Mixed Race Studies

Census Finds Many Claiming New Identity: Indian

The New York Times
1991-03-05

Dirk Johnson

For the first 43 years of her life, Barbara Anderson did not talk about her ethnic background. But now it is a matter of pride — and record. On the latest census form, Mrs. Anderson, now 48, checked a different box: American Indian.

“I no longer had to pretend,” she said.

Census officials are finding a sharp increase in the number of people who identify themselves as American Indians. Tribes are swamped with applications for enrollment. And a large wave of urban Indians now takes part in traditional Indian practices, like the “vision quest,” a time of spiritual reflection spent alone in the wilderness.

As American society becomes more accepting and admiring of the Indian heritage, and as governments set aside contracts and benefits for tribe members, an increasing number of Indians, like Mrs. Anderson, feel freer to assert their identities.

“There were many people who were ashamed of their Indian past, so they hid it,” said Russell Thornton, a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and a sociologist at the University of California at Berkeley. “But a lot of people who went the assimilationist route have come back. And the tribes have been enjoying a renaissance.”

Since 1960, the Government count of American Indians has tripled, to an estimated 1.8 million. The Census Bureau has so far released ethnic data from 38 states and the District of Columbia showing a 38 percent increase in the last 10 years. Some of the biggest increases came in states without large Indian populations: Alabama rose 118 percent, New Jersey 78 percent. In Wyoming, which had an overall population loss of more than 3 percent, the number of Indians grew by more than 33 percent…

…Many of the Indians who now strongly assert their identities are the children or grandchildren of Indians who “passed” as white. Others were adopted into white families, and later sought to reclaim their heritage. John Homer, for example, was born 44 years ago to Indian parents in Hugo, Okla., but was adopted by a white couple. As a child growing up in Arkansas, he knew that he was Indian and was bothered that he could walk comfortably in whites-only neighborhoods because of his adopted parents but that other Indian boys could not…

Read the entire article here.

Race Unknown

Diverse: Issues in Higher Education
2011-02-21

Katti Gray

Bryan Lee, a senior at the University of California, Irvine, has noticed that some of his classmates adamantly declare their multiracial heritage while others choose not to identify themselves as being any particular ethnicity.

The half-Korean, half-White biomedical engineering major is co-president of the university’s Mixed Students Organization and says many of the group’s members “absolutely refuse to check any box when they’re filling out forms that ask you to describe your race.” Lee himself has occasionally checked the “other” box in the list of racial identifiers.

It’s an exercise in choice that is driving a gradual but steady uptick in the “race unknown” category of enrollment stats at some colleges and universities. The shift results, in part, from a continuing rise in the number of interracial couples and the children born to those unions. But observers say it also hints at efforts by some current college students to be less fixated on skin color.

“They are the change,” says Arlene Cash, vice president for enrollment management at Spelman College in Atlanta. “They have a very different way of looking at themselves and a much more global perspective of who they are. Many students of mixed races do not want to be pigeon-holed.”…

…Although public funding of college programs is not determined on the basis of race, the racial makeup of a student body is commonly used to track achievement gaps among races. Entities such as the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board use the data to measure how well the student population at public universities mirrors the state’s overall racial diversity.

Read the entire article here.

Mixed: The many faces of the multiracial experience.

The Stream
Al Jazeera English
2016-01-20

Femi Oke, Host

“What are you?” is an often used opening question that doesn’t always have a short and simple answer. For people with more than one racial background, identity is a lot more than one word; it’s a sentence, a paragraph or a lived experience. As we become a more and more mixed race population world over, racial identity is also becoming more fluid. On the next Stream we’ll speak to biracial and multiracial people about their mixed race journey.

Joining this conversation:

David Shams, Blogger and Freelance Journalist

Julie Matthews, Associate Professor
University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

Naomi Kissiedu-Green and Matthew Green, Authors of Surprise Baby: The Colourful Life!
Australia

Maya McManus, Social Media Consultant

Watch the episode (00:44:04) here.

Mixed Race…So What!

Spare Rib Magazine
Issue: 131 (June 1983)
page 58-60

Sonia Osman

This piece was going to be called ‘Women of mixed Race’, but after many discussions and thought I have decided not to call it that as I find the term ‘mixed race’ racist. Therefore I have gathered together various women’s pieces and have put them in a ‘suitable’ order for you to read. The concept of race is a strange one having no genetic validity at all. There are no genetic differences between Black and White people even though white, male, scientific intellectuals would like us to believe differently. Even anthropology does not include the concept of race. Race is seen as a specific term of abuse. The concepts of ‘mixed race’ or ‘half-caste‘ are racist, they imply that there is a pure race, an idea reminiscent of  ‘Mein Kampf‘ and fascist ideology.

This piece is a very personal piece for me and does not intend to put over any specific political line; it does not intend to educate, but I hope it will make people think.

Sonia’s Piece

To be a woman of mixed race, a halfcaste, a half-breed doesn’t that sound exotic, romantic, erotic …. To Hell with the lot of you I Those are your LABELS, your racist interpretation, your fears internalized and LAID on. I don’t care anymore, do what you will, think what you will, safe in your whiteness, your blackness, your superior purity.

I am ME and I will always stay ME. I will never be white, Anglo-Saxon and PURE. Sorry, you’ll have to make do with a half-Finnish and half-Indian woman born and brought up in the splendours of Brixton, London. Am I angry with my lot? Wouldn’t you be angry if ever since you were knee high you had to put up with taunts, fights, bloody noses, put-downs, comments and insults? But perhaps that is my lot and I should be grateful for it. Thank you so much people, allowing me to be born and brought up in this glorious country of ours. It’s great to feel unwanted.

It’s strange and yet wonderfully weird, ‘cos I know that around the world I am seen as something else: In France I am taken to be a native French woman, (I do speak French, so that helps), in Spain I am taken to be Spanish. People have thought me South American, from Peru or Brazil, or from Turkey or Iran. Strange ain’t it here I am, the unwanted, the unloved, and the uncared for.

I do feel ‘lucky’ because I have learned things from both my mother and my father. From my father I learnt the proper way to make curry, chapatis and carrot halwa. He would take me to the mosque and show me where and how to pray. From my mother I learnt about her country’s history, the continual war with Sweden and Russia. Strange to think that Finland used to [be] a Russion Duchy. Memories of Finland are full and varied, miles and miles of sweet-smelling pine forest, millions of lakes, fresh-water fish, wild exotic berries, hay-making, and hot days of strawberry-picking. But yet, here in the country which is my Home, I am denied my right to be here. ‘Go home Paki’,—Ha I, where is my home? My home is HERE, and I intend to stay…

Read the entire article here.

Passion – Blackwomen’s Creativity: an interview with Maud Sulter

Spare Rib Magazine
Issue 220 (February 1991)
pages 6-8

Ardentia Verba

An Interview with Maud Suiter

In 1977 Maud Suiter stepped on a train from Glasgow to London and began her current journey into the interior of Blackwomen’s Creativity. She didn’t know at the time that some day she would call herself ‘artist’ or ‘writer’ – not many teenage coloured girls from the Gorbals in Glasgow had trailblazed a path in that direct­ion, so it was a real exploration into the unknown for her when at sixteen she set out to go to college to study fashion. Since then she has gone on to create exhibitions, including Zabat – a stunning series of Blackwomen’s portraits which will be exhibited at Camerawork Gallery in London from March 15-April 19, and has now edited Passion: Discourses on Blackwomen’s Creativity, recently published by Urban Fox Press

‘Passion’ features many visual artists including Lubaina Himid, Robyn Kahukiwa, Sutapa Biswas and Janet Caron. However Maud Suiter’s vision of Blackwomen’s Creativity includes activities as diverse as Hairbraiding, Poetry and Performance. The many women included in the book were chosen because of their involvement with the Blackwomen’s Creativity Project, an organisation which Maud Suiter founded in 1982. In creating ‘Passion’, she has not only document­ ed the activities of BWCP but also provided ‘an excellent introduction to the range and intensity of Blackwomen’s Creativity in Britain’

Artists Newsletter

Why did you decide to create ‘Passion’?

In 1982 I was the first Blackwoman to join the Sheba Feminist Publisher’s collective. At that time a variety of the women’s presses were mooting ideas for conventional anthologies of Black writing in the UK. I felt that it was too easy for what were essentially white women’s publishers culling some short stories and poems from Blackwomen and then hailing the fact that they had published x-dozen Blackwomen writers. This especially at a time when they were earning significant incomes from Blackwomen writers such as Alice Walker and Maya Angelou.

As Alice Walker has pointed out, Blackwomen must read history for clues not facts, and it seemed essential to leave clues as to a more holistic range of our artistic pursuits. Obviously no academic course in Britain is geared towards working class Blackwomen’s experience across the board, but so many of us have a vast appetite for knowledge—for a herstory. We must create our own, which is what I set out to achieve with Passion.

There comes a time in many of our lives when we say ‘Girl, get yourself a piece of paper’. Around 1985 I was getting so many requests from students, mainly from Blackwomen, to give interviews to inform their dissertations. Hours and hours of Blackwomen’s work goes—unpaid and unacknow­ledged—into quite literally saving Blackwomen from failing their degrees. So few informed Blackwomen artists are employed in institut­ions, that we are co-erced into helping out, at the very last minute, to save Blackwomen artists, no, let me correct that, Black students across the board, that it was obvious that the wheel could not be eternally re-invented.

Passion offers schools, colleges and commun­ity venues the opportunity to invest in a vast wealth of information about our work during the 80’s and then draw from that information in a more creative and challenging way. All of us face racism and sexism in our explorations, and the wonderful articles and portfolios in Passion signpost a continuum of experiences, our litany of survival, which has created the situation where we can, like the Blackwomen’s Creat­ivity Project, network internationally from a position of equality not imperialism.

And so to recap, my ambition was to look at Blackwomen’s Creativity across a spectrum of activities including fine art, childbearing, opera, theatre etc. It is not possible to create a hierarchy of our artistic fields as we are living as Blackwomen in the aftermath of slavery and imperialism. Therefore we need to recognise our creative practices as survival and press for their development from that position. It is no use to sit back on our laurels and think OK, so we were there. We need to be here now, and we need to ensure that we continue to create in the future…

Read the entire interview here.

Two Systems or A Reading Towards New Work

The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard (Sherr Room)
Cambridge, Massachusetts
2015-10-28 (Published 2015-11-06)

Sarah Howe, the 2015–2016 Frieda L. Miller Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, presents “Two Systems,” a new sequence of poems in which she explores the historical encounter between China and the West.

“Of all the places I’ve lived, there’s only one where I felt uncomfortable being black. It was where I am from: the United States.” —Nicholas Casey

Nicholas Casey, “Moving to Venezuela, a Land in Turmoil: Q&A: Race and Racism in Venezuela,” The New York Times, January 21, 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/reporters-notebook/moving-to-venezuela/race-racism.

Misc.: How to Really Kill Affirmative Action or Why Abigail Fisher Ain’t Rachel Dolezol

The Multiracial Advocate
2016-01-20

Thomas Lopez, President
Multiracial Americans of Southern California (MASC)

Abigail Fisher was a mediocre high school student applying to the University of Texas (UT). She couldn’t get in based on her grades and test scores alone so she was put into a pool of students that would be considered for admission based on alternative factors meant to diversify the campus student body. Most of the students admitted from this pool were white like Fisher, but a small number were racial minorities. Any number of factors may have been the basis for a discrimination law suit but Ms. Fisher chose to sue for racial discrimination all the way to the Supreme Court. This has been a tactic tried numerous times to chip away at affirmative action programs, but there is another strategy yet to be tried that would probably kill it for good yet for some reason no one has attempted.

Applications for college are much like the Census in that they provide the opportunity for self-identification. Since the end of Jim Crow in official legislation, the government has been accepting self-identification as the means for collecting racial demographic information more and more. So what is stopping someone from identifying as a racial minority and taking advantage of affirmative action programs? Could someone be sued for racial fraud in this case?…

Read the entire article here.

Oregon’s Portland Community College to mark ‘Whiteness History Month’

NBC News
2016-01-21

Shamar Walters and Cassandra Vinograd

First comes Black History Month and then … Whiteness History Month?

A community college in Oregon has set aside April to look at “whiteness” — but not to celebrate what it’s described as a social construct which leads to inequality.

Portland Community College’s Diversity Council is behind the event, which it called a “bold adventure” to examine “race and racism through an exploration of the construction of whiteness, its origins and heritage.”

The project is “not a celebratory endeavor” but an “effort to change our campus climate,” the school said on its website…

Read the entire article here.

Moving to Venezuela, a Land in Turmoil

The New York Times
2016-01-21

Nicholas Casey, a New York Times correspondent, is sharing moments from his first 30 days living in Caracas, a city in the midst of great tumult and change. Follow Nick on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Q&A: Race and Racism in Venezuela

Q. I’d like to hear your impressions on race and racism, since everyone seems to be mixed race in Venezuela.

—Silvia Rodriguez, Illinois

A. Race is something that has preoccupied me in my past reporting assignments, in which I’ve had a chance to watch not only how people treat each other, but how I’m received.

With a Afro-Cuban father and a white mother, I was never confused for a local during my five years reporting from Mexico. More often, I was confused for a pop singer named Kalimba. He seemed to be the only man in that country who had hair like mine and wore similar glasses…

…Of all the places I’ve lived, there’s only one where I felt uncomfortable being black. It was where I am from: the United States.

Read the entire article here.