Mixed Race Studies

They look white but say they’re black: a tiny town in Ohio wrestles with race

The Guardian
2019-07-25

Khushbu Shah

Roberta Oiler, center, stands with her daughters Janelle Stanley and Jessica Keaton in East Jackson, Ohio Photograph: Maddie McGarvey/The Guardian

Many residents in East Jackson were raised to identify as black. But what dictates race: where you live, your DNA, the history you’re taught?

The stale, smoky air around Clarice Shreck heaves. She takes a long hit of oxygen from the tube under her nose. She leans forward, shifting in her armchair, before releasing her raspy smoker’s laugh, which is smudged out a second later by her smoker’s cough.

The pale woman with frizzy grey-streaked hair commands her on-and-off partner of over 20 years, Jimmy – who is from one of the few white families in East Jackson – to fetch her purse. He plops it on to her lap; she struggles to get at an old piece of paper folded up in her wallet. She slowly unfolds it to present her birth certificate.

“Negro”, it reads, next to each of her parents’ names. She looks up triumphantly, victory in her periwinkle eyes. “It’s a legal document,” she says.

The last known full-blooded black person in her family was her great-great-grandfather Thomas Byrd, her parents told her. Photos of them, who both look white, adorn the wooden walls on either side of Shreck’s chair. Their stares follow her throughout their former home. They are the ones who told her she was black…

Note from Steven F. Riley: See the State of the Re:Union podcast “Pike County, Ohio – As Black as We Wish to Be” from 2012-09-28.

Read the entire article here.

Trying To Recognize People Like Me

The Margins
Asian American Writers’ Workshop
2017-06-16

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

(from left to right) T Kira Madden, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan and Violet Kupersmith

Writers Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, Violet Kupersmith, and T Kira Madden speak to each other about mixed-race identities in life and literature

February 28 isn’t too cold. I hurry through sharp sunlight to a café in Lincoln Center. It is the official launch day of my novel, Harmless Like You, in the USA. I feel woozy and anxious. I’ve been avoiding bookshops, because I’m too scared to know if it’s in stock. I’m meeting two dear friends who are also writers. T Kira Madden is the Editor in Chief of No Tokens Journal, with her memoir forthcoming. Violet Kupersmith’s collection of stories The Frangipani Hotel was published by Speigel & Grau, and her novel is forthcoming. They are both dear friends of mine, and it has been too long since I’ve seen their faces. The other thing we have in common is that we are mixed-race. Specifically, we have one Asian parent and one white parent. I’ve been told that equals accessible exotic. I want to ask Violet and Kira how they deal with this and how it affects them as writers.

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan: I never know what to call myself. At readings, people laugh at me when I get introduced as British-Japanese-Chinese-American, like it’s a punchline. I think, hey it’s not a joke. But I laugh too because I’m nervous. In Japan, I called myself hafu which is the accepted word there. I know lots of Americans say hapa—but I’m nervous about my right to take something from Hawaiian Islander culture. I grew up saying halfie, which I worry is too cute—but it is at least mine. So these days, I go back to halfie.

Violet Kupersmith: I’m half-Vietnamese and half-white. My mother’s family came to America on a boat in the seventies. My father’s side is all mixed European potato genes. I remember being really excited when the term “hapa” first started getting circulated, because it was finally a real label I could apply to myself after growing up having to just check the “other” box on all my paperwork. But I still feel a little squirmy referring to myself as hapa out loud because, like you said, it’s from Hawaiian Islander culture.

T Kira Madden: I am Hawaiian so I’m used to “hapa! hapa haole!”…

Read the entire interview here.

Biracial Identity Development in Danzy Senna’s Caucasia

A chapter in Body Horror and Shapeshifting: A Multidisciplinary Exploration
Brill
2014-01-04
pages: 145–152
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-84888-306-2
DOI: 10.1163/9781848883062_016

Jin-Yu Lin

Biracial individuals frequently go through a search for identity, a struggle to choose an identity and finally to accept their inherent multiplicity. They identify with more than one racial group, and their sense of self remains constant across racial contexts. In childhood, they often find their appearance different from other children. As they age, biracial individuals grow more aware of their racial heritage, and run the risk of falling into the borderlines of identities. Drawing upon models from Kerwin and Ponterotto and Poston, as well as Root’s theory of the development of identity in biracial individuals, this chapter attempts to demonstrate how the protagonist in Caucasia develops her identity when facing racial differences. This chapter explicates the protagonist’s self-consciousness about her invisibility when experiencing an identity crisis while passing for Jewish. Her search for identity, her realisation, and eventually the embracing of her both- and identity is included. Finally, the chapter concludes with a discussion of how the significance, diversity, and complexity of the experiences of biracial individuals may challenge the social construct of race. Based on a more flexible post-ethnic perspective, race is viewed as being more performative than biological.