Mixed Race Studies

 Mixed Race in the United States

Simpson Center for The Humanities at the University of Washington
Dates (Local Time: 19:30 PST): 2010-01-06, 2010-01-20, 2010-02-03, 2010-02-17, and 2010-03-03
Location: Kane Hall 220

Is it coincidence that the first nonwhite president of the United States comes from a multiracial background? Or was his election, in fact, partially due to his mixed-race background and the idea that it somehow resonated with all Americans, regardless of race? In the twenty-first century United States, mixed-race people, from the chief executive to the family next door, seem to be everywhere. In the past twenty-five years, the period since the decriminalization of interracial marriage, the births of monoracial babies have increased 15%, while multiracial births have increased a dramatic 260%.  But what do these numbers imply?  Has racialized inequality changed with the surging numbers of multiracial Americans?  This course will interrogate what it means to understand mixed-race identity in America, and what representations and histories of U.S. multiracialism can illustrate about changing notions of race, power, and privilege in the United States.

Ralina L. Joseph is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and an adjunct assistant professor in the departments of American Ethnic Studies and Women Studies at the University of Washington.  She recently completed a book manuscript, Beyond the Binaries?: Reading Mixed-Race Blackness in the New Millennium, and is currently at work on her second book project, Speaking Back: How Black Women Resist Post-Identity Culture. Joseph teaches about issues of race, gender, sexuality, and the media, and is a 2009 recipient of a Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship and a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship.

The Wednesday University provides Puget Sound residents with an intellectually stimulating way to continue their education in the humanities.

Each year, the Wednesday University offers three courses taught by distinguished faculty at the University of Washington. These courses, which meet on Wednesday evenings, are open to anyone—from high school students to senior citizens. Please join us and become a part of one of Seattle’s liveliest intellectual and cultural communities.

The Wednesday University is a collaborative program sponsored by Seattle Arts & Lectures, the Simpson Center for the Humanities, and the Henry Art Gallery. All classes are held at the Henry Art Gallery Auditorium at the University of Washington from 7:30-9 pm.

Course Fee: $80 each or $210 for all three courses. To register, please visit the Seattle Arts & Lectures website or call 206.621.2230 ext. 10.

All course locations are on the University of Washington campus.  The Fall and Winter courses will be in Kane Hall. The Spring course will be in Brechemin Hall in the Music Building.  All courses begin at 19:30 PST (Local Time).

To register for the lecture, click here.

Post-Race on America’s Next Top Model

International Communication Association, TBA
2007 Conference
San Francisco, CA
2007-05-23

Ralina L. Joseph, Assistant Professor of Communications, American Ethnic Studies and Women Studies
University of Washington

African American supermodel Tyra Banks’s popular reality show for aspiring young models, America’s Next Top Model, both reflects and produces twenty-first century ideals of post-feminism, a “girl power” moment in which second-wave feminism is antiquated, and post-race, a post-Civil Rights moment in which race is relic. ANTM features a sizable number of women of color contestants who are led by an African American female leader. The show’s explicit message is that racialized and gendered identities are equalized in the “Top Model” space. However, all of the contestants, both women of color and white women, are disciplined so that they must signify hyper-raced, hyper-sexed and essentialized versions of “difference.” At the same time, the contestants must also perform as safe, genteel, and essentially white middle class “Cover Girls.”

In this paper I investigate performances of racial and gender masquerade in a 2004 episode of America’s Next Top Model. This episode features a confluence of race as costume, because the contestants “switch ethnicities” with the help of makeup and wigs, and gender as maternity, because the contestants don milk mustaches and three-year-old children as props. ANTM demonstrates that performances of post-ethnicity and post-feminism are always reliant upon racialized and gendered stereotypes and the logic of capitalism. While the mixed-race contestants are showcased as the most seamless transgressors of racialized and gendered identity, as all of the women slip on race and gender “costumes,” the show illustrates the seductive power of post-identity politics in the twenty first century United States.

…As a graduate student I worked on notions of contemporary mixed-race African-American representations as being particularly emblematic of a post-race and postfeminist excuse that was vital in constructing neo-conservative political measures like California’s 1996 anti-affirmative action measure prop 209 and 2003’s racial privacy initiative prop[osition] 54. Historically and into the new millennium hybridized Black female bodies have been represented as not only sexually available, but also complicit in their exploitation (one of my favorite examples is Halle Berry’s much lauded academy award winning turn in 2001’s Monster’s Ball where she screams out in her sex scene with her death row inmate husband’s prison guard/executioner Billy Bob Thornton, “make me feel good!”). What I’ve been working on post-grad school is how these connected ideologies of post-race and post-feminism operate in other popular culture where mixed-race functions more often as a metaphor. One cite I’ve been investigating is the celebrity of thirty-three year old African American supermodel turned media mogul Tyra Banks and the phenomenon of her reality television show, America’s Next Top Model…

Read the entire article here.