Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

recent posts

about

  • So, What Are You?: A Multiracial Perspective On Identity

    So, What Are You?: A Multiracial Perspective On Identity

    Jossle Magazine
    2014-11-18

    Leilani Stacy
    Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts

    “So, what are you?”

    In a word, “Wasian,” or more accurately, “Multiracial.” Specifically, I’m a quarter Japanese, a “mutt” of white—Scottish, Irish, Pennsylvania Dutch, French, English, German, Danish—and probably a little Native American (don’t worry, I didn’t put that down just to get into colleges) and, contrary to my name, not Hawaiian.

    So when the issue of race comes up, one question often arises: Where do I fit in?

    I’m sure if I ever visited Japan, people wouldn’t consider me “Japanese enough.” Meanwhile in the US, I get a little too tan to be considered “White enough.” Additionally, I’ve never felt comfortable joining a Japanese or Asian-American cultural club. And when people start talking about “cultural” traditions or life at home, forget it…

    Read the entire article here.

  • How New Racial Demographics Are Remaking America

    How New Racial Demographics Are Remaking America

    The Diane Rehm Show
    WAMU 88.5 FM
    Washington, D.C.
    2015-01-05

    Diane Rehm, Host

    Mark Hugo Lopez, Director of Hispanic Research
    Pew Research Center

    Jim Tankersley, Economic Policy Correspondent
    The Washington Post

    William Frey, Senior Fellow, Metropolitan Policy Program (author of Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics Are Remaking America)
    Brookings Institution

    Jamelle Bouie, Staff writer covering politics, policy, and race
    Slate

    America is becoming a country with no racial majority. In 2009, for the first time in U.S. history, more minority than white babies were born in a year. Soon, most American children will be racial minorities. The nation’s diversity surge played a key role in Barack Obama’s election as president. Many see these trends as necessary as a much-needed younger minority labor force is already boosting an aging baby boom population. But challenges loom, including clashes over public resources, overcoming a cultural generation gap, and fears over losing privileged status. Diane and her guests discuss how new racial demographics are remaking America.

    Listen to the show (00:51:40) here.

  • Getting in Touch with Our “Identity”

    Getting in Touch with Our “Identity”

    Multiracial Identity Program
    Portland State University
    2015-01-13 through 2015-01-15

    Multicultural Center
    1825 SW Broadway
    Smith Memorial Student Union, Suite 228
    Portland, Oregon 97201
    Wednesday, 2015-01-14, 12:00-13:30 PST (Local Time)

    The multiple types of racial identities on campus varies. Let’s come together and discuss our identities to break barriers and create a better knitted community amongst ourselves. For more information please contact the Cultural Centers at cultures@pdx.edu or (503) 725-5342.

    For more information, click here.

  • Multiracial Identity Program – Panel Discussion

    Multiracial Identity Program – Panel Discussion

    Multiracial Identity Program
    Portland State University
    2015-01-13 through 2015-01-15

    Multicultural Center
    1825 SW Broadway
    Smith Memorial Student Union, Suite 228
    Portland, Oregon 97201
    Tuesday, 2015-01-13, 16:00-18:00 PST (Local Time)

    Kickstarting the Multiracial Identity Program, this panel will consist of individuals who identity as multiracial and/or multiethnic. Come together for an insightful discussion of the experiences and implications of identifying along a spectrum of racial and ethnic backgrounds. For more information please contact the Cultural Centers at cultures@pdx.edu or (503) 725-5342.

    For more information, click here.

  • Sense About Genetic Ancestry Testing

    Sense About Genetic Ancestry Testing

    Sense About Science: Science and Evidence in the Hands of the Public
    London, United Kingdom
    2013-03-07
    3 pages

    Tabitha Innocent

    Many companies now offer to tell you about your ancestors from a DNA test. Adverts for these tests can give the impression that your results are unique and that the tests will tell you about your specific personal history, but the very same history that you receive could equally be given to thousands of other people. Conversely, the results from your DNA tests could be matched with all sorts of different stories to the one you are given: you cannot look at DNA and read it like a book or a map of a journey. This guide will help explain why, and what it is exactly that genetic ancestry companies are offering.

    There are now many companies which offer to tell you about your ancestors from a DNA test. You send off a sample of your DNA and £100–£200 ($150–300), and in return you receive a report. The results of these tests may find a connection with a well-known historical figure. They might tell you whether you are descended from groups such as Vikings or Zulus, where your ancient relatives came from or when they migrated.

    Adverts for these tests give the impression that your results are unique and that the tests will tell you about your specific personal history. But the very same history that you receive could equally be given to thousands of other people. Conversely, the results from your DNA tests could be matched with all sorts of different stories to the one you are given.

    It is well known that horoscopes use vague statements which recipients think are more tailored than they really are (referred to as the ‘Forer effect’). Genetic ancestry tests do a similar thing, and many exaggerate far beyond the available evidence about human origins. You cannot look at DNA and read it like a book or a map of a journey. For the most part these tests cannot tell you the things they claim to – they are little more than genetic astrology…

    Read the entire paper here.

  • Racial Bias, Even When We Have Good Intentions

    Racial Bias, Even When We Have Good Intentions

    The Upshot
    The New York Times
    2015-01-03

    Sendhil Mullainathan, Professor of Economics
    Harvard University

    The deaths of African-Americans at the hands of the police in Ferguson, Mo., in Cleveland and on Staten Island have reignited a debate about race. Some argue that these events are isolated and that racism is a thing of the past. Others contend that they are merely the tip of the iceberg, highlighting that skin color still has a huge effect on how people are treated.

    Arguments about race are often heated and anecdotal. As a social scientist, I naturally turn to empirical research for answers. As it turns out, an impressive body of research spanning decades addresses just these issues — and leads to some uncomfortable conclusions and makes us look at this debate from a different angle.

    The central challenge of such research is isolating the effect of race from other factors. For example, we know African-Americans earn less income, on average, than whites. Maybe that is evidence that employers discriminate against them. But maybe not. We also know African-Americans tend to be stuck in neighborhoods with worse schools, and perhaps that — and not race directly — explains the wage gap. If so, perhaps policy should focus on place rather than race, as some argue.

    But we can isolate the effect of race to some degree…

    Read the entire article here.

  • I Claim Black Because My Light Skin Doesn’t Protect Me from Misogynoir

    I Claim Black Because My Light Skin Doesn’t Protect Me from Misogynoir

    For Harriet
    2015-01-03

    Kesiena Boom
    Brighton, England

    I am a mixed race woman. One of my parents is Black and the other is white. I identify as both mixed race and as Black. I do so because of the legacy of the one drop rule and because I cannot access whiteness as it is associated with being ‘pure’ and I am clearly ‘tainted’ with my racially ambiguous looks. My afro, my golden skin, my thick figure and my full lips combine to give me an appearance that is notably not white. I feel connected to Blackness in a way I cannot feel towards whiteness. Despite being mainly raised by my white parent, it is not in whiteness that I find my home…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Dreams of my mother…

    Dreams of my mother…

    One Love, One London
    2015-01-04

    Tony Thomas

    It’s October 1959; Paddington station is busy… Scanning the departures board for her train a nervous looking woman hurries towards the platform. In one hand she carries a suitcase and holding her other hand tightly is a pretty 2 year old; a mixed race child. The girls’s name was Rosemary Walter and the journey she was about to embark on would change her life forever. She could not have known it off course but she was being rejected; hidden. You see Rosie’s mother, a white woman married to a white man had had a black lover and Rosie was living proof of a relationship that was not just illicit but in those days deemed utterly shameful…

    These are not my words but the word’s of George Alagiah narrating the three part series Mixed Britannia. The little girl in the story is my mother; this was the tale of the early years of my mothers life…

    My mother was born in 1957 to a white mother and a Jamaican father; in 1959 at the age of two she was handed over to the National Children’s Home and transported from London to Wales; she would spend the next 16 years of her life in children’s homes across the country.

    The world that my mother inhabited in her youth was not like today; there were not as many black people in the country; there was no noteable mixed race population and Wales was more or less a white’s only territory. Wherever my mother would go she would not fit in. Her hair was too frizzy, she had big lips and a big nose; there was no way that she could “pass“. She was clearly an object of curiosity to the people that she met who had never interacted with a “darkie” before. On holiday’s such as Christmas unlike the other children my mother did not have a family that would come and take her back to the family home; she would spend the holiday’s with kind Welsh and English families doing a good deed.

    My mother spent most of her time in care in Wales; she was sent to London, Brixton at the age of 14 to be with her “own kind” as Brixton had become known as a place where the West Indian community congregated together and it was also where her mother lived who had become an honorary Jamaican. It was the thinking of the children’s home that as she was getting to the age of having boyfriends she should be around her own kind for mating purposes.

    For my mother Brixton was as much a culture shock as Wales. My mother had a Welsh accent; she was mixed-race and had never met her Jamaican father. Although she had always sympathised with African-American struggles and her obvious “otherness” made her desire to understand that part of her she knew nothing about; she was not a part of the Jamaican community…

    Read the entire article here.

  • ‘A Tale of Two Plantations,’ by Richard S. Dunn

    ‘A Tale of Two Plantations,’ by Richard S. Dunn

    Sunday Rook Review
    The New York Times
    2015-01-02

    Greg Grandin, Professor of History
    New York University

    Dunn, Richard S., A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014).

    For enslaved peoples in the New World, it was always the worst of times. Whether captured in Africa or born into bondage in the Americas, slaves suffered unimaginable torments and indignities. Yet the specific form their miseries took, as the historian Richard S. Dunn shows in his painstakingly researched “A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia,” depended on whether one was a slave in the British Caribbean or in the United States. The contrasts between the two slave societies were many, covering family life, religious beliefs and labor practices. But one difference overrode all others. In the Caribbean, white masters treated the slaves like “disposable cogs in a machine,” working them to death on sugar plantations and then replacing them with fresh stock from Africa. In the United States, white masters treated their slaves like the machine itself — a breeding machine.

    Dunn began working on this comparative study in the 1970s, around the time historians like Winthrop D. Jordan, Edmund S. Morgan and Eugene D. Genovese were revolutionizing the study of American slavery. Drawing on Freud, Marx and other social theorists, these scholars painted what Dunn calls the “big picture,” capturing the psychosexual terror, economic exploitation, resistance, and emotional and social dependency inherent in the master-slave relation.

    Decades of extensive research led Dunn, a professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, in a different direction, away from making large historical claims or speculating about the “interiority” of slavery’s victims. Instead, he’s opted to stay close to the facts, using demographic methods to reconstruct “the individual lives and collective experiences of some 2,000 slaves on two large plantations” — Mesopotamia, which grew sugar on the western coastal plain of Jamaica, and Mount Airy, a tobacco and grain estate on the Rappahannock River in Virginia’s Northern Neck region — “during the final three generations of slavery in both places.”…

    …Likewise, Dunn’s discussion of interracial sex seems tone deaf to decades of scholarship on the subject. Forty years ago, Winthrop D. Jordan wrote about the libidinal foundations of white supremacy in America. More recently, the historians Jennifer L. Morgan and Diana Paton have explored the linkages between ideology, law and sexual domination in slave societies. Dunn devotes a chapter each to two slave women, empathetically tracing their family history and considering the many hardships they endured. He mentions rape and “predatory” whites and discusses the sharp differences in the way mixed-race offspring were treated on the two plantations. Yet at times he plays down the varieties of sexual coercion that enslaved women lived under. At one point, he calls the relationship between a white overseer, his black “mistress” and his distraught wife a “ménage à trois.”…

    Read the entire review here.

  • Edward Brooke, first black elected U.S. senator, dies at 95

    Edward Brooke, first black elected U.S. senator, dies at 95

    USA Today
    2015-01-03

    Natalie DiBlasio

    Former Massachusetts U.S. senator Edward Brooke, the first African American to be elected to the Senate by popular vote, has died at age 95.

    Ralph Neas, a former aide, said Brooke died Saturday of natural causes at his home in Coral Gables, Fla.

    “We lost a truly remarkable public servant,” says Massachusetts Gov.-elect Charlie Baker. “A war hero, a champion of equal rights for all and an example that barriers can be broken, Sen. Brooke accomplished more than most aspire to.”

    The only blacks to serve in the Senate before Brooke were two men in the 1870s when senators were still chosen by state legislatures.

    Brooke, a liberal Republican, was elected to the Senate in 1966 and served two terms. He earned his reputation as a liberal after becoming the first Republican senator to publicly urge President Nixon to resign…

    …Historian Dennis Nordin has researched and written about African-American politicians and devoted a chapter to Brooke in his book, From Edward Brooke to Barack Obama: African American Political Success, 1966-2008.

    Nordin told The Greenville News that Brooke’s political career shows independence from the GOP…

    Read the entire obituary here.