Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • The New New Thing, Again

    The New New Thing, Again

    MPG: unofficial thoughts, whimsical critiques, and occasional cultural commentary
    2013-02-08

    Matthew Pratt Guterl, Professor of Africana studies and American studies
    Brown University

    Someone referred to mixed race children as particularly “beautiful” the other day, and it made me think of this:

    In 1993, the cover of Time magazine featured a fresh-faced young woman, designated the “New Face of America.” For twenty years, this image has circulated as a referent for the new, new thing, for the mixed-race future gestating in a womb somewhere in the U.S.  Often, it is embraced enthusiastically, and “she” is offered up as an icon for a pretty and happy future.  Sometimes, the image is described as a way-too-seductive advertisement for race-suicide. (That last link is NSFW and, really, not safe for any decent human being).

    “Take a good look at this woman,” the scrawl read, encouraging a close reading of her face.  “She was created by a computer.”  In truth, though, she wasn’t.  With brown eyes and light brown skin, she was imagined by renowned graphic artist Milton Glaser, conceived through software created by engineer Kim Wah Lam, a composite of hundreds of photographs taken by Ted Thai. A chorus line of willing employees in the Time Life building provided the visual DNA. The design team selected a handful of idealized “types,” borrowed features from them, and assembled the image by cutting the features out and stitching them together. The near future in digital flesh, “she” stood without clothes, with a slight smile and a direct gaze, and looked right into the eyes of the present tense.

    Tellingly, every student sees “her” as “Mexican,” as if that national category were itself a precise synonym for mixture…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective: “Race in Motion: Traversing the Transnational Emotionscape of White Beauty in Indonesia”

    Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective: “Race in Motion: Traversing the Transnational Emotionscape of White Beauty in Indonesia”

    Seminar Series: Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective
    University of California, Merced
    California Room
    5200 North Lake Rd.
    Merced, California 95343
    2013-10-31, 10:30 PDT (Local Time)

    L. Ayu Saraswati, Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies
    University of Hawai‘i, Manoa

    In this talk, Saraswati explores how feelings and emotions—Western constructs as well as Indian, Javanese, and Indonesian notions such as rasa and malu—contribute to and are constitutive of transnational and gendered processes of racialization. Employing “affect” theories and feminist cultural studies as a lens through which to analyze a vast range of materials, including the Old Javanese epic poem Ramayana, archival materials, magazine advertisements, commercial products, and numerous interviews with Indonesian women, she argues that it is how emotions come to be attached to certain objects and how they circulate that shape the “emotionscape” of white beauty in Indonesia.

    The seminar series “Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective” is organized by Tanya Golash-Boza, Nigel Hatton, and David Torres-Rouff. The event is co-sponsored by the UC Center for New Racial Studies, Sociology, and SSHA.

    For more information, click here.

  • Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective: “The Return of Pseudoscientific Racism? DNA Ancestry Testing, Race, and the New Eugenics Movement”

    Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective: “The Return of Pseudoscientific Racism? DNA Ancestry Testing, Race, and the New Eugenics Movement”

    Seminar Series: Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective
    University of California, Merced
    California Room
    5200 North Lake Rd.
    Merced, California 95343
    2013-10-17, 10:30 PDT (Local Time)

    Paul Spickard, Professor of History
    University of California, Santa Barbara

    Ancestry.com wants you to swab your cheek and send them a DNA sample and a check.  In return, they promise to tell you who your remote ancestors were.  Eminent literary scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., performs the same miracle on national TV.  Modern genetic technology, they promise, can tell you intimate details about your family’s past.  Professor Spickard’s lecture examines the claims of the DNA ancestry testing industry, compares them to the assumptions and claims of the racialist pseudoscience of the late 19th and early 20th century, evaluates their validity, and suggests what may really be going on with this ancestry testing business.

    Paul Spickard is Professor of History and Affiliate Professor of Black Studies, Asian American Studies, East Asian Studies, Religious Studies, and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.  He is author or editor of eighteen books and seventy-odd articles on race, migration, and related topics in the United States, the Pacific, Northeast Asia, and Europe, including:

    The seminar series “Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective” is organized by Tanya Golash-Boza, Nigel Hatton, and David Torres-Rouff. The event is co-sponsored by the UC Center for New Racial Studies, Sociology, and SSHA.

    For more information, click here.

  • The Color of Color-Blindness: Whites’ Race Talk in ‘Post-Racial’ America

    The Color of Color-Blindness: Whites’ Race Talk in ‘Post-Racial’ America

    Reitman/DeGrange Memorial Lecture Series
    Dartmouth College
    Hanover, New Hampshire
    Haldeman 41 (Kreindler Conference Hall)
    Thursday, 2013-09-26, 16:00-17:30 EDT (Local Time)

    Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Professor of Sociology
    Duke University

    Professor Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Sociology Deptartment Chair at Duke University, will deconstruct whites’ post-racial or color-blind talk & suggest this is the new, dominant prejudice in the U.S.

    Post-racial arguments did not emerge in 2008 with the election of President Obama. White America has believed a version of post-racialism since the early 1980s. In this talk, Professor Bonilla-Silva will address three things related to this subject. First, to be able to clearly discuss racial matters, he will begin by defining what racism is all about. Second, he will be devote some time to characterizing the nature of and describing the practices associated with the racial regime of Post-Civil  Rights America. Third, the bulk of the talk will revolve around the examination of “color-blind racism” or whites’ race talk in the contemporary period. He will conclude his talk with suggestions of what is to be done to prevent color-blindness from sealing the (white racial) deal in America.

    Co-Sponsored by the African and African-American Studies Program, and the Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies Program.  

    For more information, click here.

  • Race and Narrative in Italian Women’s Writing Since Unification

    Race and Narrative in Italian Women’s Writing Since Unification

    Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
    July 2013
    127 pages
    ISBN: 9781611475999

    Melissa Coburn, Assistant Professor of Italian and Italian Program Director
    Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

    Race and Narrative in Italian Women’s Writing Since Unification explores racist ideas and critiques of racism in four long narratives by female authors Grazia Deledda, Matilde Serao, Natalia Ginzburg, and Gabriella Ghermandi, who wrote in Italy after national unification. Starting from the premise that race is a political and sociohistorical construction, Melissa Coburn makes the argument that race is also a narrative construction. This is true in that many narratives have contributed to the historical construction of the idea of race; it is also true in that the concept of race metaphorically reflects certain formal qualities of narration. Coburn demonstrates that at least four sets of qualities are common among narratives and also central to the development of race discourse: intertextuality; the processes of characterization, plot, and tropes; the tension between the projections of individual, group, and universal identities; and the processes of identification and otherness. These four sets of qualities become the organizing principles of the four sequential chapters, paralleling a sequential focus on the four different narrative authors. The juxtaposition of these close, contextualized readings demonstrates salient continuities and discontinuities within race discourse over the period examined, revealing subtleties in the historical record overlooked by previous studies.

  • Walking While Black in the ‘White Gaze’

    Walking While Black in the ‘White Gaze’

    The New York Times
    2013-09-01

    George Yancy, Professor of Philosophy
    Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

    “Man, I almost blew you away!”

    Those were the terrifying words of a white police officer — one of those who policed black bodies in low income areas in North Philadelphia in the late 1970s — who caught sight of me carrying the new telescope my mother had just purchased for me.

    “I thought you had a weapon,” he said.

    The words made me tremble and pause; I felt the sort of bodily stress and deep existential anguish that no teenager should have to endure.

    This officer had already inherited those poisonous assumptions and bodily perceptual practices that make up what I call the “white gaze.” He had already come to “see” the black male body as different, deviant, ersatz. He failed to conceive, or perhaps could not conceive, that a black teenage boy living in the Richard Allen Project Homes for very low income families would own a telescope and enjoyed looking at the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn.

    A black boy carrying a telescope wasn’t conceivable — unless he had stolen it — given the white racist horizons within which my black body was policed as dangerous. To the officer, I was something (not someone) patently foolish, perhaps monstrous or even fictional. My telescope, for him, was a weapon.

    In retrospect, I can see the headlines: “Black Boy Shot and Killed While Searching the Cosmos.”

    That was more than 30 years ago. Only last week, our actual headlines were full of reflections on the 1963 March on Washington, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and President Obama’s own speech at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to commemorate it 50 years on. As the many accounts from that long ago day will tell you, much has changed for the better. But some things — those perhaps more deeply embedded in the American psyche — haven’t. In fact, we should recall a speech given by Malcolm X in 1964 in which he said, “For the 20 million of us in America who are of African descent, it is not an American dream; it’s an American nightmare.”…

    …The president’s words, perhaps consigned to a long-ago news cycle now, remain powerful: they validate experiences that blacks have undergone in their everyday lives. Obama’s voice resonates with those philosophical voices (Frantz Fanon, for example) that have long attempted to describe the lived interiority of racial experiences. He has also deployed the power of narrative autobiography, which is a significant conceptual tool used insightfully by critical race theorists to discern the clarity and existential and social gravity of what it means to experience white racism. As a black president, he has given voice to the epistemic violence that blacks often face as they are stereotyped and profiled within the context of quotidian social spaces…

    Read the entire opinion piece here.

  • Let’s Learn From the Past: Cumberland Posey Jr.

    Let’s Learn From the Past: Cumberland Posey Jr.

    The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
    2013-08-29

    Michele Sneddon, History Center Communications Assistant

    As a standout player, manager and owner, Cumberland Willis Posey Jr. built the Homestead Grays into one of the most successful franchises in Negro League baseball history.

    Born on June 20, 1890, Posey grew up in a wealthy African-American household in Homestead. His father, Cumberland “Cap” Posey Sr., was general manager for the Delta Coal Co., president of Diamond Coal and Coke, and president of the Pittsburgh Courier Publishing Co., which became one of the nation’s most influential African-American newspapers.

    At Homestead High School, Posey starred as a power-hitting right fielder on the baseball diamond, a fullback on the football field and a dominant guard on the basketball court. Posey attended Penn State University and then the University of Pittsburgh before landing at the Pittsburgh Catholic College of the Holy Ghost, now Duquesne University. He played basketball there and led his team in scoring for three years as “Charles Cumbert,” a fake name used to gain eligibility as a “white” player. While Posey never graduated from college, he established a reputation as one of the region’s top athletes…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Mixed People: “Natural Bridges” to Racial Healing & Utopia?

    Mixed People: “Natural Bridges” to Racial Healing & Utopia?

    Mixed Race Radio
    Blog Talk Radio
    2013-09-04, 16:00Z (12:00 EDT)

    Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

    Rainier Spencer, Senior Advisor to the President; Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies; Founder and Director of the Afro-American Studies Program
    University of Nevada, Las Vegas

    On today’s episode of Mixed Race Radio we will meet Rainier Spencer, Professor of Afro-American Studies in the Interdisciplinary Degrees Program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). He has authored three books: 1) Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix, Lynne Rienner, 2011; 2) Challenging Multiracial Identity, Lynne Rienner, 2006 and; 3) Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States, Westview, 1999.  All this and he currently serves as Senior Advisor to the UNLV President.

    Dr. Spencer is the founder and director of the Afro-American Studies Program at UNLV and is considered one of the founders of the field of critical mixed-race theory. While his research interest is in multiracial identity from the perspective of racial skepticism, including the ways that multiracial identity is implicated in the reification of biological race his interdisciplinary teaching interests include Afro-American history and popular culture as well as American slavery. In addition to writing numerous anthology chapters in this field of study, Rainier Spencer has been interviewed by and has provided commentary for the New York Times, has appeared on both American & Canadian television to discuss mixed-race identity, and is a featured speaker in the documentary film Multiracial Identity (Abacus Productions, 2010).

    Using his book, Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix as the foundation for today’s episode, we will discuss the long held view that mixed race people are somehow supposed to serve as a bridge to unite all people,

    “But what of the notion that black/white persons are in themselves natural bridges for the facilitation of racial healing and reconciliation? It should come as no surprise that this is a biological argument dressed up in sociological attire.” —Rainier Spencer

    For more information, click here.

  • Being Mixed Race: Am I A Human Rorschach Test?

    Being Mixed Race: Am I A Human Rorschach Test?

    Media Diversity UK: Tackling the lack of diversity in UK media and the ubiquity of whiteness
    2013-09-03

    Glen Chisholm

    Just last week I was standing at a bus stop when a gentleman; a complete stranger came and joined me. Nothing unusual about that, we then politely nodded at each other and a conversation started up.

    Me: “Evening”

    Stranger: “Evening”

    Me: “it’s still quite warm isn’t it”

    Stranger: “yes it is”; pause; “excuse me mate, but were do you come from?”

    Me: “Ipswich”

    Stranger: “no, you know, were do you originate from”

    Me: “I originate from Ipswich, my mum is English and my dad is Jamaican”

    Stranger, sounding surprised: “Really I wouldn’t have thought you were Black, I’d have thought you were Italian or Spanish or something”

    Me, politely smiles: “yeah, I sometimes get that”

    Now I wasn’t offended by this and this wasn’t the first time or probably won’t be the last time that I’ll have this conversation. I am a light skinned mixed race person with loose curly hair. I have spent most of my life with people questioning my racial identity and for a while I was left questioning it myself…

    Read the entire article here.

  • The Social Evolution of the Term “Half-Caste” in Britain: The Paradox of its Use as Both Derogatory Racial Category and Self-Descriptor

    The Social Evolution of the Term “Half-Caste” in Britain: The Paradox of its Use as Both Derogatory Racial Category and Self-Descriptor

    Journal of Historical Sociology
    Volume 26, Issue 4 (December 2013)
    pages 503–526
    DOI: 10.1111/johs.12033

    Peter J. Aspinall, Emeritus Reader in Population Health
    University of Kent, UK

    The term “half-caste” had its origins in nineteenth century British colonial administrations, emerging in the twentieth century as the quotidian label for those whose ancestry comprised multiple ethnic/racial groups, usually encompassing “White”. From the 1920s–1960s the term was used in Britain as a derogatory racial category associated with the moral condemnation of “miscegenation”. Yet today the label continues to be used as a self-descriptor and even survives in some official contexts. This paradox – of both derogatory racial category and self descriptor – is explored in the context of the term’s social evolution, drawing upon the theoretical constructs of the internal-external dialectic of identification and labelling theory.

    Read or purchase the article here.