuous widow, whose treatment serves as both a critique of aristocratic hierarchies and a means of promoting sexual and social mobility. The second, which examines the relations between incest and ethnic miscegenation, centers on Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Noting that Shakespeare takes the incestuous rape in Ovid’s tale of Philomel and replaces it with the miscegenistic rape of Lavinia, I investigate how this transposition interrogates the family’s relationship to itself and to the state. I situate my readings of these plays in a socio-political context that takes into account two different, yet intricately connected, cultural issues: the painful transition of a society still highly stratified along feudal lines to one suddenly faced with the possibilities for radical economic and political advancement; and the anxieties of a culture just as suddenly exposed, through exploration and trade, to other geographic and cultural realms. The attempt to navigate the new terrain opened up by changes in the social, political, and geographic climate, I argue, disrupts long-established institutions – the family, marriage, hierarchical stratification. Significantly, the tensions between incest and miscegenation so apparent in the period’s drama express, in part, cultural anxieties fostered by a new social openness combined with a newly heightened sense of an enticing yet threatening Other.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• DEDICATION
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CHAPTER
  • Introduction. Incest and Miscegenation on the Early Modern Stage
  • One. The Incestuous Widow and Social Mobility in Early Modern Drama
  • Two. Aristocratic Endogamy and Social Miscegenation in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi
  • Three. “Unkind and Careless of Your Own”: Incest, Miscegenation, and Family in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus
  • Epilogue. Looking Forward: A Pattern for Reading
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

Read the entire dissertation here.

Research Matters June 27, 2012

USC Dornsife Research Office Weekly Updates
University of Southern California
2012-06-27

Stephan Haas, Vice Dean of Research

Awards

This information is based upon official award data from the Contracts and Grants office. It is provided to make you aware of the interesting research that is being conducted by our colleagues and that is supported through extramural sources…

• Duncan Williams, Center for Japanese Religions and Culture, Critical Mixed Race Studies: A Transpacific Approach, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation…

Read the entire update here.

Scholars fix gaze on changing racial landscape

Chicago Tribune
2012-10-29

Dawn Turner Trice

Laura Kina, 39, is half Asian-American and half white. Her husband is Jewish, and her stepdaughter is half Hispanic. Her family, including her fair-skinned, blue-eyed biological daughter, lives near Devon Avenue in the heart of Chicago’s Indian and Pakistani community.

Kina, who’s a DePaul University associate professor of art, media and design, views her life as a vibrant collage of culture, religion and race, pieced together by chance and choice.

“I grew up in the ‘Sesame Street’ generation,” she said. “This is just my normal.”

On Thursday, Kina and DePaul professor Camilla Fojas will begin a four-day conference on campus that explores the emerging academic field of critical mixed-race studies. Hundreds of scholars and artists from around the country and globe are expected to participate in research presentations, spoken-word performances and discussions.

Kina and Fojas, who hosted a similar conference in 2010, hope to cover an array of topics on identity, discrimination and racial “passing.” Additionally, panels will tackle issues such as the role of the mixed-race person as exotic “everyman” in advertising and film, and the impact of President Barack Obama and Tiger Woods, among others, as biracial icons…

Read the entire article here.