Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Despite ‘Enormous Strides,’ Minorities Still Face Barriers, President Says

    Despite ‘Enormous Strides,’ Minorities Still Face Barriers, President Says

    The New York Times
    2013-08-23

    John Hurdle and Peter Baker

    SCRANTON, Pa. — President Obama declared on Friday that the United States had made “enormous strides” in race relations since the March on Washington 50 years ago, but said “institutional barriers” for African-Americans and other minorities still existed and must be overcome.

    Speaking at a town hall-style meeting at Binghamton University in New York, Mr. Obama said that even though there was less overt discrimination in modern society, the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow continued to afflict many in America. He said the economic troubles of recent years had exacerbated divisions across racial and class lines.

    “Fifty years after the March on Washington and the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, obviously we’ve made enormous strides,” Mr. Obama said in response to a question from a professor of African-American studies. “I’m a testament to it. You’re a testament to it.” He added that “we know that some discrimination still exists, although nothing like what existed 50 years ago.”…

    …As the nation’s first black president, Mr. Obama occupies a singular place in this anniversary moment, the culmination of a half-century of struggle and a symbol to people around the world about the progress in America. And yet he has tried to rebut arguments that his own success meant that the country had graduated beyond race.

    Mr. Obama plans to host a reception at the White House on Tuesday to mark the anniversary of the march, and then on Wednesday he will speak from the Lincoln Memorial, as Dr. King did a half-century ago. His comments at Binghamton offered a preview of sorts of some of the themes he may raise…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Steve Riley Co-hosts a Recap of Some Important Discussions

    Steve Riley Co-hosts a Recap of Some Important Discussions

    Mixed Race Radio
    Blog Talk Radio
    2013-08-21, 16:00Z (12:00 EDT)

    Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

    Steven F. Riley, Creator
    www.MixedRaceStudies.org

    On today’s of episode of Mixed Race Radio, join me and our special guest co-host, Steven Riley (Mixedracestudies.org) as we discuss some of our favorite Mixed Race Radio guests and conversations.

    Steve is one of my “go-to” sources for show recommendations and referrals. Today, we get to hear what he has been up to and the conferences, lectures, and conversations he is excited to be a part of in the coming months.

    Who knows, Steve and I may even debut a Top 10 List of favorite books, authors, programs and artists who have left an impact on our work and perspective.

    Join us today and feel free to send in your suggestions and referrals for show guests, topics and themes.

    Due to a guest cancellation, Tiffany invited me for wide ranging conversation about race and mixed-race. We discussed topics ranging from General Mills’ Cheerios ad, my favorite authors, the forthcoming inaugural issue of the Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies and Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni’s one-woman play, One Drop of Love: A Daughter’s Search for her Father’s Racial Approval.

    Go to the episode here. Listen to the episode here. Download the episode here.

  • We Should all Be Terrified

    We Should all Be Terrified

    brianbantum: theology, culture, teaching and life in-between
    2013-07-14

    Brian Bantum, Assistant Professor of Theology
    Seattle Pacific University

    Today, do not speak to me of peace. Do not speak to me of reconciliation or “turn the other cheek.” Today we must confess. We must confess to what our nation was and is continuing to be. We must open our eyes to the way the cancer of race in America not only persists but has mutated, calibrated itself to the supposed inoculations of “multiculturalism” and “post-racialism.”

    This morning we need to face a terrifying fact. George Zimmerman is a product of the “multicultural.” A mixed-race man, the son of a Latina mother and a white father, a man who identifies himself as Hispanic, killed a black boy who he identified as dangerous and followed as a suspect. The “not guilty” verdict in this case means quite simply that the [white] jury in this case deemed his actions “reasonable.” Race permeated this case, but in new ways that we cannot lose sight of.

    To lose sight of Zimmerman’s racial self-identification is to lose sight of how race has worked in this country, how whiteness was never about biology. Whiteness has always been about a presumption of innocence, a power to judge, the freedom to exist and to be who you declare yourself to be…

    Read the entire article here.

  • The Stuart Hall Project (2013) (John Akomfrah – Smoking Dogs Films)

    The Stuart Hall Project (2013) (John Akomfrah – Smoking Dogs Films)

    darkmatter: in the ruins of imperial culture
    General Issue 10 (2013-07-18)
    ISSN: 2041-3254

    Dhanveer Singh Brar

    “With deepest gratitude and respect” – If there is a moment when the pieces of Akomfrah’s The Stuart Hall Project fall into place, it is with this closing note. Gratitude and respect might seem like old fashioned words, pointing to sentiments which are thought to be out of date. They bring to mind images of unashamed acts of deference, of laying prostate (whether physically or intellectually) in front of an elder, but on the flip side there is nothing wrong with paying some dues. There is nothing wrong with acknowledging a debt, when you know how and why that debt has been earned. Gratitude and respect. With deepest gratitude and respect. Akomfrah is reaching for something infinite here, something he knows he owes Hall, but equally that neither he nor Hall would ever have any interest in cutting a deal on. There is a sense in which perhaps the film is clouded by those sentiments. It can be construed as one-eyed in its attempt to mark Hall’s importance to the history of intellectual and political life in this country, but I think such criticism might be missing the point: Hall is the condition of possibility for too many of us to forget what it is we owe him, and there is a danger, in our current moment, that such an act of collective forgetting might already be underway. It is between gratitude and the refusal to turn that gesture into credit, that The Stuart Hall Project goes to work…

    Read the entire review here.

  • Making it Last: A Couple Who See Race Clearly

    Making it Last: A Couple Who See Race Clearly

    The New York Times
    2013-08-23

    Erika Allen

    Booming’s “Making It Last” column profiles baby boomer couples who have been together 25 years or more.

    Christopher and Laura Castoro met when she asked him to tutor her in German. They didn’t realize they were of different race till their first date, and when they decided to marry, “We knew it was going to be us against the world,” she said.

    Christopher and Laura Castoro celebrated their 45th wedding anniversary on June 8. In 2000, he retired as the director of transportation for a chemical and technology company. She is an author (also writing under her maiden name, Laura Parker) who writes, among other things, romance novels, including “Love on the Line,” “Rose of the Mists,” “A Rose in Splendor” and “The Secret Rose.” The couple lives in Fort Worth. They have three adult children and nine grandchildren. A condensed and edited version of our conversation follows.

    You met in college?

    Christopher: Yes, I went to Howard University to study chemistry. As a high-schooler in Brooklyn I’d taken a test that secured me a scholarship — a full ride to Howard. I was studying German during my junior year and this girl with very fair skin and curly blond hair shyly asked me to tutor her.

    Laura: I was on scholarship, too. I had to make Bs in all of my classes. But six weeks into the year I was getting a C+ in German. Money and pride were at stake so I asked a boy from the front row to tutor me.

    First impressions?

    Laura: He was cute and professional, but he was older and I thought he had a girlfriend.

    Christopher: Even though we were at Howard I assumed that Laura was a white girl. As it turned out, she’d assumed that I was African-American and we both had it wrong.

    How did you sort things out?

    Laura: The tutoring went on for a while before we decided to go out and the first place we went was a German restaurant. Halfway through the meal he mentioned being Italian and I said, “Oh, you have Italian in your family?” and he said that yes, his whole family was Italian.

    Your reaction?

    Laura: I was stunned. I am from the segregated South. At the time one in six people at Howard was not African-American, but I assumed he was black. I was out with a white person and I had not done this intentionally. And he was out with a black woman and didn’t know it. The schools in my town in Arkansas were just being integrated, but I graduated from an all-black high school. I just did not know white people. And even though I am very fair, everyone knew my family and they knew I was black. This was the first time I realized that it wasn’t obvious that I was black.

    Christopher: I was surprised, but I had been at Howard for two years and she wasn’t the first black woman I dated…

    Read the entire interview here.

  • Not All Blacks Are African American: The Importance of Viewing Advisees as Individuals in a Culturally Mosaic Context

    Not All Blacks Are African American: The Importance of Viewing Advisees as Individuals in a Culturally Mosaic Context

    The Mentor: An Academic Advising Journal
    Pennsylvania State University
    2013-08-15

    Mary M. Livingston, Professor of Psychology
    Louisiana Tech University

    Latoya Pierce, Assistant professor of Psychology
    Louisiana Tech University

    Lou’uan Gollop-Brown, Assistant Professor of Psychology
    Louisiana Tech University

    When an advisee walks through the door, it is important for an adviser to consciously refrain from making possibly fallacious assumptions about the advisee’s racial heritage on the basis of skin color. Of course, this is also a mistake that may also be made by the advisee. One author of this paper, who is from the Caribbean, was selected as a preferred adviser by many undergraduate African American advisees, because they felt, as one of them, she would know and understand their experiences. Initial impressions influence the adviser-advisee interaction. This is not to say that the adviser should eschew accurate cultural recognition, which may be an important part of an advisee’s identity and a key to understanding and communication. Instead, we should attempt to verify our assumptions since our suppositions may not be correct…

    …An additional issue is the racial identity of individuals who consider themselves to be biracial or multiracial. Biracial is defined as “of, relating to, or involving members of two races” (Biracial, 2013). Multiracial is defined as “composed of, involving, or representing various races” (Multiracial, 2013). When individuals are biracial or multiracial, our human tendency to fit them into one category no longer works. Numerous times, biracial or multiracial advisees have told stories about meeting a person, and during the conversation, racial identity came up. The multiracial student was almost always asked to readily identify himself or herself as a member of an established racial group. The acronym VREG coincides with this experience. VREG stands for visibly recognizable ethic groups, and the concept speaks to our need to classify and recognize people as such (Helms & Cook, 1999)…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Race on the Menu: Cheerios, Paula Deen, with Some Supreme Court for Dessert

    Race on the Menu: Cheerios, Paula Deen, with Some Supreme Court for Dessert

    brianbantum: theology, culture, teaching and life in-between
    2012-06-26

    Brian Bantum, Assistant Professor of Theology
    Seattle Pacific University

    It’s been a bad month. For some reason incidents and issues of race seems to appear like death, in groups of three. They clump together, overwhelming those whom they hurt and they come too quickly for others to process…

    …But I am becoming less convinced that we will be able to have rational conversations about the facts of the cases, about how race functions in our society, what the consequences for our ignorance are for people of color. We cannot have these conversations because I am not sure we have really grappled with the reality of our condition as American citizens. We do not see ourselves as we really are. While some imagine themselves as the white wife and others as the black husband, what we fail to understand is that we are all the mixed race child. Regardless of our race we are children of this interracial union called America. We are the progeny of a tragic, dark, difficult history that we bear in our skin, even while we exhibit many wonderful possibilities.

    But we will never move forward until we can admit who we are…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Is There a “New Black Theology?” Yes and No.

    Is There a “New Black Theology?” Yes and No.

    brianbantum: theology, culture, teaching and life in-between
    2012-11-28

    Brian Bantum, Assistant Professor of Theology
    Seattle Pacific University

    Last week I had the distinct privilege of sitting on a panel with Willie James Jennings, J. Kameron Carter, and Edward Philip Antonio with Joanne Terrell responding. The panel was convened by the Black Theology Group at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meetings in Chicago, IL [Illinois] from November 16-20.

    The title of the panel was “Towards a New Black Theology?: Going Back in Order to Move Forward!” and centered upon the work of Jennings (The Christian Imagination), Carter (Race: A Theological Account), and myself (Redeeming Mulatto) and how we intersect with and diverge from Black Theology. As a panel we did not directly address the nomenclature “New Black Theology” which is not a terribly apt term for the work that we do, but it would also be a mistake to suggest that we are not indebted to Black Theological reflection either. The question of the name is less important than our hope that people might begin to enter into the problems and possibilities that animate our theological work. In the presentations we each, in our own way, sought to highlight both our connections to traditions and sensibilities of Black Christian thought as well as highlight how we are imagining a way forward…

    …What follows is the text of my presentation, “Theology From and To: What is Mulatto Theology?”…

    …What “mulatto” in a mulattic theological framework suggests is not the valorization of the mixed race body, nor the marginalization of the mixed race body. Rather, “mulatto” gestures towards the situatedness of bodies in a racial world where a person and a people occupy multiple spaces at once. The life of discipleship is navigating these various realities, discovering patterns of unfaithfulness as well as the continual possibilities that stand before us. “Mulatto” theology suggests that we stand in a space that is both transgressive and transgressed, that we cannot separate ourselves from the realities of our tragic beginnings, but that these realities do not exonerate us or protect us from perpetuating old terrors in new ways. We are children of mothers and fathers with complicated and tragic stories, but we cannot excise ourselves from them. A mulattic theology seeks to exist between these realities and discern patterns of faithfulness in their midst. Out of this reality a mulatto theology does not work to establish a cultural space or retrieve a tradition…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Who will dare say that the olive colored octoroons and quadroons, the bright mulattoes, the heiresses of wealthy-men of mixed blood, will not be sought in the next century by impecunious, thriftless and idle young men of the white race?

    “The newspapers recently reported that the private secretary to Mr. Blount of Georgia, representing the United States in the Hawaiian Islands, would shortly marry the daughter of a rich Chinaman of Honolulu. This educated young gentleman and of social standing seeks an alliance with an ex-coolie—a pig eyed pagan. Who will dare say that the olive colored octoroons and quadroons, the bright mulattoes, the heiresses of wealthy-men of mixed blood, will not be sought in the next century by impecunious, thriftless and idle young men of the white race? The negro maidens are seen at certain colleges for women of high degree in the North. Whereunto will this grow?”

    “Southern Race Question,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, (July 25, 1893), page 2, column 5.

  • The Lumbee Problem: The Making of an American Indian People

    The Lumbee Problem: The Making of an American Indian People

    University of Nebraska Press
    2001 (Originally published in 1980)
    298 pages
    Illus., maps
    Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8032-6197-6

    Karen I. Blu, Emeritus Associate Professor of Anthropology
    New York University

    How does a group of people who have American Indian ancestry but no records of treaties, reservations, Native language, or peculiarly “Indian” customs come to be accepted—socially and legally—as Indians? Originally published in 1980, The Lumbee Problem traces the political and legal history of the Lumbee Indians of Robeson County, North Carolina, arguing that Lumbee political activities have been powerfully affected by the interplay between their own and others’ conceptions of who they are. The book offers insights into the workings of racial ideology and practice in both the past and the present South—and particularly into the nature of Indianness as it is widely experienced among non-reservation Southeastern Indians. Race and ethnicity, as concepts and as elements guiding action, are seen to be at the heart of the matter. By exploring these issues and their implications as they are worked out in the United States, Blu brings much-needed clarity to the question of how such concepts are—or should be—applied across real and perceived cultural borders.