Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

recent posts

about

  • What should Multiracial people learn? Learning goals for anti-(mono)racist education

    What should Multiracial people learn? Learning goals for anti-(mono)racist education

    Paper presented at the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference
    DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois
    2012-11-01
    6 pages

    Eric Hamako
    University of Massachusetts, Amherst

    Political education has played important roles in many social movements. Philosopher Ronald Sundstrom has argued that Multiracial activists and community organizers have a responsibility to set an expressly anti-racist agenda for Multiracial social movements. However, a coherent anti-racist agenda—and the political education curricula needed to support it—has yet to solidly materialize in Multiracial movements. So, I asked Multiracial activists who teach about racism, “What learning goals would you set for Multiracial participants in anti-racist education?” In this paper, based on my dissertation research, I present some of the key learning goals proposed by my participants. Then, I offer my thoughts about those learning goals and suggest new directions for teaching Multiracial people about racism and anti-racism.

    Read the entire paper here.

  • “I Got Indian in my Family”~A Discussion on Indian Identity

    “I Got Indian in my Family”~A Discussion on Indian Identity

    Mixed Race Radio
    2013-01-23, 17:00Z (12:00 EST)

    Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

    Dwanna L. Robertson
    University of Massachusetts, Amherst

    On today’s episode of Mixed Race Radio we will speak with Dwanna L. Robertson and discuss issues of Identity: What does it mean to be Indian in today’s society?

    Dwanna is a citizen of the Muscogee Creek Nation of Oklahoma, a public sociologist, an Indigenous rights advocate, and a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst having earned with two prior master’s degrees—an MBA and a Master of Science in Sociology.

    Currently, she represents over 2600+ graduate students of color as the appointed ALANA (African-, Latin-, Asian-, and Native-American) – graduate student representative for the Faculty Senate Council Committee on the Status of Diversity for UMass-Amherst.

    Dwanna writes for Indian Country Today Media Network and speaks (by invitation) at universities and other organizations and forums about the complexities of Indigenous identity in the United States.

    Dwanna has authored or co-authored pieces in American Indian Culture and Research Journal, European Sociological Review, Research in the Sociology of Work, and Oxford Encyclopedia of American Business, Labor, and Economic History. Her research focuses on the reproduction of social inequality, particularly for American Indians. Her current project examines the problematic processes around American Indian identity within the structures of public policy and the media.

    Dwanna will share her expertise with us while educating our listeners on the federal government’s approach to many issues, old and new.

    For more information, click here.

  • Methodologies of Socio-Cultural Classification: Contexutalizing the Casta Painting (1710-1800) as a Product of Time

    Methodologies of Socio-Cultural Classification: Contexutalizing the Casta Painting (1710-1800) as a Product of Time

    Undergraduate Journal of Gender and Women’s Studies
    Volume 1, Issue 1 (2012)
    17 pages

    Pooja Chaudhuri
    University of California, Berkeley

    The “casta painting” appeared in the early 18th century Colonial Mexico (New Spain). The paintings illustrated different offspring produced from sexual unions between men and women of Spanish, native Indian and African descent in the Americas. Series of casta paintings came in sets of typically sixteen panels, each featuring a mixed race couple and their one or sometimes, two children over a period of multiple generations. The viewer’s attention is drawn to phenotypic distinctions like skin color, styles of clothing and posture, all of which serve to racially distinguish each figure. The casta paintings were generally produced by criollo (creole) painters, a term used to refer to Spaniards who were born and raised in Spanish America. The paintings served to an extent, the viewing pleasure of creole elites in colonial Mexico, as well as in the Iberian Peninsula. Some casta paintings were commissioned by colonial officials who intended to take them back to Spain. Other sets were exhibited at the Royal Cabinet of Natural History, founded by Charles III in Madrid to display a plethora of objects and cultural artifacts from overseas territories belonging to the Castilian Crown. Over the course of the century, the paintings developed into elaborate taxonomic and ethnographic projects.

    Conceptions of raza, or race are central to situating casta paintings in the history of Colonial Mexico. For the Spanish, ‘raza’ converged with views on religion, occupation, gender and the separate functions of male and female bodies. Such complex vocabularies of race were articulated in the casta paintings as mestizaje, or race mixing between people of Indian, African, Spanish and Mixed descent in the Colonial Mexico. Not only do these paintings visually depict intimate spheres between people living in the colony, they point to a greater colonial preoccupation with classifying and categorizing reproductive outcomes from sex across racial boundaries. Granted that the paintings circulated as artifacts of popular culture in elite Spanish circles, they relied on a system of racial logic that developed over the course of centuries as the Spanish encountered new ideas, people, and places.

    Furthermore, casta paintings represent a map making project that place racialized bodies of men, women, and children as points of reference in a larger narrative of human action. Each painting serves as a stage for exposing narratives of race mixing, which were informed by a range of historical processes and changing discourses on gender, race, class and sexuality. This analysis of casta paintings posits them as maps of socio-cultural, racial, and gendered hierarchy. In addition, the paintings are targeted towards an elite Spanish audience and serve as instructive maps of both desirable and undesirable mixed race combinations. Their didactic purpose points to a desire on the part of painters to classify the population of Colonial Mexico within a map of sexual reproduction thereby, endorsing the colonial management of the most intimate relations among men and women in the colony.

    Over the course of different time periods, the term, ‘race’ has been woven with ideas of gender and class. In its modern twentieth century usage, race developed from biological explanations that defined it as a cluster of genetic characteristics linking a group of people together. Genetic similarities within a group are thought to determine phenotype like skin color, hair texture, and body structure. Ian F. Haney Lopéz argues against the idea that “racial divisions reflect fundamental genetic differences.” Lopéz cites several scientific findings which have shown that variations between two or more different populations (or, intragroup differences) exceed variations within a ‘racial’ group (or, intergroup differences). This argument supports the view that race is not biologically determined but socially and historically constructed. In other words, the notion of race as a social construct suggests that different racial systems rely on interactions between humans rather than on natural distinctions.

    Moreover, because ideas about race have changed over time, racial logic has significantly transformed the ‘social fabric’ of different histories. Gender, class and sexuality are integral to this ‘social fabric’. Race is therefore not a strictly genetic category and is instead enmeshed with gender, class and long histories of colonization; at different points in time the term has been associated more with either the biological or the social. This understanding of race as a fluid category presents important insight into looking at the casta painting as a methodology of socio-cultural classification…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Editor who grew up black in Nazi Germany dies

    Editor who grew up black in Nazi Germany dies

    The Miami Herald
    2013-01-21

    Freida Frisaro, Associated Press

    MIAMI — Hans Massaquoi, a former managing editor of Ebony magazine who wrote a distinctive memoir about his unusual childhood growing up black in Nazi Germany, has died. He was 87.

    His son said Massaquoi died Saturday, on his 87th birthday, in Jacksonville. He had been hospitalized over the Christmas holidays.

    “He had quite a journey in life,” said Hans J. Massaquoi, Jr., of Detroit. “Many have read his books and know what he endured. But most don’t know that he was a good, kind, loving, fun-loving, fair, honest, generous, hard-working and open-minded man. He respected others and commanded respect himself. He was dignified and trustworthy. We will miss him forever and try to live by his example.”…

    …He writes that one of his saddest moments as a child was when his homeroom teacher told him he couldn’t join the Hitler Youth.

    “Of course I wanted to join. I was a kid and most of my friends were joining,” he said. “They had cool uniforms and they did exciting things – camping, parades, playing drums.”…

    Read the entire obituary here.

  • After the first black president, who will be second?

    After the first black president, who will be second?

    The Washington Post
    2013-01-20

    Vanessa Williams

    President Obama’s historic election in 2008 and his reelection last year proved decisively that race is no longer an insurmountable hurdle to high political office in the United States.

    But the current pool of possible candidates suggests that the next black president will not be taking the oath of office anytime soon.

    “In the shadow of Barack Obama, there’s not been a lot of growth,” Cornell Belcher, a pollster who was involved in the president’s 2008 campaign, said. “It is really hard for minorities to get elected at the statewide level, and before you start talking about president, frankly, you have to get elected to statewide office.”

    The notion of a post-Obama reformation of black politics has not been borne out at the ballot box, as black politicians continue to struggle to win the statewide offices that are the traditional paths to the presidency.

    While the election of the first black president marked a significant break from the country’s history of racial prejudice, race still matters: The vast majority of black elected officials are put into office by black voters. Even Obama needed large numbers of black and Latino votes to win, particularly last year, when a majority of whites voters voted for someone else…

    Read the entire article here.

  • In short and simple ceremony, Obama starts his second term

    In short and simple ceremony, Obama starts his second term

    The Los Angeles Times
    2013-01-20

    Kathleen Hennessey

    WASHINGTON — With a quick and simple swearing-in ceremony at the White House, President Obama formally ended his first term in office Sunday and embarked on another four years leading a nation hobbled by a weak economy and gripped by political division.
     
    Raising his right hand a few minutes before noon, Obama swore to “faithfully execute the office” and “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution in a ceremony that lasted hardly a minute.
     
    The president stood next to First Lady Michelle Obama, holding her family Bible, and their two daughters, Sasha and Malia. Chief Justice John Roberts administered the 35-word oath, more smoothly than he did four years ago, in front of rolling cameras and a small group of family and friends.

    The intimate ceremony was a quirk of the calendar and an adherence to tradition. The 20th Amendment to the Constitution states that a president’s term ends at noon on Jan. 20. When that date falls on the Sunday, presidents have delayed the public ceremony a day and opted for a simple swearing-in at the White House…

    …The president began his day at Arlington National Cemetery, where he and Vice President Joe Biden, fresh from his own swearing-in ceremony, laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns under a clear-blue winter sky.

    From there, the president and first lady, infrequent churchgoers, made a rare visit to a historically black church, Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal, the oldest A.M.E church in the nation’s capital. The first African American president, who almost never discusses his own place in history, sat in the pews where 119 years ago congregants listened to Frederick Douglass’ last speech, a call for racial and class equality.

    “Put away your race prejudice. Banish the idea that one class must rule over another,” the former slave said in 1894. “Based upon the eternal principles of truth, justice and humanity, and with no class having any cause of complaint or grievance, your Republic will stand and flourish forever.”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Obama’s inauguration carries symbolic resonance on Martin Luther King Day

    Obama’s inauguration carries symbolic resonance on Martin Luther King Day

    The Guardian
    2013-01-20

    Gary Younge, Feature Writer and Columnist

    America’s first black president will be sworn in on the day devoted to its most famous civil rights leader

    In April 1961, four months before Barack Obama was born, Bobby Kennedy told Voice of America: “There’s no question that in the next 30 or 40 years a negro can also achieve the same position that my brother has as president of the United States.” Less than a month later a group of black and white freedom riders were firebombed and beaten with baseball bats and lead piping as they tried to travel through the south. The interracial marriage of Obama’s parents was not recognised in more than 20 states. Black people’s right to vote, let alone stand for election, had not been secured in much of the south. The prospect of a black president never seemed further away.

    Four years later the essayist and author James Baldwin mocked Kennedy’s prediction. “That sounded like a very emancipated statement to white people,” he wrote in The American Dream and the American Negro. “They were not in Harlem when this statement was first heard. They did not hear the laughter and bitterness and scorn with which this statement was greeted … We were here for 400 years and now he tells us that maybe in 40 years, if you are good, we may let you become president.”

    The fact that Obama’s inauguration is taking place on Martin Luther King Day – a federal public holiday to celebrate the birth of the civil rights leader – carries great symbolic resonance. The notion that America might vote in a black president now seems little more than a banal fact of life…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Obama Should Talk About Being Biracial

    Obama Should Talk About Being Biracial

    The Daily Beast
    2013-01-20

    David Kaufman

    The President identifies as black, but David Kaufman hopes that during his second term, he’ll also discuss his biracial heritage.

    Four years after he first entered the White House, there’s no longer anything surprising about calling Barack Obama—America’s first black president—a “transformational” leader. Yet the full extent of Obama’s transformational potential has yet to be realized in one realm: his biracial heritage.

    Obama’s 1995 book Dreams from my Father makes clear that his identity was influenced as much—if not more—by his Caucasian mother than his absentee African father. But since he won the Democratic nomination in 2008, both Obama and the media seem to have shut the closet door on his multi-culti background. With his black wife and children by his side, Obama certainly represents an aspirational—and much-needed—African-American cultural ideal. But with one half of his family history so conspicuously overlooked, whether by circumstance or design, that ideal is not the entire story of his identity.

    To a certain extent, I think it’s been an act,” San Francisco State University Professor Andrew Jolivétte—editor of Obama and the Biracial Factor, a collection of essays—says of the president’s mono-racial messaging. “The President has been afraid to speak more openly about being biracial because it could be read in so many different ways.”…

    …With so few journalists actually asking the President about being mixed-race, Obama has conversely had very little to tell them. Or maybe because he’s so publicly—and repeatedly—identified as black in the past, the President simply feels he has nothing left to reveal. “Some might suggest he’s purposely not talking about it, but perhaps his mixed heritage is no longer some on-going restless question for Obama,” suggests Michele Elam, Professor in the Department of English and the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford. “I don’t think he’s repressing his mixed heritage or capitulating to the ‘one-drop’ rule,” Elam continues. “For Obama, the choice to identify as black has never been merely about biology or blood … He sees blackness as containing differences of experience and ancestry.”…

    Read the entire aritcle here.

  • Obama sworn in at low-key White House ceremony

    Obama sworn in at low-key White House ceremony

    China Daily-USA
    2013-01-21

    WASHINGTON – US President Barack Obama took the official oath for his second term on Sunday at the White House in a small, private ceremony that set a more subdued tone compared to the historic start of his presidency four years ago.

    Gathered with his family in the Blue Room on the White House’s ceremonial main floor, Obama put his hand on a family Bible and recited the 35-word oath that was read out loud by US Chief Justice John Roberts.

    “I did it,” Obama said as he hugged his wife, Michelle, and daughters Sasha and Malia. “Thank you, sweetie,” he told Michelle when she congratulated him. “You didn’t mess up,” Sasha Obama told her father.

    It was a low-key start to the first African-American US president’s second term, which is likely to be dominated – at least at the start – by budget fights with Republicans and attempts to reform gun control and immigration laws…

    Read the entire article here.