Mixed Race Studies

South Boston: Growing Up Southie

Detour
Boston, Massachusetts
2017-07-29

Narrators:

Jennifer J. Roberts

Pat Nee

Jennifer J. Roberts and ex-gangster Pat Nee take you to their ‘hood’ for a surprising story of growing up Black in Southie.

Southie – it’s got a bit of a reputation. Gangsters, busing desegregation; but most of all, the type of close knit Irish community that gave rise to it all. Although her family came here from Ireland in the 1800’s, Jennifer J. Roberts looked different from almost everyone in this neighborhood. Though she never knew him, her grandfather was black. In this Detour, Jennifer will show you Southie as only someone who knows it as both an insider and outsider can. She’ll take you to a diner that’s as quintessential Southie as it gets, and introduce you to the surrogate father who took her under his wing – the notorious criminal Irishman, Pat Nee. As she shows you the most poignant places of her youth, where navigating identity in the racially charged era of the Boston Busing Crisis was a constant, you’ll see how friends, enemies, and unlikely allies can be as much of a home as any house with a roof… Because people in Southie may seem a little rough around the edges, but they’re always willing to lend a hand if you get into any trouble. And by the end of your journey, you’ll come to see that like Jennifer herself, South Boston isn’t just one thing.

Mixed Race in Asia: Past, Present and Future

Routledge
2017-06-15
250 pages
1 B/W Illus.
Hardback ISBN: 9781138282674
eBook ISBN: 9781315270579

Edited by:

Zarine L. Rocha, Managing Editor
Current Sociology and the Asian Journal of Social Science

Farida Fozdar, Associate Professor in Anthropology and Sociology
University of Western Australia

Mixed racial and ethnic identities are topics of increasing interest around the world, yet studies of mixed race in Asia are rare, despite its particular salience for Asian societies.

Mixed Race in Asia seeks to reorient the field to focus on Asia, looking specifically at mixed race in China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam and India. Through these varied case studies, this collection presents an insightful exploration of race, ethnicity, mixedness and belonging, both in the past and present. The thematic range of the chapters is broad, covering the complexity of lived mixed race experiences, the structural forces of particular colonial and post-colonial environments and political regimes, and historical influences on contemporary identities and cultural expressions of mixedness.

Adding significant richness and depth to existing theoretical frameworks, this enlightening volume develops markedly different understandings of, and recognizes nuances around, what it means to be mixed, practically, theoretically, linguistically and historically. It will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as postdoctoral and other researchers interested in fields such as Race and Ethnicity, Sociology and Asian Studies.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Mixed Race in Asia / Zarine L. Rocha and Farida Fozdar
• Section One: China and Vietnam
  • Chapter One: “A Class by Themselves”: Battles over Eurasian Schooling in Late-19th-Century Shanghai / Emma J. Teng
  • Chapter Two: Mixing Blood and Race: Representing Hunxue in Contemporary China / Cathryn Clayton
  • Chapter Three: Métis of Vietnam: An Historical Perspective on Mixed-Race Children from the French Colonial Period / Christina Firpo
• Section Two: South Korea and Japan
  • Chapter Four: Developing bilingualism in a largely monolingual society: Southeast Asian marriage migrants and multicultural families in South Korea / Mi Yung Park
  • Chapter Five: Haafu Identity in Japan: half, mixed or double? / Alexandra Shaitan and Lisa J. McEntee-Atalianis
  • Chapter Six: Claiming Japaneseness: recognition, privilege and status in Japanese-Filipino ‘mixed’ ethnic identity constructions / Fiona-Katharina Seiger
• Section Three: Malaysia and Singapore
  • Chapter Seven: Being “Mixed” in Malaysia: Perspectives on Ethnic Diversity / Caryn Lim
  • Chapter Eight: Chinese, Indians and the Grey Space in between: Acceptance of Malaysian Chindians in a plural society / Rona Chandran
  • Chapter Nine: ‘Our Chinese’: The Mixedness of Peranakan Chinese Identities in Kelantan, Malaysia / Pue Giok Hun
  • Chapter Ten: Eurasian as Multiracial: mixed race, gendered categories and identity in Singapore / Zarine L. Rocha
• Section Four: India and Indonesia
  • Chapter Eleven: Is the Anglo-Indian ‘Identity Crisis’ a Myth? / Robyn Andrews
  • Chapter Twelve: When Hybridity Encounters Hindu Purity Fetish: Anglo-Indian Lived Experiences in an Indian Railway Town / Anjali Gera Roy
  • Chapter Thirteen: Sometimes white, sometimes Asian: Boundary-making among transnational mixed descent youth at an international school in Indonesia / Danau Tanu
  • Chapter Fourteen: Class, Race and Being Indo (Eurasian) in Colonial and Postcolonial Indonesia / Ros Hewett
• Afterword / Paul Spickard

Remapping Black Germany: New Perspectives on Afro-German History, Politics, and Culture

University of Massachusetts Press
December 2016
310 pages
16 b&w illustrations
6 x 9
Paper ISBN: 978-1-62534-231-7
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-62534-230-0

Edited by:

Sara Lennox, Professor Emerita of German Studies
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

A major contribution to Black-German studies

In 1984 at the Free University of Berlin, the African American poet Audre Lorde asked her Black, German-speaking women students about their identities. The women revealed that they had no common term to describe themselves and had until then lacked a way to identify their shared interests and concerns. Out of Lorde’s seminar emerged both the term “Afro-German” (or “Black German”) and the 1986 publication of the volume that appeared in English translation as Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out. The book launched a movement that has since catalyzed activism and scholarship in Germany.

Remapping Black Germany collects thirteen pieces that consider the wide array of issues facing Black German groups and individuals across turbulent periods, spanning the German colonial period, National Socialism, divided Germany, and the enormous outpouring of Black German creativity after 1986.

In addition to the editor, the contributors include Robert Bernasconi, Tina Campt, Maria I. Diedrich, Maureen Maisha Eggers, Fatima El-Tayeb, Heide Fehrenbach, Dirk Göttsche, Felicitas Jaima, Katja Kinder, Tobias Nagl, Katharina Oguntoye, Peggy Piesche, Christian Rogowski, and Nicola Lauré al-Samarai.

Is science racist?

Polity
January 2017
140 pages
122 x 188 mm / 5 x 7 in
Hardback ISBN: 9780745689210
Paperback ISBN: 9780745689227
Open eBook ISBN: 9780745689258

Jonathan Marks, Professor of Anthropology
University of North Carolina, Charlotte

Every arena of science has its own flash-point issues – chemistry and poison gas, physics and the atom bomb – and genetics has had a troubled history with race. As Jonathan Marks reveals, this dangerous relationship rumbles on to this day, still leaving plenty of leeway for a belief in the basic natural inequality of races.

The eugenic science of the early twentieth century and the commodified genomic science of today are unified by the mistaken belief that human races are naturalistic categories. Yet their boundaries are founded neither in biology nor genetics and, not being a formal scientific concept, race is largely not accessible to the scientist. As Marks argues, race can only be grasped through the humanities: historically, experientially, politically.

This wise, witty essay explores the persistence and legacy of scientific racism, which misappropriates the authority of science and undermines it by converting it into a social weapon.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. How science invented race
3. Science, race, and genomics
4. Racism and biomedical science
5. What we know, and why it matters

Race and Ethnicity: Constancy in Change (First Edition)

Cognella Academic Publishing
2017
372 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-63487-489-2

Edited by:

Milton Vickerman, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Virginia

Hephzibah V. Strmic-Pawl, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Manhattanville College, Purchase, New York

Race and Ethnicity: Constancy in Change uses both classic readings and new research on contemporary racial inequality to create a logical progression through the primary issues of race and ethnicity.

The nine sections discuss the history of race and racism, define major concepts, and analyze how and why inequality persists. In addition to the readings, the anthology features introductions that frame each section’s readings, key terms with which students should be familiar, learning objectives for each section, and Reflect and Consider inquiries designed for each reading. Each section ends with a Highlight that showcases a contemporary racial trend in the news. The sections are also supplemented by Read, Listen, Watch, Interact! features, which supply easily accessible links to complementary readings, audio stories, videos, and interactive websites. The book concludes with Investigate Further, a list of readings for those who wish to delve deeper into a particular topic.

Race and Ethnicity enables students to grasp the fundamentals of race and racism and encourages them to engage in conversations about them. Ideal for sociology programs, the anthology is well-suited to courses on race and ethnicity.

Table of Contents

• RACE & ETHNICITY: WHY IT MATTERS / MILTON VICKERMAN AND HEPHZIBAH V. STRMIC-PAWL
• KEY TERMS
• PART 1 THE FOUNDATIONS OF RACE
  • READING 1.1 Race BY PETER WADE
  • READING 1.2 AAA Statement on Race BY AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION
  • HIGHLIGHT: Eugenics are Alive and Well in the United States BY PAUL CAMPOS, TIME
• PART 2 THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF RACE
  • READING 2.1 Immigrants and the Changing Categories of Race BY KENNETH PREWITT
  • READING 2.2 The Theory of Racial Formation BY MICHAEL OMI AND HOWARD WINANT
  • HIGHLIGHT: Why Do So Many Americans Think They Have Cherokee Blood: The History of a Myth BY GREGORY D. SMITHERS, SLATE
• PART 3 STRUCTURING AMERICAN IDENTITY THROUGH IMMIGRATION
  • READING 3.1 The United States: A Nation of Immigrants BY PETER KIVISTO
  • READING 3.2 The Three Phases of US Bound Immigration BY ALEJANDRO PORTES AND RUBEN RUMBAUT
  • READING 3.3 The Ideological Roots of the “Illegal” as Threat and the Boundary as Protector BY JOSEPH NEVINS
  • READING 3.4 Segmented Assimilation Revisited: Types of Acculturation and Socioeconomic Mobility in Young Adulthood BY MARY C. WATERS, VAN C. TRAN, PHILIP KASINITZ, AND JOHN H. MOLLENKOPF
  • READING 3.5 Immigration Patterns, Characteristics, and Identities BY ANNY BAKALIAN & MEHDI BOZORGMEHR
  • READING 3.6 The Reality of Asian American Oppression BY ROSALIND CHOU AND JOE FEAGIN
  • HIGHLIGHT: Future Immigration Will Change the Face of America by 2065 BY D’VERY COHN, PEW RESEARCH CENTER
• PART 4 RACISM: THEORIES FOR UNDERSTANDING
  • READING 4.1 The Nature of Prejudice BY PETER ROSE
  • READING 4.2 Racism without Racists: “Killing Me Softly” with Color Blindness BY EDUARDO BONILLA-SILVA AND DAVID G. EMBRICK
  • READING 4.3 Colorstruck BY MARGARET HUNTER
  • READING 4.4 The White Supremacy Flower: A Model for Understanding Racism BY HEPHZIBAH V. STRMIC-PAWL
  • READING 4.5 Family Law, Feminist Legal Theory, and the Problem of Racial Hierarchy BY TWILA L. PERRY
  • HIGHLIGHT: Yes, All White People Are Racists— Now Let’s Do Something About It BY TIM DONOVAN, ALTERNET
• PART 5 STRUCTURED RACIAL INEQUALITY
  • READING 5.1 The American Dream of Meritocracy BY HEATHER BETH JOHNSON
  • READING 5.2 Racial Orders in American Political Development BY DESMOND S. KING AND ROGERS M. SMITH
  • READING 5.3 Migration and Residential Segregation BY JOHN ICELAND
  • READING 5.4 “White, Young, Middle Class”: Aesthetic Labor, Race and Class in the Youth Labor Force BY YASEMIN BESEN-CASSINO
  • READING 5.5 Why Both Social Structure and Culture Matter in a Holistic Analysis of Inner-City Poverty BY WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON
  • HIGHLIGHT: Nine Charts About Wealth Inequality in America BY THE URBAN INSTITUTE
• PART 6 RACISM IN POPULAR CULTURE
  • READING 6.1 The Revolution Will Not Be Available on iTunes: Racial Perspectives BY DUSTIN KIDD
  • READING 6.2 Racial Exclusion in the Online World BY REBECCA J. WEST AND BHOOMI THAKORE
  • READING 6.3 Fear Of A Black Athlete: Masculinity, Politics and The Body BY BEN CARRINGTON
  • READING 6.4 The Native American Experience: Racism and Mascots in Professional Sports BY KRYSTAL BEAMON
  • HIGHLIGHT: Pop Culture’s Black Lives Matter Moment Couldn’t Come at a Better Time BY STEVEN W. THRASHER, THE GUARDIAN
• PART 7 CONTEMPORARY SYSTEMS OF OPPRESSION
  • READING 7.1 The State of Our Education BY TERENCE FITZGERALD
  • READING 7.2 The Immigration Industrial Complex BY TANYA GOLASH-BOZA
  • READING 7.3 Evading Responsibility for Green Harm: State Corporate Exploitation of Race, Class, and Gender Inequality BY EMILY GAARDER
  • HIGHLIGHT: 5 Links Between Higher Education and the Prison Industry BY HANNAH K. GOLD, ROLLING STONE
• PART 8 THE FUTURE OF RACE
  • READING 8.1 Liminality in the Multiracial Experience: Towards a Concept of Identity Matrix BY DAVID L. BRUNSMA, DANIEL J. DELGADO, AND KERRY ANN ROCKQUEMORE
  • READING 8.2 Race and the New Bio-Citizen BY DOROTHY ROBERTS
  • READING 8.3 A Post-Racial Society? BY KATHLEEN FITZGERALD
  • HIGHLIGHT: Choose Your Own Identity BY BONNIE TSUI, THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
• PART 9 FIGHTING RACIAL INEQUALITY
  • READING 9.1 The Problem of The Twentieth Century is The Problem of The Color Line BY W.E.B. DU BOIS
  • READING 9.2 The Optimism of Uncertainty BY HOWARD ZINN
  • READING 9.3 Why We Still Need Affirmative Action BY ORLANDO PATTERSON
  • HIGHLIGHT: The Case for Reparations BY TA-NEHISI COATES, THE ATLANTIC
• INVESTIGATE FURTHER

The Afro-Latino Festival NYC Celebrates A Culture That’s Ready To Be Heard

The Village Voice
2017-06-27

Siddhartha Mitter

Two revelers dance at last year’s festival Source: New Visual Collective

At 26, Amara La Negra, the Dominican-American singer, has a string of energetic tropical-funk hits in Spanish, fierce dance moves, a fashion line, hundreds of thousands of social media followers, and rising star power in her hometown of Miami and back in the Dominican Republic. But Amara is also Afro-Latina — a visibly, unapologetically Black woman making her career in worlds where colorism still runs rampant, among them the D.R. with its social hierarchy and the international Latin entertainment industry. With her dark skin, exuberant Afro, and in-your-face “La Negra” stage name, Amara is making a point.

“Change would be more Afro-Latinos in Hollywood, more on magazine covers,” Amara says. “It would be main roles in novelas, which we don’t yet have. They’ll cast you to be either a slave, a gangster, or a prostitute. They stereotype us.” Last year, a light-skinned beauty queen put on blackface and butt pads to parody Amara on Dominican TV. “We’re still a long way [from] seeing big change,” Amara says. “But we’re being more vocal.”…

…In New York City, the flagship venue for the new cultural reassertion is the Afro-Latino Festival, which holds its fifth edition on July 7 and 8. A grassroots project led by Mai-Elka Prado Gil and Amilcar Priestley, a Panamanian couple in Brooklyn, it has ballooned since 2013 from an outdoor afternoon party to a two-day international summit gathering musicians, filmmakers, activists, scholars, and partygoers….

Read the entire article here.

Episode 32: How Race Was Made (Seeing White, Part 2)

Scene on Radio
2017-03-01

John Biewen, Host and Audio Program Director/Instructor
Center for Documentary Studies
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

Chenjerai Kumanyika, Assistant Professor of Popular Culture
Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina

Photo: The Monument to the Discoveries, Lisbon, Portugal. The highlighted figure in the center is an effigy of Gomes Eanes de Zurara. The figure at the top right is Prince Henry the Navigator. Photo by Harvey Barrison.

For much of human history, people viewed themselves as members of tribes or nations but had no notion of “race.” Today, science deems race biologically meaningless. Who invented race as we know it, and why? By John Biewen, with guest Chenjerai Kumanyika.

Listen to the podcast (00:28:50) here. Download the podcast here.

“We Are Not Used to People Thinking We Are Beautiful”

The New Yorker
2017-06-02

Jonathan Blitzer

Photograph by Cécile Smetana Baudier

It was a toothache that brought the Franco-Danish photographer Cécile Smetana Baudier to Costa Chica, on the Pacific Coast of Mexico. She was in Oaxaca at the time, for a project on women’s fashion, when she visited a dentist with a special reputation among cash-strapped local photographers. He accepted payment in the form of photographs. His waiting room, in Oaxaca City, was like a gallery, with framed images along the walls and piles of art books cascading over tables. There, just before getting a molar pulled, Baudier came across a series of photos of reedy men with fishing rods and nets, lolling in boats and along the banks of lagoons. She was surprised, given the fact that the men were black, to learn that the photographs had been taken in Mexico, in the remote southern states of Oaxaca and Guerrero. It was the first time she had ever seen images of Afro-Mexicans, and she decided to try to contribute some of her own. A few weeks later, she set out for El Azufre—a secluded coastal fishing village with a large Afro-Mexican population—where she spent five weeks living in a tent pitched on the front yard of an acquaintance’s house.

The African presence in Mexico dates back to the early sixteenth century, when Spanish conquistadors and colonialists arrived; with them came the slave trade. As many as two hundred and fifty thousand African slaves were transported Mexico, according to academic estimates*. At the turn of the nineteenth century, ten per cent of the population had African origins, but Mexican independence ignited a new national dialogue that downplayed race and elevated, instead, the idea of common citizenship. Even though some of the country’s most iconic freedom fighters and early politicians had African roots, their accomplishments fed a celebration of the broader mestizo culture. The history of Afro-Mexicans ever since has been one of erasure and marginalization. Today, there are 1.4 million citizens of African descent in Mexico, but the government did not recognize them officially until a 2015 census count…

Read the entire article here.

Too pretty to play? Stephen Curry and the light-skinned black athlete

The Conversation
2017-04-30

Ronald Hall, Professor of Social Work
Michigan State University

Golden State Warriors guard Stephen Curry walks off the court after a game against the Denver Nuggets in February. USA Today Sports/Reuters

During a recent interview, Golden State Warriors Draymond Green discussed why players around the league have long doubted or dismissed the talents of his superstar teammate, Stephen Curry. But it was Green’s last point, mentioned almost as an aside – “And of course, Steph is light-skinned so [players] want to make him out to be soft” – that got the most attention.

To white Americans, the relationship between skin color and toughness or masculinity might not be obvious. They might associate skin color with race or with attractiveness. But toughness? Not so much.

My first book, published in 1992, referred to skin color as “The Last Taboo Among African Americans.” It explored how African-Americans, within their community, grapple with prejudices that stem from their various shades of skin colors. If you’re black, depending on the shade of your skin, other black people might think of you as “high yella” or “red-boned,” a “white wanna-be” or just not “black enough.”…

..After the first African slaves arrived at Jamestown, Virginia, a population of mixed-race blacks emerged. Their masters and fellow slaves celebrated their exotic features – not quite African, but not exactly white. The women were called “fancy girls” and paraded at quadroon balls, events for wealthy white men to meet and mingle with them. Lighter-skinned black men, meanwhile, were dubbed “run ‘round men” because, with their fairer skin, they could supposedly have their pick of any woman in the black community…

Read the entire article here.

Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy

University of North Carolina Press
May 2017
230 pages
6.125 x 9.25, 12 halftones, notes, bibl., index
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-3283-4
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-3282-7
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4696-3284-1

Alisha Gaines, Timothy Gannon Associate Professor of English
Florida State University

In 1948, journalist Ray Sprigle traded his whiteness to live as a black man for four weeks. A little over a decade later, John Howard Griffin famously “became” black as well, traveling the American South in search of a certain kind of racial understanding. Contemporary history is littered with the surprisingly complex stories of white people passing as black, and here Alisha Gaines constructs a unique genealogy of “empathetic racial impersonation”–white liberals walking in the fantasy of black skin under the alibi of cross-racial empathy. At the end of their experiments in “blackness,” Gaines argues, these debatably well-meaning white impersonators arrived at little more than false consciousness.

Complicating the histories of black-to-white passing and blackface minstrelsy, Gaines uses an interdisciplinary approach rooted in literary studies, race theory, and cultural studies to reveal these sometimes maddening, and often absurd, experiments of racial impersonation. By examining this history of modern racial impersonation, Gaines shows that there was, and still is, a faulty cultural logic that places enormous faith in the idea that empathy is all that white Americans need to make a significant difference in how to racially navigate our society.