Mixed Race Studies

Census Bureau may count Arab-Americans for the first time in 2020

PBS NewsHour
Public Broadcasting System
2015-01-30

Jeff Karoub, Reporter
The Associated Press

DETROIT — The federal government is considering allowing those of Middle Eastern and North African descent to identify as such on the next 10-year Census, which could give Arab-Americans and other affected groups greater political clout and access to public funding, among other things.

The U.S. Census Bureau will test the new Middle East-North Africa (MENA) classification for possible inclusion on the 2020 Census if it gets enough positive feedback about the proposed change by Sunday, when the public comment period ends.

Arab-Americans, who make up the majority of those who would be covered by the MENA classification, have previously been classified by default as white on the Census, which helps determine congressional district boundaries and how billions of dollars in federal funding are allocated, among other things.

Those pushing for the MENA classification say it would more fully and accurately count them, thus increasing their visibility and influence among policymakers.

The Census Bureau plans to test it later this year by holding focus group discussions with people who would be affected by the proposed change. Congress would still have to sign off on the proposal before the change could be added to the 2020 Census…

Read the entire article here.

Discovering Early California Afro-Latino Presence

Heyday
November 2010
24 pages
Paperback, 6 x 9
ISBN: 978-1-59714-145-1

Damany M. Fisher, Professor of History and Political Science
Mt. San Antonio College, Walnut, California

California’s Afro-Latino heritage

Although it is not generally apparent from paintings and other depictions of early California, many members of the pioneering Anza expeditions and Spanish California’s most prominent families were of mixed race—Hispanic, Indian, and African. At a time when slavery was still legal in the United States, these Afro-Latinos made major contributions to early California. They were landowners, soldiers, judges, governors, and patriarchs of some of the state’s most influential families. They opened up trails, led rebellions, and established ranchos and pueblos that would become the basis for many of today’s cities.

This pamphlet, produced in conjunction with the Juan Bautista de Anza National Historic Trail, provides an overview of these remarkable families, describes their backgrounds, and investigates the ways in which they reshaped early California. It also provides us with an image of a society in which the relationships between races, and racism itself, were far different, and perhaps less rigidly understood, than they are today.

EIHS Lecture: “Partus Sequitur Ventrem: Slave Law and the History of Women in Slavery”

Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies
University of Michigan
1014 Tisch Hall
435 South State Street
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1003
2015-02-05, 16:00-18:00 CST (Local Time)

Jennifer L. Morgan, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, History
New York University

In 1662, legislators in the Virginia Colony passed a law that determined that, in the matter of sex between free English men and “negro women,” the legal condition of the child should follow that of the mother. Long understood as the law that codified hereditary racial slavery, this code reassured slaveowning settlers that, in the matter of enslaved people, enslaveability devolved through the mother: Partus Sequitur Ventrem or, literally, “offspring follows belly.” In this paper I ask how this legislative intervention might have been perceived by enslaved women and men in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English Atlantic.

Jennifer L. Morgan is the author of Laboring Women: Gender and Reproduction in the Making of New World Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Her research examines the intersections of gender and race in colonial America. She is currently a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton where she is at work on a project that considers colonial numeracy, racism, and the rise of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the seventeenth-century English Atlantic, tentatively titled Accounting for the Women in Slavery. She is Professor of History in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and the Department of History at New York University and lives in New York City.

Free and open to the public…

For more information, click here.

An Interview with Poet Brian Komei Dempster

Hyphen: Asian America Unabridged
2015-02-02

Jeffrey Thomas Leong, San Francisco Bay Area poet; 2014 graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing program in poetry

I first met Brian Komei Dempster in Winter 2000 as a student in his Kearny Street Workshop writing class, held in his grandfather’s Buddhist church in San Francisco’s Japantown, and was immediately impressed by his warmth and patience. Brian has edited two books of personal stories by Japanese Americans who were incarcerated in WW II camps — From Our Side of the Fence and Making Home from War. His debut poetry book Topaz, which won the 15 Bytes 2014 Book Award in Poetry, was published in 2013 by Four Way Books.

What I admire most about Topaz is its skillful interweaving of the historical and the personal, which reflects the way that inherited family legacies are both a burden and a gift for one to sort through and integrate. Brian’s story — and the speaker’s quest in the book — is further complicated by his mixed race heritage and upbringing by a Japanese American mother and white father. As a Chinese American, I’ve experienced cultural bifurcation but, through Brian’s work, have discovered a new world of racial dualism. His fearless investigation of its nuances and conflicts is inspiring. He can write of a grandmother’s grief and then seamlessly present the sexual angst of adolescent males: his ordering and juxtaposition of poems reflects the multi-layered resonances of the speaker’s life.

Brian’s poetry is carefully crafted, with formal experimentation, yet remains accessible to a broad audience. It is personally expressive, though grounded within the context of family and community. His poems chart new territory and speak hard truths. Most importantly, for me as a writer, they feel authentic.

Brian’s poems have appeared in New England Review, North American Review, Ploughshares, and numerous other journals as well as various anthologies, including Language for a New Century and Asian American Poetry: the Next Generation. He is a professor of rhetoric and language and a faculty member in Asian Pacific American Studies at the University of San Francisco, where he also serves as Director of Administration for the Master of Arts in Asia Pacific Studies.

***

Jeffrey Thomas Leong: Can you tell us about your name — Brian Komei Dempster — and where it comes from?

Brian Komei Dempster: My father’s name is Dempster, which has European roots, and my mother’s maiden name is Ishida, which is Japanese. The name Komei was given to me by my grandfather, Archbishop Nitten Ishida. I didn’t always use Komei, but as I got older and became a writer, I felt I had to use Komei; otherwise someone might not know who I was, not get the half Asian part of my identity. According to my grandfather, the name means “tall, high, clear –like a mountain. ” The fact that my grandfather — who’s a priest — gave me the name imbues it with gravitas…

Read the entire interview here.