Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • “It’s Only Other People Who Make Me Feel Black”: Acculturation, Identity, and Agency in a Multicultural Community

    “It’s Only Other People Who Make Me Feel Black”: Acculturation, Identity, and Agency in a Multicultural Community

    Political Psychology
    Published online: 2013-02-18
    DOI: 10.1111/pops.12020

    Caroline Howarth, Senior Lecturer in Social Psychology
    London School of Economics, United Kingdom

    Wolfgang Wagner, Professor of Psychology
    Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria
    University of the Basque Country, San Sebastián, Spain

    Nicola Magnusson
    The Open University, United Kingdom

    Gordon Sammut, Lecturer in Psychology
    University of Malta

    This article explores identity work and acculturation work in the lives of British mixed-heritage children and adults. Children, teenagers, and parents with mixed heritage participated in a community arts project that invited them to deliberate, construct, and reconstruct their cultural identities and cultural relations. We found that acculturation, cultural and raced identities, are constructed through a series of oppositional themes: cultural maintenance versus cultural contact; identity as inclusion versus identity as exclusion; institutionalized ideologies versus agency. The findings point towards an understanding of acculturation as a dynamic, situated, and multifaceted process: acculturation in movement. To investigate this, we argue that acculturation research needs to develop a more dynamic and situated approach to the study of identity, representation, and culture. The article concludes with a discussion on the need for political psychologists to develop methods attuned to the tensions and politics of acculturation that are capable of highlighting the possibilities for resistance and social change.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • SO224: The Sociology of Race and Ethnicity

    SO224: The Sociology of Race and Ethnicity

    London School of Economics
    2013/2014 session

    Helen Kim

    The course provides an introduction to theoretical, historical and contemporary debates around race, racism and ethnicity. It firstly explores the main theoretical perspectives which have been used to analyse racial and ethnic relations, in a historical and contemporary framework. It then examines in more detail the areas both theoretical and lived within our contemporary social and political climate where analyses of ‘race’, racism, culture, belonging and identity are urgently needed, focusing primarily on Britain, Europe and the US. Topics include: race and ethnicity in historical perspective; race, class and gender multiculturalism; diaspora and hybridity; whiteness; mixed race; race, disease and contamination; race and the senses; race and popular culture; urban multiculture and the street; race, riots and youth culture; community cohesion; Muslim identities; asylum and new migrations; the Far Right and the white working class.

  • AAAS 348 (Fall 2013): Class, Race, and Gender—“Hapas, Hafus, Mestizos, and Muggles”

    AAAS 348 (Fall 2013): Class, Race, and Gender—“Hapas, Hafus, Mestizos, and Muggles”

    California State University, Los Angeles
    Asian and Asian American Studies Program
    Fall 2013

    Michelle Har Kim

    HAPA (from the Hawai‘ian Dictionary, Māmaka Kaiao)

    1. Portion, fragment, part, fraction, installment; to be partial, less. (Eng. half) Cf. hapahā, hapalua, etc. Ka ’ike hapa, limited knowledge. Ua hapā na hae, the flags are at half-mast, ho’o.hapa To lessen, diminish.
    2. Of mixed blood, person of mixed blood, as hapa Hawai‘i, part Hawaiian. See hapa haole.
    3. A-minor in music. See lele 7.

    What assumptions do many of us make about how mixed-race Asians are supposed to look, speak, and understand themselves? Is it true that mixed-race people in general, Asian and otherwise, are able “see,” understand, or translate two or more cultural worlds? Continuing on with this theme of visuality, looking, and seeing, this course will create a space for talking about how we and others see mixed-race and race generally as a thing that has always-already and naturally been around—or something that we construct and create ourselves for certain reasons. Questions regarding identity and authenticity will surely lead us to more issues including gender, sexuality, money, and class.

    Students are required to make time for regular readings, writing, and online and Moodle access. One hard-copy text is required: the Asian American Literary Review’s 2013 Special Issue on Mixed Race. Assignments will be taken from this journal and other texts to be announced. Discussions will anchor themselves through submitted reaction papers in which you will have creative and critical opportunities to compare visual pieces with assigned readings.

    For the month of October, we will draw from an online Synchronous Teaching Program Digital Lab as we participate in the Asian American Literary Review’s Mixed Race Initiative. This hub will link us with other students studying mixed race, in an exciting effort to participate in a conversation beyond bounds of our classroom.

    For more information, click here.

  • Don’t miss Hapa-Palooza 2013: Celebrate mixed ethnicity and third culture in Vancouver

    Don’t miss Hapa-Palooza 2013: Celebrate mixed ethnicity and third culture in Vancouver

    Vancouver Observer
    Vancouver, British Columbia
    2013-09-13

    Jordan Yerman

    Celebrate the whole you with literature, film, art, and dance. This is Hapa-Palooza.

    The third annual Hapa-Palooza Festival kicks off on September 18, once again bringing three days of art and culture to Vancouver. Focusing on mixed-race identity, this is a celebration of what makes us… us.

    Anna Ling Kaye, Hapa-Palooza’s Artistic Director, says, “The big thing that’s different this year is that we’re incorporated as our own society. We’re making a big push for a bigger festival.”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Liminality in the works: The novels of Charles Chesnutt

    Liminality in the works: The novels of Charles Chesnutt

    University of Massachusetts, Amherst
    September 1996
    154 pages
    Publication Number: AAT 9709591
    ISBN: 9780591169812

    Susan Jane Doyle

    Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

    Charles Chesnutt is perhaps best known for his short stories; he also, over the course of his relatively short publishing career, produced three novels, which have been less well represented in the critical community. This neglect is due to some oversimplified readings in the past. My readings offer a revised view of Chesnutt’s work, which I have opened up by using the critical lens of liminality, and by drawing on Chesnutt’s own natural deconstructionist tendencies to do deconstructive readings of the novels.

    I draw on Victor Turner’s definition of liminality, which comes from Turner’s rites of passage studies. I show that Chesnutt’s characters frequently attain liminal status in his work—they take on the “betwixt and between” characteristics that Turner defines as essential to the liminal state. But far from attaining the final assimilation that comes at the end of liminality, Chesnutt’s characters end up as marginals—Turner’s term for permanent outcasts. Thus, Chesnutt, in his typically ironic way, has described the status of black Americans at the turn of the 19th century in America.

    Chesnutt’s novels are, when looked at as a continuum, a brooding meditation on the despair of black existence following Reconstruction. In the first novel. The House Behind the Cedars, Chesnutt shows the liminal quality of passing, an option which he chose not to exercise. In the second (and most successful) book, The Marrow of Tradition, he shows the liminal nature of the racial space occupied by a professional black man, who tries to be all things to all people, and who ends up utterly unable to express himself And in the third, and final, novel, The Colonel’s Dream, Chesnutt shows the failure of a white man who tried to go back to his hometown in the South and change the course of its future by combining what he perceives to be the best of the past with the best of the present. But in the frozen landscape of the post-Reconstructionist South, all dreams have become nightmares. Thus, because of his prophetic voice, Chesnutt deserves more appreciative readings in the present.

    TABLE OF CONTENTS

    • ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    • ABSTRACT
    • 1. INTRODUCTION
    • 2. CLOTHING THE EMPEROR: THE ABSENCE OF TEXT IN “BAXTER’S PROCRUSTES“
    • 3. FINDING THE COST OF FREEDOM: THE LIMTNAL QUALITY OF PASSING IN THE HOUSE BEHIND THE CEDARS
    • 4. LOST IN THE MIDDLE OF THINGS: THE RACIAL SPACES IN THE MARROW OF TRADITION
    • 5. PAST THE RUBICON: THE MERE ABSTRACTIONS OF THE COLONEL’S DREAM
    • 6. CONCLUSION
    • BIBLIOGRAPHY

    Purchase the dissertation here.

  • Identity Politics, in a Brand-New Form

    Identity Politics, in a Brand-New Form

    The New York Times
    2013-09-14

    Sam Roberts, Urban Affairs Correspondent

    ARGUABLY, New York’s identity politics peaked in 1945. That year, William O’Dwyer, the Democratic Party machine’s mayoral favorite, was Irish and from Brooklyn. Lazarus Joseph, the candidate for comptroller, was Jewish and from the Bronx. Party leaders balanced their citywide ticket with a candidate for City Council president by plucking the name of Vincent R. Impellitteri, an obscure legal secretary to a Manhattan judge, from the index to the official city directory.

    “We flipped through the Green Book for the longest Italian name we could find,” Bert Stand, the secretary of Tammany Hall, the venerable Democratic organization, explained at the time.

    Last week, after Bill de Blasio finished first in the Democratic mayoral primary, students of New York politics were already pronouncing identity politics dead. After all, half the black voters abandoned the black candidate, William C. Thompson Jr., to back Mr. de Blasio (he and Mr. Thompson each got 42 percent among blacks, according to an Edison Research survey of voters leaving the polls). Ideology trumped race as even the Rev. Al Sharpton, more impressed with Mr. de Blasio’s policy agenda, remained publicly neutral instead of reflexively endorsing the black candidate. Mr. Thompson carried Italian and Irish Catholic districts in Staten Island and Breezy Point, Queens, which, in the past, have not routinely embraced black candidates, as well as several Orthodox Jewish and Russian enclaves…

    …This year, said John H. Mollenkopf, director of the Center for Urban Research at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a neighbor of Mr. de Blasio, “the really big story is that black central Brooklyn, the single largest contiguous settlement of black people anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, did not back an African-American who climbed up the rungs of regular Democratic politics in the borough, but chose instead a younger white leader in a biracial family who is a former organizer and much more Obamaesque.”…

    Read the entire news analysis here.

  • Kinship and Identity: Mixed Bloods in Urban Indian Communities

    Kinship and Identity: Mixed Bloods in Urban Indian Communities

    American Indian Culture and Research Journal
    ISSN 0161-6463 (Print)
    Volume 23, Number 2 (1999)
    Pages 73-89

    Susan Applegate Krouse [Ziigwam Nibi Kwe (Spring Water Woman) Haslett] (1955-2010), Associate Professor of Anthropology
    Michigan State University

    INTRODUCTION

    American Indians have become an increasingly urban population in the twentieth century, moving away from their rural home communities and reservations in search of jobs or schooling. This movement to cities has resulted in higher rates of intermarriage with non-Indians for urban Indians than for rural Indians and consequently higher numbers of mixed bloods in urban areas than on reservations. Today, many of those urban mixed bloods are interested in claiming their Indian identity and learning more about their culture, but they often lack both physical characteristics and cultural knowledge that would allow them readily to assert their Indianness. Consequently, they turn to kinship—an important component of American Indian communities, whether urban, rural, or reservation—to provide an entry into the urban Indian community. By aligning themselves with a larger structure of family and relations, mixed bloods fit into an existing framework and community. This paper examines the effectiveness and the limitations of kinship-based identity for mixed bloods in urban Indian communities.

    The population under study here is mixed bloods who, because of their parents’ or grandparents’ move to the city and subsequent marriage to non-Indians, have lost ties to their tribal communities. They may be a single generation removed from their tribes or many generations, but they are defined for purposes of this study as a population with mixed ancestry, urban for one or more generations, without clear ties to a reservation or tribal community. This study examines those people who are hoping to establish or reestablish ties to their Indian identity, and one strategy for doing so—through kinship—and excludes mixed bloods who have maintained community ties as well as full bloods who have lost ties to their tribal communities through relocation or adoption. This paper is concerned specifically with the problems of mixed…

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • “Squaw Men,” “Half-Breeds,” and Amalgamators: Late Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Attitudes Toward Indian-White Race-Mixing

    “Squaw Men,” “Half-Breeds,” and Amalgamators: Late Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Attitudes Toward Indian-White Race-Mixing

    American Indian Culture and Research Journal
    Volume 15, Number 3 (1991)

    David D. Smits, Professor of History
    The College of New Jersey

    Indian-white biological amalgamation, whether in or out of wedlock, is a subject well calculated to evoke spirited conceptions and feelings; certainly, it impinges upon the research of those who would probe more deeply into the labyrinth of Indian-white interaction in late nineteenth-century America. The tapestry of post-Civil War America is woven with many-hued Indian and white attitudes toward race-mixing. To unravel, illuminate, and interpret the complex and often antithetical views of authoritative white commentators on this issue is the purpose of this essay. The Anglo-American commentators whose attitudes will be surveyed include natural and social scientists, novelists, army officers, Christian reformers, Protestant missionaries, Indian Service personnel, historians, imperialists, and immigration restrictionists, among others. Of course, their personal fears, hatreds, prejudices, jealousies, aspirations, imaginations, sympathies, and emotions shape their views. Moreover, their attitudes represent a complex interaction among the prevailing ideas about race, gender, and class, a topic of considerable current scholarly interest. Because Indian-white race-mixing often has been associated with the more inflammatory Black-white variety, it is useful to begin with a glimpse of representative antebellum attitudes…

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Las Tejanas: 300 Years of History

    Las Tejanas: 300 Years of History

    University of Texas Press
    2003
    456 pages
    6 1/8 x 9 1/4
    142 illustrations, 3 tables
    Paperback ISBN: 978-0-292-70527

    Teresa Palomo Acosta

    Ruthe Winegarten (1929-2004)

    Awards

    • 2004 T.R. Fehrenbach Award; Texas Historical Commission
    • Texas Reference Source Award; Reference Round Table, Texas Library Association

    This groundbreaking book is at once a general history and a celebration of Tejanas’ contributions to Texas over three centuries

    Since the early 1700s, women of Spanish/Mexican origin or descent have played a central, if often unacknowledged, role in Texas history. Tejanas have been community builders, political and religious leaders, founders of organizations, committed trade unionists, innovative educators, astute businesswomen, experienced professionals, and highly original artists. Giving their achievements the recognition they have long deserved, this groundbreaking book is at once a general history and a celebration of Tejanas’ contributions to Texas over three centuries.

    The authors have gathered and distilled a wide range of information to create this important resource. They offer one of the first detailed accounts of Tejanas’ lives in the colonial period and from the Republic of Texas up to 1900. Drawing on the fuller documentation that exists for the twentieth century, they also examine many aspects of the modern Tejana experience, including Tejanas’ contributions to education, business and the professions, faith and community, politics, and the arts. A large selection of photographs, a historical timeline, and profiles of fifty notable Tejanas complete the volume and assure its usefulness for a broad general audience, as well as for educators and historians.

    Contents

    • Foreword by Cynthia E. Orozco
    • Acknowledgments
    • Introduction
    • Chapter 1: Native Women, Mestizas, and Colonists
    • Chapter 2: The Status of Women in the Colonial Period
    • Chapter 3: From the Republic of Texas to 1900
    • Chapter 4: Revolution, Racism, and Resistance: 1900-1940
    • Chapter 5: Life in Rural Texas: 1900-1940
    • Chapter 6: Life in Urban Texas: 1900-1940
    • Chapter 7: Education: Learning, Teaching, Leading
    • Chapter 8: Entering Business and the Professions
    • Chapter 9: Faith and Community
    • Chapter 10: Politics, the Chicano Movement, and Tejana Feminism
    • Chapter 11: Winning and Holding Public Office
    • Chapter 12: Arts and Culture Epilogue: Grinding Corn Fifty Notable Tejanas
    • Time Line
    • Notes
    • Bibliography
    • Index

  • The Plum Thicket

    The Plum Thicket

    University Press of Kentucky
    1996-04-11 (Originally published in 1954)
    284 pages
    Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8131-1947-2 (out of print)
    Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8131-0859-9

    Janice Holt Giles (1905-1979)

    Janice Holt Giles had a life before her marriage and writing career in Kentucky. Born in Altus, Arkansas, Giles spent many childhood summers visiting her grandparents there. After the success of her historical novel The Kentuckians in 1953, she planned to write a second frontier romance. But a visit to Altus caused her imagination to drift from Kentucky in 1780 to western Arkansas in 1913.

    At age forty-eight—the same age as Giles at the writing of the novel—the heroine Katie Rogers recalls her first visit alone to her grandparent’s home in Stanwick, Arkansas. Eight-year-old Katie spends her summer climbing the huge mulberry tree and walking with her wise grandfather, a veteran of bloody Shiloh. She is fascinated, not frightened, by the grave of an unknown child in the nearby plum thicket. Throughout the visit Katie helps Aunt Maggie plan her wedding and looks forward to the three-day Confederate Reunion. But the Reunion—and the summer—end violently, as guilt, repression, and miscegenation are unearthed. “That summer was the end of a whole way of life,” Katie realizes, for she can never again dwell in the paradise of childhood.

    In Katie Rogers, Giles voiced her own lament for “the beautiful and the unrecoverable past.” To her publisher Giles wrote, “Out of my forty-odd years of living, much of whatever wisdom I have acquired has been distilled into this book.” This new edition of The Plum Thicket gives Giles’s many fans a powerful, moving glimpse into the mind and heart of this beloved author.