Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Jean Toomer’s Conflicted Racial Identity [Reader Responses]

    Jean Toomer’s Conflicted Racial Identity [Reader Responses]

    The Chronicle of Higher Education
    2011-03-06

    Charles R. Larson, Professor of Literature
    American University, Washington, D. C.

    To the Editor:

    Congratulations to Rudolph P. Byrd and Henry Louis Gates Jr. for concluding that Jean Toomer was a Negro who decided to pass for white—the same conclusion I made in my biography of Toomer, Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen, published in 1993. Nothing like reinventing the wheel.

    ———————————————————————————————
    Kimberly A. Barrett, Vice President for Student Affairs
    University of Montevallo, Montevallo, Alabama

    To the Editor:

    Despite the interesting investigative work of its authors, the recent Chronicle article on Jean Toomer was troubling to me because it served as another apparent grain of truth that sustains two deeply entrenched stereotypes. One of these is the myth of the confused mulatto who is disabled by incessant struggles with his or her racial identity. The other is the “one-drop rule“—the idea that anyone with an identifiable black person in his or her lineage is assumed black. I think it’s time we acknowledge the reality of the existence of the well-adjusted multiethnic/biracial white person. As the self-identifying African-American mother of a young man who fit that description while growing up, I’d like to share part of our story in the spirit of balance.

    “Your mom is black?” was a frequent refrain and innocent nod to the notion of the one-drop rule when my son’s acquaintances met me for the first time. I must admit that I, too, did not escape the influence of this perennial rule. On those dreamy weekend mornings when my husband and I lay awake pondering who our child would look like, I smugly argued that of course our child would be black because one parent was black. My husband, on the other hand, who is white (of Irish and Danish descent) and a card-carrying member of a Native American tribe, asked with dismay, “Where am I in this equation?”…

    ———————————————————————————————

    Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
    Brown University

    To the Editor:

    In their article on Jean Toomer, the authors Rudolph P. Byrd and Henry Louis Gates Jr. claim that Toomer suffered from a case of “conflicted racial identity” (“Jean Toomer’s Conflicted Racial Identity,” The Chronicle Review, February 11). Toomer, one of the first proponents of thinking about race in multiracial “American” terms, is now said to have been passing as white. The authors justify this assertion by presenting new evidence that Toomer identified himself differently based on location and situation.

    It is true that Toomer most likely self-identified as “Negro” when he registered for the draft. It is also true that in Toomer’s era, and the eras in which his ancestors were identified, census takers were allowed to list racial designation as they perceived it. So, whether Toomer is listed as white or black on the census may say little about his own thoughts on racial identity. It may, however, say much about how he was perceived by the person taking the census and/or responding on his behalf. A similar case can be made for the marriage licenses. In the absence of a handwriting expert, eyewitness, or recorded conversation, it is not verifiable that Toomer self-identified as white or whether he was designated as white by the licensor.

    Nevertheless, Byrd and Gates maintain that Toomer had to be passing—and therefore engaging in racial deception—because it is not documented that any of his “direct ancestors chose to live or self-identify as white.”

    Flying in the face of decades’ worth of scholarship that builds on Toomer’s work, Byrd and Gates ignore Maria Root’s “Bill of Rights for People of Mixed Heritage.” In it, Root states that multiracial people may identify differently over time, may identify differently than their parents or siblings, and that doing so is totally acceptable. As my colleague Ulli K. Ryder of Brown University put it, “It feels like Byrd and Gates have made a conflict where, in fact, there isn’t one.”…

    Read the entire responses here.

  • Daughter from Danang

    Daughter from Danang

    2002
    U.S.A.
    81 Minutes

    Directed by:

    Gail Dolgin

    Vicente Franco

    A heartbreaking documentary that upsets your expectations of happily-ever-afters, Daughter from Danang is a riveting emotional drama of longing, identity, and the personal legacy of war. To all outward appearances, Heidi [Bub] is the proverbial “all-American girl”, hailing from small town Pulaski, Tenn. But her birth name was Mai Thi Hiep. Born in Danang, Vietnam in 1968, she’s the mixed-race daughter of an American serviceman and a Vietnamese woman. Fearing for her daughter’s safety at the war’s end, Hiep’s mother sent her to the U.S. on “Operation Babylift”, a Ford administration plan to relocate orphans and mixed-race children to the U.S. for adoption before they fell victim to a frighteningly uncertain future in Vietnam after the Americans pulled out. Mother and daughter would know nothing about each other for 22 years.

    Now, as if by a miracle, they are reunited in Danang. But what seems like the cue for a happy ending is anything but. Heidi and her Vietnamese relatives find themselves caught in a confusing clash of cultures and at the mercy of conflicting emotions that will change their lives forever. Through intimate and sometimes excruciating moments, Daughter from Danang profoundly shows how wide the chasms of cultural difference and how deep the wounds of war can run—even within one family.

  • Jean Toomer’s Conflicted Racial Identity

    Jean Toomer’s Conflicted Racial Identity

    The Chronicle of Higher Education
    2011-02-06

    Rudolph P. Byrd, Goodrich C. White Professor of American Studies and African American Studies
    Emory University

    Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research
    Harvard University

    On August 4, 1922, about a year before he published his first book, Cane, Jean Toomer, age 27, wrote to his first love, a black teenager named Mae Wright, confessing his ambivalence about the dogged pursuit by African-Americans of Anglo-American cultural ideals: “We who have Negro blood in our veins, who are culturally and emotionally the most removed from Puritan tradition, are its most tenacious supporters.” That would be one of the last times he admitted his own Negro ancestry, either publicly or privately. Six years later, Georgia O’Keeffe—Toomer’s friend and later lover—wrote to her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, describing the way Toomer, then living in Chicago, was identifying himself: “It seems that in Chicago they do not know that he has Negro blood—he seems to claim French extraction.”

    When we were working on a new Norton critical edition of Cane, a masterpiece of modernism composed of fiction, poetry, and drama, we confronted the question of Toomer’s race. Literary critics and biographers have long speculated about how he identified himself, but too often they have chosen not to conduct research into public documents about the topic. Was Toomer—a central figure in two faces of American modernism, the New Negro (or Harlem Renaissance) Movement and the Lost Generation—a Negro who, following the publication of Cane, passed for white?

    Toomer is known for proclaiming a new, mixed racial identity, which he called “American.” In an era of de jure segregation, such a claim was defiantly transgressive. But he may have been far more conflicted about his identity than his noble attempt to question American received categories of “race” might suggest…

    …In the course of the 25 years between his 1917 and 1942 draft registrations, it seems that Toomer was endlessly deconstructing his Negro ancestry. During his childhood and adolescence in Washington, as a member of the mulatto elite, he lived in both the white and the black worlds. At times he resided in white neighborhoods, but he was educated in all-black schools. Toomer would write that it was his experience in that special world, “midway between the white and Negro worlds,” that led him to develop his novel “racial position” as early as 1914, at the age of 20, when he defined himself as an “American, neither white nor black.”…

    …Why is it so important, as we read Cane, to understand Toomer’s conflicts over his racial identity? What light does it shine on scholarship about his work, about African-American literature, and the way our society has dealt with race? The first reason is the simple, or rather complicated, fact that Toomer himself thought it was important. Important? Toomer obsessed over it, endlessly circling back upon it in the comfortable isolation of his upper-middle-class home in Bucks County, Pa...

    Read the entire article here.

  • Black Seminole Involvement and Leadership During the Second Seminole War, 1835-1842

    Black Seminole Involvement and Leadership During the Second Seminole War, 1835-1842

    Indiana University
    May 2007
    228 pages

    Anthony E. Dixon

    A Dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History Indiana University

    This thesis examines the involvement, leadership, and impact of the Black Seminoles during the Second Seminole War. In Florida, free Blacks, runaway slaves, and Blacks owned by Seminoles collectively became known as Black Seminoles. Black Seminoles either lived in separate communities near Seminole Indians, or joined them by cohabitating or intermarriage. Throughout this cohabitation, Blacks became an integral part of Seminole life by taking positions as advisers, counselors, and trusted interpreters to the English (who were rapidly advancing plantation society into territorial Florida).

    By the advent of the Second Seminole War, Black Seminoles, unlike their Seminole Indian counterparts were not given the opportunity to emigrate westward under the United States government’s Indian Removal Policy. The United States government’s objective became to return as many Black Seminoles, if not all, to slavery. Therefore, it became the Black Seminole’s objective to resist enslavement or re-enslavement (for many) on American plantations.

    The Introduction explains the objective and focus of this study. Moreover, it explains the need and importance of this study while examining the historiography of the Second Seminole War in relation to the Black Seminoles. The origins and cultural aspects of the Black Seminoles is the topic of chapter one. By examining the origins and cultural aspects of the Black Seminoles, this study establishes the autonomy of the Black Seminoles from their Indian counterparts. Chapter two focuses on the relationship and alliance between Seminole Blacks and Indians. Research concerning Black Seminole involvement throughout the war allows chapter three to reconstruct the Second Seminole War from the Black Seminole perspective. A biographical approach is utilized in chapter four in order to understand the Black Seminole leadership. This chapter examines the lives of the three most prominent Black Seminole leaders during the war. The overall impact of the Black Seminole involvement in the war is the focus of chapter five. Chapter six summarizes this study and provides the historiography of the Second Seminole War with a perspective that has remained relatively obscure.

    It is clear that from the onset of the war, the United States government, military, and state militias grossly underestimated both the determination and the willingness of the Black Seminole to resist at all cost. Throughout the war, both United States’ military and political strategies were constructed and reconstructed to compensate for both the intensity with which the Black Seminoles fought as well as their political savvy during negotiations. This study examines the impact of the Black Seminoles on the Second Seminole War within the context of marronage and subsequently interprets the Second Seminole War itself as a form of slave rebellion.

    Table of Contents

    • Title Page
    • Acknowlegements
    • Abstract
    • Table of Contents
    • Table of Illustrations
    • Introduction
    • Chapter 1: Origins and Cultural Character of the Black Seminole
    • Chapter 2: Seminole and Black Seminole Alliance
    • Chapter 3: Black Seminole Early Resistance and Involvement During the Second Seminole War
    • Chapter 4: Black Seminole Leadership During the Second Seminole War
    • Chapter 5: The Impact of the Black Seminoles on the Second Seminole War
    • Conclusion
    • Bibliography

    Table of Illustrations

    • Afro-Seminole Creole Language
    • Annual Distribution of Runaway Slaves

    Read the entire dissertation here.

  • Mixed Race Beauty Gets a Mainstream Makeover

    Mixed Race Beauty Gets a Mainstream Makeover

    TruthDig
    2011-03-07

    Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
    Brown University

    Are mixed race faces considered the most beautiful? A recent report from Allure magazine says yes. Results of a survey conducted by Allure reveal that 64 percent of its readers thought mixed race was the most attractive. The editors attribute the results to the growing population of mixed race youth. As much as I’d like to agree it appears that this is just another case of wishful racial thinking.

    Here are a few reasons why. We need to remember that beauty and race are both social constructions—concepts societies create that may not actually exist in nature. As a result, beauty and race are associated with and impacted by class, immigration, gender, sexuality and marketing. Case in point: Since the Time magazine cover in the late 1990s, multiracials are more and more said to be the face of 21st century America. But what’s less known is that even this image was altered to look less “Hispanic/Latino” and more “European.”…

    …With that in mind, we also need to think very carefully about what the rise in the mixed race population means. Despite interpretations of the 2000 and 2010 censuses, the idea that the Two or More Races (TOMR) population is somehow seeing a surge in the U.S. because of 1967’s Loving v. Virginia case is false.  Multiracial populations have been in existence since the days of exploration, colonialism and enslavement. The rise that statistics are tracking now reflects people’s ability, willingness, perceived advantages and comfort in describing themselves as multiracial. This growing trend is certainly laudable and may even be a sign of personal progress, but it definitely does not reflect a change in standards of beauty. It might be more accurate to say that the surge in TOMR identification is a sign that we are moving away from the old tragic mulatta stereotype. This stereotype—applied mostly to women—says that multiracials desire to be white and that they loathe the nonwhite part(s) of themselves. Note that what’s still missing from the conversation is how even this unfortunate stereotype privileges mixes that include whiteness and marginalizes others (i.e., Asian-Black)…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Black ‘Like Me’: (Mis)Recognition, the Racial Gothic, and the Post-1967 Mixed-Race Movement in Danzy Senna’s Symptomatic

    Black ‘Like Me’: (Mis)Recognition, the Racial Gothic, and the Post-1967 Mixed-Race Movement in Danzy Senna’s Symptomatic

    African American Review
    Number 42 (Summer 2008)
    pages 287-305

    Hershini Bhana Young, Associate Professor of English
    State University of New York, Buffalo

    Symptomatic, Danzy Senna’s second novel, is a dense and disturbing satire of the post-1967 mixed-race movement. Tersely written, “hard-edged and kind of minimalist,” as Senna describes it in an interview with Rebecca Weber, it invokes the thrillers and film noir of Roman Polanski, Alfred Hitchcock, Brian DePalma, and Barbet Schroeder (Single White Female), to name a few. The novel’s style pays overt homage to Ralph Ellison’s brooding Invisible Man, even as it also gestures toward W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nella Larsen. Symptomatic describes the life of an unnamed woman who has just moved to New York on a writing fellowship. After a short-lived and disastrous relationship with Andrew, who is white, the protagonist sublets an apartment that she learns about from an older colleague named Greta Hicks, who befriends her. Their tense relationship, based on their “shared” mixed-race identity, rapidly disintegrates when the protagonist starts dating a black artist named Ivers. Greta, who eventually reveals herself as the original occupant of the apartment that the protagonist is subletting, stalks the protagonist and eventually attempts to kill her. Both main characters are tragic, confused, and inseparable until one of them dies…

    …Symptomatic, in contrast, is dark and troubling, using imagery, metaphor and a strained plot to tackle romantic ideas about community formation and race. I feel that most readers’ discomfort with the novel revolves around what Senna’s experiments in form hope to accomplish: an imminent warning about the danger of racialized communities that counters popular belief about the glamorous, though ordinary and well adjusted mixed-race community member. Senna launches a devastating critique of models of community based on collective political action. She shows how community comes to stand in for a “passive, static, conservative [timeless and naturalized]… network of people who inevitably know your name and your business because you interact with them every day, rather than those you have sought out as allies”; they are not driven by shared political purposes but rather by a simplistic recognition of inherent similarity (Joseph 10). Senna accomplishes her warning about this type of community through several means, most importantly through her 1) deployment of the African American gothic to create a disturbing and implausible plot with stock characters and 2) her historicization of contemporary mixed-race community formations based on phenotypic sameness, specifically those that resulted from the post-1967 mixed-race movement. Symptomatic begins where Caucasia ostensibly ends, with the protagonist Birdie’s poignant recognition of another girl who is “black like her” in the San Francisco Bay area. But it then asks us what implications there are of this moment of racial (mis)recognition on a personal, cultural and national level. What specifically does Senna hope to articulate about sameness, difference and community that demonstrate the promise of a mixed-race utopia gone tragically awry? Symptomatic, through a careful and strategic deployment of African American gothic conventions, critiques overly optimistic cultural understandings of hybridity both as the source of community formation and as racial (non) identity. It articulates the need for new models of community based on noncompulsory politicized identifications and strategies for redressing historical injustice.

    The “Bi-Racial Baby Boom”: Which Mixed-Race Movement?

    Racial mixing in this country is certainly nothing new, nor are the various esponses by mixed-race people to the violent implementation of the one-drop rule that has historically characterized black-white interrelations. (2) But Senna’s novel does not target the entire history of mixed-race people in the United States. While thoroughly grounded in this history, the novel focuses on the contemporary mixed-race movement enabled by the successes and failures of the civil rights movement. Kim Williams argues that while historically racial designations have been used to distinguish and disenfranchise those who were not deemed white, the political leadership of the civil rights campaign saw the opportunity to use those same racial classifications to end racism and ensure equality. An example of this would be the 1965 Voting Rights Act that required statistics on race to ensure equality of access to voting. In the 1970s, multiracial activists, using the language of civil rights, argued that “the official recognition of multiracialism” was a civil right “By arguing that the recognition of multiracial people was the ‘next logical step in civil rights,’ multiracial activists drew shrewdly on the symbolism of the civil rights movement, yet in the process cast themselves as more progressive than the so-called progressives (i.e., the civil rights lobby)” (K. Williams 87). (3) To the civil rights movement’s linking of rights and identity, the mixed-race movement added an appeal to the state for official endorsement of their particular identity with the understanding that “[n]onrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm; can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being” (Charles Taylor qtd. in K. Williams 89). Thus, not being seen as mixed-race, but as only black or white by others and by the state constitutes a psychological form of injury supposedly equal to centuries of material oppression with psychological effects. This problematic idea of recognition as ensuring equality is at the heart of Symptomatic. Senna relies on the gothic imagery of doubles and mirroring to critique the notion that racial recognition is an adequate basis for community formation, as I develop later…

    …Contrary to Time magazine, mixed-race people have not become more common during the last two decades. The misperception stems from the foundational status of legalized interracial marriage as the only legitimate site of the production of hybrid offspring. What gets silenced, in the case of African Americans, is the hybridity of Africans themselves and the long legacy of sexual abuse that reproduced racialized categories of property. The children of white planters, for example, were first and foremost slaves due to the condition of blackness inherited from their mothers. Hypodescent was not a choice but a pseudoscientific term brutally enacted on the bodies of Africans and their New World descendants. (6) The mixed-race movement is fraught with such misunderstandings and contradictions, another of these being that most of the organizations within it are not constituted by people of mixed race. Rather, the mixed-race movement’s membership consists largely of monoracially identified parents, almost always white, who claim to act on their children’s behalf. One could argue, then, that the mixed-race movement attempts to extend the hitherto denied privileges of whiteness to children who historically would be black. Indeed, this “new” multiracial national imaginary “has worked to reconfigure the popular discourse on race and sexuality, forging [instead] … an increasingly sentimentalized white [power] that rewrites its centrality to the nation by embracing new modes of cross-racial feeling” (Wiegman 872). While these senti-mental modes may appear to differ from earlier dominant forms of white supremacy, such as during Reconstruction, wherein interracial sex was violently disavowed and policed in order to preserve the unpreservable purity of race, the effect of maintaining white power is the same. Contemporary liberal whiteness in the age of global capital assimilates interracial desire, and under the guise of recognizing a common humanity, perpetuates the same racialized injustices that have become all too familiar. The recognition of humanity comes at the expense of not recognizing a history…

    …Senna states repeatedly in interviews that she is “wary of the way multiraciality has become fetishized in the media and in the popular discussion on race…. I’m suspicious of adding a new category to the Census for a lot of reasons …” (qtd. in Arias 448). (13) She insists that given the complex histories around “mulattos” (the word Senna prefers to use for its historicity), the mixed-race movement has been seen as an unequivocal solution for those people marginalized by racial binary thinking that has them occupying the interstitial spaces of neither/nor. Symptomatic fully articulates what Caucasia hints at during its final pages: that the warm embrace of coercive sameness, while seeming to provide salve for the wounds of racist exclusion repeats the violence of racial binarisms. A community of people who are “biologically” alike results, not in the transcendence of racial hierarchical categories, but rather in their perpetuation. Senna urges us to interrogate the role of prescriptive sameness in the construction of identity by her use of the gothic, no matter how much this sameness is viewed as deconstructing the larger structures of racism in the United States. She does not depict the racially ambiguous character as essentially threatening to dialectical formations of black and white. Part of Symtomatic’s “dark” vision is how the racially ambiguous character can reinforce racial categorizations and misrecognitions, leading to a deepening of the racial chasms that haunt the American landscape and the revocation of civil rights gains. Senna thinks through race, moving away from prescriptive physical sameness (even multiracial sameness) towards an understanding of racial community as constituted via engaged, deliberate historical interactions grounded in material realities. She uses the gothic to defamiliarize the specter of sameness and expose its dangerous logic, no matter in what context that sameness appears. I wish to be clear: the compulsion to seek out those who think and act like you is the essence of community formation. Sameness is essential in the formation of common political agendas, in the organizations of communities with common historical memories. What happens, however, when this compulsion moves from one of voluntarism to another of phenotypic coercion? The novel uses the racial gothic to explore the tensions between compulsory unions (biologically determined via the logic of sameness) and other more deliberate, engaged interactions based on common agendas and concerns. (14)…

    Read the entire review here.

  • Symptomatic

    Symptomatic

    Riverhead Books (an imprint of Penguin)
    February 2005
    224 pages
    5.07 x 7.87in
    Paperback ISBN: 9781594480676

    Danzy Senna

    A young woman moves to New York City for what promises to be a dream job. Displaced, she feels unsure of her fit in the world. Then comes a look of recognition, a gesture of friendship from an older woman named Greta who shares the same difficult-to-place color of skin. On common ground, a tenuous alliance grows between two women in racial limbo. So too, does the older woman’s unnerving obsession, leading to a collision of two lives spiraling out of control. A beautifully written novel, at once suspenseful, erotic, and tantalizingly clever, Symptomatic is a groundbreaking contribution to the literature of racial identity.

  • Under the Moon’s Light

    Under the Moon’s Light

    Directory of World Cinema
    2011

    English Title: Under the Moon’s Light
    Original Title: Sous la clarté de la lune
    Country of Origin: Burkina Faso, France
    Studio: Les Films de la plaine, NDK productions
    Director: Apolline Traoré
    Producer(s): Idrissa Ouédraogo
    Screenplay: Apolline Traoré
    Cinematographer: Daniel Barrau
    Editor: Lucie Thierry
    Runtime: 90 minutes
    Genre: Drama
    Language: Moore (Moré), French
    Starring/Cast: Rasmané Ouédraogo, Sylvain Lecann, Abdoulaye Koné, Tania Azar, Silvie Homawoo
    Year: 2004
    Volume: African / Nigerian

    Reviewed by: Zélie Asava

    Synopsis:

    Sous la clarté de la lune interrogates African women’s personal and cultural histories and identities by foregrounding the experiences of mixed-race women and their families, thus exploring the history of interracial relationships in Africa and its diaspora.

    Its central story begins before the narrative starts, about 10 years earlier in a small village in Burkina Faso.  Patrick (Sylvain Lecann), a young white Frenchman steals his mixed-race daughter moments after her young Burkinabé mother has given birth.  As the film opens we see the child, who has been raised in France, return to her mother’s village with her father for what is supposed to be a brief encounter with her other home and family.  Her mother Kaya (Silvie Homawoo) has been mute since the incident.  The mixed-race daughter Martine (Tania Azar) hates the village and its inhabitants, thinking they are all inferior.  She believes her mother to be dead.   Her father Patrick treats the villagers as his servants.  The villagers have been waiting two years for an engineer and Patrick is in town to fix their water pump, as well as to discuss the past with Kaya.  While the locals may reject this white man because of the brutal history he left behind, they need his expertise and money.  The story thus has immediate resonances with Franco-African colonialism and neo-colonialism.

    The film follows the three lead characters as they negotiate their differences to form a family.  A fourth key figure, Habib (Abdoulaye Koné), emerges as a young man in love with Kaya and through him spectators are introduced to village life, local systems of power and love, and come to realise that the story may also be read as a series of metaphors on issues of identity…

    Read the entire review here.

  • Request to interview members of multiracial organizations for Sociology Honors Research Study

    Request to interview members of multiracial organizations for Sociology Honors Research Study

    My name is Steve Alcantar, a Sociology honors student attending the University of California, Irvine who is currently conducting a research study from January until April of this year [2011] on government classification of multiracial individuals. The purpose of this study is to observe how modern-day racial and ethnic categories used by the government are implemented on documentation, as well as the effects this may have on American society’s views on the concept of race. Another objective is to compare past and present day sentiments on a multiracial identifier and the idea of being multiracial in general.

    One aspect of my research involves interviewing individuals belonging to groups that were represented in events during the 1990s that ultimately led to the Office of Management and Budget’s 1997 decision to allow census respondents to “mark one or more” races in the race question. This includes interviewing members of multiracial organizations, and interviewing experts with comprehensive knowledge and experience studying the concept of race and race relations.

    The in-person interview (around the Southern California area, I could also meet in Northern California March 19th-23rd [2011])  on average takes about 30 minutes to complete, and responses are kept confidential in that no one will be able to trace back to any statement a respondent makes during the interview.

    If you are interested, please contact me at alcantas@uci.edu or (510) 965-2030.

    Thank You

    For more information, read the Study Information Sheet.

  • The Truth About Dublin—An Unfair City

    The Truth About Dublin—An Unfair City

    The Evening Herald
    Dublin, Ireland
    2010-10-02

    Zélie Asava

    The tradition of a big Irish welcome isn’t always evident to a mixed-race Irish woman in Dublin, writes Zélie Asava

    “So where are you from?”

    “Dublin .”

    “No, like originally”

    This is a conversation I have with people on average once every two days. I am a mixed-race Irish woman. But when I tell people that I’m Irish they ask: “Where are you really from?” Instead of red hair and freckles, I have brown hair and skin. Sometimes I tell people I’m from London. After that they don’t ask again because London—unlike Dublin—is regarded as a racial melting pot.

    The alternative involves explaining why and how I am from Dublin—where I was born, where my mother is from, where I went to school, where my father is from, and of course, how he met my mother. This sparks other questions like: “How would a Kenyan ever meet an Irish woman?” And: “Are you from Africa?” Understandably, when you’re having the same conversation over and over again, this gets tiresome…

    Read the entire article here.