Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

recent posts

about

  • Latinos and Whiteness: On Being Sold An Empty White Privilege Knapsack

    Latinos and Whiteness: On Being Sold An Empty White Privilege Knapsack

    Race-work, Race-love
    2014-06-13

    Blanca E. Vega (@BlancaVNYC), writer, educator, and race-worker

    Sophia (@sophiagurule) on May 30th replied to my tweet about White Supremacy and Latinidad:

    “‪@BlancaVNYC : and yep ‪#nuncamas. this [choosing White on the Census] has haunted/shaped my life, and used against me, and I’m just done with it.”

    To read more of the conversation, click here.

    For many Latinos in the U.S., race is still an elusive and misunderstood concept. This is due to many reasons but primarily for this one: Latinos have been taught that we are not a race, that instead, we are an ethnicity, and therefore have the ability/privilege to dodge the race question altogether.

    The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line – W.E.B. Du Bois

    For Latinos, the race question on a Census is confused for the color question. For the 2000 Census, even Latinos who were unmistakably White, Black, Native, or Asian, could pick “Other”. In 2010, “Other” was no longer available for Latinos, thus, forcing them to choose (what many confuse) “Color” for “Race” – and there is a difference, one that is often never unpacked for Latinos.

    So, if the problem is the color line, then where do Latinos, who are taught “they have no race” fit in this now 21st century problem?…

    …Latinos should remember that while some of us have privileges associated with Whiteness, this is not White Privilege. However, the only way we can understand our own racialization is to identify those areas in which some of us benefit from White Supremacy and where we don’t – a category Eduardo Bonilla Silva calls “honorary white” – and attack those areas if we are truly in the business of killing White Supremacy. This provides a more nuanced understanding of Latinidad, Latinization of race, and the racialization of Latinos, more so than the frames we inherited….

    Read the entire article here.

  • Say Hapa, With Care

    Say Hapa, With Care

    AAPI Voices: Amplifying the voices of Asian Pacific America.
    2014-06-18

    Sharon Chang, Guest Columnist

    What does Hapa mean?  One way to know is to look at the ways in which the word is used.

    It’s a “Hawaiian word for ‘mixed-race’,” says Hapa Kitchen Supper Club, “coined to refer to people of East Asian and Caucasian backgrounds.” Hapa Sushi Grill & Sake Bar calls it “a harmonious blend of Asian and American.” It’s a “slang term,” proclaims The Natural Hapa: Bamboo Bundles and Hapa Time: Style Inspiration chirps it’s “just one of the coolest words ever.” There’s Hapa Yoga, Hapa Ramen, Hapa Grill, Hapa Cupcakes, Hinode sells a “Hapa Blend” of brown and white rices and Hapa Culture sells…erasers?

    Let’s talk about this word, Hapa…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Seoul International Seminar on Racism/Mixed Race in Korea and Japan

    Seoul International Seminar on Racism/Mixed Race in Korea and Japan

    Yonsei University, South Korea
    2014-06-21 through 2014-06-22
    Co-organized & Sponsored by Department of Cultural Anthropology & Institute of Korean Studies, Yonsei University

    …1:30-3:30 pm Mixed race/blood in modern Japan

    (Chair: Lee Sang Kook, Yonsei University)

    1. A.K.M. Skarpelis (NYU Sociology and Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo) , “Eugenic Ironies: Assimilating Colonial Korea into the Japanese Empire”
    2. Johanna O. Zulueta (Soka University), “Multiculturalism and Mixed Race in Okinawa: Politics of Inclusion/Exclusion in the Post-Cold War Years”
    3. Sachiko Horiguchi (Temple University Japan Campus) & Yuki Imoto (Keio University), “From Konketsu to Hafu: The politics of mixed-race categories in modern Japan”

    Discussant: Han Geon Soo (Kangwon National University), Park Kyung Min (Michigan State University)

    Coffee Break

    4:00-6:00pm Cultural politics of mixed race celebrities in East Asia

    Chair: Koichi Iwabuchi (Monash University)

    1. Ji-Hyun Ahn (University of Washington Tacoma), “Questioning the cultural currency of whiteness: White mixed-race celebrities and (contemporary) Korean popular culture”
    2. Jeehyun Lim (Denison University), “Black and Korean in Neoliberal Multiculturalism in South Korea”
    3. Kaori Mori-Want (Shibaura Institute of Technology), “Japan We are Haafu, So What?: A Different Perspective in Mixed Race Studies in the Voices of Japanese Haafu Comedians”

    Discussant: Jung Hyesil (Hanyang University), Sachiko Horiguchi (Temple University Japan Campus)

    6:00- 8:00 pm Reception…

    For more information click here.

  • Search through own heritage leads evangelist to story about enslaved mixed-race pastor

    Search through own heritage leads evangelist to story about enslaved mixed-race pastor

    The Advocate
    Baton Rouge, Louisiana
    2014-06-16

    Mark H. Hunter, Special to The Advocate

    If local school district officials knew then what Sammy Tippit knows now, he might not have been allowed to attend Istrouma High School.

    Tippit, 66, is a world-renowned evangelist who grew up in Baton Rouge and now lives in San Antonio. He was a prominent Istrouma High student government leader and proudly represented the Indians at statewide high school meetings and debates.

    “I truly am an Istrouma Indian,” Tippit said with a big smile and a twinkle in his blue eyes. And he means that in more ways than one.

    As a youthful “Jesus freak” in the late 1960s, he boldly preached the Gospel of Jesus Christ in dangerous nightclubs on the west side of the Mississippi River. He was arrested and deported from Communist Romania and risked arrest in the Soviet Union for preaching in underground churches in the 1970s and ’80s.

    Just a few months ago, Tippit said, he preached in Pakistan where a large portion of the 10,000-member audience — many of them Muslim men, — prayed for salvation in Jesus Christ. A suicide bomber, perhaps on his way to the service, exploded a few blocks away.

    But one of Tippit’s most unnerving experiences came 10 years ago when a man in Portugal, researching his own family roots, told him they were related by Native American blood going back to Revolutionary War times.

    “All of a sudden I didn’t know who I was,” Tippit said during an interview at a local coffee shop. “I have fair skin and blue eyes, but my bloodline is a mixture of English, Native American and African.”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • On The Census, Who Checks ‘Hispanic,’ Who Checks ‘White,’ And Why

    On The Census, Who Checks ‘Hispanic,’ Who Checks ‘White,’ And Why

    Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity
    National Public Radio
    2014-06-16

    Gene Demby, Lead Blogger

    We’ve been talking a lot lately about how who fills out the Census in what way. It’s an ongoing preoccupation of Code Switch, and one shared by Julie Dowling. Dowling, a University of Illinois sociologist, whose book, Mexican Americans and the Question of Race, came out earlier this year. (As the daughter of a Mexican-American mother and Irish-American father, Dowling knows all about the complexities of filling out the race question on the Census form.)

    I interviewed Dowling about her research, and she shared some fascinating insights about the gap between how people fill in Census forms and how they think of themselves.

    On the history of ‘Hispanic’ on the Census Questionnaire

    In 1930, “Mexican” was put on the Census [questionnaire] as a race. This was during the Depression and it was a time period when [the government was] rounding up people. They used the Census in the 1940s to locate Japanese-Americans for internment camps. So people didn’t want to be identifiable on the Census because they were afraid of the government.

    Today, everyone wants to be counted. Now everyone wants representation. But at that time period, people did not want that. And they also did not want to be racialized. This was a time where the best avenue for people to fit in was to claim whiteness.

    In 1929, the League of the United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), a Mexican-American organization, formed in Corpus Christi, TX. One of their main organizing efforts was to get “Mexican” off the 1930 census. They protested: we are white race, we are Americans.

    The Mexican government itself protested the category, because the entire Southwest used to be part of Mexico, and when it was taken over by the United States, they promised Mexico that the Mexican residents there would be treated as full citizens. Well, at the time, you had to be white to be a citizen. So that’s where the whole issue came about of Mexicans, specifically, identifying as legally white but socially not-white.

    It worked against them in some ways, because they claimed segregation and discrimination, the parties being accused of discrimination could say, Well, no, you’re white. So this history of claiming whiteness has been a strategy that Mexican Americans and other Latino groups have used to try to lobby for acceptance — claiming Americanness, claiming whiteness…

    Read the entire article here.

  • When Dad Wiped Away My Tears: Accepting a Child’s Vulnerability

    When Dad Wiped Away My Tears: Accepting a Child’s Vulnerability

    Psychology Today
    2014-06-15

    Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu Ed.D.
    Stanford University

    I thought summer camp would be endless fun. My two best friends were going and I wanted to go with them so badly I asked my dad to lie about my age so I could get in. I was seven and you were supposed to be eight. Dad liked my spunk, so he changed my birthday on the application and I got to go to the two-week overnight camp. On Father’s Day I always remember this story with gratitude and want to share it with you.

    Camp Russell wasn’t quite what I had dreamed about. It wasn’t a rich kids’ camp, but the Boy’s Club camp and was full of tough kids from all over the city. I was scared and tried not to be noticed, but as the only Asian kid there I stood out everywhere I went. Kids would whisper to each other when I walked by or shout from a distance, “Hey Jap” or “Ching, Chong, Chinaman!” and everyone would laugh or pretend to speak Chinese. I didn’t know what to do. There were too many and they were too big to fight. So I pretended not to hear anything and no one approached me or threatened me. I was big for my age and I heard them joking that I knew karate…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Black Identity and Racism Collide in Brazil

    Black Identity and Racism Collide in Brazil

    The Root
    2014-06-17

    Dion Rabouin

    The country’s complex history with race gains the spotlight as the World Cup attempts to address the recent wave of racist attacks against black players.

    Before teams representing their countries from around the world arrived in Brazil, the country’s president, Dilma Rousseff, took the opportunity to label 2014 the “anti-racism World Cup.”

    The declaration came after a wave of racist incidents in soccer around the world targeting black players, many of whom are Brazilian. While it’s a well-intentioned gesture and a particularly important one for a World Cup being hosted in the country that’s home to the largest population of people of African descent outside of Africa, Brazil has a complex past and present when it comes to race.

    That complexity can perhaps best be illustrated by the fact that many black Brazilians don’t think of themselves as black. Brazilian soccer star Neymar is a great example. Asked during an interview in 2010 if he had ever experienced racism, his response was, “Never.” He added, “Not inside nor outside of the soccer field. Even more because I’m not black, right?”

    This denial of blackness may seem confusing to many Americans, because despite his long, straightened and occasionally blond hair, Neymar is clearly black. (Take a look at a picture of young Neymar with his family.) But for Brazilians, being black is very different from what it is in the United States.

    “The darker a person is in Brazil, the more racism she or he is going to suffer. Light-skinned black people don’t identify as black most of the time,” says Daniela Gomes, a black Brazilian activist who is currently pursuing a doctorate in African Diaspora studies at the University of Texas. “A lot of people choose to deny their blackness. They don’t believe they are black, but they suffer racism without knowing why.”

    Gomes calls it a “brainwash” that Brazilians go through in a country that likes to hold itself up as a model for racial harmony. But she also points to differences in the histories of the United States and Brazil. “We never had segregation, we never had the one-drop rule, we never had those kinds of things that are so normal for an African American,” she said. “What happened in Brazil was the opposite.”

    Integration and miscegenation were actually government policy in Brazil. Around the time that slaves were freed, in 1888, the government sought to whiten its population through the importation of European immigrants. This idea was made law by Decree 528 in 1890 and opened the country’s borders to foreign immigrants, except for those from Africa and Asia…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Japanese Brazilians celebrate mixed heritage

    Japanese Brazilians celebrate mixed heritage

    Al Jazeera
    2014-06-17

    Jillian Kestler-D’Amour, Online Producer

    Sao Paulo, Brazil – The room was a mixture of Brazilian green and yellow and Japanese red and white, as more than 200 members of the city’s large Japanese community turned out to watch the country of their ancestors take on Cote d’Ivoire in both teams’ World Cup opening match.

    Chants of Japao! (Japan in Portuguese) rang out through the crowd, which was dominated by navy jerseys with the names Honda, Toshio, Takaya, Shiota, and Kagawa affixed to the back. The room erupted when Japanese star Keisuke Honda put the Samurai Blue ahead in the first half, but fans were ultimately stunned when Cote d’Ivoire scored twice in two minutes to win, 2-1.

    “I feel very proud that Japan is in the World Cup and that we can host them here in Brazil,” said Analia Kita, before the game began. Wife of Kihatino Kita, the director of the Japanese-Brazilian Association that hosted the screening, Analia said she has tickets to cheer on Japan when the team takes on Switzerland next week in Natal.

    “Between Japan and Brazil, it’s going to be very hard to choose [my favourite],” she said laughing. “But it’s going to have to be Brazil. I’m Brazilian.”…

    …Dual identities

    “We can characterise it as a mixture. We have 106 years of immigration and in this time, we have seen the mixture and integration of the Japanese culture in Brazil,” explained Celia Sakurai, a researcher on Japanese-Brazilian community and culture.

    Born in Sao Paulo where she lives today, Sakurai told Al Jazeera that Japanese influence on Brazil’s culture can be viewed through the popularity of anime, Manga comics, and haikai (the Portuguese-language version of a haiku), the practise of judo and taeko (traditional Japanese drumming), and other arts…

    Read the entire article here.

  • People from Mexico show stunning amount of genetic diversity

    People from Mexico show stunning amount of genetic diversity

    Science
    2014-06-12

    Lizzie Wade, Latin America Correspondent

    Imagine if people from Kansas and California were as genetically distinct from each other as someone from Germany is from someone from Japan. That’s the kind of remarkable genetic variation that scientists have now found within Mexico, thanks to the first fine-scale study of human genetic variation in that country. This local diversity could help researchers trace the history of the country’s different indigenous populations and help them develop better diagnostic tools and medical treatments for people of Mexican descent living all over the world.

    The team has done a “tremendous job” of creating a “blueprint of all the genetic diversity in Mexico,” says Bogdan Pasaniuc, a population geneticist at the University of California (UC), Los Angeles, who was not involved in the research…

    …When the team analyzed the genomes of 511 indigenous individuals from all over Mexico, they found a striking amount of genetic diversity. The most divergent indigenous groups in Mexico are as different from each other as Europeans are from East Asians, they report online today in Science. This diversity maps onto the geography of Mexico itself. The farther away ethnic groups live from each other, the more different their genomes turn out to be.

    But most people in Mexico or of Mexican descent these days are not indigenous but rather mestizo, meaning they have a mixture of indigenous, European, and African ancestry. Do their genomes also vary by what region of Mexico they come from, or has all that local variation been smoothed out by centuries of different groups meeting, mixing, and having babies?…

    Read the entire article here.

  • LeiLani Nishime explores the Asian American experience in her new book

    LeiLani Nishime explores the Asian American experience in her new book

    The Seattle Globalist
    2014-03-25

    Diane Han
    University of Washington

    We understand that race doesn’t exist biologically, but it doesn’t mean that race isn’t real.

    “We think we see race because it exists in the world, but really, we learn to see race,” says LeiLani Nishime, author of the recently published “Undercover Asian: Multiracial Asian Americans in Visual Culture.”

    “I think the approach to race is not to ignore it or pretend it is not there, but to confront it, see that it’s there, and understand what it does for us in a social context.”

    Nishime’s book is a critical examination of the ways multiracial Asian Americans are represented in mass media…

    Read the entire article here.