Mixed Race Studies

For mixed-descent people on America’s frontier, acceptance and suspicion

The Washington Post
2022-03-11

H.W. Brands

In the late 19th century, Frederick Jackson Turner lit up the historical world with his frontier thesis of American history. He asserted that American democracy owed its distinctiveness to the existence of an advancing frontier, where American institutions reinvented themselves every generation. By no means did all historians accept Turner’s views, but his approach framed debate on the subject far into the 20th century.

More recently the concept of frontier has given way to the idea of borders and borderlands, where peoples and cultures have intermingled and interacted. In “Born of Lakes and Plains: Mixed-Descent Peoples and the Making of the American West,” Anne F. Hyde examines family life in the borderlands; her carefully wrought portrait of five families reveals the peculiar challenges faced by these quintessential people of the border…

Read the entire review here.

Barack Obama: Conservative, Pragmatist, Progressive

Cornell University Press
2022-03-15
392 pages
Hardcover ISBN13: 9781501761973

Burton I. Kaufman, Dean Emeritus, School of Interdisciplinary Studies; Professor Emeritus, Department of History
Miami University, Oxford, Ohio

In this insightful biography, Burton I. Kaufman explores how the political career of Barack Obama was marked by conservative tendencies that frustrated his progressive supporters and gave the lie to socialist fearmongering on the right. Obama’s was a landmark presidency that paradoxically, Kaufman shows, resulted in few, if any, radical shifts in policy.

Following his election, President Obama’s supporters and detractors anticipated radical reform. As the first African American to serve as president, he reached the White House on a campaign promise of change. But Kaufman finds in Obama clear patterns of classical conservativism of an ideological sort and basic policy-making pragmatism. His commitment to usher in a multiracial, multiethnic, and multicultural society was fundamentally connected to opening up, but not radically altering, the existing free enterprise system.

The Affordable Care Act, arguably President Obama’s greatest policy achievement, was a distillation of his complex motivations for policy. More conservative than radical, the ACA fitted the expansion of health insurance into the existing system. Similarly, in foreign policy, Obama eschewed the use of force to affect regime change. Yet he kept boots on the ground in the Middle East and supported ballot-box revolts geared toward achieving in foreign countries the same principles of liberalism, free enterprise, and competition that existed in the United States.

In estimating the course and impact of Obama’s full political life, Kaufman makes clear that both the desire for and fear of change in the American polity affected the popular perception but not the course of action of the forty-fourth US president.

Lewis Hamilton to change name to include mother Carmen’s surname

The Guardian
2022-03-14

Jamie Grierson, Reporter

Lewis Hamilton to change name to include mother Carmen’s surname

The British racing driver Lewis Hamilton is to change his name to incorporate his mother’s original surname – Larbalestier.

The seven-time world champion says he intends to incorporate his mother Carmen’s surname, Larbalestier, alongside Hamilton.

Hamilton’s father, Anthony, and his mother, Carmen, separated when Lewis was two; he lived with his mother until he was 12 before moving in with his father.

Speaking before the new Formula One season, which starts in Bahrain on Sunday, Hamilton, 37, said: “I am really proud of my family’s name. My mum’s name is Larbalestier and I am just about to put that in my name…

Read the entire article here.

Uncovering Family Secrets: Forming a New Identity

Los Angeles Public Library Blog
Los Angeles Public Library
Los Angeles, California
2022-03-07

Janice Batzdorff, Librarian

Imagine discovering that the man who raised you is not your biological father. That your mother’s race differs from how she presented herself. That the person you are attracted to is your sibling. That you are the descendent of a renowned individual. A monstrous one.

Unknown details about blood relationships surface through DNA testing, genealogical research, an adoptee meeting a birth parent, or a confession made, perhaps after a loved one dies. Learning the truth triggers feelings ranging from betrayal to outrage over privileges denied, to joy at meeting new relatives, to a sense of peace in connecting to one’s heritage.

Novelists have the latitude to develop a backstory for family secrets, whereas historians and memoir writers generally don’t have access to such information. Are the fictional narratives about lineage less plausible? To decide, consider the following true stories…

Read the entire article here.

‘We Are Black. We Just Speak Spanish’: Why Some Afro Latinos Want More Visibility During Black History Month

KQED News
San Fransisco, California
2022-02-18

Blanca Torres

Nelson German, the chef and owner of alaMar, a seafood restaurant in Oakland, remembers the day a Black family asked a staffer about the Black owner they had heard about.

“This isn’t a Black-owned restaurant,” he recalled the staffer telling the family. “This is a Dominican-owned restaurant.”

Hearing about that interaction was a turning point for German. As a Black Dominican American, German, 41, realized he hadn’t done enough to educate those around him about his Blackness and the importance of it.

“We are Black. We are part of the African diaspora. We just speak Spanish,” German said. “The African continent influenced the world. We should embrace that, and really give tribute to it now, because there’s a lot of people who had to shed their blood and sacrifice their lives for us to be in this position. We should show them some respect.”

“So, I always say Afro Latino,” he said…

Read the entire article here.

The Heaviest Drop of Blood: Black Exceptionalism Among Multiracials

Political Psychology
First published 2022-03-04
DOI: 10.1111/pops.12806

Gregory John Leslie, Ph.D. Candidate
University of California, Los Angeles

David O. Sears, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Political Science
University of California, Los Angeles

We leverage the emerging multiracial population to reexamine prominent theories of the American color line. A Black exceptionalism hypothesis suggests that Black heritage will be more restrictive of biracials’ social and political assimilation prospects than Asian or Latino heritage. Black exceptionalism better explains biracials’ sorting into the racial hierarchy than does classic assimilation theory or a people-of-color hypothesis. In the American Community Survey, Black heritage dominates subjective racial self-identification among biracial adults and identity assignments to children of interracial marriages. In the 2015 Pew Survey of Multiracials, Black-White biracials’ social identity, social networks, perceptions and experiences of discrimination, and political attitudes relevant to race resemble those of monoracial Blacks, whereas Latino-Whites and Asian-Whites are more similar to monoracial Whites than to their minority-group counterparts. Results suggest that even in a more racially mixed future, Black Americans will continue to be uniquely situated behind a most impermeable color line.

Read or purchase the article here.

She’s Biracial, but She’s Still Black: Reflections from Monoracial African American Parents Raising Biracial Children

Journal of Child and Family Studies
Volume 31, Issue 3 (March 2022) (Special Issue on Multiracial Families)
Published online 2022-02-22
pages 675–684
DOI: 10.1007/s10826-022-02263-8

Yolanda T. Mitchell, Assistant Professor of Human Development and Family Science
University of North Texas, Denton, Texas

In this commentary, a scholar of Black families blends observations that emanate from her research with those arising within personal experiences. Applying a multicrit lens, she seeks to reflect on the experiences of monoracial parents in joint biological stepfamilies, raising biracial children. Her work draws upon heuristic analysis of African American parents raising biracial children in concert with monoracial Black children. Multicrit tenets of experiential knowledge, challenge to dominant ideology, racism, monoracism, and colorism, a monoracial paradigm of race, and intersections of multiple racial identities are applied to contextual environmental factors of socialization including racial profiling, parents’ perception of their mixed-race child’s personality and skin tone, and parental orientations toward mixed-race versus monoracial children. This study highlights relevant aspects in the development of mixed-race children including how they are perceived and how they encounter the world around them in an effort to help monoracial parents limit racial polarization and increase an understanding of multiple intersectional identities.

Highlights

• Monoracial Black parents engage racial socialization as a protective factor in the development of their children.
• Racial identity development is a central component of healthy identity development in biracial children.
• Biracial identity development is influenced by contextual environmental factors such as family structure and parent racial socialization practices of monoracial parents.
• Multicrit highlights the unique needs of multiracial individuals regarding experiences of race-ethnicity in the United States.
• Biracial identity development techniques can be used to reduce racial polarization and inform a sense of shared racial identity.

Read the entire article here.

Ever since I started living in the U.S., I’ve felt a constant underlying pressure to choose a side. To be white or to be Black. On every form I’ve ever filled out in Canada, I’ve always had the chance to pick All That Apply — Black, White, etc., when asked about my race. On the first form I filled out for my student visa application, they asked me to Pick One — Black, White, or Other. Though I didn’t give it much thought at the time, the very use of the word “Other” demonstrates how the multiracial experience is far more marginalized in the United States than in Canada. Now, when I look at the words “Pick One” with a pen in my hand, I feel like the Other. I feel alienated and ostracized, thrust into a dilemma that I have no solution for.

Zach Bayfield, “A Canadian’s Perspective On The American Multiracial Experience,” The Oberlin Review, March 4, 2022. https://oberlinreview.org/26143/opinions/a-canadians-perspective-on-the-american-multiracial-experience/.

Your Attention Please: Initiative 29 – Tao Leigh Goffe • Hulu

Hulu
2021-05-29

Tao Leigh Goffe, Assistant Professor of Literary Theory and Cultural History
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

Journey through time with professor and DJ Tao Leigh Goffe as she uncovers her story at the intersection of Black and Chinese culture in this month’s #Initiative29 episode.

A Canadian’s Perspective On The American Multiracial Experience

The Oberlin Review
Oberlin, Ohio
2022-03-04

Zach Bayfield

Before coming to Oberlin [College], my racial identity was something I rarely reflected on. My mother is a fifth-generation Canadian with entirely European ancestry. My father was born in Jamaica to an English father and a Jamaican mother. The Afro-Caribbean side of my ancestry was discussed comfortably in my family, and I felt no pressure to identify with one race over the other. Regardless of who I surrounded myself with or what activities I was engaging in, I felt like my identity was understood.

When I first came to Oberlin, my identity suddenly became more contentious. I remember my freshman year, I was eating lunch in Stevenson Dining Hall when one of my Black teammates asked me, “What are you?” I explained my genealogy in an abbreviated version of the previous paragraph, and his response was, “So you’re Black, right?” I was confused and taken aback by this statement. How could I identify as Black when I’ve never experienced racism directly? Why do I have to identify as a particular race? Why can’t I just be me?…

Read the entire article here.