Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Black in a Foreign Land: In Defense of Dominican Identity

    Black in a Foreign Land: In Defense of Dominican Identity

    The Huffington Post
    2015-12-17

    César Vargas

    I was born and raised in the Dominican Republic until I was two months shy of turning 13. The Dominican Republic has a peculiar color metric system–not necessarily on race. So it should go without saying that I wasn’t exposed to the clear cut Americentric, and very binary, concept of race in America until I set foot in the United States.

    Since a very young age, I was aware of how both colorism and classism were prevalent back in the island. I noticed how people were treated and often saw how the socioeconomic standing of an individual trumped their color–up to a point if we’re to test folks by the brown paper bag. I’ve said once or twice that a Black man with money is more white than a white poor man. In a third world country where the majority of people are mulattoes, and most of the darker population would be of Haitian descent, you’d be hard pressed not to find people of most shades within families. Some of those family members were better off than others, and often, I’ve found, they could be of any shade.

    Of course, like any nation of the world colonized by Europeans, power and wealth is usually concentrated with their descendants, but it would be dishonest to say that most of the power and wealth in the Dominican Republic is owned and controlled solely by its small white population. There are people of color (and visibly so), in most power and entertainment structures. A lot more, I dare say, than most Latin American countries. If we go by the one drop rule, there have been Black public figures, Black businesspeople, Black athletes, Black entertainers, Black generals, Black presidents, and so on. If you put them next to most African Americans, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference…

    Read the entire article here.

  • How To Be A Black Girl

    How To Be A Black Girl

    Thought Catalog
    2014-12-03

    Carmen Molina
    Chicago, Illinois

    I will always feel a little strange calling myself a black girl.

    Whenever I am at a party or somewhere where there are new people to meet, the question that every mixed girl gets asked at least once a week, every week, for all of her life comes up.

    “What are you?”

    This question doesn’t offend me like it offends others of mixed race. I don’t necessarily see it as ignorant, like others do. The person doing the asking most likely thinks that I am interesting looking and I usually take it as a compliment of sorts.

    What is irritating about the question is that I never know quite how to answer it. It always causes anxiety. I stammer my way through what I hope is a passable response, finish with a nervous smile and then immediately ask them where they got their shoes to distract them so that I don’t have to talk about it anymore.

    This tactic works almost every time… but every once in a while someone calls my bluff and asks me to explain.

    And how can I? It’s very difficult to explain it to a stranger when no one ever really explained it to me.

    Here is what I know…

    Read the entire article here.

  • When You Grow Up Mixed Race

    When You Grow Up Mixed Race

    Thought Catalog
    2015-12-11

    Evicka Chang

    Growing up mixed-race is confusing. It wasn’t until my third year of University when the theory of hybridity was introduced in a Lit Theory class that I even began to consider the complexities of my own existence. It was also then that I started to realize that much of my own experience was not unusual for those of us who exist in the in-between.

    The biggest struggle is exactly that: not fitting into either space. With a White mother and a Chinese father, neither will ever understand my experience. My mother sees me as White; never will she understand the struggles I have and will continue to face as a non-White female. My father sees me as Chinese, only with the benefit of being able to ‘pass’ when needed. My Chinese extended family only knows me as the White member of the family, the Westerner who is not quite Chinese. My White extended family continuously ‘others’ me, pushing me back into the margins because I do not look like them…

    Read the entire article here..

  • Mixed Race Experience in Celeste Ng’s EVERYTHING I NEVER TOLD YOU

    Mixed Race Experience in Celeste Ng’s EVERYTHING I NEVER TOLD YOU

    GrubStreet
    2015-12-01

    Sonya Larson

    Not many characters in literature look like me. Half Chinese and half white, I’m used to reading about people who could occupy one half of my family tree, but rarely about the person who emerges where their branches join. I’m speaking about the mixed race experience: complex, elusive, and with a racial identity wholly separate from either person who birthed and raised you.

    So I felt grateful and enriched to read Celeste Ng’s masterfully constructed Everything I Never Told You. Many have praised the novel’s confident drive, deft omniscience, and intricate storytelling, but I want to discuss its exploration of race around—and inside—of one mixed American family.

    The novel concerns the Lees—a family of five struggling to make sense of the mysterious drowning death of Lydia, their middle child. James Lee, a Chinese-American, has married Marilyn, who is white, at a time when interracial marriage was illegal in much of the United States. From the beginning many see their coupledom as problematic, especially Marilyn’s mother. “Where will you live?” she says. “You won’t fit in anywhere. Think about the children. It’s not right, Marilyn. It’s not right.”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • “I will continue to talk about race… I think that’s part of my purpose.”

    There is also a sort of evangelism at work. She is of mixed race, but, as Mr. [Nelson] George pointed out, she embraces her blackness, grasping every opportunity to speak out as a role model, getting out her message that a person’s so-called flaws, skin color among them, need be no hurdle to success.

    “I will continue to talk about race,” she said. “I think that’s part of my purpose.” —Misty Copeland

    Ruth La Ferla, “The Rise and Rise of Misty Copeland,” The Year in Style 2015, The New York Times, December 18, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/20/fashion/the-rise-and-rise-of-misty-copeland.html.

  • The many faces of Frederick Douglass

    The many faces of Frederick Douglass

    Democrat and Chronicle
    Rochester, New York
    2015-12-25

    Jim Memmott, Adjunct Assistant Professor of English
    University of Rochester, Rochester, New York


    Portrait of Frederick Douglass taken November 3, 1882 by John Howe Kent, 24 State Street, Rochester, New York
    (Photo: Courtesy of the Department of Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation, University of Rochester River Campus Libraries)

    In November 1882, Frederick Douglass, escaped slave, orator, abolitionist, writer, lecturer, was back in Rochester, the city where he had lived for nearly 30 years, to give a talk.

    Not surprisingly, he found time to visit the studio of Rochester photographer John Howe Kent to pose for a portrait.

    The photograph, which is among the collection of the University of Rochester, shows a white-haired, bearded and contemplative Douglass. He looks away from the camera, his brow furrowed, his eyes on a distant prize.

    According to the authors of a rich and rewarding book, the recently published Picturing Frederick Douglass, Kent’s picture became a lasting image of Douglass. It was used as the illustration facing the title page of the last edition of Douglass’s autobiography. And it was reproduced again and again on monuments, on a postage stamp and in drawings.

    As the subtitle of Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American makes clear, the Rochester picture is just one of many of Douglass taken during a time when photography was coming of age.

    The authors of the book, John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd and Celeste-Marie Bernier, have identified 160 separate photographs of Douglass, a handful taken in Rochester, and all republished in the book.

    Read the entire article here.

  • He has settled instead on an expansive, evolving notion of “belonging” that takes into account lineage without precise blood calculations or federal documents.

    [Gabriel] Galanda’s own ancestors were Native American, Scandinavian, Portuguese and Austrian — a mixed heritage that caused him to question his identity during his formative years.

    But he says he kept remembering his grandma, born on California’s Round Valley Indian Tribes reservation, putting him on her knee and saying, in her smoky, gravelly voice, “You’re Nomlaki and Concow. Don’t ever forget it.”

    “Before I undertook this work,” Galanda says, “I was really caught up in blood quantum.” Now, he says, “I don’t really care.” He has settled instead on an expansive, evolving notion of “belonging” that takes into account lineage without precise blood calculations or federal documents.

    Nina Shapiro, “Native lawyer takes on tribes that kick members out,” The Seattle Times, December 19, 2015. http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/northwest/native-lawyer-takes-on-tribes-that-kick-members-out/.

  • When a master class with ballerina Misty Copeland becomes a San Pedro homecoming

    When a master class with ballerina Misty Copeland becomes a San Pedro homecoming

    The Los Angeles Times
    2015-12-23

    Deborah Vankin, Contact Reporter


    Ascendant ballerina Misty Copeland leads a master class during Monday’s celebration in San Pedro. (Christina House/For The Times)

    The crowd of about 200 huddled in the parking lot of San Pedro City Ballet, ensconced in fog and drizzle. Restless and excited, they might have been awaiting the arrival of a rock legend. Some rubbed their palms together to keep warm on the chilly Monday afternoon; others stretched their necks, peering down Pacific Avenue in anticipation. Neighbors crouched on the roof of a small bungalow next door to get a glimpse of the action.

    When at last a gray SUV rolled up, smartphones and tablets shot into the air and the chanting began: “Misty, Misty, Misty.”

    San Pedro’s ballet prodigy was home.

    A populist ballerina if ever there was one, Misty Copeland has become a pioneering hero not just to dance hopefuls but to a generation of young women looking for inspiring, boundary-breaking athletic and artistic role models. Earlier this year, the American Ballet Theatre soloist was promoted to principal dancer; she is the New York company’s first African American woman to hold that title. And she was the first African American woman to dance the lead in an ABT “Swan Lake” production. It’s partly why Copeland landed on the cover of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” issue this spring…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Feet in two worlds: The American Indian, cowboy hybrid

    Feet in two worlds: The American Indian, cowboy hybrid

    NonDoc
    2015-12-26

    Sunny Cooper


    (Sunny Cooper)

    The Native American is historically pedigreed. Its bloodlines bound through hundreds of years and generations, and lopes straight as I-40. Not so with the American Cowboy. Here, history zigzags, revealing how Spaniards and Native Americans formed the early American Cowboy: the Mestizos, the Criollos, the vaqueros. Russell Freedman says, “It is the cowboy whose fabled reputation we remember, while the vaquero has all but disappeared from history.”

    The romantic icon we know today appears relatively new on the scene of humanity. What isn’t new to us is the historic conflicts, and Hollywood cinema, that deeply divided the American West into a split personality: Cowboys vs. Indians.

    With respect to the fundamental fact that one set of cultures is rooted in bloodlines and the other in a lifestyle, the two identities share a vital commonality in the American West: the hybrid culture, the amalgamation of Indian and cowboy. We’re horses of a different color with feet in both worlds…

    Read the entire article here.

  • “A columnist examining Obama’s background summed up his racial identity into one equation: ‘white + black = black.’ For me, that said it all.”

    The media’s metadiscussion explicitly endorsed a definition of Obama’s race that was essentially intersubjective, basing its racial descriptor on a combination of self-identification and ascription by others. Their reasoning, while not to be taken as gospel, explicitly endorsed the use of racial descriptors which were intersubjectively agreed upon. For instance, the Associated Press, whose articles and analysis dominate newspaper discussions of politics and race through both reputation and sheer numbers, endorsed such a view. As Karen Hunter, the Reader Representative at the Hartford Courant, explained in 2008, “Because The Courant relies on the Associated Press for much of its national coverage of the presidential race, the AP plays a key role in how the newspaper presents the candidates.” In accounting for the AP’s decision to use of “black” and “African American” as the proper – and essentially interchangeable – descriptors for Obama, AP Senior Managing Editor Mike Silverman explained, “I would say the answer has to do partly with the way Sen. Obama has defined himself and partly with the way American society defines someone who is biracial.” While Silverman implied a static public definition of black and biracial individuals, and ignored his organization’s own role in creating and shifting these definitions, the AP relied on what it perceived to be the intersubjective consensus in order to determine Obama’s race, rather than any set of facts related to American rules regarding blackness. Nowhere in Silverman’s recapitulation of the AP’s behind-the-scenes discussions does he mention Obama’s parentage, hypodescent, biology, or other American rules of race, although they perhaps form the background of “the way American society defines someone.”

    The Washington Post, Hartford Courant, and New York Times editorial boards were among the media to take similar stances. While endorsing and explaining the AP’s use of an intersubjective standard in deciding how to describe Obama, the Hartford Courant stated that,“Obama’s candidacy is a rare and riveting opportunity exactly because it is forcing conversations about issues that have been easier to ignore for centuries.” And in CNN’s “Behind the Scenes” look at it’s coverage of Obama’s race, Jay Carrol somewhat retrospectively summed up the media’s predominate position, writing, “A columnist examining Obama’s background summed up his racial identity into one equation: ‘white + black = black.’ For me, that said it all.” While the piece is entitled “Obama: Black or Biracial?” and Carrol continues with a discussion that claims the answer is complicated, the “accuracy” of the description is treated as an academic exercise attendant to the obvious conclusion based on an assumed social ascription.

    Peter Geller, “Making Blackness, Making Policy,” PhD diss., Harvard University, 2012. 42-43. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:9548618.