Mixed Race Studies

Everyone Looks a Little Bit Asian

truthdig: drilling beneath the headlines
2010-10-27

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

Like many other Hispanics, I am a member of Generation E.A. (ethnically ambiguous). Over the years I’ve been mistaken for just about every racial or ethnic combination—from Eurasian to Afro-Irish to Arab-Native American.

This guessing game is something members of Generation E.A. are used to in discussions with acquaintances, classmates, co-workers and curious passersby. Sometimes it’s even educational. But this is never something one would expect to hear from a politician, particularly a politician addressing the Hispanic Student Union at Rancho High School in Las Vegas, Nev. Yet this is exactly what happened when Sharron Angle, the Republican candidate for Senate in Nevada, told a group of students that she did not know if the brown border crossers featured in her “Best Friend” commercial were all Hispanic because “some of you look a little more Asian to me.” She continued, “What we know, what we know about ourselves is that we are a melting pot in this country. My grandchildren are evidence of that. I’m evidence of that. I’ve been called the first Asian legislator in our Nevada State Assembly.”…

…But the most recent confusing remarks about race and ethnicity are different because they serve a unique purpose. They provide an opportunity to open dialogue in a campaign season that has been more focused on economics than on ethnicity. Could it be that the two are connected?

“The interesting thing about Angle’s version of racial and ethnic talk is that it is more focused on Hispanic issues than on the traditional black-white paradigm,” according to professor Ulli K. Ryder of Brown University’s Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America. “What’s happening here is that Hispanics and Asians are being compared and confused because they both equal foreign in the U.S. racial imagination.” So, Angle is saying that these two foreign groups can melt and look alike, but that they will never look like Americans...

Read the entire article here.

Obama and Race in America

The Huffington Post
2010-08-06

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

In his first major comment on race and race relations in our nation since his “A More Perfect Union Speech” on March 18, 2008, President Barack Obama called for frank discussion about race last week. In both a speech to the National Urban League and on the ABC daytime talk show “The View,” the president talked about race relations in the context of the political controversy over last month’s firing of long-time Agriculture Department employee Shirley Sherrod.

Obama agreed with those who have been calling for some sort of national conversation on race beyond CNN’s “Black in America” and “Latino in America.” He invited us to “look inward” and find the space to have “mature” dialogues about “the divides that still exist.” For Obama, these honest conversations should be based on our personal experiences and occur “around kitchen tables and water coolers and church basements.” However, many are left wondering whether Obama’s remarks represent a racial dialogue initiative or a post-racial accomplishment.

Here’s a question we might consider: Does Obama want us to talk about race while he effectively sidesteps the conversation himself?…

…Some might argue that statements like this one are clever attempts to use multiracial identity to sanitize the country’s history of chattel slavery and racist discrimination. After all, Obama made no mention of how black and white people got “all kinds of mixed up” in the first place. It follows that if we hear Obama from this perspective, then we may be hearing a call to transcend race without getting beyond racial inequalities. On the other hand, there are those who assert that Obama makes use of his multiracial identity to do precisely the opposite: to acknowledge racial division as well as its problems and awkwardness…

Read the entire article here.

Passing as Mixed Race

Open Salon
2010-03-03

Marcia Dawkins, Assistant Professor of Human Communication
California State University, Fullerton

Alexandre Dumas has always been one of my favorite writers. Works like The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo and Georges took me on countless adventures in worlds and times much different from my own. But there’s a kinship I’ve always felt with the author despite our differences in gender, nationality and history—being of mixed race. Dumas was the grandson of a freed Haitian slave and a French nobleman. When describing his racial profile to a man who insulted him for being different he’s reported to have said, “My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends.” Though my own background is different from Dumas’s, and feels even more complex, that multiracial kinship is one of the reasons why I look forward to the U.S. release of the new biopic that opened in Paris on February 10th, L’Autre Dumas, or The Other Dumas…

Read the entire article here.