Mixed Race Studies

The Book Keeper: A Memoir of Race, Love, and Legacy

Swallow Press (an imprint of Ohio University Press)
January 2020
256 pages
5½ × 8½ in.
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8040-1221-8
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8040-4106-5

Julia McKenzie Munemo

In a memoir that’s equal parts love story, investigation, and racial reckoning, Munemo unravels and interrogates her whiteness, a shocking secret, and her family’s history.

When interracial romance novels written by her long-dead father landed on Julia McKenzie Munemo’s kitchen table, she—a white woman—had been married to a black man for six years and their first son was a toddler. Out of shame about her father’s secret career as a writer of “slavery porn,” she hid the books from herself, and from her growing mixed-race family, for more than a decade. But then, with police shootings of African American men more and more in the public eye, she realized that understanding her own legacy was the only way to begin to understand her country.

Mixed-Race Superheroes

Rutgers University Press
2022-04-16
288 pages
24 color images
6 x 9
Paperback ISBN: 9781978814592
Cloth ISBN: 9781978814608
EPUB ISBN: 9781978814615
PDF ISBN: 9781978814639
Kindle ISBN: 9781978814622

Edited by:

Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins, Associate Professor of English
Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton

Eric L. Berlatsky, Associate Professor of English
Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton

American culture has long represented mixed-race identity in paradoxical terms. On the one hand, it has been associated with weakness, abnormality, impurity, transgression, shame, and various pathologies; however, it can also connote genetic superiority, exceptional beauty, and special potentiality. This ambivalence has found its way into superhero media, which runs the gamut from Ant-Man and the Wasp’s tragic mulatta villain Ghost to the cinematic depiction of Aquaman as a heroic “half-breed.”

The essays in this collection contend with the multitude of ways that racial mixedness has been presented in superhero comics, films, television, and literature. They explore how superhero media positions mixed-race characters within a genre that has historically privileged racial purity and propagated images of white supremacy. The book considers such iconic heroes as Superman, Spider-Man, and The Hulk, alongside such lesser-studied characters as Valkyrie, Dr. Fate, and Steven Universe. Examining both literal and symbolic representations of racial mixing, this study interrogates how we might challenge and rewrite stereotypical narratives about mixed-race identity, both in superhero media and beyond.

Table of Contents

• Introduction by Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins and Eric L. Berlatsky
• Part I Superheroes in Black and White
  • 1. Guess Who’s Coming Home? Mixed Metaphors of Home in Spider-Man’s Comic and Cinematic Homecomings by Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins
  • 2. The Ride of the Valkyrie Against White Supremacy: Tessa Thompson’s Casting in Thor: Ragnarok by Jasmine Mitchell
  • 3. “Which World Would You Rather Live In?” The Anti-utopian Superheroes of Gary Jackson’s Poetry by Chris Gavaler
  • 4. Flash of Two Races: Incest, Miscegenation, and the Mixed-Race Superhero in The Flash Comics and Television Show by Eric L. Berlatsky
• Part II Metaphors of/and Mixedness
  • 5. “Let Yourself Just Be Whoever You Are!” Decolonial Hybridity and the Queer Cosmic Future in Steven Universe by Corrine E. Collins
  • 6. The Hulk and Venom: Warring Blood Superheroes by Gregory T. Carter
  • 7. Monsters, Mutants, and Mongrels: The Mixed-Race Hero in Monstress by Chris Koenig-Woodyard
  • 8. Examining Otherness and the Marginal Man in DC’s Superman through Mixed-Race Studies by Kwasu David Tembo
• Part III Multiethnic Mixedness (or Mixed-Race Intersections)
  • 9. Talented Tensions and Revisions: The Narrative Double Consciousness of Miles Morales by Jorge J. Santos Jr.
  • 10. “They’re Two People in One Body”: Nested Sovereignties and Mixed-Race Mutations in FX’s Legion by Nicholas E. Miller
  • 11. Into to the Spider-Verse and the Commodified (Re)imagining of Afro-Rican Visibility by Isabel Molina-Guzmán
  • 12. Truth, Justice, and the (Ancient) Egyptian Way: DC’s Doctor Fate and the Arab Spring by Adrienne Resha
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Index

For Mike, the revelation left him with a sense of confusion. “I had literally no idea of my own racial background,” he says. “I obviously had some questions. I occasionally met relatives. But a large part of the passing meant that we did not see relatives very often. So, I really grew up in a white community acting as white with these kinds of questions. … I spent a couple of years in Chicago sort of running after every Black person I could find saying, ‘Hey, me too, me too,’ and they would look at my perfectly white skin, blondish hair, and light brown eyes and say, ‘Yeah right, not in this lifetime.’”

Harvey Long and Ethelene Whitmire, “Running from Race,” On Wisconsin, March 1, 2021. https://onwisconsin.uwalumni.com/features/running-from-race/.

Mestizo Modernity: Race, Technology, and the Body in the Postrevolutionary Mexico

University Press of Florida
2018-08-28
250 pages
6×9
Hardcover ISBN 13: 9781683400394
Paper ISBN 13: 9781683403104

David S. Dalton, Assistant Professor of Spanish
University of North Carolina, Charlotte

After the end of the Mexican Revolution in 1917, postrevolutionary leaders hoped to assimilate the country’s racially diverse population into one official mixed-race identity—the mestizo. This book shows that as part of this vision, the Mexican government believed it could modernize “primitive” Indigenous peoples through technology in the form of education, modern medicine, industrial agriculture, and factory work. David Dalton takes a close look at how authors, artists, and thinkers—some state-funded, some independent—engaged with official views of Mexican racial identity from the 1920s to the 1970s.

Dalton surveys essays, plays, novels, murals, and films that portray indigenous bodies being fused, or hybridized, with technology. He examines José Vasconcelos’s essay “The Cosmic Race” and the influence of its ideologies on mural artists such as Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco. He discusses the theme of introducing Amerindians to medical hygiene and immunizations in the films of Emilio “El Indio” Fernández. He analyzes the portrayal of indigenous monsters in the films of El Santo, as well as Carlos Olvera’s critique of postrevolutionary worldviews in the novel Mejicanos en el espacio.

Incorporating the perspectives of posthumanism and cyborg studies, Dalton shows that technology played a key role in race formation in Mexico throughout the twentieth century. This cutting-edge study offers fascinating new insights into the culture of mestizaje, illuminating the attitudes that inform Mexican race relations in the present day.

Betty Reid Soskin shares forgotten histories as a national park ranger

The San Francisco Chronicle
2021-06-02

Brittany Bracy
Las Positas College, Livermore, California

The nation’s oldest ranger is hopeful for tomorrow: ‘I get a feeling that change is going to come’

At age 85, Betty Reid Soskin started a new career. She took a job as a park ranger at Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, sharing her story and the story of Black women’s and men’s efforts during World War II with visitors who are often familiar with the white “We Can Do It!” propaganda figure — and little else.

Soskin grew up in Oakland in the 1920s and ’30s, and well before she became the country’s oldest park ranger, she found ways to contribute to her community. She has been a record store owner, a fundraiser for the Black Panthers and a political aide during her “ordinary extraordinary” life.

Now 99, Soskin has used her platform with the National Park Service to educate the public about crucial moments in history and highlight the sacrifices of those whose names are often left out of the retellings. As she approaches her 100th birthday this year, Soskin’s wisdom and courage continues to have a positive impact on California residents and institutions.

This interview is part of Lift Every Voice, a series that connects young Black journalists with Black elders in our communities to celebrate and learn from their life experiences. The San Francisco Chronicle has joined Hearst newspapers, magazines and television stations to publish dozens of profiles as part of the project…

Read the entire interview here.

“I discovered I was an Asian American when I arrived in the U.S.,” says Mitski [Miyawaki]. “I didn’t identify as that before I came here. People started calling me that, and I started being treated in a specific way.”

Tom Murphy, “Mitski Doesn’t Bother With Labels. She Prefers Excellence,” Westworld, July 14, 2017. https://www.westword.com/music/mitski-miyawakis-mixed-race-identity-informs-her-music-9246091.

How Cross-Discipline Understanding and Communication Can Improve Research on Multiracial Populations

Social Sciences
Volume 11, Issue 3, 90
Published online 2022-02-22
13 pages
DOI: 10.3390/socsci11030090

Sarah E. Gaither, Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

Jennifer Patrice Sims, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Alabama, Huntsville

One of the strengths of Critical Mixed Race Studies is that it represents research methodologies and frameworks from multiple disciplines across the social sciences and humanities. However, if these disciplines are not in dialogue with each other, that benefit may be lost. Here, we use psychological and sociological research on Multiracial populations as examples to argue how strict disciplinarity and methodological trends may limit scientific production. We propose that reading and citing work across disciplines, expanding methodological training, and rejecting hegemonic “white logic” assumptions about what is “publishable” can enhance Multiracial research. First, the ability to cite effectively across disciplines will shorten the time it takes for new theories to be developed that focus on empirically underrepresented populations. Secondly, increasing understanding of both quantitative and qualitative methods will allow more effective reading between disciplines while also creating opportunities to engage with both causality and the richness of experiences that comprise being Multiracial. Finally, these changes would then situate scholars to be more effective reviewers, thereby enhancing the peer-reviewed publication process to one that routinely rejects color evasive racist practices that privilege work on majority populations.

Read the entire article in HTML or PDF format.

21. Fredi’s Migration: Washington’s Forgotten War on Hollywood

Chapter in the anthology: Women and Migration: Responses in Art and History
Deborah Willis, Ellyn Toscano and Kalia Brooks Nelson (ed.)
(2019-09-12, Open Book Publishers)
Printed ISBN: 9781783745654
eBook ISBN: 9791036538070

Pamela Newkirk, Professor of Journalism
New York University

Nearly eight decades before #OscarsSoWhite focused attention on the dearth of roles for Blacks and other people of color in Hollywood, actress Fredi Washington became one of the most vocal critics of the industry’s racial bias. But despite her trailblazing work on stage and screen beginning in the 1920s, Washington has largely been forgotten as one of the pioneering African-American leading ladies, and for her noteworthy civil rights activism.

The eldest of five children, Washington was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1903 and relocated to Philadelphia aged eleven following the death of her mother, a former dancer. In 1919 Washington launched her own career as a chorus girl in Harlem’s Alabam Club, and, in 1926, landed a coveted role in the landmark Broadway play Shuffle Along. When the show closed she sailed to Europe to tour with her dance partner Al Moiret. Two years later she returned to the United States and starred in a string of successful films and plays including the short film Black and Tan Fantasy with Duke Ellington (1929); Black Boy starring Paul Robeson (1930); Emperor Jones with Robeson again (1933); and Drum in the Night (1933); with an equal number of plays, including Singing the Blues (1930), Sweet Chariot (1930) and Run Lil’ Chillun (1933).

Washington’s stardom was secured with her performance as Peola, the tortured bi-racial daughter who passes for white in Imitation of Life, the 1934 feature film starring Claudette Corbert and Louise Beavers. However, after achieving critical acclaim for her performance Washington was routinely passed over for lead roles. This was in part due to Hollywood’s Hays Codes, which, beginning that year, explicitly prohibited the depiction of miscegenation in film. The Hays Codes made life especially challenging for Washington, whose green eyes and pale complexion rendered her too light to be cast in films with all-Black casts. In 1937 her skin was darkened for her co-starring role in One Mile from Heaven with Bill Robinson…

Read the entire chapter here.

Running from Race

On Wisconsin
Wisconsin Foundation and Alumni Association (alumni and friends of the University of Wisconsin, Madison)
2021-03-01

Harvey Long MA’16, Librarian, Assistant Professor
North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, Greensboro, North Carolina

Ethelene Whitmire, Professor
Departments of Afro-American Studies; German, Nordic, and Slavic; andGender & Women’s Studies
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Librarian Louise Butler Walker ’35 took desperate measures to survive in a racist society.

During the Great Depression, Louise Butler Walker ’35 completed her bachelor’s in French and earned a library diploma from what is now UW–Madison’s Information School. Walker had been an outstanding student, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, and completed a prestigious internship at the American Library Association (ALA) headquarters in Chicago. The school’s career placement office said her assets were her “brilliant mind” and “excellent academic background.” Her limitations, they said, were “racial (she is a mulatto).”

Although Walker was not privy to the egregious behind-the-scenes machinations and handwringing about her being Black, she knew that her race was detrimental to her career, so she eventually passed as white to work as a librarian in rural Wisconsin. Her story reveals the extraordinary pressures that African Americans faced…

Read the entire article here.

Descendant of Alex Manly talks about modern impact of 1898 Massacre

WECT News 6
Wilmington, North Carolina
2021-11-10

Mara McJilton, Multimedia Journalist

WILMINGTON, N.C. (WECT) –Alex Manly was the owner of The Daily Record newspaper in 1898 when it was burned down by white supremacists.

Now, 123 years later, descendants of Manly are still trying to piece together what happened on November 10, 1898.

“The real, real granular details, the real truth of it — it’s been an ongoing experience and process,” said Alex Manly’s great-great-grandson Kieran Haile.

Haile has had a vague understanding of the 1898 Massacre since he was a teenager, but it wasn’t until about five years ago when he was nearing his 30′s that he really started to take a deep dive into history and learn more about this horrific day…

Read and watch the entire story here.