Mixed Race Studies

Shades Of Grey: Interracial Couples On TV

FlowTV
Volume 15, Issue 4 (2011-12-05)

Erica Chito-Childs, Associate Professor of Sociology
Hunter College, City University of New York

Showing interracial couples on television is not necessarily something new. In 1968, Star Trek aired what is widely regarded as the first black-white interracial kiss on television between William Shatner’s character, Captain Kirk, a white man and a black woman, Lt. Uhura, when the two were forced to kiss against their will by a galactic enemy.

Now, over thirty years later, media reports play up the idea that the numbers of interracial couples, both on-screen and off, are skyrocketing, and push the idea that these unions are so common that interracial relationships barely raise an eyebrow. Yet according to 2010 Census data, only eight percent of all marriages are interracial. While real-life interracial marriage remains low, interracial couples may be cropping up more frequently on television. Do the growing numbers of interracial couples on television signify increased racial acceptance and color-blindness or do these depictions overwhelmingly reproduce long-standing societal notions about the deviant nature of interracial sex and the location of these relationships in the margins of society?

Looking at the contemporary representations on television, interracial relationships are most often found as temporary relationships (lasting just a few episodes), in side-storylines or otherwise marginalized. These relationships are almost exclusively depicted as comical misadventures, introduced as part of a criminal case, used as symbolic of the different worlds that are being portrayed, or play on perceptions of difference, highlighting that racially matched characters are the norm.

Even among newer shows that are heralded for their diverse casts or cutting-edge approach, interracial representations are arguably problematic. There may be a trend to present interracial couples without mentioning race but that does not mean that these representations do not carry familiar racial messages. Still a number of television show producers maintain that they have adopted a colorblind strategy, which they argue transcends race. For example, on New Adventures of Old Christine, Christine is a divorced white woman who becomes interested in a black teacher at her daughter’s private school

…The question remains, if interracial coupes are portrayed in these problematic ways, then why do television shows feature interracial relationships at all? I argue that by showing interracial relationships yet parodying or fetishizing them at the same time, the shows can maximize their audience without alienating others. Difference sells, yet the presentation must be constantly adjusted to fit the contemporary discourses on race. Using interracial sex to push boundaries is widely recognized. Dana Wade, the president of advertising agency, Spike DDB, discussed this idea with television ads, arguing “certain brands might use interracial couples to convey a hip image” adding that “the whole personae of the brand is kind of risky, or on the edge.” Ironically these “hip” and “cutting-edge” depictions are actually just barely repackaged stereotypes…

Read the entire article here.

Racial melting pot won’t end social disparities

San Francisco Chronicle
2012-02-12

Brenda Payton, Lecturer in Journalism
San Francisco State University

I looked at the room full of San Francisco State University students and saw the beginning of the end of race as we have defined it.
 
If that sounds a little over-the-top, here’s some background. Last semester, I taught a class in the journalism department at S.F. State. It was entitled “The Social Impact of Journalism,” and between the Arab Spring, the BART protests and the Occupy movement, we had more than enough to talk about. (Even if it was like pulling teeth to get most of them to talk. That’s another story.)

The class was huge, 120 students, and hugely diverse. The first day, I took roll and managed to butcher most of their names. The Spanish names I handled OK. The Russian, Filipino and Chinese names were more of a challenge. They corrected my mispronunciations good-naturedly.
 
After a few meetings, I realized it wasn’t only the class that was racially diverse—a number of the students were also. They appeared to be, in traditional terms, racially mixed—the face of a future when race will be diminished as a distinguishing characteristic…

…People have been debating whether our country entered a post-racial phase after we elected President Obama. A number of ironies suggest we aren’t there yet. For one, we identify him as our first African American president when he is biracial, as white as he is black. Second level of irony: With an African father and American mother, he is more accurately African American than those of us born to two African American parents. OK, that’s confusing.
 
To add to the confusion: Most African Americans are mixed-race, descendants of whites who held Africans as slaves and overseers during bondage and many descendants of American Indians. When I was growing up, even kids who were biracial were considered black, make that Negro. I have first cousins whose mother is Chinese, and I never thought of them as anything other than Negro. For even more confusion, our other cousins are so light, at one time I thought they were white but didn’t think that meant we couldn’t be first cousins. We didn’t think of ourselves as a mixed-race family. We were proud Negroes.
 
The country has always been more racially mixed than we’ve pretended. That includes white people who have discovered (or not) black ancestors. “Black” people who were light enough passed for white to escape segregation and had children who knew nothing of their racial background. Asian and Latino communities also have been racially mixed…

Read the entire article here or here.

Why Are We Hung Up on Our Mixed Roots?

The Root
2012-03-06

Nsenga K. Burton, Ph.D., Editor At-Large

The latest controversy in Beyoncé Knowles news may be her breast-feeding Blue Ivy in public, but I’m still shaking my head about the recent fuss over her True Match commercial for L’Oréal, which highlights the singer’s mixed-race heritage. In the ad the star says, “There’s a story behind my skin. It’s a mosaic of all the faces before it.” Apparently this is controversial to some, who suggest that the singer is trying to distance herself from African Americans. Come again?

News flash: As revealed by Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. (who is also The Root’s editor-in-chief), the majority of blacks in this country are of mixed-race heritage, as are many throughout the Diaspora. I find it interesting when critics try to erase history in an attempt to promote the idea that we’re 100 percent black. The truth is that the history of African Americans is a history of mixed-race ancestry—some of it by choice, and much of it by force. Many blacks in America and throughout the Diaspora are no more 100 percent black than those who identify as white people are 100 percent white. Just because you say it doesn’t make it so…

Read the entire article here.

A Mixed Bag: Examining the College Experience of Multi-Racial Students

INSIGHT Into Diversity
April/May 2012 (2012-03-29)

Andrea Williams, Contributing Writer

To most American youth, college is the requisite rite of passage into adulthood, an experience marked as much by self-exploration and discovery as biology lectures and late night cram sessions.
 
From managing the excitement of living away from home for the first time, to coping with the stresses of time management, college can be simultaneously exhilarating and intimidating. And for biracial students who don’t fit neatly into the predetermined ethnic categories of many colleges and universities, the journey can be especially challenging.

For Theresa Lopez, the daughter of a white mother and a Latino father, the issues started with her application to the University of Illinois. “I was not given the option to be both white and Hispanic because the boxes were marked ‘White (Non-Hispanic)’ and ‘Hispanic (Non-White),’ making me feel as though whoever created the application was under the impression that white people and Hispanics could not have babies together,” says Lopez. “I would prefer, however, to call myself both white and Hispanic without denying either ancestry.”

The problems didn’t stop there for the college senior. In a society where people are confident in their own assumptions, even going to dinner becomes a lesson in cultural sensitivity. “When we go to eat at the local Mexican restaurant here in town, my friend, who is Columbian but does not speak Spanish, is always waited on in Spanish while I am always greeted in English because of the way I look,” says Lopez, whose blonde hair and blue eyes belie her Hispanic roots. “It makes me upset sometimes because even though I continue to speak Spanish to them, they seem to think I’m just some white girl who is trying to speak their language and be a part of their people. But I’m their people, too.”…

…Luckily for Matt Kelley, he discovered during the fall semester of his freshman year at Connecticut’s Wesleyan University that the school sponsored a mixed heritage student organization. “It was the first time I was made aware of ‘people like me’ who shared the experience of not fitting neatly into generally accepted racial boxes and boundaries,” he says. Kelley subsequently learned about similar clubs at other schools and in 1998 decided to launch a national magazine that would create a community among those organizations.

The publication – given the Yiddish name MAVIN, which means “one who understands” – was immediately well received, leading Kelley to form the nonprofit MAVIN Foundation in 2000 to further the work and reach of the magazine…

Read the entire article here.

Can Drake Save the Bar Mitzvah?

The Jewish Week
Blog: Well Versed
2012-04-12

Eric Herschthal

When Drake’s new video, “HYFR,” dropped [was released] over the weekend—in which the Jewish, biracial hip-hop superstar raps at a bar mitzvah—I was thrilled. Initially.

For years, pop culture references to the Jewish rite of passage have been stuck in the same mode of self-mockery.  Self-criticism is great, and in retrospect I partly appreciate the brutal truth that films like the Coen brothers’ “A Serious Man” show to us Jews—that this once incredibly powerful, meaningful rite had become totally cauterized, stripped of any real substance.  The bar mitzvah has become just another excuse to get the family together—half of which you may not even like—and torture a poor 13-year-old with a foreign tongue he’s probably less comfortable with than trigonometry.

But the Coen brothers didn’t invent that trope; it’s been around for years.  What felt so refreshing about Drake’s video, and still sort of does, is how it isn’t self-mocking at all.  Here’s a rapper so at ease in the self-conscious, status-driven world of pop star culture, that he can brandish his Jewish identity with little self-pity.  He brings his Jewishness to a world—the hip-hop world, and the millions who love it, myself included—that’s mainly known Jews as a stereotype.   The Jew, in hip-hop, is either the boss behind the scenes or, on the rare occasion (as with the Beastie Boys), the nerdy white kids who are lovingly embraced—but still, let’s be clear, as nerdy white kids.

Drake’s changed all that.  In large part that’s because his Jewishness is not the first fact about him.  Many see him mainly as a black rapper, if a light-skinned one.  And even when he broke onto the scene a few years ago and, when asked, would talk about his upbringing by a white Jewish mother in Canada—who sent him to a Jewish day school, and had him bar-mitzvahed—you didn’t get the sense he was trying to hide it.  But I’m actually less interested in what Drake’s openness about Judaism says about the changing world of hip-hop—and my sense is that, in many ways, it’s far more evolved in terms of black-Jewish relations than much of the country—than what it might say about Jews’ perceptions of themselves…

…As much as I want to stick up for Drake, I think Kuehne is right.  The song and the video still have many of the hallmarks of what’s problematic with hip-hop—mostly, the objectification of women.  Plus, there’s a ton of profanity.  “But she was no angel, and we never waited,” Drake raps at one point. “I took her for sushi, she wanted to f*** / So we took it to go, told them don’t even plate it.”

The song’s title, “HYFR,” stands for “Hell Yeah F***ing Right.”…

Read the entire article here.

Obama and the Elusive Idea of Race

The Root
2011-04-26

Mary C. Curtis

Scientists increasingly conclude that ethnicity cannot be defined scientifically, but that hasn’t stopped the racists, the Birthers and the confused from casting their insecurities onto the president.

It’s not surprising to get involved in a heated discussion about race when you’re strolling through a museum exhibit called “Race: Are We So Different?” And wouldn’t you know that President Barack Obama would get caught right in the middle of it.

Not all charges that the president isn’t who he says he is come from Donald Trump’s “Birther” fantasies or a California GOP official’s crude email. A young mother and fan had her own issues with Obama when we talked while strolling through the latest attraction at Discovery Place, Charlotte, N.C.’s hands-on science museum.

“Race: Are We So Different?”—with its science-based displays showing that human beings are more alike than any other living species, and its assertion that no one gene or set of genes can support the idea of race—shouldn’t be controversial or particularly revelatory. That the exhibit is, in fact, both reveals how invested so many people are in racial differences and in the ranking of one race over another. The show—which closes May 8—has inspired discussions by school and business groups in a city with an African-American mayor whose residents have nonetheless scored low on measures of trust among the races.

The mother, with a young daughter at her side and a son in a stroller, couldn’t contain her disappointment—anger, even—that the president had marked “black” instead of indicating “biracial” or one in the long list of multiracial alternatives on the 2010 census form. She was white; her husband—not in attendance that day—was black. And their children were the reason she was upset at the president of the United States and why it was personal. “He’s president. He could have been an example,” she insisted.

I tentatively engaged her. Since she and her children had the right to choose, wasn’t it hypocritical for her to criticize others for their choices? And since—as the exhibit around us made clear—race is an uneven line that has shifted throughout history, depending on political and economic expediency, why does a check mark on a page matter so much?

Suppose, at some later date, one or both of her children checked “black” on that census form. Would she love them any less? I asked her…

Read the entire article here.

Rutgers Student, a German ‘Brown Baby,’ Helps Others Search for their Identities and Creates Community

Focus: News for and about Rutgers faculty, students, and staff
Rutgers University
2012-05-01

Carrie Stetler

She grew up in Willingboro, New Jersey, as Wanda Lynn Haymon, the only child of an African-American mother and father who made her feel special and loved.
 
But when relatives whispered at family gatherings, she knew they were talking about her. One day she asked her parents if she was adopted.
 
 “Do you feel adopted?’’ they answered.
 
She did, but had no proof until 1994 when Wanda Lynn discovered that she was born Rosemarie Larey in Viernheim, Germany, the daughter of a black soldier and German mother. Although she was born in 1956, just 11 years earlier, Nazis, who regarded blacks as racially inferior, sent some of the estimated 25,000 Afro-Germans to concentration camps. Many were subject to medical experiments or were forcibly sterilized. Others simply disappeared.
 
After the war, the stigma of bearing a bi-racial child was so great that many mothers brought their children to orphanages, which often placed them with African-American families in the United States.
 
Today, Rosemarie Pena  (her married name) is completing her master’s degree at the Rutgers-Camden, in the Department of Childhood Studies, researching the history of “brown babies,’’ as they were known at the time of their birth, as well as people who identify as Afro-German around the world.
 
Pena also heads the Black German Cultural Society of New Jersey, an academic organization that connects Afro-Germans internationally. Its mission is to document and inform others about black Germans and their history. For post-war adoptees like Pena, the society helps them find closure and connects them with others who share their experience…

Read the entire article here.

Race is a hierarchical social construct that assigns human value and group power. Social constructions are human inventions, the products of mind and circumstance. This is not to say that they are imaginary. Racialized taxonomies have real consequences upon biological functions, including the expression of genes. They affect the material conditions of survival-relative respect and privilege, education, wealth or poverty, diet, medical and dental care, birth control, housing options and degree of stigma.

Patricia J. Williams, “The Elusive Variability of Race,” GeneWatch, (Volume 21, Issue 3-4, July-August 2009). http://www.councilforresponsiblegenetics.org/GeneWatch/GeneWatchPage.aspx?pageId=197

383a. Nation, Race and Gender in Latin America and the Caribbean – Senior Seminar

Vassar College
Poughkeepsie, New York
2013/2014

Light Carruyo, Associate Professor of Sociology
 
(Same as Sociology 383) With a focus on Latin America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean this course traces and analyzes the ways in which the project of nation building creates and draws upon narratives about race and gender. While our focus is on Latin America, our study considers racial and gender formations within the context of the world-system. We are interested in how a complicated history of colonization, independence, post-coloniality, and “globalization” has intersected with national economies, politics, communities, and identities. In order to get at these intersections we examine a range of texts dealing with policy, national literatures, common sense, and political struggle. Specific issues addressed include the relationship between socio-biological theories of race and Latin American notions of mestizage, discursive and material “whitening,” the myth of racial democracy, sexuality and morality, and border politics.

305. The Social Construction of Race in the U.S.

Vassar College
Poughkeepsie, New York

Diane Harriford, Professor of Sociology

This course examines the social construction of race in the United States from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present. The focus is on the changing racial meanings and identities of specific socio-historical groups and the ways in which social institutions interpret and reinterpret race over time. Contemporary issues addressed include: the construction of “whiteness”, the making of model minorities, color-blindness and the post-racial society, and the emergence of the “mixed race” category. Readings may include Cooper, DuBois, hooks, Collins, Frye, Omni and Winant, and Roediger.