Mixed Race Studies

Douglas Todd: Mixed unions applauded by some, but dismissed by others as brownwashing

The Vancouver Sun
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
2015-07-24

Douglass Todd, Vancouver Sun columnist

Ethnically mixed couples — involving whites, blacks, Japanese, Hispanics, Chinese, South Asians or others — were heralded not long ago as the wave of a tolerant, open, non-racist future.

National Geographic and Time magazine ran cover features with photos of mixed-race people, celebrating The New Face of America. The hero in the Warren Beatty movie, Bulworth, trumpeted inter-marriage as the way to end racial discrimination.

Polls consistently reveal many whites, blacks, Asians and others are attracted more to other ethnicities than their own, particularly for dating. British writer Laura Smith, who has a Guyanese mother and Scottish father, says she’s often told her mixed-race children “look cool.”

In the age of multi-ethnic celebrities such as Paula Abdul, Vin Diesel, Barack Obama, Tiger Woods, Halle Berry and Mariah Carey, Smith, who frequently writes about mixed unions, says white mothers, in particular, confess to her they yearn for mixed offspring; they want a society that’s less white and more “brown.”

But three cultural trends are shaking up this utopian dream, which places inter-ethnic couples at the vanguard of cultural fusion…

…Scholars SanSan Kwan and Kenneth Spiers, editors of Mixing it Up: Multiracial Subjects, also maintain the melting pot ideal, in which people of different ethnicities inevitably join up to make babies together, is a “problematic” form of “brownwashing.”

“To embrace a ‘brown’ or raceless society and to dispense with concepts of race are to deny the beauty there is in difference,” say Kwan and Spiers.

“Brownwashing hopes to erase the ugly patterns of racism and in one grand gesture homogenize us all.”

Roosevelt University Professor Heather Dalmage’s book also questions the vision of a society replete with mixed marriages. In The Politics of Multiracialism: Challenging Racial Thinking, contributors criticize white people who seek a “colour-blind” society, claiming they just want to deny the prevalence of racism.

British researcher Miri Song, of Kent University, also suggests a Western inter-marriage involving a white person can lead to questionable “assimilation,” in which the ethnic minority loses their identity to the so-called “dominant culture.”

Instead of being a sign of cultural success, Song writes, mixed marriages could “engender deep ambivalence” for minority members…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed race in the UK: am I the future face of this country?

The Telegraph
London, United Kingdom
2014-11-08

Laura Smith

With ‘mixed race’ now the fastest-growing ethnic minority in the country, prejudice should be a thing of the past – but as one writer reveals, we’ve still got a long way to go

Where I grew up, a mixed-race family was something of an anomaly. Families, according to our neighbours – and the pictures on cereal boxes, board games and holiday brochures – meant a white mother and a white father and two children, preferably a boy and a girl, ideally blonde. The father went to work in a suit; the mother stayed home and sang along to Radio 1 while doing the housework.

My family wasn’t like that. My mother was from Guyana and wore her hair in a short Afro. She liked jumpsuits and jewellery and, shockingly, worked full-time. My father was from Scotland and wore embarrassing checked jackets from the 1960s (he was in his forties when my brother and I were born). Neither had heard of Radio 1.

My childhood memories of growing up in a mainly white, expensively heeled north London suburb include the following…

…Reaction to this social change has been contradictory, and peppered with hyperbole. On the one hand, the rise of “beige Britain” is eulogised as evidence of an open, tolerant country that’s moved beyond outdated notions of race and racism. It has become fashionable to shrug and say, “Well, we’ll all be brown soon.” On the other, it is not unusual to see alarmist articles about white people becoming the minority (two recent stories predicting that so-called “indigenous white children” would be “outnumbered” in state schools by 2037 were illustrated with images of mixed children), while in the black press there are reports about the disappearance of the Caribbean presence as increasing numbers “marry out”…

…Negative ideas around racial mixing have a long history. In Britain, concern about interracial unions reached a peak in the first half of the 20th century, when mixed neighbourhoods such as Toxteth and Tiger Bay were portrayed as immoral and dangerous, mixed children as tragic outcasts. Marie Stopes, then a prominent eugenicist, called for all “half-castes” to be “sterilised at birth”. Caballero says this notion of mixed people as divided and confused – the “marginal man” of early social science – remains. “When I started in this area I got sick of reading about how we were all psychologically traumatised and about all these broken relationships when my own parents have been together for 30 years,” she says…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed race Britain: charting the social history

The Guardian
2011-10-04

Laura Smith

While mixed race is one of the fastest-growing ethnic groups in the UK, there is nothing new in people from different cultures getting together

Olive was just 15 when she met the man who was to become her husband. It was 1930s Cardiff and the trainee nurse had become lost on her way home from the cinema to the Royal Infirmary. “I stopped and asked this boy the way to Queen Street. And we started talking and I think we fell in love there and then.”

The “boy” Olive met on the street that night was Ali Salaman, a young Yemeni working as a chef in his own restaurant, the Cairo Café, a popular hang-out in the city’s Tiger Bay neighbourhood. Despite being told by her priest that she was marrying a heathen, the Methodist teenager married Ali Salaman when she was 16 and they went on to have 10 children.

With mixed race now measured in the national census and one of the fastest growing ethnic groups, it is often viewed as a contemporary phenomenon. But Chamion Caballero, senior research fellow at London South Bank University’s Weeks centre, says: “There is a long history of racial mixing in the UK that people don’t talk about.”

Caballero has co-authored as yet unpublished research with Peter Aspinall, reader in population health at the University of Kent, that puts contemporary mixing into perspective.

It demonstrates that unions between white British women and men from immigrant communities were commonplace in areas where they were thrown together in the 1920s, 30s and 40s: from South Shields and Liverpool’s Toxteth to Cardiff’s Tiger Bay and London’s Docklands. The Era of Moral Condemnation: Mixed Race People in Britain, 1920-1950, shows that although they faced prejudice from some, mixed race families created new communities in which those from different backgrounds swapped cultural traditions. It also explores how official perceptions of mixed race families contrasted with the way people experienced it…

…Aspinall says the dominance of eugenics during this period was central to such attitudes. “If you look at the aims of the British Eugenics Society in the 1930s there was this explicit statement about the dangers of what they called race crossing,” he says. Marie Stopes, then a prominent eugenicist, advocated that all “half castes” should be “sterilised at birth”. Connie Hoe, the daughter of a Chinese father and white mother, was one of dozens of mixed race children who were experimented on by the eugenics society to test the relationship between physical appearance and intellect…

Read the entire article here.

Microaggressions and Marginality: Manifestation, Dynamics, and Impact

Wiley
July 2010
360 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-470-49139-3

Edited By:

Derald Wing Sue, Professor of Psychology and Education
Teachers College, Columbia University

A landmark volume exploring covert bias, prejudice, and discrimination with hopeful solutions for their eventual dissolution

Exploring the psychological dynamics of unconscious and unintentional expressions of bias and prejudice toward socially devalued groups, Microaggressions and Marginality: Manifestation, Dynamics, and Impact takes an unflinching look at the numerous manifestations of these subtle biases. It thoroughly deals with the harm engendered by everyday prejudice and discrimination, as well as the concept of microaggressions beyond that of race and expressions of racism.

Edited by a nationally renowned expert in the field of multicultural counseling and ethnic and minority issues, this book features contributions by notable experts presenting original research and scholarly works on a broad spectrum of groups in our society who have traditionally been marginalized and disempowered.

The definitive source on this topic, Microaggressions and Marginality features:

• In-depth chapters on microaggressions towards racial/ethnic, international/cultural, gender, LGBT, religious, social, and disabled groups
• Chapters on racial/ethnic microaggressions devoted to specific populations including African Americans, Latino/Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, indigenous populations, and biracial/multiracial people
• A look at what society must do if it is to reduce prejudice and discrimination directed at these groups
• Discussion of the common dynamics of covert and unintentional biases
• Coping strategies enabling targets to survive such onslaughts

Timely and thought-provoking, Microaggressions and Marginality is essential reading for any professional dealing with diversity at any level, offering guidance for facing and opposing microaggressions in today’s society.

Table of Contents

• Preface.
• About the Editor
• About the Contributors

PART I: MICROAGGRESSIONS AND MARGINALITY.

• Chapter 1: Microaggressions, Marginality and Oppression: An Introduction (Derald Wing Sue). (Read here.)

PART II: RACIAL/ETHNIC MANIFESTATION OF MICROAGGRESSIONS.

• Chapter 2: Black Undergraduates’ Experience with Perceived Racial Microaggressions in Predominantly White Colleges and Universities (Nicole L. Watkins, Theressa L. LaBarrie, & Lauren M. Appio).
• Chapter 3: Microaggressions and the Life Experience of Latina/o Americans (David P. Rivera, Erin E. Forquer, & Rebecca Rangel).
• Chapter 4: Racial Microaggressions Directed at Asian Americans: Modern Forms of Prejudice and Discrimination (Annie I. Lin).
• Chapter 5: The Context of Racial Microaggressions against Indigenous Peoples: Same Old Racism or Something New? (Jill S. Hill, Suah Kim, & Chantea Williams).
• Chapter 6: Multiracial Microaggressions: Exposing Monoracism in Everyday Life and Clinical Practice (Marc P. Johnston & Kevin L. Nadal).
• Chapter 7: Microaggressions and the Pipeline for Scholars of Color (Fernando Guzman, Jesus Trevino, Fernand Lubuguin, & Bushra Aryan).

PART III: OTHER SOCIALLY DEVALUED GROUP MICROAGGRESSIONS: International/Cultural, Sexual Orientation and Transgender, Disability, Class and Religious.

• Chapter 8: Microaggressions Experienced by International Students Attending U. S. Institutions of Higher Education (Suah Kim & Rachel H. Kim).
• Chapter 9: The Manifestation of Gender Microaggressions (Christina M. Capodilupo, Kevin L. Nadal, Lindsay Corman, Sahran Hamit, Oliver Lyons, & Alexa Weinberg).
• Chapter 10: Sexual Orientation and Transgender Microaggressions: Implications for Mental Health and Counseling (Kevin L. Nadal, David P. Rivera, & Melissa J.H. Corpus).
• Chapter 11: Microaggressive Experiences of People with Disabilities (Richard M. Keller & Corinne E. Galgay).
• Chapter 12: Class Dismissed: Making the Case for the Study of Classist Microaggressions (Laura Smith & Rebecca M. Redington).
• Chapter 13: Religious Microaggressions in the United States: Mental Health Implications for Religious Minority Groups (Kevin L. Nadal, Marie-Anne Issa, Katie E. Griffin, Sahran Hamit, & Oliver B. Lyons).

PART IV: MICROAGGRESSION RESEARCH.

• Chapter 14: Microaggression Research: Methodological Review and Recommendations (Michael Y. Lau & Chantea D. Williams).
• Author Biographies.