Mixed Race Studies

Multiracial Experiences in Higher Education: Contesting Knowledge, Honoring Voice, and Innovating Practice

Stylus Publishing
2021-02-17
Paperback ISBN: 9781642670691
E-Book (ePub) ISBN: 9781642670714
Hardback ISBN: 9781642670684
Lib E-Book ISBN: 9781642670707

Edited by:

Marc P. Johnston-Guerrero, Associate Professor
Department of Educational Studies
Ohio State University

Charmaine L. Wijeyesinghe, Ed.D., Consultant and Author in Organizational Development and Social Justice Education

Foreword by:

G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

Recipient of the 2021 Innovation Award of The Multiracial Network (MRN)

In the last Census, over 9 million people – nearly 3% of the population – identified themselves as of two or more races. The proportion of college students who identify as Multiracial is somewhat higher, and growing. Although increasing at a slightly slower rate, Multiracial faculty and staff are also teaching and working on campuses in greater numbers. Together, Multiracial people from diverse backgrounds and in various roles are influencing college and university culture, practices, and climate.

This book centers the experiences of Multiracial people, those individuals claiming heritage and membership in two or more (mono)racial groups and/or identifies with a Multiracial term. These terms include the broader biracial, multiethnic, and mixed, or more specific terms like Blasian and Mexipino.

In addressing the recurring experiences of inclusion, exclusion, affirmation, and challenges that they encounter, the contributors identify the multiple sites in higher education that affect personal perceptions of self, belonging, rejection, and resilience; describe strategies they utilized to support themselves or other Multiracial people at their institutions; and to advocate for greater awareness of Multiracial issues and a commitment to institutional change.

In covering an array of Multiracial experiences, the book brings together a range of voices, social identities (including race), ages, perspectives, and approaches. The chapter authors present a multiplicity of views because, as the book exemplifies, multiracial people are not a monolithic group, nor are their issues and needs universal to all.

The book opens by outlining the literature and theoretical frameworks that provide context and foundations for the chapters that follow. It then presents a range of first person narratives – reflecting the experiences of students, faculty, and staff – that highlight navigating to and through higher education from diverse standpoints and positionalities. The final section offers multiple strategies and applied methods that can be used to enhance Multiracial inclusion through research, curriculum, and practice. The editors conclude with recommendations for future scholarship and practice.

This book invites Multiracial readers, their allies, and those people who interact with and influence the daily lives of Multiracial people to explore issues of identity and self-care, build coalitions on campus, and advocate for change. For administrators, student affairs personnel, and anyone concerned with diversity on campus, it opens a window on a growing population with whom they may be unfamiliar, mis-categorize, or overlook, and on the need to change systems and structures to address their full inclusion and unveil their full impact.

Table of Contents

• Foreword —G. Reginald Daniel
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part One: Framing Multiracial Experiences in Higher Education
  • 1) Insights on Multiracial Knowledge, Voices, and Practices: Lessons From Our Lives and Work—Charmaine L. Wijeyesinghe and Marc P. Johnston-Guerrero
  • 2) Multiracial Identity on Campus: Identities and Experiences of Multiracial People in Higher Education—Kristen A. Renn
  • 3) The Naming and Framing of Identity: Reflecting on Core Concepts Through the Experiences of Multiracial People—Charmaine L. Wijeyesinghe
  • 4) Monoracism: Identifying and Addressing Structural Oppression of Multiracial People in Higher Education—Jessica C. Harris, Marc P. Johnston-Guerrero, and Maxwell Pereyra
• Part Two: Multiracial Narratives Across the Higher Education Landscape
  • 5) Back to Black—Nick Davis
  • 6) On the Path to Multiracial Consciousness: Reflections on My Scholar-Practitioner Journey in Higher Education—Victoria K. Malaney Brown
  • 7) Being Mexipina in Higher Education—Rebecca Cepeda
  • 8) Remembering to Resist Racist Colonial Forgetting on Campus—e alexander
  • 9) Existing In-Between: Embodying the Synergy of My Ancestors—Naliyah Kaya
  • 10) Reflections of a Creole, Indigenous, Afro-Latin Scholar: From Community to the Classroom—Andrew Jolivétte
• Part Three: Strategies and Tools for Enhancing Multiracial Inclusion
  • 11) Contextualizing Multiraciality in Campus Climate: Key Considerations for Transformative Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—Chelsea Guillermo-Wann and Marc P. Johnston-Guerrero
  • 12) Building Multiracial Aikido: A Student Social Justice Retreat—Charlene C. Martinez and Stephanie N. Shippen
  • 13) Mixed and Multiracial Student Organizations on Campus: The Necessity of Weaving Together Art and Critique—Orkideh Mohajeri and Heather C. Lou
  • 14) Critical Mixed Race Studies: Rooted in Love and Fire—Nicole Leopardo, Kira Donnell, and Wei Ming Dariotis
• Part Four: Future Directions
  • 15) Intergenerational Reflections and Future Directions—Marc P. Johnston-Guerrero, Charmaine L. Wijeyesinghe, and Lisa Combs
• Editors and Contributors
• Index

The Afro-Latinx Experience Is Essential To Our International Reckoning On Race

National Public Radio
ALT.LATINO
2020-07-03

Felix Contreras
Anaïs Laurent
Marisa Arbona-Ruiz
Jasmine Garsd

In Tijuana, raised fists show solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. Guillermo Arias/AFP via Getty Images

Let’s pause the music for a bit and talk through some things.

In three segments, we’re going to have a conversation about how Afro-Latinx folks often get left out of national discussions about Blackness and, in particular, the Black Lives Matter movement. Petra Rivera-Rideua, of Wellesley College, and Omaris Z. Zamora, of Rutgers, help us wade through layers of complexities. Our newest contributor to the Alt.Latino family, NPR publicist Anaïs Laurent, lends her considerable knowledge of Afro-Latinx culture and reggaeton to the conversation.

“I don’t think that the media, on a national level, is doing the work to understand that Blackness is heterogeneous,” Zamora says.

“There are Black Latinos, there are Afro Latinos who very much a part of Black Lives Matter and the experiences we’re talking about,” Laurent adds.

Read the entire story here.

Dash Harris is doing the work to end anti-Blackness in LatinX culture

theGrio
2020-06-16

DeMicia Inman

Through her work in creating ‘NEGRO: A DOCU-SERIES ABOUT LATINX IDENTITY,’ Harris hopes to dismantle anti-Blackness in the LatinX community.

The African diaspora gave much of the world a very layered identity. For centuries, the slave trade resulted in African natives being sold or stolen as slaves and transported across the globe. Now, Black people reside in countries from the United States and Brazil to Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Dash Harris, an Afro-LatinX woman, understands not only her multi-cultural heritage but also the implications and societal structure surrounding her identity. Through her work in creating NEGRO: A DOCU-SERIES ABOUT LATINX IDENTITY and more, she hopes to highlight LatinX existence and dismantle anti-Blackness in the LatinX community…

Read the entire interview here.

Jessica Krug and the theft of Black Latina identity.

Daily Kos
2020-09-05

Denise Oliver Velez

Professor Jessica A. Krug, a white woman from Kansas, who has been passing herself off as an Afro-Latina Professor Jessica Krug, panelist, Diasporic Politics panel Institute for Research in African-American Studies (IRAAS) 25th Anniversary Conference, Friday , Columbia University, April 26, 2019

We all know what identity theft is, in a world filled with cyber crimes. We’ve all watched horror films with body snatchers as the main villains. Things become far more complicated when we address the issue of humans who, for a host of warped reasons, assume a false racial or ethnic identity.

Such is the case of Professor Jessica A. Krug, who is currently an Associate Professor of African American history at George Washington University. Krug has for years portrayed herself as Black, and Afro-Latina, while publishing her academic work, receiving grant funding, teaching and also acting as a Afro-Latina political activist from the Bronx under the pseudonym “Jess La Bombalera,” all the while hiding her real self — a white woman from Kansas City.

Her exposure as a fraud, has unleashed a firestorm of pushback on social media and in academia, similar to the exposure of black-passing Rachel Dolezal in 2015…

Read the entire article here.

A Hard Conversation for the Latino Community

The New York Times
2020-07-03

Jorge Ramos, Television Anchor
Univision

Ilia Calderón onstage during Univision’s Premio Lo Nuestro 2020 at Miami’s American Airlines Arena, in February. Jason Koerner/Getty Images

Racism is deeply rooted in America’s social system, putting Afro-Latinos at a constant disadvantage.

MIAMI — Every weeknight, I sit down next to my co-anchor Ilia Calderón to host the Spanish-language news program “Noticiero Univision.” Although our many viewers have come to know Ms. Calderón’s face, not many know how much she has had to overcome to sit in that chair. Her story, like that of many Latinos with African ancestry in the United States, is one of tremendous personal achievement, as well as astonishing perseverance in the face of deep-seated racism.

Ms. Calderón was born in the Chocó region of Colombia, a place she describes as “our little Black paradise.” When Ilia was 10, she left home to study in a Catholic school in Medellín, where one of the white students was so disgusted by the color of Ilia’s skin — and so proud of her own fair complexion — that she told Ilia, “You’re Black? Not even my horse is black!” That first encounter with racism in Latin America left a mark on Ilia — one she never forgot.

When she moved to Miami in 2001 to pursue a career in journalism, things weren’t much different. “I had to endure racism in Colombia,” she told me recently, “and it turns out that here I have to face the same thing. It’s how they look at you, how they behave when you are around. …It’s like you have to go through that experience twice: For being Hispanic and also for being Black.”

According to a 2014 survey by the Pew Research Center, 24 percent of the roughly 54 million Hispanics living in the United States at the time self-identified as Afro-Latino, Afro-Caribbean or as another, more specific Afro-Latino identity, such as Afro-Colombian. At the same time, 34 percent identified as “mestizo, mulatto or some other mixed race.”…

Read the entire article here.

Local Voices: What Does it Mean to “Pass” as White?

The Coronado Times
Coronado, California
2020-06-07

Carolyn Osorio
Barrio Logan, San Diego, California

Carolyn Osorio

The Coronado Times asked its writers to tackle the topic of race in Coronado. Given the current environment, we were asked to address the topic head-on and at first, I’ll admit, I wasn’t sure how to tackle it. I do not live in Coronado, I am not black, and I would not presume to imagine the lived experience of being black in America today. However, tensions are high everywhere and an altercation with one of my Barrio Logan neighbors about my whiteness this past week highlighted a very important topic that I do feel qualified to tackle: What does it mean to “pass” as white?

This is a question I, and other mixed-race people, ask ourselves constantly. Born from a combination of cultures, we have a foot in two (or more) worlds but, oftentimes, none of them fits quite right. For many of us, our racial makeup can be physically ambiguous and this ambiguity often allows us to “pass.” I’d like to think we are the living embodiment of America’s melting pot, a celebration of mixed cultures and languages, the product of two people choosing to love a different race than their own. Instead, we are often not quite white enough to be “white” but not quite brown or black or Asian or native enough to belong entirely to part of our cultural makeup. When we fill out the racial demographic section of forms, we are forced to select just one box that might define us. This has never felt more important than it does now in the face of protests and movements dedicated to abolishing racial prejudice…

Read the entire article here.

‘Racialization works differently here in Puerto Rico, do not bring your U.S.-centric ideas about race here!’

Black Perspectives
2020-03-03

Hilda Lloréns, Associate Professor of Anthropology
University of Rhode Island

“FSA – T[enant] P[urchase] borrowers? by their house, Puerto Rico” – Jack Delano (Library of Congress)

This title is a variation of a statement I have heard during the last two decades as a professional anthropologist. I was reminded of it again recently, when a Puerto Rico-based colleague mentioned that it is common in the archipelago to think about the race research produced by U.S.-based Puerto Rican researchers as being tainted by U.S.-centric ideas about race. At its base, this assertion has the effect, and maybe even the goal from the outset, of discrediting the race research produced by those of us living in the Diaspora. But I believe there is more going on than just marking our research as suspect.

Because at this point I have heard variations of this opinion dozens of times, and particularly so by a subset of the archipelago’s intelligentsia, it is time to explore the ideological work this claim does. This brief analysis is less a defense of the validity of research like mine, and instead exposes how as a cultural construction in itself, this hegemonic statement is an example of how cultural nationalism and anti-Black racism warps even the brightest minds. While it is true that anti-Black racism takes on specific and locally contextual qualities, it is also true that the anti-Black racism experienced by evidently Black individuals throughout the American hemisphere has strikingly similar consequences: poverty and marginalization; lack of access to quality education, health care, employment, and a clean environment; police profiling and brutality; spatial segregation and territorial dispossession; denial of entry into restaurants, night clubs, stores, and country clubs; social marginalization and political exclusion; and the attempt to silence the voices of those who dare speak out against on-going racial violence and terror.

Read the entire article here.

HALF MEASURES: California’s Journey Toward Counting Multiracial People By 2022

Multiracial Americans of Southern California (MASC)
2020
30 pages

Thomas Lopez, Editor
Sarah Gowing, Lead Researcher

Reviewers:

G. Reginal Daniel, Ph.D., Professor and Vice Chair, Department of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

Kelly F. Jackson, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Social Work
Arizona State University

Racial and ethnic data is collected by the government to enable the enforcement of civil rights laws, ensure equitable distribution of resources, and measure inequality. In 2016, the State of California released new policy standards for the collection and public reporting of racial/ethnic demographic data. All State agencies, boards, and commissions that collect this data must comply by January 1, 2022, allowing respondents to select multiple racial/ethnic categories. They must also disseminate this information in such a way as to not obscure mixed-race individuals. Potentially the most significant change to the standards would be the counting of people with mixed Latina/o and non-Latina/o identity. California will be the first state in the nation to do this.

This study’s aim is to determine whether these agencies are in compliance or whether there are still changes to be made. After reviewing organizations and aims from four sectors (education, business, health, and criminal justice), it was found that only one system is in compliance with the data collection, and none have followed the standards for race/ethnic data presentation. The counting of mixed Latina/o identified people is the most conspicuous gap in both the data collection and reporting methods. With less than two years to make the required changes, agencies must ensure that they are beginning the process now due to the time and resources required.

Table of Contents

• Executive Summary
• About MASC
• Terminology
• Introduction
• Current vs. Future Standards
  • Future Data Collection Compliance
  • Future Data Presentation Compliance
• Methodology
• Results
  • Data Collection
  • Data Presentation
• Discussion & Recommendations
• About the Authors
• Works Cited
• Appendix A: Assembly Bill 532
• Appendix B: Supporting Data

Read the entire report here.

White Colorism

Social Currents
Volume 2, Issue 1, March 2015
pages 13-21
DOI: 10.1177/2329496514558628

Lance Hannon, Professor of Sociology and Criminology
Villanova University, Villanova, Pennsylvania

Perhaps reflecting a desire to emphasize the enduring power of rigidly constructed racial categories, sociology has tended to downplay the importance of within-category variation in skin tone. Similarly, in popular media, “colorism,” or discrimination based on skin lightness, is rarely mentioned. When colorism is discussed, it is almost exclusively framed in terms of intraracial “black-on-black” discrimination. In line with arguments highlighting the centrality of white racism, the present paper contends that it is important for researchers to give unique attention to white colorism. Using data from the 2012 American National Election Study, an example is presented on white interviewers’ perceptions of minority respondent skin tone and intelligence (N = 223). Results from ordinal logistic regression analyses indicate that African American and Latino respondents with the lightest skin are several times more likely to be seen by whites as intelligent compared with those with the darkest skin. The article concludes that a full accounting of white hegemony requires an acknowledgment of both white racism and white colorism.

Read or purchase the article here.

To fight discrimination, the U.S. census needs a different race question

Science News: Independent Journalism Since 1921
2020-03-08

Sujata Gupta, Social Sciences Writer

An accurate sense of racial diversity is hard to achieve with current U.S. census questions. Delphine Lee

The government has asked people their race since 1790

Wendy Roth has been arguing for years that the U.S. Census Bureau should ask about race in a different way. The race box that people check for themselves on the census doesn’t always match the box someone else might have checked for them. And that, Roth says, is a problem.

Roth, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, began researching that mismatch in racial identification in the early 2000s. She recruited 60 New Yorkers who had been born in Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic, showed them the census race question and asked them how they would answer. The responses surprised her.

Consider the case of Salvador, a kitchen worker in the Bronx. “Many Americans observing him would consider him to be black,” Roth wrote in December 2010 in Social Science Quarterly. But Salvador told Roth that he checks “white.”

While attitudes in the mainland United States have been shaped by the long legacy of the “one-drop rule,” in which a single drop of “black blood” conferred “blackness,” Puerto Ricans believe the opposite — that even dark-skinned people can’t be black if they have “white blood.” Puerto Ricans use terms like mulatto or trigueño to describe those falling somewhere between white and black. But when presented with race checkboxes that offer no intermediate options, Salvador simply goes by what he knows…

…A slippery sense of self

As minority groups fight for greater visibility, and the race question gets wound up in ideas about self-affirmation and group empowerment, the census data have been getting more difficult to decipher since the 1960 shift to self-identification.

With the power to check their own race box, many people previously identified as white have embraced a nonwhite or mixed-race identity. That’s evident in the American Indian numbers. From 1890 to 1960, the American Indian population grew from 248,000 to 524,000, with an average annual growth rate of just 1.1 percent. But over the next several decades, and coinciding with the shift to self-identification, that population grew to almost 2 million by 1990 — with an average annual growth rate of 4.3 percent. That meteoric growth extends well beyond what is possible through births alone, [Carolyn] Liebler says…

Read the entire article here.