Mixed Race Studies

Mixed race and mixed reactions

Columbia Daily Spectator
2016-10-17

Laura Salgado

“But, like, what are you?”

It’s a question I’m asked pretty often, both inside and outside of Morningside Heights. You’d think that after almost two decades on this planet I’d finally be able to answer it easily, but you’d be wrong. This seemingly innocent query still manages to fill me with dread, discomfort, and anxiety every time I hear it. My heart leaps into my throat, my hands start to sweat, and my words get caught on the tip of my tongue.

I know how most people want me to answer. They expect to hear something simple and comprehensible, like “Hispanic” or “white.” They want to know which box to put me in. Their world is one of simple distinctions, one where everyone fits into only one category…

Read the entire article here.

“So, What Are You?”

Columbia Daily Spectator
New York, New York
2016-10-04

Alexandra Peebles and Eliza Solomon

Members of the Mixed Heritage Society at a club meeting. (Jared Orellana / Staff Photographer)

“For me, personally, thinking of myself as defined by race has never really worked, because I don’t fit in with the Asians, [and] I don’t fit in with white people,” Zina Sockwell, a Columbia College senior, explains when asked about her identity as a mixed-heritage student.

Sockwell is half Korean on her mother’s side and a quarter Native American on her father’s side, and she identifies as mixed heritage. Her entire “nuclear family” is Asian, white, and Native American. Growing up, Sockwell did not feel different or perplexed by her mixed background. “I didn’t realize for a long time that I was mixed race—I was just a person, in a family. I was a Sockwell; that’s what was normal,” she says matter-of-factly.

But when Sockwell got to college, things were different. When the Mixed Heritage Society (previously known as the Mixed-Race Students Society) debuted on campus in the spring of 2015, it filled what some saw as a glaring cavity by providing an identity-based discussion space for students like Sockwell. These students don’t identify strictly with one race or ethnicity, and as a result must combat the pressure to define themselves as belonging to one specific culture. The club set out to meet a need for the students who wanted to share their often unique experiences with their fellow “mixed” classmates…

Read the entire article here.

Leaving to learn

Columbia Daily Spectator
2015-12-02

Claire Liebmann

Courtesy of Karl Jacoby

Several years ago while browsing newspaper clippings online, Karl Jacoby, a history professor at Columbia, came across the story of William Ellis—a Texan slave who built a million dollar fortune while posing as a Mexican millionaire in New York, essentially hacking the system of American expansionism and oppression.

Tracking Ellis as he took on different names and personas was difficult: Ellis deliberately introduced falsehoods into the historical record to ensure that his racial passing was accepted by the broader society, but Jacoby stuck with it. Years later, this chance encounter with Ellis’ story would come to drive his personal historical research. Undertaking a yearlong leave of absence, he pursued his interest in reclaiming untold narratives, working on his book The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire.

Jacoby’s academic career is driven by his interest in complicating comfortable historical narratives. This process of reinvention and rediscovery depends on another kind of separation from the establishment: Jacoby’s reliance on his leave of absence as a means of promoting academic innovation…

Read the entire article here.

“Being mixed race and being American is really weird because Americans, and I say this as an American, they like to do this thing where they put literally everyone into a box. We see it on the Census, we see it in schools, standardized testing, anything you could possibly label, Americans like to label. Mixed race people will present this as a cognitive dissonance. It’s really hard to be two things at once, or at least from a Westernized perspective. So when we want to check two things off it kind of becomes a little hard. So I think it’s distinctly more difficult in America to be mixed race than it is in a lot of other places.” —Julia Muhsen, Columbia College sophomore

Caroline Wallis, “Blending shades of self,” Columbia Daily Spectator, November 5, 2015. http://features.columbiaspectator.com/eye/2015/11/05/blending-shades-of-self/.

Blending shades of self

Columbia Daily Spectator
New York, New York
2015-11-05

Caroline Wallis

At a place like Columbia, where how you identify can define the spaces you occupy and the people you interact with, being of mixed race presents an extra challenge. The balancing act between multiple cultures, communities, and colors can leave one wondering where they belong. Last year, Keenan Smith, Columbia College sophomore, founded the Mixed-Race Students Society, which created a forum for multiracial students to discuss issues that directly affect those who don’t fit in one box. The students profiled in this piece aren’t all members of the Society, but they all represent an emerging community of students bringing these conversations into our discussions of race on campus…

Read the entire article here.

New group looks to bring together mixed-race students

Columbia Daily Spectator
New York, New York
2015-04-08

Marium Dar, Spectator Staff Writer

A new student group is hoping to create a safe space for mixed-race students to discuss the challenges and struggles they face when discussing self-identity and racialization.

The Mixed-Race Students Society of Columbia University, which was founded last month, holds biweekly discussions where members take on topics including the difference between identification and racialization.

“As an organization, we have shared form and not content. The form of our experiences is the same,” board member Eliana Pipes, CC ’18, said. “Even though we all have completely different backgrounds, completely different mixes, we can identify on that common ground.”.

“The mixed-race [experience] is its own unique racial experience. If you are mixed with black, then you can never have the black experience on its own,” Pipes said. “If you are mixed with white, then you can never have the white experience on its own.”

Group founder Keenan Smith, CC ’18, who identifies as half black and half white, said he feels a tension between the two parts of his racial background…

…While a group called Hapa [Club] aimed to carry out a similar mission for students of partial Asian descent, it has been inactive since 2013. Smith said he wanted to create a community for students who felt marginalized based on their multiracial background…

Read the entire article here.

The Perils of Compartmentalization

Columbia Daily Spectator
New York, New York
Friday, 2008-09-26

Dennis Yang
Teachers College

When I arrived from California as an incoming graduate student at Teachers College, one of the first things I attempted to find was a large-scale supermarket—a task that proved to be more difficult than I had anticipated. Without a car or friends nearby, I ventured on foot to the market nearest to my on-campus dormitory and was pleasantly surprised at my discovery. Though modest in physical infrastructure, this market was just like any other that I had ever visited; every item was organized and stacked according to predetermined labels. The chips were aligned, the vegetables were neatly displayed in an aisle, and the frozen meat section was impeccably synchronized—chicken, pork, beef…

…To my understanding, the cardinal reason why Barack Obama is being branded “black” is simply for no other reason than his skin color—which, by the way, is not by any conventional definitions, black. Obama, like other mixed-race individuals in America, is the victim of a society that prefers to attach labels on and insert into categories those people who unambiguously do not fit into austerely sealed boxes. What this election has shown is that Americans, in general, with exceptions of course, are unable to differentiate a child who is a product of one African American parent and a child who is a product of two African American parents. Debates abound regarding the importance of such clarifications, but to anyone who grows up answering questions, both internally and externally, about which pre-ordained ethnic/racial categories they are forced to identify with, this clarification is of monumental importance. We owe it to the multiracial and multicultural Americans from Sacramento, Calif., to Scranton, Pa., to extend appropriate recognition to their unique experiences in life…

Read the entire article here.