Mixed Race Studies

The First Multiracial Miss Universe Japan Has Been Crowned

NBC News
2015-03-17

Frances Kai-Hwa Wang

The stunning Miss Nagasaki, Ariana Miyamoto, is the first multiracial contestant ever to be crowned Miss Universe Japan and will represent Japan in the 2015 Miss Universe pageant.

Born in Japan to a Japanese mother and African American father, Miyamoto is a Japanese citizen, grew up in Japan, and identifies as Japanese. Described in local media as a “saishoku kenbi,” a woman blessed with both intelligence and beauty, she holds a 5th degree mastery of Japanese calligraphy.

But reaction to her win has been both positive and negative, with some people questioning whether a multiracial person can truly represent Japan. According to local media, even she was initially a little wary about entering the pageant because she was “hāfu,” the Japanese word used to refer to multiracial or multi-ethnic half-Japanese people…

Read the entire article here.

Great Character: Sam White (“Dear White People”)

Go Into the Story
2015-03-13

Scott Myer

The Great Character theme for the month: Rebel. Today: Sam White from Dear White People (2014), written and directed by Justin Simien.

As a biracial gentleman, it has been blatantly clear to me my entire movie-going existence that my distinct mixed race experience must be just some fairytale figment of my imagination to those shining the greenlight in Hollywood. Characters of multiple ethnicities typically find their stories swept under the dirty rug to give the red carpet treatment to the “more relatable” struggles of the interracial couples that give birth to us instead.

Enter the bold, brave, brilliant voice of Justin Simian, an auteur screenwriter/director of African-American descent and gay sexual orientation, inspired by his own outsider college occurrences. With Simian’s slick, super smart 2014 debut being the racial satire Dear White People, we receive a nuanced black and white female protagonist played by a charismatic actress that has the added layer of understanding stemming from actually being of mixed heritage herself. Heavily armed with a movie camera, a radio mic and a public speaking voice, Sam White, superbly played by Tessa Thompson (Selma), puts a modern spin on black activist Angela Davis reimagined in a bohemian chic Denise Huxtable Lisa Bonet fashion sensibility.

SAM WHITE: Dear white people, the minimum requirement of black friends needed to not seem racist has just been raised to two. Sorry, but your weed man, Tyrone, does not count…

Read the entire article here.

Homeland Tour for Biracial Adoptees

KoreAm
2015-03-09

Katherine Kim

Dawn Tomlinson

photographs by Denis Jeong

International adoption began in South Korea in 1953, as thousands of Korean children were left parentless and/or homeless by the Korean War, while many others were born to Korean women and fathered by American GIs or soldiers from one of 16 UN countries stationed in the country. Late last year, the Me & Korea Foundation and MBC Nanum hosted the first-ever homeland tour of Korea tailored for mixed-race adoptees. The co-authors were two of the 25 participants on the 10-day-long tour, which was funded by Korean Adoption Services, the Korean Ministry of Health and Welfare and the Jesus Love Presbyterian Church in Seoul. The following is a personal reflection of the authors’ experience returning to their birth country.

As half-Korean, half-white adoptees who came to the U.S. as toddlers more than 50 years ago, we were raised in white communities by white parents having little to no understanding of our Korean roots. A Korea homeland tour tailored to mixed-race adoptees, we believed, was a start to understanding this painful chapter in our personal histories.

For adoptees as a whole, a visit to Korea is more than about just travel and tourism. It can trigger profound feelings of loss and rejection. For mixed-race adoptees born during the post-Korean War era, those feelings are further complicated by the fact that we look neither fully Korean nor fully Western, and are a minority among more than 200,000 Korean adoptees worldwide.

While Korean War orphans were cast as “nobodies,” having lost their family lineage, mixed-race children fathered by American GIs or other UN soldiers during the war were thought of as even more inferior—we were known as tuigi, slang for “devil’s child.” We were labeled the “dust of the streets,” the lowest of the low. Within that bottom hierarchy even, Korean whites were treated better than Korean blacks.

Regardless of the nationality of our fathers, most mixed-race adoptees were born stateless, as our Korean mothers, often abandoned by these servicemen, could not confer citizenship onto us.

We were, and still are, the in-betweens…

Read the entire article here.

Old Glory: The Symbol of One America

1696 Heritage Group
2015-03-16

Keith Stokes, Vice President

Richard Gill Forrester, c. 1850

The photograph taken in 1850 during the earliest years of a new-fangled technology called photography, captures a well-dressed, handsome five year old boy named Richard Gill Forrester, of antebellum Richmond, Virginia. Just as the photograph represented a new era in the technology of imagery, young Forrester, and others like him, represented a new-fangled generation of what it meant to be an American. Our national motto, “E Pluribus Unum” Out of Many, One, whose meaning some have come to suggest that out of many ethnicities, races, and religions would emerge a single people and America, seems to be embodied by the little boy pictured. And Forrester, who was my great, grandfather, with blended Jewish and Christian religion; black, Indian and white race; and northern and southern political persuasion, would grow and defend his right to be called an American.

After four long years of war, Union Troops on the morning of April 3, 1865 entered the city of Richmond, Virginia then capital of the Confederate States of America. Richmond had become the single-minded focus of the Union war effort, in a civil war between Americans of Northern and Southern persuasions that would claim an estimated three quarter of a million combatants…

Read the entire article here.

“If you’re passing due to white privilege, then you’re white in a societal way,”… “Now, does that build a different set of issues inside somebody who knows they’re not white, but they know that they’re passing as white? Yeah, sure. Who the fuck am I to sit here and act like I can speak for black people? I can’t even speak for white people. I can’t speak for nobody. And I felt weird about that. So I took my racial makeup and just stuck it in the back corner for a long time.” —Slug (Sean Michael Daley)

Killian Young, “Once Upon a Time in Minneapolis: 20 Years of Rhymesayers,” Consequence of Sound, (March 12, 2015). http://consequenceofsound.net/2015/03/once-upon-a-time-in-minneapolis-20-years-of-rhymesayers/.

How To Tell Someone They Sound Racist

Ill Doctrine
2008-07-21

Jay Smooth

You gotta use some strategy. See more of this discussion here.

Hispanic Journalists To Survey Race In Spanish-Language TV After Univision Incident

The Huffington Post
2015-03-17

Roque Planas

Carolina Moreno

The National Hispanic Journalists Association applauded Univision’s decision to fire host Rodner Figueroa, after he compared first lady Michelle Obama to a character from “Planet of the Apes” during a segment of “El Gordo Y La Flaca” last week.

In a statement published to NAHJ’s website on Tuesday, the organization’s President Mekahlo Medina called Figueroa’s comments “racist” and said that Univision made “the right decision” by dismissing him.

“Univision, the fifth largest network in the U.S., took a stand against racism and we are all better for it,” Medina’s statement said. “But I keep wondering, what was Figueroa thinking when those words came out of his mouth? Why was it okay for him, at that moment, to compare the First Lady of the United States or any person to an ape? And why, still today, does he think that was not racist?”…

…Medina also highlighted the lack of racial diversity within both the Spanish-language and English-language news media, saying it helps perpetuate a “hierarchy of skin color and race.”

“How many dark-skin or afro-Latino anchors do you see on Spanish language newscasts?” Medina said in the statement. “How many indigenous Latinos do you see on any newscast, English or Spanish? There isn’t a single Latino/a anchoring an 11pm English language newscast in Los Angeles, despite the market being 53% Latino and overwhelmingly English speaking or bilingual.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Contribution of Genomic Research to Explaining Racial Disparities in Cardiovascular Disease: A Systematic Review

American Journal of Epidemiology
First Published online: 2015-03-01
DOI: 10.1093/aje/kwu319

Jay S. Kaufman, Professor
Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Occupational Health
McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Lena Dolman
McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Dinela Rushani
McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Richard S. Cooper, Anthony B. Traub Professor of Community and Family Medicine
Stritch School of Medicine
Loyola University, Chicago, Illinois

After nearly a decade of genome-wide association studies, no assessment has yet been made of their contribution toward an explanation of the most prominent racial health disparities observed at the population level. We examined populations of African and European ancestry and focused on cardiovascular diseases, which are collectively the largest contributor to the racial mortality gap. We conducted a systematic search for review articles and meta-analyses published in 2007–2013 in which genetic data from both populations were available. We identified 68 articles relevant to this question; however, few reported significant associations in both racial groups, with just 3 variants meeting study-specific significance criteria. For most outcomes, there were too few estimates for quantitative summarization, but when summarization was possible, racial group did not contribute to heterogeneity. Most associations reported from genome-wide searches were small, difficult to replicate, and in no consistent direction that favored one racial group or another. Although the substantial investment in this technology might have produced clinical advances, it has thus far made little or no contribution to our understanding of population-level racial health disparities in cardiovascular disease.

Read or purchase the article here.

A reconsideration of the role of self-identified races in epidemiology and biomedical research

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
Available online: 2015-03-16
DOI: 10.1016/j.shpsc.2015.02.004

Ludovica Lorusso
Department of Political Science, Communication, Engineering and Information Technologies
University of Sassari, Italy
Department of Philosophy
University of San Francisco, San Francisco, California

Fabio Bacchini
Laboratory of Applied Epistemology, DADU
University of Sassari, Italy
Department of Philosophy
Stanford University, Palo Alto, California

Highlights

• We explore the role of race in biomedicine and epidemiology.
• We reject the use of race as a proxy for a genetic component to a complex disease risk.
• Self-identified race and exposomic and epigenomic variation tend to match each other.
• Self-identified race captures the effects of present and past racism on people’s health.

A considerable number of studies in epidemiology and biomedicine investigate the etiology of complex diseases by considering (self-identified) race as a relevant variable and focusing on the differences in risk among racial groups in the United States; they extensively draw on a genetic hypothesis—viz. the hypothesis that differences in the risk of complex diseases among racial groups are largely due to genetic differences covarying with genetic ancestry—that appears highly problematic in the light of both current biological evidence and the theory of human genome evolution. Is this reason for dismissing self-identified races? No. An alternative promising use of self-identified races exists, and ironically is suggested by those studies that investigate the etiology of complex diseases without focusing on racial differences. These studies provide a large amount of empirical evidence supporting the primacy of the contribution of non-genetic as opposed to genetic factors to the risk of complex diseases. We show that differences in race—or, better, in racial self-identification—may be critically used as proxies for differences in risk-related exposomes and epigenomes in the context of the United States. Self-identified race is what we need to capture the complexity of the effects of present and past racism on people’s health and investigate risk-related external and internal exposures, gene–environment interactions, and epigenetic events. In fact patterns of racial self-identifications on one side, and patterns of risk-related exposomes and epigenomes on the other side, constantly coevolve and tend to match each other. However, there is no guarantee that using self-identified races in epidemiology and biomedical research will be beneficial all things considered: special attention must be paid at balancing positive and negative consequences.

Read or purchase the article here.

‘Kiss me, I’m Irish’ took on a new meaning when DNA proved that I was

The Guardian
2015-03-17

Michael W. Twitty

New tests confirmed what my family had long known: our ancestors were children of their Irish-American slaveholders

Like many African Americans, I was excited by the possibility of using DNA tests to learn about my cultural roots before they were severed by centuries of slavery, obfuscation and the destruction of records. Today, I’m proud to say that multiple tests have confirmed my roots among ethnic groups living Ghana, Sierra Leone and other countries in West and Central Africa.

But the tests also confirmed the legacy of slavery in quite another way: my family, like most black American families, has not one but several white ancestors – men who took advantage of their access to young enslaved women and, in the process, increased the number of human beings they called property.

“Kiss Me, I’m Irish” took on a whole new meaning for me, when I discovered that I was…

Read the entire article here.