Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Coffee Colored Children: A film by Ngozi Onwurah

    Coffee Colored Children: A film by Ngozi Onwurah

    Women Make Movies
    England, 1988
    23 minutes
    Color/BW, VHS/16mm/DVD
    Order No. W99160

    • National Black Programming Consortium, Prized Pieces
    • San Francisco Film Festival, Golden Gate Award

    This lyrical, unsettling film conveys the experience of children of mixed racial heritage. Suffering the aggression of racial harassment, a young girl and her brother attempt to wash their skin white with scouring powder. Starkly emotional and visually compelling, this semi-autobiographical testimony to the profound internalized effects of racism and the struggle for self-definition and pride is a powerful catalyst for discussion.

    The work opens with a video essay showing adults and children of many ethnicities interacting harmoniously to an upbeat and soulful song with a chorus about “coffee-colored people.” Through narration by her and her brother and dramatization, Onwurah relays incidents from her own childhood. She recounts the brutal and racist vandalization of her apartment. In reenactments, she is seen making up her face with white makeup and scrubbing her body in the bathtub with chemical abrasives. At the close of the piece, she and her brother stand in front of a fire, burning symbolic mementos of their pain and confusion over their own physical identities. “Melting pot,” she asks, “or incinerator?” The work is approximately 16 and one-half minutes long.

    Director:
    Onwurah, Ngozi A.

    Producers:
    Onwurah, Ngozi A.
    Onwurah, Simon K.

    Editor:
    Onwurah, Ngozi A.

    Performers:
    Onwurah, Madge
    McKay, Haley
    McKay, Michael
    McKay, Anette
    Onwurah, Ngozi A.
    Onwurah, Simon K.

  • IC Documentarians: Incongruities Investigator – Nisma Zaman

    IC Documentarians: Incongruities Investigator – Nisma Zaman

    Ithica College Quarterly
    2006/4

    Mbeti Hyess

    Nisma Zaman ’92 solidified her passion for documentary filmmaking at IC, where she began work on a short 16mm film exploring mixed-race identities. Beyond Black and White went on to debut at the Asian American International Film Festival in 1995 and remains in distribution with Women Make Movies.

    After graduating, Zaman began a four-year stint at the New York Center for Visual History, a nonprofit arts and culture documentary organization, where she worked on a variety of productions including the PBS series American Cinema. Simultaneously she moonlighted on the postproduction of Jennifer Fox’s acclaimed film series American Love Story, following the lives of an interracial family. In 1996 Zaman served as a production coordinator on Walk This Way, a program exploring children’s experiences of race and difference for USA Network’s “Erase the Hate” campaign. This provided a perfect segue into her ever-increasing role on Nickelodeon’s Little Bill, a 52-episode digital animation series based on Bill Cosby’s children’s books, for which she won an Emmy as a coordinating producer…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Review of Ngozi Onwurah’s “The Body Beautiful”

    …Onwurah’s ending is not, however, Utopian; neither her own objectification and labeling by discourse nor her mother’s stigmatization is miraculously resolved. Onwurah’s comment on “a world that sees only in black and white” is both fitting and predictive, since viewers and critics continue to lean towards that very essentialism (if existing scholarship on the film is any indication). But on a fundamental level, Onwurah’s The Body Beautiful remains an unusual example of a film directed by a woman of white-black racial heritage, which centralizes the consciousness of the mixed-race identity. The film delivers a rare message by encouraging viewers to challenge ethnic absolutism and essentialist codes of gender. To borrow an appropriate quotation from Françoise Lionnet, The Body Beautiful effectively “subverts] all binary modes of thought by privileging (more or less explicitly) the intermediary spaces where boundaries become effaced and Manichean categories collapse into each other.” And it is precisely where binaries and essentialist codes of identity are subverted that the process of identification becomes constructive, rather than a site for problematic exclusion, inclusion, and marginalization.

    Diana Adesola Mafe. “Misplaced Bodies: Probing Racial and Gender Signifiers in Ngozi Onwurah’s The Body Beautiful.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. 2008, Volume 29, Number 1, pages 37-50.

  • Misplaced Bodies: Probing Racial and Gender Signifiers in Ngozi Onwurah’s The Body Beautiful

    Misplaced Bodies: Probing Racial and Gender Signifiers in Ngozi Onwurah’s The Body Beautiful

    Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies
    Volume 29, Number 1 (2008)
    pages 37-50
    E-ISSN: 1536-0334 Print ISSN: 0160-9009
    DOI: 10.1353/fro.0.0004

    Diana Adesola Mafe, Assistant Professor of English
    Denison University, Granville, Ohio

    Exalted by poets, painters and sculptors, the female body, often reduced to its isolated parts, has been mankind’s most popular subject for adoration and myth, and also for judgment, ridicule, esthetic alteration and violent abuse.

    Susan Brownmiller, Femininity

    In her seminal text Femininity, Susan Brownmiller identifies what can simply be termed the mythic proportions of the female body. Idealized, worshiped, ravaged, and reviled-the female body is forever being measured (usually against the unattainable paradigms of a male imagination) and found lacking. The myth of the female body’s inadequacy is crucial to my discussion of Nigerian British director Ngozi Onwurah’s 1991 film, The Body Beautiful. In the spirit of Brownmiller’s claim that “biological femaleness is not enough. Femininity always demands more,”21 wish to posit Onwurah’s film as a seldom discussed yet highly subversive text where cinematic representations of the (lacking) female body and the racialized performance of femininity are concerned.

    Neither a documentary nor a fictional film, The Body Beautifuloperates as a memoir, merging the memories and imaginations of both the director and her mother to create a twenty-three-minute film of their lives. Onwurah, played by actress Sian Martin, appears in the film as a confident, attractive, and sexual young woman of mixed race. Her mother Madge (who plays herself) is a visibly scarred older white woman who has undergone a mastectomy. The dissimilar female bodies of mother and daughter are constantly juxtaposed, reminding viewers that “how one looks is the chief physical weapon in female-against-female competition.” And, bearing out the epigraph of this paper, the young Ngozi, a fashion model, seemingly epitomizes the role of the female body as “subject for adoration” while Madge remains subject to “judgment, ridicule, [and] esthetic alteration.” But Onwurah, as director, points to the commonality of these raced and gendered bodies, both of which are subject to myths of inadequacy despite their differences.

    Notably, race cannot be extricated from this discussion of the female body and its idealization. Even the beautiful young Ngozi is rendered lacking because her body is, in the words of Homi Bhabha, “almost. . . but not quite” the (white) Western feminine aesthetic. Ngozi’s modeling success thus hinges on her manipulation at the hands of a white male photographer, who urges her to fulfill the stereotypical role of the sexualized “black” woman as he clicks the camera, saying, “Give me sex. Give me passion.” For Madge, a survivor of breast cancer and a mastectomy, the “lack” is literal and symbolic. Although biologically female, she is consistently situated by social discourses (as represented in the film) outside the sphere of femininity.

    Indeed, I suggest that discursive practices are unable to accommodate either Madge, an aging, arthritic, breastless woman, or Ngozi, an attractive, young, mixed-race woman caught between the myths of white beauty and black sexuality, except through essentialized notions of gender and race. Although excluded from the sphere of “real” femininity, Madge is included in the category of majority white British society. Her visibly raced daughter, on the other hand, while coded as highly attractive and feminine, is very much excluded from that white world and read, in typically Manichean terms, as a black model. But despite these respective exclusions and inclusions in vexed categories of identity as a result of their visibly marked bodies, neither of these women is ever adequately “placed,” and therein lies the fallibility of identification, which, as Stuart Hall aptly states, is “never a proper fit.”

    Incidentally, the mixed-race woman of African and European descent has long functioned as a recognizable signifier for illicit sexuality and racial ambiguity in Western literary traditions. In both Europe and the Americas, the origins of the “mulatta” as cultural icon are linked to the erotic/exotic fantasies of a white (male) imagination. In early modern travel narratives dealing with the African coast and the Caribbean, European men often made careful observations about mixed race women. And the mulatta character appears with enough frequency in British novels to betray an ongoing British fascination with that figure. By critiquing her own stereotypical role as an eroticized/exoticized mixed-race woman, Onwurah also challenges the problematic iconography of the mulatta figure. Since the very process of identification is fraught, that is, “lodged in contingency,” the self-identification or self-representation of the mixed-race subject becomes a useful starting point for understanding and theorizing (white-black) mixedness. The Body Beautiful, a rare example of a film with a mixed-race woman behind and in front of the camera, literally speaks to these exigencies where representations of interraciality are concerned…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Census snapshots: An evolving portrait

    Census snapshots: An evolving portrait

    Chicago Tribune
    2010-03-14

    Oscar Avila, Tribune reporter

    Dahleen Glanton, Tribune reporter

    Multiracial, gay and immigrant Americans question whether 2010 form captures country’s fast-changing makeup

    Look in the mirror and what do you see?

    When the census form arrives in mailboxes this week, the complex answers to that question will help paint America’s evolving portrait, with repercussions for a decade and beyond.

    For most people, the census will be a simple 10-minute process. For others in this nation of Barack Obama, Jessica Alba, Tiger Woods, Halle Berry, Apolo Ohno and Joakim Noah , questions of mixed race and ethnicity will prompt soul-searching over how to categorize themselves among a small but growing minority in the national fabric.

    The census is a montage of self-portraits that will detail the ways a nation of nearly 309 million has changed since 2000, including migration, family size and housing patterns. While that data is easier to quantify, critics say a rote list of boxes and checkmarks can’t adequately reflect all the racial and ethnic transformations…

    On Chicago’s South Side, the daughter of a black father and white mother will check both. Her brother will check black. Their children will write in “mixed” or “biracial.”

    A Brazilian immigrant will mark a box that says Hispanic, though she doesn’t accept the label. A woman from Jordan won’t check Asian, though she is. A man born to a Japanese mother and white father considers himself white only at census time.

    Another respondent may check four racial boxes like the multi-ethnic Woods, who invented his own identifier: “cablinasian,” a mix of Caucasian, black, Indian and Asian. Obama jokingly labeled himself a “mutt,” but he won’t find that box on the form…

    …”The lesson is that, like reality, like our lives, census data are messy,” said Jorge Chapa, a University of Illinois professor who has consulted for the Census Bureau. “But the messiness does reflect the growing diversity and our complexity as a people. It’s closer to the truth.”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Miscegenation Facts […From 1879]

    Miscegenation Facts […From 1879]

    Daily British Colonist
    Vicoria, British Columbia
    1879-10-07
    21st Year
    Page 1, 2nd Column

    David W. Higgins, Editor and Proprietor

    The child of colored parents of different tints, such as quadroon and mulatto, or mulatto and black, will be nearer to the tint of the darker parent.  If both parents of the same color, the child will be a shade darker, and singularly enough, the second child will be darker than the first, the third darker than the second, and so on to the last. In other words, a colored community, left to itself, is fatally destined to return to the original African black after a limited number of generations.  Thus, while each alliance with an individual of pure Caucasian blood brings the negro a step nearer to the white standard, the reverse is the case the moment the Caucasian element is withheld, and the color retrogrades from light to dark…

    Continue reading the “facts” in this article here.

  • My People Will Sleep for One Hundred Years: Story of a Métis Self

    My People Will Sleep for One Hundred Years: Story of a Métis Self

    University of Victoria
    2004
    106 pages

    Sylvia Rae Cottell, B.F.A.
    Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design

    A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the Department of Educational Psychology and Leadership Studies at the University of Victoria.

    “My people will sleep for one hundred years when they awake, it will be the artists who give them their spirit back.”
    Louis Riel

    As a result of the current political debate that surrounds the definition of Métis, the issue of Métis identity on both community and individual levels is often challenged in a public forum. Metis people outside of the areas considered the main hubs of Metis culture are likely to be faced with a myriad of different factors that impact their identity, including lack of community connections and limited contact with Métis cultural influences. There is a need to openly voice the diverse experiences of being Métis in order to affirm the experiences of many Métis people. This autoethnographic study aims to provide an account of an experience of being Métis and to salvage a sense of identity after many generations of assimilation. Autoethnography provides the freedom necessary for the representation of cultural values that are beyond the traditional assumptions of academic discourse (Spry, 2001) and aims to engage the reader on an emotional level. A purpose of this study is to validate the experience of many Métis readers and to enhance the level of culturally relevant practice provided to Métis individuals and communities by counsellors.

    Read the entire thesis here.

  • Metis Identity Creation and Tactical Responses to Oppression and Racism

    Metis Identity Creation and Tactical Responses to Oppression and Racism

    Variegations Journal
    University of Victoria, Canada
    Volume 2 (2005)
    ISSN: 1708-9840

    Cathy Richardson
    Indigenous Governance
    University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada

    As one of Canada’s founding Aboriginal people (Department of Justice Canada, 1982), the Metis exist at the periphery of the Canadian historical, cultural and social landscape. Today, the Metis are starting to write themselves into larger historical and social sciences narratives, reclaiming their right to inclusion and belonging after generations of living “underground” without public cultural expression. The Canadian Metis are an Aboriginal group who celebrate their mixed ancestry and identify with a unique Metis culture.  This culture evolved and crystallized after the Metis lived together for generations, mixing and mingling with other Metis of both English and French-speaking origins. Due to the forces of colonization, the Metis exist as marginalized Aboriginal people living between a number of cultural worlds within the larger Euro-Canadian society. In “Becoming Metis: The Relationship Between The Sense of Metis Self and Cultural Stories” (Richardson, 2004), I elucidate various tactics used by Metis people to create a personal and cultural identity. In this paper, I draw on this work to present some of the socio-political conditions that set the context for a Metis tactical identity development.

    I present and discuss some of the responses enacted by key Metis interview participants in the process of creating a “sense of Metis self.” These tactical responses were, and are, performed by Metis people who are trying to balance their need for safety and inclusion with a need to live as cultural beings in a European Canada. I term the responses “tactical,” as opposed to “strategic,” in response to an important distinction between oppressor and oppressed in colonial societies. Political strategies and strategic responses tend to be developed for long-term use by those in political positions of relative power, on secure ground whereas tactical responses tend to be developed “on the move,” as short-term acts to attack political oppression. For example, General [Frederick Dobson] Middleton implemented strategic military plans to defeat the Metis, while Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont employed tactical acts in response to Middleton’s attacks. Finally, after discussing various tactical responses, I close with some explanations about how Metis people have developed a third space to create a Metis cultural identity…

    Read the entire article here.

  • The role of Japanese as a heritage language in constructing ethnic identity among Hapa Japanese Canadian children

    The role of Japanese as a heritage language in constructing ethnic identity among Hapa Japanese Canadian children

    Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development
    Volume 30, Issue 1     (February 2009)
    pages 1-18
    DOI: 10.1080/01434630802307874

    Hiroko Noro, Professor of Pacific and Asian Studies
    University of Victoria, Canada

    Today, Japanese Canadians are marrying outside of their ethnic community at an unprecedented rate, resulting in the creation of a newly identifiable group of ‘Japanese Canadians’ borne from these interracial unions. Members of this emergent group are increasingly being referred to both by social scientists and self-referentially as Hapa. This term, originally a Hawaiian term, is now a common and empowering tool of self-identification for people of mixed ethnic heritage. Recent sociological research argues that, while the notion of a shared Hapa identity exists, it is less rooted in individual members’ physical appearance or cultural identification and more rooted in their experiences, parental upbringing, and the locality/environment in which they grew up.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Biracial Sensitive Practice: Expanding Social Services to an Invisible Population

    Biracial Sensitive Practice: Expanding Social Services to an Invisible Population

    Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment
    Volume 5, Issue 2 (March 2002)
    pages 29 – 44
    DOI: 10.1300/J137v05n02_03

    Ronald E. Hall, Professor of Social Work
    Michigan State University

    Although literature acknowledges the existence of a biracial population, there has been minimal discussion of the differences indicative of biracial clients and how these differences impact provision of services. Too frequently, race criterion has been utilized to categorize biracial clients resulting in an all but invisible population. A biracial individual may then assume a multiplicity of identities, including African-, Asian-, Latino- and Native-American, when negotiating with macro institutions, including social services. As an alternative to racial paradigms, identity across the lifespan is suggested as a more comprehensive model for biracial clients. In the aftermath said clients will be rendered visible by identity models that prevail less on the basis of race and more on the basis of experience extended across the lifespan.

    Read or purchase the article here.