Mixed Race Studies

How A Latina-Asian American Ascended Amazon’s Ranks

NBC News
2015-05-29

Stephen A. Nuño, Associate Professor of Politics & International Affairs
Northern Arizona Univeristy

If you have ever bought anything from the online retail giant, Amazon.com, you probably didn’t know that a multicultural woman is one of the managers leading the work behind the scenes with software developers, user interface (UI) designers and product teams to help you spend your money.

In an age where the tech industry has increasingly come under fire for being mostly male and for its lack of diversity, women like Erica Gomez are serving as role models and urging others to break through the technology ranks. Currently Amazon’s Senior Technical Program Manager, Gomez has also worked at Microsoft as an engineer and program manager for the Bing search platform and at Boeing as a software developer for real-time aircraft monitoring programs.

A lover of trivia and a tennis athlete, Gomez illustrates the proliferation of people who identify with multi-ethnic backgrounds since the U.S. Census began allowing respondents to check multiple boxes for their racial and ethnic identity in 2000. She is also an example of the growing diversity among Latinos.

Gomez’s mother, who is of Japanese-Scottish descent, was born on an Air Force base in Texas and grew up mainly in Taipei. Gomez’s father is Puerto Rican; her grandparents moved from Puerto Rico to Los Angeles before her dad was born and he grew up bouncing between the island and Los Angeles. His family eventually settled in San Clemente, California, a sleepy surfers’ haven in Orange County…

Read the entire article here.

#471: Mixed Race in a Box: Teaching Mixed Race in the 21st Century

The 28th Annual National Conference on Race & Ethnicity in American Higher Education (NCORE)
Washington Hilton
1919 Connecticut Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20009
2015-05-26 through 2015-05-30

Friday, 2015-05-29, 15:30-17:30 EDT (Local Time)

In Fall 2013, The Asian American Literary Review published Mixed Race in a Box, a multimedia project equal parts art piece, anthology, and innovative educational tool. It has since been adopted as a course text for teaching race and mixed race in over 80 college and university classrooms in 6 countries—the U.S., Ireland, Argentina, Hong Kong, Poland, and Germany.

Popular consciousness of “multiracialism” is at an all-time high, and with it, student (and faculty) needs for reflecting personally and academically on mixed identities and the histories and realities of mixed race. But what exactly does it mean to teach mixed race? What are we teaching, and how, and why? Where—in what disciplines? And who are we teaching—what understandings of race and mixed race are our students, across the U.S. and beyond, bringing into the classroom?

This proposed session will outline Mixed Race in a Box as a pedagogical experiment, opening to a larger discussion of teaching mixed race and race more generally. It will explore how we can best equip students and teachers to think critically about race while, as the saying goes, “meeting them where they are.” Produced by an editorial team of University of Maryland students, featuring collaborative projects by leading artists, scholars, poets, and writers, the Box includes a range of unusual materials—a foldout map of mixed Native poetics, a deck of playing cards, three pocket books, photo slideshows and video art—and offers a wealth of different approaches to teaching race and mixed race. The session will examine some of these particular strategies and discuss the challenges and successes of employing them in various classrooms, with varying student constituencies, across the country. Prospective presenters will include a senior editor of the Box, a student editor of the Box, and two scholar-writers who contributed pieces to the Box and taught it in their respective classrooms.

Presenters

Jennifer Kwon Dobbs
St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota

Zohra Saed
Hunter College, City University of New York, Brooklyn, New York

Lawrence-Minh Davis, Director
Asian American Literary Review, College Park, Maryland

Andrew Mayton
University of Maryland, College Park

Mystery, and Discovery, on the Trail of a Creole Music Pioneer

The New York Times
2015-05-28

Campbell Robertson, Southern correspondent

PINEVILLE, La. — Somewhere among the thousands beneath a grassy hill here lies the body of Amédé Ardoin.

He was singular in life: one of the greatest accordion players ever to come out of south Louisiana. A Creole prodigy who traveled the countryside playing his bluesy two-steps and waltzes, he changed Cajun music and laid down the roots for zydeco.

At his death at the age of 44 in 1942, he was Case No.13387 in the state psychiatric hospital, destined for an anonymous burial.

Years of attempts to recover the body of Amédé, as he is widely known, have come to nothing. As with Mozart’s grave, Amédé’s is known only by its general vicinity: the area where the blacks were buried. But a desire for some sort of physical commemoration of his life, beyond a few documents and a blurry photograph, has not gone away.

“I started thinking of possible symbolic ways of bringing Amédé home, placing a kind of image of him in the culture, something physical,” said Darrell Bourque, a former state poet laureate, who has been trying to raise funds to have a statue erected, most likely in Eunice, La., where Amédé spent much of his life.

Mr. Bourque described Amédé as bringing the white Cajun and black Creole traditions together in a society that policed racial boundaries so rigidly that it ultimately brought about his death. His music, Mr. Bourque said, represented “a little pocket of possibility that didn’t get replicated in the larger culture.”

It was only after he began looking for Amédé that Mr. Bourque came to learn how complicated those boundaries could be for whites and blacks at that time — and how deeply connected he was to the people who crossed them…

Read the entire article here.

#312: Mixed Foundations: Supporting and Empowering Multiracial Student Organizations

The 28th Annual National Conference on Race & Ethnicity in American Higher Education (NCORE)
Washington Hilton
1919 Connecticut Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20009
2015-05-26 through 2015-05-30

Thursday, 2015-05-28, 08:30-10:00

Multiracial college students face pervasive monoracist attitudes and structural oppression. These students, like many students from historically marginalized backgrounds, experience greater satisfaction and retention rates when their identities are understood and their needs accommodated. This session will focus on supporting and empowering multiracial students and mixed race student organizations on college campuses. Presenters will utilize student affairs research and identity development theory to address common challenges that multiracial organizations face and how to effectively confront them. Participants will learn about the importance of creating inclusive spaces for multiracial students, equipping them with strong leadership skills, and advising them through political and administrative hurdles.

Presenters

Victoria Malaney, Special Assistant to the Dean of Students
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Kendra Danowski, Program Coordinator for Civic Engagement & Social Justice
Eugene Language College, New York, New York

#262: Researching and Publishing on Multiracial Topics

The 28th Annual National Conference on Race & Ethnicity in American Higher Education (NCORE)
Washington Hilton
1919 Connecticut Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20009
2015-05-26 through 2015-05-30

Wednesday, 2015-05-27, 15:30-17:30 EDT (Local Time)
Columbia 3, Terrace Level

From the politics of labeling and counting mixed race students in research, to the interactions with editors who might not care about multiraciality, this session explores key issues related to researching and publishing on multiracial topics. Join several panelists from various fields in and outside of academia, as they share their experiences with various aspects of the research and publishing enterprise. From developing their own ideas for projects and conducting research, to writing for peer-reviewed journals and even turning the dissertation into a book, the panelists have a wealth of knowledge and expertise related to researching and publishing. They will share lessons learned along the way in their various roles as researchers, authors, editors, and most importantly, readers that can help others move their own work forward. Moreover, this session allows for the discussion of not only the general challenges of the research and publishing process, but also what happens when you add the complexities of multiraciality. Depending on contexts, multiracial topics can at times be viewed as too controversial or unworthy of our scholarly attention. Without conducting innovative research and disseminating new knowledge, there will continue to be limited/limiting discourses on mixed race, setting up dangers of a “single story” to encompass all experiences of such a diverse population. Publishing can be used as a way to open up new lines of inquiry, challenge narrow framings, and insist upon anti-racist approaches to research and practice. It also allows us to use various approaches to reach multiple audiences (e.g., scholarly, popular, student, literary). By exposing some of these issues, participants will have the opportunity to engage in critical conversations and move toward developing their own best practices for researching and publishing on multiraciality.

Presenters

Marc Johnston, Assistant Professor
Ohio State University

Kristen Renn, Professor of Higher, Adult, & Lifelong Education
Michigan State University

Lawrence-Minh Davis, Director
The Asian American Literary Review, Inc., College Park, Maryland

Steven Riley, Founder/Creator
MixedRaceStudies.org, Silver Spring, Maryland

Tony Williams’ “Wilderness” and Mixed-Race Identity through Jazz

Soundscapes and Such: Critical Thoughts on Sonic Subjects
2015-05-27

Shawn M. Higgins
University of Connecticut

Tony Williams (source: Wikipedia)

Why do song writers choose the song titles they do? Perhaps Herbie Hancock’s 1980 track “4 A.M.” was recorded at that exact time – or maybe finished then? The song isn’t sleepy and lethargic as I might connotatively connect with the before-dawn hour, but jazz musicians are infamously night owls, and the song’s rhythm suggests this might be the funkiest, most active hour of the cycle. The title of John Coltrane’s 1967 song “Stellar Regions”, through the frenzied, echoing cymbal work of Rashied Ali and Coltrane’s trilling, screaming saxophone, could serve in a Romantic sense to invoke feelings of a paean to the heavens. The listeners, upon closing their eyes, are sonically shot into space and flung around the cosmos through the combination of music and such a song title. And of course, one of Duke Ellington’s most famous songs, which is in turn an absolute standard of jazz today, was given a title by the composer Billy Strayhorn after Duke gave him directions to his house and told him to “Take the ‘A’ Train.” None of these songs at the time of their composure had any lyrics to support these titles either in a refrain or in any thematic way. Rather, the listener is encouraged to interpret the sounds alongside the title or through the title. What happens in this exchange between artist, product, and consumer is my primary interest, and I would like to point to one artist in particular who used his song titles as a conscious way of addressing his newly discovered mixed-race identity.

Tony Williams, the legendary jazz drummer who is credited with inventing the “blast beat” and who called legends like Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, and John McLaughlin his musical partners, candidly explained in a 1995 BET interview a recent revelation in his life. Williams had discovered at the age of roughly forty-nine that he was of a racially mixed ancestry – he was phenotypically African American but also of Chinese and Portuguese background…

Read the entire article here.

The Invention of Hispanics

Latino USA
2015-05-22

Hosts:

Marlon Bishop, Producer

Camilo Vargas, Producer

Guest:

G. Cristina Mora, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of California, Berkeley

Before 1970, the US Census Bureau classified Mexican, Cuban and Puerto Rican immigrants as whites. Each community of Latin American origin would go by their nationality and by the region where they lived in the United States. But all that changed in the seventies, as activists began lobbying the US Census Bureau to create a broad, national category that included all these communities. The result was the creation of the term “Hispanic”, first introduced in the US Census in 1970.

Then it was up to Spanish-language media to get the word out. The network that would later become Univision released this series of ads calling on “Hispanics” to fill out the 1980 Census. The ads feature “Hispanic” sports stars and… Big Bird:…

By the 1990s, Univision was creating the images and sounds associated to Hispanics in the US. The 1990 Census ads feature the likes of Tito Puente and Celia Cruz telling Hispanics to fill out el censo:…

Read the preview here. Listen to the story here.

On The Cherokee Rose, Historical Fiction, and Silences in the Archives

Process: a blog for american history
2015-05-26

Martha S. Jones, Arthur F Thurnau Professor, Associate Professor of History and Afroamerican and African Studies
University of Michigan

Martha S. Jones

Martha S. Jones is the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor at the University of Michigan on the faculties in Afroamerican and African studies, history, and law. She is also a codirector of the university’s Program in Race, Law, and History. The author of the forthcoming Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America and a coeditor of Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), she is at work on a new book entitled “Riding the Atlantic World Circuit: Slavery and Law after the Haitian Revolution.” She is also an OAH Distinguished Lecturer.

The Cherokee Rose, the debut novel by historian Tiya Miles, caught me in the middle of a longstanding argument. I had pre-ordered the book from its publisher John F. Blair, and so it arrived unexpectedly, as if unsummoned. It was March, a busy moment in the term. Still, I stole time that Saturday, reading it nearly cover-to-cover in one sitting. I left the last chapter until the next day, just to savor the experience. Miles is my colleague at the University of Michigan, and that hints at why I’d let my email pile up just to read a work of fiction. Generally, I’m the sort that lets a stack of books accumulate for later summer reading. But there was more. As I said, I was trying to settle an argument and thought The Cherokee Rose might help.

Many of us know Miles for her award-winning works of history: Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family (University of California Press, 2006), The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story (University of North Carolina Press, 2012), and Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era (also coming from UNC Press this fall). Miles’ insight into the intimate dynamics of slavery at the crossroads of Native American and African American experience has won her professional accolades and an eager readership. In this sense, while The Cherokee Rose is fiction, it is no sharp departure. Miles builds upon what she had already taught us, including her exploration of Georgia’s Chief Vann House, to provide a new vantage point from which to explain the past…

Read the entire review here.

Novelist Mat Johnson Explores The ‘Optical Illusion’ Of Being Biracial

Weekend Edition Sunday
National Public Radio
2015-05-24

Growing up in Philadelphia, Mat Johnson lived mostly with his mother in a black neighborhood. The son of an African-American mother and an Irish-American father, his skin was so light that he might have passed for white. But being biracial meant only one thing back in the ’70s: “Um, it meant: black,” Johnson says with a laugh. “There wasn’t a lot of ambiguity there. I didn’t hear the world biracial or didn’t think of myself as biracial. And when I did hear that, I reacted to it defensively. I thought it was just black people of mixed heritage who were just trying to run away from blackness.”

Johnson was born three years after Loving Day — the historic 1967 Supreme Court decision which made interracial marriage legal. His new novel, Loving Day, is a funny, sometimes absurd look at what it means to be mixed race in this country.

These days, Johnson has a more nuanced way to describe his racial identity. He says he is a mixed person of African-American descent. But he also uses another, more loaded word, to describe himself: mulatto…

Read the entire article here. Download the interview here. Read the transcript here.

Crossed lines

The University of Chicago Magazine
May-June 2015

Lydiayle Gibson

Allyson Hobbs, AM’02, PhD’09. (Photography by Jennifer Pottheiser)

A secret in her own family led Allyson Hobbs, AM’02, PhD’09, to uncover the hidden history of racial passing.

“You know, we have that in our own family too.” That was the bombshell, the offhand remark that plunged historian Allyson Hobbs, AM’02, PhD’09, into a 12-year odyssey to understand racial passing in America—the triumphs and possibilities, secrets and sorrows, of African Americans who crossed the color line and lived as white. As a first-year graduate student at the University of Chicago, Hobbs happened to mention to her aunt the subject of passing, a casual curiosity sparked by the Harlem Renaissance writers she was reading in school. Her aunt responded by telling her the story of a distant cousin from the South Side of Chicago who disappeared into the white world and never returned.

That story opens Hobbs’s book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life (Harvard University Press, 2014), a lyrical, searching, and studious account of the phenomenon from the mid-19th century to the 1950s. Hobbs’s cousin was 18 when she was sent by her mother to live in Los Angeles and pass as a white woman in the late 1930s. “And our cousin—and this was the part of the story that my aunt really underscored—was that our cousin absolutely did not want to do this,” Hobbs says. “She wanted to stay in Chicago; she didn’t want to give up all her friends and the only life she’d ever known.” But her mother was resolved. And so the matter was decided.

Ten or 15 years later, her cousin got what Hobbs calls an “inconvenient phone call.” Her father was dying. And her mother wanted her to come home right away. “And she says to her mother, ‘I can’t come home. I’m a white woman now.’” She was married to a white man; she had white children. “So she never goes back,” Hobbs says.

Many threads weave through A Chosen Exile, released last fall to glowing reviews: the meaning of identity, the elusive concept of race, ever-shifting color lines and cultural borderlands. But by far the book’s most potent thread is about loss. “The core issue of passing is not becoming what you pass for,” Hobbs writes in the prologue, “but losing what you pass away from.” Historians have tended to focus on the privileges and opportunities available to those with white identities. Hobbs reckons with the trauma, alienation, and scars—not only for those who passed, but also for those they left behind. In letters, unpublished family histories, personal papers, sociological journals, court cases, anthropological archives, literature, and film, she finds “a coherent and enduring narrative of loss.”…

Read the entire article here.