Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • “War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art”

    “War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art”

    Critical Ethnic Studies Association Conference
    University of California, Riverside
    Critical Ethnic Studies and the Future of Genocide: Settler Colonialism/Heteropatriarchy/White Supremacy
    2011-03-10 through 2011-03-12

    Laura Kina, Associate Professor of Art, Media, and Design and distinguished Vincent de Paul Professor
    DePaul University

    Wei Ming Dariotis, Associate Professor Asian American Studies
    San Francisco State University

    Gina Osterloh, Artist
    Silverlens Gallery, Manila Philippines
    François Ghebaly, Los Angeles

    “War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art” investigates the construction of mixed race/mixed heritage Asian American (or, controversially, “Hapa”) identity in the United States. As an increasingly ethnically ambiguous Asian American generation is coming of age in an era of “optional identity,” “War Baby/Love Child” examines how, or even if, mixed Asian Americans are addressing their hybrid identities in their artwork.

    For more information, click here.

  • ASNAMST 173S: Transcultural and Multiethnic Lives: Contexts, Controversies, and Challenges (AFRICAAM 173S, CSRE 173S)

    ASNAMST 173S: Transcultural and Multiethnic Lives: Contexts, Controversies, and Challenges (AFRICAAM 173S, CSRE 173S)

    Stanford University
    Spring 2011

    Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu

    Lived experience of people who dwell in the border world of race and nation where they negotiate transcultural and multiethnic identities and politics. Comparative, historical, and global contexts such as family and class. Controversies, such as representations of mixed race people in media and multicultural communities. What the lives of people like Tiger Woods and Barack Obama reveal about how the marginal is becoming mainstream.

    For more information, click here.

  • The Browning and Yellowing of Whiteness

    The Browning and Yellowing of Whiteness

    The Black Commentator
    2005

    Tamara K. Nopper, Adjunct Professor of Asian American Studies
    University of Pennsylvania

    Latino/as and Asians Americans do not necessarily reject dominant culture and ideology when it comes to racial politics.

    A Review of Who is White?: Latinos, Asians, and the New Black/Nonblack Divide by George Yancey (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2003).

    In 1903 the ever-forward looking W. E. B. DuBois declared, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.”  A century later, the relevance of DuBois’ observation is being contested by those preoccupied with the increasing ethnic and cultural diversification of the US.  Many argue that DuBois’ centralization of the boundary between the entangled black and white worlds is outdated, going so far as to propose that we now have “colorlines.”  Such gestures are more than semantic and instead imply that blackness as the definitive social boundary for US race relations is either less pronounced or completely erased by the significant presence of nonblack racial minorities such as Latino/as and Asian Americans.

    This is precisely why George Yancey’s book Who is White?: Latinos, Asians, and the New Black/Nonblack Divide is such a necessary read.  Yancey, a sociologist at the University of North Texas, provides compelling evidence that supports the (unstated) hypothesis that the color line of the twentieth century will remain firmly entrenched in the twenty-first. Using as his point of departure the popular projection that whites will soon be a minority group, Yancey opens his book by arguing that whites will remain the majority despite the growing populations of Latino/as and Asian Americans.  How can the increase of Latino/as and Asian Americans enforce, rather than disrupt, the color line?  Simple.  By 2050, according to Yancey, most Latino/as and Asian Americans will be white…

    …Overall, while some will surely dismiss Who is White? as “academic”—a practice many activists and even academics engage in when confronted with political conclusions that make them uncomfortable—Yancey’s research is extremely relevant for contemporary racial politics.  Most importantly, Yancey’s findings hint at possible inadequacies of current approaches to “multiracial” America, most of which emphasize a white/non-white paradigm that minimizes or outright dismisses the reality of antiblack racism as the structuring and generative ideology of US race relations and social inequality…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Greg Carroll Draws Large Crowd for Talk on Melungeon Heritage

    Greg Carroll Draws Large Crowd for Talk on Melungeon Heritage

    West Virginia Archives & History
    West Virginia Division of Culture & History
    Volume 11, Number 8 (October 2010)
    page 2

    Archives historian Greg Carroll drew a large crowd for his talk [2010-09-09] on groups of people in the Appalachian area and beyond commonly called Melungeon. To view photos of the evening, [click here]. If you were unable to attend and would like more information regarding Melungeon, mixed race, or tri-racial isolate groups, you may contact Carroll at (304) 558-0230 or greg.b.carroll@wv.gov.

  • AAS 4570 – Passing in African-American Imagination

    AAS 4570 – Passing in African-American Imagination

    University of Virginia
    The Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American & African Studies
    Spring 2011

    Alisha Gaines, Post-Doctoral Fellow (English)
    Duke University

    This course considers the canonical African American literary tradition and popular culture texts that think through the boundaries of blackness and identity through the organizing trope of passing. We will engage texts that represent passing as a liberating performance act, a troubling crime against authenticity, an economic necessity, and/or a stunt of liberal heroics. By the end of the course we will evaluate how our thinking about passing inflects our understanding of supposedly stable categories of identity including gender, class, and sexuality as well as begin to think critically about the relationships between blood and the law, love and politics, opportunity and economics, and acting and being.

    Questions to be considered include: What do we make of a literary tradition that supposedly gains coherence around issues of racial belonging but begins by questioning race itself?  What work does the highly gendered depictions of the “tragic mulatta” figure (a mixed-race woman undone by her periled existence between two racialized worlds) do for, and to, African American literature? What happens when the color line crosses you?  Or in other words, where is agency in this discussion?  Do we really know blackness when we see it?  Hear it?  How (and why) is blackness performed and for (and by) whom?  In what ways is identity shaped by who can and can’t pass?  How has globalization made blackness an even more accessible commodity?  How has hip hop?  And finally, aren’t we all passing for something?

    For more information, click here.

  • SOCI 006 601 – Race and Ethnic Relations

    SOCI 006 601 – Race and Ethnic Relations

    University of Pennsylvania
    College of Liberal and Professional Studies
    Spring 2011

    Tamara Nopper, Adjunct Professor of Asian American Studies

    The election of Barack Obama as the United States’ first Black president has raised questions about whether we have entered a post-racial society. This course examines the idea of racial progress that is at the heart of such a question, paying close attention to how social scientists have defined and measured racial inequality and progress in the last century. We will consider how dramatic demographic shifts, the growing number of interracial families and individuals who identify as mixed-race, trans-racial adoptions, and the increased visibility of people of color in media, positions of influence, and as celebrities inform scholarly and popular debates about racial progress. Along with some classic works, we will also read literature regarding the class versus race debate and color-blind racism. In the process, students will become familiar with sociological data often drawn from in debates about racial progress and will also develop analytical and critical thinking skills.

    For more information, click here.

  • “Mixed Race, White Mother: Love and Identity in the Age of Obama”

    “Mixed Race, White Mother: Love and Identity in the Age of Obama”

    8th Floor, Raymond Hall
    State University of New York, Potsdam
    2011-03-22, 16:00 EST (Local Time)

    Dr. Traci Fordham-Hernandez, Associate Professor of Performance and Communication Arts
    St. Lawrence University

    Part of the SUNY Potsdam Women’s and Gender Studies Anne R. Malone Lecture Series.

    For more information, click here.

  • “Race” Trials

    Trials contesting racial identity illustrate the ways that racial categories have come into being over the course of U.S. history.  Through them we can observe the changing meaning of race throughout our history, and the changes and continuities in racism itself, from the roots in a slave society up through the twentieth century.  Drawing lines between “races” determined not only who could be free but also who could be capable of citizenship.  Thus the trials of racial identity became trials about the attributes of citizenship for the men and women who were their subjects.

    Gross, Ariela J. 2008. What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America. page 7. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

  • The Marrow of Tradition: Electronic Edition

    The Marrow of Tradition: Electronic Edition

    Boston; New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company
    The Riverside Press, Cambridge
    1901
    329 pages

    Electronic Edition
    University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
    1997
    Text scanned (OCR) by Kathy Graham
    Text encoded by Teresa Church and Natalia Smith
    Filesize: ca. 600KB

    Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932)

    The electronic edition is a part of the UNC-CH database “A Digitized Library of Southern Literature, Beginnings to 1920.”

    • Any hyphens occurring in line breaks have been removed, and the trailing part of a word has been joined to the preceding line.
    • All quotation marks and ampersand have been transcribed as entity references.
    • All double right and left quotation marks are encoded as ” and ” respectively.
    • All single right and left quotation marks are encoded as ‘ and ‘ respectively.
    • Indentation in lines has not been preserved.
    • Running titles have not been preserved.
    • Spell-check and verification made against printed text using Author/Editor (SoftQuad) and Microsoft Word spell checkers.

    Partial summary by Mary Alice Kirkpatrick from 2004:

    …Chesnutt’s ambitious and complex novel, The Marrow of Tradition (1901), was based on the 1898 race riot in Wilmington, North Carolina, which some of Chesnutt’s relatives survived. This event left a considerable number of African Americans dead and expelled thousands more from their homes. Set in the fictional town of Wellington, The Marrow of Tradition centers on two prominent families, the Carterets and the Millers, and explores their remarkably intersected lives. Major Philip Carteret, editor of The Morning Chronicle newspaper, emerges as the unabashed white supremacist who, along with General Belmont and Captain George McBane, seeks to overthrow “Negro domination,” setting in motion those events that culminate in the murderous “revolution.” Dr. William Miller, following his medical education in the North and abroad, has returned home to “his people,” establishing a local black hospital in Wellington. Dr. Miller’s wife, Janet, is the racially mixed half-sister of Major Carteret’s wife, Olivia. Not surprisingly, Olivia Merkell Carteret struggles to suppress the truth of her father’s scandalous second marriage to Julia Brown, his black servant and Janet Miller’s mother. The novel also contains several intricate subplots involving a wide cast of secondary characters: a heroic rebel’s vow to avenge his father’s wrongful death; a staged robbery that results in an ostensible murder; romantic entanglements; and endless doublings and pairings of both white and black characters. Yet throughout The Marrow of Tradition, Chesnutt depicts the problems afflicting the New South, offering an invective that criticizes the nation’s panicked responses to issues of social equality and miscegenation…

    Read the entire summary here.

    Read the entire novel here in HTML or XML/TEI format.

  • A Critical Race Theory Approach to Understanding Cinematic Representations of the Mixed Race Experience

    A Critical Race Theory Approach to Understanding Cinematic Representations of the Mixed Race Experience

    Center for Race & Gender
    University of California, Berkeley
    2010-12-08

    10/5/2010 CRG Forum: Mixed Race/Mixed Space in Media Culture & Militarized Zones
    “A Critical Race Theory Approach to Understanding Cinematic Representations of the Mixed Race Experience”

    Kevin Escudero, Ethnic Studies

    This presentation focuses on the developmental trajectory of the portrayal of mixed race people in mainstream media.  Primarily looking at film, but also analyzing other media texts such as photography, stand-up comedy and particular sub-genres of film (Disney, television series, etc.) this presentation seeks to understand the ways in which different forms of media have portrayed mixed race people pre and post-Loving.  While much work has been done on the depiction of mixed race people in media post-Loving, there is a need for such work to be contextualized within the pre-Loving depictions of mixed race.  Furthermore, very little attention has been given to the ways in which pre-1967 depictions of mixed race characters (e.g. the tragic mulatto) oftentimes reflect as well as perpetuated racist stereotypes of mixed race people.  These depictions of mixed race people during the anti-miscegenation era are what I argue, has given rise to the utilization by mixed race people of multiple forms of self-expression available through various media in the post-Loving era.

    Listen to the presentation here.