Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Tiger Woods: Black, white, other

    Tiger Woods: Black, white, other

    The Guardian
    2010-05-29

    Gary Younge, Feature Writer and Columnist

    Before he was engulfed in a sex scandal Tiger Woods was a poster boy for a multiracial America. Gary Younge on the real legacy of golf’s fallen hero

    On 13 April 1997 Tiger Woods putted his way to golfing history in Augusta, Georgia. The fact that he was the first black winner of the US Masters was not even half of it. At 21, he was the youngest; with a 12-stroke lead, he was the most emphatic; and finishing 18 under par, he was, quite simply, the best the world had ever seen.

    …But within a fortnight of black America gaining a new sporting hero, it seemed as though they had lost him again. From the revered perch of Oprah Winfrey’s couch, Woods was asked whether it bothered him being termed “African-American”. “It does,” he said. “Growing up, I came up with this name: I’m a ‘Cablinasian’.”

    Woods is indeed a rich mix of racial and ethnic heritage. His father, Earl, was of African-American, Chinese and Native American descent. His mother, Kutilda, is of Thai, Chinese and Dutch descent. “Cablinasian” was a composite of Caucasian, black, Indian and Asian. When he was asked to fill out forms in school, he would tick African-American and Asian. “Those are the two I was raised under and the only two I know,” he told Oprah. “I’m just who I am … whoever you see in front of you.”…

    …In 1998, the American Anthropological Association declared, “Evidence from the analysis of genetics (eg DNA) indicates that most physical variation, about 94%, lies within so-called racial groups. Conventional geographic ‘racial’ groupings differ from one another only in about 6% of their genes. This means there is greater genetic variation within ‘racial’ groups than between them.” In short, we really are more alike than we are unalike. If race is an arbitrary fiction, then “race-mixing” is a conceptual absurdity. To the extent to which “mixed race” makes any sense at all, we are all mixed race…

    …Economically and politically, all of this made perfect sense. Intellectually, it was and remains a nonsense. As Barbara J. Fields pointed out in her landmark essay Ideology And Race In American History, it meant that “a black woman cannot give birth to a white child” while “a white woman [is] capable of giving birth to a black child”…

    …Similarly, those who insist that, because Barack Obama has a white mother and grandmother who raised him, he could just as easily be described as another white president as the first black president are in a losing battle with credibility. “Obama’s chosen to identify as an African-American male,” explains Jennifer Nobles, the campaigner for multiracialism. “It’s the same thing with Halle Berry. That’s their choice and it makes sense. But he could identify as white. The trouble is no one would receive it that way.”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • 2010 Hurst Prize Winner: Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally

    2010 Hurst Prize Winner: Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally

    Legal History Blog
    2010-06-03

    Mary L. Dudziak, Judge Edward J. and Ruey L. Guirado Professor of Law, History and Political Science
    University of Southern California

    Peggy Pascoe, University of Oregon, Department of History, has won the Willard Hurst Prize for 2010 from the Law and Society Association for her new book, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Oxford University Press). Here’s the Prize Committee’s citation:

    What Comes Naturally is a comprehensive, interesting, and important sociolegal history that takes us through the history of miscegenation law beyond its commonly accepted geography. It analyzes how by “naturalizing” miscegenation law, politics, religious beliefs and scientific knowledge came together to sustain a set of legal parameters that eventually became policy in the post Civil War world throughout the United States, enhancing and expanding the Black/White race dichotomy, while complicating it in gendered terms. The book is an outstanding contribution richly nuanced and insightful. It expands our understanding of conceptions of race, not only in the South, but elsewhere. It contains as well a superb elucidation of the role that gender played in the process of defining and elaborating on miscegenation…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Women-Loving Women: Queering Black Urban Space during the Harlem Renaissance

    Women-Loving Women: Queering Black Urban Space during the Harlem Renaissance

    Women’s Studies 197: Senior Seminar
    2010-06-07
    Professor Lilith Mahmud

    Samantha Tenorio

    The experience of black “women-loving-women” during the Harlem Renaissance is directly influenced by what Kimberlé Crenshaw terms intersectional identity, or their positioning in the social hierarchies of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation that are simultaneously intertwined. Considering contemporary terms like lesbian and bisexual, it is difficult to define the sexual identity of many famous black women of the early 20th century, such as Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Bessie Jackson to name a few. However, their work both on and off the stage contributes to the construction of identities during the Harlem Renaissance that transgress both racial and sexual conventions. Although these social identities emerged from a long history of slavery and sexual oppression, they nonetheless produced a seemingly free space for the expression of lesbian sensibilities in the black community during the Harlem Renaissance. At a time of racial segregation in America, but also of ideologies of uplift within the black community, social spaces existed in Harlem where sexual “deviance” and race-mixing could be articulated and seen explicitly. Using song lyrics, literature, and scholarly work on social and cultural spaces of the time period between 1919 and 1939, this paper analyzes how certain forms and sites of cultural production, specifically the blues, the cabaret, and literature helped to construct these transgressive identities.

    …Relating Racial Movement to a Queer Politics

    Similarly, but not at all equivalent, racial passing implies a more fluid movement between the worlds of black and white. Both Irene and Clare partake in passing for their own gain, though doing so in differing degrees. Their movement between the worlds of black and white represent a fluidity that speaks to a queer reading of Passing and can be read as representing sexual mobility insomuch as segregation was established in order to protect the purity of the white race. This protection is what makes Clare‘s passing, and marriage to a white man, that much more compelling. Here her passing is in direct opposition to segregation and the fear of miscegenation, which are based on the sexual reproduction of a pure white race. Thus, I understand Clare and her passing to be a symbol for the transgression of both racial and sexual boundaries. Her racial fluidity as well as her transgression both speak to a queer reading of Larsen‘s fiction…

    Though an act of agency, the movement employed by Larsen can also be read as relating to the theme of mobility and fluidity that is present within queer politics. The figure of the “tragic mulatta” employed by [Nella] Larsen in Quicksand illustrates a point of mediation, or a movement between two worlds, one who is constantly taking part in criminal intimacies. Helga is eternally caught between two worlds, yet being a victim of the “one-drop rule” she is always marked as ultimately belonging to the black race.  Here, though she is of mixed-race, her character illustrates that the bi-racial character cannot exist, she must always be defined as ultimately belonging to one race, and when this individual‘s races include black, she is always labeled as such. This marks the limitations of the tragic mulatta’s movement, but still speaks to a movement that is constantly a theme of queer politics.

    Read the entire paper here.

  • Multiculturalism and Morphing in “I’m Not There” (Haynes, 2007)

    Multiculturalism and Morphing in “I’m Not There” (Haynes, 2007)

    Wide Screen
    Volume 2, Number 1, June 2010
    15 pages
    ISSN: 1757-3920
    Published by Subaltern Media

    Zélie Asava

    ‘Passing’ narratives question fixed social categorisations and prove the possibility of self-determination, which is why they are such a popular literary and cinematic trope. This article explores ‘passing’ as a performance of identity, following Judith Butler’s (1993) idea of all identity as a performance language. The performance of multiple roles in I’m Not There (Haynes, 2007) draws our attention not only to ‘passing’, ‘morphing’ and cultural hybridity, but also to the nature of acting as inhabiting multiple identities.

    I’m Not There is a biopic of the musician Bob Dylan.  It is a fictional account of a real man who, through his ability to plausibly ‘pass’ for a range of personae, has achieved legendary status.  It uses four actors, an actress and a black child actor to perform this enigma.

    The performance of multiple identities in this film explores the ‘moral heteroglossia’, that is, the variety and ‘many-languagedness’ (as Mikhael Bakhtin put it) of identity, through its use of multiply raced and gendered actors.  But the film’s use of representational strategies is problematic. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam (1994) note that mixed-race and black representations are often distorted by a Eurocentric perspective. And, as Aisha D. Bastiaans notes, representation is a process which operates ‘in the absence or displaced presence, of racial and gendered subjects’ (2008: 232). This article argues that I’m Not There, like Michael Jackson’s Black or White (1991) video, exploits racial and gendered difference through ‘passing’ and ‘morphing’ narratives, to reinforce the white-centrism of American visual culture.

    Read the entire article here.

  • The Diversity Paradox: Immigration and the Color Line in Twenty-First Century America

    The Diversity Paradox: Immigration and the Color Line in Twenty-First Century America

    Russell Sage Foundation
    May 2010
    240 pages
    Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-87154-041-6

    Jennifer Lee, Associate Professor of Sociology
    University of California, Irvine

    Frank D. Bean, Chancellor’s Professor of Sociology and Economics; Director of the Center for Research on Immigration, Population, and Public Policy
    University of California, Irvine

    African Americans grappled with Jim Crow segregation until it was legally overturned in the 1960s. In subsequent decades, the country witnessed a new wave of immigration from Asia and Latin America—forever changing the face of American society and making it more racially diverse than ever before. In The Diversity Paradox, authors Jennifer Lee and Frank Bean take these two poles of American collective identity—the legacy of slavery and immigration—and ask if today’s immigrants are destined to become racialized minorities akin to African Americans or if their incorporation into U.S. society will more closely resemble that of their European predecessors. They also tackle the vexing question of whether America’s new racial diversity is helping to erode the tenacious black/white color line.

    The Diversity Paradox uses population-based analyses and in-depth interviews to examine patterns of intermarriage and multiracial identification among Asians, Latinos, and African Americans. Lee and Bean analyze where the color line—and the economic and social advantage it demarcates—is drawn today and on what side these new arrivals fall. They show that Asians and Latinos with mixed ancestry are not constrained by strict racial categories. Racial status often shifts according to situation. Individuals can choose to identify along ethnic lines or as white, and their decisions are rarely questioned by outsiders or institutions. These groups also intermarry at higher rates, which is viewed as part of the process of becoming “American” and a form of upward social mobility. African Americans, in contrast, intermarry at significantly lower rates than Asians and Latinos. Further, multiracial blacks often choose not to identify as such and are typically perceived as being black only—underscoring the stigma attached to being African American and the entrenchment of the “one-drop” rule. Asians and Latinos are successfully disengaging their national origins from the concept of race—like European immigrants before them—and these patterns are most evident in racially diverse parts of the country.

    For the first time in 2000, the U.S. Census enabled multiracial Americans to identify themselves as belonging to more than one race. Eight years later, multiracial Barack Obama was elected as the 44th President of the United States. For many, these events give credibility to the claim that the death knell has been sounded for institutionalized racial exclusion. The Diversity Paradox is an extensive and eloquent examination of how contemporary immigration and the country’s new diversity are redefining the boundaries of race. The book also lays bare the powerful reality that as the old black/white color line fades a new one may well be emerging—with many African Americans still on the other side.

  • The Social Experience of Mixed Race [Book Review]

    The Social Experience of Mixed Race [Book Review]

    Jill Olumide. Raiding the Gene Pool: The Social Construction of Mixed Race. London: Pluto Press, 2002. xii + 212 pp., ISBN 978-0-7453-1764-9; ISBN 978-0-7453-1765-6.

    H-Net Online
    December 2002

    Mohamed Adhikari, Lecturer of Historical Studies
    University of Cape Town, South Africa

    The author, a medical sociologist at the University of London, defines the “mixed race condition” as encompassing the “patterns and commonality of experience among those who obstruct whatever purpose race is being put to at a particular time” and describes mixed race as “the ideological enemy of pure race as a means of social stratification” (p. 2). The concept as used in this study includes not only people of mixed racial origin but also those who are perceived as mixing race as, for example, in the case of couples involved in inter-racial relationships or people adopting children of a different race.

    This book explores the social experience of people who have been designated mixed race. It examines the operation of racialized boundaries and how they are promoted, sustained and constructed through changing ideologies of race and ideas of mixed race. It asserts that the mixed race condition has resulted in similar social experiences across time, place and social class and endeavors to explain why this is the case. As its definition of mixed race above illustrates, this is a strongly anti-racist tract and takes every opportunity of challenging the racial bases of social differentiation, especially the preferential treatment of people whether by officialdom or in the private domain. Olumide expresses dissatisfaction with the current state of mixed race studies and sets out to create “fresh knowledge” on the subject (p. 3). She complains that the term anti-racism “has become a very moth-eaten construct” and insists that for it to regain validity it “must endeavour to be anti-race. Nothing less will do” (emphasis in the original, p. 5). As this example indicates, the writing sometimes verges on the polemical in its anti-racial posture…

     Read the entire review here.

  • Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community

    Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community

    Ohio University Press/Swallow Press
    2005
    264 pages
    5 1/2 x 8 1/2 in.
    Paperback ISBN: 978-0-89680-244-5

    Mohamed Adhikari, Lecturer of Historical Studies
    University of Cape Town, South Africa

    The concept of Colouredness—being neither white nor black—has been pivotal to the brand of racial thinking particular to South African society. The nature of Coloured identity and its heritage of oppression has always been a matter of intense political and ideological contestation.

    Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community is the first systematic study of Coloured identity, its history, and its relevance to South African national life. Mohamed Adhikari engages with the debates and controversies thrown up by the identity’s troubled existence and challenges much of the conventional wisdom associated with it. A combination of wide-ranging thematic analyses and detailed case studies illustrates how Colouredness functioned as a social identity from the time of its emergence in the late nineteenth century through its adaptation to the postapartheid environment.

    Adhikari demonstrates how the interplay of marginality, racial hierarchy, assimilationist aspirations, negative racial stereotyping, class divisions, and ideological conflicts helped mold people’s sense of Colouredness over the past century. Knowledge of this history, and of the social and political dynamic that informed the articulation of a separate Coloured identity, is vital to an understanding of present-day complexities in South Africa.

  • The Law: Anti-Miscegenation Statutes: Repugnant Indeed

    The Law: Anti-Miscegenation Statutes: Repugnant Indeed

    Time Magazine
    1967-06-23

    Judge Leon Bazile looked down at Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter Loving as they stood before him in 1959 in the Caroline County, Va. courtroom. “Almighty God,” he intoned, “created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.” With that, Judge Bazile sentenced the newlywed Lovings to one year in jail. Their crime: Mildred is part Negro, part Indian, and Richard is white.

    In Virginia, as in 15 other states (the number was once as high as 30), there is a law barring white and colored persons from intermarrying. The Lovings could have avoided the sentence simply by leaving the state, but they eventually decided to fight the Virginia antimiscegenation law “on the ground that it was repugnant to the 14th Amendment.” In rare unanimity, all nine Supreme Court Justices agreed last week that it was repugnant indeed.

    Read the entire article here.

  • The Transformation of U.S. Racial and Ethnic Identities in Global Media

    The Transformation of U.S. Racial and Ethnic Identities in Global Media

    Contact Spaces of American Culture: LOCALIZING GLOBAL PHENOMENA
    36th International Conference of the Austrian Association for American Studies (AAAS)
    Department of American Studies, University of Graz
    2009-10-22 through 2009-10-25

    Shelleen Greene, Assistant Professor of Digital Studio Practice and Theory
    University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

    Through an analysis of the DreamWorks SKG 2008 release Tropic Thunder, this essay investigates how the rhetoric of race and ethnicity in U.S. films is influenced and transformed through their circulation within the global film market. Engaging Arjun Appardurai’s work on
    global culture in the digital era, in particular his model of the mediascape, or the production and distribution of images through electronic media platforms that are used to create “imagined worlds”, “narratives of the other” and “protonarratives of possible lives”, I examine contemporary “Hollywood” films that speak not only to industrial shifts, such as film financing as well as film productions across national boundaries, but also to the ways these new circulations lead to a re-consideration of racial and ethnic identities that are no longer bound to the nation-state. Tropic Thunder garnered media attention and controversy for its use of blackface performance. However, I argue that while the film’s reception was mired in discussion of the historical legacy of racial stereotypes in American film, the broader implications of Tropic Thunder’s critique of Hollywood’s hegemonic role within global cinema has remained unexamined. As a pastiche of the Vietnam War film and a satire of the Hollywood film industry, I suggest that Tropic Thunder’s use of blackface performance must be read in light of the film’s ruminations on American cultural imperialism. The film’s meditation on the role of Hollywood in the global film industry can be read through a comparison of the film’s explicit blackface performance (Robert Downey Jr.) and what can be considered its performance of racial drag in the character of Les Grossman (Tom Cruise). Ultimately, films such as Tropic Thunder index a shift in the reception and consumption of racial identities due to their dissemination within the global cinema, but also point to the continued use of racial performance and stereotype to sustain the Hollywood industry in a rapidly transforming and highly competitive global film economy.

    …Testified by his own tongue-and-cheek portrayal and response to the performance and film overall, it is evident that Downey Jr.’s performance is markedly different from what was the norm of popular American culture some sixty years ago. Not only should we consider changing notions of race brought about by genetic science, proving that one’s racial identity is arbitrarily related to one’s skin color, but also a radical shift in the American political, social and cultural landscape that has seen the rise and fall of affirmative action, the first census to allow a “mixed-race” designation, and the acknowledgement of race as a construct. We find ourselves in the era of self-reflexive racial performance, as seen in the comedic work of Dave Chappelle, or the emblematic and troubling figure of post-race, Michael Jackson. “Race” is no longer taken as an inherent quality of the subject, but one that can be performed or produced through surgical procedure. That Robert Downey Jr.’s performance speaks to these shifts in the popular conceptualization of race is not surprising…

    Read the entire paper here.

  • ART & DESIGN FACULTY – Shelleen Greene awarded IRE Faculty Diversity Research Award

    ART & DESIGN FACULTY – Shelleen Greene awarded IRE Faculty Diversity Research Award

    Peck School of The Arts News
    University of Wisconsin, Madison
    2010-06-15

    The award will allow Assistant Professor Shelleen Greene to complete her book project, Equivocal Subjects: Mixed-Race Identity in the Italian Cinema. The book examines the representation of mixed-race subjects of Italian and African descent in the Italian cinema, arguing that the changing cultural representations of mixed-race identity reveal shifts in the country’s conceptual paradigms of race and nation. Greene’s work further contends that these representations of mixed-race identity inform African diasporic filmmakers seeking to “write” the history of post-colonial Italy as a means of narrating African disaporic identity formation in the present era of global migration…

    Read the entire article here.