Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Seeking Participants for Study on Asian and White Multiracial Individuals

    Seeking Participants for Study on Asian and White Multiracial Individuals

    2021-08-29

    Hephzibah V. Strmic-Pawl, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Sociology
    Manhattanville College. Purchase, New York

    I am an associate professor at Manhattanville College conducting a study on how Asian and White multiracials feel about recent events related to anti-Asian discrimination.

    I am looking for people to participate in a brief 28 question survey. The survey is completely anonymous (unless you choose to partake in a follow-up interview).

    If you are interested in participating, please read for more details.

    To participate in the study, you must meet the following requirements.

    1. You are between the ages of 18-30
    2. One of your biological parents is White and one of your biological parents is Asian.
    3. You currently or formerly identify as biracial/multiracial

    Your participation in this study would be greatly appreciated. You may choose to end your participation in the study at any point without penalty.

    Please take the survey here. By selecting the embedded link you are consenting to participate in the survey study

    Your participation is voluntary.

    If you have questions or are interested in participating, please contact me at hvsp@mville.edu.

    Thanks very much,

    Hephzibah Strmic-Pawl

  • How Jean Toomer Rejected the Black-White Binary

    How Jean Toomer Rejected the Black-White Binary

    The Paris Review
    2019-01-14

    Ismail Muhammad

    …to be a Negro is—is?—
    to be a Negro, is. To Be.

    —from “Toomer,” by Elizabeth Alexander

    Jean Toomer had a complex relationship to his first and only major publication, the 1923 book Cane. The “novel,” which Penguin Classics has recently reissued with an introduction by the literary scholar George Hutchinson and a foreword by the novelist Zinzi Clemmons, is a heterogeneous collection of short stories, prose vignettes, and poetry that became an unlikely landmark of Harlem Renaissance literature. Its searching fragments dramatize the disappearance of African-American folk culture as black people migrated out of the agrarian Jim Crow South and into Northern industrial cities. It is a haunting and haunted celebration of that culture as it was sacrificed to the machine of modernity. Toomer termed the book a “swan song” for the black folk past.

    The literary world was then (as it is now, perhaps) hungry for representative black voices; as Hutchinson writes, “Many stressed the ‘authenticity’ of Toomer’s African-Americans and the lyrical voice with which he conjured them into being.” This act of conjuring lured critics into reflexively accepting the book as a representation of the black South—and Toomer as the voice of that South. As his one-time friend Waldo Frank remarked in a forward to the book’s original edition, “This book is the South.” Cane transformed Toomer into a Negro literary star whose influence would filter down through African-American literary history: his interest in the folk tradition crystallized the Harlem Renaissance’s search for a useable Negro past, and would be instructive for later writers from Zora Neale Hurston to Ralph Ellison to Elizabeth Alexander…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Charting a course beyond racism | Carlos Hoyt | TEDxWaltham

    Charting a course beyond racism | Carlos Hoyt | TEDxWaltham

    TEDx Talks
    2021-08-12

    Carlos Hoyt, Ph.D., LICSW

    In this talk, Carlos Hoyt, Ph.D., LICSW, points out how our misunderstandings about race and our well-meaning but misguided efforts to achieve “racial equality” only end up keeping us trapped in a vicious cycle of trying to get beyond racism while reproducing and re-enforcing its false basis, race. Carlos provides directions that can finally and truly enable us to get past racism. References and notes related to this talk can be found here. Carlos Hoyt, Ph.D., LICSW, is the Director of Equity and Inclusion, Belmont Day School, a Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Consultant, and a Psychotherapist. Through his research, writing, teaching, Carlos interrogates master narratives and the dominant discourse on race with the goal of illuminating and virtuously disrupting the racial worldview and reductive identity constructs in general.

    His approach consists of preparing participants to interact fully, empathically, courageously, and candidly; grounding all content in facts and critical thinking; and, facilitating experiential opportunities for participants to be active synthesizers who can translate cognitive growth into positive personal action.

    Watch the video here.

  • Silvia Hector Webber: A Freedom Fighter’s Story

    Silvia Hector Webber: A Freedom Fighter’s Story

    María Esther Hammack, PhD: Historian, Researcher, Teacher, & Public Scholar
    November 2018

    María Esther Hammack, Ph.D.

    Silvia Hector (also known as Silvia Webber) was a freedom fighter born in West Florida in 1807.1 She was the first free Black woman settler of Webberville, a town located in the outskirts of present-day Austin, Texas. Silvia played a foundational role in leading freedom seekers to safe havens by ferrying them away from US bondage to freedom destinations in Mexico.2

    In 1819, 12-year-old Silvia was transported to the Cryer family’s plantation in Clark County, Arkansas. There she was sold on Mach 10, 1819 by Silas McDaniel to Morgan Cryer Sr., a Revolutionary War veteran, for $550.3 Silvia labored in Arkansas for seven years until she was forced South from there, to Mexican Texas by her enslaver’s son, John. Silvia arrived in Texas on March 15, 1826, as one five enslaved individuals introduced into Austin’s Colony by John Cryer, his wife, and his two children.4…

    …While still enslaved at John Cryer’s plantation in central Texas Silvia was pursued by John Webber, a white man from Vermont who had settled in a neighboring land grant. Silvia’s freedom papers and several witness accounts highlight the relationship John Webber established with her.7 Webber met Silvia at some point between 1826 and 1829 and records point out that “he became infatuated with her.”8 In early 1829 Silvia became pregnant with her first child by John Webber, a daughter she named Alcy (also knowns as Elsie) and who was born, enslaved, in October of 1829.9…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Don’t Let It Get You Down: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Body

    Don’t Let It Get You Down: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Body

    Simon & Schuster
    2021-07-13
    208 pages
    Hardcover ISBN-13: 9781982137267

    Savala Nolan, Executive Director
    Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice
    University of California, Berkeley School of Law

    A powerful and provocative collection of essays that offers poignant reflections on living between society’s most charged, politicized, and intractably polar spaces—between black and white, rich and poor, thin and fat.

    Savala Nolan knows what it means to live in the in-between. Descended from a Black and Mexican father and a white mother, Nolan’s mixed-race identity is obvious, for better and worse. At her mother’s encouragement, she began her first diet at the age of three and has been both fat and painfully thin throughout her life. She has experienced both the discomfort of generational poverty and the ease of wealth and privilege.

    It is these liminal spaces—of race, class, and body type—that the essays in Don’t Let It Get You Down excavate, presenting a clear and nuanced understanding of our society’s most intractable points of tension. The twelve essays that comprise this collection are rich with unforgettable anecdotes and are as humorous and as full of Nolan’s appetites as they are of anxieties. The result is lyrical and magnetic.

    In “On Dating White Guys While Me,” Nolan realizes her early romantic pursuits of rich, preppy white guys weren’t about preference, but about self-erasure. In the titular essay “Don’t Let it Get You Down,” we traverse the cyclical richness and sorrow of being Black in America as Black children face police brutality, “large Black females” encounter unique stigma, and Black men carry the weight of other people’s fear. In “Bad Education,” we see how women learn to internalize rage and accept violence in order to participate in our culture. And in “To Wit and Also” we meet Filliss, Grace, and Peggy, the enslaved women owned by Nolan’s white ancestors, reckoning with the knowledge that America’s original sin lives intimately within our present stories. Over and over again, Nolan reminds us that our true identities are often most authentically lived not in the black and white, but in the grey of the in-between.

    Perfect for fans of Heavy by Kiese Laymon and Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay, Don’t Let It Get You Down delivers an essential perspective on race, class, bodies, and gender in America today.

  • New York City Ballet’s Rachel Hutsell Is Turning Heads in the Corps

    New York City Ballet’s Rachel Hutsell Is Turning Heads in the Corps

    Pointe
    2018-05-22

    Marina Harss


    Rachel Hutsell Photographed for Pointe by Jayme Thornton.

    “I’m very cautious by nature,” Rachel Hutsell says over herbal tea at Lincoln Center between rehearsals. You wouldn’t think so from the way she moves onstage or in the studio. In fact, one of the most noticeable characteristics of Hutsell’s dancing is boldness, a result of the intelligence and intention with which she executes each step. (What she calls caution is closer to what most people see as preparedness.) She doesn’t approximate—she moves simply and fully, with total confidence. That quality hasn’t gone unnoticed.

    Even though she has been at New York City Ballet for less than three years, Hutsell, 21, is regularly cast in a wide variety of repertoire. She has already collaborated with several choreographers, including Troy Schumacher, Gianna Reisen, Peter Walker and Justin Peck, on new works. “She’s not afraid to make mistakes,” says Peck, who has used her in two premieres, The Most Incredible Thing and The Decalogue. “And she’s open to exploring new movements.”…

    Read the enter article here.

  • Is There Racism in the Deed to Your Home?

    Is There Racism in the Deed to Your Home?

    The New York Times
    2021-08-17

    Sara Clemence


    Kyona and Kenneth Zak found a racial covenant in the deed to their house in San Diego that barred anyone “other than the White or Caucasian race” from owning the home. Although now illegal across the country, the covenant would have prevented Ms. Zak, who is Black, from owning the home. John Francis Peters for The New York Times

    Racial covenants were designed to keep neighborhoods segregated. Some states are now making it easier to erase them from legal documents.

    Last year, to celebrate the centennial of their charming Craftsman home, Kyona and Kenneth Zak repainted it in historically accurate colors — gray, bronze green and copper red. They commissioned beveled-glass windows to complement the original stained glass. And they visited the San Diego County Recorder, to have a line drawn through a sentence in their deed that once would have prohibited Ms. Zak, who is Black, from owning the home.

    “I’ve referred to it as the ultimate smudge stick to the house,” said Ms. Zak, an ayurvedic health counselor and yoga therapist, drawing parallels to the Indigenous practice of purifying a place by burning sacred herbs.

    Buried in the fine print of the Zaks’ deed was a racial covenant, a clause that barred anyone “other than the White or Caucasian race” from owning the home. For much of the 20th century, it was common practice to insert such restrictions into deeds. The covenants targeted people who were Asian, Latino and Jewish, but especially those who were Black…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Josephine Baker is 1st Black woman given Paris burial honor

    Josephine Baker is 1st Black woman given Paris burial honor

    The Associated Press
    2021-08-21


    FILE – In this file photo dated March 6, 1961, singer Josephine Baker poses in her dressing room at the Strand Theater in New York City, USA. The remains of American-born singer and dancer Josephine Baker will be reinterred at the Pantheon monument in Paris, Le Parisien newspaper reported Sunday Aug. 22, 2021, that French President Emmanuel Macron has decided to bestow the honor. Josephine Baker is a World War II hero in France and will be the first Black woman to get the country’s highest honor. (AP Photo)”

    PARIS (AP) — The remains of American-born singer and dancer Josephine Baker will be reinterred at the Pantheon monument in Paris, making the entertainer who is a World War II hero in France the first Black woman to get the country’s highest honor.

    Le Parisien newspaper reported Sunday that French President Emmanuel Macron decided to organize a ceremony on Nov. 30 at the Paris monument, which houses the remains of scientist Marie Curie, French philosopher Voltaire, writer Victor Hugo and other French luminaries.

    The presidential palace confirmed the newspaper’s report.

    After her death in 1975, Baker was buried in Monaco, dressed in a French military uniform with the medals she received for her role as part of the French Resistance during the war.

    Baker will be the fifth woman to be honored with a Pantheon burial and will also be the first entertainer honored…

    Read the entire article here.

  • This Is How The White Population Is Actually Changing Based On New Census Data

    This Is How The White Population Is Actually Changing Based On New Census Data

    National Public Radio
    2021-08-22

    Hansi Lo Wang, Correspondent, National Desk

    Ruth Talbot

    Some news coverage of the latest 2020 census results may have led you to think the white population in the U.S. is shrinking or in decline.

    The actual story about the country’s biggest racial group is more complicated than that.

    And it’s largely the result of a major shift in how the U.S. census asks about people’s racial identities. Since 2000, the forms for the national, once-a-decade head count have allowed participants to check off more than one box when answering the race question.

    While the 2020 census results show fewer people checking off only the “White” box compared with in 2010, there was an almost 316% jump in the number of U.S. residents who identified with the “White” category and one or more of the other racial groups. Their responses boosted the size of a white population that includes anyone who marked “White.”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • What Does It Mean To Be Latino? The ‘Light-Skinned Privilege’ Edition

    What Does It Mean To Be Latino? The ‘Light-Skinned Privilege’ Edition

    Code Switch
    National Public Radio
    2021-07-14

    Shereen Marisol Meraji, Co-host/ Senior Producer

    Kumari Devarajan, Producer

    Leah Donnella, Editor


    Maria Hinojosa (left) and Maria Garcia.
    Krystal Quiles for NPR

    Maria Garcia and Maria Hinojosa are both Mexican American, both mestiza, and both relatively light-skinned. But Maria Hinojosa strongly identifies as a woman of color, whereas Maria Garcia has stopped doing so. So in this episode, we’re asking: How did they arrive at such different places? To find out, listen to our latest installment in this series about what it means to be Latino.

    Listen to the story (00:37:15) here.