Mixed Race Studies

Artists explore the image of mixed race Asian-Americans in DePaul exhibit

Medill Reports, Chicago
2013-04-18

Zhiyu Wang

Medill Reports is written and produced by graduate journalism students at Northwestern University’s Medill school.

In college, Wei Ming Dariotis used to want a T-shirt with “war baby” on the front and “love child” on the back. That way whenever people asked her “what are you?” she could just point to the T-shirt and say, “take your pick.”

Now her imaginary T-shirt has turned into an actual exhibition. The “War Baby/Love Child” show at DePaul University features artworks from 19 contemporary artists, all of whom are of mixed heritage, meaning either they are mixed-raced or they are transracial adoptees.

“This is part of a beginning that people can see visually what it means to be mixed raced,” said Debra Yepa-Pappan, a Jemez Pueblo and Korean artist who lives in Chicago.

The title “War Baby/Love Child” comes from the experience Dariotis, co-curator and associate professor of Asian-American studies at San Francisco State University, had when she was young. When she said her mom is Chinese and her father is Greek /Swedish /English /Scottish /German /Pennsylvania Dutch, people would always ask, “did your parents meet in the war?”…

Read the entire article here.

Results from the 2010 Census Race and Hispanic Origin Alternative Questionnaire Experiment

U.S. Census Bureau
Technical Briefing
2012-08-08
62 pages

What is the AQE?

The 2010 Census Race and Hispanic Origin Alternative Questionnaire Experiment (AQE) focused on improving the race and Hispanic origin questions by testing a number of different questionnaire design strategies…

Overview of Technical Briefing

• (AQE) Goals and Research Strategies
• Methodology
• Race and Hispanic Origin Questionnaires
• Reinterview Study
• Focus Groups
• Major Findings
• Recommendations

Goals and Research Strategies

• Increase reporting in the standard Office of Management and Budget (OMB) race and ethnic categories
• Lower item nonresponse to the race and Hispanic origin questions
• Improve the accuracy and reliability of race and ethnic data
• Elicit the reporting of detailed race and ethnic groups

…Detailed Approach

• Includes examples and write-ins for all OMB race and Hispanic origin categories
• Maintains all original race and Hispanic origin checkboxes

…Streamlined Approach

• Includes examples and write-ins for all OMB race and Hispanic origin categories
• Removes specific national origin checkboxes; presented as example groups
• Streamlined presentation of OMB race and Hispanic origin categories…

…Very Streamlined Approach

• Part 1 – Very streamlined presentation of OMB race and Hispanic origin categories
• Part 2 – Examples for all OMB race and Hispanic origin categories
• Write-in areas for specific race(s), origin(s), or tribe(s)

…

Read the entire report here.

Critical Race Theory and Christianity: Race Is A Social Construction

Jesus For Revolutionaries: A Blog About Race, Social Justice, and Christianity
2013-04-16

Robert Chao Romero, Associate Professor of Chicana/o Studies and Asian American Studies
University of California, Los Angeles

Good morning.  It’s taken me a little longer than usual to write this new post, but I have a good reason.  I just got back from a wonderful birthday celebration with my wife!  One of my gifts to her—no blog writing this weekend!

Last week we began a new series on Critical Race Theory and Christianity.  Our first topic was “Racism is Ordinary.” This week’s theme is, “Race is a Social Construction.” 

According to Critical Race Theory (CRT), “race” is a social construction.  I.e., race is something that human beings invented.  We invented race as a way of dividing up people from different ethnic backgrounds so that we could give special rights and privileges to some, and deny them to others.  The racial categories we create, moreover, do not correspond to true biological and genetic differences among human cultural populations.  They are socially constructed…

Read the entire article here.

Owning my Whiteness, Becoming an Ally

The Race Card Project: Six-Word Essays
By Michele Norris
2013-04-17

Becky Christensen
Ann Arbor, MI

Despite growing up in a somewhat racially diverse area in the San Francisco Bay Area, I had never thought about the privileges I had based on being White until I read Peggy McIntosh’s “White: Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” in graduate school. Since then, I’ve been actively exploring and acknowledging my Whiteness and am involved with social justice efforts on campus to help others become aware of their own racial identities as well as the systems of power and oppression in our society.

Author takes on modern myths about race

Skokie Review
Chicago, Illinois
2013-04-05

Mike Isaacs

he 8-year-old girl who had difficulty breathing had been misdiagnosed for a long time, but then a technician looked at her X-ray and asked incredulously why she had not been treated for cystic fibrosis.

The reason was because she was black, and cystic fibrosis was thought to be a white people’s disease. The technician had never met the girl when he asked his question.

“It’s bad medicine to look at someone’s race and say you should get this test or that test, because you may be completely wrong,” said distinguished author and educator Dorothy Roberts.

To Roberts, who penned “Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics and Big Business Re-Create Race in the 21st Century,” this is just one example of a distorted view of science and race playing out today.

“There’s no such thing as a white disease or a black disease or an Asian disease,” Roberts said during a provocative talk Sunday at Skokie’s Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago. “That doesn’t make sense, because there’s no gene that belongs to a particular race that doesn’t belong to other races.”

She argues that the tie between biology and race is a myth that has been resurrected again, this time with the help of a false reliance on modern-day science…

…Some of the same theories from the era of eugenics, she said, are being resuscitated in 21st century science.

Roberts isn’t saying, though that we’re all identical – one reason she isn’t keen on President Clinton’s famous declaration about the Human Genome Project that all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99 percent the same.

“It makes it sound like we’re all alike, and you can see that everyone isn’t alike,” she said. “There’s lots of genetic variation in the human species, but it’s not grouped into races.”…

Read the entire article here.

The operationalization of race and ethnicity concepts in medical classification systems: issues of validity and utility

Health Informatics Journal
Volume 11, Number 4 (December 2005)
pages 259-274
DOI: 10.1177/1460458205055688

Peter J. Aspinall, Emeritus Reader in Population Health
University of Kent, UK

This article looks at the operationalization of race and ethnicity concepts in medical classification systems, notably the main bibliographical databases of MEDLINE and EMBASE. In particular, an attempt is made to assess recent changes, including the impact of the 2004 major changes to the MeSH headings for race and ethnic groups, and the introduction of ‘Continental Population Groups’. The underlying conceptual basis of the typologies, their relevance for capturing specific population groups, and their overall usefulness in appraising the literature on ethnic/racial disparities in health are examined. The bibliographical database thesauri reveal the pervasiveness of the notion of the biological basis of health differences by race/ethnicity as well as continuing use of antiquated racial terminology. Their system-oriented terminology is likely to limit the effectiveness of retrieval by users who may lack knowledge of their hierarchical structures.

Read or purchase the article here.

Ralina Joseph discusses her book Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial

Weekday with Steve Scher
KUOW.org 94.9 FM
Seattle News & Information
2013-04-15

Steve Scher, Host

Also this hour: Everett Herald reporter and columnist Jerry Cornfield catches us up on what’s happening this week in Olympia. Then, University of Washington Communication professor Ralina Joseph discusses her book Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial.

The interview with Dr. Joseph begins at 00:13:30 and ends at 00:40:39.

When asked about what transcending blackness means, she replied, “I chose this phrase because I think it’s a really disturbing one; the notion that blackness is something that needs to be transcended, that needs to be gotten over. It is inevitably a lack, a slight, a mark as opposed to a positive, wonderful entity.”

Download/Listen to the interview here.

Miscegenation in America started not in the thirteen original colonies but in Africa. English, French, Dutch and American slavetraders took black concubines on the Guinea coast and mated with females on the slave ships. It should be noted that many Africans and Europeans were themselves the products of thousands of years of mixing between various African, Asian and Caucasian peoples.

Lerone Bennett, Jr., “Negro History, Part X: Miscegenation in America,” Ebony Magazine, (October 1962) 94.

Opening 4/25: “War Baby / Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art”

DePaul Art Museum
Chicago, Illinois
2013-04-16

CHICAGO — The DePaul Art Museum explores the construction of mixed-heritage Asian American identity in the United States with “War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art,” which opens April 25.

“It gives visibility to the increasingly mixed generation coming of age by highlighting artworks that map personal biography and the construction of mixed heritage Asian American identity against U.S. and transnational histories,” said Laura Kina, exhibit curator. Kina is a Vincent de Paul Professor and founding member of Global Asian Studies at DePaul University, where she also is an associate professor of art, media and design in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences.

An opening reception will be held from 6 to 8 p.m. April 25 at the museum, located at 935 W. Fullerton Ave., just east of the CTA’s Fullerton ‘L’ stop. The museum is free and open to the public every day. The exhibition runs through June 30.

“Through traditional media as well as video, installation and other approaches, artists explore a range of topics, including U.S. wars in Asia, multiculturalism and identity politics, racialization, gender and sexual identity, citizenship and nationality, and transracial adoption,” said Kina. She co-edited a book of the same title with Wei Ming Dariotis, an associate professor of Asian American studies at San Francisco State University.

Artists featured in the exhibition include Mequitta Ahuja, Albert Chong, Serene Ford, Kip Fulbeck, Stuart Gaffney, Louie Gong, Jane Jin Kaisen, Lori Kay, Li-Lan, Richard Lou, Samia Mirza, Chris Naka, Laurel Nakadate, Gina Osterloh, Adrienne Pao, Cristina Lei Rodriguez, Amanda Ross-Ho, Jenifer Wofford and Debra Yepa-Pappan…

Read the entire press release here.

The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

Random House
2012-09-18
432 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-307-38246-7

Tom Reiss

Here is the remarkable true story of the real Count of Monte Cristo—a stunning feat of historical sleuthing that brings to life the forgotten hero who inspired such classics as The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers.

The real-life protagonist of The Black Count, General Alex Dumas, is a man almost unknown today yet with a story that is strikingly familiar, because his son, the novelist Alexandre Dumas, used it to create some of the best loved heroes of literature.

Yet, hidden behind these swashbuckling adventures was an even more incredible secret: the real hero was the son of a black slave—who rose higher in the white world than any man of his race would before our own time.

Born in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), Alex Dumas was briefly sold into bondage but made his way to Paris where he was schooled as a sword-fighting member of the French aristocracy. Enlisting as a private, he rose to command armies at the height of the Revolution, in an audacious campaign across Europe and the Middle East—until he met an implacable enemy he could not defeat.

The Black Count is simultaneously a riveting adventure story, a lushly textured evocation of 18th-century France, and a window into the modern world’s first multi-racial society. But it is also a heartbreaking story of the enduring bonds of love between a father and son. 

Table of Contents

• prologue, part 1 • February 26, 1806
• prologue, part 2 • January 25, 2007
• book one
  • chapter 1 • The Sugar Factory
  • chapter 2 • The Black Code
  • chapter 3 • Norman Conquest
  • chapter 4 • “No One Is a Slave in France”
  • chapter 5 • Americans in Paris
  • chapter 6 • Black Count in the City of Light
  • chapter 7 • A Queen’s Dragoon
• book two
  • chapter 8 • Summers of Revolution
  • chapter 9 • “Regeneration by Blood”
  • chapter 10 • “The Black Heart Also Beats for Liberty”
  • chapter 11 • “Mr. Humanity”
  • chapter 12 • The Battle for the Top of the World
  • chapter 13 • The Bottom of the Revolution
  • chapter 14 • The Siege
  • chapter 15 • The Black Devil
• book three
  • chapter 16 • Leader of the Expedition
  • chapter 17 • “The Delirium of His Republicanism”
  • chapter 18 • Dreams on Fire
  • chapter 19 • Prisoner of the Holy Faith Army
  • chapter 20 • “Citizeness Dumas… Is Worried About the Fate of Her Husband”
  • chapter 21 • The Dungeon
  • chapter 22 • Wait and Hope
• epilogue • The Forgotten Statue
• Acknowledgments
• Author’s Note on Names
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index