Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Jesus for Revolutionaries: An Introduction to Race, Social Justice, and Christianity

    Jesus for Revolutionaries: An Introduction to Race, Social Justice, and Christianity

    Robert Chao Romero
    2013-10-07
    262 pages
    5.83 wide x 8.26 tall
    Paperback ISBN: 9781304513984
    eBook ISBN: 9781304531063

    Robert Chao Romero, Associate Professor of Chicana/o Studies and Asian American Studies
    University of California, Los Angeles

    Are you a “revolutionary”? Are you curious about exploring issues of race and social justice from a Christian perspective? This book by UCLA Professor and Pastor, Robert Chao Romero, is for you!

    Topics covered include: a biblical framework for understanding poverty, race, and gender; undocumented immigration; politics; affirmative action; mixed race issues; Christian social justice pioneers; and, an introduction to the Christian world of social justice and community development.

    Contents

    • Foreword
    • Preface
    • Introduction: Student Stories from the Revolution
    • 1. God’s “Equal Protection Clause”: The Biblical Basis for Social justice
    • 2. Jesus Was An Immigrant
    • 3. “A Day Without A Mexican”: The Essential Economic Contributions of Undocumented Immigrants
    • 4. “Secure Communities” Destroys Immigrant Families
    • 5. God Loves “Dreamers”: Undocumented Youth and Comprehensive Immigration Reform
    • 6. Jesus Invented Affirmative Action
    • 7. The Case for Affirmative Action Today
    • 8. Jesus and the Tea Party: Politics and Christianity
    • 9. “Chino-Chicano“: A Biblical Framework for Diversity
    • 10. Colorblindness, Structural Inequality, and Trayvon Martin
    • 11. Gender
    • 12. Class
    • 13. Summing Up the Image of God: Neither Jew nor Gentile, Male nor Female, Slave nor Free
    • 14. Manifest Destiny? The Historical Misrepresentation of Christianity
    • 15. God Never Leaves Himself Without A Witness: MLK, Cesar Chavez, and other Social Justice Pioneers
    • 16. Modern-Day Revolutionaries
    • 17. Join the Revolution!
    • Appendix I: A Faith and Justice Manifesto
    • Appendix II: More Resources for the Budding Revolutionary—Books, Films, and Immigration
    • Appendix III: PraXis Groups and The 4-Part Study

  • The Duty to Miscegenate

    The Duty to Miscegenate

    University of Michigan
    152 pages
    2013

    Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman

    A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Philosophy)

    In ‘The duty to miscegenate’, I harness John Stuart Mill’s 19th century theory of social freedom to explain and to dismantle contemporary racialised and gendered injustice. In the first chapter—Social stigmatisation: ‘a social tyranny’—I argue that persons racialised-and-gendered-as-black-women were, in the past, unjustly stigmatised by legal penalties against ‘miscegenation‘ and are still, today, unjustly stigmatised by white male avoidance of cross-racial marriage and companionship. In the second chapter—Encounters that count: ‘a foundation for solid friendship’—I argue that we can dismantle this stigmatisation, by engaging in regular and frequent cross-racial commensality with persons racialised-and-gendered-as-black-women. In the third chapter—White right: ‘a right to avoid’—I argue that, although we have a right to avoid commensal encounters with others, we do not have a right to avoid persons we racialise as black. On the contrary, we have a duty to encounter them, on terms of equality and intimacy.

    Table of Contents

    • DEDICATION
    • ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
    • LIST OF TABLES
    • 1. Social stigmatisation: ‘a social tyranny’
      • The chief mischief of the legal penalties
      • They strengthen the social stigma
    • 2. Encounters that count: ‘a foundation for solid friendship’
      • The real remedy for breaking caste is inter-marriage
      • Another plan of action for the abolition of caste is to begin with inter-caste dinners
    • 3. White right: ‘a right to avoid’
      • We have a right to avoid it
      • A right to avoid blacks?
    • BIBLIOGRAPHY

    Read the entire dissertation here.

  • Mixed messages

    Mixed messages

    The Queen’s Journal
    Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada
    Volume 141, Issue 16, 2013-10-22

    Olivia Bowden, Assistant News Editor

    Many mixed race people, myself included, have trouble defining our ethnic identity.

    As a child, I’d put on my mother’s makeup and be confused as to why her dark brown foundation didn’t blend with my pale skin. A family reunion with my dad’s side felt strange as I looked nothing like the blonde hair, blue-eyed bunch.

    Both sides of my family, South Asian and Anglo-Saxon, have thoroughly accepted that I don’t reflect either side in my appearance. But, the question remains, where do I belong?…

    …It’s sometimes unsettling when people ask me where I’m from. While it might seem like an innocent question, it makes me feel like I have to accept a racial label. I’ve completed many surveys where I’ve had to state my race as “other”.

    It’s especially sickening when I’ve been told that I am “lucky” to pass as white. Some people feel comfortable saying racist comments in reaction to my appearance. I’ve been told that I’m “pretty, for a brown girl”.

    Looking “white” does not mean I am okay with racism…

    Read the entire article here.

  • “A Future Unwritten”: Blackness between the Religious Invocations of Heidi Durrow and Zadie Smith

    “A Future Unwritten”: Blackness between the Religious Invocations of Heidi Durrow and Zadie Smith

    South Atlantic Quarterly
    Volume 112, Number 4 (2013)
    pages 657-674
    DOI: 10.1215/00382876-2345225

    Brian Bantum, Assistant Professor of Theology
    Seattle Pacific University

    Race and religion were two aspects of the Western colonial project. Novelists Heidi Durrow and Zadie Smith reflect two related but distinct articulations of how to understand this relationship from within the black diaspora and in particular the legacies of “mixed-race” children of the diaspora. This essay argues that each literary exploration of race and place demonstrates the inherent complications of two strategies of negotiating racial and religious identity in contemporary society. While Durrow seeks to extricate her character from both race and religion, seeing religion as simply a cultural marker, Smith wraps her main character inextricably to the historicity of race and religion. Through these interlocutors, this essay examines how black religion might imagine its future in relationship to the particularities of its diaspora(s) and confessions of faith.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • The Fluidity

    The Fluidity

    Neither/Both: my mixed-race experience
    2013-10-19

    Lola Osunkoya

    I went to the skating rink on a night I don’t usually go, and found myself to be the only female of color there.  It was unusual to me because on my regularly night, it’s a predominantly Black crowd.  In this stage of my identity development, I’m very conscious of my racial surroundings when I am one of the few.

    Today I identify primarily as Mixed, but also as Black.  That has changed over the years as Mixed identities are inherently fluid… if we choose that route – static is another choice.  I have been militantly Mixed, not White enough, begrudgingly Black.  All of them had a certain frantic energy on them because I felt like they were dependent on outside validation.  Today I feel more at peace with my chosen identity.  Will it remain this way now that it feels peaceful?  Maybe.  But the fluidity could push me in a new direction sometime in the future…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Cuba is White, Black and Mixed Race Because it is Diverse

    Cuba is White, Black and Mixed Race Because it is Diverse

    Havana Times: open-minded writing from Cuba
    2013-10-22

    Dmitri Prieto
    Agrarian University of Havana

    HAVANA TIMES — Recently, on the eve of October 10, a Cuban national holiday commemorating the date (in 1868) in which Cuban landowner Carlos Manuel de Cespedes and his retinue of (former) slaves took up arms against Spanish colonial domination, a Round Table program bearing the controversial title of “Neither Black Nor White: Cuba is Mixed Race” was aired on television.

    During the Round Table discussion, Cuban scientists presented valuable and interesting evidence showing that our population’s gene pool combines the DNA of African, European and Asian / Indo-American peoples, concluding that, therefore, it would be impossible to define any Cuban “races” on the basis of genetics as such.

    On the basis of this accurate insight, however, they also suggested something that I consider dangerously dubious: the notion that Cuba is a “mixed race” country…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Growing Up Black in American Apartheid – Ford Pt1

    Growing Up Black in American Apartheid – Ford Pt1

    Reality Asserts Itself
    The Real News Network
    2013-10-23

    Paul Jay, Host

    Glen Ford, Executive Editor
    Black Agenda Report

    On Reality Asserts Itself with Paul Jay: Glen Ford, Executive Editor of Black Agenda Report, tells his story as a red-diaper baby, growing up facing racism in the North living with his white activist mother, and living in the Deep South with his black deejay father.

  • Virgina Ban on Interracial Marriages Goes to Federal Court This Week

    Virginia Ban on Interracial Marriages Goes to Federal Court This Week

    The New York Times
    1965-01-24
    page 43

    RICHMOND, Jan. 23—A constitutional test of Virginia laws that make it a crime for a white person to marry a Negro will begin here next week. The case is regarded as certain to go to the United States Supreme Court and may become a landmark. Eighteen other states have similar laws that would be affected by a Supreme Court decision in the Virginia case.

    In a unanimous opinion last month, the Court struck down a Florida statute punishing extramarital cohabitation by whites and Negroes. It avoided a ruling on state laws against interracial marriage, but the decision raised new doubts about the continuing validity of such laws.

    Knew About Law

    On Wednesday, lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union will argue before a three-judge Federal court here that the state’s enforcement of Virginia’s antimiscegenation laws has grossly violated the constitutional rights of Mr. and Mrs. Richard P. Loving, both life-long residents of Virginia.

    Mr. Loving, 31 years old, is a big, silent construction worker. He is white. His wife, Mildred, 25, is colored—part Indian and part Negro. Both had spent their lives in Caroline County, just south of Fredericksburg, until January, 1959, when they were banished from the state by County Circuit Judge Leon M. Bazile. They moved to Washington with their three children. Aware of the Virginia law, they had been married in Washington on June 2, 1958.

    The charge brought against them five weeks after their marriage was violation of Title 20, Sections 53 and 59 of the Virginia Code:

    “If any white person and colored person shall go out of this state for the purpose of being married and with the intention of returning … they shall be punished — by confinement in the penitentiary for not less than one nor more than five years.”

    Other sections of the code provide for the annulment of interracial marriages “without any decree of divorce” and for a fine of $200 for performing an interracial marriage ceremony, “of which the informer shall have one-half.”…

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Interracial couples now part of mainstream

    Interracial couples now part of mainstream

    The Chicago Tribune
    2013-10-23

    Dawn Turner Trice, Reporter

    Mixed-race relationships becoming more common in Chicago — and everywhere else

    Stephen Blessman and Patricia Jones Blessman met in the mid-1990s and fell in love. It didn’t matter to either of them that he’s white and she’s African-American.

    They have a lot in common. They are both Roman Catholic and deeply involved in the church. They came of age in the 1960s and are socially conscious.

    “But we didn’t get married to prove a point,” said Blessman, 57, who lives with his wife of 14 years and their 5-year-old son in Chicago’s South Loop. “I fell in love with her because she’s funny, beautiful, smart and principled and we’re of the same generation and have the same values.”

    As an interracial couple in America, the Blessmans are a relatively rare pairing — but such couples are not nearly as rare as they used to be. A study by the Pew Research Center found that in 2010 about 15 percent of all new marriages in the U.S. were between spouses of a different race or ethnicity — more than double the 6.7 percent in 1980.

    The surge has brought the percentage of all current U.S. marriages that are interracial to 8.4 percent. In Chicago, about 7.4 percent of marriages in 2011 involved mixed-race couples, according to data compiled by the Center for Governmental Studies at Northern Illinois University…

    …Even in politics, where for many years it was considered a drawback to be in an interracial relationship, there’s been a shift. In New York City, Bill de Blasio, a white man married to a black woman, is the front-runner in the mayoral race. In Illinois, two prominent white political figures, Gov. Pat Quinn and former Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, are dating black women. And of course, President Barack Obama is the product of an interracial marriage.

    Even so, experts say modern mixed-race relationships, like the country’s racial past, can be complicated.

    “When I research in white communities across the class division and the country, people say they’re fine with interracial relationships,” said Erica Chito Childs, an associate professor of sociology at Hunter College/CUNY Graduate Center.

    “But they also say, ‘Why do it? Marriage is difficult enough. Why make it more difficult?’ You hear about young people growing up in a more multiracial world and being so much more accepting, but the majority says dating is fine, marriage is not.”

    She said that many young people still live in racially homogenous neighborhoods and their first pool of partners tends to reflect that. In addition, first marriages are often more closely tied to the expectations of family and community members…

    …The Pew Research Center study released last year, using 2010 data, is the most recent major look at interracial relationships. It found that among new marriages in 2010, Asians were the group most likely to intermarry, at 27.7 percent. Hispanics were next at 25.7 percent, then blacks at 17.1 percent and whites at 9.4 percent. For the Pew study, marriages between two people who are mixed-race weren’t considered interracial.

    In Chicago, the most common interracial marriages in 2011 were between Asians and whites. Those types of pairings were about four times more likely than black-white marriages, according to data compiled by the Center for Governmental Studies, using the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series.

    Laura Kina, 40, is Japanese-American and white. For the past 16 years she has been married to Mitch Aronson, 54, who’s white and Jewish. She grew up as an evangelical Christian in a small Seattle suburb of Norwegian immigrants, and converted to Judaism after marrying. She said she’s always identified as a person of color…

    …Online dating has made it easier for people who want to date interracially but don’t work together or hang out in racially diverse circles.

    “It provides a safe space for people who are afraid of rejection and don’t feel comfortable walking up to someone of a different race and asking them out,” said Hunter College’s Childs, the author of “Fade to Black and White: Interracial Images in Popular Culture.”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • crossings: undone presents, pyrrhic futures

    crossings: undone presents, pyrrhic futures

    The State
    Dubai, U.A.E.
    Voicing
    2013-03-30

    Tiana Reid
    Columbia University

    “Cyaan live split. Not in this world.”

    The first time I read Michelle Cliff’s 1987 book No Telephone to Heaven, I immediately forgot which character had said this line. Was it Harry/Harriet, the queer Jamaican character? Or was it Clare Savage, the cosmopolitan “bi-racial” protagonist? It could have been either/both really. And that was partially the point.

    What I did remember, however—what I felt—was the resonances of feeling the impulse of having to choose identity. The backdrop, for Clare, and to some extent for Cliff too, is about negotiating an existence in between races, cultures, nationalities and an endless act of et cetera. In the book, Clare undergoes a process of becoming(s) through a series of transatlantic yearnings, which culminate in her realization that she must choose her identity. And then, well, dies for that choice. In an essay called “Clare Savage as a Crossroads Character,” Cliff writes that “in [Clare’s] death she has complete identification with her homeland; soon enough she will be indistinguishable from the ground. Her bones will turn to potash, as did her ancestors’ bones.”

    All the same, Clare is never accepted and never accepts herself. I’m still not sure what’s worse. No Telephone to Heaven complicates the idea of wholeness and that in order to “be true to yourself” if you have one parent, say, of European ancestry and the other of African ancestry, you should, as a citizen of the West (or perhaps the global West, i.e., the world) acknowledge the ambiguity of your both/and state of being, as if everyone doesn’t exist in a similar mode of being. A multimodal existence— a similar vacillating position of entering, understanding and being in the world. Don’t we all exist between things—parents, cultures, lovers, yesses and nos, life and death?

    What I remembered, then, was what I didn’t think I had to be aware of. What I remembered was that until then, until that very moment when I read No Telephone to Heaven, I had identified as “mixed,” which would refer to my White mom and my Black Jamaican dad, who got married and had sex and had miscarriages and then had me. But I mean, isn’t a child always a mixture? Aren’t we (and is the “we” here decidedly North American?) all products of mixings and jumbles and breaking of the law pre-Loving v. Virginia and also victims and perpetrators of rape before abolition, and, and, and…?

    I won’t get into how I learned how not to identify as “mixed,” how I began to understand that “mixed-race” in my generation was predicated on racial essentialism, false notions of purity, historical inaccuracies and worst of all, a sense of superiority over those who were only Black. Soon, I understood “mixed” as an intermediary between Black and White, a cushion almost, between racism and progress…

    Read the entire article here.