Mixed Race Studies

A Multiethnic Movement Emerges in Guyana to Counter Politics-as-Usual

The New York Times
2015-01-17

Girish Gupta

GEORGETOWN, Guyana — Swaying to the rhythms of Afro-Guyanese reggae, the protesters, descendants of African slaves and indentured laborers from India, gathered on the streets of Georgetown in a show of unity against the country’s president.

A few years ago, a gathering of members of Guyana’s two main ethnic groups, which have long been at opposite ends of the country’s political divide, would have been unusual.

But the protest in November, after President Donald Ramotar suspended Parliament in order to fend off a no-confidence motion, reflected an important change taking place in this tiny English-speaking country of just 740,000 people perched on the shoulder of South America.

Politics in Guyana have long been delineated by race. But a multiethnic movement that has emerged in recent years has given voice to a new generation of Guyanese who say that politics as usual has held the country back by favoring race over merit, undermining economic progress.

“This shows the true reality of Guyana now,” Marcia de Costa, 37, a manager of a beauty salon, said, pointing toward the diverse crowd at the rally. “This is new for us.”

The two main political parties in Guyana have traditionally hewed to racial lines: one drawing support from the descendants of Africans brought over by the Dutch in the 17th century, and the other from the descendants of the Indians brought by the British a couple of centuries later.

But the emergence of a third party in recent years has changed the dynamics…

Read the entire article here.

On race, Obama sticks to a game plan of seeking steady progress within the system

The Washington Post
2015-01-18

Steven Mufson, White House correspondent, financial staff writer

During racially tense moments that have beset the nation recently, many Americans have longed for President Obama to display some of the passion and soaring rhetoric that made the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who would have turned 86 last week, a civil rights legend.

But the messages of restraint Obama has given in response to outcry over police violence are the same ones he has been dispensing for 20 to 30 years, echoes of thoughts he has had ever since he was a young community organizer in Chicago. His central tenets: Don’t give in to anger and violence; work to improve, not destroy, the legal system; and accept that change will come and things are getting better, albeit more slowly than many would like.

Though Obama’s views have evolved on issues such as gay marriage and national security during his six years in office, his views on race have remained remarkably consistent, and recent events appear to have affirmed rather than altered those views.

The president is likely to touch on race again Tuesday in his State of the Union address, and if so, he will probably acknowledge that on race, as on the economy, a “resurgent America” has made great progress but still requires greater inclusiveness.

Rather than making pressing demands for economic justice like those that defined King’s crusade, Obama will make a pitch for a tax package that will aid lower- and middle-class households and serve as modest tools for economic advancement for both whites and blacks…

Read the entire article here.

Confusion.

Mixed Humans ~ Reflections on occupying a space of inbetweenness. Persistently grappling with identity.
2015-01-18

Natalie Armitage
London

Authenticity. Authentic. What is that? I always wondered, what it meant when people referred to the lentils mum made us as “really authentic, not like that stuff you get in the curry houses thats not real, its not actually indian compared to this”. I assume it was because she was the only indian person that they actually knew, the first time that they actually saw lentils being made in this way.

Authenticity. The first thing that comes to mind was a house, a large old manor that was converted into a place called “Trading Boundaries” and there were two large model elephants outside. We used to go there to look at the furniture that had been imported from Bali on the way back from school. It was lavish.

The objects and ornaments in there mixed with the smell of incense felt like something, out of a book I read called A Little Princess. A story, of little rich girl that feels lost and abandoned in London, after being sent to boarding school from India where her father is a Captain. Upon her father’s death in war, and a confusion about financial ownership she is rendered worthless by the English headmistress and made to be a servant at the school, where previously she was a princess. Anyway, the part that I remember is that she becomes friends with a black girl called Becky, who is also a servant though treated a lot worse than the princess, but they bond over their misery and become friends and the princess entertains her with magical stories of Gods in India. There is also a pet monkey involved somewhere that they play with and love as much as they do each other.

What a story to read as a little girl. Being half indian, half english, the princess of my fathers eye, blissfully unaware of what colonialism actually was. Confusion, is a word that doesn’t quite cover it. Authentic?…

Read the entire article here.

Erasing the Color Line: The Racial Formation of Creoles of Color and the Public School Integration Movement in New Orleans, 1867-1880

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
2013

Mishio Yamanaka

A thesis submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the master’s degree of History in the Department of History

This thesis examines the public school racial integration movement of Creoles of color, a francophone interracial group in New Orleans, from 1867 to 1880. During Reconstruction, Creoles of color succeeded in desegregating about one-third of the city public schools. This thesis argues that the integration campaign of Creoles of color was an attempt to maintain their in-between identity – being neither fully whites nor fully blacks and being both Creoles and Americans – and an effort to erase the color line by improving the social status of black Americans to equal that of white Americans. Creoles of color forged desegregation by manipulating their ambiguous ethno-racial heritage and by negotiating with white radical Republicans, white New Orleanians and Anglophone blacks. Focusing on the political, legal and grass-root struggles of Creoles of color, this thesis reveals that they challenged segregation as it symbolized the emergence of biracial hierarchy in post-Civil War New Orleans.

Read the entire thesis here.

ENLT 2513 Major Authors of American Literature: Race and Performance

University of Virginia
Spring 2015

Sarah Ingle, Lecturer

This course will explore representations of race and performance in American literature and culture from the eighteenth century to the present. We will examine cultural phenomena such as blackface minstrel shows, stories of racial “passing,” and a variety of texts (plays, fiction, poetry, and non-fiction) that depict the complex relationship between race and identity in American culture. Authors will include Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain, William Wells Brown, Herman Melville, Charles Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Zitkala-Sa, Sui Sin Far, Onoto Watanna, David Henry Hwang, and Suzan Lori-Parks. Course requirements will include three essays, weekly informal reading responses, active class participation, and a final exam.

For more information, click here.

The Dubious, Dangerous Science of Race Lives On, Says Scholar

Colorlines: News for Action
2011-09-23

Julianne Hing, Reporter/Blogger
Oakland, California

Back in the 19th century, scientists thought it was possible to determine a person’s race, and their corresponding levels of intelligence, based on the size of their skull. In the 20th century, mainstream scientists were convinced that intelligence was genetically determined, and therefore an inheritable trait; they helped spur the now disgraced eugenics movement.

In the 21st century, with racial science’s embarrassing history—and its disgraceful, deadly effects on people of color—seemingly long behind us, it’s easy to dismiss the science of yore as silly and antiquated. But Northwestern University law professor Dorothy Roberts argues this line of scientific inquiry is as alive as ever.

In her new book “Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the 21st Century,” Roberts says that scientists are still preoccupied with the problematic questions of whether racial stratification in society is the result of genetic differences. Is race something that’s written into our genetic code? Is there, say, a gene within black folks that makes them more predisposed to cancer and hypertension? Why not use DNA as a forensic tool to predict the race of an unknown suspect?

This obsession, she argues, has led us astray from focusing on the more pressing and legitimate causes of racial stratification: racial inequality that’s deeply embedded in the structures of society. We caught up with Roberts to talk about her new book, and some of the ridiculous, troubling ways this racial science is impacting everyday people’s lives.

You write in the intro that you took on this question looking into the biological reality of race as a personal challenge to yourself, to test your convictions that race is a political category. Can you say more about that?

What motivated me to write the book was that I noticed this revival of the idea that human beings are divided into biological races in genomic science and biotechnologies. I read the headlines, first, of studies that purported to prove that there was a deep structure based on race in the human genome, [of] the approval of race-specific medicine. And I went to a lecture at Northwestern’s medical school where a conservative commentator was invited to talk about race even though he was well-known for his views that biological race determines intelligence. So I was really alarmed that this idea was being resuscitated in new technologies and on the cutting edge of science, and even some liberals were embracing it as a way to address health inequities, without having any sense that there was a danger in this way of thinking about human beings.

So when I say it was a personal challenge it was because I was at first surprised that genomic science was going in that direction and also surprised in the number of people who I talked to who believe that race really is a natural division of human beings and who embrace genetic technologies for a test of identity. To me that really contradicted the political convictions I had, not only about the meaning of race but also the way to fight against racism in America…

Read the entire interview here.

“Funny—You Don’t Look Jewish!”: Racial, Ethnic, and Religious Identities of Children of Asian American and Jewish American Spouses

Journal of Jewish Identities
Issue 8, Number 1, January 2015
pages 129-148

Helen Kim, Associate Professor of Sociology
Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington

Noah Leavitt, Research Associate
Department of Sociology
Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington

Rachel Williams
Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington

Who is a Jew? What does it mean to be Jewish? Often connected to these questions is the subject of intermarriage among Jewish Americans, a demographic reality that has long been understood as problematic and threatening to the Jewish people because of the supposed dilution, and possible extinction, of Jewish identity and community that will necessarily follow when a Jew marries a non-Jew. Often, the most pressing concern regarding intermarriage is its impact on the Jewish identity of the children and grandchildren of these relationships. Will the offspring of intermarriage identify as Jewish? If so, what does Jewish identity mean for these individuals? Furthermore, what impact does Jewish identification or non-identification mean for the continuity of the Jewish people?

Currently, the debate regarding the continuity of Jewish identity and peoplehood as it pertains to intermarried couples and their children is unresolved, especially within the realm of academic scholarship pertaining to this subject. Most notably, the Pew Research Center’s 2013 Portrait of Jewish Americans acknowledges that, according to its findings, support exists for both sides of the debate. In their discussion of the Pew survey, Gregory A. Smith and Alan Cooperman note that adult children of intermarriage are more likely to identify as religiously agnostic, atheist, or nothing in particular than those born to two Jewish parents. This difference may suggest the eventual erosion of Jewish religious identification as a result of intermarriage. Smith and Cooperman also note, however, an increase in Jewish identification in adulthood among offspring of intermarriage. Thus while intermarriage may be leading to a significant decrease in religious identification, it may be contributing to an increase in a different type of Jewish identification that is no less important.

Some scholars have argued that the debate and scholarship regarding intermarriage as assimilation and an erosion of Jewish authenticity stifles innovative ways to think about and encourage more nuanced conceptions of Jewish identity and, subsequently, Jewish belonging and community. These critiques often point to the importance of broadening our understanding of Jewish identity through frameworks and methods that complicate common notions of Jewish authenticity based in religiosity and descent.

Our exploratory qualitative study of adult children born to Asian American and Jewish American spouses adds to the debate regarding intermarriage and Jewish authenticity by investigating how Jewish identity is negotiated through the lenses of religion and race. We argue that multiraciality and Jewish identity are intrinsically connected for respondents in our sample. Our work derives from a larger project on intermarriage between Jewish Americans of any racial or ethnic background and Asian Americans of any ethnic or religious background.

More specifically, we seek to understand how children of mixed backgrounds experience and think about their Jewish identity in light of their position as children of intermarried spouses who are ethnically, religiously, and racially different. While our findings are not generalizable to a larger population, they do call into serious question the conceptualization and, for some, the strongly held belief that intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews necessarily results in an erosion of Jewish identity and community through children and subsequent generations. Rather, our interviews with children of multiracial intermarriages point to the maintenance of many traditional markers of Judaism and Jewish identity commonly associated with certain institutional affiliations at the same time that they challenge and offer newer understandings of Jewish authenticity through the lens of external and internal racial identification. Thus, our findings emphasize the importance of understanding these kinds of identity negotiations within a larger national landscape that is increasingly multiracial and multicultural. Put differently, the U.S. population, including its Jewish and Asian American populations, is becoming increasingly multiracial and multiethnic and is doing so, in large part, through intermarriage broadly construed. In this sense, our work highlights the importance of understanding how our respondents think about their identity, whether racial, ethnic, or religious, within a demographic landscape that is changing at a pace much faster than the debate regarding intermarriage fully acknowledges.

The data for this paper comes from qualitative in-depth interviews conducted in 2011 with twenty-two adult children, ages eighteen to twenty-five, of Jewish and Asian intermarriages, residing in the San Francisco Bay Area and in parts…

To date, the multiracial movement has helped make great strides for multiracial individuals striving to define their own racial identity and made valuable contributions to a broader conversation about how we might reconceive of race and its role in society. It has also presented a danger—in the hands of those who would use it for specific political ends—of undermining other important movements. Here, I suggest that while the ability to define one’s own identity and adoption of a more fluid understanding of race are positive developments and should be embraced or at least explored, we should be wary of immediately reconfiguring legal doctrine in response. And while the debate of how and whether racial classifications can be used by the state will rage on post-Fisher, we should protect identity from being used as a tool to advocate for any doctrinal approach. Issues of racial identity need not necessarily be perceived as incompatible with the goals of the civil rights movement. A more cautious approach would divorce the quest for identity from the use of racial classifications, allowing for individuals to define their own racial identity, but also for the state to act, when deemed appropriate, based on a broader view of racial dynamics. While a post-racial world may be the ideal for some, for now, it is also aspirational; to ignore current realities in favor of future hopes may disguise regression as progress.

Lauren Sudeall Lucas, “Undoing Race? Reconciling Multiracial Identity with Equal Protection,” California Law Review, (Volume 102, Number 5 October 2014), 1302. http://www.californialawreview.org/6undoing-race-reconciling-multiracial-identity-with-equal-protection/.

A Jewish-Asian Couple’s Union Leads to a Scholarly Interest in Intermarriage

The New York Times
2012-06-15

Samuel G. Freedman, Professor of Journalism
Columbia University, New York, New York

One weekend night 15 years ago, a group of graduate students at the University of Chicago decided to interrupt their research long enough for a dinner party. Helen K. Kim made a chocolate tart with ginger cream filling. Her classmate Noah S. Leavitt regarded it and scoffed, “Nice use of your time, making a fancy dessert with all the homework we have.”

Ms. Kim did not exactly swoon at that snarky version of a pickup line.

Over the next three weeks, though, Mr. Leavitt kept pursuing her in more polite fashion and they eventually went out for dinner and drinks. Very quickly, the two aspiring academics found themselves talking in candid detail about the recent and untimely deaths of their fathers.

From that encounter grew not only their own subsequent marriage but a joint scholarly interest in the very trend they embodied: intermarriage between Asian-Americans and American Jews. Their major research paper on the subject appeared in February, just three months before arguably the highest-profile example of the phenomenon, the wedding of Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder, to his longtime girlfriend, Dr. Priscilla Chan…

Read the entire article here.

Beyond Zebra – presented at National Association of Social Workers 2014 National Conference

Slideshare
2014-07-31

Carlos Hoyt

Read the presentation transcript here.