Mixed Race Studies

A Look at Race as a Social Construct

The Huffington Post
2015-02-03

Kimberly Cooper

Sometimes a picture is truly worth a thousand words. For those of us from the “multiracial” or mixed race community, photos of our population — our people, our families, our children — aren’t as shocking as they are an affirmation of what we have already known: Race is a social construct.

For twins, Lucy and Maria Aylmer from Gloucester, England who have been asked to produce their birth certificates to prove they are related, they aren’t alone. In the U.S., the self-identified “multiracial” community is at nine million and climbing. So why is it so difficult for so many to believe that the two girls are related, even after being told of their biological ties? Well, our notion of “race” and the historical “one-drop-rule” may be a good place to start.

The 1924 Racial Integrity Act defined race by the “one-drop rule,” defining as “colored” persons as anyone with any African or Native American ancestry. This law was in effect to purify the white population, while also expanding the scope of Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage (anti-miscegenation law) by criminalizing all marriages between white persons and non-white persons. In 1967 the law was overturned by the United States Supreme Court in its ruling on Loving v. Virginia.

As for those who believe that “race” is somehow biologically determined, Lucy and Maria are twins — (yes, from the same mother and father), but which racial group do they belong to? Is it the same one? Given the one-drop rule, should red-headed Lucy still be considered “black”?…

Read the entire article here.

The Question I’m Often Asked as a ‘High Yellow’ Black Man

The Good Men Project
2015-02-21

Christopher “Flood the Drummer^®” Norris

Before I’m even asked my name, people inquire about my race.

Ever since authoring the popular post “You’re Black; So Why Do You Talk White?” I’ve been considering writing a piece about how I often I’m asked by strangers what my race is. But after viewing a video clip yesterday from Bill Duke’s new documentary “Light Girls,“ where women with light complexions share the common experience of being questioned about their race, I decided it was time to tell my story.

For the record, I know I’m black, and many of life’s experiences have reminded me of that. However, many people I’ve encountered, particularly in my early twenties, were convinced otherwise and weren’t afraid to let me know it.

I was a few months shy of age 21 when I left Philadelphia and moved to Austin, Texas. I had been preparing myself for the subtle and blatant racism that a young black kid from the hood like me was going to receive. But all the training in the world couldn’t have prepared me for the level of ignorance that greeted me in corporate America…

Read the entire article here.

Occupation Babies: Mixed-Race Japanese Children

Wonders & Marvels: A Community for Curious MInds who love History, its Odd Stories, and Good Reads
2015-02-28

James McGrath Morris, Guest Contributor

One of the pleasures of researching a book is coming across something you don’t anticipate, something surprising that is fascinating to both the reader and the writer.

In my case, in the course of working on Eye on the Struggle, I learned for the first time the story of mixed-race babies in Japan born from African American soldiers and Japanese women in the years shortly after World War II when American troops occupied Japan. White soldiers fathered children as well, but the offspring of black fathers were far more ostracized.

Being of such visible mixed race, the babies were unwanted by the Japanese, who abhorred what they viewed as the tainting of their blood. They were frequently abandoned upon birth. In one case, a train passenger unwrapped a cloth bundle she spotted on the luggage rack to discover the corpse of a black Japanese baby…

Read the entire article here.

Blood Quantum – Why it Matters, and Why it Shouldn’t

All Things Cherokee
2014-08-04

Christina Berry

“You’re an Indian? What part?”

That’s the universal question many mixed-blood American Indians are asked every day. How many times have you mentioned in passing that you are Cherokee to find your conversation interrupted by intrusive questions about percentage? How many times have you answered those questions? Well stop! That’s right — stop answering rude questions.

Have you ever been talking to someone who mentioned that they were part Hispanic, part African-American, part Jewish, part Italian, part Korean, etc.? Have you ever asked them what percentage? Hopefully your answer is no, because if your answer is yes, then you’re rude. It would be rude to ask someone what part Hispanic they are, but we accept that people can ask us what part Cherokee we are. This is a double standard brought about by our collective history as American Indians, and is one we should no longer tolerate…

Read the entire article here.

A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life [Live event at the National Archives Museum]

The National Archives Museum
William G. McGowan Theater
Corner of Constitution Avenue and 7th Street, NW
Washington, D.C.
2015-02-27, 12:00 EST (Local Time)

Airs on C-SPAN 2, Sunday, 2015-03-08, 19:00 EDT. For more information, click here.

Between the 18th and mid-20th centuries, countless African Americans passed as white, leaving behind families and friends, roots and community. Historian Allyson Hobbs explores the possibilities and challenges that racial indeterminacy presented to men and women living in a country obsessed with racial distinctions.

A book signing will follow the program. Purchase this book [A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life] on the day of the event from the myArchives Store and receive a 15% discount (members get 20% off).

For more information, click here.

Roundtable: Global Mixed Race

University of California, Santa Barbara
Department of Political Science
The Lane Room (Ellison 3824)
Monday, 2015-03-02, 16:00 PST (Local Time)

The authors of the new book Global Mixed Race (New York University Press) will participate in a Roundtable on the subject. The authors are:

• G. Reginald Daniel, UCSB Sociology
• Adrienne Edgar, UCSB History
• Paul Spickard, UCSB History
• Lily Anne Y. Welty Tamai, Japanese American National Museum

Discussant: Ingrid Dineen Wimberly, University of La Verne

For more information, click here.

Beyond The Chinese Connection: Contemporary Afro-Asian Cultural Production by Crystal S. Anderson (review)

Journal of Asian American Studies
Volume 18, Number 1, February 2015
pages 107-109
DOI: 10.1353/jaas.2015.0003

Edlie Wong, Associate Professor of English
University of Maryland

Anderson, Crystal S., Beyond The Chinese Connection: Contemporary Afro-Asian Cultural Production (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013).

Afro-Asian comparative racialization studies have begun to change how we think about race and its multiple and contradictory meanings across different periods of U.S. history. Beyond The Chinese Connection: Contemporary Afro-Asian Cultural Production contributes to this important trend in thinking about comparative constructions of race and cross-racial antagonisms and alliances. Earlier work on Afro-Asian comparative racialization such as Vijay Prashad’s Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting (2001) and Bill Mullen’s Afro-Orientalism (2004) tended to emphasize the revolutionary—indeed, at times utopian—forms of anticolonial transpacific polyculturalism and political collaborations. Anderson’s volume explicitly builds upon and broadens this work. According to Anderson, Afro-Asian comparative racialization studies often favor anticapitalist critiques, taking the 1955 Bandung conference as the storied origins of the global alignment of the political struggles of African and Asian peoples. In contrast, her book offers a self-described cultural approach that emphasizes historical and ethnic specificity, disarticulating the homogenizing panethnicities implied in the term “Afro-Asian” to consider “the way the histories of individual ethnic groups may impact their interaction with one another” (37).

There is perhaps no more fitting figure for this study than the martial arts film star Bruce Lee, whose cross-racial and cross-ethnic appeal transformed him into an Afro-Asian cultural icon in the 1970s. Anderson’s volume stages a series of encounters between Lee’s signature films—one for each of the four chapters—and a range of post-1990s novels, films, and popular culture revealing the complexities of inter- and intraethnic Afro-Asian interactions. Anderson begins with the film Way of the Dragon (1972) and charts Lee’s emergence as a transnational and cross-cultural phenomenon. “Lee’s legacy,” she argues, “functions as a framework to interrogate the contemporary landscape” (5). In chapter 2, Lee’s Enter the Dragon (1973) facilitates an exploration of the limits and possibilities of interethnic male friendship in Frank Chin’s novel Gunga Din Highway (1994) and two mainstream Hollywood films, Rush Hour 2 (2001) and Unleashed (2005). In chapter 3, Lee’s The Chinese Connection (1972) allows Anderson to examine the theme of ethnic imperialism in Ishmael Reed’s satirical novel Japanese by Spring (1993) and the Japanese anime series Samurai Champloo (2004), while Lee’s The Big Boss (1971) frames the final chapter on intra- and interethnic conflict and solidarity in Paul Beatty’s novel White Boy Shuffle (1996) and the highly popular Matrix science fiction film trilogy (1999 (2003). These cultural case studies allow Anderson ample opportunity to engage in broader historical contextualization and considerations of Afro-Asian social dynamics. In the case of Rush Hour 2 and Unleashed, Anderson draws attention away from film reception to explore the historical underpinnings of their plots and characterizations, from Rush Hour 2’s eroticization of Chinese women and the 1875 Page Act equating all Chinese women with prostitutes to the economic exploitation of the Chinese coolie reformulated in Unleashed’s plot of human trafficking.

Anderson organizes these cultural readings according to how each work constructs Afro-Asian cross-cultural dynamics along a broad “continuum of intercultural interactions” (3). At one end of this spectrum lies what she identifies as “cultural emulsion.” A concept drawn from Homi K. Bhabha’s theory of hybridity, cultural emulsion designates those instances where “cultures come together but do not mix in response to pressures to reinforce ethnic or national boundaries” (3). Against this more limited form of cultural distancing, Anderson counterpoises the concept of “cultural translation,” which “uses one ethnic culture to interpret another ethnic culture” and “recognizes more complex combinations of cultures” across national boundaries (35). This framework of emulsion and translation lends a somewhat static quality to Anderson’s detailed readings, and the most compelling of the case studies predictably land on the cultural translation end of the spectrum. For example, Anderson explores how Samurai Champloo’s uses of African American hip-hop and graffiti aesthetics transform animated tales of eighteenth-century Japan into social commentaries aimed at urban Japanese youth culture. Her reading of White Boy Shuffle emphasizes Beatty’s experimentation with Japanese aesthetics and his encoding of African American political disillusionment in the subplot of ritual suicide and…

Zoe: That — that is the ineffaceable curse of Cain. Of the blood that feeds my heart, one drop in eight is black — bright red as the rest may be, that one drop poisons all the flood; those seven bright drops give me love like yours — hope like yours — ambition like yours — life hung with passions like dewdrops on the morning flowers; but the one black drop gives me despair, for I’m an unclean thing — forbidden by the laws — I’m an Octoroon!

Dion Boucicault, The Octoroon: A Play, in Four Acts, (First Performed at the Winter Garden Theatre, New York, December, 1859), Act I. http://www2.latech.edu/~bmagee/louisiana_anthology/texts/boucicault/boucicault–octaroon.html.

Mr. Spock, Mixed-Race Pioneer

Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity
National Public Radio
2015-03-01

Steve Haruch

At a time when the mere sight of Petula Clark touching Harry Belafonte’s arm held the potential to upset delicate sensibilities, the half-human, half-Vulcan character Mr. Spock embodied an identity rarely acknowledged, much less seen, on television: a mixed-race person.

Sure, the mixing of races was allegorical in Spock’s case, as was the brilliantly subversive mode for social commentary on Star Trek. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t resonate.

In 1968 — the year Clark made contact with Belafonte, and the same year the Star Trek episode “Plato’s Stepchildren” caused much consternation for network executives who feared backlash against the interracial kiss between Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura — a young girl wrote a letter to Spock, care of FaVE magazine. In the letter, she makes the connection between Spock’s fictional identity and her own very real situation:

“I know that you are half Vulcan and half human and you have suffered because of this. My mother is Negro and my father is white and I am told this makes me a half-breed. In some ways I am persecuted even more than the Negro. The Negroes don’t like me because I don’t look like them. The white kids don’t like me because I don’t exactly look like one of them either.”

Leonard Nimoy, who played Spock, wrote a long and thoughtful response that reads, in part:

“Spock learned he could save himself from letting prejudice get him down. He could do this by really understanding himself and knowing his own value as a person. He found he was equal to anyone who might try to put him down — equal in his own unique way.

You can do this too, if you realize the difference between popularity and true greatness.”

Spock certainly knew what “true greatness” was all about. You didn’t have to be mixed-race to feel this kind of connection to Spock, though…

Read the entire article here.

Muscogee Creek Indian Freedmen Band 2015 Conference

Muscogee Creek Indian Freedmen Band
Moore, Oklahoma
2015-02-17

Rhonda Kay Grayson

For Immediate Release

Muscogee Creek Indian Freedmen Band
P.O. Box 6366
Moore, OK, 73135

The Muscogee Creek Indian Freedmen Band is thrilled to announce its 2015 conference. The conference theme is “Africans and Indians: Eating from the same pot, Generations of shared culture, traditions, language, food and music”. The conference will be held at Langston University, (OKC-Campus) 4205 N. Lincoln Blvd, Oklahoma City, OK 73105, May 29-30, 2015. The two day conference will focus on the history and plight of the African Indian Freedmen from all Five Tribes of Oklahoma, Indian Territory (Creek, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Choctaw, and Seminole). Activities and presentations will include genealogy workshops; a Mvskoke language workshop; a presentation by the renowned Storyteller, Wallace Moore; presentations by scholars, lecturers, and attorneys; a panel discussion; and a presentation by the Urban League ‘Young Professionals.’ In addition, a special viewing of the MCIFB’s documentary “Bloodlines” will be shown at the historic Paramount Theater, centrally located in downtown OKC, only minutes away from the historic Deep Deuce and Bricktown district.

Who should attend?

Scholars, History Buffs, Genealogy Societies, Genealogists, Family Historians, Beginner, intermediate, or experienced researchers, Hobbyists, Students, The descendants of Black Indians, the general public, and anyone interested in learning more about the unique history of the Black Indians…

For more information, click here.