Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • ‘Negroland’ by Margo Jefferson

    ‘Negroland’ by Margo Jefferson

    The Boston Globe
    2015-09-05

    Donna Bailey Nurse

    While a student at University High in Chicago in the early 1960s, Margo Jefferson was introduced to the essays of James Baldwin. The future New York Times drama critic and Pulitzer Prize winner was struck by passages in “Notes of a Native Son’’:

    “‘One must say that the Negro in America does not really exist except in the darkness of our minds.’

    ‘One’: a pronoun even more adroitly insidious than ‘we.’ An ‘I’ made ubiquitous. ‘Our’: say it slowly, voluptuously. Baldwin has coupled and merged us in syntactical miscegenation.’’

    Jefferson devotes the first chapters of her memoir to explaining the secret of that group’s success, which has a lot to do with the privileges their light skin bestowed. Like Betsey Keating, for example, who was freed by her master before giving birth to his five children. He died leaving money to educate his black sons, setting them up for the future.

    She also tells of a biracial slave named Frances Jackson Coppin whose aunt purchased her freedom. Eventually Frances was able to work, save money, and attend Oberlin College. These mostly mixed-race blacks became teachers, writers, artisans, and abolitionists. They were careful to intermarry, establishing a color line between themselves and darker members of the race.

    Jefferson herself is a descendant of slaves and slave masters from Kentucky, Virginia, and Mississippi, individuals who clawed their way into the elite milieu she calls Negroland…

    Read the entire book review here.

  • The top 13 Jewish newsmakers of 5775

    The top 13 Jewish newsmakers of 5775

    JTA: Jewish Telegraphic Agency
    2015-08-26

    Julie Wiener

    (JTA) — With the Jewish year winding down, here’s a look back at 13 Jews who repeatedly made the news in 5775. Whether you love them or hate them — or your feelings are purely pareve — it’s hard to deny they had an impact…

    …Lacey Schwartz, 38, grew up believing she was a white Ashkenazi Jew, only to discover that her biological father was an African-American man with whom her mother had an affair. In “Little White Lie,” a documentary that screened in major U.S. cities and aired on PBS in March, Schwartz explored her shifting racial identity and what it means to be black — and Jewish — in America. Designated a New York Times Critics’ Pick, the film received favorable reviews overall. Plus, in a year in which high-profile police brutality cases involving black youth and a massacre at a black church have captured the public’s attention, “Little White Lie” has contributed to the larger discussion about race in America…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Negroland: A Memoir

    Negroland: A Memoir

    Pantheon
    2015-09-08
    256 pages
    Hardcover ISBN: 978-0307378453
    eBook ISBN:

    Margo Jefferson

    At once incendiary and icy, mischievous and provocative, celebratory and elegiac—here is a deeply felt meditation on race, sex, and American culture through the prism of the author’s rarefied upbringing and education among a black elite concerned with distancing itself from whites and the black generality while tirelessly measuring itself against both.

    Born in upper-crust black Chicago—her father was for years head of pediatrics at Provident, at the time the nation’s oldest black hospital; her mother was a socialite—Margo Jefferson has spent most of her life among (call them what you will) the colored aristocracy, the colored elite, the blue-vein society. Since the nineteenth century they have stood apart, these inhabitants of Negroland, “a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty.”

    Reckoning with the strictures and demands of Negroland at crucial historical moments—the civil rights movement, the dawn of feminism, the fallacy of postracial America—Jefferson brilliantly charts the twists and turns of a life informed by psychological and moral contradictions. Aware as it is of heart-wrenching despair and depression, this book is a triumphant paean to the grace of perseverance.

    (With 8 pages of black-and-white photographs.)

  • What Are You? A Personal Poetry Reading

    What Are You? A Personal Poetry Reading

    Slide Share
    2013-10-18

    Gerry Yokota, Professor
    Osaka University, Osaka, Japan

    My reading of the 1971 poem by Nobuko JoAnne Miyamoto

    when I was young
    kids used to ask me
    what are you?
    I’d tell them
    what my mom told me
    I’m an American
    Chin Chin Chinaman
    you’re a Jap!
    flashing hot inside
    I’d go home
    my mom would say
    don’t worry
    he who walks alone
    walks faster…

    Read the entire poem here.

  • Race in the United States – Mississippi and Hawaii at Two Ends of the Spectrum

    Race in the United States – Mississippi and Hawaii at Two Ends of the Spectrum

    UCR Today
    University of California, Riverdale
    2015-09-04

    Mojgan Sherkat (mojgan.sherkat@ucr.edu)

    RIVERSIDE, Calif. (www.ucr.edu) – There’s a lot to learn about race in the United States through statistical figures alone, especially when comparisons are made between Hawaii and Mississippi, according to David Swanson, professor of sociology at the University of California, Riverside.

    “Hawaii and Mississippi stand out from each other and the U.S. as a whole in terms of health, education, and income,” said Swanson.

    Swanson will release an essay on the topic on Zócalo Public Square on Sept. 16, 2015. The not-for-profit ideas exchange board will have a discussion on “What can Hawaii Teach America About Race?” It is co-sponsored by the Smithsonian and the Inouye Institute. The essay will be available on Zocalo‘s website.

    Swanson used data from the U.S. Census Bureau (except life expectancy data, which comes from Wikipedia) to demonstrate race in America…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Multiracial Gen Z And The Future Of Marketing

    Multiracial Gen Z And The Future Of Marketing

    Media Post
    2015-09-03

    Jose Villa, Founder and president
    Sensis, Los Angeles, California

    Millennials are generally believed to be the most ethnically and racially diverse generation in American history. Hispanics (20%), African-Americans (14%) and Asians (6%) make up 40% of the total millennial population. This diversity underpins the notion of the bicultural millennial, a young consumer straddling two worlds, balancing their cultural lives with their mainstream integration into popular culture. Yet, lost in the buzz around bicultural millennials is the growing multiracial U.S. population truly living in two worlds at home and in society…

    …Multiracial America

    The large segment of multiracial Gen Z is the result of demographic trends at work for the last two decades. Starting with the 2000 census – the first census that allowed individuals to self-identify with more than one race – we have been seeing a steady demographic shift resulting from an increase in multiracial marriage. In a recent New Republic article, William Frey laid out how the blending of racial minorities through multiracial marriage is leading to a major demographic shift in the U.S. In 2000, 6.7% of all marriages were multiracial. That number jumped to 8.4% in 2010. Hispanics are driving the increase in multiracial marriages, accounting for 49% of all multiracial marriages in 2010 (Hispanics and Whites: 44%, Hispanics and Black: 3%, Hispanics and Asian: 2%). Furthermore, more than one in seven newlywed couples are now multiracial. This data also does not account for non-married multi-racial couples that are adding to the growing multiracial Gen Z population…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Understanding Race on Black London history walk

    Understanding Race on Black London history walk

    Sociology in the City: blogging from Sociology at the University of Westminster
    University of Westminster
    London, United Kingdom
    2015-02-20

    Students of the first year module Understanding Race went on a walking tour this morning, led by the writer and historian Steve Martin.

    Challenging the popular idea that race in Britain is a phenomenon of post-WW2 immigration, Steve gave us an insight into the longstanding presence of non-white people in London’s history, with a focus on people of African and African-Carribean heritage…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Louise Erdrich on her fiction: ‘I’m writing out of the mixture of cultures’

    Louise Erdrich on her fiction: ‘I’m writing out of the mixture of cultures’

    The Guardian
    2015-09-05

    Bridey Heing

    Receiving the Library of Congress prize for American fiction, Erdrich spoke of how her writing emerged from the ‘great loss’ of Native Americans

    Novelist Louise Erdrich was presented with the Library of Congress prize for American fiction on Saturday in recognition of her three-decade literary career.

    In the Q&A at the National Book Festival in Washington, DC, that followed, Erdrich – the author of Tracks, Love Medicine and The Round House and a key voice in contemporary American literature – offered insight into the worldview from which she writes, one heavily influenced by her own experiences as a mixed-race Native American.

    “It is where I’m from; literally there’s no other way than this that I can write. I’m writing out of the mixture of cultures,” she said. “Knowing both sides of my family really infused my life with a sense that I lived in many times and in many places as many people. It was never just me. I was always filled with the stories, the humor, the loss. Because, of course, we are all part of this great loss that occurred.”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Call for Papers: “Mixed Race in Scandinavia”

    Call for Papers: “Mixed Race in Scandinavia”

    The Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies
    e-ISSN: 2325-4521
    September 2015

    G. Reginald Daniel, Editor in Chief and Professor of Sociology
    University of California, Santa Barbara

    JCMRS encourages established and emerging scholars to submit articles in response to the annual call of papers. The journal is currently inviting submissions on the topic of global mixed race, particularly in terms of populations, experiences, and concerns outside the United States. Articles will be considered for publication based on their contribution to important and current discussions in critical mixed race studies, and their scholarly competence and originality. The primary criterion for selection will be the quality of the paper, not its connection to the CMRS conference theme.

    The journal is transracial, transdisciplinary, and transnational in scope. It places the concept of mixed race at the critical center of focus such that multiracial individuals become subjects of historical, social, and cultural processes rather than simply objects of analysis. This involves the study of racial consciousness among racially mixed people, the world in which they live, and the ideological forces that inform their identity and experience.

    JCMRS also stresses the critical analysis of the institutionalization of social, cultural, and political structures based on dominant conceptions of race. JCMRS acknowledges that the concept of race invokes biologically-based human characteristics, but the selection of specific human features for the purposes of racial signification is a constantly changing sociohistorical process. Accordingly, the journal emphasizes the constructed nature of race and the notion that racial categories are unstable and decentered structures of sociocultural meanings that are continuously being created, inhabited, contested, transformed, and destroyed. Finally, JCMRS underscores the mutability of race and the porosity of racial boundaries in order to critique local and global systemic injustices rooted in processes of racialization and social stratification based on race, as well as the interlocking nature of racial phenomena with sex, gender, sexuality, class, and other categories of difference.

    Submission Deadline: Open

    Submission Guidelines: Article manuscripts should range between 15-30 double-spaced pages, Times New Roman 12-point font, including notes and works cited, must follow the Chicago Manual of Style, and include an abstract (not to exceed 250 words). Papers will not be reviewed unless they follow the exact formatting of the submission guidelines.

    Visit our website for complete submission guidelines and to submit an article: http://escholarship.org/uc/ucsb_soc_jcmrs.

    Please address all inquiries to: socjcmrs@soc.ucsb.edu.

  • Chosen by Mississippi Democrats, Shy Trucker Is at a Crossroad

    Chosen by Mississippi Democrats, Shy Trucker Is at a Crossroad

    The New York Times
    2015-09-07

    Campbell Robertson, Southern Correspondent


    Robert Gray (Photo source: WLBT-TV)

    JACKSON, Miss. — Only three people who had ever met this man, Robert Gray, knew that he was running in the primary for governor of Mississippi.

    There were the two volunteers who took his $300 filing fee and qualifying papers several months ago at the state Democratic Party office and the candidate for agriculture commissioner who happened to be in the headquarters at the same time.

    Otherwise, no one — not even Mr. Gray’s mother, with whom he lives.

    At least she voted for him when she saw his name on the Aug. 4 ballot. Mr. Gray, 46, a round-faced, soft-spoken long-haul truck driver who lives on a quiet country road south of Jackson, was too busy working on his rig to vote himself. He would, nonetheless, go on to win, taking 79 out of Mississippi’s 82 counties.

    Mr. Gray beat two other candidates, who unlike him spent money and campaigned. Democratic Party officials were stunned. The news media was stunned. Mr. Gray, now Mississippi’s Democratic nominee for governor, gave some interviews and then set off with a truck full of sweet potatoes for a potato chip factory in Pennsylvania…

    …No one there had met Mr. Gray, but Gary Downing, who was getting a little off the ears, offered a thought on the state of politics: “Can’t do no worse than what we’ve got.”

    This may be the central plank of the Gray campaign, such as it is. His campaign staff for now consists mostly of his sister, Angela Gray, 45, who works in real estate in Georgia, and Dwight Utz, 57, an engineer who moved here three years ago from Idaho. Mr. Utz, who is white, sees the campaign as the stirrings of a new civil rights movement.

    Mr. Gray does not talk much about race. He cites no specific issue that prompted him to run for governor. He emphasizes a more general conviction that the state has been foundering for too long and that it could be thriving if only the governor would expand Medicaid and spend more on infrastructure and education…

    Read the entire article here.