Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • I think there is an additional layer of psychological interest for me in that my vision is filtered through the lens of my personal experience as someone of mixed race growing up in Canada.

    “I think there is an additional layer of psychological interest for me in that my vision is filtered through the lens of my personal experience as someone of mixed race growing up in Canada. I was often identified as being “different” and even persecuted for this perception. As a result, I tended to form friendships with minority kids and anyone who might have felt excluded from the “mainstream.” This has had a significant impact on my view of the world, my desire for social justice and equality, and my long-standing motivations as an artist who is interested primarily in people.” —Tim Okamura

    “Q&A with Tim Okamura: A Painter with a Purpose,” SCA Close Up: News and Events From the School of Visual Arts (August 29, 2013). http://blog.sva.edu/2013/08/qa-with-tim-okamura-a-painter-with-a-purpose/.

  • MOsley WOtta

    MOsley WOtta

    Oregon Art Beat
    Oregon Public Broadcasting
    Aired: 2013-05-30
    Length: 00:08:24

    MOsley WOtta is a sly play-on-words meant to remind us that we are all “mostly water.” This inclusive, hip-hop reminder helps Bend-based man-behind-the-artist Jason Graham find family wherever he goes and to share his danceable message of peace and mutual support.

  • An unmanageable Commodity to have imported into this white Country: Growing up Mixed-Race in India and Scotland, 1780-1830

    An unmanageable Commodity to have imported into this white Country: Growing up Mixed-Race in India and Scotland, 1780-1830

    Institute of Historical Research
    Senate House (Room 103)
    Malet Street
    London WC1E 7HU
    Tuesday, 2014-01-14, 17:15-19:15Z

    Ellen Filor
    University College London

    Seminar Series: Life-Cycles (Spring Term 2014)

    This seminar series will address issues relating to the life-cycle such as age, intergenerational relationships, parenthood, ageing, childhood and youth, from long-chronological and interdisciplinary perspectives.

    For more information, click here.

  • Q&A with Tim Okamura: A Painter with a Purpose

    Q&A with Tim Okamura: A Painter with a Purpose

    SCA Close Up: News and Events From the School of Visual Arts
    School of Visual Arts, New York, New York
    2013-08-29

    An eclectic heritage, a penchant for hip-hop, and life as an artist in New York City set Tim Okamura (MFA 1993 Illustration as Visual Essay) on a path toward social consciousness. Collected by celebrity clients (including Uma Thurman, Questlove and John Mellencamp) and exhibited in the National Portrait Gallery in London, his portraits are meant to “contribute a positive voice to the conversations going on today.” Okamura’s paintings in “The Pond, the Mirror, the Kaleidoscope” depict a trio of female boxers, suggesting women’s plight for equality and justice.

    SCA: You’re known for your paintings of African American women.  You’re half-Japanese, half-Caucasian and you grew up in Canada. Many of your paintings celebrate the New York street scene. How did this juxtaposition come about?

    Tim Okamura: It’s a question that comes up often—and it’s really not a short answer for me—and it’s very intriguing to me that there are people who tend to find the juxtaposition of the work, and who I am, quite “conceptual.” It’s something I hadn’t fully considered when I began making the work. The idea that there would be an intertwining assessment of both model and artist when looking at the work was vaguely in the back of my mind, but it never influenced my choices. As someone who has focused primarily on portraiture up to this point in my career, I think the biggest factor in choosing my subjects has always just been a deep interest in the “stories” of the people I paint. I consider portraiture a form of story-telling as it relates to the subject, and I really wanted to discover or reveal to my audience stories that I felt were compelling, and perhaps had not been told previously…

    …I think there is an additional layer of psychological interest for me in that my vision is filtered through the lens of my personal experience as someone of mixed race growing up in Canada. I was often identified as being “different” and even persecuted for this perception. As a result, I tended to form friendships with minority kids and anyone who might have felt excluded from the “mainstream.” This has had a significant impact on my view of the world, my desire for social justice and equality, and my long-standing motivations as an artist who is interested primarily in people…

    Read the entire interview here.

  • The story behind Dido Belle – the bi-racial Londoner who helped end slavery in Britain

    The story behind Dido Belle – the bi-racial Londoner who helped end slavery in Britain

    London Evening Standard
    2014-01-08

    Susannah Butter

    Susannah Butter tells the tale of Dido Belle, ahead of the release of a film about her extraordinary life starring Tom Felton and Miranda Richardson.

    Among the many aristocratic faces gazing out of frames in Hampstead’s newly refurbished Kenwood House, there’s one that sticks out. Standing next to Elizabeth Murray in a print of Johann Zoffany’s portrait from c.1799, there is a smiling girl wearing pearls. But although she looks equal to her playmate, she is black. This girl is Dido Belle, the daughter of an enslaved woman. Belle was brought up at Kenwood, a house partially built with “blood money” from the Triangular Trade, and she made her own contribution to the abolition of slavery. A film of her extraordinary life, Belle, is out this spring with a cast including Tom Felton and Miranda Richardson.

    It comes after two films examining the black historical experience: British director Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave and Lee Daniels’s The Butler, both set in the United States. But there is another story of slavery that needs telling and it’s set in London…

    …Belle was born the illegitimate daughter of Admiral Sir John Lindsay of the Royal Navy and Maria Belle, a slave who he met en route from England to Jamaica around 1761. When Lindsay went back to the navy, he entrusted five-year-old Belle to his uncle, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, who lived at Kenwood. Lord and Lady Mansfield had no children of their own but raised Belle with Lady Elizabeth Murray, the daughter of Mansfield’s other nephew, David Murray.

    “The idea that there was this girl who was part of our cultural legacy in England — a mixed race woman in the 1780s — hooked me,” says Gugu Mbatha-Raw, the London actress who plays Belle. “Speaking as a mixed-race woman in 2013, there aren’t many historical stories about people like me. When people think of ‘dual heritage,’ they think it’s a modern concept but it’s not. I wanted to do justice to Dido.”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Home is Where the Hurt Is: Racial Socialization, Stigma, and Well-Being in Afro-Brazilian Families

    Home is Where the Hurt Is: Racial Socialization, Stigma, and Well-Being in Afro-Brazilian Families

    Duke University
    2012
    228 pages

    Elizabeth Hordge Freeman

    Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Sociology in the Graduate School of Duke University

    This dissertation examines racial socialization in Afro-Brazilian families in order to understand how phenotypically diverse families negotiate racial hierarchies and ideologies of white supremacy. As an inductive, qualitative project, this research is based on over fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil in fifteen poor and working-class Bahian families and 116 semi-structured interviews with family members and informants. Findings suggest that one of the most prominent features of racial socialization is the pervasive devaluation of black/African influences, which is conveyed through implicit and explicit messages as well as concrete practices (including rituals) that promote the stigmatization of negatively valued racialized physical features. The study reveals a pattern of unequal distribution of affection based on racial appearance (phenotype), which is evident in parent-child, sibling, extended family, and romantic relationships. Findings suggest that negative appraisals of racial phenotype may significantly compromise affective bonds in families and have social psychological consequences impacting self-esteem and sense of belonging, while also eliciting suicidal ideations and anxieties. These outcomes are most pronounced for Afro-Brazilian females. Racial socialization also conveys the “strategically ambiguous” logic of color and racial classification, uncritically exposes family members to racist messages, jokes, and stereotypical images of Afro-Brazilians, and encourages cultural participation that superficially valorizes Afro-Brazilian culture and fosters nationalism, rather than racial identity. In contrast to traditional findings of racial socialization in the U.S., messages valorizing racial heritage are rare and efforts to prepare family members for bias rely on universal terms. Families do employ counter-discourses and creative strategies of resistance; and so, racial socialization is characterized by practices that reflect both resistance and accommodation to racial hierarchies. I conclude that racial socialization in families is influenced by and sustains racialization processes that maintain the broader system of white supremacy. Contrary to how racial socialization has been framed as having a purely protective role in families, this study illustrates how it may disadvantage blacks vis-à-vis whites and uniquely stigmatizes the most “black-looking” family members vis-à-vis those who more closely approximate an idealized (whiter) somatic norm. Future studies should triangulate data on racial socialization from other regions of the Americas.

    Contents

    • Abstract
    • Acknowledgements
    • 1. Introduction
      • 1.1 “The Face of A Slave”
      • 1.2 Background
      • 1.3 Case Selection
        • 1.3.1 Community Site
      • 1.4 Data and Methods
      • 1.5 Methodology
      • 1.6 “Second Sight” or Double Vision? My Subjectivity in the Field
      • 1.7 Organization of the Dissertation
    • 2. Literature Review
      • 2.1 Crafting a Social Order: Race and Racialization
        • 2.1.1 Towards a Phenotypic Continuum
      • 2.2 Blinded by the White: Whitening and Racial Socialization in Families
        • 2.2.1 Studying Families in the U.S. and Brazil
        • 2.2.2 Mothering in Families
      • 2.3 The Stigmatized Body and Well Being
      • 2.4 The Family Systems Paradigm and Emotions
      • 2.5 Conceptual Framework
      • 2.6 Theoretical Framework
      • 2.7 The Racial Rubik: Salvador, Bahia, Brazil
    • 3. “All in the Family”: Implicit and Explicit Racial Socialization
      • 3.1 Chapter Preface
      • 3.2 “Strategic Ambiguity” and Color Inconsistencies
        • 3.2.1 Family Interventions in Racial Classification
        • 3.2.2 Will the real white person please stand up?
        • 3.2.3 There are no whites, We are all black!
      • 3.3 Race and Space
        • 3.3.1 Todo no seu Lugar – Everything in its Place
      • 3.4 “Explicit Socialization Messages?.
        • 3.4.1 Educação é Salvação: Education is Salvation
        • 3.4.2 Reading Bodies, Not Books
      • 3.5 Racially (Mixed Messages) and Quotas
      • 3.6 What is racism?
      • 3.7 Media and Culture
        • 3.7.1 Novelas
        • 3.7.2 Re-Telling National Tales
      • 3.8 Conclusion
    • 4. What’s Love Got to Do With It? : The Stigma of Racialized Features, Affect, and Socialization in Families
      • 4.1 Context
      • 4.2 The Hand That Rocks the Cradle: Mother-Child Relationships
      • 4.2.1 Harbingers of Racial Socialization: Babies
      • 4.3 Like a Good Neighbor
      • 4.4 Mama’s Baby is Daddy’s Maybe
      • 4.5 Racial Roulette and Sibling Rivalry
      • 4.6 She’s just my (pheno)Type: Romantic Love
        • 4.6.1 Race and Romance
      • 4.7 Discussion
    • 5. Black and “Blue”: Racial Stigma and Well being
      • 5.1 Incog-negro: Abandoning Blackness
      • 5.2 When Racial Roulette is Violent
      • 5.3 Depression, Trust, and Trauma
      • 5.4 Pretty Please?! Beauty and Self-Esteem
      • 5.5 We (Don’t) Belong Together
      • 5.6 Discussion
    • 6. Pigments of the Imagination: Beauty, Body, and Racialization
      • 6.1 The Bodies Exhibit
      • 6.2 Hands, Feet, and Ears, Oh My!
      • 6.3 Hair-itage
        • 6.3.1 The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
      • 6.4 The Roots of Resistance: Afro-Aesthetics
        • 6.4.1 Hide My Roots! Afro-Aesthetics and Cultural Movements at Home
      • 6.5 Discussion
    • 7. “Where There is Power, There is Also Resistance
      • 7.1 Nascimento Family Values
        • 7.1.1 Racial Names.
        • 7.1.2 Race and Privilege
        • 7.1.3 Beauty
        • 7.1.4 Racial History
        • 7.1.5 Internalized Racism
      • 7.2 The Santos Family
        • 7.2.1 Racial Rituals
      • 7.3 The de Jesus Family: The Brazilian Black Panthers
        • 7.3.1 Brief Life History of Pantera Negra
        • 7.3.2 Explicit Socialization
      • 7.4 Discussion
    • 8. Conclusion – The Ties That Bind
      • 8.1 Limitations and Future Directions
      • 8.2 Conclusions
    • Appendix A
    • Appendix B
    • Appendix C
    • Appendix D
    • Appendix E
    • References
    • Bibliography

    List of Tables

    • Table 1: Color Categorization by Percentage
    • Table 2: Summary of the color terms used in interviews and observations
    • Table 3: Summary of responses to the question: What is your race?
    • Table 4: List of all color or racial nicknames used by informants

    Read the entire dissertation here.

  • The concept of socialrace

    The concept of socialrace

    Philosophy Social Criticism
    Volume 40, Number 1 (January 2014)
    pages 69-90
    DOI: 10.1177/0191453713498252

    Michael O. Hardimon
    Department of Philosophy
    University of California, San Diego

    Explication of the concept of socialrace: the concept variously refers to (1) a social group that is taken to be a racialist race, (2) the social position occupied by a particular social group that is a socialrace and (3) the system of social positions that are socialraces. Socialrace is distinguished from other more familiar forms of social construction. The sense in which socialrace counts as a race concept is explained. The advantages of the term ‘socialrace’ are discussed. The desiderata for a conception of socialrace are articulated. The concept socialrace is contrasted with other similar concepts.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Jackie Kay on reading out an anti-racist poem at a football ground

    Jackie Kay on reading out an anti-racist poem at a football ground

    The Guardian
    2012-10-26

    Jackie Kay, Professor of Creative Writing
    Newcastle University

    Jackie Kay readies for an experiment – being a poet on Sheffield United’s pitch and helping to kick racism out of football

    On Monday I’m going to be pitching my anti-racist poem to fans of the Blades and Pompey at Sheffield United’s Bramall Lane stadium, the oldest major football stadium in the world still hosting matches.

    I’m an experiment – a poet on the pitch, but not a pitch-perfect poet. I might even be a botched experiment. As far as I know, I’m the first poet to read to a whole stadium just before kick-off – but certainly the first woman poet. The two women behind this initiative are Sue Beeley, head of community at Sheffield United, and Su Walker from Off the Shelf Literature Festival. They came up with the idea of commissioning a poet to write an anti-racist poem, read it at a match, and paint the poem on the stadium walls. They picked me because they’d read I was sporty! Beeley said: ”If it works, it will go down a storm, if it doesn’t we’ll let you know.” Off the Shelf has commissioned poets for years; slowly, deftly, they’ve been creating a poetic map of the city of steel. In Sheffield, Andrew Motion has a poem on the side of one student building, Jarvis Cocker is on another, Benjamin Zephaniah on the railings of another, and Roger McGough can be found in the Winter Garden…

    …When I was researching my poem, I came across Arthur Wharton, the first professional black footballer to play in the Football League. He was born in Ghana; his father was half-Scottish and half-Grenadian. He came to England in 1882 and by 1894 was playing for Sheffield United. He died in 1930. Wharton was my talisman. I imagined him coming back from the dead and hearing the news. I imagined his reaction to the monkey chanting. Just thinking about him made me think about the extra time on racism’s clock; how racism is society’s own goal. Shaming….

    Read the entire article here.

  • The New York Times and NPR Are Still Clueless About Latinos

    The New York Times and NPR Are Still Clueless About Latinos

    Alisa Valdes: Official Website for Writer and Producer Alisa Valdes
    2014-01-03

    Alisa Valdes

    More than a decade ago, when I worked as a staff writer for two of the nation’s top newspapers (The Boston Globe and the LA Times), I was often disappointed to see my fellow writers and editors using the words “Hispanic” or “Latino” as physical descriptors. They seemed to believe the US Census category of Hispanic/Latino to denote physical, “racial” characteristics, in spite of race itself being entirely a social construct with no basis in genetic or scientific fact, and in spite of the United States Census Bureau itself stating clearly that “Hispanics may be of any race.”

    Put in simpler terms, Latin America is as “racially” or physically diverse as the United States as a whole. There is no single “type” or “race” of human being in Latin America, and as a result Latinos are “racially”/physically as diverse as the United States population as a whole — or as the entirety of humanity…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Free African Americans of Maryland and Delaware from the Colonial Period to 1810

    Free African Americans of Maryland and Delaware from the Colonial Period to 1810

    Genealogical Publishing Company
    2000
    392 pages
    Hardcover ISBN: 9780806350424

    Paul Heinegg

    As he did for Free Blacks in North Carolina and Virginia, Paul Heinegg has reconstructed the history of the free African American communities of Maryland and Delaware by looking at the history of their families.

    Free African Americans of Maryland and Delaware is a new work that will intrigue genealogists and historians alike. First and foremost, Mr. Heinegg has assembled genealogical evidence on more than 300 Maryland and Delaware black families (naming nearly 6,000 individuals), with copious documentation from the federal censuses of 1790-1810 and colonial sources consulted at the Maryland Hall of Records, county archives, and other repositories. No work that we know of brings together so much information on colonial African Americans except Mr. Heinegg’s earlier volume on Virginia and North Carolina. The author offers documentation proving that most of these free black families descended from mixed-race children who were the progeny of white women and African American men. While some of these families would claim Native American ancestry, Mr. Heinegg offers evidence to show that they were instead the direct descendants of mixed-race children.

    Colonial Maryland laws relating to marriages between offspring of African American and white partners carried severe penalties. For example, one 18th-century statute threatened a white mother with seven years of servitude and promised to bind her mixed-race offspring until the age of thirty-one. Mr. Heinegg shows that, despite these harsh laws, several hundred child-bearing relationships in Delaware and Maryland took place over the colonial period as evidenced directly from the public record. Maryland families, in particular, which comprise the preponderance of those studied, also had closer relationships with the surrounding slave population than did their counterparts in Delaware, Virginia, or North Carolina. Mr. Heinegg recounts the circumstances under which a number of these freedmen were able to become landowners. Some Maryland families, however, including a number from Somerset County, chose to migrate to Delaware or Virginia, where the opportunities for land ownership were greater.

    Free African Americans of Maryland and Delaware is a work that will be sought after for its commentary on social history as for its genealogical content and methodology. No collection of African American history or genealogy can be without it.