Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Saint Augustine’s College senior’s documentary wins award at film festival

    Saint Augustine’s College senior’s documentary wins award at film festival

    Saint Augustine’s College, Raleigh, North Carolina
    Press Release
    2010-10-19

    LaToya Sutton, Communications Specialist

    Eric Barstow’s short documentary, “Bi/Racial Me,” won the “Best Short Documentary” award at the Urban Mediamakers Film Festival, held October. 14-17, [2010] in Norcross, Georgia The film was an official film selection festival. Barstow is a senior theatre and film major at Saint Augustine’s College.

    Barstow’s documentary offers a glimpse into what life is like for those who are racially mixed and explores the issues they face. The film’s trailer is available online here.

    The Urban Mediamakers Film Festival places an emphasis on showcasing work produced by or featuring people of African, Asian and Latin descent. The three-day festival gives actors, writers, filmmakers, musicians and graphic designers an opportunity to learn from and network with other industry professionals.

    Read the entire press release here.

  • The Japanese in multiracial Peru, 1899-1942

    The Japanese in multiracial Peru, 1899-1942

    University of California, San Diego
    November 2009
    335 pages
    Publication Number: AAT 3355652

    Stephanie Carol Moore

    This study analyzes the integration of the Japanese into the politics of race and nation in Peru during the period from 1899 to 1942. The first generation of Japanese immigrants arrived in Peru at the apex of debates on national racial identity and popular challenges to the white oligarchy’s exclusive hold on national political and economic power. This dissertation examines how not only elites, but also working- and middle-class movements advocated the exclusion of the Japanese as a way of staking their claims on the nation. In this study, I argue that Peru’s marginalization of the Japanese sprang from racist structures developed in the colonial and liberal republican eras as well as from global eugenic ideologies and discourses of “yellow peril” that had penetrated Peru. The Japanese were seen through Orientalist eyes, conceptualized and homogenized as a race that acted as a single organism and that would bring only detriment to the Peruvian racial “whitening” project. Eugenics conflated women with their reproduction, leading “racial science” advocates to portray Japanese women in Peru as the nation’s ultimate danger and accuse them of attempting to conquer Peru “through their wombs.”

    The Japanese men and women who settled in Peru, however, were also actors in their Peruvian communities. Many Japanese laborers, largely Okinawan, were participants in rural labor movements in Peru. Policymakers, hacienda owners, and local power holders, however, undermined class-based challenges to their authority by demonizing the Japanese as a cultural, racial, and political threat to the Peruvian nation. In stepping out of their rung on the racial hierarchy, the Japanese shop keepers also provoked resentment both among their fellow Peruvian business owners and elements within the urban labor movement. The deeper the Japanese Peruvians sank their roots into Peru, the more shrill became the accusations that they were “inassimilable.” Finally, opportunistic politicians played upon the Peruvian elites’ deepest fears by accusing the Japanese immigrants of joining with Peru’s indigenous people to launch a race war.

    Table of Contents

    • Signature Page
    • Table of Contents
    • List of Figures
    • Lis of Tables
    • Map
    • Acknowledgements
    • Vita
    • Abstract
    • Introduction
    • Chapter One: The Historical and Hemispheric Context of Japanese Immigration to Peru: Independence to 1920s
    • Chapter Two: Japanese Workers on Peru’s Sugar Plantations, 1890-1923
    • Chapter Three: Conflict and Collaboration: Yanaconas in the Chancay Valley
    • Chapter Four: The Butcher, The Baker, and the Hatmaker: Working Class Protests against the Japanese Limeños
    • Chapter Five: Race, Economic Protection, and Yellow Peril: Local Anti-Asian Campaigns and National Policy
    • Chapter Six: Peru’s “Racial Destiny”: Citizenship, Reproduction, and Yellow Peril
    • Epilogue
    • Conclusion
    • References

    List of Fugures

    • Figure 5.1: Anti-Asia cartoons
    • Figure 5.2: “The Asian Metamorphosis”
    • Figure 5.3: Business License of Y. Nishimura, Tailor, Lima
    • Figure 6.1: Mundo Gráfico Cartoon

    List of Tables

    • Table 4.1: Selected Professions of Peruvians and Foreigners (Lima 1908)
    • Table 4.2: 1940 Investigation of Japanese Bakeries, Lima
    • Table 6.1: Births to Japanese Women in Lima

    Order the dissertation here.

  • Mulatto Nation: An installation by Lezley Saar

    Mulatto Nation: An installation by Lezley Saar

    The List Gallery at Swarthmore College
    2003-02-28 through 2003-03-30

    Lezley Saar

    From: Mulattos at War: Battle of ‘Halfway’

    Historian Lezley Saar, professor emerita from MU (Mulatto University) and a lifelong outspoken activist for the Mulatto Movement, traces the history of the Mulatto Nation from its bumpy beginnings to its conflicted present. She has codified the five stages of its history, depicted here in visual form, as follows: “Birth of a Nation”, “The Founding Mothers and Fathers of the Mulatto Nation”, “The Mulattoville Athenaeum”, “Alienation” and “Materialism and the Mulatto”. This site is dedicated to all the Mulattos, Quadroons, Octoroons, Lily-skins, Creoles, Cafe-au-Laits, Hybrids, Half-Breeds, and High Yellow House Niggers who have championed this great Nation.

    For for information, click here.

  • The Professor’s Daughter: A Novel

    The Professor’s Daughter: A Novel

    Picador an Imprint of Macmillan
    January 2006
    288 pages
    5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
    Paperback ISBN: 978-0-312-42568-5, ISBN10: 0-312-42568-6

    Emily Raboteau, Associate Professor of English
    The City College of New York

    “My father is black and my mother is white and my brother is a vegetable.” When Emma Boudreaux’s older brother winds up in a coma after a freak accident, she loses her compass: only Bernie was able to navigate—if not always diplomatically—the terrain of their biracial identity. And although her father and brother are bound by a haunting past that Emma slowly uncovers, she sees that she might just escape.

    In exhilarating prose, The Professor’s Daughter traces the borderlands of race and family, contested territory that gives rise to rage, confusion, madness, and invisibility. This astonishingly original voice surges with energy and purpose.

  • Mulattobama

    Mulattobama

    The Guardian
    2008-08-14

    Emily Raboteau, Associate Professor of English
    The City College of New York

    As Barack Obama’s presidential campaign has shown, being mixed race in America means balancing black and white identities

    My boyfriend, Victor, and I flew into Kingston the day after Barack Obama clinched the Democratic party nomination. We were giddy. A trip to Jamaica and a potential black president. We were discussing Obama’s campaign on the flight down when Victor suddenly asked: “How would you feel if our baby came out looking white?”

    “Negro, puhleez,” I said, polishing off my airline peanuts. “I am not pregnant.”

    “Answer the question,” he pushed…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Discourses on Miscegenation in the Caribbean

    Black and white sexual pairings, therefore, became a widespread phenomenon that originated from a demographic imbalance, but expanded and developed through a cultural fetishization of women of color. The islands, built upon complex systems of violence and sexual control, promoted and legitimated interracial relationships. Caribbean visitors certainly held this impression. Pierre McCallum emphasized the importance of finding a lover of color in Trinidad: “On the arrival of the European, his first object is, to look out for a mistress, either of the black, yellow, or livid kind.” “As for the native creole,” McCallum continued, “a female companion is provided for him from among the slaves of the family, at an early age, to prevent his going astray to increase the stock of his neighbours.” McCallum’s account indicates the ubiquity of West Indian miscegenation, its role as a measure of status, and its sanction by all members of society, including relatives. Not only did family members support such behavior, but they promoted it within a plantation endogamy to increase further slave holdings – albeit enslaved kin. Such descriptions reveal a West Indian system perfectly at ease with interracial pairings, if not encouraging of them. This sexual tolerance dramatically grew the islands’ population of color…

    …The culture of miscegenation that developed in the British West Indies came from demographic conditions, as well as customary promotions of common practice. Although white men grossly outnumbered white women in most Caribbean islands, white families still survived. Indeed, white islanders’ seemingly universal engagement with women of color belied actual gender imbalances within their populations. Cross-racial relations became a part of West Indian culture; married and single men alike had their mistresses of color. For imperial observers, this confirmed long-standing associations between the West Indies and anarchic morality. The mistress of color, so often portrayed in travel accounts and expositions, visibly embodied island vice. British commentary condemned her, her lover, and West Indian society as a whole. The men in these relationships were, after all, not simply colonial “others,” but friends and relatives of Britons back home.

    Daniel Alan Livesay, “Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Migration from the West Indies to Britain, 1750-1820” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2010) pages 29-30 .

  • Mixing Blood: What Does “Biracialism” Do to the Notion of “Race”? [Book Review]

    Mixing Blood: What Does “Biracialism” Do to the Notion of “Race”? [Book Review]

    PINS (Psychology in Society)
    Volume 31 (2005)
    pages 99-105

    Gerhard Maré, Professor of Sociology
    University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban

    Book review: Rockquemore, Kerry Ann & David L. Brunsma (2002) Beyond Black: Biracial identity in America. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. ISBN 0-7619-2322-5 pbk. Pages 256.

    The term and notion of “biracial” confirms a perception of “races”, resting as it does on the acceptance of the existence, in some form, of two distinct “somethings” (races) that give rise to a combination. At the same time, paradoxically, it also adds confusion to the apparent certainty of race existence – what meaning can “race” have if it is so easily undermined through the creation of a totally new racial group or of a person who straddles “races”? Can we then have an infinite number of “races” through the infinitely various combinations of union that are possible?

    In America, “biracial” challenges the “one drop of blood rule” that for so long turned the offspring of a dilution of the hegemonic notion “white” into “black”, and not into “biracial”, or into “Coloured” as was the case in South Africa. In the strange world of race thinking, and of racism and “race” or racist power, one drop could not, ever, turn “black” into “white”. This rule came to be accepted and then supported by black Americans as well, for a number of reasons.

    In academic research and writing, the area of “race mixing” seems to be gaining in popularity. As Parker and Song note, “Of course racial mixture is nothing new – it has been the history of the world. What stands out as novel are the forms of political contestation gathering around the topic of ‘mixed race’” (2001:1). Paul Spickard (2001) refers to the “boom in biracial biography”. Charmaine Wijeyesinghe (2001:129) writes that “Multiracial identity is the newest chapter in the evolving field of racial identity development. The heightened interest in the experience of Multiracial people is fuelled by changing social demographics, an increasing number of Multiracial people who identify with their racial ancestries, and the emergence of groups advocating the rights of Multiracial people”. Interest in this aspect of social life was also illustrated by the appearance of a second edition, in 2002, of Barbara Tizard and Ann Phoenix’s Black, White or Mixed Race? Race and Racism in the Lives of Young People of Mixed Parentage, first published in 1993.In South Africa, too, several contributions in the field of “mixed race” identity include an edited collection by Zimitri Erasmus (2001) and an article by Jane Battersby (2003).

    “Bi-racialism”, “hybridity”, “cross-racial”, “mulatto”, “coloured”, and so on, are terms that in different contexts signify an unnatural “mixing of blood” – in other words, moving beyond what is usually socially acceptable. The investigations that are reported on in books on this topic are of cases that need to be examined because of the disturbance it implies to the certainty of “race” categories, ripples on the smooth surface of the pond of race thinking. Of course, earlier, studies of the same social phenomenon set out to prove the horrors that arose from such mixing, the taint and the supposed mental and physical deficiencies that were to be the inevitable destiny of such people, the tragedies that befell them!

    As Zimitri Erasmus comments on “mixture”: “There is no such thing as the Black ‘race’. Blackness, whiteness and colouredness exist, but they are cultural, historical and political identities. To talk about ‘race mixture’, ‘miscegenation’, ‘inter-racial’ sex, and ‘mixed descent’ is to use terms and habits of thought inherited from the very ‘race science’ that was used to justify oppression, brutality and the marginalisation of ‘bastard people’“ (Erasmus (ed) 2001: Editor’s note)…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Between Race; Beyond Race: The Experience of Self-Identification of Indian-White Biracial Young Adults and the factors Affecting their Choices of Identity

    Between Race; Beyond Race: The Experience of Self-Identification of Indian-White Biracial Young Adults and the factors Affecting their Choices of Identity

    PINS (Psychology in Society)
    Issue 34 (2006)
    pages 1-16

    Dennis Francis, Dean of Education
    University of The Free State, South Africa

    This study, based on my doctoral research, is an exploration of how nine Indian-White biracial young adults interpret their social reality, especially with regard to their understanding and experience of racial identity. I chose life histories as a method in line with my view of social identity as a resource that people draw on in constructing personal narratives, which provide meaning and a sense of continuity to their lives. As a life history researcher I started with the assumption that by asking the participants to tell me stories of their lives I would gain access to how biracial young adults interpret their social world and what they believe about themselves. All of the primary research took place within the Durban area. In giving an account of their identities, the nine biracial young adults in my study described their life worlds as the sum of many parts, which included but was not limited to their racial identity. With regards to racial identity, the participants chose a variety of ways to name themselves. Four self-identified as Indian, one chose not to place himself into a racial category, and four named themselves as Indian and White or mixed race. None of the nine Indian-White biracial young adults in my study named themselves as White, and none identified themselves as Coloured. The participants named a combination of factors as influencing how they identified – at times these were not without inconsistencies and contradictions. While some factors were more salient than others, I argue that no single factor that influences identity can be looked at in isolation or as assumed to be more important from any other. In their account of the various factors that contributed to their understanding of racial identity, none of the participants identified their assigned racial classification as having a direct influence on their choice of racial identity.

    Read the entire article here.

  • Centuries of skin

    Centuries of skin

    Ragged Raven Press
    2010
    80 pages
    ISBN: 978-0-9552552-9-8

    Joanna Ezekiel

    Some of the poems in Joanna Ezekiel’s first full poetry collection Centuries of skin engage imaginatively with her discoveries, in childhood and adolescence, of her dual Indian Jewish and Eastern European Jewish heritage. In the title poem, Centuries of skin, Ezekiel responds to overhearing in synagogue that, “She’s not a proper Jew”, with “Perhaps I’ll shout./Hurl my outlawed voice over wide hats…” and in “Rainbow”, she pictures her family in England and India connected by a rainbow, “our family tree of praying voices/murmuring the seven colours”. Economic imagery, raw honesty, and wry humour characterise Ezekiel’s poems.

    Joanna blogs at delayed reactions.

    Rainbow

    Friday nights, stumbling Sabbath blessings
    with my brothers and parents, I’d imagine a rainbow
    that stretched from our home to Bombay,
    our family tree of praying voices
    murmuring the seven colours
    radiant as peacock blessings
    or precious stones, its arc transcending
    timezones, continents, fractured partitions.
    climbing through dense English cloud
    to set in a haze of Eastern red.
    I didn’t know then that over it
    my father’s parents loomed, large
    as Buddhas and angry as the sun.

    A braid of words

    I cling to the edge
    of the roar of a lion,
    it’s white-gold edge
    like a coast at sunrise.
    My feet hang clear
    of the quicksand below
    as it bubbles and sucks.
    I will scramble up
    to face the roar,
    it’s mountains and valleys,
    my breath a sirocco,
    my pulse a landslide.
    I will hear my calm voice
    through the tremor,
    a braid of words
    like a pulley-cable
    to haul myself across
    until I fall off
    into full noon sunlight,
    blinking, my palms
    stripped and raw.

  • Wild Cinnamon and Winter Skin

    Wild Cinnamon and Winter Skin

    Peepal Tree Press: The Best in Caribbean Writing
    2007-03-05
    64 pages
    ISBN: 9781845230500

    Seni Seneviratne

    Seni Seneviratne’s debut collection offers a poetic landscape that echoes themes of migration, family, love and loss and reflects her personal journey as a woman of Sri Lankan and English heritage.

    The poems cross oceans and centuries. In ‘Cinnamon Roots’ Seni Seneviratne travels from colonial Britain to Ceylon in the 15th century and back to Yorkshire in the 20th Century; in A Wider View time collapses and carries her from a 21st century Leeds back to the flax mills of the 19th century; poems like ‘Grandad’s Insulin’, based on childhood memories, place her in 1950’s Yorkshire but echo links with her Sri Lankan heritage.