Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Identity Is At The Heart Of Brash, Essential ‘Mulattos’

    Identity Is At The Heart Of Brash, Essential ‘Mulattos’

    National Public Radio
    2015-08-07

    Michael Schaub, Book Critic

    Williams, Tom, Among The Wild Mulattos and Other Tales (Huntsville, Texas: Texas Review Press, 2015)

    “Odder than two-headed calves, stranger than, Uri Geller who could bend spoons with his mind.” That’s how the narrator of “Who Among Us Knows the Route to Heaven?” — one of the stories in Tom Williams’ collection Among the Wild Mulattos and Other Tales — describes himself and his brother, growing up in the suburbs of Ohio in the early 1970s.

    What sets them apart is their heritage. Their father is black and their mother is white, and they’re not allowed to forget it. The narrator’s white schoolmates admire his athleticism, but, he recalls, “when I brought to lunch fried chicken or napped in history, they chuckled quietly and nodded at each other in affirmation that their parents and the TV were right about black folk.” As for his black friends: “[I]f I professed an admiration, say, for the music of Supertramp … they aimed at me the barbs their parents had taught them: ‘Tom’ and ‘Traitor.’ ”

    For many Americans, the experience of being multiracial in a society obsessed with neat, arbitrary categories is a no-win situation. That’s not just because of the prejudice they face, whether it comes in the form of unvarnished racism or willful ignorance. It also has a lot to do with a society that urges them to integrate, but slaps them down any time they dare express their identity in a way that seems right to them…

    Read the entire book review here.

  • Most of the time I see myself as mixed, but when I see black men and women brutalized or killed for breathing while black, I’m black, and proudly, viscerally so.

    Most of the time I see myself as mixed, but when I see black men and women brutalized or killed for breathing while black, I’m black, and proudly, viscerally so.

    Shannon Luders-Manuel, “What it Means to be Mixed Race During the Fight for Black Lives,” For Harriet, August 12, 2015.
    http://www.forharriet.com/2015/08/what-it-means-to-be-mixed-race-during.html.

  • Kang Soo-il’s drugs ban ruins inspirational tale for mixed-race Koreans

    Kang Soo-il’s drugs ban ruins inspirational tale for mixed-race Koreans

    The Guardian
    2015-07-30

    John Duerden, Asian football correspondent

    The striker with an American GI father was on the verge of a dream debut for South Korea after a lifetime struggle against discrimination when he tested positive for an anabolic steroid he blamed on moustache-growing cream

    Claiming that you have failed a drug test because of the application of moustache-growing cream is sure to amuse and there are plenty of internet memes of Kang Soo-il with facial hair that would put Dick Dastardly to shame. But it really wasn’t that funny and ended a football dream that meant more than most. Few players had gone through such hardships to appear for their national team but just hours before it was actually, finally, going to happen for the South Korean, the negative news of the positive test result came through.

    Instead of leading the line for his country at the start of qualification for the 2018 World Cup, Kang is banned for much of the season, his international career likely over before it started…

    Read the entire article here.

  • The complicated relationship between Asian Americans and affirmative action

    The complicated relationship between Asian Americans and affirmative action

    Quartz
    2015-07-17

    Lauren Gurley

    In most places, my hair and my skin color don’t stand out in a crowd. In the past, people have mistaken me for Mexican, Italian, Hawaiian, and Israeli. Although sometime this has felt like a privilege and a reason for pride, at other times it has become a source of confusion and guilt. This is the reality of my mixed race identity: half-Japanese and half-white, I still couldn’t tell you whether I technically qualify, or even identify, as a person of color.

    Five years ago, I applied to college in the US and was forced to face this confusion head on during the university admissions process. 2010 was the first year that the Common Application offered the option for applicants to select two or more races. This has been both a blessing a curse for schools that have long wrestled with students who identified as multi-racial. A decade ago, such applicants at Emory University would have had their race literally chosen for them by an admissions officer.

    But my problem was first and foremost a personal one: How did I identify? Growing up in a very white, yet liberal-leaning community in Southern California, I always wanted to identify with my Asian half in order to stand out. I would squint my eyes in photos to appear more Asian, and ask my mother to pack me bento-box lunches. On standardized tests, I always checked the “Asian/Pacific Islander” box…

    Read the entire article here.

  • New group looks to bring together mixed-race students

    New group looks to bring together mixed-race students

    Columbia Daily Spectator
    New York, New York
    2015-04-08

    Marium Dar, Spectator Staff Writer

    A new student group is hoping to create a safe space for mixed-race students to discuss the challenges and struggles they face when discussing self-identity and racialization.

    The Mixed-Race Students Society of Columbia University, which was founded last month, holds biweekly discussions where members take on topics including the difference between identification and racialization.

    “As an organization, we have shared form and not content. The form of our experiences is the same,” board member Eliana Pipes, CC ’18, said. “Even though we all have completely different backgrounds, completely different mixes, we can identify on that common ground.”.

    “The mixed-race [experience] is its own unique racial experience. If you are mixed with black, then you can never have the black experience on its own,” Pipes said. “If you are mixed with white, then you can never have the white experience on its own.”

    Group founder Keenan Smith, CC ’18, who identifies as half black and half white, said he feels a tension between the two parts of his racial background…

    …While a group called Hapa [Club] aimed to carry out a similar mission for students of partial Asian descent, it has been inactive since 2013. Smith said he wanted to create a community for students who felt marginalized based on their multiracial background…

    Read the entire article here.

  • DNA Is Said to Solve a Mystery of Warren Harding’s Love Life

    DNA Is Said to Solve a Mystery of Warren Harding’s Love Life

    The New York Times
    2015-08-12

    Peter Baker, Chief White House Correspondent

    WASHINGTON — She was denounced as a “degenerate” and a “pervert,” accused of lying for money and shamed for waging a “diabolical” campaign of falsehoods against the president’s family that tore away at his legacy.

    Long before Lucy Mercer, Kay Summersby or Monica Lewinsky, there was Nan Britton, who scandalized a nation with stories of carnal adventures in a White House coat closet and endured a ferocious backlash for publicly claiming that she bore the love child of President Warren G. Harding.

    Now nearly a century later, according to genealogists, new genetic tests confirm for the first time that Ms. Britton’s daughter, Elizabeth Ann Blaesing, was indeed Harding’s biological child. The tests have solved one of the enduring mysteries of presidential history and offer new insights into the secret life of America’s 29th president. At the least, they demonstrate how the march of technology is increasingly rewriting the nation’s history books.

    The revelation has also roiled two families that have circled each other warily for 90 years, struggling with issues of rumor, truth and fidelity. Even now, members of the president’s family remain divided over the matter, with some still skeptical after a lifetime of denial and unhappy about cousins who chose to pursue the question. Some descendants of Ms. Britton remain resentful that it has taken this long for evidence to come out and for her credibility to be validated…

    …The testing also found that President Harding had no ancestors from sub-Saharan Africa, answering another question that has intrigued historians. When Harding ran for president in 1920, segregationist opponents claimed he had “black blood.”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • I am where I am today only because men and women like Rosanell Eaton refused to accept anything less than a full measure of equality.

    I am where I am today only because men and women like Rosanell Eaton refused to accept anything less than a full measure of equality. Their efforts made our country a better place. It is now up to us to continue those efforts. Congress must restore the Voting Rights Act. Our state leaders and legislatures must make it easier — not harder — for more Americans to have their voices heard. Above all, we must exercise our right as citizens to vote, for the truth is that too often we disenfranchise ourselves.

    President Barack Obama, “President Obama’s Letter to the Editor,” The New York Times Magazine, August 12, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/magazine/president-obamas-letter-to-the-editor.html.

  • Dark-Skinned Or Black? How Afro-Brazilians Are Forging A Collective Identity

    Dark-Skinned Or Black? How Afro-Brazilians Are Forging A Collective Identity

    Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity
    National Public Radio
    2015-08-12

    Lulu Garcia-Navarro, South America Correspondent


    Sisters Francine and Fernanda Gravina have German, Italian, African and indigenous ancestry. (Lourdes Garcia-Navarro/NPR)


    If you want to get a sense of how complex racial identity is in Brazil, you should meet sisters Francine and Fernanda Gravina. Both have the same mother and father. Francine, 28, is blond with green eyes and white skin. She wouldn’t look out of place in Iceland. But Fernanda, 23, has milk chocolate skin with coffee colored eyes and hair. Francine describes herself as white, whereas Fernanda says she’s morena, or brown-skinned.

    “We’d always get questions like, ‘How can you be so dark skinned and she’s so fair?’” Fernanda says. In fact, the sisters have German, Italian, African and indigenous ancestry. But in Brazil, Fernanda explains, people describe themselves by color, not race, since nearly everyone here is mixed.

    All of that is to say, collecting demographic information in Brazil has been really tricky. The latest census, taken in 2010, found for the first time that Brazil has the most people of African descent outside Africa. No, this doesn’t mean that Afro-Brazilian population suddenly, dramatically increased. Rather, the new figures reflect changing attitudes about race and skin color in Brazil…

    …”We should see the history of Brazil as a history of racial inequality,” Heringer says — and that’s a fairly new idea. For a long time, Brazilians have believed in what’s been called “the myth of racial democracy,” she explains. Part of that myth-building was a controversial survey that the government conducted the 1970’s. It asked people to describe their skin color, and the answers varied a lot. All together, respondents used at least 134 different terms…

    Read the article here. Listen to the story (00:05:38) here. Download the story here.

  • President Obama’s Letter to the Editor

    President Obama’s Letter to the Editor

    The New York Times Magazine
    2015-08-12

    Barack Obama, President of the United States
    Washington, D.C.


    Illustration by Ben Wiseman

    For the cover story of our Aug. 2 issue, Jim Rutenberg wrote about efforts over the last 50 years to dismantle the protections in the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the landmark piece of legislation that cleared barriers between black voters and the ballot. The story surveyed a broad sweep of history and characters, from United States Chief Justice John Roberts to ordinary citizens like 94-year-old Rosanell Eaton, a plaintiff in the current North Carolina case arguing to repeal voting restrictions enacted in 2013. The magazine received an unusual volume of responses to this article, most notably from President Barack Obama.

    I was inspired to read about unsung American heroes like Rosanell Eaton in Jim Rutenberg’s “A Dream Undone: Inside the 50-year campaign to roll back the Voting Rights Act.”

    “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union. …” It’s a cruel irony that the words that set our democracy in motion were used as part of the so-called literacy test designed to deny Rosanell and so many other African-Americans the right to vote. Yet more than 70 years ago, as she defiantly delivered the Preamble to our Constitution, Rosanell also reaffirmed its fundamental truth. What makes our country great is not that we are perfect, but that with time, courage and effort, we can become more perfect. What makes America special is our capacity to change…

    …I am where I am today only because men and women like Rosanell Eaton refused to accept anything less than a full measure of equality. Their efforts made our country a better place. It is now up to us to continue those efforts. Congress must restore the Voting Rights Act. Our state leaders and legislatures must make it easier — not harder — for more Americans to have their voices heard. Above all, we must exercise our right as citizens to vote, for the truth is that too often we disenfranchise ourselves…

    Read the entire article here.

  • What it Means to be Mixed Race During the Fight for Black Lives

    What it Means to be Mixed Race During the Fight for Black Lives

    For Harriet
    2015-08-12

    Shannon Luders-Manuel

    When I talk about my family culture, I’m mixed. When I talk about racism, I’m black. When Trayvon Martin was shot for wearing a hoodie, I was black. When Eric Garner was choked to death for selling cigarettes on the street, I was black. When Sandra Bland was arrested for failing to turn on her blinker, I was black. When churchgoers were shot for being black, I was black.

    I was raised by the white side of my family, in mostly white areas. I had white friends most of my life, not because of any type of preference, but because that’s who was around. I grew up Eastern European folk dancing in the Santa Cruz Mountains with my family. I had plum pudding at Christmas, and my first celebrity crush was Neil Patrick Harris. During both childhood and adulthood, I’ve had others try to define me the way they wanted to, which varied depending on who was doing the defining. My father said mixed isn’t whole. A black woman told me I wasn’t black. A white best friend said she didn’t see me as black. The grandmother of another white friend asked why she was hanging around with a black girl. As I’ve gotten older, the labeling hasn’t stopped, but my self-identity has gotten stronger. Most of the time I see myself as mixed, but when I see black men and women brutalized or killed for breathing while black, I’m black, and proudly, viscerally so…

    Read the entire article here.