Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Critical Ethnic Studies: An Anthology (Call for Papers)

    Critical Ethnic Studies: An Anthology (Call for Papers)

    Rather than attempting to pose and answer the question, “What is critical ethnic studies?,” this anthology seeks to catalyze a more wide-ranging set of critical problems for emergent scholarly work and new forms of knowledge. Building on longstanding critiques of race, imperialism, and capital in ethnic studies and related fields, some broadly framed key conceptual questions for this anthology include: Is it necessary to rethink and reframe some of the central—even taken-for-granted—analytical and theoretical rubrics of ethnic studies, such as “race,” “gender,” “sexuality,” “citizenship,” and “class?” How do long histories of multiple, incommensurable racial genocides (e.g., land conquest, racial slave trade, militarized extermination) constitute the historical present? How do we apprehend and theorize the persistent systems and structures of gendered racial violence, on the one hand, while attending to the resilience of political agency and transformation, on the other? How can we rethink the question of (racist/state) violence in rigorous and creative ways, neither reifying nor pathologizing it, but asking instead how a violence of condition produces a condition of violence? What do notions of the “subaltern,” “collective,” “popular,” and “multitude” mean in a white supremacist and settler colonial formation such as the U.S.? What is the relationship between critical ethnic studies and related emergent fields, such as critical prison studies, queer ethnic studies, and settler colonial studies? How can we create the conditions and framework for the ongoing appreciation of marginalized yet dynamic modes of critique, contestation, and inquiry within (and across) various fields, such as: critiques of sovereignty and recognition within Native and Indigenous studies; anti-Blackness as an analytical rubric within Black studies; debates about the politics and theorization of Asian settler colonialism within Asian American studies; and critiques of First World privilege and mobility within (U.S.) queer of color studies?

    We invite essay submissions on a wide range of topics that may include but are not limited to the following:

    • Race, colonialism, and capitalism
    • Warfare and militarism
    • Theories of violence
    • Settler colonialism and white supremacy
    • Critical genocide studies
    • Cultural studies, the politics of aesthetic and cultural practice
    • Critical feminist epistemologies
    • Queer ethnic studies
    • Decolonization and empire
    • Social movements, activism, insurrection, and revolution
    • Immigration and labor
    • Multiculturalism and colorblindness
    • Critical race studies
    • Critical legal studies
    • Liberationist epistemologies
    • Critical ethnic studies, undisciplinarity, and relationship to other fields
    • Professionalization, praxis, and the academic industrial complex
    • Relationship between racism and environmental justice movements
    • Sovereignty, the nation, and the nation-state
    • Ethnic studies in relation to past and current eras of the privatization, corporatization, and defunding of the university
    • Tension between institutionalization and movement-building in ethnic studies
    • New frameworks for the comparative analysis of differential racial histories, e.g., immigrant and indigenous histories
    • The erotic and sexual outlaw
    • Academics of color and the erasure of class privilege

    Submission Deadline: January 31, 2012
    Word Limit: 4,000 – 6,000 words including notes
    Format: Word document with citations in Chicago Style
    Email Submission to: cesanthology@gmail.com

  • Role of Identity Integration On the Relationship Between Perceived Racial Discrimination and Psychological Adjustment of Multiracial People

    Role of Identity Integration On the Relationship Between Perceived Racial Discrimination and Psychological Adjustment of Multiracial People

    Society for Social Work and Research
    Sixteenth Annual Conference
    “Research That Makes A Difference: Advancing Practice and Shaping Public Policy”
    2012-01-11 through 2012-01-15
    Grand Hyatt Washington, Washington, DC
    Saturday, 2012-01-14, 14:30-16:15 EST (Local Time)

    Kelly F. Jackson, Assistant Professor of Social Work
    Arizona State University, Phoenix

    Hyung Chol (Brandon) Yoo, Assistant Professor of Asian Pacific American Studies
    Arizona State University, Tempe

    Rudy Guevarra, Assistant Professor of Asian Pacific American Studies
    Arizona State University, Tempe

    Racial discrimination is a pervasive social problem that has a negative impact on the physical and mental health of ethnic minority groups. Yet few researchers have examined this phenomenon within the growing population of multiracial persons, which according to the 2010 census has dramatically increased by 32% since 2000. This is particularly troubling in lieu of new evidence that multiracial persons may be more vulnerable to racial discrimination and other mental and behavioral health risks. This highlights the need for social workers to understand the risks and strengths associated with multiracial identity and navigating multiple racial and ethnic ties within a racialized society.

    The purpose of the study was to examine the relationships between perceived racial discrimination, multiracial identity integration, and psychological adjustment of diverse multiracial persons.

    Three hypotheses guided this study: (1) perceived racial discrimination would negatively correlate with psychological adjustment (i.e., lower depression, anxiety, stress, negative affect, and higher positive affect); (2) individuals with high multiracial identity integration (who identify strongly with two or more racial groups) would positively correlate with psychological adjustment; and (3) strong multiracial identity integration would buffer the effect of perceived racial discrimination on psychological adjustment…

    For more information, click here.

  • For Many Latinos, Racial Identity Is More Culture Than Color

    For Many Latinos, Racial Identity Is More Culture Than Color

    The New York Times
    2012-01-13

    Mireya Navarro

    Every decade, the Census Bureau spends billions of dollars and deploys hundreds of thousands of workers to get an accurate portrait of the American population. Among the questions on the census form is one about race, with 15 choices, including “some other race.”

    More than 18 million Latinos checked this “other” box in the 2010 census, up from 14.9 million in 2000. It was an indicator of the sharp disconnect between how Latinos view themselves and how the government wants to count them. Many Latinos argue that the country’s race categories—indeed, the government’s very conception of identity — do not fit them.

    The main reason for the split is that the census categorizes people by race, which typically refers to a set of common physical traits. But Latinos, as a group in this country, tend to identify themselves more by their ethnicity, meaning a shared set of cultural traits, like language or customs…

    …A majority of Latinos identify themselves as white. Among them is Fiordaliza A. Rodriguez, 40, a New York lawyer who says she considers herself white because “I am light-skinned” and that is how she is viewed in her native Dominican Republic.

    But she says there is no question that she is seen as different from the white majority in this country. Ms. Rodriguez recalled an occasion in a courtroom when a white lawyer assumed she was the court interpreter. She surmised the confusion had to do with ethnic stereotyping, “no matter how well you’re dressed.”

    Some of the latest research, however, shows that many Latinos—like Irish and Italian immigrants before them—drop the Latino label to call themselves simply “white.” A study published last year in the Journal of Labor Economics found that the parents of more than a quarter of third-generation children with Mexican ancestry do not identify their children as Latino on census forms.

    Most of this ethnic attrition occurs among the offspring of parents or grandparents married to non-Mexicans, usually non-Hispanic whites. These Latinos tend to have high education, high earnings and high levels of English fluency. That means that many successful Latinos are no longer present in statistics tracking Latino economic and social progress across generations, hence many studies showing little or no progress for third-generation Mexican immigrants, said Stephen J. Trejo, an economist at the University of Texas at Austin and co-author of the study…

    …On the other side of the spectrum are black Latinos, who say they feel the sting of racism much the same as other blacks. A sense of racial pride has been emerging among many black Latinos who are now coming together in conferences and organizations.

    Miriam Jiménez Román, 60, a scholar on race and ethnicity in New York, says that issues like racial profiling of indigenous-looking and dark-skinned Latinos led her to appear in a 30-second public service announcement before the 2010 census encouraging Latinos of African descent to “check both: Latino and black.” “When you sit on the subway, you just see a black person, and that’s really what determines the treatment,” she said. The 2010 census showed 1.2 million Latinos who identified as black, or 2.5 percent of the Hispanic population…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Jean Toomer: Fugitive

    Jean Toomer: Fugitive

    American Literature
    Volume 47, Number 1 (March, 1975)
    page 84-96

    Charles Scruggs, Professor of English
    University of Arizona

    As a young boy, Jean Toomer attended a dinner party during which someone asked his famous grandfather, P. B. S. Pinchback, if he indeed had “colored” blood. The light-skinned former lieutenant governor of Louisiana answered enigmatically, “That is what I have claimed.” According to Toomer in his unpublished autobiography, Pinchback never cleared up the matter for his grandson. Toomer insisted that he never knew for sure whether or not he was part Negro.

    If Toomer’s racial identity was a puzzle to himself, his attitudes toward himself as Negro have also puzzled his critics. Before the publication of Cane (1923), he seemed to advertise his dark blood. After 1923 he ambiguously referred to himself as “an American, simply an American”; and around 1930 he refused to be included in several Negro anthologies. In the same year he let it be known that he was actually “white,” blaming the confusion on Waldo Frank, who had given the impression in his introduction to Cane that Toomer was a Negro. What mystifies everyone, as Darwin Turner pointed out, is why in the summer of 1923 Toomer rejected “a racial identification which a few months earlier he had accepted as a matter of slight importance.”

    Explanations have been offered for Toomer’s apparent apostasy…

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Jean Toomer and American Racial Discourse

    Jean Toomer and American Racial Discourse

    Texas Studies in Literature and Language
    Volume 35, Number 2, Anxieties of Identity in American Writing (Summer 1993)
    pages 226-250

    George Hutchinson, Booth Tarkington Professor of Literary Studies; Adjunct Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies; Adjunct Professor of American Studies
    Indiana University, Bloomington

    The culture which will transcend, and thus unite, East and West, or the Earthlings and the Galactics, is not likely to be one which does equal justice to each, but one which looks back on both with the amused condescension typical of later generations looking back at their ancestors.

    Knowledge of what cannot be said… signals the rock-bottom shape, the boundaries, of our situation in the world; it is the ethical, in the classical sense of the term.

    An undated poem kept in a tin box that no one but the author ever saw in his lifetime bears haunting witness to the great lack of Jean Toomer’s existence:

    Above my sleep
    Tortured in deprival
    Stripped of the warmth of a name
    My life breaks madly. . . .
    Breaks against world
    Like a pale moth breaking
    Against sun.

    In their biography of the poet, The Lives of Jean Toomer, Cynthia Kerman and Richard Eldridge discuss the relationship of this poem to Toomer’s sense of lacking a permanent and certain name, deriving from the fact that his name had changed during his childhood and that different family members called him by different names. His grandfather, for example (the patriarch with whom he lived to young adulthood and who died, Toomer claimed, the day after he completed the first draft of “Kabnis”), would not acknowledge the name he had been given at birth. “Jean Toomer” itself is a later fabrication of the author…

  • However, “self-identified race” is a subjective term, influenced by cultural factors, and not even grounded in the ancestral genomics of, for example, the International HapMap Project.

    While many commentators who supported the approval of BiDil for black patients state that “race” is not a scientifically precise term for identifying relevant genomic or physiological characteristics that differentiate population groups, nevertheless, they argue that “self-identified race” is a useful proxy for those characteristics. However, what is the evidence that the proxy “self-identified race” is a reliable surrogate? The best evidence derives from the fact that genetic variation conferring disease susceptibility is not equally distributed among ancestral populations. For example, sickle cell anaemia is more prevalent in populations whose ancestry can be traced to sub-Saharan Africa. However, “self-identified race” is a subjective term, influenced by cultural factors, and not even grounded in the ancestral genomics of, for example, the International HapMap Project. For the purpose of the clinical trials, “self-identified race” is interpreted as a dichotomous variable (black or non-black). If race were used as a proxy for ancestral African genomics it should be a continuous function (10%, 30%, 70%, etc). It makes no scientific sense to map a continuous function onto a dichotomous variable…

    Sheldon Krimsky, “The short life of a race drug,” The Lancet, Volume 379, Issue 9811 (2012-01-14 through 2012-01-20): 114. http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(12)60052-X/fulltext.

  • Author, Yaba Blay, to appear on CNN Newsroom with Don Lemon

    Author, Yaba Blay, to appear on CNN Newsroom with Don Lemon

    CNN NewsRoom: Weekend Primetime
    2012-01-14, 19:00-20:00 EST

    Don Lemon, Host

    Yaba Blay, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies
    Lafayette College

    (1)ne Drop author, Yaba Blay, will appear on the weekend edition of CNN Newsroom with Don Lemon on Sunday, January 15, 2012 during the 7:00 pm-8:00 pm hour (EST).

  • “Multiracial” Genes?

    Barack Obama can call himself black, white magenta, green, or whatever he wants, it really does not matter socially. However, genes are genes and his genes are multiracial. Barack Obama has a white mother and a black father, and to categorize him as only one race medically is just wrong, inaccurate, and likely to cost multiracial people their lives.

    Susan Graham, “The Obama Racial Identity Factor and Saving Multiracial Lives,” Project Race: From the Director, June 2008.

  • The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White

    The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White

    Harvard University Press
    January 1996
    560 pages
    6-3/8 x 9-1/4 inches
    Hardcover ISBN: 9780674372627

    George Hutchinson, Booth Tarkington Professor of Literary Studies; Adjunct Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies;  Adjunct Professor of American Studies
    Indiana University, Bloomington

    It wasn’t all black or white. It wasn’t a vogue. It wasn’t a failure. By restoring interracial dimensions left out of accounts of the Harlem Renaissance—or blamed for corrupting it—George Hutchinson transforms our understanding of black (and white) literary modernism, interracial literary relations, and twentieth-century cultural nationalism in the United States. What has been missing from literary histories of the time is a broader sense of the intellectual context of the Harlem Renaissance, and Hutchinson supplies that here: Boas’s anthropology, Park’s sociology, various strands of pragmatism and cultural nationalism—ideas that shaped the New Negro movement and the literary field, where the movement flourished. Hutchinson tracks the resulting transformation of literary institutions and organizations in the 1920s, offering a detailed account of the journals and presses, black and white, that published the work of the “New Negroes.” This cultural excavation discredits bedrock assumptions about the motives of white interest in the renaissance, and about black relationships to white intellectuals of the period. It also allows a more careful investigation than ever before of the tensions among black intellectuals of the 1920s. Hutchinson’s analysis shows that the general expansion of literature and the vogue of writing cannot be divorced from the explosion of black literature often attributed to the vogue of the New Negro—any more than the growing sense of “Negro” national consciousness can be divorced from expanding articulations and permutations of American nationality. The book concludes with the first full-scale interpretation of the landmark anthology The New Negro.
     
    A courageous work that exposes the oversimplifications and misrepresentations of popular readings of the Harlem Renaissance, this book reveals the truly composite nature of American literary culture.

  • An Overview of the Event: Jean Toomer and Politics at the 2012 MLA

    An Overview of the Event: Jean Toomer and Politics at the 2012 MLA

    Gino Michael Pellegrini: Education, Amalgamation, Race, Class & Solidarity
    2012-01-12

    Gino Pellegrini, Adjunct Assistant Professor of English
    Pierce College, Woodland Hills, California

    This is my general overview of the “Jean Toomer and Politics” special session roundtable at the 2012 MLA Annual Convention. First, I want to thank Professors Barbara Foley, Charles Scruggs, and Belinda Wheeler for their excellent presentations, and a special thanks to Professor George Hutchinson for starting the Q & A. I am very much looking forward to continuing this conversation!

    In her presentation, Belinda Wheeler focused on the “documents” (census, marriage, and draft) that Byrd and Gates include in the second Norton Critical Edition of Cane to support their claim that Toomer was a Negro who passed as white. Wheeler discussed how the documents, when examined carefully and in aggregate, weaken their claim. The documents show (and this is a point that Barbara Foley also made) that Toomer sometimes identified as black and sometimes as white at different junctures in his life, and this assumes that it was Toomer who actually authored the documents. In countering their claim, Wheeler also drew upon interviews that she had conducted with Susan Sandberg, the daughter of Marjorie Content, Toomer’s second wife, as well as with Jill Quasha, a friend of Sandberg and Content who knew the family well and authored a book on Content’s photography. Toomer was married to Content from 1934 until his death in 1967, and Wheeler’s important bibliographic research sheds light on how Toomer, post-Cane, identified and lived. Her interviews suggest that Toomer did not waver from his basic position that he was an American, neither black nor white, and that he tried to live his life free from the influence of racial categories and standards…

    Read the entire overview here.