Mixed Race Studies

“I have some Chinese roots, I’m mestizaje [mixed]. I’m always sincere with people who know me. To be honest I never had an interest in Chinese culture before. I never wanted to get involved in the Chinese Association. But my mother always wanted to be connected to the community, to have Chinese friends,” he told me. “But what I’m trying to say is that for me I started to get involved with all this and it changed me.” —Junior Chen

Nidhi Prakash, “The forgotten history of Chinese immigrants in this Mexican border town,” Fusion, October 13, 2016. http://fusion.net/the-forgotten-history-of-chinese-immigrants-in-this-mex-1793862816.

When my son first started to black identify at about 5 or 6 years old, an acquaintance of ours asked my husband, in my presence, if he felt like we were “depriving” our son of his “white side.” My husband, a sociology professor and the author of two books on the failure of housing and school desegregation in the United States, said: “If my parents had instilled any Italian culture in me, I might want to share that with my son. But if you’re talking about general whiteness, there’s nothing there to pass down.”

Rebecca Carroll, “Black and Proud. Even if Strangers Can’t Tell.” The New York Times, April 1, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/01/opinion/sunday/black-and-proud-even-if-strangers-cant-tell.html.

People with mixed backgrounds can disrupt notions of purity that undergird race and synthesize vast cultural traditions. People with mixed backgrounds can also internalize and carry out racism.

Daniel José Camacho, “Diversity doesn’t make racism magically disappear,” The Guardian, April 1, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/01/diversity-doesnt-make-racism-magically-disappear.

Mixed race child zigzags through Shanghai world

Otago Daily Times
2017-04-03

Jessie Neilson, Library Assistant
University of Otago

DRAGON SPRINGS ROAD
Janie Chang
William Morrow
(Harper Collins Publishers)

Janie Chang’s second novel, Dragon Springs Road, details a landscape of memories, where traditional spiritual beliefs coexist with more modern ways of living.

Author Janie Chang, a Taiwanese Canadian, draws on her own family heritage and ancestors’ beliefs in her second novel.

It is 1908, the Year of the Monkey, Dragon Springs Road, Shanghai. In a traditional, affluent Chinese housing complex, a young girl is abandoned by her mother, with little explanation.

The 7-year-old, Jialing, is Eurasian, or za zhong, as strangers insult her, and as such is treated with contempt by most of society. She has little chance of education or opportunity beyond prostitution, but fortunes look up when she is taken under the wing of the new family in residence…

Read the entire review here.

Free People of Color in Slaveholding North Carolina: The Andersons of Granville County

Renegade South: Histories of Unconventional Southerners
2017-04-01

Vikki Bynum, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History
Texas State University, San Marcos

Map courtesy of Kianga Lucas.

Late last year, I was contacted by Raymont Hawkins-Jones, a descendant of a family I’d written about many years earlier: the Andersons of Granville County, North Carolina. The Andersons were one of the many fascinating free families of color that I’ve studied over the years, and I enjoyed learning more about their history from Raymont. Back in pre-internet 1992, pretty much everything I knew about my subjects was what I’d learned from records held at the North Carolina State Archives. Today, social media has enabled me to meet many of their descendants and to access additional records posted on the internet. The same digital revolution that stimulated me to create this blog also allows me to revisit my early topics of research and bring their stories up to date! (1)

The Andersons and the families with whom they intermarried belonged to a community of people defined by society as non-white, but who rarely appeared as slaves in North Carolina’s state and court records. As I’ve noted in earlier Renegade South essays about the mixed heritage communities of Gloucester County, Virginia, and the “Winton Triangle” of North Carolina, the lives of free people of color reveal far more complicated histories of racial identity and race relations than the broad images of “white freedom” and “black slavery” would suggest.

In fact, families such as the Andersons are central to understanding historical events that preceded and followed the institution of slavery, including colonization, the American Revolution, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the postwar rise of the Ku Klux Klan, and the New South era of white supremacy.

The very existence of free people of color, especially those in the South, threatened the growing institution of slavery. Southern whites especially feared their influence on slaves as the United States moved toward a Civil War generated by national conflicts over slavery. Determined to prevent free people of color from exercising full rights of citizenship and mobility, lawmakers increasingly policed their behavior through oppressive laws and customs…

Read the entire article here.

Colin Kaepernick Saw This Coming

Complex
2017-03-30

Dria Roland

Image via USA Today Sports

In pop culture years, 2012 was ages ago. But try to remember. That was the year quarterback Alex Smith suffered a concussion in the first half of the Niners game against the Rams in Week 10, and a backup QB named Colin Kaepernick had to fill in. The game ended in a tie, the NFL’s first in four years. The next week Kaepernick started, and led the team to victory. And even after Smith was declared healthy, Kaepernick continued to start—and to win. A “quarterback controversy” brewed, but coach Harbaugh went with the guy “with the hot hand,” as they say.

With that, a star was born. A second-year, backup QB led the Niners all the way to Super Bowl XLVII, and even though the Ravens came out on top, all people could talk about was Kap. His spread in the ESPN Body Issue made women swoon all around the nation. He signed endorsement deals with Jaguar, Nike, Beats, and Electronic Arts. Feature stories were written about his tattoos, his pet tortoise named Sammy, his being a biracial kid adopted by white parents…

Read the entire article here.