Mixed Race Studies

“Makin a way Outta no way:” The dangerous business of racial masquerade in Nella Larsen’s Passing

Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory
Volume 15, Issue 1 (2005)
pages 79-104
DOI: 10.1080/07407700508571489

Carlyle Van Thompson, Acting Dean, School of Liberal Arts and Education
Medgar Evers College, the City University of New York

Early in Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), Clare Kendry Bellew and Irene Westover Redfield (the light-skinned and middle-class black female protagonists) are both passing for white in Chicago at an elite and segregated restaurant atop the Drayton Hotel during the horrid heat of August. Here, in this coincidental meeting of two childhood friends, Irene and Clare have a conversation about the possibility of permanently assuming a white identity. Irene, who only passes sometime, superciliously relates her reason for not permanently passing herself off as white: “‘You see Clare, I’ve everything I want. Except, perhaps a little more money'” (1929, 190). in contrast, Clare responds: “‘Of course…that’s what everybody wants just a little more money, even the people who have it. And I must say I don’t blame them. Money’s awful nice to have. In fact, all things considered, I think, ‘Rene, that it’s even worth the price'” (1929, 190). Larsen reveals that economic security is a critical concern in the lives of these middle-class black women. Despite the vulnerabilities of revelation, Clare adamantly believes that the monetary and social advantages of passing for white surpass the disadvantages. Class, as inflected by gender within the nexus of race, con-…

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Art Review: In the New World, Trappings of a New Social Order

The New York Times
2013-09-19

Karen Rosenberg

‘Behind Closed Doors’ Regards Spanish Colonial Art

“Behind Closed Doors: Art in the Spanish American Home, 1492-1898,” at the Brooklyn Museum, leaves us in the strange position of marveling at the opulence of domestic life in the Spanish colonies while pondering some of the ugliest aspects of colonialism. This is awkward, to be sure, but also enlightening.

As its voyeuristic title suggests, the show follows the layout of a typical house belonging to an elite member of New World society. Drawn largely from the museum’s sizable collection of Spanish colonial art, it fashions a gorgeous set of temporary period rooms out of the fourth-floor special-exhibition galleries. They overflow with sumptuous textiles, family portraits bearing coats of arms, fine silver and porcelain and gilded everything — arranged in the more-is-more manner of the Spanish American upper crust, with cabinets stacked in pyramids and luxury goods laid out on carpeted platforms….

…Also on view are “casta” paintings that employ a rigid racial-classification system; one is called “From Spanish and Indian, Mestizo,” and shows a Spanish man and his indigenous wife with their mestizo, or mixed-race, baby. Here too are works that are not quite casta paintings but seem closely related, such as the group portrait “Free Women of Color With Their Children and Servants in a Landscape” by Agostino Brunias (an Italian working in the British colonies). The painting is not as progressive as it sounds; it reinforces colonial hierarchies of race and class by surrounding its fashionable young heroine — one of the “free women” of the title — with darker-skinned attendants who may well be her slaves…

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Northwestern sophomores form group for mixed race students

The Daily Northwestern
Evanston, Illinois
2013-09-26

Julian Gerez (@JGerez_news), Reporter

One year ago, Medill sophomore Kalina Silverman, a half-Chinese, half-White, Jewish student browsed through the bustling activities fair. Amid the numerous student cultural groups, Silverman couldn’t find a home.

“I went to a couple events hosted by the Chinese Students Association, and Hillel and I didn’t feel like I fully fit in,” Silverman said.

Silverman’s friend, SESP sophomore Tori Marquez, had a similar problem.

“I identify as mixed race because I don’t feel completely comfortable identifying myself just as Caucasian or just as Hispanic … Even as a Hispanic, I’m also Mexican and Peruvian,” Marquez said.

A year later, what started as two friends joking about forming a club for people like them became the Mixed Race Student Coalition, known as MIXED.

The club was recognized by the office of Multicultural Student Affairs this summer. Marquez and Silverman are now the co-presidents…

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Government forms limit mixed race people

Daily Trojan
University of Southern California
2013-09-26

Ida Abhari

According to The New York Times, the current generation of college students is the largest group of mixed race people in America so far. The number of individuals who identified as mixed race is at 9 million. Increasingly more Americans find themselves in a gray area when it comes to defining their races. You might have heard of “Hapas” — people of partially Asian/Pacific Islander ancestry — or “Blasians,” people of mixed black and Asian ancestry. Though these types of self-identification are becoming more common in everyday language, a conflict arises when the standard “Check the box” race forms can’t properly identify a growing population of Americans. Most people do not cleanly fit into the four standard racial categories of black, white, American Indian or Pacific Islander.

The  problem with racial identification lies in faulty methods of collecting data about such groups. Questions of race in the United States have always been a particularly sensitive topic. With its peculiar mix of European colonists, American Indians and Spanish and French explorers, the U.S. has always struggled with race relations. In an effort to better resolve and address race questions in the modern era, the federal Office of Management and Budget has issued Directive No. 15. According to the official White House website, this directive “requires compilation of data for four racial categories (White, Black, American Indian or Alaskan Native, and Asian or Pacific Islander), and an ethnic category to indicate Hispanic origin, or not of Hispanic origin.” And  here is the problem: A person is now forced to identify him or herself as one of only four races even though changing demographics show that there are more possibilities…

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Discrimination Down to a Science

Hyphen Magazine
Issue 26, Spring 2013 (The South)

Dharushana Muthulingam, Health Editor and a resident physician at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland

How genetic data shapes science and medicine and what is being done to change it.

In the 1997 science fiction movie Gattaca, set in a future of genetically engineered humans, Vincent Freeman — the unfortunate product of “natural conception” — declared: “I belonged to a new underclass, no longer determined by social status or the color of your skin. No, we now have discrimination down to a science.” It is a touching picture of dystopia, where we have moved beyond our current social myopias, only to find new, more elaborate ones.

In 1997, the race to map the human genome — the entire hereditary information of humans — was in full force. It held the promise of better medicine, better technology and a better idea of where we come from. But a long history of discrimination by social status and skin color still had an unwitting effect in shaping science.

Genetics has only recently had concrete applications in medicine and everyday life. By the mid-2000s, the price of genetic testing decreased steeply enough to make it usable outside of research. Now, we can identify which specific breast cancer variant will respond to a certain treatment or predict if an HIV medication will cause a bad reaction.

The potential for Personalized Medicine was born on these few successes, with slick promises of customized treatment for what ails you. This has also improved the well-being of a handful of stockholders, with the nascent industry estimated to be worth $232 billion and growing 11 percent annually…

…To its credit, the National Institute of Health has repeatedly tried to tie funding to increasing diversity in research subjects since the 1970s, with mixed results. This long shadow of history and the general societal conversation of race still shape the culture of how scientists approach race and which people are willing to sign up as subjects.

This caution may have been the prudent thing, but it may have also slowed down investigations that are biologically valid and in fact, facilitate a more just and accessible science. The last 10 years have seen an astonishing rise in the health research of minority populations and disparities due to social class, and the genetic database is only just starting to catch up.

Another barrier is having a misleading taxonomy: the trouble with getting your racial categories right. While there is some relation between your geographical lineage and your collection of genes, the traditional American racial categories like “white” and “Hispanic” are historical artifacts that do not map rigorously to anything in the natural world, even as they shape our society.

This was suspected by famed evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin in 1972 and confirmed in a 2004 analysis that found that there is more genetic variation within each of those categories than there are differences between any two categories. Of course, people mix across categories, which complicates genetic profiles…

…For all these important reasons for having a diverse genetic database — accuracy in research, finding unique mutations and, yes, a more marketable consumer genetic industry — there is also the sense that race is only one tiny lens among many to view the data. Since the Human Genome project was completed, they found that over 99.5 percent of genes are identical across human kind.

“Yet, almost as soon as researchers announced this result, several research projects began to focus on mapping the less than one percent of human genetic variation onto social categories of race,” Osagie Obasogie, a professor of law at UC Hastings, noted in GeneWatch Magazine in 2009.

Despite the fact that social categories of race do not match genetic categories, and despite the existence of far more similarity than difference among these social categories, a lot of effort has gone into trying to dig up what minuscule matching does exist.

Not only are the old categories of race too rough and misleading for modern biological work, there is a risk for what sociologist Troy Duster calls the “reification of race” — a circular process of using a popular understanding of race (shaped by hundreds of years of custom, biases and so on) to shape the scientific questions and research funding, which then gives an aura of legitimacy to that pile of unexamined biases…

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Romance and Rights: The Politics of Interracial Intimacy, 1945-1954

University Press of Mississippi
2005
224 pages
bibliography, index
Cloth ISBN: 9781578067053
Paper ISBN: 9781604732474

Alex Lubin, Associate Professor of American Studies
University of New Mexico

Romance and Rights: The Politics of Interracial Intimacy, 1945-1954 studies the meaning of interracial romance, love, and sex in the ten years after World War II. How was interracial romance treated in popular culture by civil rights leaders, African American soldiers, and white segregationists?

Previous studies focus on the period beginning in 1967 when the Supreme Court overturned the last state antimiscegenation law (Loving v. Virginia). Lubin’s study, however, suggests that we cannot fully understand contemporary debates about “hybridity,” or mixed-race identity, without first comprehending how WWII changed the terrain.

The book focuses on the years immediately after the war, when ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality were being reformulated and solidified in both the academy and the public. Lubin shows that interracial romance, particularly between blacks and whites, was a testing ground for both the general American public and the American government. The government wanted interracial relationships to be treated primarily as private affairs to keep attention off contradictions between its outward aura of cultural freedom and the realities of Jim Crow politics and antimiscegenation laws. Activists, however, wanted interracial intimacy treated as a public act, one that could be used symbolically to promote equal rights and expanded opportunities. These contradictory impulses helped shape our current perceptions about interracial romances and their broader significance in American culture.

Romance and Rights ends in 1954, the year of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, before the civil rights movement became well organized. By closely examining postwar popular culture, African American literature, NAACP manuscripts, miscegenation laws, and segregationist protest letters, among other resources, the author analyzes postwar attitudes towards interracial romance, showing how complex and often contradictory those attitudes could be.