Mixed Race Studies

Not Another Remix: How Obama Became the First Hip-Hop President

Journal of Popular Music Studies
Volume 22, Issue 4, December 2010
pages 389–415
DOI: 10.1111/j.1533-1598.2010.01252.x

Travis L. Gosa, Assistant Professor of Social Science at Cornell University
Cornell University

January 20, 2009 marked the inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama as the first African-American president of the United States. Political commentators are busy making sense of Obama’s candidacy and election, but not enough attention has been given to how youth have made sense of Obama. As I show in this article, young people—so-called “hip-hoppers” and “millennials”—used their unique sensibilities, technologies, and music to help define and elect the first black, hip-hop president.

This article examines “Obama-Hop,” rap music about Barack Obama, and the 2008 presidential election. Rap songs about election year politics were a highly visible aspect of the election (Hamby; NPR). This study provides the first systematic analysis of the political, racial, and gendered discourse of the Obama-Hop movement. While Obama’s campaign was discussed in the framework of “post-racialism” (Crowley), this study shows how Obama’s black masculinity became a major source of identification for rappers. The paper explores how Obama was depicted, embraced, and defended from scrutiny in hip-hop. Based on the review of ninety-seven Obama-themed mixtapes, I show how music was used in an attempt to energize youth toward voting and embracing Obama’s political messages.

The exploration necessarily informs the larger debate over hip-hop politics. The “hip-hop wars”—as Rose (2008) labels the persistent controversy over rap—are currently being waged over the political relevance of the music. Representing a generational divide over the meaning of political activism (Boyd), there has been resistance to the claim that hip-hop is indeed “political” (Bynoe; McWhorter 2008). Hip-hop academics are increasingly concerned that corporate control and media consolidation are destroying rap’s political significance (Asante; Rose; Powell). This article addresses the debate by considering the political content of digital mixtapes, which are non-commercial compilations of music, news clips, and photos. The proliferation of Obama rap mixes provides evidence that hip-hop continues to be used toward political ends. This paper shows how Obama’s campaign and subsequent victory put in motion a new wave of explicitly political rap, but one that still includes many of the same problematic tropes around race and masculinity…

Read the entire article here.

‘Visible & Invisible’ Exhibition to Explore History of Hapa JA Experience

The Rafu Shimpo: Los Angeles Japanese Daily News
2013-03-31

The Japanese American National Museum, in collaboration with the USC Hapa Japan Database Project, will present its next exhibition, “Visible & Invisible: A Hapa Japanese American History,” from Sunday, April 7, through Sunday, Aug. 25.

Through photos, historical artifacts, multimedia images, and interactive components, “Visible & Invisible” explores the diverse and complex history of the mixed-roots and mixed-race Japanese American experience.

At a free opening night party planned for Saturday, April 6, from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m., visitors can preview this unique perspective on mixed race within the Japanese American community.

“Visible & Invisible” is preceded by the five-day Hapa Japan Festival, a free event featuring Hapa musicians and artists, a comedy night, readings by award-winning authors, film screenings of leading documentaries, and a two-day academic conference at USC. The festival runs from April 2 to 6. For more information on the schedule and featured programs, visit http://www.hapajapan.com/…

Read the entire article here.

Poverty at a Racial Crossroads: Poverty Among Multiracial Children of Single Mothers

Journal of Marriage and Family
Volume 75, Issue 2, April 2013
pages 486-502
DOI: 10.1111/jomf.12012

Jenifer L. Bratter, Associate Professor of Sociology
Rice University

Sarah Damaske, Assistant Professor of Labor Studies & Employment Relations
Pennsylvania State University

Although multiracial youth represent a growing segment of children in all American families, we have little information on their well-being within single-mother households. This article examines multiracial children’s level of poverty within single-mother families to identify the degree to which they may stand out from their monoracial peers. Using data from the 2006–2008 American Community Survey (3-year estimates), we explore the level of racial disparities in child poverty between monoracial White children and monoracial and multiracial children of color. Fully adjusted multivariate logistic regression analyses (n = 359,588) reveal that nearly all children of color are more likely to be poor than White children. Yet many multiracial children appear to hold an in-between status in which they experience lower rates of poverty than monoracial children of color. The high level of variation across groups suggests that the relationship between race and childhood poverty is more complicated than generally presumed.

Read or purchase the article here.

Kodiak Kreol: Communities of Empire in Early Russian America [Patricia Cleary Review]

William and Mary Quarterly
Third Series, Volume 69, Number 3, July 2012
pages 665-667
DOI: 10.5309/willmaryquar.69.3.0665

Kodiak Kreol: Communities of Empire in Early Russian America. By Gwenn A. Miller. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2010. 242 pages.

Patricia Cleary, Professor of History
California State University, Long Beach

In a period of imperial expansion in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Russia founded only one overseas colony, in several sites off the Alaskan coast. On Kodiak Island, the focus of Gwenn A. Miller’s study, the Russian American Company pursued the fur trade and sought the support of church and state for its efforts. In the process, the company’s agents disrupted the lives of the indigenous Alutiiq people, not least through forming relationships with local women and creating an ethnically mixed Kreol population. In her exploration of this North Pacific outpost, Miller focuses on how these initially tenuous and later increasingly formalized relationships laid the basis for a distinctive category and community of people within the Russian empire.

Drawing on slim and occasionally challenging sources, Miller traces Russian colonial expansion, examining how conquest and the exaction of tribute from subjugated peoples in Siberia facilitated the Kodiak venture. Teasing out how Russians differentiated themselves from locals, Miller focuses narrowly on the inhabitants of one island outpost, whose interactions, both peaceful and violent, led to the creation of a “new world” that was “never wholly Russian or Alutiiq” (xi). Although less well known than other Russian ventures, such as that at Sitka, Kodiak was, Miller argues, important in no small part because it lay at the “crossroads of early Alaskan colonial contact” (xi)…

…At the heart of Miller’s analysis is how mixed-race children came to be important both culturally and economically. Russian American children drew the interest of company leaders and government officials, who “singled out these children to be groomed for middling and at times high-level work within the colonial apparatus” (138). Demographic changes prompted such attention. With the overwhelming majority of native men forced to engage in the increasingly dangerous and difficult otter hunt, overhunting led to ever longer voyages, and growing numbers of men perished at sea. European diseases further contributed to the decline of the indigenous population. Company officials began to recognize two related needs: for young indigenous boys to remain in their communities “to train in the art of the sea otter hunt” (114) as their elders died at accelerated rates and for a population of future company workers to be educated appropriately. The hardships of life in the colonial outpost, the “difficulty of transporting substantial numbers of settlers from mainland Russia” (127), the skewed sex ratio among those who did emigrate, the declining Alutiiq population, and an expanding Kreol one turned the Kreol into “an important constituent of the subject population on Kodiak” (127), a few of whom were sent to study at the company’s expense in Saint Petersburg. State encouragement of mixed-race unions elsewhere, Miller states, typically took place in the earlier rather than later phases of colonial enterprises, with families rather than the state or firms responsible for making decisions about children’s educations. In stark contrast, Russian imperial officials “took increasing interest in this Kreol group of colonial residents as a loyal local population, and their expectations for the behavior of these people as European Russians was expressed in more concrete terms over time” (138), with the 1820s a high point. The church, state, and company all became more interested in these children; the company paid for their education in exchange for years of service, an arrangement that would turn “the local Kreol population into a literate managerial force that would be loyal to the Russian crown” (112)…

Read the entire review here.