Mixed Race Studies

A Japanese School Edited Her Yearbook Photo. She Says It Was Racist.

VICE World News
2021-07-01

Hanako Montgomery, Reporter

AI NISHIDA’S HAIR IS NATURALLY BROWN (LEFT), BUT HER HAIR WAS EDITED TO APPEAR BLACK IN HER SCHOOL’S YEARBOOK (RIGHT). PHOTO: COURTESY OF AI NISHIDA

Ai Nishida had never been punished for her brown hair before.

Like many other schools in Japan, her middle school required all students to have black hair. But having told her teachers of her mixed heritage, she was exempt from this rule. Besides, she thought, she looked the part of the mixed-Japanese and white girl, so it was unlikely faculty would forget her lighter hair color was natural.

But when she received her middle school yearbook just days after graduating, she was shocked to see her picture had been edited. Nishida’s hair was painted black, a thick slab coated over her locks. For the first time, she felt someone was telling her she looked wrong. She’s called the school’s actions “racist.”…

Read the entire article here.

Critical Mixed Race Studies 6th Conference

Ancestral Futurisms: Embodying Multiracialities Past, Present, and Future
Virtual Conference
2022-02-24 through 2022-02-26
Proposals Due on: 2021-07-07

Art by Favianna Rodriguez

Please note that the abstract submission deadline has been extended until July 7th, 2021. The conference website now reflects this new date to allow for new submissions and modifications to previously submitted proposals (thanks for your patience) 😉.

To submit a proposal for the upcoming Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference to be held virtually February 24-26th, 2022 please go HERE and don’t forget to register.

Please consider becoming a sponsor of the 2022 Conference! You can also donate any amount to support CMRS. To read about how your donation helps to support CMRS and to help us in our efforts to provide more free and reduced cost programming that features the important critical works of multiracial students, scholars, artists, activists, and community members, please check out and spread the word by sharing our virtual brochure.

To Escape Jim Crow–Era Discrimination and Violence, Some Black Men Passed as White. But How Many?

Kellogg Insight
Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University
Evanston, Illinois
2021-04-01

Based on the Research of:

Ricardo Dahis, Ph.D. Candidate in Economics
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois

Emily Nix, Assistant Professor of Finance and Business Economics
University of Southern California, Los Angeles

Nancy Qian, James J. O’Connor Professor of Managerial Economics & Decision Sciences
Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois

Lisa Röper

Hundreds of thousands, according to a new study of Census data. Doing so provided some economic benefits but came at a great personal cost.

In the 1920s, a doctor named Albert Johnston had trouble finding a medical residency. Johnston was biracial, with Black ancestry, and hospitals at the time often did not permit Black physicians to treat white patients. But when a Maine hospital allowed him to apply without specifying his race, Johnston finally secured a position. He and his wife Thyra, who was one-eighth Black, started a new life as a white couple.

Johnston’s decision was an example of “passing”: identifying as a different race. During the Jim Crow era, when Black people were systematically denied opportunities and lived under the threat of lynching, some who were able to pass chose to do so in order to avoid the economic, physical, and social injustices of the time. And while historians and biographers have documented many instances of passing, researchers have not had a clear idea of how common this behavior was.

“The big question is, can we quantify this?” says Ricardo Dahis, a PhD student in economics at Northwestern University, who coauthored a study on this topic with Nancy Qian, a professor of managerial economics and decision sciences at Kellogg, and Emily Nix at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business.

To come up with numbers, the researchers searched detailed U.S. census records taken from 1880 to 1940. They were able to thus track specific people through time and note if their race changed from one census to the next. (Women were too difficult to track because they usually changed their last names after marriage.) The team estimated that, on average, at least 1.4 percent of Black men under age 55 started passing as white per decade, adding up to more than 300,000 men over the study period. However, the estimate is very conservative, and the actual rate could be as high as 7–10 percent, the researchers say.

Men who passed often moved to other counties or states. Census records suggest that in some cases, the men passed without their Black wives or children; in others, the entire family may have passed as white.

“Racial discrimination was so extreme that in order to escape it, people redefined themselves,” Qian says. “They changed their own identity.”…

Read the entire article here.