Mixed Race Studies

The Passing Paradox: Writing, identity & publishing while black

Fusion
2015-02-13

Stacia L. Brown

A wife lives in constant fear that her husband will discover she’s not who she claims to be. A black aspiring architect is mistaken for an ethnicity other than his own and is offered a job he never would’ve accessed had he corrected the error. A pregnant mother prays nightly that her baby’s skin won’t betray a bit of brownness. Such are the predicaments of characters in the early 20th century “passing narratives” I’ve loved since my days as an undergraduate English major.

To “pass,” as African American writers in the early 1900s defined it, was to choose to escape from the violence and discrimination attendant to blackness — a privilege possible only for those whose skin was light enough to pull it off. Peaking in popularity by the 1930s, passing narratives were often melodramatic and cautionary, detailing the myriad dangers of abandoning one’s black identity in order to take cover amid the white communities that systemically oppressed black citizens.

The penalty for being caught passing could be as merciless as emotional and physical abandonment or as cruel as a violent death. In Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing, for instance, one of the story’s protagonists, Clare, either falls or is pushed from the top floor of a building during a party. Unbeknownst to her, her racist white husband has discovered her blackness through her light-skinned friend, Irene, who isn’t exactly passing. When he charges toward her stumbles out to her death.

Passing narratives not only interrogate the fluidity of racial identity and assess the stakes of racial allegiance, but also double as slow-burning thrillers: Race itself is the stalker, an implicit threat skulking in the backgrounds of seemingly contented, white identified lives…

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Here’s why Equal Protection may not protect everyone equally

The Washington Post
2015-09-23

Lauren Sudeall Lucas, Assistant Professor of Law
Georgia State University

Intersectionality is the acknowledgment that different forms of identity-based discrimination can combine to give rise to unique brands of injustice. For example, although women may generally face certain challenges in the workplace — unequal pay and the “motherhood penalty” are common — women of color may face different obstacles, including a bigger wage gap and the perception that they are too aggressive.

The Equal Protection Clause is the primary constitutional tool for addressing claims of identity-based discrimination. Finding out whether an incident of discrimination is legal typically begins with identifying the identity category — such as race or gender — on which the alleged discrimination is based. Depending on the category invoked, courts will apply varying levels of analysis to the claim, making it easier or harder for those accused of discrimination to defend their policies.

But for those who face discrimination at the intersection of multiple identity categories, it is not immediately clear how a court should respond. If someone claims that she has been denied the equal protection of the law because she is a black woman, should the alleged discrimination be examined with strict scrutiny, the most stringent standard of review in the court system, which is applied to classifications based on race? Or should it be treated with intermediate scrutiny, the lesser standard typically applied to gender classifications?…

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Korla

Appleberry Pictures
San Rafael, California
April 2005

A Film by John Turner & Eric Christensen

Korla Pandit was a spiritual seeker, a television pioneer and the godfather of exotica music. Known for his hypnotic gaze, Korla captured the hearts of countless Los Angeles housewives in the 50s with his live television program that featured a blend of popular tunes and East Indian compositions, theatrically performed on a Hammond B3 organ. In the 90s he resurfaced as a cult figure with the tiki/lounge music aficionados, filling clubs, skating rinks and bars with retro hipsters. Often pegged as a “man of mystery,” Korla lived up to that billing when he took an amazing secret with him to his grave in 1998 – one that is revealed in Korla.

Priming White identity elicits stereotype boost for biracial Black-White individuals

Group Processes Intergroup Relations
Volume 18, Number 6 (November 2015)
pages 778-787
DOI: 10.1177/1368430215570504

Sarah E. Gaither, Provost’s Career Enhancement Postdoctoral Scholar
University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois

Jessica D. Remedios, Assistant Professor of Psychology
Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts

Jennifer R. Schultz
Department of Psychology
Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts

Samuel R. Sommers, Associate Professor of Psychology
Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts

Psychological threat experienced by students of negatively stereotyped groups impairs test performance. However, stereotype boost can also occur if a positively stereotyped identity is made salient. Biracial individuals, whose racial identities may be associated with both negative and positive testing abilities, have not been examined in this context. Sixty-four biracial Black-White individuals wrote about either their Black or White identity or a neutral topic and completed a verbal Graduate Record Examination (GRE) examination described as diagnostic of their abilities. White-primed participants performed significantly better than both Black-primed and control participants. Thus, biracial Black-White individuals experience stereotype boost only when their White identity is made salient.

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Multiracial kids will soon have a more colorful toy set for pretend play

The Chicago Tribune
2015-09-23

Sadé Carpenter

The MyFamilyBuilders toy set includes 48 magnetic wooden pieces that snap together. (MyFamilyBuilders)

When Ez Karpf went shopping for a gift for his friends’ children, he thought it would be easy to find a toy set that represented their multiracial family. In the U.S. — Karpf is from Argentina — there are products for everyone, or so he thought.

He quickly realized the store aisles were not overflowing with the toys he hoped to buy. He noticed not only a lack of racial diversity, but also the absence of toys portraying same-sex parents and single-parent households.

“A lot of kids are not reflected in today’s toys; a lot of families are not reflected in today’s toys,” Karpf said. “It’s much easier to learn not to be biased about differences than to unlearn that.”…

…A product developer/designer, Karpf assembled a group that included an education specialist, child psychologist, illustrator and tech entrepreneur to address the lack of diversity in toys. Together, they created MyFamilyBuilders.

“When kids don’t see themselves reflected in toys they play with every day, basically this is like having no mirror of themselves,” Karpf said.

The MyFamilyBuilders toy set includes 48 magnetic wooden block pieces children 3 and up can use to customize their playtime experience. It also includes 25 cards for five different games for children 5 and up. The goal is for parents to join the playing process and create teachable moments for their kids…

Read the entire article here.

To consider the life of Korla Pandit—and that’s what I will call him because that is who he became—is to consider the weight of wearing a mask for 50 years. It is to grasp the fear of exposure, of a revelation that would have killed his career. One slip and he would have gone from being a mirror of white America’s mania for things “exotic” to somebody white America didn’t want to face. He would have been revealed as a fraud, and his fans would have never forgiven him. It is to recognize how he had to cut himself off from a black community that he’d grown up in, from a culture that had shaped the musical skills, and the survival skills, that he drew on for the rest of his life.

RJ Smith, “The Many Faces of Korla Pandit,” Los Angeles Magazine, June 2001, 76. https://books.google.com/books?id=aF8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA73#v=onepage&q&f=false.

Positioning Multiraciality in Cyberspace: Treatment of Multiracial Daters in an Online Dating Website

American Sociological Review
Volume 80, Number 4 (August 2015)
pages 764-788
DOI: 10.1177/0003122415591268

Celeste Vaughan Curington
Department of Sociology
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Ken-Hou Lin, Assistant Professor of Sociology
The University of Texas, Austin

Jennifer Hickes Lundquist, Professor of Sociology
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

The U.S. multiracial population has grown substantially in the past decades, yet little is known about how these individuals are positioned in the racial hierarchies of the dating market. Using data from one of the largest dating websites in the United States, we examine how monoracial daters respond to initial messages sent by multiracial daters with various White/non-White racial and ethnic makeups. We test four different theories: hypodescent, multiracial in-betweenness, White equivalence, and what we call a multiracial dividend effect. We find no evidence for the operation of hypodescent. Asian-White daters, in particular, are afforded a heightened status, and Black-White multiracials are treated as an in-between group. For a few specific multiracial gender groups, we find evidence for a dividend effect, where multiracial men and women are preferred above all other groups, including Whites.

Read or purchase the article here.

Guadalupe and the Castas: The Power of a Singular Colonial Mexican Painting

Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos
Volume 31, Number 2
pages 218-247
DOI: 10.1525/mex.2015.31.2.218

Sarah Cline, Research Professor of History
University of California, Santa Barbara

A mid-eighteenth-century casta painting by Luis de Mena uniquely unites the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe and casta (mixed-race) groupings, along with scenes of everyday life in Mexico, and the natural abundance of New Spain. Reproduced multiple times, the painting has not been systematically analyzed. This article explores individual elements in their colonial context and the potential meanings of the painting in the modern era.

Una pintura de Luis de Mena sobre las castas, de mediados del siglo xviii, reúne de manera singular la imagen de la Virgen de Guadalupe, los agrupamientos de castas y escenas de la vida cotidiana en México, junto con la abundancia natural de Nueva España. Aunque reproducida en múltiples ocasiones, la pintura no ha sido analizada sistemáticamente. Este artículo explora sus elementos individuales en el contexto colonial y los significados potenciales de la pintura en la época moderna.

Read or purchase the article here.