Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Passing, in Moments

    Passing, in Moments

    Topic Magazine
    Issue No. 25, Journeys
    July 2019

    Mat Johnson

    The uneasy existence of being black and passing for white.

    When I was 12, my Aunt Margaret told me, “You got straight hair, you got pale skin. If people don’t know you’re colored, don’t tell them.”

    Aunt Margaret was black, but if you said “black” and not “colored,” she would go off on you. I was black too—still am—but I look white. Or I look whitish; it depends on the viewer. My father’s white and my mother is black, but high yellow and racially ambiguous. Though my mom insisted I was black too, I found a strong argument against that every time I looked in the mirror. And I grew up cut off from my extended black family, which just added to that feeling of disconnection. Sometimes I’d tell other kids I was black, and until they saw my mom, they wouldn’t believe me.

    One time I told Aunt Margaret, “Nobody at school knows I’m black—”

    “Colored.”

    “Nobody at school knows I’m colored.”

    She looked at me like I’d lost my mind. That’s when she said it, holding one of my flaccid brown curls in her hand like it was a piece of gold. “You got straight hair, you got pale skin. If people don’t know you’re colored, don’t tell them!”

    At 12 years old, I thought Aunt Margaret was confused. I thought her response was antiquated, ridiculously old-fashioned, like how she insisted on using the word “colored” instead of “black.” I thought it was cute. I thought it was funny.

    At 19, radical as all undergraduates should be, I thought that, despite how much I loved Aunt Margaret, that she was a color-struck sellout for telling me to live my life as a white man. That, in essence, she was encouraging me to abandon my roots, to reject the black community, in exchange for complete access to white privilege.

    At 49, I think she told me what she told me because she loved me. Because she’d been black in America for 80-some years and she didn’t want me to have to endure the way she did. That she wanted the safety of whiteness for me. That she wanted me to thrive, but also to have the full force of America’s wind at my back, instead of getting hit with it head-on.

    That Aunt Margaret was expressing what generations of black mothers sometimes told white-appearing children, particularly boys: escape from blackness for your survival.

    (And, also, she was color-struck.)…

    Read the entire article here.

  • We The Animals

    We The Animals

    Dirty Movies
    2019-03-25

    Victor Fraga

    Homosexuality of nine-year-old begins to flourish as he contends with his dysfunctional household, in lyrical drama based on the eponymous novel – in cinemas and also on VoD

    Three mixed-race boys – Manny (Isaiah Kristian), Joel (Josiah Gabriel) and Jonah (Evan Rosado) – live with their parents (Raúl Castillo and Sheila Vand) somewhere in upstate New York. They affectionately call them “Ma” and “Paps”. The affection that they receive in exchange, however, is extremely volatile. Paps is the stereotypical über macho type who uses violence as his main currency. He’s abrupt and short-tempered. Ma is vulnerable. She allows Paps to manipulate and abuse her. The three children often come across as far more emotionally held-together than their parents.

    Nine-year-old Jonah, the youngest of the three boys, is also the most sensitive person in the family. While Manny and Joel attempted to emulate their father’s grotesque sense of masculinity, Jonah prefers to go into hiding. Drawing is his venting outlet. He does it from under the bed, as if finding shelter from the stormy family life outside…

    Read the entire review here.

  • For instance, Sarah Gaither at Duke, a frequent collaborator of Dr. Pauker’s, has discovered that, when reminded of their multiracial heritage, mixed-race individuals score higher on tests that measure creativity.

    But Dr. [Kristin] Pauker belongs to a small group of psychologists, many of them mixed themselves, who have begun to explore the advantages of being multiracial. For instance, Sarah Gaither at Duke, a frequent collaborator of Dr. Pauker’s, has discovered that, when reminded of their multiracial heritage, mixed-race individuals score higher on tests that measure creativity. This is probably not because they are inherently superior in some way, but because the very thing that’s so difficult for them — the need to navigate multiple worlds — may actually enhance mental flexibility.

    Moises Velasquez-Manoff, Damon Winter (photography), “Want to Be Less Racist? Move to Hawaii,” The New York Times, June 28, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/28/opinion/sunday/racism-hawaii.html.

  • Mixed Race-Politics and Homi Bhabha’s Third Space Theory in Charles Chesnutt’s “The Wife of His Youth” and “The Sheriff’s Children”

    Mixed Race-Politics and Homi Bhabha’s Third Space Theory in Charles Chesnutt’s “The Wife of His Youth” and “The Sheriff’s Children”

    The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English
    Volume 20, Issue 1 (2018)
    Article 6 (pages 37-50)

    Gabrielle Sanford
    Christopher Newport University, Newport News, Virginia

    Tru Leverette, a Mixed race professor of African American and Mixed race literature, explains that people of mixed ancestry have a difficult and confusing racial path: “I, like many other persons born to parents of different races, sometimes think of myself as moving in the space that unites the two, as traveling from one shore to another . . . and other times as sailing the river that forms the meridian between two shores” (“Traveling” 79). And while there has been progress in how America regards biracial people today, Mixed race people are often marginalized in society, literature, and politics through underrepresentation and a lack of acknowledgment of their culture and characteristics. There is very little space for Mixed race people to have their own identities because they are neither seen as a separate race nor accepted into the races that form their racial identity. They are only seen as a combination of two or more races that needs to fit into a predetermined racial mold. This blindness sidelines biracial and multiracial groups and leaves them without legal status.

    Charles Chesnutt, a post-Reconstruction Mixed race author, presents Mixed race issues in his short stories “The Wife of His Youth” (1899) and “The Sheriff’s Children” (1889). Chesnutt’s characters, however, do not want representation for their Mixed race to be the final goal in the changing social structure of America, but rather want to be a part of White society and leave behind their Black heritage. This is seen in “The Wife of His Youth” when Ryder seeks to leave his Blackness in his past and embrace an upward climb to White status by being a part of the Blue Vein Society. The same is seen in “The Sheriff’s Children” when Tom grieves over the unfairness of his life due to being Mixed race. Notwithstanding the feelings of these characters, though, Chesnutt encourages a third space for Mixed race representation and a social acceptance of hybridity; he also, to be sure, recognizes that this third space has the potential to marginalize Blacks and biracial people even further…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Want to Be Less Racist? Move to Hawaii

    Want to Be Less Racist? Move to Hawaii

    The New York Times
    2019-06-28

    Moises Velasquez-Manoff, Contributing Opinion Writer
    Photographs by Damon Winter

    We asked people on Oahu to give their ethnicity. Many had long answers.
    We asked people on Oahu to give their ethnicity. Many had long answers.
    Photographs by Damon Winter/The New York Times; Illustration by Katie Scott

    The “aloha spirit” may hold a deep lesson for all of us.

    HONOLULU — Kristin Pauker still remembers her uncle’s warning about Dartmouth. “It’s a white institution,” he said. “You’re going to feel out of place.”

    Dr. Pauker, who is now a psychology professor, is of mixed ancestry, her mother of Japanese descent and her father white from an Italian-Irish background. Applying to colleges, she was keen to leave Hawaii for the East Coast, eager to see something new and different. But almost immediately after she arrived on campus in 1998, she understood what her uncle had meant.

    She encountered a barrage of questions from fellow students. What was her ethnicity? Where was she from? Was she Native Hawaiian? The questions seemed innocent on the surface, but she sensed that the students were really asking what box to put her in. And that categorization would determine how they treated her. “It opened my eyes to the fact that not everyone sees race the same way,” she told me…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Band of Angels, A Novel

    Band of Angels, A Novel

    Louisiana State University Press
    August 1994 (originally published in 1955)
    375 pages
    5.50 x 8.50 inches
    no illustrations
    Paperback ISBN: 9780807119464

    Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989)

    Amantha Starr, born and raised by a doting father on a Kentucky plantation in the years before the Civil War, is the heroine of this powerfully dramatic novel. At her father’s death Amantha learns that her mother was a slave and that she, too, is to be sold into servitude. What follows is a vast panorama of one of the most turbulent periods of American History as seen through the eyes of star-crossed young woman. Amantha soon finds herself in New Orleans, where she spends the war years with Hamish Bond, a slave trader. At war’s end, she marries Tobias Sears, a Union officer and Emersonian idealist. Despite sporadic periods of contentment, Amantha finds life with Tobias trying, and she is haunted still by her tangled past. “Oh, who am I?” she asks at the beginning of the novel. Only after many years, after achieving a hard-won wisdom and maturity, does she begin to understand that question.

    Band of Angels puts on ready display Robert Penn Warren’s prodigious gifts. First published in 1955, it is one of the most searing and vivid fictional accounts of the Civil War era ever written.

  • Multi Racial Reads #20 and #21

    Multi Racial Reads #20 and #21

    Carol Baldwin’s Blog
    2019-07-22

    Carol Baldwin

    It’s been awhile since I’ve shared the books that I read while writing Half-Truths. Here are two more books that have helped me understand one of my characters, Lillian Harris.

    If you aren’t familiar with Half-Truths, this is the pitch for my book:

    In the heavily segregated South, fifteen-year-old Kate Dinsmore’s world is shaken when she realizes she’s related to her grandmother’s Black housemaid. This knowledge leads Kate to truths that threaten to destroy her family.

    Ever since I saw the pictures of the principals in the hallway of the former Rosenwald School in Charlotte, NC and saw a man who appeared White but was Black, I knew that my book would revolve around two girls—Kate Dinsmore and Lillian Harris—who were related but belonged to two different races.

    What I didn’t know was what Lillian looked like.

    Light, Bright, and Damn Near White by Michelle Gordon Jackson helped me figure that out…

    …But what about the Blacks who chose to pass? What was their life like?

    Allyson Hobbs’ book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, pointedly showed me the pain and difficulties associating with passing…

    Read the entire article here.

  • They look white but say they’re black: a tiny town in Ohio wrestles with race

    They look white but say they’re black: a tiny town in Ohio wrestles with race

    The Guardian
    2019-07-25

    Khushbu Shah


    Roberta Oiler, center, stands with her daughters Janelle Stanley and Jessica Keaton in East Jackson, Ohio Photograph: Maddie McGarvey/The Guardian

    Many residents in East Jackson were raised to identify as black. But what dictates race: where you live, your DNA, the history you’re taught?

    The stale, smoky air around Clarice Shreck heaves. She takes a long hit of oxygen from the tube under her nose. She leans forward, shifting in her armchair, before releasing her raspy smoker’s laugh, which is smudged out a second later by her smoker’s cough.

    The pale woman with frizzy grey-streaked hair commands her on-and-off partner of over 20 years, Jimmy – who is from one of the few white families in East Jackson – to fetch her purse. He plops it on to her lap; she struggles to get at an old piece of paper folded up in her wallet. She slowly unfolds it to present her birth certificate.

    “Negro”, it reads, next to each of her parents’ names. She looks up triumphantly, victory in her periwinkle eyes. “It’s a legal document,” she says.

    The last known full-blooded black person in her family was her great-great-grandfather Thomas Byrd, her parents told her. Photos of them, who both look white, adorn the wooden walls on either side of Shreck’s chair. Their stares follow her throughout their former home. They are the ones who told her she was black…

    Note from Steven F. Riley: See the State of the Re:Union podcast “Pike County, Ohio – As Black as We Wish to Be” from 2012-09-28.

    Read the entire article here.

  • Trying To Recognize People Like Me

    Trying To Recognize People Like Me

    The Margins
    Asian American Writers’ Workshop
    2017-06-16

    Rowan Hisayo Buchanan


    (from left to right) T Kira Madden, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan and Violet Kupersmith

    Writers Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, Violet Kupersmith, and T Kira Madden speak to each other about mixed-race identities in life and literature

    February 28 isn’t too cold. I hurry through sharp sunlight to a café in Lincoln Center. It is the official launch day of my novel, Harmless Like You, in the USA. I feel woozy and anxious. I’ve been avoiding bookshops, because I’m too scared to know if it’s in stock. I’m meeting two dear friends who are also writers. T Kira Madden is the Editor in Chief of No Tokens Journal, with her memoir forthcoming. Violet Kupersmith’s collection of stories The Frangipani Hotel was published by Speigel & Grau, and her novel is forthcoming. They are both dear friends of mine, and it has been too long since I’ve seen their faces. The other thing we have in common is that we are mixed-race. Specifically, we have one Asian parent and one white parent. I’ve been told that equals accessible exotic. I want to ask Violet and Kira how they deal with this and how it affects them as writers.

    Rowan Hisayo Buchanan: I never know what to call myself. At readings, people laugh at me when I get introduced as British-Japanese-Chinese-American, like it’s a punchline. I think, hey it’s not a joke. But I laugh too because I’m nervous. In Japan, I called myself hafu which is the accepted word there. I know lots of Americans say hapa—but I’m nervous about my right to take something from Hawaiian Islander culture. I grew up saying halfie, which I worry is too cute—but it is at least mine. So these days, I go back to halfie.

    Violet Kupersmith: I’m half-Vietnamese and half-white. My mother’s family came to America on a boat in the seventies. My father’s side is all mixed European potato genes. I remember being really excited when the term “hapa” first started getting circulated, because it was finally a real label I could apply to myself after growing up having to just check the “other” box on all my paperwork. But I still feel a little squirmy referring to myself as hapa out loud because, like you said, it’s from Hawaiian Islander culture.

    T Kira Madden: I am Hawaiian so I’m used to “hapa! hapa haole!”…

    Read the entire interview here.

  • Biracial Identity Development in Danzy Senna’s Caucasia

    Biracial Identity Development in Danzy Senna’s Caucasia

    A chapter in Body Horror and Shapeshifting: A Multidisciplinary Exploration
    Brill
    2014-01-04
    pages: 145–152
    Ebook ISBN: 978-1-84888-306-2
    DOI: 10.1163/9781848883062_016

    Jin-Yu Lin

    Biracial individuals frequently go through a search for identity, a struggle to choose an identity and finally to accept their inherent multiplicity. They identify with more than one racial group, and their sense of self remains constant across racial contexts. In childhood, they often find their appearance different from other children. As they age, biracial individuals grow more aware of their racial heritage, and run the risk of falling into the borderlines of identities. Drawing upon models from Kerwin and Ponterotto and Poston, as well as Root’s theory of the development of identity in biracial individuals, this chapter attempts to demonstrate how the protagonist in Caucasia develops her identity when facing racial differences. This chapter explicates the protagonist’s self-consciousness about her invisibility when experiencing an identity crisis while passing for Jewish. Her search for identity, her realisation, and eventually the embracing of her both- and identity is included. Finally, the chapter concludes with a discussion of how the significance, diversity, and complexity of the experiences of biracial individuals may challenge the social construct of race. Based on a more flexible post-ethnic perspective, race is viewed as being more performative than biological.