Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • The Racial Politics of Mixed Race

    The Racial Politics of Mixed Race

    Journal of Social Philosophy
    Volume 30, Issue 2, Summer 1999
    pages 276–294
    DOI: 10.1111/0047-2786.00018

    Lisa Tessman, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies
    Binghamton University, State University of New York

    Recently there has been an increasing amount of attention given in academic, political, and popular settings in the United States to the experience and identities of mixed-race or multiracial people.  In the academic realm, there is a growing body of work that can generally be called mix-race racial theory, including, for instance, pieces anthologized in Maria P. P. Root’s 1992 and 1996 volumes Racially Mixed People in America and The Multiracial Experience, and Naomi Zack’s 1995 collection American Mixed Race.  There are also many popular autobiographical pieces about mixed race, several periodicals devoted to mixed-race people, a deluge of talk shows on the subject, and both local and national organizations that serve as support groups or political interest groups for mixed-race people.  Much of the more theoretical work emphasizes the issue of individual rights for mixed-race people—particularly the right to an “accurate” racial identity on forms such as the Census.  An enormous portion of the literature also analyzes the experiences of mixed-race individuals from a sociological or psychological point of view. Frequently the discussion of the rights of mixed-race people in fact draws upon the social scientific research that indicates that such things as the lack of opportunity to identify officially as mixed race or multiracial has detrimental effects on the self-concept, self-esteem, and development of mixed-race people, particularly children…

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • The Geography of a Mixed-Race Society

    The Geography of a Mixed-Race Society

    Growth and Change: A Journal of Urban And Regional Policy
    Volume 40, Issue 4 (December 2009)
    Pages 565 – 593
    DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2257.2009.00501.x

    William A. V. Clark, Professor of Geography
    University of California, Los Angeles

    Reagan Maas
    University of California, Los Angeles

    The pattern and level of separation among ethnic groups continues to change, and there are certainly more mixed neighborhoods both in cities and suburbs than two decades ago. The immigration flows of the past decade have substantially altered the ethnic mix and neighborhood mixing. In addition, multi-ethnic individuals themselves are altering the level of mixing among racial and ethnic groups. The research in this article shows that those who report themselves of more than one race have high levels of residential integration both in central cities and suburbs. These residential patterns can be interpreted as further evidence of tentative steps to a society in which race per se is less critical in residential patterning. The level of integration, for Asian mixed and black mixed is different and substantially higher than for those who report one race alone. The research in this article builds on previous aggregate studies of mixed-race individuals to show substantial patterns of integration in California’s metropolitan areas.

    Read the entire article here.

  • The Shadow King

    The Shadow King

    Mariner Books an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
    2004-11-23
    320 pages
    Trim Size: 5.50 x 8.25
    Paperback ISBN-13/EAN: 9780618485369; ISBN-10: 0618485368

    Jane Stevenson, Regius Chair of Humanity
    University of Aberdeen

    In The Shadow King, Jane Stevenson illuminates the world of the intriguing Balthasar Stuart, the secret biracial child born of the illicit love between a queen of Bohemia and an exiled African prince. A gifted young doctor in the late seventeenth century, Balthasar struggles with very contemporary issues of identity, brought into play by his difficult heritage. Driven out of Holland by the plague, he makes his way first to the raffish, cynical world of Restoration London, where he encounters Aphra Behn, the English spy and sometimes playwright. He leaves to seek prosperity in colonial Barbados, a society marked by slavery and savage racism. Utterly absorbing and deeply perceptive, The Shadow King brings the past radiantly to life in people’s habits of speech, their food and fashions, and their medical practices.

  • Panel: Exploring the Historical Context for Contemporary Stories of the Mixed Experience

    Panel: Exploring the Historical Context for Contemporary Stories of the Mixed Experience

    Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival
    Japanese American National Musuem
    National Center for Democracy, Tateuchi Democracy Forum
    2010-06-13, 18:30 to 19:30Z

    Moderator

    Frank Buckley, Co-Anchor
    KTLA Morning News

    Panelists

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

    Farzana Nayani, President
    Multiracial Americans of Southern California (MASC)

    Larry Aaronson, Retired public school teacher

    G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
    University of California, Santa Barbara

    Listen to part 1 (00:31:12) or download the audio here.
    Listen to part 2 (00:31:05) or download the audio here.

  • Shades of Gray

    Shades of Gray

    American Jewish Life Magazine
    January/February 2007

    E. B. Solomont

    Lacey Schwartz had the typical middle-class Jewish upbringing in upstate New York. Until her 18th birthday when her mom told her she was the product of an affair with a black man. Now Lacey is making a documentary about her newfound life as a black Jew.

    The problem was the boxes on her college application. The ones where you check white or black. Lacey Schwartz didn’t know which to check, so she sent a picture instead, which led the school administrators to enroll her as a black student, one who inexplicably had two white Jewish parents. That’s how she made it 18 years before blowing the lid off the family secret: That her mother had an affair with a black man, that she was the product of their union.

    In a certain sense, the boxes still haunt a 30-year-old Lacey — now a Harvard-educated lawyer and successful film producer in New York City. American culture seeks to compartmentalize people, she tells me during a discussion of her work-in-progress documentary about black Jews in America…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, 2nd Edition

    Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, 2nd Edition

    Routledge
    1994-12-14
    248 pages
    Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-31183-0

    Robert J. C. Young, Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature
    New York University

    As one of the most important books in post-colonial studies, this book argues that contemporary theories on post-colonialism and ethnicity are disturbingly close to the colonial discourse of the nineteenth century.

    Rather than marking ourselves off from patterns of thought which characterized Victorian racial theory, we show remarkable complicity with historical ways of viewing ‘the other’, both sexually and racially. ‘Englishness’, Young suggests, has been less fixed and stable than uncertain, fissured with difference and a desire for otherness.

    In this updated new edition, the author revisits the ideas set out in the book in light of recent developments in post-colonial theory, including projects influenced by his own work. With this fresh intervention, Robert Young is set once again to re-energize his field and open new channels of debate.

  • Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race

    Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race

    Farrar, Straus and Giroux (an imprint of MacMillan)
    April 1998
    84 pages
    5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
    Paperback ISBN: 978-0-374-52533-0, ISBN10: 0-374-52533-1

    Patricia J. Williams, James L. Dohr Professor of Law
    Columbia Law School

    In these five eloquent and passionate pieces (which she gave as the prestigious Reith Lectures for the BBC) Patricia J. Williams asks how we might achieve a world where “color doesn’t matter”—where whiteness is not equated with normalcy and blackness with exoticism and danger. Drawing on her own experience, Williams delineates the great divide between “the poles of other people’s imagination and the nice calm center of oneself where dignity resides,” and discusses how it might be bridged as a first step toward resolving racism. Williams offers us a new starting point—“a sensible and sustained consideration”—from which we might begin to deal honestly with the legacy and current realities of our prejudices.

  • Jewish After Mount Sinai: Jews, Blacks and the (Multi) racial Category

    Jewish After Mount Sinai: Jews, Blacks and the (Multi) racial Category

    Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal
    Volume 9, Number 1 (Summer 2001)
    pages 31-45

    Katya Gibel Azoulay [Katya Gibel Mevorach], Associate Professor of Anthropology and American Studies
    Grinnell College

    My point of departure begins with the social and political fact of being both a Black woman who is Jewish and a Jewish woman who is Black in order to undermine the presupposition of inherent cultural or racial differences that favors the vocabulary of mixed or hybrid identities over the conjunction [both.. and].  Instead of being mutually exclusive, the link between Jewish and Black identities witness Stuart Hall’s “logic of coupling rather that the logic of binary opposition.”…

    …The revisionist celebration of a mixed-race identity negates and eclipses a long history of white men crossing the color line to engage in sex with Black women, usually without their consent.  It has rendered invisible violations of Black women while critiquing the strategic efficacy of privileging Black political identities. Although questions of appearance, performance and class require a separate analysis of diverse and divisive perceptions and conceptions of Blackness, the campaign for a multiracial category obscures the fact that Black/African-Americans is already a multiracial category.  Legal scholar Patricia Williams skillfully encapsulates this sentiment when she writes, “what troubles me is the degree to which few people in the world, and most particularly in the United States, are anything but multiracial, to say nothing of biracial.  The use of the term seems to privilege to offspring of mixed marriages as those ‘between’ races without doing much to enhance to social status of all of us mixed-up products of illegitimacies of the not so distance past.”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • The New Hollywood Racelessness: Only the Fast, Furious, (and Multiracial) Will Survive

    The New Hollywood Racelessness: Only the Fast, Furious, (and Multiracial) Will Survive

    Cinema Journal
    Volume 44, Number 2, Winter 2005
    pages 50-67

    Mary C. Beltrán, Associate Professor of Media Studies
    University of Texas, Austin

    This article interrogates the rise of the “multiculti” action film and the casting of multiracial actors as Hollywood action film protagonists. These trends are examined in light of shifts in U.S. ethnic demographics and youth-oriented popular culture.

    Recent Hollywood films such as Romeo Must Die (Andrzej Bartkowiak, 2000) and The Fast and the Furious (Rob Cohen, 2001) are notable for their multiethnic casts and stylized urban settings. Correspondingly, the key to the survival of the protagonists in these “multiculti” action narratives is their ability to thrive in environments defined by cultural border crossings and pastiche. Perhaps not coincidentally, the heroes who command these environments increasingly are played by biracial and multiethnic actors, such as Vin Diesel in The Fast and the Furious and XXX (Rob Cohen, 2002) and Russell Wong, who plays a pivotal role in Romeo Must Die.

    This trend reflects contemporary shifts in U.S. ethnic demographics and ethnic identity, while subtly reinforcing notions of white centrism that are the legacy of the urban action movie. In particular, as I shall argue, the new, ethnically ambiguous protagonist embodies contemporary concerns regarding ethnicity and race relations with respect to the nation’s burgeoning cultural creolization and multiethnic population. The analysis presented here shall be situated in the history of Hollywood representations of the multiethnic inner city, as well as in relation to shifts in the country’s ethnic demographics, cultural interests, and popular culture…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Racial Revolutions: Antiracism and Indian Resurgence in Brazil

    Racial Revolutions: Antiracism and Indian Resurgence in Brazil

    Duke University Press
    2001
    392 pages
    46 b&w photos, 1 map, 3 figures
    Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-2731-8
    Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-2741-7

    Jonathan W. Warren, Associate Professor of International and Latin American Studies
    University of Washington

    Since the 1970s there has been a dramatic rise in the Indian population in Brazil as increasing numbers of pardos (individuals of mixed African, European, and indigenous descent) have chosen to identify themselves as Indians. In Racial Revolutions—the first book-length study of racial formation in Brazil that centers on Indianness—Jonathan W. Warren draws on extensive fieldwork and numerous interviews to illuminate the discursive and material forces responsible for this resurgence in the population.

    The growing number of pardos who claim Indian identity represents a radical shift in the direction of Brazilian racial formation. For centuries, the predominant trend had been for Indians to shed tribal identities in favor of non-Indian ones. Warren argues that many factors—including the reduction of state-sponsored anti-Indian violence, intervention from the Catholic church, and shifts in anthropological thinking about ethnicity—have prompted a reversal of racial aspirations and reimaginings of Indianness. Challenging the current emphasis on blackness in Brazilian antiracist scholarship and activism, Warren demonstrates that Indians in Brazil recognize and oppose racism far more than any other ethnic group.

    Racial Revolutions fills a number of voids in Latin American scholarship on the politics of race, cultural geography, ethnography, social movements, nation building, and state violence.

    Designated a John Hope Franklin Center book by the John Hope Franklin Seminar Group on Race, Religion, and Globalization.