Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Emory and CNN Launch Public Dialogue Series

    Emory and CNN Launch Public Dialogue Series

    The Emory Wheel
    2011-09-02

    Amanda Serfozo

    Emory University hosted an inaugural event in partnership with CNN on Wednesday evening that aims to facilitate discourse related to the results of the 2010 Census and its reflection of new population trends in America.
     
    CNN Dialogues—an ongoing colloquium with panels scheduled throughout October, November and December—is organized in partnership with Emory University, the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference, and the National Center for Civil and Human Rights. Panelists discussed how popular culture, urban studies and sociology explores the identities behind the 2010 U.S. Census and how people live.
     
    Panelists included Heidi W. Durrow, author of the novel The Girl Who Fell From the Sky; Edward James Olmos, actor and activist; Yul Kwon, the host of PBS’s “America Revealed”; Kris Marsh, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Maryland at College Park; and Dana White, Goodrich C. White professor of Urban Studies at Emory University…

    …Panelists discussed the U.S. Census, which the government administers each decade and is federally mandated by the Constitution.

    It serves not only as a population marker used to reapportion electoral seats, but also to reassess state funding…
     
    Durrow addressed the recent argument over having a one “box” limit for the race category on the Census form, to a multi-choice option for citizens with multiple ethnicities.
     
    “As someone with a Danish mother and an African-American father, I struggled with my [Census form] selection,” she said. “I understand that the Census is not exactly the place for self-identification. It’s about reapportionment and money, but it’s also important to know that there’s an evolving mix occurring.”
     
    Adding to Durrow’s point, Marsh acknowledged the differences in inner and outer identity in standardized Census data collection.

    “I believe that there are two Americas today,” Marsh said. “There’s how we selectively self-identify—for instance, I could claim I’m a white woman all day—and then there’s how the outside world identifies us, where I would be more apt to be seen as a black woman.”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • “A Race of Mules”: Mixed-Bloods in Western American Fiction

    “A Race of Mules”: Mixed-Bloods in Western American Fiction

    The Canadian Journal of Native Studies
    Volume 15, Number 1 (1995)
    ISSN  0715-3244
    pages 61-74

    Brian Hubner

    The regional literature of the American west includes a wide variety of characters. One character is hard to find, however: the Métis or mixed blood, for these novels lack appropriate literary space within their structure for Métis. As a result Métis, when they do appear, are forced to choose between either White or Indian worlds.

    Read the entire article here.

  • Pure mixed blood: The multiple identities of Amerasians in South Korea

    Pure mixed blood: The multiple identities of Amerasians in South Korea

    Indiana University
    February 2007
    256 pages
    Publication Number: AAT 3253643

    Sue-Je Lee Gage, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
    Ithaca University

    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  Anthropology, Indiana University

    Political and social currents play a role in how identities are ascribed and claimed by Amerasians in South Korea. Amerasians continue to be racialized as “other” within a set of desirable and undesirable qualities. Attitudes are complicated by the effects of globalization, especially the temporary immigration of US military personnel and guest workers, as well as current fashion and aesthetic trends. Within the context of a diversifying Korea, the very nature of “Amerasian” (American and Asian) and “Kosian” (Korean and South Asian) call into question notions of purity and race within the assumed ethnonation of Korea. How “pure” is pure when it comes to people and identity? In what ways do perceived appearances affect experiences?

    Many Amerasians subscribe to a presumed racial hierarchy incorporated and contextualized in the countries of their births from a western perspective on “race” in their own identity ascription and claiming. However, this hierarchy is neither simple nor fixed. It is complicated by perceptions and notions of “race” and what it means to be “human.” Class, gender, generation, English-speaking ability, appearance/beauty, parentage, education, and social support networks and organization affiliations also influence attitudes and perceptions. My research examines the local, global, and historical reasons that contribute to the ways Amerasians are perceived, as well as the ways they perceive themselves, including the on-going racial/ethnic/political dialogue within Korea and between Korea, the United States, and the international community.

    TABLE OF CONTENTS

    • Dedication
    • Acknowledgments
    • Abstract
    • List of illustrations and appendixes
    • Note to Reader
    • CHAPTER 1. Introduction
      • Methodology
      • Theory
      • Overview of the Book
    • Part I: The Thick and Thin of Blood
      • CHAPTER 2. Minjok and the History of Korean Nationalism
        • Pre-Modern Context and Early Korean Interactions with the West
        • Nationalist Movements and the Articulation of Identities
        • US-ROK Relation
        • The More Recent Period
        • Conclusion
      • CHAPTER 3. Racing Self and Otherness in South Korea
        • Racing the Korean Self
        • Representations
        • Racing the Other in Korea
        • Globalization
        • Conclusion
      • CHAPTER 4. The “Amerasian Problem”: Blood, Duty, and Race
        • Representations of Amerasian Identity in the United States
        • Transnational Advocacy Networks Prior to the 1980s
        • Amerasian Policy Formation
        • Conclusion
    • Part II: The Purity of Mixed Blood
      • CHAPTER 5. Living “Amerasian”
        • The Legacy of a Name: Looking “American,” Feeling “Korean”
        • American Names & Korean Names
        • Marriage & Breeding Out Amerasian Blood
        • Amerasian Entertainers & Celebrities
        • “Our Country” & Patriotism
        • Redefining and Claiming Amerasian Identity
        • Conclusion
      • CHAPTER 6. “We Want What Everybody Else Wants, to Live”
        • Human Rights, International Community & Globalization
        • From “other” to “Other
        • Immigrating to the US – Why and Why not?
        • Conclusion
    • Part III: Globalizing Blood – Intersections and Conclusion
      • CHAPTER 7. Conclusion: Pure Mixed Blood
      • CHAPTER 8. Afterward: Feeling the Want of Something More – ashwiwŏ hada
    • Epilogue
    • Appendix A Glossary
    • Appendix B Illustrations
    • Bibliography
    • Curriculum Vitae

    LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

    • Figure 1.1 US Military Map of Korea. Highlights the major US military installations – Camp Casey in Tongduch’on, Osan Airbase near Pyongt’aek.
    • Figure 1.2 Kyonggi Province (Gyeonggi-do) – Includes Tongduch’on to the north of Seoul, Seoul, and Pyongt’aek to the south of Seoul.
    • Figure 1.3 Shalom House Building
    • Figure 3.1 Korea Special Tourism sign – “This Facility is for Foreigners, Tourists, and US Soldiers Stationed in Korea Only.”
    • Figure 3.2 Club Proof of Inspection by the Second Infantry, US Army in Tongduch’on – “Cheer” is handwritten on the label on the right corner.
    • Figure 3.3 Korea Special Tourism Association Club. Exchange Bank located on the Right Side of the Club.
    • Figure 3.4 Tongduch’on’s Kijich’on
    • Figure 3.5 Molly Holt
    • Figure 3.6 Director Woo, Sun-duk and Two Women Working in the Clubs
    • Figure 3.7 Advertisement for Whitening Lotion for Men
    • Figure 4.1 St. Vincent’s Home Sign
    • Figure 5.1 I am Korean
    • Figure 5.2 I am Korean
    • Figure 5.3 We are Korean
    • Figure 5.4 We are Korean
    • Figure 5.5 I am Korean
    • Figure 5.6 We are Korean
    • Figure 5.7 I am Korean
    • Figure 5.8 We are Korean
    • Figure 5.9 We are Korean
    • Figure 5.10 Pearl S. Buck Summer Camp 2002, Picture Taken at the Blue House
    • Figure 5.11 Mrs. Chung Rodrigues
    • Figure 5.12 Mrs. and Mr. Kang
    • Figure 6.1 ACA Students
    • Figure 6.2 Sports Day
    • Figure 6.3 Durihana ACA Logo
    • Figure 6.4 Marriage and Visa Center in Itaewon
    • Figure 7.1 The Right to Experience Life
    • Figure 8.1 Dance Therapy at Sunlit Sisters’ Center
    • Figure 8.2 Family and Me in Tongduch’on
    • Figure 8.3 Family in Tongduch’on
    • Figure 8.4 Family in Anjong-ri
    • Figure 8.5 Family and Me in Anjong-ri
    • Figure 9.1 Baby Buddhas

    APPENDIXES

    • Appendix A Glossary
    • Appendix B Illustrations
    • Appendix C Map of Tongduch’on with Legend of Clubs and Shops

    Purchase the dissertation here.

  • Balancing Evils Judiciously: The Proslavery Writings of Zephaniah Kingsley

    Balancing Evils Judiciously: The Proslavery Writings of Zephaniah Kingsley

    University Press of Florida
    2000
    160 pages
    6 x 9
    Cloth: ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-1733-4 ISBN 10: 0-8130-1733-5
    Paper: ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-2117-1 ISBN 10: 0-8130-2117-0

    Edited and Annotated by

    Daniel W. Stowell, Director & Editor
    The Papers of Abraham Lincoln

    Foreword by Eugene Genovese

    For the first time, all the proslavery—but also pro-black—writings of Zephaniah Kingsley (1765-1843) appear together in one volume. Kingsley was a slave trader and the owner of a large plantation near Jacksonville in what was then Spanish East Florida. He married one of his slaves and had children with several others.

    While Kingsley eventually emancipated all of his children and their mothers, he became alarmed at the deteriorating status of free blacks after Florida became a territory in 1821. His unusual protest of their treatment, “A Treatise on the Patriarchal System of Society [,as it exists in some governments and colonies in America, and in the United States, under the name of slavery: with its necessity and advantages (1833)],” called for a three-caste society that separated race and class. He envisioned a buffer caste of free people of color between whites and enslaved blacks, but united with whites by economic interests. The treatise simultaneously upheld the legitimacy and necessity of slavery yet assaulted the white southern premise of abject black inferiority.

    Daniel Stowell carefully assembles all of Kingsley’s writings on race and slavery to illuminate the evolution of his thought. The intriguing hybrid text of the four editions of the treatise clearly identifies both subtle and substantial differences among the editions. Other extensively annotated documents show how Kingsley’s interracial family and his experiences in various slaveholding societies in the Caribbean and South America influenced his thinking on race, class, and slavery.

    In despair of ever changing the slaveholding patterns of Florida, Kingsley finally settled his mixed-race children and several of his slaves in Haiti; however, he left behind more than 80 of his slaves to work his plantations in Florida. When he died, these African Americans remained in bondage, unfortunate victims of hardening American racial attitudes and of Kingsley’s effort to “balance evils judiciously.”

  • Shades of Fraternity: Creolization and the Making of Citizenship in French India, 1790–1792

    Shades of Fraternity: Creolization and the Making of Citizenship in French India, 1790–1792

    French Historical Studies
    Volume 31, Number 4 (2008)
    pages 581-607
    DOI: 10.1215/00161071-2008-007

    Adrian Carton
    Centre for Cultural Research
    University of Western Sydney, Australia

    On October 16, 1790, a group of topas men wrote a petition to the Colonial Assembly at Pondichéry, protesting the decision of September that year to exclude them from the electoral list of active citizens on the basis of “race.” These propertied, free men of color demanded to have the same rights as Europeans and the métis. While historians of the French empire have long considered how mulatto and creole people in the French Caribbean negotiated the boundaries of citizenship after the Revolution, the debate that emerged in India offers a different view. This essay argues that the topas drew on precedents from other French colonies, as well as on the status of foreigners in France itself, to argue that domicile (ius solis) rather than bloodline (ius sanguinis) formed the basis of what it meant to be French. Hence skin color could not be a barrier to citizenship rights.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Historicizing Hybridity and the Politics of Location: Three Early Colonial Indian Narratives

    Historicizing Hybridity and the Politics of Location: Three Early Colonial Indian Narratives

    Journal of Intercultural Studies
    Volume 28, Issue 1 (2007)
    pages 143-155
    DOI: 10.1080/07256860601082996

    Adrian Carton
    Centre for Cultural Research
    University of Western Sydney, Australia

    From White Mughals to Vikram Seth, novels, historical blockbusters and more nuanced anthropological and postcolonial critiques have exposed the fiction of fixed notions of “race” through sensitive understandings of the liminal space of the “inter-racial” relationship and the “mixed-race” experience. In an era where the textual and cultural production of hybridity has become a new form of cultural capital, articulations of racial “inbetween-ness” have also become somewhat universalised and romanticised. While acknowledging the radical potential of these new paradigms of transnational slippage and métissage as an affront to the old narratives of racial certainty, this article challenges the universalization of the term “mixed-race” in the context of colonial India, both ontologically and historically. By historicising cultural difference according to the social syntax that gives it meaning, it asks whether the term “mixed race” has political relevance in all colonial spaces and across time and culture or whether it needs to be interrogated as an historical product in itself. Finallly, this article turns to the politics of location in a global context to illustrate the limits of Homi Bhabha’s notion of the “third space” by moving beyond celebratory and static notions of the “mixed-race” experience.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Identity Notes Part One: Playing in the Light

    Identity Notes Part One: Playing in the Light

    American University Law Review
    Volume 45, Number 3 (February 1996)
    pages 695-720

    Adrienne D. Davis, Vice Provost; William M. Van Cleve Professor of Law
    Washington University in St. Louis

    What parts do the invention and development of whiteness play in the construction of what is loosely described as “American”?’

    INTRODUCTION

    There is now a well-developed and compelling body of scholarship challenging the notion that race is either a natural or a scientific category. Scholarly treatments regarding the social construction of race are still finding their way into law and legal scholarship. Most of these treatments argue that race is socially constructed. This Essay makes a different point. Using two cases from the early and midnineteenth century, I discuss how race is socially constructed, why it matters, and how the process can appear in issues as dry as an allocation of the burden of proof. In particular, I focus on the construction of whiteness, which, I argue, drives the process of legally classifying groups of color.

    A focus on the politics of local contests invites an archaeological exploration of historic sites where a black/white paradigm of race was in crisis and vulnerable to correction. In each of these crises, however, the force of the paradigm itself prevailed, reinscribing itself with yet more force in law and the lives of all three groups implicated: African Americans, other groups of color, and whites. An historical assessment of the relationship of other groups of color to a black/white paradigm reveals the paradigm as not only undescriptive and inaccurate, but debilitating for legal analysis, as well as civil rights oriented organizing.

    The two cases reveal distinct dynamics of the binary model, which I suggest is hegemonic for the following reasons. A primary mechanism of this model is its disciplining function on other groups of color seeking legal rights and recognition. It is an organizing principle for knowledge (here, law), it has an internal hierarchy of power, it masks this hierarchy through a seemingly neutral shell of “race,” and it operates as self-reinforcing through its disciplining mechanism. In addition, in classicly hegemonic fashion, the paradigm includes rules that prove to be internally inconsistent. The cases reveal the internal contradiction of the rules employed by courts to establish racial identity at law. In one opinion, jurists use mutually exclusive determinations of racial identity in resolving a single legal matter. The underlying facts and interests involved suggest that the court’s reasoning was driven not by the interests of the immediate parties, but rather by a larger, perhaps unconscious, desire to define white identity and secure white liberty interests.

    Finally, I hope that the contrast of the two cases demonstrates that the black/white paradigm exercises influence on legal reasoning across time and geographic space, and also that the paradigm itself appears to be a natural ordering, obscuring the assumption of a white subject position. Though involving seemingly unrelated legal conflicts, the cases are linked together through the discursive structure formed by binarism. It orders the legal logic and rhetoric of the judges, as well as the arguments of the litigants. Both cases prove to be inescapably embedded with racial determinations and, inevitably, legal constructions.

    What follows stems from a series of discussions, and remains an inquiry directed toward certain suggestive episodes within a much broader history that I leave to others to continue to explore and excavate…

    Read the entire article here.

  • In the Middle, In Between: Cultural Hybridity, Community Rejection, and the Destabilization of Race in Percival Everett’s “Erasure”, Adam Mansbach’s “Angry Black White Boy”, and Danzy Senna’s “Caucasia”

    In the Middle, In Between: Cultural Hybridity, Community Rejection, and the Destabilization of Race in Percival Everett’s “Erasure”, Adam Mansbach’s “Angry Black White Boy”, and Danzy Senna’s “Caucasia”

    Howard University
    2011
    84 pages
    Publication Number: AAT 1495397
    ISBN: 9781124728568

    Laura R. Perez

    A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Howard University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the Department of English

    Cultural hybridity, a term first introduced by post-colonial theorist Homi Bhabha, has been a shifting and difficult to define concept within academic discourse. My thesis will focus on cultural hybridity as the embodiment of a pluralistic identity that encompasses the characteristics or attributes of more than one culture or race. I will examine three contemporary literary works of racial satire—Percival Everett’s Erasure, Adam Mansbach’s Angry Black White Boy, and Danzy Senna’s Caucasia—that present culturally hybrid protagonists and explore the ways in which these protagonists are utilized to destabilize race. Furthermore, I will demonstrate the tensions that this destabilization creates through community rejections of each protagonists’ hybridity – tensions that become inherent to hybridity itself.

    My exploration will include an analysis of the protagonists’ hybridity—the ways in which they do not fit into the existing notions of what blackness or whiteness is—and how this hybridity is marginalized by their communities. Following this, I will explicate the protagonists’ responses to their marginalization—their creation of dual identities or alter egos and the racial/psychoanalytic significance of this process. I will draw upon post-colonial and critical race theory writings, as well as Freudian and Lacanian theory, to frame my analysis. But most importantly, I will draw upon the work of scholars—including Marwan Kraidy, Jopi Nyman, Sabrine Broeck, Pnina Werbner, Peter Burke, and Robert Young—to theorize hybridity within my analysis.

    Finally, I will examine the novels’ conclusions, during which the protagonists’ dual identities are forcefully merged, and demonstrate the lack of resolution that this merging creates. This examination will reveal that the community rejections of hybridity in each novel are, in themselves, impossible to mediate. Thus, I will prove that each protagonist’s hybrid positioning not only destabilizes race by challenging the concreteness of racial categorizations, but that this positioning, and the community’s response to it, also demonstrates the tensions inherent to hybridity itself. In this way, each text undermines the black-white binary, while also affirming the tensions that result from not willfully engaging in it.

    Table of Contents

    • Thesis Committee
    • ABSTRACT
    • CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
      • Background to the Problem
      • Statement of the Problem
      • Review of Literature
      • Theoretical Framework and Methodology
      • Plan of Research
      • Definition of Terms
    • CHAPTER 2: PERCIVAL EVERETT’S ERASURE
    • CHAPTER 3: ADAM MANSBACH’S ANGRY BLACK WHITE BOY
    • CHAPTER 4: DANZY SENNA’S CAUCASIA
    • REFERENCES

    Purchase the dissertation here.

  • ‘Obama’s My Dad’: Mixed Race Suspects, Political Anxiety and the New Imperialism

    ‘Obama’s My Dad’: Mixed Race Suspects, Political Anxiety and the New Imperialism

    thirdspace: a journal of feminist theory & culture
    Volume 10, Number 1 (2011)

    Rachel Gorman, Lecturer
    Women and Gender Studies Institute
    University of Toronto

    In this article I will argue that the ideology of white supremacy is currently being reproduced as an ideology of political supremacy. I explore narratives of Obama and my father, and bring a transnational feminist framework to an examination of ontological and cultural ideologies of mixed race identity.

    All my life I have encountered suspicion about my race. As a child in a working class neighbourhood of Toronto, Canada in the 1970s, my mixed race identity seemed to be an ontological threat to my European immigrant and white settler neighbours, and my ‘Mediterranean’ appearance rendered me unintelligible in relation to Blackness As a pre-teen transplanted to Muscat, Oman in the 1980s, I was intelligible as Arab, which, given Oman’s historical and geographical proximity to Eastern Africa, did not preclude African ancestry. While I was unremarkable at the national school, I was questioned by British ‘expats’ when I circulated in the international neighbourhood, despite (or perhaps because of) the presence of several mixed families. Back in Toronto during the aggressive intensification of war and occupation in the Middle East in the 2000s, my racial ambiguity has become suspicious in new ways. I am dating this shift from September 2000, the beginning of the second Intifada, not September 2001, when the New American Century went prime time. Much happened between the two Septembers–mass protests at the summit on the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas at Québec City in April 2001; the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa in August 2001. In the weeks following Durban, the global struggle to maintain white supremacy was recast as the will to reestablish American political supremacy. It was also during this time that, as an antiwar and anti-occupation organizer, my racial ambiguity was reconstituted through suspicions over whether I harbour dangerous worldviews…

    …A phenomenology of race is useful to continue to dispel the illusions of white supremacists who argue that Obama’s presidency means we are living in a post-racist world. Indeed, there are many questions to be asked about how mixed race people are emerging as tropes of the triumph of a liberal brand of diversity—as Kimberley DaCosta argues, the identity ‘multiracial’ emerged in the US context in part through a struggle over racial categories on government forms, and in part through niche market recognition. In order to resist the tendency to analytically collapse antiracism into advocacy for market inclusion, we need a phenomenology of race that allows us to grasp both ontology and culture in relation to political consciousness…

    Read the entire article here.