Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

recent posts

about

  • We aren’t playing the race card; we are analyzing the racialized deck.

    We aren’t playing the race card; we are analyzing the racialized deck.

    Taking Jesus Seriously
    The Christian Century: Thinking Critically. Living Faithfully
    2014-12-08

    Drew G. I. Hart

    Changing the game and changing our rhetoric around race and racism.

    I would be rich if I got money for every time a white person told me that I was playing the race card. Well it happened recently. While I was lamenting the lack of indictment [for the killing] of Michael Brown compounded with the recent decision not to indict the police that choked the life out of Eric Garner, a white person charged me with playing such a card. Merely speaking about this incident and mentioning racism resulted in the common backlash accusation of playing this mythical item. It is used over and over again by some white people instead of engaging in dialogue through sharing and listening, the choice is made to stigmatize and scapegoat those that disagree that America is mostly a colorblind post-racial nation. There are certain scripts that the white majority learns and rehearses through subtle socialization in dominant culture. Rather than doing the hard work of careful in-depth investigation of the matter, quick cliché dismissals are used to uphold the status quo. The status quo is silence about racism other than pointing out the overt cases, as well as getting into extensive conversation about reverse racism. While I have often gotten frustrated by these little remarks that dismiss black experiences without doing the hard work of listening and wrestling with another perspective, I decided that from now on I was going to “play along” with their game.

    This is how the game works. There is an incident that happens in which a large percentage of white Americans tend to interpret such event from a particular cultural and social vantage point while African Americans (and often the majority of other racialized groups) interpret that same moment very differently, in light of their own experiences, history, and context. Each of these moments or incidents must be interpreted. We’ll say they are interpreted by playing a card of one’s choosing that seems most appropriate. See, I am playing along with the given white definitions, so each incident is followed up with playing a card.

    African Americans, having experienced hundreds of years of racialized oppression as a community, look at particular incidents and recognize the continuity of systemic oppression, which merely has mutated shape and form, often becoming more sophisticated and structural in nature along the way. With that observation we say that a particular situation is racist and needs to be addressed. However, the moment that race is brought into the conversation, many from the white majority label this move as ‘playing the race card’. By doing so, they suggest that race is being brought up inappropriately. The wrong card is being played. More foundational, and at the heart of the matter, it suggests that the African American interpretation is subjective or manipulative, and that by categorizing an event as racial in nature, it must be called out and dismissed…

    …With a sociological framework we can begin to see that white people live highly racialized lives, though they are often unaware of it. Patterns of self-segregation become clear. Where one lives is mostly among those of the same race. Same thing for Church, for intimate relational networks, for the majority of people in one’s phone contacts, or who is invited around one’s table for dinner. You can even see the racial distinctiveness of most people’s book shelves and music. Through these social patterns sociologists are able to reveal high levels of self-segregation among white Americans (more so on average than any other racial group). These patterns also begin to reveal what it means to live on the underside of our racialized society…

    Read the entire article here.

  • 2014 National Poetry Month Poem of the Day: Fred Wah

    2014 National Poetry Month Poem of the Day: Fred Wah

    Turnstone Press
    Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
    2014-04-16

    “Waiting for Saskatchewan,” the title poem for the book, arose out of an event that occurred in Nelson, BC on a winter night in the early ’80s. We had been anticipating an exhibition of art from Saskatchewan about to open at a local art gallery when we were advised that the show would be delayed due to heavy snows over Kootenay Pass, preventing delivery of the art. So I took the poetic hint and used the phrase to meditate on my own historically tethered relationship to Saskatchewan, a place that held, for me, the complications of a mixed-race family history and the geographical site for an Asian-European intersection, a kind of hyphen that I have used to construct a personal imaginary. The poem is a biotext that offers the space to measure the accumulation of particularities and apprehensions, dreams, and memory. The poem is one way to remember the future.

    —Fred Wah on “Waiting for Saskatchewan”

    Waiting for Saskatchewan
    and the origins grandparents countries places converged
    europe asia railroads carpenters nailed grain elevators
    Swift Current my grandmother in her house
    he built on the street…

    Read the entire poem here.

  • Transforming Three Sisters: A Hapa Family in Chekhov’s Modern Classic

    Transforming Three Sisters: A Hapa Family in Chekhov’s Modern Classic

    Asian American Literature: Discourses and Pedagogies
    Volume 3 (2012): Special Issue: Mixed Heritage Asian American Literature
    pages 130-146

    Elizabeth Liang

    “All right, let’s agree that this town is backward and vulgar, and let’s suppose now that out of all its thousands of  inhabitants there are only three people like you… But you won’t simply disappear; you will have some influence. And after you’ve gone there will be six more, let’s say, like you, then twelve, and so on, until finally people like you will be in the majority. In two or three hundred years, life on earth will be unimaginably beautiful, astonishing.” (Vershinin in Act I of Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov, translated by Paul Schmidt)

    It is an act of courage or foolhardiness to produce theatre in the heart of the film world, depending on your point of view and how large the houses turn out to be. In the fall of 2005, I produced Three Sisters in a 60-seat theatre in Burbank, California (home of Disney and Warner Brothers). The odds were stacked even higher against the show’s success when my assistant producer and I stipulated that the main characters, the upper-class and highly educated Russian Prozorov siblings, had to be played by Hapa actors. I chose to foreground mixed heritage Asians because I am Hapa and wanted to see something akin to my own family on stage. The play had never been cast this way anywhere according to my research. Meanwhile, I assumed that our audience would be largely European American, because that is usually the case whenever I attend the theatre. Thus it was difficult to predict if this production would spark any interest in the average L.A. theatregoer, since people tend to flock toward stories to which they can relate. I hoped that they would be intrigued by our unusual “take” on a play with which they were likely familiar (as it is one of Chekhov’s most popular works), but I also worried that they would feel the ethnic “layering” was forced and unnatural, or that we were trying to teach them something they had no interest in learning. My reasons for casting the siblings as Hapa were manifold:

    • To deliberately represent a section of the population that is normally under- and misrepresented. Census 2000 proved that over 6.8 million or 2.4 percent of Americans considered themselves multi-ethnic. 25 percent of those people resided in California. (And Census 2010 discovered that over 9 million or 2.9 percent of Americans considered themselves to belong to two or more racial groups. Among those, Asian and white are the third most common pairing.)
    • To allow the actors to interpret legendary roles in which they might not normally get cast.
    • To further emphasize the difference of the Prozorov family from others by adding race to Chekhov’s division based on class and education.
    • To tell the audience a mixed heritage story without making it feel like a classroom lesson…

    Read the entire article here.

  • James Baldwin asks ‘How are white Americans so sure they are white?’

    James Baldwin asks ‘How are white Americans so sure they are white?’

    Dangerous Minds
    2014-12-04

    Paul Gallagher

    In 1963, James Baldwin wrote two essays that examined the role of race and racism in the history of America. Published in The New Yorker, Baldwin’s first essay, written in the form of a letter to his fourteen-year-old nephew on the 100th anniversary of Emancipation explained “the crux of [his] dispute with [his] country”:

    You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits to your ambition were thus expected to be settled. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity and in as many ways as possible that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence. You were expected to make peace with mediocrity…

    …Baldwin began by talking about a visit to the British Museum where he got in conversation with a West Indian man who asked the writer where he was from…

    …Baldwin went onto explain why he doesn’t know—for his ancestral entry into America was by a “bill of sale, which stops you from going any further.”

    But Baldwin wasn’t interested in just offering personal historical context of the black American experience, he also asked provocative and difficult questions about white ethnicity and the complex relationship between all Americans:

    White men lynched negroes knowing them to be their sons.
    White women watched men being lynched knowing them to be their lovers…
    How are white Americans so sure they are white?

    The point is racism damages everyone.

    In light of the institutionalised racism exposed by the Michael Brown fiasco in Ferguson, the killing of Eric Garner in New York and the rise of racist and xenophobic politics across Europe and the Middle East, Horace Ové‘s film of James Baldwin and Dick Gregory is necessary viewing.

    Read the entire article here.

  • The Half Has Never Been Told with Edward E. Baptist, Ph.D.

    The Half Has Never Been Told with Edward E. Baptist, Ph.D.

    Research at the National Archives and Beyond
    BlogTalk Radio
    Thursday, 2014-12-18 21:00 EST (Friday, 2014-12-19, 02:00Z)

    Bernice Bennett, Producer and Host

    Historian Edward E. Baptist reveals in The Half Has Never Been Told, the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States. In the span of a single lifetime, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations to a continental cotton empire, and the United States grew into a modern, industrial, and capitalist economy. Until the Civil War, Baptist explains, the most important American economic innovations were ways to make slavery ever more profitable. Through forced migration and torture, slave owners extracted continual increases in efficiency from enslaved African Americans. Thus the United States seized control of the world market for cotton, the key raw material of the Industrial Revolution, and became a wealthy nation with global influence.

    Told through intimate slave narratives, plantation records, newspapers, and the words of politicians, entrepreneurs, and escaped slaves, The Half Has Never Been Told offers a radical new interpretation of American history. It forces readers to reckon with the violence at the root of American supremacy, but also with the survival and resistance that brought about slavery’s end—and created a culture that sustains America’s deepest dreams of freedom.

    Edward E. Baptist is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and House Professor and Dean at the Carl Becker House at Cornell University.

    For more information, click here.

  • Racial divisions still require full attention

    Racial divisions still require full attention

    The Daily News Journal
    Murfreesboro, Tennessee
    2014-12-01

    Editorial Board

    Harpers Ferry…Montgomery…Little Rock…Birmingham…Selma…Ferguson…

    Despite some optimism that the United States had evolved into a “post-racial” era, particularly with the election of a black president, events in Ferguson, Missouri, continue to reinforce the reality of a racial divide in this country.

    While the initial focus of demonstrations in Ferguson was a white police office’s fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager, what is at issue now appears to be the entire scope of racial divisions in this country since its founding.

    The decision of a St. Louis County grand jury not to indict Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown has shown further the racial divisions in this country.

    Read the entire article here…

  • How can you identify as Irish on the census if you are not white?

    How can you identify as Irish on the census if you are not white?

    Manchester Policy Blogs: Ethnicity
    Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity
    University of Manchester, United Kingdom
    2014-11-27

    Lindsey Garratt, Research Associate

    The census allows people to identify as Irish only if they are also white. What about the growing number of ethnic minority Irish?, asks Lindsey Garratt.

    When I moved to the UK from the Republic of Ireland in August 2012, I filled in an application to privately rent a house. The form contained a question on ethnicity.

    As I ticked the ‘white Irish’ box, it was the first time I had identified myself as anything other than part of the majority group of a country. Now outside the dominant category and the anonymity this sometimes provides, a fleeting nervousness passed through me – what if identifying myself as Irish went against securing the house?

    This thought came and went in an instant, but what hasn’t left me was my second reaction – what category would I have checked if I wasn’t ‘white’, what if I was ‘black’ and Irish, what box could I tick then?…

    …Uncoupling ‘white’ from Irish in the census would allow at least three important groups to be recognised. Firstly, those of two migrant origin parents born in Ireland, or those who themselves moved to Ireland and subsequently to the UK. Secondly, those of mixed parentage born in Ireland, who have moved to the UK. Lastly, those of mixed parentage, born in the UK…

    Read the entire article here.

  • We Need to Talk about Race

    We Need to Talk about Race

    Sociology
    Volume 48, Number 6 (December 2014)
    pages 1107-1122
    DOI: 10.1177/0038038514521714

    Bethan Harries, Research Associate
    Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity
    University of Manchester, United Kingdom

    It is not easy to name racism in a context in which race is almost entirely denied. Despite a recent focus on the ‘silencing’ of race at a macro level, little has been done to explore the effects of living with these processes, including how they might be resisted. Drawing from a study with 20–30 year olds in Manchester, this article addresses this gap. It examines how respondents disavow racism they experience when to do so is counter-intuitively understood to be associated with being racist or intolerant. These narratives demand that we ask the question, why is racism denied? Or, why is it difficult to articulate? To do this, the article argues we must access narratives in ways that reveal the embeddedness of race and contradictory levels of experience and bring attention back to the meanings and effects of race in everyday life in order to challenge racism and white privilege.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • The Forsaken: Portraits of Mixed-Race Orphans in Postwar Korea

    The Forsaken: Portraits of Mixed-Race Orphans in Postwar Korea

    TIME Magazine
    2014-12-04

    David Kim
    Yale Law School


    Joo Myung Duck (1940-)

    Pictures made in the ’60s by a young photographer, Joo Myung Duck, depict the mixed-race children of foreign servicemen and Korean women

    On July 27, 1953, a ceasefire ended open hostilities in the Korean War, and the United Nations, the People’s Republic of China, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) established a border and a demilitarized zone at the 38th parallel. After three years of fighting, the border between north and south was, in effect, exactly where it had been prior to the beginning of the war. The Republic of Korea (South Korea) refused to join the armistice; and, as a formal peace treaty was never signed, South and North Korea today remain technically at war, 60 years after the guns fell silent.

    Nearly three million people died or went missing in the war, in which North Korean and Chinese troops fought an international force comprised largely of Americans. Of those three million, more than half were civilians, and most were Korean. Since the mid-1950s, meanwhile, the American military has maintained a heavy presence in South Korea; this footprint is the uneasy foundation that underlies relations between the two countries.

    The photos in this gallery were made in the early 1960s by Joo Myung Duck, then a young photojournalist. They depict mixed-race orphans, the children of foreign servicemen and Korean women, at the Holt orphanage in Seoul. Most of these children were born after the war, and they were abandoned by nearly everyone: by their fathers, who rarely remained in Korea; by their mothers, who endured ostracism and social stigma; and by the Korean government, which endorsed a politics of racial purity and sought to expel mixed-race children from the country.

    In exploring these realities, Joo’s photographs are at-once inquisitive, undaunted, and gentle, attending carefully to variations in racial appearance while suggesting the centrality of Christian faith at Holt. His highly formal compositions revel in visual detail. And, in large part, he avoids sentimentality…

    Read the entire article and view the photographs here.

  • Mayor Bill De Blasio Speaks On Eric Garner, NYPD, And More On Ebro In The Morning [AUDIO]

    Mayor Bill De Blasio Speaks On Eric Garner, NYPD, And More On Ebro In The Morning [AUDIO]

    HOT 97, WQHT 97.1 FM
    New York, New York
    2014-12-04

    Ebro Darden, Co-Host

    Peter Rosenberg, Co-Host

    Laura Stylez, Co-Host

    It’s an emotional time in NYC and across the nation after a grand jury decided to not indict NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo for the chokehold death of Eric Garner.

    There were protests all over the city last night when the news was announced; calling for change and justice, especially since this decision only comes weeks after Ferguson [, Missouri] police officer Darren Wilson was given the same ruling.

    New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio called into Ebro In The Morning this morning to discuss the Eric Garner decision, the changes he will enforce when it comes to the NYPD, and so much more:

    Download the audio here.