Mixed Race Studies

Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial [Gaither Review]

MXDWELL
2013-02-17

Renoir Gaither

MXDWELL is a versatile online news source that celebrates and redefines the mixed experience by presenting a variety of cultural and artistic news, while promoting diversity as a vital aspect of our community.

Behind her behemoth title, “Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulattato the Exceptional Multiracial,” author Ralina L. Joseph carries on the business of dissecting multiracial representation in American popular culture with acuity and zeal.

The result is a study that cedes little to those who decry that race no longer matters in American society. Over the past few decades a groundswell of scholarly attention has sprouted on the subject of multiraciality. And hybridity and critical mixed-race theorists continue to stake claims on the theoretical landscape. Professor Joseph acquires her piece of theoretical real estate through interdisciplinary analysis of mixed-race characters in contemporary film, fiction and television, in particular, representations of mixed-race African Americans. Joseph tackles a multitude of cavernous issues surrounding such representations, ever delving into the intersectionality of race, gender, sexuality and class, and the many codes in which the latter are inscribed on mixed-race representation…

Read the entire review here.

The Identity Development of Multiracial Youth. ERIC/CUE Digest, Number 137

Education Resources Information Center (ERIC)
ERIC Identifier: ED425248
November 1998
9 pages

Wendy Schwartz

In the past several decades, individuals have been responding more actively to political and personal pressures to identify with a specific group that shares their background. For many people of mixed racial, ethnic, and cultural heritage, making such an identification is complicated. It is important for society to foster the positive development of these individuals, and it is even more important for educators and counselors to know how best to serve the special developmental and educational needs of multiracial students. A key factor in the lives of multiracial children is how they are labeled by themselves, their families, and society in general. A model of the identity development of multiracial children and youth has been proposed by W. Poston (1990). This model suggests that families may foster identity choices for their children that encompass “human,” “multiracial,” and “monoracial” options. At present, many of the important official tallies of individuals in the United States allow for only one racial or ethnic designation. However, in the year 2000, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget will allow individuals to identify themselves with as many racial designations as appropriate. By 2003, schools will also have to change the ways in which students report race, and this may affect the way in which multiracial students see themselves. Individuals who are socialized as multiracial usually benefit from their heritage, but there are disadvantages to being multiracial. One of the disadvantages is the complicated nature of the identity development process for multiracial youth. Another pressure on multiracial youth is societal racism in general and bias against interracial marriage in particular. Given the existence of the prejudices, it is likely that educators and counselors will also harbor some of these ideas, even unconsciously. It is important that educators and counselors consider their personal views carefully to ensure that they do not further complicate the development of the multiracial student’s identity. Learning about and respecting the beliefs, attitudes, and concerns of multiracial students is crucial for educators.

Read the entire paper here.

Beyond Race: Human Biological Diversity (Third Edition)

Cognella
2013

Joelle Presson, Affiliate Research Assistant Professor
Department of Biology
University of Maryland

Jan Jenner
University of Alabama, Birmingham

Race. It’s an idea that dominates our culture and continues to generate societal tensions. But what really are human races? Are races meaningful in a biological sense? What is the significance of the variety of human skin and hair colors? Are black, white, Asian, and Native American valid categories that reflect basic human differences?

Beyond Race: Human Biological Diversity answers these questions and provides the most recent scientific studies on human genetic groups and on the origins of the human family tree. Prepare to see racial stereotypes challenged as Beyond Race: Human Biological Diversity integrates basic biological knowledge with current understanding of human genetics, evolution, and human variation. Beyond Race allows students to view humanity through the lens of modern biology and re-evaluate society’s traditional ideas about human races. Exciting new findings about human evolution are presented along with DNA analyses that have revised our understanding of human history. In this context the reader will reflect on race and how racial distinctions have influenced society’s attitude to and treatment of different groups of people.

Beyond Race begins with discussions of the concepts that are the foundation of biology. These foundations provide the basic biological context that is essential to a genuine understanding of the current revolution in the study of human relationships. Coverage of Darwin’s principles, evolution, biological classification, the emergence of life from chemistry, cell reproduction, and genetics lead to a sophisticated appreciation of DNA lineages. The reader will find all of this invaluable in navigating the modern world of genetic and ancestry testing. The study of genomics also is central to understanding human biological diversity and is woven into the content of Beyond Race.

As a result of this comprehensive and integrated coverage, students will learn that the separation of humans into “races” is not biologically valid and that the idea of race can now be replaced with the concept of a more accurately detailed human family tree. The primary goal of Beyond Race is not to give students simple answers to complex questions concerning race, but rather to enable them to draw their own conclusions about the value of continuing to use “races” as labels for human beings.

Sections entitled Threads… begin each chapter and link the readings to real-world events that are already familiar to students. They demonstrate the clear, vital, critically important connections between the science studied in the classroom and life on a broader stage. Of special note are the Now You Can Understand, What Do You Think?, and Chapter Review sections that conclude each chapter. These offer opportunities for reflection and synthesis, reinforce important ideas and concepts, and enhance student retention of the material. Additional Reading, a short annotated bibliography that closes each chapter, links chapter content to a broader pool of intellectual resources.

Beyond Race: Human Biological Diversity is designed for use in courses on Human Biology and Genetics.

Black Indian With a Camera: The Work of Valena Broussard Dismukes

Southeastern Oklahoma University
Native American Symposium
2005-Proceedings of the Sixth Native American Symposium
pages 40-46

Sarita Cannon
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

In this paper, I examine the liberatory photography of a living African-Choctaw-French American artist, Valena Broussard Dismukes. I am especially fascinated by the way in which Dismukes takes the camera, an object that had previously been used as a weapon of oppression against Native Americans and people of African descent, and uses it to capture the spirit of twenty-first-century Black Indians on their own terms. In her series of portrait photographs entitled “Red-Black Connection: The Cultural Heritage of Black Native Americans,” Dismukes highlights the varied experience of Black Indians in the United States and forces her viewers to reevaluate their notions of what a “real” Indian and what a “real” Black person look like….

…The verbal narratives that accompany many of the portraits highlight many issues that contemporary Black Indians face, including the difficulty of tracing their lineage and the responses they receive from others about their authenticity or lack thereof. However, generally the narratives celebrate Black Indian Identity. A few of Dismukes’ subjects discuss how their own family members obscured their “true” ancestry. For instance, Elnora Tena Webb Mitchell (of Cherokee/Blackfeet descent) writes, “My grandparents and other members of my family were identified as Native American. However, there is much information about our ancestry that is kept secret. Being Native American is not revered nor honored by many family members.” It is interesting to note here that it is not the Black blood that is repressed, but rat her it is the Indian ancestry. It was not always advantageous to be identified as Black rather than Native. This choice depended upon historical and geographical context. Still others note how they are viewed as “wannabes” who are trying to distance themselves from Blackness. Gene “Quietwalker” Holmes of Comanche descent says, “There have been people from both communities who react to my heritage on a negative basis and ask, ‘Who or what are you trying to be?’” But Carol Munday Lawrence of Cherokee descent responds to these attacks simply by saying that she is merely discovering her multiple selves: “I fully understand why some fear that to claim Native American, or any other heritage, is to reject one’s Blackness, but this is not about ‘going Native.’ Knowing who your people are, and embracing them all unconditionally, can only enrich your life.” And Stella Vaugh playfully embraces this historical moment in which she can identify as a multiracial person: “In fact, I’m having fun boasting about my mixed-race. I jokingly say I’m 57 Heinz Variety. My mother’s mother is Cherokee and Irish. My father’s mother is Bohemian and his father is Choctaw. I am told that one of my ancestors is black and I’m still searching for that beautiful person.” Vaugh proudly embraces her multiple heritage and openly acknowledges the mystery that still surrounds her ancestry. She symbolizes the twenty-first century Black Indian who is coming out” after living much of her life in a space where she felt the need to repress parts of her identity. If Dismukes’ project can give at least one person the opportunity to feel a sense of dignity about who she is and introduce her to a community of people who also live at the crossroads of Native and African American cultures, then it is, without a doubt, a meaningful political and artistic endeavor…

Read the entire paper here.

The Mismeasure of Man

W. W. Norton & Company
June 1996 (Originally published in 1981)
448 pages
5.5 × 8.3 in
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-393-31425-0

Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002), Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and Professor of Geology
Harvard University

The definitive refutation to the argument of The Bell Curve.

When published in 1981, The Mismeasure of Man was immediately hailed as a masterwork, the ringing answer to those who would classify people, rank them according to their supposed genetic gifts and limits.

 Yet the idea of biology as destiny dies hard, as witness the attention devoted to The Bell Curve, whose arguments are here so effectively anticipated and thoroughly undermined. In this edition, Stephen Jay Gould has written a substantial new introduction telling how and why he wrote the book and tracing the subsequent history of the controversy on innateness right through The Bell Curve. Further, he has added five essays on questions of The Bell Curve in particular and on race, racism, and biological determinism in general. These additions strengthen the book’s claim to be, as Leo J. Kamin of Princeton University has said, “a major contribution toward deflating pseudo-biological ‘explanations’ of our present social woes.”

Race: The History of an Idea in the West

Johns Hopkins University Press
May 1996
464 pages
Paperback (on-demand) ISBN: 9780801852237

Ivan Hannaford

In Race: The History of an Idea in the West Ivan Hannaford guides readers through a dangerous engagement with an idea that so permeates Western thinking that we expect to find it, active or dormant, as an organizing principle in all societies. But, Hannaford shows, race is not a universal idea—not even in the West. It is an idea with a definite pedigree, and Hannaford traces that confused pedigree from Hesiod to the Holocaust and beyond.

Hannaford begins by examining the ideas of race supposedly held in the ancient world, contrasting them with the complex social, philosophical, political, and scientific ideas actually held at the time. Through the medieval, Renaissance, and early modern periods he critically examines precursors in history, science, and philosophy. Hannaford distinguishes those cultures’ ideas of social inclusion, rank, and role from modern ones based on race. But he also finds the first traces of the modern ideas of race in the proto-sciences of late medieval cabalism and hermeticism. Following that trail forward, he describes the establishment of the modern scientific and philosophical notions of race in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and shows how those notions became popular and pervasive, even among those who claim to be nonracist.

At the same time, Hannaford sets out an alternative to a race-based notion of humanity. In his examination of ancient Greece, he finds in what was then a dazzling new idea, politics, a theory of how to bring a purposeful oneness to a society composed of diverse families, tribes, and interests. This idea of politics has a history, too, and its presence has waxed and waned through the ages.

At a time when new controversies have again raised the question of whether race and social destiny are ineluctably joined as partners, Race: The History of an Idea in the West reveals that one of the partners is a phantom—medieval astrology and physiognomy disguised by pseudoscientific thought. And Race raises a difficult practical question: What price do we place on our political traditions, institutions, and civic arrangements? This ambitious volume reexamines old questions in new ways that will stimulate a wide readership.

SNAPSHOT: “a true story of love interrupted by invasion”

Greenway Court Theatre
544. N. Fairfax Avenue
Los Angeles, California
2013-04-04 through 2013-04-21

Mitzi Sinnott

A daughter’s journey through a landscape of years, memories and realities, initiated by her questioning, “what do I know about war?”  The answers are lying in an album of faded photos of her absent father, who left for the Vietnam War before she was born.  Fusing words, dance, music and film this story chronicles the quest of a mixed-race daughter from Southern Appalachia who eventually finds her homeless Veteran father suffering in Hawaii.

Her growing insights reveal how the forces of history, race and war affected herself and her family, and the torn fragments of her life begin to re-connect. SNAPSHOT honors her father and other Vietnam Veterans who have been lost under the avalanche of history. This play is a daring look at the truth of our past and an inspiring example of the need for us to reconcile our history—one life at time.

For more information, click here.

Racial Theories in Context (Second Edition)

Cognella
2013
224 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-60927-056-8

Edited by:

Jared Sexton, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Film & Media Studies
University of California, Irvine

This book presents a critical framework for understanding how and why race matters — past, present, and future. The readings trace the historical emergence of modern racial thinking in Western society by examining religious, moral, aesthetic, and scientific writing; legal statutes and legislation; political debates and public policy; and popular culture. Readers will follow the shifting ideological bases upon which modern racial theories have rested, from religion to science to culture, and the links between race, class, gender, and sexuality, and between notions of race and the nation-state.

The authors of Racial Theories in Context discuss the relationship of racial theories to material contexts of racial oppression and to democratic struggles for freedom and equality:

• First and foremost in this discussion is the vast system of racial slavery instituted throughout the Atlantic world and the international movement that sought its abolition.
• Continuing campaigns to redress racial divisions in health, wealth, housing, employment, and education are also examined.
• There is a focus on the specificity of racial formation in the United States and the centrality of anti-black racism.
• The book also looks comparatively at other regions of racial inequality and the construction of a global racial hierarchy since the 15th century CE.

Contents

• Introduction / Jared Sexton
• A Long History of Affirmative Action—For Whites / Larry Adelman
• The Cost of Slavery / Dalton Conley
• Statement on Gender Violence and the Prison-Industrial Complex / INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence and Critical Resistance
• Introduction To Racism: A Short History / George M. Fredrickson
• Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West / Darlene Clark Hine
• Understanding the Problematic of Race Through the Problem of Race-Mixture / Thomas C. Holt
• The Sexualization of Reconstruction Politics / Martha Hodes
• The Original Housing Crisis / Derek S. Hoff
• The American Dream, or a Nightmare for Black America? / Joshua Holland
• The Hidden Cost of Being African American / Michael Hout
• Slavery and Proto-Racism in Greco-Roman Antiquity / Benjamin Isaac
• Colorblind Racism / Sally Lehrman
• The Wealth Gap Gets Wider / Meizhu Lui
• Sub-Prime as a Black Catastrophe / Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro
• Unshackling Black Motherhood / Dorothy E. Roberts
• Is Race -Based Medicine Good for Us? / Dorothy E. Roberts
• Understanding Reproductive Justice / Loretta J. Ross
• The History of the Idea of Race / Audrey Smedley
• The Liberal Retreat From Race / Stephen Steinberg
• “Race Relations” / Stephen Steinberg