Mixed Race Studies

Boundaries of Love: Interracial Marriage and the Meaning of Race

New York University Press
May 2019
320 pages
16 black and white illustrations
152.40 x 228.60 mm
Cloth ISBN: 9781479878611
Paper ISBN: 9781479831456

Chinyere K. Osuji, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Camden

How interracial couples in Brazil and the US navigate racial boundaries

How do people understand and navigate being married to a person of a different race? Based on individual interviews with forty-seven black-white couples in two large, multicultural cities—Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro—Boundaries of Love explores how partners in these relationships ultimately reproduce, negotiate, and challenge the “us” versus “them” mentality of ethno-racial boundaries.

By centering marriage, Chinyere Osuji reveals the family as a primary site for understanding the social construction of race. She challenges the naive but widespread belief that interracial couples and their children provide an antidote to racism in the twenty-first century, instead highlighting the complexities and contradictions of these relationships. Featuring black husbands with white wives as well as black wives with white husbands, Boundaries of Love sheds light on the role of gender in navigating life married to a person of a different color.

Osuji compares black-white couples in Brazil and the United States, the two most populous post–slavery societies in the Western hemisphere. These settings, she argues, reveal the impact of contemporary race mixture on racial hierarchies and racial ideologies, both old and new.

Leitner Human Rights Speaker Series: Chinyere Osuji, Rutgers University – cosponsored with the Center on Race, Law and Justice – Boundaries of Love: Interracial Marriage and the Meaning of Race in Brazil and the United States

Leitner Center for International Law and Justice
Fordham Law School
150 West 62nd Street
Room 3-09
New York, New York 10023
2019-04-09, 12:30-13:30 EDT (Local Time)
Contact: leitnercenter@law.fordham.edu

Chinyere Osuji is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University with affiliations in Africana Studies and Latin American and Latino studies. Before coming to Rutgers-Camden, she was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Africana Studies.

Chinyere conducts research on the meaning that social actors give to racial and ethnic boundaries. Her first book, Boundaries of Love: Interracial Marriage and the Meaning of Race (April 2019, NYU Press) takes a novel approach to comparing race and ethnicity across societies by examining the experiences of interracial couples. Boundaries of Love relies on 103 qualitative interviews that she conducted with 52 black-white couples between 2008 and 2012 in Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro (in Portuguese). Through using what she calls a critical constructionist approach, Boundaries of Love compares the experiences of couples involving black men and white women with those of black women with white men in these two diverse, multicultural settings. This book reveals how non-elites in these two post-Atlantic slavery societies employ cultural repertoires that push against, bridge over, blur, dismantle or reproduce ethnoracial boundaries.

Chinyere’s next project will employ the critical constructionist approach to nursing and healthcare. In addition, she will be examining the lives of African immigrants, focusing on how they form community without being spatially concentrated.

For more information, click here.

How My Southeast L.A. Culture Got to Japan

The New York Times
2019-02-19

Walter Thompson-Hernández

I grew up with Chicano and Chicana culture in Los Angeles and heard it had spread to Japan. I wondered: Is this cultural appropriation?

I grew up in southeast Los Angeles, the son of an African-American father and Mexican mother, and the concept of identity is a theme that has been central to my life and a thread that weaves through many of my stories. I heard a rumor that lowrider culture — a community with an affinity for cars, outfit with intricate designs, multicolored lights and heavily tinted windows that can be traced in Southern California to as far back as the 1940s — had traveled to Japan. Apparently a Japanese journalist came to Los Angeles in the early 1990s to cover a lowrider event and returned to Japan with photos and stories to share…

Read the story here and watch the video here.

More cities add Barack Obama’s name to landmarks, highways

USA TODAY
2019-01-13

Chris Woodyard, Los Angeles Bureau Chief

LOS ANGELES – Barack Obama hasn’t been the president for nearly two years, but his fame is still spreading – at least when it comes to naming things after him.

The nation’s first African-American president need not go far around the country these days to find something that carries his name. There’s Barack Obama Way in New Albany Township, Indiana, and Barack Obama Boulevard in Pahokee, Florida. There’s a long list of schools now named for him, like Barack Obama Academy for Academic & Civic Development in Plainfield, New Jersey, and Barack Obama Elementary School in Richmond, Virginia.

Obama even has animal species named after him, like placida barackobamai, a sea slug…

Read the entire article here.

Portrait Of: ‘The Latinos Of Asia’

Latino USA
2018-05-22

Janice Llamoca, Digital Media Editor
Futuro Media Group

When you hear of last names like Torres, Rodriguez or Santos, you might automatically think of Latin America—and you’re not completely wrong. Those surnames are common throughout Latin America, but they’re also common in the Philippines.

Because of Spanish colonization, Filipinos and Latinos also share —aside from last names— religion, food and even similarities in language. These lines become even clearer here in the United States, as Filipino-Americans grow up in a cities with large Latino populations, like Los Angeles.

Anthony Ocampo, associate professor of sociology at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, breaks down these similarities in his book, The Latinos of Asia: How Filipino Americans Break the Rules of Race.

Maria Hinojosa talks to Ocampo about the book, his experience growing up in Los Angeles as a Filipino-American and what his research tells us about the link between Filipinos and Latinos…

Listen to the interview (00:19:30) here.

Donna Nicol: An Agent of Change for Africana Studies

CSUDH Campus News Center
California State University, Dominguez Hills
Carson, California
2018-03-12

Donna Nicol, associate professor and chair of Africana Studies at CSU Dominguez Hills.

Donna Nicol, associate professor and chair of Africana Studies, arrived at CSUDH in fall 2017. As a faculty member, she teaches Comparative Ethnic and Global Societies. As chair, Nicol is working with her colleagues and the university administration to strengthen the program’s curriculum and bolster its presence on campus and in the region.

A fourth-generation “Comptonite,” Nicol’s deep local roots and unique upbringing in a community-focused family has had a profound effect on her as a researcher and educator. She briefly left South Los Angeles for Ohio State University where she earned a Ph.D. in Social and Cultural Foundations of Education with a specialization in African American higher educational history, and a minor in African American Studies in 2007.

Prior to coming to CSUDH, Nicol was the first woman of color to be promoted and tenured in Women’s Studies at CSU Fullerton. She joined the faculty ranks at Fullerton after spending nearly a decade working in higher education administration, a nontraditional career path that she believes gives her a unique perspective on the ethos of public education, and an advantage as an academic chair…

…Nicol sat down with CSUDH Campus News Center to discuss her unique Compton upbringing, her latest research, and her perspectives regarding the African American experience in higher education.

Q: To get started, can you tell me about your upbringing in Compton, and a little about how it influences you as an educator?

A: My family moved the Compton because it was one of the few places in Los Angeles at the time that allowed African Americans to buy homes. Coming from a military background—my great-grandfather was as an Army doctor during World War I—my great-grandparents didn’t want to go back to the South with mixed-race kids (Filipino and Black). After World War II, they moved to California as did my paternal grandparents who also moved to Compton to avoid racial segregation in the Jim Crow South. We were one of the few families that had the opportunity to go to college. My great-grandfather was a doctor, so he had “cultural capital,” and taught my grandmother how to prepare for college; who passed it on to my mother; who passed it on to me…

Read the entire article here.

New York Times journalist comes to talk about multiracial identity for Black History Month

Iowa State Daily
2018-02-23

Naye Valenzuela

Journalist Walter Thompson-Hernandez came to Iowa State on Feb. 22 to speak to students about what it’s like being multicultural and speaks about how to define ones identity. Megan Petzold/Iowa State Daily

As the lights went down and as the crowd hushes to a silence, a man gets up and walks to the podium. He opens his laptop and presents a PowerPoint. The first slide presents a graffiti on a blue brick wall in Los Angeles.

The graffiti says “black power, brown pride – Tupac,” which led to the man’s first question.

“What Tupac song is this from?” He asks the crowd.

A student jumps up right away and proudly states the song is “To Live and Die in L.A.”

Walter Thompson-Hernandez, the guest presenting, is shocked, to realize a lecture attendee in Ames was the first to get it right.

Most known for his work called “Blaxicans of L.A.,” where his photos and videos talk about people in South Central Los Angeles and their experience with their multiracial identity of being both black American and Mexican in the United States, Thompson-Hernandez talks about the history of Blaxicans and what could be the future of multiracial identities in the future…

Read the entire article here.

Painter Ellen Gallagher’s tragic sea tales: How African slaves went from human to cargo on the Atlantic

The Los Angeles Times
2017-11-17

Carolina A. Miranda

An installation view of Ellen Gallagher’s painting “Aquajujidsu” at Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles. (Fredrik Nilsen / Hauser & Wirth)

On first glance, the painting that greets visitors to the South Gallery at Hauser & Wirth in downtown Los Angeles looks like a crab quietly resting on the bottom of an ocean floor. But look again and that crab morphs into the fragmented face of a person, its myriad pieces coming undone in a watery deep.

In her first solo show in Los Angeles, painter Ellen Gallagher broaches the history of the Middle Passage in ways that are both poetic and surprising — rendering underwater scenes that seem perfectly innocent at first glance, but that on second, third and fourth viewing, quietly evoke the terrible tragedies that occurred in the Atlantic Ocean during the roughly four centuries of the slave trade.

“These are history paintings,” she says thoughtfully, as she settles into a sleek chair in a small lounge at Hauser & Wirth. “It’s this portrait of this space in between, this space where you are dead and alive at the same time.”

Artist Ellen Gallagher. Ellen Gallagher / Hauser & Wirth

The artist, who divides her time between New York and Rotterdam, and whose work resides in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, has long explored questions of history and power in works that straddle the gray area between figurative and abstract…

Read the entire article here.

“Blaxicans of LA” challenges racial binaries and unpacks the complexities of intersectional identity

The Occidental Weekly
Los Angeles, California
2017-04-04

Mallory Leeper

Photograph by Walter Thompson-Hernández

Walter Thompson-Hernández, multimedia journalist and current doctoral student at UCLA, visited Occidental College Monday, March 27 to discuss his research, which aims to bridge the gap between academia and photography and popular culture. Thompson-Hernandez’s lecture explored the historical framework of brown and black relations including anti-black sentiments within the Latinx community. Thompson-Hernández sought to highlight the experiences of Angelenos facing issues of racial classification and assumed singular ethnic identity.

The Latino/a & Latin American Studies department at Occidental College and the Institute for the Study of Los Angeles (ISLA) co-sponsored the Blaxicans of LA lecture in Fowler 202. As a part of their spring speaker series, Professor Raul Villa, department chair, explained that the event is a part of an educational and promotional campaign to bring awareness about the stdy of Latinxs across the hemisphere to Occidental. According to Villa, Latinx representation is an important component in a global education.

Three years ago, Thompson-Hernández started the Instagram page Blaxicans of LA to address the complexity of intersectional experiences — especially those of “Blaxican,” a combination of African and Mexican heritage…

Read the entire article here.

Number of Interracial Marriages, Multiracial Americans Growing Rapidly

VOA News
Voice of America
2017-03-04

Elizabeth Lee, West Coast Bureau Reporter

LOS ANGELES — Delia Douglas’ experience growing up has been different from the rest of her schoolmates.

“In any of the storybooks that I was reading growing up, I remember the families always looked a certain way. Both parents matched,” she said. “Even it seemed like in many of the storylines that were about animal families, both bears kind of looked the same, and the baby bear looked the same.”

These storybooks did not reflect her family. Douglas’ father is African American and American Indian. Her mother is white. And Douglas is married to William Haight, who is white. They have a 5-year-old daughter who is fair skinned, with light hair.

“Especially in the first three years of my daughter’s life, people often would stop and ask me if I was the nanny. There were days when that would be incredibly frustrating,” Douglas recalled…

…“In the year 2000, the U.S. Census actually allowed for individuals to check more than one box, so now each person was able to see, for instance, I’m Mexican and black, so I was able to check more than one box. And so we’ve noticed an uptick in the amount of multiracial folks,” Smith-Kang said…

Read the entire article here. View the story here.