Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • ‘Stunning Portraits of Mixed Race Families’?: Slate’s Human Zoo of Race Mongrelization

    ‘Stunning Portraits of Mixed Race Families’?: Slate’s Human Zoo of Race Mongrelization

    We Are Respectable Negroes: Happy Non-Threatening Coloured Folks, Even in the Age of Obama
    Wednesday, 2014-06-25

    Chauncey DeVega, Editor and Founder

    Am I the only person who found Slate.com’s photo essay “Stunning Portraits of Mixed Race Families” to be very problematic?

    To my eyes, it contains and channels the echoes of race science and eugenics wrapped in a veneer of praise and curiosity for “unusual” and “fascinating” bodies.

    Questions of race and representation were and remain central to the dynamics of the global color line. The ways in which certain types of people and bodies are visually represented through film, photographs, paintings, and other mediums reflect the dynamics of power.

    Whose eyes are “we” seeing through? What assumptions are driving the Gaze? How are the bodies and people in visual images posed and positioned relative to one another? Who is included? What types of people and bodies are excluded?…

    …The contemporary American fascination with “mixed race” and “biracial” identity is a reflection of changing demographics and globalization; it is also a surrender to and performance of a shallow type of faux cosmopolitanism.

    Ironically, the race scientists of Nazi Germany and the United States, as well as the photographer Cyjo (whose work was featured in Slate’s essay) who fetishize and find something “stunning” or “interesting” about “mixed race” and/or “biracial” people (what are fictive identities, social constructs, as there is only one race, the human race) share some common assumptions.

    One, that those types of “racial” identities are somehow new or novel. In fact, human history is a story of “miscegenation” and “interracial” intimacy. Two, that those types of bodies and individuals merit study and analysis because there is some connection, either implied or explicitly stated, between genes, color, culture, destiny, and personal, as well as national “character”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • UCLA Mixed Heritage Conference 2014 – Mixed Stories

    UCLA Mixed Heritage Conference 2014 – Mixed Stories

    Team Mixed Show
    University of California, Los Angeles Mixed Heritage Conference 2014
    2014-06-18

    Recorded at the Mixed Student Union at UCLA’s Mixed Heritage Conference, April 2014. Participants at the conference share their stories.

    *Our apologies to the people who we filmed but did not make it into the video. Our second data card malfunctioned and we lost quite a bit of footage, unfortunately this was the footage of the mixed Black participants.

    Thank you to all who participated on and off camera and to the Mixed Student Union for inviting us.

  • Bill de Blasio and the Art of Political Image at… the Mermaid Parade

    Bill de Blasio and the Art of Political Image at… the Mermaid Parade

    The New York Times
    2014-06-23

    Vanessa Friedman, Chief Fashion Critic


    Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York with, from left, his son, Dante; his wife, Chirlane McCray; and his daughter, Chiara, at the Coney Island Mermaid Parade on Saturday. [Tina Fineberg/Associated Press]

    Mayor Bill de Blasio and his family had kind of an interesting fashion moment over the weekend. In case you missed it, I offer the above photo of Mr. de Blasio in pirate kit; his wife, Chirlane McCray, in full Ariel getup and their two children both body-painted blue — all for the annual Coney Island Mermaid Parade. In fact, Dante and Chiara were king and queen of the parade, a kitsch classic that takes place on the first official day of summer (i.e. Saturday).

    Why does this matter beyond the obvious comedic value? Strategy and image spin, my dear Watson. Strategy and image spin…

    Read the entire article here.

  • An Evening with Hip Hop Scholar/Activist and 2008 Green Party Vice Presidential Candidate, Rosa Clemente

    An Evening with Hip Hop Scholar/Activist and 2008 Green Party Vice Presidential Candidate, Rosa Clemente

    Yemaya Pictures
    California State University, Los Angeles
    2014-05-08, 20:00 PDT
    5151 State University Drive
    Annenberg Science Building 132 (Science Building Wing B, Lecture Hall)
    Los Angeles, California 90032

    From May 8, 2014. The Pan-African Studies Department at California State University, Los Angeles presents An Evening with Hip Hop Scholar/Activist Rosa Clemente. Rosa speaks about Afro-Latin@ Identity and Critical Approaches to Blackness.

  • Stunning Portraits of Mixed-Race Families

    Stunning Portraits of Mixed-Race Families

    Slate
    2014-06-24

    David Rosenberg, Editor of Slate’s Behold blog

    Fascinated by the evolution of identity, the photographer Cyjo, who styles her name CYJO, has created a series of portraits that examines how race, ethnicity, and heritage contextualize a person as an individual, and how they coexist within the framework of a family.

    Cyjo identifies herself as a Westerner of Korean ethnicity (she was born in South Korea and raised in the United States) and photographed the series “Mixed Blood” from 2010–13 in both New York and Beijing. She has explored the dynamic between individual and collective identities in her previous work via a more abstract approach, but, with “Mixed Blood,” she uses the more literal approach of portraiture.

    Over time, as humans migrate and change environments, the definition of identity has evolved to adjust to a broader definition of race and ethnicity. Cyjo pointed out that, in 2000, the United States Census for the first time allowed people to choose more than one identifier when noting their race. Almost 7 million people chose to count themselves as mixed race, a number that has continued to grow over the past decade and a half…

    Read the article and view the photo essay here.

  • Elective Race: Recognizing Race Discrimination in the Era of Racial Self-Identification

    Elective Race: Recognizing Race Discrimination in the Era of Racial Self-Identification

    Georgetown Law Journal
    Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.
    Volume 102, Issue 5 (2014)
    pages 1501-1572

    Camille Gear Rich, Associate Professor of Law
    University of Southern California, Gould School of Law

    This Article posits that we are in a key moment of discursive and ideological transition, an era in which the model of elective race is ascending, poised to become one of the dominant frameworks for understanding race in the United States. Because we are in a period of transition, many Americans still are wedded to fairly traditional attitudes about race. For these Americans, race is still an objective, easily ascertainable fact determined by the process of involuntary racial ascription—how one’s physical traits are racially categorized by third parties. The elective-race framework will challenge these Americans to recognize other ways in which people experience race, including acts of voluntary affiliation as well as selective and conditional affiliations. Importantly, even if one concludes that most Americans still hold traditional, ascriptive-based understandings of race, there is evidence that elective race is steadily gaining influence in certain quarters, shaping government institutions’ formal procedures as well as certain Americans’ racial understandings.

    To improve the clarity and precision of discussions about elective race, this Article outlines the key premises and norms associated with this ideological framework. My primary goal is to help courts and scholars understand the basic tenets and tensions that are likely to be present in plaintiffs’ elective-race claims. Although some scholars have trivialized racial self-identification interests or represented them as a threat to antidiscrimination law, my project is to show that racial self-identification decisions matter in concrete ways because they can trigger serious race-based social sanctions that are a core antidiscrimination law concern. Indeed, as we will see, voluntary racial-affiliation decisions can and do trigger race-based resentment, rejection, and social sanction when race-based resentment, rejection, and social sanction when they do not match certain expected or established American understandings about the boundaries of racial categories. Moreover, I predict that, though the number of cases that sound in the nature of elective race may be small at present, we should expect to see more cases of this kind given both the increased focus Americans place on the interest in racial self-identification and the shift toward institutional protocols that are intended to accommodate this interest. The elective-race cases will challenge courts, forcing them to decide whether Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII) should recognize the autonomy claims of individuals who are injured in the workplace by the social and formal processes of involuntary racialization. Courts will be asked to rule on cases that suggest that an employee’s dignity interests are unjustly frustrated when other fail to respect the employee’s right to racial self-definition.

    Read the entire article here.

  • Creating positive out-group attitudes through intergroup couple friendships and implications for compassionate love

    Creating positive out-group attitudes through intergroup couple friendships and implications for compassionate love

    Journal of Social and Personal Relationships
    Published online before print: 2014-02-10
    DOI: 10.1177/0265407514522369

    Keith M. Welker
    Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan

    Richard B. Slatcher, Associate Professor of Psychology
    Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan

    Lynzey Baker
    Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan

    Arthur Aron, Professor of Psychology
    State University of New York, Stony Brook

    Building personal relationships with out-group members is an important catalyst of positive intergroup attitudes. In a 2 × 2 experimental design, Caucasian and African American individuals and couples were randomly assigned to interact in either cross-race or same-race individual dyads and couple pairs. Participants completed pretest measures of race attitudes and engaged in a high self-disclosure closeness-induction task with an in-group or out-group race member in pairs of couples or individuals and completed measures of self-disclosure and intergroup attitudes. These results suggest that intergroup contact in the presence of romantic partners may be particularly effective for improving intergroup attitudes. We explore the implications of these results for developing compassionate love toward out-groups.

    Read the entire article here.

  • Radical Love: A Transatlantic Dialogue about Race and Mixed Race

    Radical Love: A Transatlantic Dialogue about Race and Mixed Race

    Asian American Literary Review
    Volume 4, Issue 2, Pandora’s Box (2013)
    pages 15-26

    Daniel McNeil, Ida B. Wells-Barnett Professor of African and Black Diaspora Studies
    DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois

    Leanne Taylor, Assistant Professor of Education
    Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada

    Boy meets girl. Boy makes the girl laugh with some playful jibes about his English accent and her “cynical Canadian” response to a talk about radical love in America. Girl gives boy a lingering, flirtatious handshake. Boy resists the urge to say, “this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

    This is a transatlantic love story informed by the neurotic heroes of the Facebook era as much as the stoic men of 1940s Hollywood or the stubborn women of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The boy displays similar levels of social awkwardness and ambition to the character of Marc Zuckerberg, one of the founders of Facebook, in The Social Network. Yet he has a modicum of charm and is able to craft some touching emails to the girl when he returns to England. The girl is far more interesting than any of the female characters in The Social Network and sparks back some funny Facebook messages from Canada. After reconnecting in Toronto in January 2011, they start to communicate via Blackberry instant messenger and send each other letters, books and poetry. Their conversations provide a revealing glimpse into the politics and poetics of mixed race relationships. For whereas the transracial, transdisciplinary and transnational field of mixed race studies tends to focus on the love between “interracial couples” and their children, their romantic back and forth offers a revealing glimpse into the love between two people defined as mixed race.

    Read the entire article here.

  • Racial categories vary across the world. Thus, identical twins separated and raised in different countries could end up identifying their race differently.

    “Racial categories vary across the world. Thus, identical twins separated and raised in different countries could end up identifying their race differently. Similarly, were we able to send a person back through time, his or her race might change. Social scientists point to this variation in racial categories across time and space to argue that race is a social construct. Further support for the fluidity of race also comes from recent studies that show that some people report membership in different races at different times in their lives. The race that one selects often depends upon one’s current social position.”

    Brooke A. Cunningham, MD, PhD, “Race: A Starting Place,” Virtual Mentor: American Medical Association Journal of Ethics, Volume 16, Number 6 (June 2014), 474. http://virtualmentor.ama-assn.org/2014/06/msoc1-1406.html.