Mixed Race Studies

Museum Offers Interactive Oral History of Mixed Race Brooklynites

NY1 News
New York, New York
2014-12-29

Jeanine Ramirez, Brooklyn Reporter

A new interactive website offers an interracial, multi-ethnic view of Brookynites. NY1’s Jeanine Ramirez filed the following report.

Deborah Schwartz clicks on the latest resource at the Brooklyn Historical Society, an oral history project about self-identity, showcasing those who are of mixed race and heritage.

“We’re not just telling a sweetness and light story. This is not just that America is kind of the perfect melting pot. But rather that this is something that’s had very powerful impact on people both positive and negative, said Schwartz.

The project, “Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations,” offers a view into the lives of Brooklynites who have to balance different cultural worlds. The more than 100 oral histories collected can be listened to online. There’s Park Slope resident Alexander David who started the Half Asian Club at his school…

Read the entire article and watch the video here.

Intermarried Couples and “Multiculturalism” in Japan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
ISSN 1481-4374
Volume 15, Issue 2 (2013)
DOI: 10.7771/1481-4374.2216

Kaori Mori Want
Shibaura Institute of Technology

In her article “Intermarried Couples and ‘Multiculturalism’ in Japan” Kaori Mori Want discusses why hyphenated names for the children of intermarried children are important for the achievement of multiculturalism in Japan in an era of globalization. In Japan the number of people who marry interracially or inter-ethnically is increasing, but changes to naming practices must occur for Japan to become a multicultural society. Intermarriage is not a reliable indicator of the maturity of multiculturalism. Foreign residents who have intermarried in Japan do not have the rights of Japanese, such as those of voting, social welfare, education, and so on. This fact alone makes Japan far from multicultural. One of the aspects missing in the critiques of multiculturalism in Japan has to do with naming practices. Children of intermarried couples have at least two cultural heritages but under the present Japanese family law, it is almost impossible to give children a hyphenated last name that would reflect their multicultural heritage.

Read the entire article here.

The uncanny return of the race concept

Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
Volume 8, 2014-11-04
DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2014.00836

Andreas Heinz
Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy
Charité—University Medicine Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Daniel J. Müller, Associate Professor of Psychiatry
Centre for Addiction and Mental Health
Department of Psychiatry
University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Sören Krach
Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
Philipps-University Marburg, Marburg, Germany

Maurice Cabanis
Center for Mental Health, Klinikum Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany

Ulrike P. Kluge
Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy
Charité—University Medicine Berlin, Berlin, Germany

The aim of this Hypothesis and Theory is to question the recently increasing use of the “race” concept in contemporary genetic, psychiatric, neuroscience as well as social studies. We discuss “race” and related terms used to assign individuals to distinct groups and caution that also concepts such as “ethnicity” or “culture” unduly neglect diversity. We suggest that one factor contributing to the dangerous nature of the “race” concept is that it is based on a mixture of traditional stereotypes about “physiognomy”, which are deeply imbued by colonial traditions. Furthermore, the social impact of “race classifications” will be critically reflected. We then examine current ways to apply the term “culture” and caution that while originally derived from a fundamentally different background, “culture” is all too often used as a proxy for “race”, particularly when referring to the population of a certain national state or wider region. When used in such contexts, suggesting that all inhabitants of a geographical or political unit belong to a certain “culture” tends to ignore diversity and to suggest a homogeneity, which consciously or unconsciously appears to extend into the realm of biological similarities and differences. Finally, we discuss alternative approaches and their respective relevance to biological and cultural studies.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Abstract
• Introduction
• The Origin of the “Race Concept” and Controversies about its Biological Usefulness
• Cultural Impact on Race Classifications
• Racial Classifications, Colonial Hierarchies and the Construction of the Psychotic Patient as Primitive Man
• The Social Impact of “Race” Classifications
• “Culture” as a Proxy of “Race”
• Implications of Cultural and Genetic Diversity in Psychiatry
• Summary and Outlook
• Conflict of Interest Statement
• Acknowledgments
• References

Read the entire article here.

The Whiteness Project: Facing Race In A Changing America

National Public Radio
All Things Considered
2014-12-21

Karen Grigsby Bates
Los Angeles Correspondent

Whitney Dow found participants in the Whiteness Project by putting out a call for interested white folks in Buffalo to talk about whiteness on tape.

The voices in the Whiteness Project vary by gender, age and income, but they all candidly express what it is like to be white in an increasingly diverse country.

“I don’t feel that personally I’ve benefited from being white. That’s because I grew up relatively poor,” a participant shared. “My father worked at a factory.” These are the kind of unfiltered comments that filmmaker Whitney Dow was hoping to hear when he started recording a group of white people, and hoped to turn their responses into provocative, interactive videos.

“I was essentially giving people permission to discuss this,” he says. “And I believe there’s a huge hunger in this country to engage this topic.”…

…”It is not typical for white people to think about their race,” says Catherine Orr, who teaches critical identity studies at Beloit College in Wisconsin. She says that many white people who don’t feel privileged struggle against the notion that race gives them an inherent advantage. “I think white folks are terribly invested in our own innocence,” she points out. “We don’t want to think about how what we have is related to what other people don’t have.”…

Listen to the story here. Download the story here.

When White People See Themselves With Black Skin, Something Interesting Happens

The Huffington Post
2014-12-15

Anna Almendrala, Healthy Living Editor

Macrina Cooper-White, Associate Science Editor

The antidote to racism partly lies in empathy, or the willingness to “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes,” as the saying goes. But scientists from universities across Europe are taking the maxim one step further, providing people an opportunity to experience life in someone else’s skin by experimenting with virtual reality as a means of helping people shed racial stereotypes.

Researchers from London and Barcelona teamed up to discuss their recent experiments on virtual reality and race in an opinion piece for the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, published Dec. 15. The researchers found that if people got the chance to physically experience their own body with different skin colors (or ages and sexes), their unconscious biases against other racial groups could be diminished.

This isn’t merely a question of changing mentality or perception. The experience of “living” in different skin triggers sensory signals in the brain that allow it to expand its understanding of what a body can look like. This can “cause people to change their attitudes about others,” wrote the study’s co-researcher, Professor Mel Slater, a part-time professor of virtual environments at the University College London and research professor at the University of Barcelona…

Read the entire article here.

Caught in the Middle: Defensive Responses to IAT Feedback Among Whites, Blacks, and Biracial Black/Whites

Social Psychological and Personality Science
Published online before print: 2014-12-15
DOI: 10.1177/1948550614561127

Jennifer L. Howell
Department of Psychology
University of Florida

Sarah E. Gaither, Provost’s Career Enhancement Postdoctoral Scholar
Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture
University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois

Kate A. Ratliff, Assistant Professor of Psychology
University of Florida

This study used archival data to examine how White, Black, and biracial Black/White people respond to implicit attitude feedback suggesting that they harbor racial bias that does not align with their self-reported attitudes. The results suggested that people are generally defensive in response to feedback indicating that their implicit attitudes differ from their explicit attitudes. Among monoracial White and Black individuals, this effect was particularly strong when they learned that they were implicitly more pro-White than they indicated explicitly. By contrast, biracial Black/White individuals were defensive about large discrepancies in either direction (more pro-Black or more pro-White implicit attitudes). These results pinpoint one distinct difference between monoracial and biracial populations and pave the way for future research to further explore how monoracial majority, minority, and biracial populations compare in other types of attitudes and responses to personal feedback.

Read or purchase the article here.

‘Half Asian’? ‘Half White’? No — ‘Hapa’

National Public Radio
Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity
2014-12-15

Alex Laughlin, Social Media Journalist
National Journal

She was tall and freckled, with long, dark hair — and we stood out in the same way. As I leaned in to say hi, she yelled over the din, “You’re hapa, aren’t you?” It was the last word I expected to hear in D.C., but I welcomed the refreshing respite from the constant and inevitable question: “What are you?”

What am I? This is what they’re really asking here: What is the particular racial mix that created you? Because YOU don’t fit into a single box in my mind, and that confuses me.

I’m half Korean and half white, and it’s usually easier to just leave it there. If I were to volunteer my identity though, I would tell you I’m hapa.

Hapa is a Hawaiian pidgin word used to describe mixed-race people — primarily, though not exclusively, those who are half white and half Asian. It’s short for hapalua, the Hawaiian word that literally means “half” — and it originated as a derogatory term toward mixed-race children of plantation guest workers from the Philippines, Korea, China and Japan, and the women they married in Hawaii in the early part of the 20th century…

…Artist Kip Fulbeck lived in Hawaii for several years, and he remembers a more keen awareness of racial and cultural differences among nonwhites than on the mainland.

“If I’m living in Hawaii and playing pickup basketball,” he said, “they’ll say ‘Hapa haole, throw me the ball!’ or ‘Hey, buddhahead! Hey, kimchi!'”…

…In 2000, Fulbeck started taking photos of hapa people and inviting them to identify themselves in their own words. The collection of photographs grew into the Hapa Project, a multiracial identity project encompassing traveling exhibits, presentations and a published book: Part Asian, 100% Hapa. He has photographed thousands of people for the project, and the community surrounding it remains lively online…

Read the entire article here.

‘I’m proud of my African heritage’

The Korea Times
2014-12-14

Kim Se-jeong

Top award winner Park Ji-han says taekwondo changed him

When Park Ji-han was in his first year at elementary school, his classmates called him “African shala shala” because of his background and because he spoke Arabic.

Now, a decade later, the handsome youth’s nickname is “walking statue.” The high school sophomore stands about 179 centimeters tall, and he has chiseled features that could stare down any K-pop star or actors for that matter.

The change speaks volumes about how much Park, 17, went through as a young boy and how far he has come. He attributes this to taekwondo.

A student at Daekyeong Commercial High School in Seoul, he was recently named the grand winner in the 3rd Korea Multicultural Youth Awards organized by The Korea Times and the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family.

Park was born in 1997 to a Korean mother and Sudanese father. He lives with his parents and older brother in Itaewon in Seoul.

He began learning taekwondo when he was in the second grade.

“I had no friends in the first grade, but in the second grade I finally met a good friend, and I practiced taekwondo with him,” he told The Korea Times. Initially, he took up the martial art to defend himself as he was still scared of the boys who had mocked him…

Read the entire article here.

INTERVIEW: Martha S. Jones, University of Michigan Professor

Impolite Conversations
2014-12-10

John L. Jackson Jr., Richard Perry University Professor of Communication, Anthropology, and Africana Studies
University of Pennsylvania

Martha S. Jones, Arthur F Thurnau Professor, Associate Professor of History and Afroamerican and African Studies
University of Michigan

Impolite Conversations is a fascinating collection of essay that captures a set of exchanges between journalist Cora Daniels and cultural anthropologist John L. Jackson, Jr. I make an appearance in Jackson’s chapter titled “All my best friends are light skinned women.” You’ll have to read the book to see how I fare. But check out my brief exchange with John about how I think about the question of skin color today here. This episode is part of their Impolite Conversations Web Series.

View the interview here. Download the interview here.

A Look at Looking Different

The New York Times
2014-12-02

Felicia R. Lee

‘Crossing Borders,’ at the Brooklyn Historical Society

Alexander David grew up with a Chinese mother and a white Jewish father in the liberal Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn. He attended the predominantly Asian elite Stuyvesant High School. He was comfortable in his skin in both places, but in a world of tribes, the Asian kids considered him white, and the white ones considered him Asian.

“We’re not like a racially blind kind of society,” Mr. David said in an interview recently.

Mr. David’s experience is now part of an unusual project by the Brooklyn Historical Society called “Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations,” which has as its centerpiece a collection of more than 100 oral histories of people who identify themselves as being of mixed heritage, whether through race, ethnicity, religion or nationality.

Three years in the making, “Crossing Bridges” will be completed in mid-January and is uncommon in subject and scope for a historical society, said Annie Valk, vice president of the Oral History Association. It comes with public programs, a school curriculum and an interactive website…

…About 30 of the oral histories are now gathered on the website, which includes photographs, audio clips, transcripts and scholarly articles. The full oral history collection will be available next year at the historical society’s Othmer Library, the repository of more than 1,200 oral history narratives on a variety of topics. In February, educators will also be offered a curriculum for grades six through 12.

All the oral history subjects were volunteers who live or work in Brooklyn, or did so in the past. They were a diverse flock, including biracial lesbian couples and Jewish couples from different European countries. Their stories reflect changes from the time when mixed marriage often meant spouses of different religions to a time when it means gay or interracial marriage, or both, said Sady Sullivan, the former director of oral history at the historical society. Ms. Sullivan, who conceived the project, has been named the curator of oral history at Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

“The idea I get really excited about is that this is for the future,” Ms. Sullivan said. “What will it be like to listen to stories about the social construction of race in 150 years?”…

…Championing multiracial families — including the struggle for the right to check more than one census box for race — has also had detractors. Some argue that multiracial identity only increases racial stratification. Others have argued that discussions about multiracial identity too often fail to examine how race is related to wealth and power.

Nitasha Tamar Sharma, an associate professor of African-American studies and Asian-American studies at Northwestern, wondered how the oral histories would be framed. “Is it going to be used only as a celebration?” asked Professor Sharma, who writes about and researches issues of racial identity…

Read the entire article here.