Mixed Race Studies

One-Dropping and Multi-Dropping: Embracing Contradictions of the Racialized Self (A Personal Journey)

Musings of a Mixed Race Feminist: Random diatribes from a mixed race feminist scholar.

Donna J. Nicol, Associate Professor Women & Gender Studies
California State University, Fullerton

My exploration of my mixed race identity began in my early 20’s after an incident I describe in my blog post entitled “There I Said It: Reflections on Identity from a Feminist Racial Hybrid”. But I didn’t exactly get thrown out of the Black community on Monday and proclaim myself as “mixed race” by Thursday.

My process for coming into my mixed race identity was slow because though I was socially ostracized from many Black peers by my junior year in college for outing myself as a “feminist”,  I was still embraced by other Black people who didn’t feel threatened by my public declaration.  Likewise, in my neighborhood which was predominantly Black but had a good number of Filipinos who settled in the area post World War II, people knew we were a mixed family.  I don’t recall there ever being a situation where people treated me like anyone but a full member of that community.  I think why I experienced this ease was due to the fact that I was raised to be Black with Filipino traditions passed on by my Filipina great-gram. My great-gram placed more emphasis on us keeping her cultural traditions alive rather than insisting we call ourselves Filipino because she was acutely aware of how her mixed race children, grands, and great-grams were judged as Black.  So, I didn’t go around saying I was “part this, or part that” which might have led to harassment or ostracism from the Black community.  I just said I was Black in public and in private, I could be both or neither if I wanted…

Read the entire article here.

“There is nothing ‘black’ about rioting”: Actor Jesse Williams unloads on Baltimore critics in passionate Twitter essay

Salon
2015-04-28

Joanna Rothkopf, Assistant Editor

(Credit: DFree via Shutterstock)

The “Grey’s Anatomy” actor wrote about the prevelance of rioting throughout history

On Monday evening, as Baltimore was rocked by violent and nonviolent protests alike, actor Jesse Williams, known for his role on “Grey’s Anatomy” and for occasionally weighing in on issues of race and police brutality, wrote what amounted to an essay on the history of rioting.

Read the whole thing below:..

Read the entire article here.

Dragons in the Land of the Condor: Writing Tusán in Peru

University of Arizona Press
2014
264 pages
6.00 x 9.00
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8165-3111-0

Ignacio López-Calvo, Professor of Latin American Literature
University of California, Merced

Foreword by Eugenio Chang-Rodríguez, Professor Emeritus

Building on his 2013 study on Nikkei cultural production in Peru, in Dragons in the Land of the Condor Ignacio López-Calvo studies the influence of a Chinese ethnic background in the writing of several twentieth- and twenty-first-century Sino-Peruvian authors.

While authors like Siu Kam Wen and Julia Wong often rely on their Chinese cultural heritage for inspiration, many others, like Pedro Zulen, Mario Wong, and Julio Villanueva Chang, choose other sources of inspiration and identification. López-Calvo studies the different strategies used by these writers to claim either their belonging in the Peruvian national project or their difference as a minority ethnic group within Peru. Whether defending the rights of indigenous Peruvians, revealing the intricacies of a life of self-exploitation among Chinese shopkeepers, exploring their identitarian dilemmas, or re-creating—beyond racial memory—life under the political violence in Lima of the 1980s, these authors provide their community with a voice and a collective agency, while concomitantly repositioning contemporary Peruvian culture as transnational.

López-Calvo bridges from his earlier study of Peruvian Nikkei’s testimonials and literature and raises this question: why are Chinese Peruvian authors seemingly more disconnected from their Asian heritage than Japanese Peruvian authors from theirs? The author argues that the Chinese arrival in Peru half a century earlier influenced a stronger identification with the criollo world. Yet he argues that this situation may soon be changing as the new geopolitical and economic influence of the People’s Republic of China in the world, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean, affects the way Chinese and Sino–Latin American communities and their cultures are produced and perceived.

Brian Bantum on Redeeming Mulatto

Homebrewed Christianity
2014-08-17

Bo Sanders

Brian Bantum teaches theology at Seattle Pacific University out in the mighty Northwest. This spring when he and Callid were both at the Christian Leadership Forum of FTE they sat down to talk about Brian’s book Redeeming Mulatto: A Theology of Race and Christian Hybridity. Because they are in a hotel lobby there a bit of background noise, but it is such a terrific interview that you’ll want to listen all the way through anyway If you want to followup on this conversation another great resource is this video of Brian giving a talk called “The Church Cannot be About Multiculturalism” at Quest Church‘s annual day conference on Faith & Race. Bantum is on twitter as well…

Listen to the interview here.

President Obama Condemns Both the Baltimore Riots and the Nation’s ‘Slow-Rolling Crisis’

The New York Times
2015-04-28

Julie Hirschfeld Davis, White House Correspondent

Matt Apuzzo

WASHINGTON — President Obama responded with passion and frustration on Tuesday to the violence that has rocked Baltimore and other cities after the deaths of young black men in confrontations with the police, calling for a period of soul-searching about what he said had become a near-weekly cycle of tragedy.

Speaking from the White House Rose Garden, Mr. Obama condemned the chaos unfolding just 40 miles north of the White House and called for “full transparency and accountability” in a Department of Justice investigation into the death of Freddie Gray, the young black man who died of a spinal cord injury suffered while in police custody.

He said that his thoughts were also with the police officers injured in Monday night’s unrest in Baltimore, which he said “underscores that that’s a tough job, and we have to keep that in mind.”…

…He spoke as Loretta E. Lynch, the new attorney general, dispatched two of her top deputies to Baltimore to handle the fallout: Vanita Gupta, her civil rights chief, and Ronald L. Davis, her community-policing director. The unrest there and the epidemic Mr. Obama described of troubled relations between white police officers and black citizens have consumed Ms. Lynch’s first two days on the job and could define her time in office.

They have also raised difficult and familiar questions for Mr. Obama about whether he and his administration are doing enough to confront the problem, questions made all the more poignant because he is the first African-American to occupy the White House…

Read the entire article here.

“A Chosen Exile” by History Professor Allyson Hobbs, has won two prizes from the Organization of American Historians

Stanford University Department of History
Palo Alto, California

2015-04-20

“A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life” by History Professor Allyson Hobbs has won two prizes from the Organization of American Historians: the Frederick Jackson Turner Award for best first book in American history and the Lawrence Levine Award for best book in American cultural history.

Will Police Killings of Blacks be the Defining Crisis of the Obama Presidency?

NewBlackMan (in Exile)
2015-04-24

Mark Anthony Neal, Host and Professor of African & African American Studies
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

Duke University University Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, author of the classic Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America (now in its 4th edition) and Left of Black host Mark Anthony Neal discuss #BlackLivesMatters and the Obama Presidency.

Watch the interview (00:06:45) here.

Embracing otherness, embracing myself

TedGlobal
July 2011
00:13:55

Thandie Newton

Actor Thandie Newton tells the story of finding her “otherness” — first, as a child growing up in two distinct cultures, and then as an actor playing with many different selves. A warm, wise talk, fresh from stage at TEDGlobal 2011.

Trevor Noah’s World

The Atlantic
2015-04-05

Douglas Foster, Associate Professor of Journalism
Medill School of Journalism
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois

What makes The Daily Show’s new host unique—according to South African comics

CAPE TOWN, South Africa—When word circulated on Monday that standup comic Trevor Noah had been chosen to succeed Jon Stewart as host of The Daily Show, South Africans hailed Noah in hyper-caffeinated terms as the country’s “next great export” after Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and Charlize Theron. On that day, I happened to be in Johannesburg shepherding students through the newsroom of The Star, where the lineup of stories at the morning editorial conference included a series of firefights between gangsters and police on public highways, allegations of corruption at every level of government, and the teetering condition of the state-run utility company, which regularly plunges the country into rolling blackouts. It was no wonder that news of a major U.S. television show hiring a 31-year-old mixed-race South African phenom as anchor had proven so welcome.

By now, the basics about Trevor Noah are well-known. He’s the young, super-cool comedian with the cherubic face and itchy Twitter finger who, beginning in 2012, achieved global recognition by way of Jay Leno, David Letterman, and Jon Stewart. In a series of solo performances around the world over the last three years, he has blown up in ways that cultural figures from South Africa haven’t since the 1960s and 1970s, when musicians like Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba packed music halls during the height of racial oppression back home…

…What makes Noah’s comedy unique? “He’s slick as fuck!” Evans replied. “But also super charming,” added the young comic sitting next to him. He was a slight, Afrikaans-speaking man named Schalk Bezuidenhout, who sometimes opens for Noah when he’s performing in town. Only 22 years old—the same age as Noah when he jump-started his career as a comedian—Bezuidenhout had just come off stage after a set about the hazards of dating a flight attendant (“a non-smoking fuck”) and the unintended consequences of imposing a non-racial ideal on young people from South Africa’s 11 different language groups (“There’s nothing more messed up than a bunch of Afrikaans kids singing an African song”).

Both men said Noah distinguished himself from other comics by resisting labels and “genre-based comedy.” Bezuidenhout noted that Noah always identified himself as a mixed-race South African raised in straitened circumstances in Soweto without “using it as a crutch.” Contemporaries who have shared the stage with him say he’s unusually attuned to the audience, shifting direction based on the feel in the room, and Bezuidenhout has seen Noah drop chunks of material based on the city he’s performing in. This was a quality that a number of immigrants in South Africa had already mentioned to me. Omega Chembhere, a waiter, told me that when he had arrived from Zimbabwe 10 years earlier, much of South African pop culture had seemed inaccessible. “Trevor’s different, so good at it,” he said. “His strength is that everything springs from his experience in life, but you understand his reality because he makes an effort to explain.”…

Read the entire article here.

Ticking the box: Finding a place for mixed race

The Cambridge Student
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom
2015-04-25

Chase Caldwell Smith

In my life, I have been told many things – that I “look like a bit of a foreigner” or that “I couldn’t tell you were part-Asian before – I can definitely see it now.” I’ve been informed, jokingly, that I’m basically “the blackest person” in the room, or told, imaginatively, that “all Asians look alike” anyway. Or my personal favourite, that because my mother is Asian and my father white, that I “live in one of those kinds of families.”

There’s much talk about race in Cambridge, with the establishment of FLY two years ago igniting a much-needed debate on how we should discuss racial discrimination in a university as multicultural as our own. I know for a fact that other students have been forced to confront much more discrimination than the little I have faced. But I still can’t help feeling that sometimes, much of the debate over race seems to pitch a cut-and-dry privileged majority, usually white, against a generalized group of underprivileged minorities, usually non-white. The issues dividing these groups are painfully real: I am not in any way refuting this.

However, I am concerned that this debate between a clearly delineated majority and minority has the unintended consequence of leaving out the voices of the students in-between – people like me who are neither all-white nor all-Asian, for example. It is sometimes difficult to take part because we don’t fit into the existing scheme of privilege and oppression: we are constantly uncertain of which ‘category’ we fit into, and perhaps, should fit into…

Read the entire article here.