Mixed Race Studies

The Chican@ Hip Hop Nation: Politics of a New Millennial Mestizaje

Michigan State University Press
2013-11-01
310 pages
6 in x 9 in
Paperback ISBN: 9781611860863
eBook ISBN: 9781609173753

Pancho McFarland, Associate Professor of Sociology
Chicago State University

The population of Mexican-origin peoples in the United States is a diverse one, as reflected by age, class, gender, sexuality, and religion. Far from antiquated concepts of mestizaje, recent scholarship has shown that Mexican@/Chican@ culture is a mixture of indigenous, African, and Spanish and other European peoples and cultures. No one reflects this rich blend of cultures better than Chican@ rappers, whose lyrics and iconography can help to deepen our understanding of what it means to be Chican@ or Mexican@ today. While some identify as Mexican mestizos, others identify as indigenous people or base their identities on their class and racial/ethnic makeup. No less significant is the intimate level of contact between Chican@s and black Americans. Via a firm theoretical foundation and a collection of vibrant essays, Pancho McFarland explores the language and ethos of Chican@/Mexican@ hip hop and sheds new light on three distinct identities reflected in the music: indigenous/Mexica, Mexican nationalist/immigrant, and street hopper. With particular attention to the intersection of black and Chicano cultures, the author places exciting recent developments in music forms within the context of progressive social change, social justice, identity, and a new transnational, polycultural America.

Table of Contents

• Foreword by Ruben O. Martinez
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• PART 1. SETTING THE THEORETICAL CONTEXT
  • Chapter 1. Quién es más macho? Quién es más Mexicano?: Chican@ and Mexicans Identities in Rap
  • Chapter 2. Barrio Logos: Tlie Sacred and Profane Word of Chicano Emcees
• PART 2. IDENTITIES OLD AND NEW
  • Chapter 3. Sonido Indígena: Mexica Hip-Hop and Masculine Identity
  • Chapter 4. Paísas, Compas, Inmigrantes: Mexicanidad in Hip-Hop
  • Chapter 5. Barrio Locos: Street Hop and Amerikan Identity
• PART 3. MEXICANIDAD, AFRICANIDAD
  • Chapter 6. Multiracial Macho: Kemo the Blaxican’s Hip-Hop Masculinity
  • Chapter 7. The Rap on Chicano/Mexicano and Black Masculinity: Gender and Cross-Cultural Exchange
  • Chapter 8. “Soy la Kalle”: Radio, Reggaetón, and Latin@ Identity
• PART 4. HIP-HOP AND JUSTICE
  • Chapter 9. Teaching Hip-Hop: A Pedagogy for Social Justice
  • Afterword. Hip-Hop and Freedom-Dreaming in the Mexican Diaspora
• Appendix. Music Sources
• NOTES
• REFERENCES
• INDEX

Creative Media lecturer publishes new book

Dundalk Institute of Technology
Dundalk, County Louth, Ireland
2013-09-02

Sarah Mc Cann

Zélie Asava, a lecturer on the BA & BA (Hons) in Video & Film Production has recently had her book—The Black Irish Onscreen: Representing Black and Mixed-Race Identities on Irish Film and Television—published by the Peter Lang Publishing Group. 

The book is also the winner of the 2011 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Irish Studies.

The book examines the position of black and mixed-race characters in Irish film culture. By exploring key film and television productions from the 1990s to the present day, the author uncovers and interrogates concepts of Irish identity, history and nation…

Read the entire article here.

“Not Tainted by the Past”: Re-Constructions and Negotiations of Coloured Identities Among University Coloured Students in Post- Apartheid South Africa

University of Pittsburgh
2013
152 pages

Sardana Nikolaeva

The South African coloured identity is a profoundly complex construction that, on the one hand, is interpreted as an ambiguous and ‘in-between’ identity and, on the other hand, its own ambiguity and complexity provides multiple means and strategies of production and articulation within various contexts. This dissertation seeks to examine a production of multiple discourses by post-apartheid coloured youth in order to re-construct and negotiate their identities moving through various social contexts of everyday experiences within diverse university settings. Similarly to other minority and marginalized youth, coloured students produce various discourses and practices as the medium of counter-hegemonic formation and negotiation of their minoritized and marginalized identities. In this sense, coloured students implement produced discourses and practices as instrumental agency to create resistance and challenge the dominant discourses on their marginalized and minoritized identities, simultaneously determining alternate characteristics for the same identities. Turning to the current conceptualizations of coloured identities as heterogeneous, non-static and highly contextual, I analyze two dominant discourses produced by the coloured students: coloured as an ethnic/hybrid cultural identity and an adoption of an inclusive South African national identity, simultaneously rejecting coloured identity as a product of the apartheid social engineering. Additionally, integrating an ecological approach and ecology model of identity development, created and utilized by Renn (1998, 2004) in her work that explores how multiracial students construct their identities in the context of higher education, I develop an ecology model of coloured students’ identity development and present the data to determine what factors and opportunities, provided by microsystems, mesosystem, exosystems and macrosystem of identity development, are significant and how they influence coloured students’ identities production, development and negotiation in and out of the university environments. The dissertation analysis on coloured identities builds on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Western Cape, South Africa, including limited participant observation and semi-structured interviews with the undergraduate and graduate coloured students of the University of the Western Cape and University of Stellenbosch, the Western Cape, South Africa.

Read the entire dissertation here.

Belle: Toronto Review

The Hollywood Reporter
2013-09-12

John DeFore

The true story of a mixed-race child raised by British aristocrats is lightly fictionalized by Amma Asante.

TORONTO — Hoping to use some Jane Austen-style courtship anxiety to lend drama to an episode in 18th-century English history that is novel enough on its own, Amma Asante’s Belle centers on Dido Elizabeth Belle, the mixed-race child who was sent to be raised by the second-highest judge in England’s courts. Though the inventions of Misan Sagay’s script emphasize concerns over dowries and social rank that will be grating for many contemporary viewers, extracting little of the humor that Austen regularly found in such hangups, the picture’s sour notes are balanced by fine performances and clear historical appeal. Moviegoers should respond well, if not overwhelmingly, when Fox Searchlight brings it to theaters next spring…

Read the entire review here.

The Changing Face of America

National Geographic Magazine
October 2013
Special 125th Anniversary Issue: The Power of Photography

Lise Funderburg

Photography by Martin Schoeller

Lise Funderburg is the author of Black, White, Other and Pig Candy. When asked, “What are you?” she often describes herself as a woman of some color.

We’ve become a country where race is no longer so black or white.

What is it about the faces on these pages that we find so intriguing? Is it simply that their features disrupt our expectations, that we’re not used to seeing those eyes with that hair, that nose above those lips? Our responses can range from the armchair anthropologist’s benign desire to unravel ancestries and find common ground to active revulsion at group boundaries being violated or, in the language of racist days past, “watered down.”

Out in the world, the more curious (or less polite) among us might approach, asking, “Where are you from?” or “What are you?” We look and wonder because what we see—and our curiosity—speaks volumes about our country’s past, its present, and the promise and peril of its future.

The U.S. Census Bureau has collected detailed data on multiracial people only since 2000, when it first allowed respondents to check off more than one race, and 6.8 million people chose to do so. Ten years later that number jumped by 32 percent, making it one of the fastest growing categories. The multiple-race option has been lauded as progress by individuals frustrated by the limitations of the racial categories established in the late 18th century by German scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who divided humans into five “natural varieties” of red, yellow, brown, black, and white. Although the multiple-race option is still rooted in that taxonomy, it introduces the factor of self-determination. It’s a step toward fixing a categorization system that, paradoxically, is both erroneous (since geneticists have demonstrated that race is biologically not a reality) and essential (since living with race and racism is). The tracking of race is used both to enforce antidiscrimination laws and to identify health issues specific to certain populations…

Read the entire article here. View the photographs here.

Will Interracial Relationships Ever Be Common on TV?

Bitch Magazine
2013-09-04

Sophia Seawell

I’m usually skeptical of advertising. I know companies spend millions of dollars hoping that their body lotion or paper towels or lunch meat will bring me to tears.

But ads are powerful. They’re a form of media where we see representations of ourselves and our society, just like on TV shows they interrupt. And it’s rare to see people like me—with a black father and a white mother—represented in ads.

Earlier this year, like many other people, I heard about a Cheerios ad, “Just Checking,” that featured an interracial family—a white mother, black father and their daughter—before I saw it. I was excited about it, sure, but why I was excited didn’t really register until I finally did see it for myself…

…The Cheerios ad caused stirred up some racist controversy, leaving many people wondering why interracial relationships still have the ability to alarm 46 years after the Supreme Court struck down laws that banned interracial marriages in the 1967 Loving v. Virginia case. Clearly the idea that interracial relationships are not okay runs deeper than we’d like to think.

A half-century isn’t enough time to dissolve the well-engrained ideas about race and marriage that were constructed after the Civil War, when miscegenation laws spread across the country “to serve as props for the racial system of slavery, as one more way to distinguish free Whites from slaves,”  as historian Peggy Pascoe puts it. The idea that mixing of races was unnatural, against God’s will, and would lead to biological degradation made miscegenation laws a tool to define what a legitimate family was and thereby maintain white supremacy. 

At the time of the Loving v. Virginia decision, seventeen states still had miscegenation laws in place. In fact, it took Alabama until 2000 to officially amend their law. Even more recently, in 2009, a judge in Louisiana refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple.

Meanwhile, according to the Pew Research Center, the proportion of interracial marriage reached all-time high in 2010. In that year, about 15 percent of all new marriages were interracial and 8.4 percent of all existing marriages were interracial.

But films, TV, and advertising haven’t caught up to the current racial reality…

Read the entire article here.

In the United States, much of this debate has centered on the biological meaning of race, an historically contentious concept that has polarized what might otherwise be a more nuanced consideration of the distribution and structure of genetic differences among humans. This polarization is not surprising in light of the importance that the public attaches to race. As a prominent way of defining population membership over the past 500 years, race has been used to advantage some groups over others. For that reason, race should not, and cannot, be avoided in considerations of issues such as access to care, exposure to environmental hazards and preferences regarding clinical interventions. However, when used to define populations for genetic research, race has the potential to confuse by mistakenly implying biological explanations for socially and historically constructed health disparities.

Morris W. Forster and Richard R. Sharp, “Beyond race: towards a whole-genome perspective on human populations and genetic variation,” Nature Reviews Genetics (Volume 5, Issue 10, October 2004), 790.

Engaging Culture, Race and Spirituality: New Visions

Peter Lang Publishing
2013
232 pages
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-4331-2327-6
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4331-2328-3

Cynthia B. Dillard, Mary Frances Early Endowed Professor in Teacher Education
University of Georgia

Chinwe L. Okpalaoka, Director of Undergraduate Recruitment and Diversity Services in the College of Arts and Sciences
Ohio State University

Engaging Culture, Race and Spirituality addresses a critical question rarely addressed in our conversations and the literature about race, culture and diversity: How might spirituality and our inner lives matter in teaching and teacher education that explicitly engages and addresses race and culture? In ways explicit and embodied, this book focuses on how engaging spirituality and the inner life can serve as radical intervention in our dialogues about race and culture in education. Gathered together are the voices of emerging young scholars whose thinking and research explicitly marshal theories of spirituality as critical interventions in their dialogues and discourses about culture and race in teaching and teacher education. Each chapter is followed by a scholar visionary who points to ways for educators and educational researchers to see the usefulness of such spirituality in engaging research, pedagogy and practices. Their collective visions  all deeply political, sometimes humorous, always insightful, and thoughtfully provocative  call us to a new way of thinking about the «evidence of things unseen», about spirituality in education as a site of profound possibilities for change, equity, and social justice.

Contents

• Cynthia B. Dillard/Chinwe L. Ezueh Okpalaoka: Introduction: Culture, Race, and Dialogue: Toward a Spiritual Praxis in Education
• Tami A. Augustine/Deborah Justice Zurmehly: Conversations about Race: How Embracing Spirituality Opens Space for Dialogues in Teacher Education
• Barbara Dray: Visionary Response: With Mindfulness as a Guide: Engaging Conversations in Teacher Education
• Eyatta Fischer: Writing and Telling: Healing the Pain of Disconnection
• Robin M. Boylorn: Visionary Response: On Teaching and Telling: Two Sides of a Teaching (Cassette) Tape
• Brooke Harris Garad: Spiritually Centered Caring: An Approach for Teaching and Reaching Black Students in Suburbia
• Samara D. Madrid: Visionary Response: Care as a Racialized, Critical, and Spiritual Emotion
• Gilbert Kaburu/Chris Landauer: Less Religion, More Spirituality: Spiritually Relevant Pedagogy in the Global Era
• Khosi Kubeka: Visionary Response: Infusing Identity Enactment as a Component of Spiritually Relevant Pedagogy
• Angela Cartwright Lynskey: Occupy Classrooms: Teaching from a Spiritual Paradigm
• Carmen Liliana Medina: Visionary Response: Spiritual Occupations: Reflections on Pedagogies and Everyday Stories of Globalization
• Ashley N. Patterson: Can One Ever Be Wholly Whole? Fostering Biracial Identity Founded in Spirit
• Bettina L. Love: Visionary Response: Biracial Identity, Spiritual Wholeness, and Black Girlhood
• Erica Womack: Lessons in Love, Literacy, and Listening: Reflections on Learning with and from Black Female Youth
• Marcelle M. Haddix: Visionary Response: Listening Face-to-Face and Eye-to-Eye: Seeing and Believing Black Girls and Women in Educational Practice and Research

Beyond race: towards a whole-genome perspective on human populations and genetic variation

Nature Reviews Genetics
Volume 5, Issue 10 (October 2004)
pages 790-796
DOI: 10.1038/nrg1452

Morris W. Foster, Professor of Anthropology
University of Oklahoma

Richard R. Sharp, Director of Bioethics Research
Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, Ohio

The renewed emphasis on population-specific genetic variation, exemplified most prominently by the International HapMap Project, is complicated by a longstanding, uncritical reliance on existing population categories in genetic research. Race and other pre-existing population definitions (ethnicity, religion, language, nationality, culture and so on) tend to be contentious concepts that have polarized discussions about the ethics and science of research into population-specific human genetic variation. By contrast, a broader consideration of the multiple historical sources of genetic variation provides a whole-genome perspective on the ways in which existing population definitions do, and do not, account for how genetic variation is distributed among individuals. Although genetics will continue to rely on analytical tools that make use of particular population histories, it is important to interpret findings in a broader genomic context.

Read the entire article here.

Black and white in America: The culture and politics of racial classification

International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society
Volume 7, Issue 2 (Winter 1993)
pages 229-258
DOI: 10.1007/BF02283196

Ernest Evans Kilker

The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and external career for a variety of individuals . . . The first fruit of this imagination —and the first lesson of the social science that embodies it—is the idea that the individual can understand his own experience and gauge his fate only by locating himself within his period, that he can know his chances in life only by becoming aware of all those individuals in his circumstances . . . The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. —C. W. Mills

It is in race that the postmodern world today finds its most exemplary vanishing point. Race appears as if it is fixed and permanent, immune to being altered by the ideas or expressions used to address or comprehend it. Yet what does it really mean? To what extent does it have anything to say about specifiable differences between peoples, cultures and histories? The point here is when we talk about race we are never sure what we are referring to: a dilemma which posits many contradictory futures and opportunities. —Timothy Maliqualim Simone

THE POLITICS OF RACIAL CLASSIFICATION

Who is Black? Is there any “scientific” and “objective” answer or simply a cultural and “subjective one? In a racist culture, the answer to this question is fraught with political, economic, legal, familial, psychological, and sexual intended and unintended consequences. Surprisingly, the first book length sociological survey treatment of this subject, by F. James Davis appeared only last year (Davis, 1991: ix). Davis himself admits that the theoretical connections, to phenomenological, symbolic interactionist, structural, and conflict theories, which his excellent work implicitly suggests, go unexplored (Davis, 1991: x). Although we take for granted our definition of “black” which pivots on the Louisiana “one drop” or “any known black ancestry” rule (Dominquez, 1986), cross culturally its definition and meanings are extremely variable (Adams, 1969; Hoetnik, 1967; Lowenthal, 1969; Pierson, 1942; Freyre, 1963). In addition, historical studies of racial miscegenation and mulattos in the United States are few and far between (Williamson, 1980: xi; Reuter, 1918).

Because of the amount of interbreeding that has taken place over the last several thousand years, the scientific status of the biological concept of race is an especially dubious one (Simone, 1989). What exists is a spectrum and continuum of human types which share certain physical traits in an almost infinite variety of combinations (Kuper, 1975; Montagu, 1965). However, from a cultural point of view, the American belief in the biological reality of race is still a pervasive one. In our racist culture, any known black ancestry (i.e. “one drop”) can lead to the societal designation of the individual genetically as “black” — even if the individual is overwhelmingly “white.” As a result of this cultural rule, many black leaders, who were significantly and even predominantly white, were defined and defined themselves as “black.” The most dramatic example on this longand illustrious list (which would include Frederick Douglass, Booker T, Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, A. Phillip Randolph, and Adam Clayton Powell) is Walter White, head of the NAACP from 1931-1955, who anthropologists estimate could not have been more than one sixty-fourth African black (Davis, 1991:7). Walter White “passed for white” when he went “undercover” while investigating lynchings in the South for the NAACP. In addition in 1923 he deceived Edward Y. Clark, a Ku Klux Klan recruiter, into inviting him to Atlanta to advise him on recruitment. However his cover was blown before the trip could take place (Lewis, 1979: 131). In the same year he managed to embarass many a federal legislator, while lobbying for an anti-lynching bill. When they discovered White was Black, they regretted their candor (Lewis, 1979: 132). Even Malcolm X, the individual most responsible for the black consciousness and black power movement in the United States, had a white rapist for a grandfather and a mother who, for employment purposes, regularly “passed for white” (Haley, 1964: 2). Malcolm’s mother, Louise, claimed that if she scrubbed the young Malcolm hard and often enough, “I can make him look almost white” (Perry, 1991: p. 5). Once Malcolm himself converted to the nation of Islam, he regularly took “skin baths” in the sun to deepen his self-described “light” skin tone (Perry, 1991: 117)…

Read or purchase the article here.