Mixed Race Studies

All Mixed Up: examining mixed children and unions

The Source
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Volume 16, Issue 5 (September 8-22, 2015)

Florence Hwang

Sharon Chang says she embodies “mixedness.” Chang’s thoughtful examination about growing up multiracial at this year’s Hapapalooza festival: “Raising Mixed Kids: Family Workshop” will be at the Heartwood Community Café, Sept. 19 from 6–8 p.m. The Hapapalooza festival celebrates mixed heritage and hybrid cultural identity.

“I bring my lived life to the table. I also now bring the experiences of my family (my husband and son are also mixed) to the table,” says Chang, a mixed-race parenting expert and activist.

Children and race

Every single experience Chang has had with others is inevitably a multiracial exchange. Her father is from Taiwan and her mother is Caucasian American of Slovakian, German and French Canadian descent.

“But what does all this mean for mixed-race children growing up across racial boundaries? How can we raise multiracial kids to feel good about themselves in a raced world?” asks Chang, who will be sharing some of her findings from her new book Raising Mixed Race, which will be released later this fall.

According to Chang, children have used racial reasoning to discriminate against their peers by the ages of four or five. Children see and hear everything and racism is woven into the very fabric of society. Research also shows children as young as six months are able to categorize people by race…

Read the entire article here.

Spirituality can help us to transcend race consciousness

The Orlando Sentinel
Orlando, Florida
2015-09-02

Charles Michael Byrd, Guest columnist

As someone whom society views as racially mixed, traversing a spiritual path was indispensable for me to achieve happiness by resolving the internal conflicts arising from America’s obsession with the politics of racial identity..

Ultimately the question of how multiracial individuals should identify comes down to the level of individual spiritual consciousness. Does one see himself as the body or the spark of consciousness animating that body? Is one obligated to accept the label society issues at birth, or should one be able to freely name oneself?

Against that backdrop, the Sentinel’s Jeff Weiner’s June 4 article, “Orlando faith leaders: Improving race relations means building relationships” caught my eye and compelled me to reflect on just how inextricably blended race and religion are in America, particularly in the black community.

With Sunday mornings remaining this country’s most segregated time slot, not only have mainstream religions not allowed individuals of all colors to build transcendent interpersonal relationships, but many Americans have soured on the Abrahamic belief systems in favor of innate spirituality. The soul exists beyond racial-identity politics and does not impute value and character onto skin color…

Read the entire article here.

The Lives of Frederick Douglass

Harvard University Press
February 2016
350 pages
5-1/2 x 8-1/4 inches
9 halftones
Hardcover ISBN: 9780674055810

Robert S. Levine, Professor of English and a Distinguished University Professor
University of Maryland

Frederick Douglass’s fluid, changeable sense of his own life story is reflected in the many conflicting accounts he gave of key events and relationships during his journey from slavery to freedom. Nevertheless, when these differing self-presentations are put side by side and consideration is given individually to their rhetorical strategies and historical moment, what emerges is a fascinating collage of Robert S. Levine’s elusive subject. The Lives of Frederick Douglass is revisionist biography at its best, offering new perspectives on Douglass the social reformer, orator, and writer.

Out of print for a hundred years when it was reissued in 1960, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) has since become part of the canon of American literature and the primary lens through which scholars see Douglass’s life and work. Levine argues that the disproportionate attention paid to the Narrative has distorted Douglass’s larger autobiographical project. The Lives of Frederick Douglass focuses on a wide range of writings from the 1840s to the 1890s, particularly the neglected Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, 1892), revised and expanded only three years before Douglass’s death. Levine provides fresh insights into Douglass’s relationships with John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, William Lloyd Garrison, and his former slave master Thomas Auld, and highlights Douglass’s evolving positions on race, violence, and nation. Levine’s portrait reveals that Douglass could be every bit as pragmatic as Lincoln—of whom he was sometimes fiercely critical—when it came to promoting his own work and goals.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Lives after the Narrative
• 1. The Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society Narrative
• 2. Taking Back the Narrative: The Dublin Editions
• 3. Heroic Slaves: Madison Washington and My Bondage and My Freedom
• 4. Tales of Abraham Lincoln (and John Brown)
• 5. Thomas Auld and the Reunion Narrative
• Epilogue: Posthumous Douglass
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index