Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • The Obama Era: A New Age in American Politics

    The Obama Era: A New Age in American Politics

    The Huffington Post
    2012-12-05

    Brandon Hill
    Stanford University

    Barack Obama’s elections—both 2008 and 2012—have inaugurated a new political reality in America. He has rewritten history in two consecutive elections, and his groundbreaking victories will forever change the game of politics in our country. Before 2008 the political process was perceived as exclusive and elusive, accessible to only a few privileged players. But after two presidential elections of unprecedented campaign involvement and voter turnout, historically soft-spoken and underrepresented groups like African-Americans, Hispanics, gays, women, and young people are now reclaiming ownership of their political destinies. And the revolution is only just beginning.

    Welcome to the Obama era.

    President Obama has reengineered America’s political atmosphere, where political inclusion has now replaced the status quo. Obama brings a new face to political leadership. He is a refreshing departure from the markedly un-diverse brand of presidents and politicians that preceded him. He is real and relatable and able to reach more people, which encourages new groups to become engaged in the political process. In the Obama era, politics is no longer an enterprise reserved for old balding White men. It is no longer an old boys’ network or a country club aristocracy. Instead, it is a democracy built for and by the everyday American, and it is this inclusiveness that is politically energizing young people, women, and communities of color…

    …Obama connects with a broader spectrum of people than past candidates and presidents have. Reagan alienated Black voters with his Welfare Queen caricature. Romney dyed his face orange trying to appeal to Hispanic Univision viewers. Bush refused to let Hurricane Katrina ruin the end of his vacation, surveying the ruined low-income communities from the comfort of Air Force One instead of consoling families on the ground. These types of blunders make it clear why many groups historically have felt disconnected from political leadership.

    Obama’s massive appeal to minorities, women, and youth is that he is relatable. He’s real. Little Black boys find confidence in the fact that the president’s hair texture is the same as theirs. Latino parents find assurance in the fact that their president speaks their native tongue. Middle age women find solace in the fact that their president has two young daughters and will protect a woman’s right to her own body. College students across the nation find inspiration in the fact that their president can shoot the breeze with foreign heads of state, shoot down terrorist masterminds, and shoot a wicked jump shot all at the same time. Obama has both swagger and substance, a potent combination that prior commanders in chief have lacked. It’s simple. More people feel connected to the political process because now more people feel connected to their political leader.

    The Obama era is a new age that politically empowers the people that the political process has historically overlooked. It is an age where those who were once voiceless have become the most vocal; where the most apathetic have claimed significant authority. Now that minorities and women and youth have taken the reins in the past two elections, I don’t see this trend changing any time soon…

    Read the entire article here.

  • No longer your father’s electorate

    No longer your father’s electorate

    The Los Angeles Times
    2012-11-08

    Paul West, Washington Bureau

    WASHINGTON — Even more than the election that made Barack Obama the first black president, the one that returned him to office sent an unmistakable signal that the hegemony of the straight white male in America is over.

    The long drive for broader social participation by all Americans reached a turning point in the 2012 election, which is likely to go down as a watershed in the nation’s social and political evolution — and not just because in some states voters approved of same-sex marriage for the first time.

     On Tuesday, Obama received the votes of barely 1 in 3 white males. That too was historic. It almost certainly was an all-time low for the winner of a presidential election that did not include a major third-party candidate.

    “We’re not in the ’50s any more,” said William Frey, a Brookings Institution demographer. “This election makes it clear that a single focus directed at white males, or at the white population in general, is not going to do it. And it’s not going to do it when the other party is focusing on energizing everybody else.”…

    … “Obama lost a lot of votes among whites,” said Matt Barreto, a University of Washington political scientist. “It was only because of high black turnout and the highest Latino turnout ever for a Democratic president that he won.”

    Obama planted his base in an America that is inexorably becoming more diverse. If left unchecked by Republicans, these demographic trends would give the Democrats a significant edge in future presidential elections.

    Latinos were an essential element of Obama’s victories in the battlegrounds of Nevada and Colorado. States once considered reliably Republican in presidential elections will probably become highly competitive because of burgeoning Latino populations, sometimes in combination with large African American populations. North Carolina, where Obama won narrowly in 2008 and came close this time, is one. The Deep South state of Georgia is another. Texas and Arizona in the Southwest are future swing states — by 2020, if not sooner…

    Read the entire article here.

  • 1.1 But Where are You Really From? Intro

    1.1 But Where are You Really From? Intro

    Schema Magazine
    Schema In-Depth
    2009-05-05

    Jen Sookfong Lee, Founding Senior Editor

    With no easy answer to this often complicated question, author of End of East, Jen Sookfong Lee, begins our inaugural special series, featuring no less than SIX highly unique “But where are you really from?” stories.

    A seemingly innocent question, one that many people would never even imagine to contain layers of subtext or carry with it a history of exclusion and authenticity. “But where are you really from?” rarely appears in a conversation all by itself. It’s the sum in a complicated equation that reaches deep into personal identity, diversity and belonging.

     Many of us know that feeling, that combination of anger, resentment, hesitation and confusion that bubbles up from your gut whenever someone asks you the question, “Where are you from?” Yes, it’s a simple question, and, yes, you know that the answer can be simple as well, but that’s not the problem. Before you even open your mouth to respond, a very familiar thought runs circles inside your head, “No matter what I say, this person will not understand.”

    Canada is a great country. I love living here. I love that I was born and educated here. I’m attached to cold winters and ice hockey and the very particular delights of poutine and the polar bear swim (not that I’ve ever participated in the polar bear swim, but I appreciate the urge that propels half-naked people to run screaming into frigid bodies of water on New Year’s Day, the urge, that is, to flout the cold and thumb my nose at my fellow Canadians who run away to Arizona every holiday season to play golf in short pants). I love that we’re a country built on immigration, a country where indigenous peoples and newcomers have the opportunity to live together and constantly renew the pains and processes of diversity, which is the very thing that marks us as uniquely Canadian and which pushes us to learn and re-learn what it means to be part of this human community…

    Read the entire article here.

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  • Why Do Pacific People with Multiple Ethnic Affiliations Have Poorer Subjective Wellbeing? Negative Ingroup Affect Mediates the Identity Tension Effect

    Why Do Pacific People with Multiple Ethnic Affiliations Have Poorer Subjective Wellbeing? Negative Ingroup Affect Mediates the Identity Tension Effect

    Social Indicators Research
    Published online: December 2012
    18 pages
    DOI: 10.1007/s11205-012-0220-8

    Sam Manuela
    Department of Psychology
    University of Auckland

    Chris G. Sibley, Senior Lecturer in Psychology
    University of Auckland

    We argue that multi-ethnic affiliation as a member of both the Pacific and majority (European) group creates tension in psychological wellbeing for Pacific peoples of mixed ancestry. Study 1 showed that multi-ethnic Pacific/non-Pacific people were lower in Pacific Familial Wellbeing relative to mono-ethnic Pacific and multi-ethnic Pacific/Pacific people (n = 586). Study 2 replicated this effect in a New Zealand (NZ) national probability sample using a measure of self-esteem (n = 276). Study 2 also modelled the mechanism driving the identity tension effect, and showed that group differences in negative affect toward Pacific peoples fully mediated the effect of ethnic mixed or mono-ethnic group affiliation on self-esteem. This currently affects the one-third of Pacific people who identify as Pacific/non-Pacific in NZ and occurs because multi-ethnic identification promotes the endorsement of negative societal attitudes toward Pacific peoples. Our model indicates that endorsement of such attitudes produces a more negative self-evaluation and generally corrodes subjective wellbeing and family integration. Population projections indicate that this potentially at-risk Pacific/non-Pacific group may increase dramatically in subsequent generations (upwards of 3.3% of the population by 2026). Implications for the study of Pacific wellbeing, and avenues for applied research targeting this newly-identified emerging social problem are discussed.

    Read the entire article here.

  • The Transpacific Shift in Mixed-Race Studies: Sawyer Seminar II

    The Transpacific Shift in Mixed-Race Studies: Sawyer Seminar II

    University of Southern California, Univeristy Park Campus
    Doheny Memorial Library (DML)
    East Asian Seminar Room (110C)
    Friday, 2013-02-08, 10:00-16:00 PST (Local Time)

    Presented by the Center for Japanese Religions and Culture’s “Critical Mixed-Race Studies: A Transpacific Approach” Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminars Series at the University of Southern California.

    Conference Convenors:

    Duncan Williams, Associate Professor of Religion
    University of Southern California

    Brian C. Bernards, Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures
    University of Southern California

    Velina Hasu Houston, Associate Dean for Faculty Recognition and Development, Director of Dramatic Writing and Professor
    University of Southern California

    PRESENTERS – MORNING SESSION (10:00 AM)

    “Filipino-Mexican Relations, Mestizaje, and Identity in Colonial and Contemporary Mexico”
    Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr., Assistant Professor of Asian Pacific American Studies
    Arizona State University

    “Unruly Identities in the Hispanic Pacific”
    Jason Chang, Assistant Professor of History and Asian American Studies
    University of Connecticut

    Respondent: Robert Chao Romero, Assistant Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies
    University of California, Los Angeles

    PRESENTERS – AFTERNOON SESSION (1:30 PM)

    “Erasing Race and Sex: Adoption of Stateless GI babies in Early Cold War America”
    Bongsoo Park, Independent scholar; Ph.D. U-Minnesota
    University of Minnesota

    “Seeing Race: Korean ‘GI Babies’ and Legacies of U.S. Neocolonial Care”
    Susie Woo, ACLS New Faculty Fellow in American Studies and Ethnicity
    University of Southern California

    Respondent: Lily Anne Welty, IAC Postdoctoral Fellow, Asian American Studies Center
    University of California, Los Angeles

    For more information, click here.

  • there does not exist today a descendant of Virginia ancestors claiming to be an Indian who is unmixed with negro blood.

    Public records in the office of the Bureau of Vital Statistics, and in the State Library, indicate that there does not exist today a descendant of Virginia ancestors claiming to be an Indian who is unmixed with negro blood.

    W. A. [Walter Ashby] Plecker, Circular Letter to “Local Registrars, Clerks, Legislators, and others responsible for, and interested in, the prevention of racial intermixture,” Commonwealth of Virginia, Bureau of Vital Statistics, December 1943. (Source: Rockbridge County (Va.) Clerk’s Correspondence, 1912-1943. Local Government Records Collection, Rockbridge County Court Records. The Library of Virginia. 10-0878-003). http://lva.omeka.net/items/show/63.

  • Eric Garcetti invokes Latino-Jewish ancestry in mayor’s race

    Eric Garcetti invokes Latino-Jewish ancestry in mayor’s race

    The Los Angeles Times
    2013-01-02

    Michael Finnegan

    Working a recent breakfast gathering of business owners in Northridge, Los Angeles mayoral contender Eric Garcetti introduced himself in Hindi when a Sikh businessman approached.

    A few hours later, Garcetti donned a colorful Peruvian headpiece with ear flaps as he spoke Spanish with immigrants on the steps of City Hall, part of a show of solidarity for designating a stretch of Hollywood’s Vine Street as “Peru Village.”

    After lunch, Garcetti joined rabbis at a City Hall menorah lighting. Wearing a yarmulke, the Hollywood-area councilman sang Hanukkah songs in Hebrew, English and Spanish. “Toda la familia,” Garcetti said as the group huddled for a photo.

    A top contender to succeed Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Garcetti prides himself on his ease with the city’s diverse cultures. He sees his mixed ancestry (“I have an Italian last name, and I’m half Mexican and half Jewish,” he says) as a powerful part of his appeal in a city where voters for decades have split along racial and ethnic lines in mayoral elections…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Circular Letter to “Local Registrars, Clerks, Legislators, and others responsible for, and interested in, the prevention of racial intermixture,” from Walter A. Plecker, State Registrar of Vital Statistics, Richmond

    Circular Letter to “Local Registrars, Clerks, Legislators, and others responsible for, and interested in, the prevention of racial intermixture,” from Walter A. Plecker, State Registrar of Vital Statistics, Richmond

    Commonwealth of Virginia, Bureau of Vital Statistics
    Richmond, Virginia
    December 1943

    Source: Rockbridge County (Va.) Clerk’s Correspondence, 1912-1943. Local Government Records Collection, Rockbridge County Court Records. The Library of Virginia. 10-0878-003.

    In a 1943 letter to local registrars, clerks, and legislators, Plecker asserted, “[T]here does not exist today a descendant of Virginia ancestors claiming to be an Indian who is unmixed with negro blood.”

    To Local Registrars, Clerks, Legislators, and others responsible for, and interested in, the prevention of racial intermixture:

    In our January 1943 annual letter to local registrars and clerks of courts, with list of mixed surnames, we called attention to the greatly increased effort and arrogant demands now being made for classification as whites, or at least for recognitions as Indians, as a preliminary step to admission into the white race by marraiage, of groups of the descendants of the “free negroes,” so designated before 1865 to distinguish them from slaves.

    According to Mendel’s law of heredity, one out of four of a family of mixed breeds, through the introduction of illegitimate white blood, is now so near white in appearance as to lead him to proclaim himself as such and to demand admission into white schools, forbidden by the State Constitution.  The other three people of this type are applying for licenses to marry whites, or for white licenses when intermarrying amongst themselves.  These they frequently secure with ease when they apply in a county or city not the home of the woman and are met by clerk or deputy who justifies himself in accepting a casual affidavit as the truth and in issuing a license to any applicant regardless of the requirements of Section 5099a, Paragraph 4, of the Code.  This Section places the proof upon the applicants, not upon the clerks.  We have learned that affidavits cannot always be accepted as truth. This loose practice (to state it mildly) of a few clerks is now the greatest obstacle in the way of proper registration by race required of the State Registrar of Vital Statistics in that Section. Local registrars, who are supposed to know the people of their registration areas, of course, have no excuse for not catching false registration of births and deaths.

    Public records in the office of the Bureau of Vital Statistics, and in the State Library, indicate that there does not exist today a descendant of Virginia ancestors claiming to be an Indian who is unmixed with negro blood…

    Read the entire letter here.

  • Denying Brazil (Review)

    Denying Brazil (Review)

    African Film Festival: More than just a festival
    Essays & Articles
    2002

    John D. H. Downing, Professor Emeritus of International Communication
    Southern Illinois University

    The documentary, Denying Brazil, is a plain-speaking and fascinating unmasking of the white racism endemic in Brazilian television’s most popular genre, which in the USA we would call the soap opera, but which throughout Latin America is known as the telenovela.
     
    The telenovela is more than a soap opera. It has a centrality in everyday life in much of Latin America way beyond its cousin in the USA. At times a series will comment very directly on current events, rather like the special “West Wing” episode produced after 9/11. People are glued to the set across social classes, the audience includes lots of men as well as women — and we’re talking prime time, not daytime. Telenovelas are not only amazingly prominent, but also have a format different to soap operas. Soaps usually run once a week and often for years on end, whereas telenovelas run every weekday night for some months and then come to a final climax.

    The genre is now worldwide. Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela, in particular, but also other Latin American countries even export their telenovelas quite successfully around the world. Exclusive US rights to the plot-concept of Colombia’s hugely popular “Ugly Betty (Betty La Fea)” were not long ago sold for serious money. In other words, when we’re talking telenovelas, we’re talking about something ultra high profile.

    So how they portray— or don’t— people of color is a really big deal in our multi-colored hemisphere. There have been some hard-hitting documentaries on racism in US media, such as the late Marlon Riggs’ Ethnic Notions and Color Adjustment, and Deborah Gee’s Slaying The Dragon. In Denying Brazil Brazilian director Joel Zito Araújo zeroes in on the very same issue: persistent white racism in media, with Brazilian telenovelas — usually acknowledged as the best there are in Latin America — in close-up…

    …To properly grasp the documentary’s message, one needs to take a step back and understand the way race works in Brazil and many Latin American nations. In the USA for most purposes, there is a binary code — one is either black or white, however light-skinned. In much of Latin America, however, the code that dominates is one which puts value on the lightness of skin color, the nearness to being white.
     
    This code obviously still prizes being white as the index of both beauty and intelligence, and disfavors being black as signifying unattractiveness and stupidity, but there is no fixed In-Out as there is in the USA. There is instead a microscopically detailed ladder of racial acceptability, where the more you can “whiten” yourself the better things get for you. It is referred to as branqueamento in Portuguese, blanqueamiento in Spanish and can be translated to whitening in English.
     
    Over the past hundred years this different system has permitted many Latin American commentators to claim that racism is peculiar to the USA, and that Brazil, for instance, is a “racial democracy” or that Venezuela is a “coffee-colored” country where lots of folk are at least a little mixed in origin, so being lack doesn’t matter. Denying Brazil rips the mask off this comforting myth…

    Read the entire review here.

  • A Rising Hockey Star With N.B.A. DNA

    A Rising Hockey Star With N.B.A. DNA

    The New York Times
    2012-12-20

    Jeff Z. Klein

    Seth Jones probably should have wound up a basketball player. He is tall, with a great vertical leap, and his father is Popeye Jones, who played 11 years in the N.B.A. and is now an assistant coach with the Nets.

    But instead, Seth Jones, 18, is projected to be a top pick in the N.H.L. draft and may be on his way to becoming hockey’s first African-American star.

    “I’d be shocked myself if I heard a story like that,” Jones said, when asked if people are surprised by the combination of a basketball father and a hockey son. “Me and my two brothers all play hockey, so it was weird, I guess, that none of us played basketball.”…

    …Now in his first year with the Portland Winter Hawks of the Western Hockey League, Jones has 28 points in 31 games, third among rookies, and a plus-27 mark, fourth among all players. On the ice he is a commanding presence, a hard hitter. But more often he is the rare defenseman who can control a game’s tempo with his stickhandling and passing — a “full-package defenseman,” in the words of Phil Housley, the United States coach.

    Probably not what anyone expected from a son of Popeye Jones…

    …The N.H.L., mired in a lockout and struggling to renew fan interest, would probably welcome the marketing potential of a young African-American star, especially if Jones were to play, say, in Brooklyn when the Islanders move there in 2015.

    Seth, whose mother, Amy, is white, said he would prefer that race not be part of the conversation when it comes to his hockey career.

    “I don’t want to be looked at as an African-American, you know?” he said. “I want to be looked at as someone who has good character, and people know me for the person I am, not my color.”…

    Read the entire article here.