Mixed Race Studies

Critical Mixed Race Studies 2010 Event Report

2011-02-17

Wei Ming Dariotis, Associate Professor Asian American Studies
San Francisco State University, IPride Board
dariotis@sfsu.edu

Camilla Fojas, Associate Professor and Chair
Latin American and Latino Studies
DePaul University

Laura Kina, Associate Professor Art, Media and Design and Director Asian American Studies
DePaul University

Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference
DePaul University, Lincoln Park Campus
2250 N. Sheffield
Chicago, Illinois USA 60614
2010-11-05 through 2010-11-06

For the inaugural CMRS 2010 conference, we had over 450 people registered and 430 people actually showed up from all over the U.S. from Hawaii to Tennessee to New York as well as scholars from Canada, Korea, and the UK. The programming included 62 sessions of panels, round tables, and seminars; multiple film screenings, keynote addresses by leading scholars Mary Beltrán from University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Andrew Jolivette from San Francisco State University, and community activist and artist Louie Gong from MAVIN and Eighth Generation; a Mixed Mixer social event with live jazz music; a performance by comedian Kate Rigg; an Informational Fair; a Book Table; Caucus and Business meetings.

We sold out three boutique hotels with CMRS attendees and many panels were standing room only or at capacity. We were honored to have many senior scholars present at CMRS 2010 as well as a strong contingent of undergraduate and graduate students from area colleges, community members, and a surprisingly high number of graduate students and junior colleagues from across the country. A critical mass of new media artists (podcasters, bloggers, film and video) including bloggers Steven F. Riley from MixedRaceStudies.org and Fanshen Cox from the Mixed Chicks Chat podcast joined us as well. Representatives from community organizations came out in full force from: MAVIN, SWIRL Inc., Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival, Multiracial Americans of Southern California, LovingDay.org, and the Biracial Family Network.

You can find links to download the conference poster and a PDF of the schedule as well as the video of the welcoming address and the three keynote addresses and audio recordings from 18 sessions via iTunes U on the CMRS 2010 website: http://las.depaul.edu/aas/About/CMRSConference/index.asp

Outcomes and Future Goals
We can’t express how grateful we are to all the attendees, participants, volunteers, hosts and co-sponsors for making this event happen.

Following the 2010 CMRS conference, we were able to establish the following Tangible Outcomes:

• DePaul’s Media Production & Training (Wen Der Lin and Greg Barker) video recorded, edited, and posted video from the welcoming address and the three keynote addresses on iTunes U.
• DePaul’s Media Production & Training (Wen Der Lin and Russ Patterson) worked with the organizers and participants to audio record conference sessions. 18 conference sessions were edited and MP3 audio was posted on iTunes U.
• DePaul’s Linda Greco created updated the conference website under the Global Asian Studies URL (http://las.depaul.edu/cmrs).
• Laura Kina started a Google group “criticalmixedracestudies” which participants are using to continue to stay in touch. If you haven’t joined yet, please do so at: criticalmixedracestudies@googlegroups.com!
• CMRS participants are also using our “Critical Mixed Race Studies” facebook page to stay in touch. Friend us! http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=13919553099.
• Chris Paredes, a student at the University of Washington, organized a network of mixed race student organizations from across the country to stay in touch on a regular basis. If you would like to join this discussion, please contact Chris at: paredc@gmail.com.
• Amanda Erekson, President of MAVIN, is coordinating monthly call ins for the community orgs. If your mixed race community organization would like to participate, contact Amanda for details at: amanda.erekson@gmail.com.
• DePaul LA&S undergrad student, Erin Kushino, would like to start a mixed race student org at DePaul. If you know DePaul students who might want to help her with these efforts, please contact her at: erincaitlink@sbcglobal.net.

Goals in progress and/or that we need help with still:

• Next CMRS conference – Camilla Fojas and the DePaul University Department of Latin American and Latino Studies will host the second CMRS conference in November 2012. Be on the look out for the call for papers shortly. Please direct all conference questions to Camilla Fojas at: cfojas@depaul.edu.
• G. Reginald Daniel and Paul Spickard (University of California, Santa Barbara), Laura Kina (DePaul University), Wei Ming Dariotis (San Francisco State University) plan to launch an online peer reviewed CMRS journal. We are in the process of reviewing digital platforms for the online journal and drafting a list of CMRS journal advisory board members. We will be sending out invitations to senior scholars shortly. We will be looking for additional junior and senior scholars to be blind reviewers and guest editors. Please direct all questions about the journal to G. Reginald Daniel at: rdaniel@soc.ucsb.edu.
• Plans are in the works to found an association for CMRS. If you are interested in volunteering for a leadership role, please contact Laura Kina at: cmrs@depaul.edu. Our immediate needs are for a volunteer lawyer to review our by-laws and help us apply for non-profit status.

Thank you for supporting the inaugural CMRS 2010 conference!

The other thing is, as Reggie [G. Reginald Daniel] said, Reggie knows that we are all multiracial.  He doesn’t need a genetic test to prove that.  I mean, we know that. Even though this can tell us new information—and I think it is an opportunity for conversation—it’s not enough because we already know it and it hasn’t been enough.  You know that slave owners knew those brown children where their children. Did it matter?  They knew those were multiracial children were related to them.  It didn’t make a difference… To me it is a political revolution that we need to see that we’re connected as human beings.  Genetics isn’t going to do it by itself.

Dorothy Roberts, “A Rx for the FDA: Ethical Dilemmas for Multiracial People in Race-Based Medicine” (panel at the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference, DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois, November 5-6, 2010).

Color Struck: Essays on Race and Ethnicity in Global Perspective

University Press of America
April 2010
516 pages
Paper ISBN: 0-7618-5064-3 / 978-0-7618-5064-9
Electronic ISBN: 0-7618-5092-9 / 978-0-7618-5092-2

Edited by

Julius O. Adekunle, Professor of History
Monmouth University, West Long Branch, New Jersey

Hettie V. Williams, Lecturer, African American History
Department of History and Anthropology
Monmouth University, West Long Branch, New Jersey

Color Struck: Essays of Race and Ethnicity in Global Perspective is a compilation of expositions on race and ethnicity, written from multiple disciplinary approaches including history, sociology, women’s studies, and anthropology. This book is organized around a topical, chronological framework and is divided into three sections, beginning with the earliest times to the contemporary world. The term “race” has nearly become synonymous with the word “ethnicity,” given the most recent findings in the study of human genetics that have led to the mapping of human DNA. Color Struck attempts to answer questions and provide scholarly insight into issues related to race and ethnicity.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction

Part 1: The First Complex Societies to Modern Times

1. Race, Science, and Human Origins in Africa
Julius O. Adekunle

2. Race and the Rise of the Swahili Culture
Julius O. Adekunle

3. ‘Caste’-[ing] Gender: Caste and Patriarchy in Ancient Hindu Jurisprudence
Indira Jalli

4. Comparative Race and Slavery in Islam, Judaism, and Christianity: Texts, Practices, and Current Implications
Magid Shihade

5. The Dark Craven Jew: Race and Religion in Medieval Europe
James M. Thomas

6. Growth of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Racial Slavery in the New World
Kwaku Osei Tutu

7. The Yellow Lady: Mulatto Women in the Suriname Plantocracy
Hilde Neus

Part 2: Race and Mixed Race in the Americas

8. Critical Mixed Race Studies: New Approaches to Resistance and Social Justice
Andrew Jolivétte

9. Militant Multiraciality: Rejecting Race and Rejecting the Conveniences of Complicity
Rainier Spencer

10. Whiteness Reconstructed: Multiracial Identity as a Category of “New White”
Kerry Ann Rockquemore and David L. Brunsma

11. Conversations in Black and White: The Limitations of Binary Thinking About Race in America
Johanna E. Foster

12. The Necessity of a Multiracial Category in a Race-Conscious Society
Francis Wardle

13. Mixed Race Terminologies in the Americas: Globalizing the Creole in the Twenty First Century
DeMond S. Miller, Jason D. Rivera, and Joel C. Telin

14. Examining the Regional and Multigenerational Context of Creole and American Indian Identity
Andrew Jolivétte

15. Race, Class, and Power: The Politics of Multiraciality in Brazil
G. Reginald Daniel and Gary L. Haddow

16. All Mixed Up: A New Racial Commonsense in Global Perspective
G. Reginald Daniel and Gary L. Haddow

Part 3: Race, Ethnicity, and Conflict in Contemporary Societies

17. Black No More: African Americans and the ‘New’ Race Science
Hettie V. Williams

18. Contesting Identities of Color: African Female Immigrants in the Americas
Philomina Okeke-Ihejirika

19. Burdened Intersections: Black Women and Race, Gender, and Class
Marsha J. Tyson Darling

20. Ethnic Conflicts in the Middle East: A Comparative Analysis of Communal Violence within the Matrix of the Colonial Legacy, Globalization, and Global Stability
Magid Shihade

21. Ethnic Identity in China: The Politics of Cultural Difference
Dru C. Gladney

22. Shangri-la has Forsaken Us: China’s Ethnic Minorities, Identity, and Government Repression
Reza Hasmath

23. The Russian/Chechen Conflict and It’s Consequences
Mariana Tepfenhart

Contributors
Index

 Mixed Dreams: A Symposium on Multiracial Identities in the United States

2010-10-15 through 2010-10-20
Oberlin College
Oberlin, Ohio

At its root, Mixed Dreams: A Symposium on Multiracial Identities in the U.S. aims to create a space to discuss and interrogate historical and contemporary perspectives on multiraciality and the “multiracial experiences” of people identifying as bi-racial, mixed, and/or transracial/transnational adoptees in the United States. Through public lectures and panels it will explore current trends and dilemmas in understanding multiraciality historically, socially and politically as well as the growing narratives and spaces being created to express these “mixed” subjectivities. Featured guests will be Paul Spickard, Eric Hamako, Debra Yepa-Pappan, Alicia Arrizón and a video conference discussion with G.Reginald Daniel.

For more information, click here.

We Are a People: Narrative and Multiplicity in Constructing Ethnic Identity

Temple University Press
January 2000
304 pages
7×10
5 tables 5 figures
Paper EAN: 978-1-56639-723-0; ISBN: 1-56639-723-5

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

and W. Jeffrey Burroughs, Dean of Math and Sciences and Professor of Psychology
Brigham Young University, Hawaii

As the twentieth century closes, ethnicity stands out as a powerful force for binding people together in a sense of shared origins and worldview. But this emphasis on a people’s uniqueness can also develop into a distorted rationale for insularity, inter-ethnic animosity, or, as we have seen in this century, armed conflict. Ethnic identity clearly holds very real consequences for individuals and peoples, yet there is not much agreement on what exactly it is or how it is formed.

The growing recognition that ethnicity is not fixed and inherent, but elastic and constructed, fuels the essays in this collection. Regarding identity as a dynamic, on-going, formative and transformative process, We Are a People considers narrative—the creation and maintenance of a common story—as the keystone in building a sense of peoplehood. Myths of origin, triumph over adversity, migration, and so forth, chart a group’s history, while continual additions to the larger narrative stress moving into the future as a people.

Still, there is more to our stories as individuals and groups. Most of us are aware that we take on different roles and project different aspects of ourselves depending on the situation. Some individuals who have inherited multiple group affiliations from their families view themselves not as this or that but all at once. So too with ethnic groups. The so-called hyphenated Americans are not the only people in the world to recognize or embrace their plurality. This relatively recent acknowledgment of multiplicity has potentially wide implications, destabilizing the limited (and limiting) categories inscribed in, for example, public policy and discourse on race relations.

We Are a People is a path-breaking volume, boldly illustrating how ethnic identity works in the real world.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
1. We are a People – Paul Spickard and W. Jeffrey Burroughs

Part I: The Indeterminacy of Ethnic Categories: The Problem and A Solution
2. Multiple Ethnicities and Identity Choices in the United States – Mary C. Waters
3. That’s the Story of Our Life – Stephen Cornell

Part II: Construction of Ethnic Narratives: Migrant Ethnicities
4. Black Immigrants in the United States – Violet M. Johnson
5. The Children of Samoan Migrants in New Zealand – Cluny Macpherson and La’avasa Macpherson

Part III: Ethnicities of Dominated Indigenous Peoples
6. Narrating to the Center of Power in the Marshall Islands – Phillip H. McArthur
7. Discovered Identities and American-Indian Supratribalism – Stephen Cornell
8. Racialist Responses to Black Athletic Achievement – Patrick B. Miller
9. I’m Not a Chileno! Rapa Nui Identity – Max E. Stanton and Andrés Edmunds P.

Part IV: Emerging Multiethnic Narratives
10. Multiracial Identity in Brazil and the U.S. – G. Reginald Daniel
11. Mixed Laughter – Darby Li Po Price
12. Punjabi Mexican American Experiences of Multiethnicity –  Darby Li Po Price

Part V: Theoretical Reflections
13. Rethinking Racial Identity Development – Maria P. P. Root
14. The Continuing Significance of Race – Lori Pierce
15. What Are the Functions of Ethnic Identity? – Cookie White Stephan and Walter G. Stephan
16. Ethnicity, Multiplicity, and Narrative – W. Jeffrey Burroughs and Paul Spickard

Read an excerpt of chapter 1 here.

Colorblind parents could handicap their biracial kids

The Grio
2010-09-16

Jennifer H. Cunningham

When he was still a toddler, Rebecca Romo’s son, Emilio asked her why his skin was darker than hers.

The now 8-year-old Emilio, who is of Mexican and African-American heritage, also went through a stage where he hated his hair, telling his mother that he wished it was straight and blonde instead of curly and brown.

Romo realized that Emilio had been exposed to — and possibly internalized — what many perceive to be a normal standard of appearance. It was a standard that didn’t look like him.

“I had to reinforce a positive image that curly hair was beautiful,” said Romo, Mexican-American sociology doctoral student at University of California, Santa Barbara. “I would have to constantly tell him that. I realized that I had to start with him very young in fostering a positive self-image.”…

…Non-African-American mothers with biracial children can struggle not only with issues like hair and skin tone, but also with intangible matters, like fostering a sense of African-American identity or heritage in their children. And that can be especially difficult for single, non-African-American mothers.

“To me, honesty and being straightforward is really critical,” said G. Reginald Daniel, Ph.D, professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “When a child raises a question, it needs to be addressed immediately.”

Daniel said it is key that parents address their children’s questions about race, racial differences and racism in an empathetic manner, but also in a way that the child can understand. They may believe that by not addressing the child’s query that they are shielding the child or sharing their pain. But in reality, ignoring their concerns can do the exact opposite…

Read the entire article here.

One Drop of Blood

The New Yorker
1994-07-24

Lawrence Wright, Staff Writer

Washington in the millennial years is a city of warring racial and ethnic groups fighting for recognition, protection, and entitlements. This war has been fought throughout the second half of the twentieth century largely by black Americans. How much this contest has widened, how bitter it has turned, how complex and baffling it is, and how far-reaching its consequences are became evident in a series of congressional hearings that began last year in the obscure House Sub-committee on Census, Statistics, and Postal Personnel, which is chaired by Representative Thomas C. Sawyer, Democrat of Ohio, and concluded in November, 1993.

Although the Sawyer hearings were scarcely reported in the news and were sparsely attended even by other members of the subcommittee, with the exception of Representative Thomas E. Petri, Republican of Wisconsin, they opened what may become the most searching examination of racial questions in this country since the sixties. Related federal agency hearings, and meetings that will be held in Washington and other cities around the country to prepare for the 2000 census, are considering not only modifications of existing racial categories but also the larger question of whether it is proper for the government to classify people according to arbitrary distinctions of skin color and ancestry. This discussion arises at a time when profound debates are occurring in minority communities about the rightfulness of group entitlements, some government officials are questioning the usefulness of race data, and scientists are debating whether race exists at all…

In this battle over racial turf, a disturbing new contender has appeared. “When I received my 1990 census form, I realized that there was no race category for my children,” Susan Graham, who is a white woman married to a black man in Roswell, Georgia, testified. “I called the Census Bureau. After checking with supervisors, the bureau finally gave me their answer: The children should take the race of their mother. When I objected and asked why my children should be classified as their mother’s race only, the Census Bureau representative said to me, in a very hushed voice, ‘Because, in cases like these, we always know who the mother is and not always the father.’”…

…Actual interracial marriages, however, were historically rare. Multiracial children were often marginalized as illegitimate half-breeds who didn’t fit comfortably into any racial community. This was particularly true of the off spring of black-white unions. “In my family, like many families with African-American ancestry, there is a history of multiracial offspring associated with rape and concubinage,” G. Reginald Daniel, who teaches a course in multiracial identity at the University of California at Los Angeles, says. “I was reared in the segregationist South. Both sides of my family have been mixed for at least three generations. I struggled as a child over the question of why I had to exclude my East Indian and Irish and Native American and French ancestry, and could include only African.”…

…Kwame Anthony Appiah, of Harvard’s Philosophy and Afro- American Studies Departments, says, “What the Multiracial category aims for is not people of mixed ancestry, because a majority of Americans are actually products of mixed ancestry. This category goes after people who have parents who are socially recognized as belonging to different races. That’s O.K.–that’s an interesting social category. But then you have to ask what happens to their children. Do we want to have more boxes, depending upon whether they marry back into one group or the other? What are the children of these people supposed to say? I think about these things because–look, my mother is English; my father is Ghanaian. My sisters are married to a Nigerian and a Norwegian. I have nephews who range from blond- haired kids to very black kids. They are all first cousins. Now, according to the American scheme of things, they’re all black-even the guy with blond hair who skis in Oslo. That’s what the one drop rule says. The Multiracial scheme, which is meant to solve anomalies, simply creates more anomalies of its own, and that’s because the fundamental concept–that you should be able to assign every American to one of three or four races reliably-is crazy.”…

…Multiracial people, because they are now both unable and unwilling to be ignored, and because many of them refuse to be confined to traditional racial categories, inevitably undermine the entire concept of race as an irreducible difference between peoples. The continual modulation of racial differences in America is increasing the jumble created by centuries of ethnic intermarriage. The resulting dilemma is a profound one. If we choose to measure the mixing by counting people as Multiracial, we pull the teeth of the civil-rights laws. Are we ready for that? Is it even possible to make changes in the way we count Americans, given the legislative mandates already built into law? “I don’t know,” Sawyer concedes. “At this point, my purpose is not so much to alter the laws that underlie these kinds of questions as to raise the question of whether or not the way in which we currently define who we are reflects the reality of the nation we are and who we are becoming. If it does not, then the policies underlying the terms of measurement are doomed to be flawed. What you measure is what you get.”…

Read the entire article here or here.

SOC 139C. Betwixt and Between: Multiracial Identity in the United States

University of California, Santa Barbara

G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

Note from Steven F. Riley [I believe this is the longest actively running university course on multiracial identity in the United States.]

An examination of the factors that have influenced the social location of racially mixed individuals of African and European descent in the United States, in order to provide a context for understanding the complexities surrounding the newly emerging multiracial conciousness.

Panel: Exploring the Historical Context for Contemporary Stories of the Mixed Experience

Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival
Japanese American National Musuem
National Center for Democracy, Tateuchi Democracy Forum
2010-06-13, 18:30 to 19:30Z

Moderator

Frank Buckley, Co-Anchor
KTLA Morning News

Panelists

Kelly F. Jackson, Assistant Professor of Social Work
Arizona State University

Farzana Nayani, President
Multiracial Americans of Southern California (MASC)

Larry Aaronson, Retired public school teacher

G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

Listen to part 1 (00:31:12) or download the audio here.
Listen to part 2 (00:31:05) or download the audio here.

More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order [Book Review: Christian]

The Western Journal of Black Studies
Volume 27, Number 4 (2003)
pages 279-280

Mark Christian, Professor & Chair of African & African American Studies
Lehman College, City University of New York

This book comes out the school of thought that advocates for the “multiracial identity” classification in the US. More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order offers a postmodern analysis of “race” and issues a call for the acknowledgement of what can be deemed the multifaceted racialized heritages of many Black peoples located in the African Diaspora. In this sense the book offers little other than what is largely akeady known. Indeed many peoples of African descent do have claim to other heritages. For example it is broadly accepted now that at least two-thirds of African Americans have some Native American and European heritage. However, it is erroneous to run away with this idea as if it is the sole criteria for establishing a “new racial order” based on what is in fact unlikely to have any impact on white supremacy and its continued dominance over the socially constructed “peoples of color.”…

Read or purchase the book review here.