Mixed Race Studies

Marcia Dawkins to be Featured Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

Mixed Chicks Chat (The only live weekly show about being racially and culturally mixed. Also, founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival) Hosted by Fanshen Cox and Heidi W. Durrow
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #217 – Marcia Dawkins
When: Wednesday, 2011-07-27 21:00Z (17:00 EDT, 14:00 PDT)

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Ph.D., is a blogger, professor and communication researcher in Los Angeles. Her interests are mixed race identification, politics, popular culture and new media. Her new book, Clearly Invisible:  Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity, looks at racial passing as a viable form of communication. She lectures and consults on these issues at conferences worldwide.

Daphne Grace in Conversation with Keith A. Russell

Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal
Volume 8, Issue 1 – Bahamian Literature (2011-04-22)
Article 14

Daphne Grace

Keith A. Russell, Adjunct Professor
The College of The Bahamas, Northern Campus

Daphne Grace in Conversation with Keith A. Russell, Freeport, Grand Bahama (27 August 2008)

DG: You have written several short stories and three published novels that are full of social realism, brutality, violence, and the harsh realities of life. Is that a sense of anger coming out?

KR: Well, I think you are certainly correct that there is brutality in the novels and a great amount of social realism, there’s no question about it. Whether or not the anger is something in the author himself, I’m not sure; maybe it’s unconscious if it’s coming across. But I’m sure the language and the tone sometimes could be interpreted as anger. It’s more me trying to be very forceful and clear about some of the situations of life and those we encounter. Even if I think I’m writing a love story, love doesn’t happen in a vacuum, sometimes love situations can be brutal. So I guess anger is something that comes out of that type of brutality.

DG: I’d like to come back to your ideas about love later. But based on what you have just said, do you see yourself as part of the tradition of social protest in the works of Caribbean writers?

KR: There is a sense of that; although I see myself not so much as a writer engaged in social protest. Rather, I see myself as a writer engaged with social accuracy, and as a writer engaged with trying to provide an alternative vision of what the world could be like. If that is protest, then I am very much in the line of writers who are writing protest, as I am looking at our society from a particular angle and asking questions. How did we get here and how do we move from this place? Is this the best we can do? This is a slice of life, this is our experience. Can we do better?…

…DG: In your earlier novels, in J.D. Sinclair especially, much of the tension and many of the problems arise from the colonial past and the lingering aftermath of colonization. Do you see yourself also as a postcolonial writer in terms of dealing with this past?

KR: In a sense. Postcolonialism is an interesting term, especially for those of us who live in these colonial aftermaths, so to speak. Whether or not postcolonialism is a reality is another matter, and I don’t know how we get beyond the colonial idea. Especially for us living in The Bahamas, and our relationship with Britain, it is to extricate ourselves from that to say that we are ‘post-colonial’ in any sense. The British are no longer here ruling on land, but our encounter with them is deeply engrained and we are also British. We are British and Bahamians and also Africans, however that hybrid comes together. So we cannot extricate ourselves from being British and become postcolonial, because it is engrained in our psyche that we are also British—and that encounter with the British has sometimes been harsh.

DG: And how does that inform or impact your novels?

KR: To date in my novels, I have been writing more or less about the harsh encounter and the aftermath of that, but the encounter has not always been harsh. Even in my moments when I am quite clear in depicting the harshness of the encounter, I hope that there is no bitterness in that regard. It is just a matter of: this is who we are, we have encountered the British and this is how  it has affected us, and this is what it has done to our abilities, and so on. But beyond that, how do we accept our British selves? How do we recognize both the good and the bad, but yet move on from that without having to dismantle our British identity, but also carry that with us in a positive way and appreciate the good encounter of it?

DG: You mention hybridity and the concept of asking are we British, are we African, or some hybrid mix. In Hezekiah’s Independence (where both the father and the son are given the same name) the younger of the Hezekiah’s is half white, and is called a ‘pale nigger’ at one point. Is it intentional that the protagonist of the novel is a result of the colonial encounter?

KR: Yes, very much so.

DG: And in this case, that encounter has disastrous consequences for the white woman, his mother.

KR: I think they are a forward looking couple, in that they are able to rise above that whole conflict between the British and African Bahamians, and the distinction of “are we British, are we African?”—and find love. And even that is fraught with all sorts of dangers, because even though they have moved on, their society hasn’t moved on yet. The society isn’t ready to see this as something legitimate that ought to happen in the world. So the whole concept of colour that happens in our society, that long spectrum of colours we have, is beyond that black/white issue, because in the long journey of our encounter with Britain we have produced individuals of all shades of skin. So how do we determine who is black and who is white in this mix? Really? In our society, very often the more pale your skin the more privileges you have, so how do we reconcile this problem? How do we deal with the long spectrum of colour that has come out of this union, this encounter, of the Europeans and the Africans? And that mix is the exploration that is going on here. So I think the younger of the Hezekiah’s is wrestling with the notion of ‘how and where do I fit in?’

DG: And for many people, this is really one of the key questions of the new millennium.

KR: In America there is the long tradition of the tragic mulatto, this individual who doesn’t fit in anywhere. She doesn’t fit in with the traditionally white folks, or the traditionally black folks. Here is a lost individual sitting in limbo someplace trying to find her identity; and finding out that identity involves not only working out how do I accept my black self, but how do I accept my white self also. This is part of Hezekiah’s dilemma: how do I come to a sense of myself? By endorsing, legitimizing, accepting all of who I am, both my father’s side and my mother’s side. So how do we as Bahamians come to a place where we accept both our African heritage and our European heritage? How do we put that all together and find a whole sense of self?

DG: I think that’s true of anyone who is not just racially mixed but culturally mixed in any way, as the whole concept of identity and belongingness takes on a new dimension. Also, with the massive migrancy today, it’s also the situation that dislocated or diasporic peoples feel they no longer have a place in either world: they don’t fit in anymore in the homeland and they don’t feel at home in the new place either. It’s a sense of what’s been called living in “nowhere-ville”. So I think it’s larger than just a color question.

KR: That’s right…

Read the entire interview here.

Breaking the Black-White Binary

Fathom: the source for online learning
Columbia University
2002

Gary Okihiro, Professor of International and Public Affairs
Columbia University

Where do Asians fall in the American construct of race? According to Gary Okihiro, the director of Columbia University’s Center for Race and Ethnicity, the position of Asians has had to be invented and reinvented over the past two centuries to fit into a binary, black-white national racial definition

Gary Okihiro: In the US, the racial formation is a binary of black and white. In fact, there is actually mainly black. White is frequently not seen as a racial category; it is simply the normative. Blackness is race. And when today we deploy the term “minority,” for example, we mean basically African-Americans. I think binaries are simpleminded ways of categorizing not just people but also things, objects other than oneself. Binaries provide a kind of coherence. They allow for a simple and straightforward explanation of who one is and who one is not. And so this binary of who one is, which is whiteness, and who one is not, which is blackness, in this case affords a kind of self-definition and also a privilege that authorizes one to define the other.

Now, Asians and Latinos and other racialized minorities who do not fit into that black-white binary pose a problem for that kind of racialized thinking. The binary itself, by the way, is very functional. Obviously it is an invention, first of all. Who is white, for example, is an invention, and the category “white” is an elastic one. It includes different peoples at different times; for example, at some point Irish people were not included within the category “white” within the United States. Similarly, the category “black” is an invented category and is also an elastic one…

Read the entire interview here.

Carlos Hoyt to be Featured Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

Mixed Chicks Chat (The only live weekly show about being racially and culturally mixed. Also, founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival) Hosted by Fanshen Cox and Heidi W. Durrow
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #204 – Carlos Hoyt
When: Wednesday, 2011-05-04, 21:00Z (17:00 EDT, 14:00 PDT)

Carlos Hoyt

Carlos Hoyt is the creator the site Race Trancenders which is created for individuals (like himself) who are commonly ascribed to the black or African American race, but who do not subscribe to any notion of race whatsoever.  He is also a researcher seeking to provide a voice for other individuals.

To read more about his study, click here.

Ten Questions, with Adebe DeRango-Adem

Open Book Toronto
2011-03-25

Adebe DeRango-Adem talks to Open Book about the anthology she co-edited with Andrea Thompson, Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out (Inanna Publications). The goal for this exciting anthology was not to nail down what identity means, but rather to open discussion and interrogate the diverse experiences of mixed-race identity and identification.
 
Open Book:
 
Tell us about the anthology Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out.

Adebe DeRango-Adem:
 
Other Tongues was born from a combination of necessity and a desire to see a new and refreshing literature that could be at the forefront of mixed-race discourse and women’s studies. We are very proud of the finished product and anticipate that it will make many waves in literary and academic communities across the continent!
 
OB:
 
What inspired you to put together this anthology?

ADA:
 
The idea behind this anthology of writing by and about mixed-race women in North America was planted in our minds when we each came across Miscegenation Blues: Voices of Mixed Race Women (1994), edited by Carol Camper. While we picked up this groundbreaking book at different times in our lives, the anthology had a lasting impact on both of us, an impact that would set the stage for the collaboration that became Other Tongues. We are thrilled to have had Carol Camper contribute to our anthology and continue to be inspired by the women who have responded so warmly to this book. What inspired me personally is, as many interracial women may share experientially, a feeling that my interracial history is a ripe place for critical analysis.
 
OB:
 
The subtitle, Mixed-Race Women Speak Out, suggests that identity is a significant theme for Other Tongues. What are some of the ways that your contributors approach issues of identity?
 
ADA:
 
In seeking work for this book, we asked our prospective contributors to share their own individual experiences and tell their unique stories in relation to the way(s) in which they identified themselves. This process led to the excavation of perspectives of women from diverse backgrounds, ideologies, racial mixes, ages, social classes, sexual orientations and geographical locations. This collection has become a snapshot of the North American terrain of questions about race, mixed-race, racial identity, and how mixed-race women in North America identify in the 21st Century.

Yet, Andrea and I made it clear that our agenda was not to define what or how mixed-race identity means, but to open up dialogue. Talking about identity is as dangerous as it is reifying and necessary; as contestable as it is a question of commitment. Authenticity is as much about finding oneself as it is a concept shaped by social norms. In addressing these questions, we asked the women who submitted work to be considered to make a distinction between issues of race and those of cultural identity. In Other Tongues, there are multiple visions and understandings of authenticity/identity, as exemplified by the various sections we have. Where this book treats interracial identities uniquely is in our conscious effort to link creativity to identification; recognizing our potential for creativity as a source of value for writing who we are…

Read the entire interview here.

Drs. Regina E. Spellers and Kimberly R. Moffitt to be Featured Guests on Mixed Chicks Chat

Mixed Chicks Chat (The only live weekly show about being racially and culturally mixed. Also, founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival) Hosted by Fanshen Cox and Heidi W. Durrow
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #199-Drs. Regina E. Spellers and Kimberly R. Moffitt
When: Wednesday, 2011-03-30, 21:00Z (17:00 EDT, 16:00 CDT, 14:00 PDT)

Regina E. Spellers, President and CEO
Eagles Soar Consulting, LLC

Kimberly R. Moffitt, Assistant Professor of American Studies
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Drs. Spellers and Moffitt are editors of the anthology Blackberries and Redbones: Critical Articulations of Black Hair/ Body Politics in Africana Communities.

Midday with Dan Rodricks 3-8-11 Hour 2 [The Invisible Line: Daniel Sharfstein]

WYPR 88.1 FM
Baltimore, Maryland
2011-03-08

Dan Rodricks, Host

Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law
Vanderbilt University

The Invisible Line: Daniel Sharfstein, a Vanderbilt law professor visiting Baltimore for an engagement at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, followed three families, from the Revolutionary Era up to the Civil Rights movement, as they straddled the color line and changed their racial identification from black to white. While previous stories of “passing” have focused on individuals’ struggles to redefine themselves, Sharfstein’s subjects managed to defy the legal definitions of race within their own communities. For members of the Gibson, Spencer, and Wall families, what mattered most was the ways that their neighbors treated them in spite of their racial differences.

Listen to the entire interview here. (00:41:06, 28.2 MB)

The Invisible Line: Three American families and the secret journey from black to white [Live Interview with Daniel J. Sharfstein]

Minnesota Public Radio News
Midmorning Broadcast: 2011-03-15 15:06Z (10:06 CDT, 11:06 EDT, 08:06 PDT)

Kerri Miller, Host

Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law
Vanderbilt University

For much of American history, racial identity has been defined in terms of black and white. But because of their heritage and physical appearance, some families walk the line between cultures.

A new book chronicles three mixed-race families whose identities were called into question at various periods in history – with surprising consequences.

Interview with Daniel J. Sharfstein, author of “The Invisible Line”

The Christian Science Monitor
2011-02-23

Stacie Williams, Monitor Contributor

In “The Invisible Line,” law professor Daniel J. Sharfstein uses the stories of three families to explore the fluid nature of racial identity in America.

Race has never been an easy concept in this country; the rigid constructs by which people judge black and white have always left room for individuals who could move across either side of the line. Today, more Americans are choosing to identify as multiracial; that segment of the population has grown 35% since the 2000 Census.

Exhibit A: The president of the United States, who has a white mother, but chooses to identify himself as African American.

Vanderbilt University Associate Law Professor Daniel J. Sharfstein analyzes the constantly evolving perceptions and experience of race in his new book The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White. Sharfstein uses his legal background to fill in the shades of gray and highlight an American experience, which for many changed with the stroke of a pen, or with hair dye.

I recently had a chance to talk with Professor Sharfstein about his book and questions of racial identity in America….

…How key is the role of the Census in gauging how many more people are keeping their racial identities fluid?

As a country, we’re committed to principles of equality. The Census has an important function in figuring out how things are going—how well we’re living up to the principles of equality and anti-discrimination. On one level, how people self-identify is an interesting measure of how far we’ve come. On another level, it’s not completely related to larger societal issues we’ve made a commitment to overcome.

Have your opinions on racial constructs changed with Obama in the White House?

I think this country has changed a lot in the past couple decades and the way in which we understand the color line has been changed. As people have embraced multiracialism, its raised interesting questions about people who have been able to discover they have African Americans in their family history. I think these new ways of understanding identity are playing a role in how people are understanding their heritage. But I do think the election of Barack Obama is a major moment in the history of race. Race has never been about biology and blood. Plenty of white people have African blood. I’m looking at this history of migration across the color line and what do categories of black and white mean? These categories have been proxies for hierarchies and discrimination… for having a full set of rights as citizens.

Read the entire interview here.

Not an “Other”

Online Newshour
1997-07-16

Paul Solman, Host

Increasingly, many Americans find they don’t easily fit into any racial group. But will adding a new “multiracial” category on the census take away the effectiveness of the count? After a background piece by Betty Ann Bowser, Paul Solman leads a debate.

PAUL SOLMAN: Well, what should the Census Bureau do? To answer that question, we’re joined by Harvard Sociologist Orlando Patterson, who has just completed a book on race: “Ordeal of Integration;” Charles Byrd publishes “Multiracial Voice,” an Internet journal on mixed race issues; Carlos Fernandez founded the Association of Multiethnic Americans and teaches law at Golden Gate University. And we’re trying to get his signal. We’ve had some trouble with it. And demographer, Linda Jacobsen, works for Claritas, a consumer database firm and also advises the Census Bureau. And welcome to you all.

Mr. Byrd, should there be a multiracial box on the census form, as we’ve just seen some talk about?

CHARLES BYRD, Internet Journal Publisher: (New York) Yes. Well, actually the name of my publication is the Interracial Voice, not multiracial. But, yes, we’ve been advocating for a separate multiracial category for a number of years now. We’re not terribly happy with the OMB decision. We don’t think it’s a great compromise. It’s a step forward towards this nation recognizing multiracialialty, but it’s not a huge one. The same check all that applies format could fit very easily underneath a multiracial header. What we have–what OMB has essentially recommended–…

…PAUL SOLMAN: Okay. Well, Ms. Jacobsen, I mean, how do you look at this? Do you like the check-off provision that is now the proposal before us? How do you respond to this idea of the multiracial box?

LINDA JACOBSEN, Demographer: Well, I think the difficulty with the multiracial box is that it provides less rich information and less detail about the composition of that group that Charles is describing as being multiracial. And it also has some disadvantages in the sense that it provides less of a link to historical data on race and ethnicity, as well as providing a disadvantage, for example, to health researchers, who know that certain health conditions or health problems are linked to particular races, such as sickle cell anemia, for example.

PAUL SOLMAN: Play that out for a second. Exactly how would it work with sickle cell anemia if you did or didn’t have a multiracial box? I mean, what would happen?

LINDA JACOBSEN: Well, for example, if an individual who say was black–had one parent who was black and one parent who was white–and then checked the multiracial box, they would be indistinguishable from say another individual who was multiracial, checked the multiracial box, and was say of Asian and white parentage. So a health researcher would not be able to count or to categorize those with any black heritage who might be at risk for sickle cell anemia…

…PAUL SOLMAN: Okay. So, Professor Patterson, you’ve heard both of these proposals, if you will, where you come down on this multiracial box, checking off more than one?

ORLANDO PATTERSON, Harvard University: I don’t think we need a racial box at all. And I noticed that Mr. Byrd said that race is a social construct, something we invent, an identification, partly imposed on us, partly what we select and choose. I agree with that. The only problem is that there’s another term, another category which is exactly like that, is the ethnic ancestry category…

…LINDA JACOBSEN: –that whether or not we like it, whether or not we think that should be the case, historically certain population and specifically racial groups have suffered discrimination on the basis of their race and ethnicity. And if we can–if we discontinue collecting that information, we don’t eliminate discrimination, we really eliminate our ability to measure it and to monitor compliance with civil rights laws such as Mr. Byrd suggested…

Read the entire transcript here.