Mixed Race Studies

“Two or More Races” or Just Another Category?

Open Salon
2011-02-20

Ulli K. Ryder, Ph.D.

The Department of Education’s “two or more races” category may appeal to some people but this is a slippery slope towards ignoring race altogether. Race still matters. Combating racism still matters. Acknowledging multiracial identities or agreeing to be placed in a “two or more races” category does not remove our responsibility to fight against the ways race—and racism—have impacted our lives in many, and sometimes violent, ways.

The recent debate about the Department of Education’s “two or more races” category demonstrates both the importance of race today and the absurdity of racial categories. As Rainier Spencer rightly reminds us, racism is alive and well in the 21st century. The only way we have found to combat institutional racism is through the accurate reporting of racial data and our ability to make connections between race, class, gender and other factors such as employment and housing. Without this information we will not be able to measure discrimination or make policies that help create equality for all Americans…

Read the entire article here.

The President, the Census and the Multiracial “Community”

Open Salon
2011-02-20

Ulli K. Ryder, Ph.D.

What is the connection between Obama, the 2010 U.S. Census and multiracials?  Not as much as some may think. While it is tempting to look to Obama as a mixed race icon and to see the Census as publicly acknowledging a multiracial “community,” we may need to rethink these ideas. 

The 2010 Census data is being released a few states at a time but already the data suggests a large increase in those identifying as “more than one race.”… …What does this data tell us? First, all states that have been released so far have shown an increase in those who identify as more than one race. Second, even with this increase, the actual percentage of people who identify as more than one race is still a relatively small percentage of the population.

Yet, multiracials are a growing and highly visible population. Multiracials, specifically the mixed race Millennials, are everywhere asserting their right to check more than one box and have all their heritages respected, counted and acknowledged.  Public discussions of multiracial identity demonstrate  the importance of this group to current debates about race in the United States.  Whether in popular culture such as Halle Berry and Gabriel Aubry’s daughter or in the world of academia such as the recent New York Times article exploring multiracial students, we seem determined to understand multiracial identities and what they mean about race relations in the United States. In these debates, President Obama is frequently evoked as an icon of multiraciality.  However, on the 2010 Census, he chose to identify as “Black” and only “Black.” Multiracial discomfort with Obama’s choice seems to speak less about Obama and his views of race (either public or private) and more about multiracials’ desire for public acknowledgement of private identities. Is this how we should develop and create our identities?  Is self-affirmation driven by external forces or internal comfort and wholeness?…

Read the entire article here.

Part Asian, Not Hapa

Open Salon
Thoughts from a Third Culture: on being mixed in America
2010-07-27

Mia Nakaji Monnier

My mother is Japanese from Osaka; my father, American from a small town in Western Oregon. There’s a word for people like me, used especially on the West Coast and popularized in recent years, maybe most notably by artist Kip Fulbeck:

Hapa.

From the Hawaiian phrase “hapa haole” (“half white”), the word “hapa” has come to be a label that many multiracial people with some Asian heritage incorporate into their identities, whether they wear it with pride or with ambivalence.

I don’t wear it at all.

It’s not that I think “hapa” is an offensive word, though my parents took issue with it as my brothers and I were growing up, their reason being that it means, literally, “half.” “Haafu,” the Japanese equivalent has the same literal meaning and I’ve even heard people skip over both these words entirely, going straight to “half.” As in, “You look a little Japanese. Are you half?” or “Why do you work at the Japanese American National Museum? OH, are you half?!”…

Read the entire essay here.

Passing as Mixed Race

Open Salon
2010-03-03

Marcia Dawkins, Assistant Professor of Human Communication
California State University, Fullerton

Alexandre Dumas has always been one of my favorite writers. Works like The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo and Georges took me on countless adventures in worlds and times much different from my own. But there’s a kinship I’ve always felt with the author despite our differences in gender, nationality and history—being of mixed race. Dumas was the grandson of a freed Haitian slave and a French nobleman. When describing his racial profile to a man who insulted him for being different he’s reported to have said, “My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends.” Though my own background is different from Dumas’s, and feels even more complex, that multiracial kinship is one of the reasons why I look forward to the U.S. release of the new biopic that opened in Paris on February 10th, L’Autre Dumas, or The Other Dumas…

Read the entire article here.