Mixed Race Studies

Nicole Myoshi Rabin to be Featured Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

Mixed Chicks Chat (Founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival)
Hosted by Fanshen Cox, Heidi W. Durrow and Jennifer Frappier
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: Nicole Myoshi Rabin
When: Wednesday, 2012-04-25, 21:00Z (17:00 EDT, 14:00 PDT)

Nicole Myoshi Rabin, Instructor of Liberal Arts & Interdisciplinary Studies
Emerson College, Boston. Massachusetts

Rabin is the author of the articles “True Blood: The Vampire as a Multiracial Critique on Post-Race” in Journal of Dracula Studies (2010) and “Interrogating Identity Construction: Bodies versus Community in Cynthia Kadohata’s In the Heart of the Valley of Love” in Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies (2010).

Listen to the podcast here. Download the podcast here.

The Social Construction of Race and Monacan Education in Amherst County, Virginia, 1908–1965: Monacan Perspectives

History of Education Quarterly
Volume 47, Issue 4 (November 2007)
pages 389–415
DOI: 10.1111/j.1748-5959.2007.00107.x

Melanie D. Haimes-Bartolf
Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia

That’s all you heard, everywhere we went, or whatever we done, “oh, he’s one of those issues.” We couldn’t work with white people, we couldn’t be in schools with them, we couldn’t associate with them, we couldn’t eat |with them). I think they came up with the slang word “free issue.” They had this hatred; they just had this ungodly hatred. They couldn’t accept you as a human.

At the prodding of Thomas Jefferson, the Virginia General Assembly in 1782 passed legislation that allowed slave owners to manumit their slaves by issuing slaves a copy of their emancipation papers and making them “free issues.”‘ Nevertheless, in Amherst County, Virginia, the meaning of “free issue” evolved to connote something very different than it did at its inception for a small mountain community.

In 1953, the school board of Amherst County, Virginia, approved plans for new white and black high schools, and the State Board of Education made it possible for Pamunkey and Mattaponi Indian children of Virginia’s tidewater to finish their education beyond the eighth grade at accredited Indian high schools outside Virginia. Notwithstanding, there was a group of children living in the Tobacco Row Mountains at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains for whom educational opportunity beyond the seventh grade would remain largely out of reach for another decade…

Read or purchase the article here.

Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego

Rutgers University Press
June 2012
256 pages
Hardcover ISBN-13: 9780813552835, ISBN: 0813552834
Paperback ISBN-13: 9780813552842, ISBN: 0813552842

Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr., Associate Professor, Asian Pacific American Studies, School of Social Transformation, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Arizona State University, Tempe

Becoming Mexipino is a social-historical interpretation of two ethnic groups, one Mexican, the other Filipino, whose paths led both groups to San Diego, California. Rudy Guevarra traces the earliest interactions of both groups with Spanish colonialism to illustrate how these historical ties and cultural bonds laid the foundation for what would become close interethnic relationships and communities in twentieth-century San Diego as well as in other locales throughout California and the Pacific West Coast.

Through racially restrictive covenants and other forms of discrimination, both groups, regardless of their differences, were confined to segregated living spaces along with African Americans, other Asian groups, and a few European immigrant clusters. Within these urban multiracial spaces, Mexicans and Filipinos coalesced to build a world of their own through family and kin networks, shared cultural practices, social organizations, and music and other forms of entertainment. They occupied the same living spaces, attended the same Catholic churches, and worked together creating labor cultures that reinforced their ties, often fostering marriages. Mexipino children, living simultaneously in two cultures, have forged a new identity for themselves.  Their lives are the lens through which these two communities are examined, revealing the ways in which Mexicans and Filipinos interacted over generations to produce this distinct and instructive multiethnic experience. Using archival sources, oral histories, newspapers, and personal collections and photographs, Guevarra defines the niche that this particular group carved out for itself.

We the “White”” People: Race, Culture, and the Virginia Constitution of 1902

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
September 2003
92 pages

Jeremy Boggs

In 1902. in an effort to reestablish what they saw as whites’ natural right to control government rule over blacks, the delegates to Virginia’s Constitutional Convention of 1901-1902 declared the new constitution law that they felt reflected “the true opinion of the people of Virginia.” This thesis argues that while Virginia’s 1902 Constitution increased the political power of whites and decreased that of black Virginians, the reasons why they needed the document in the first place highlights an important aspect regarding the anxiety of many white Virginians in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Specifically, it helps to show how whiteness as a source of political and social power was not concrete or absolute, but rather was a reaction to the increasing presence and assertion of power by black Virginians. I argue that white Virginians, faced with the increasing political and social presence of black Virginians as equals, sought to reestablish their racial superiority through law and constitutional revision. However, by making their whiteness “visible”—by continually reasserting their claim to legitimate power because they were “white”—white Virginians revealed how unstable their racial world had become.

Table of Contents

• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Combating the “Peril of Negro Domination”
• A New Emancipation
• “To Purify, Exalt, and Ennoble”
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Curriculum Vitae

Read the entire thesis here.

Sweeter the Juice: A Family Memoir in Black and White

Simon & Schuster
January 1995
272 pages
ISBN-10: 0671899333
ISBN-13: 9780671899332

Shirlee Haizlip

The Sweeter the Juice is a provocative memoir that goes to the heart of our American identity. Shirlee Taylor Haizlip, in an effort to reconcile the dissonance between her black persona and her undeniably multiracial heritage, started on a journey of discovery that took her over thousands of miles and hundreds of years. While searching for her mother’s family, Haizlip confronted the deeply intertwined but often suppressed tensions between race and skin color.

We are drawn in by the story of an African-American family. Some members chose to “cross over” and “pass” for white while others enjoyed a successful black life. Their stories weave a tale of tangled ancestry, mixed blood, and identity issues from the 17th century to the present. The Sweeter the Juice is a memoir, a social history, a biography, and an autobiography. Haizlip gives to us the quintessential American story, unveiling truths about race, about our society, and about the ways in which we all perceive and judge one another.

The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

Dover Publications
May 1995 (Originally published in 1912)
112 pages
5 3/16 x 8 1/4
ISBN 10:  048628512X 
ISBN 13: 9780486285122

James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938)

This remarkable novel documents the life of an American of mixed ethnicity who moves freely in society — from the rural South to the urban North and eventually, Europe. A revolutionary work which not only probes the psychological aspects of “passing for white” but also examines the American caste and class system.

“This damned business of colour”: Passing in African American novels and memoirs

Lehigh University
2005-04-28
230 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3167071
ISBN: 9780542026218

Irina C. Negrea

Presented to the Graduate and Research Committee of Lehigh University in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English

The topic of this dissertation is an analysis of racial passing, as depicted in the novels The House Behind the Cedars by Charles Chesnutt, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, by James Weldon Johnson, and Passing by Nella Larsen, as well as in the memoirs The Sweeter the Juice by Shirlee Taylor Haizlip, Notes of a White Black Woman by Judy Scales-Trent, and Life on the Color Line by Gregory Williams.

Starting from the premise that passing is a complex phenomenon that reinforces and subverts the racial system simultaneously, this dissertation focuses on the subversive side of passing that comes to light especially when the passer is found out—a side that becomes obvious in the reactions it provokes in white racists: horror, fear, disgust, and insecurity.

One other new element that this dissertation brings into the field is a classification of passing that can be used as a tool for the analysis of similar literary works. The majority of passers fall into one of two categories: identificatory and performative. Identificatory passing is predicated on the passer’s identification with the white ideology. It is permanent, and the passer breaks all ties with his/her African American ancestry. At the other end of the spectrum is performative passing, based on the view of race as performance—a matter of props, makeup, and/or behavior. The passer crosses the color line and “acts” white, but in most cases, s/he does not break his/her ties with his/her African American roots and community. Rather, the performative passer tries to acknowledge both his/her racial identities, refusing to be boxed in one narrow racial category. These types of passing do not exist in a “pure” state; there are characters who start as performers of race and end up identifying with whiteness, for example, but the two basic types exist, in one combination or another, in all the stories of passing ever written. These two different types of passing engender different types of subversion of the racial system, and they are discussed as well in this dissertation.

Table of Contents

• Chapter I: “Gone Over on the Other Side:” Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars
• Chapter II: “They Wouldn’t Know you from White:” The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
• Chapter III: “They Always Come Back:” Nella Larsen’s Passing
• Chapter IV: The Family’s “Heart of Darkness:” Passing in African American Memoirs
• Bibliography

Purchase the dissertation here.

The short life of a race drug

The Lancet
Volume 379, Issue 9811 (2012-01-14 through 2012-01-20)
pages 114-115
DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(12)60052-X

Sheldon Krimsky, Professor of Urban & Environmental Policy & Planning; Adjunct Professor of Public Health and Family Medicine
Tufts School of Medicine
Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts

The headlines back in June, 2005, read “FDA approves a heart drug for African Americans”. The decision that gave the company NitroMed approval for its drug BiDil exclusively to a “racial group” represented a milestone in US drug policy. The decision ignited a debate that polarised the African American community, confounded proponents of personalised medicine, and dismayed groups opposed to reinscribing racial categories into science. Ever since Ashley Montagu published Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race in 1964 [1942?], scientists have reached a broad consensus that “race” applied to human populations has no standing in science…

…In a historical context too, the use of such racial classification is shown to be a subjective process. The concept of “race” in the USA grew out of slavery when state laws dictated racial identity by percentage admixture. A person who self-identifies as African American could have one great-grandfather (or about one-eighth of his or her genome) as the exclusive source of that identity. Homer Plessy was the plaintiff in an 1896 US Supreme Court decision (Plessy v. Ferguson) that established the “separate but equal” foundations of segregation in the USA. Plessy, who was escorted off a train for whites only, was considered black based on the infamous “one drop rule”, even though he considered himself seven-eighths white. By contrast, Jean Toomer, author of the 1923 book Cane, which chronicled the lives of black Americans, sometimes identified himself as black and sometimes as white. Thus, two individuals, both with one-eighth African ancestry, might either be defined by others as black or self-identify as white or black. Why should the drug’s approval for a differentiated group be based upon such quixotic criteria? Despite all the reasons why “race” has no role in science, it was a science-based agency that approved BiDil for a racial group…

…While many commentators who supported the approval of BiDil for black patients state that “race” is not a scientifically precise term for identifying relevant genomic or physiological characteristics that differentiate population groups, nevertheless, they argue that “self-identified race” is a useful proxy for those characteristics. However, what is the evidence that the proxy “self-identified race” is a reliable surrogate? The best evidence derives from the fact that genetic variation conferring disease susceptibility is not equally distributed among ancestral populations. For example, sickle cell anaemia is more prevalent in populations whose ancestry can be traced to sub-Saharan Africa. However, “self-identified race” is a subjective term, influenced by cultural factors, and not even grounded in the ancestral genomics of, for example, the International HapMap Project. For the purpose of the clinical trials, “self-identified race” is interpreted as a dichotomous variable (black or non-black). If race were used as a proxy for ancestral African genomics it should be a continuous function (10%, 30%, 70%, etc). It makes no scientific sense to map a continuous function onto a dichotomous variable…

Read the entire article here or here.

Making Race: Biology and the Evolution of the Race Concept in 20 Century American Thought

Columbia University
December 2008
309 pages

Michael Yudell

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy under the Executive Committee of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

At the dawn of the 21^st century the idea of race—the belief that the peoples of the world can be organized into biologically distinctive groups, each with its own discrete physical, social and intellectual characteristics—is seen by most natural and social scientists as unsound and unscientific. Race and racism, while drawn from the visual cues of human diversity, are ideas with a measurable past, identifiable present, and uncertain future. They are concepts that change with time and place; the changes themselves products of a range of variables including time, place, geography, politics, science, and economics. As much as scientists once thought that race and racism were reflections of physical or biological differences, today social scientists, with help from colleagues in the natural sciences, have shown that the once scientific concept of race is in fact a product of history with an unmistakable impact on the American story. This dissertation examines the history of the biological race concept during the 20^th century, studying how the biological sciences helped to shape thinking about human difference. This work argues that in the 20^th century biology and genetics became the arbiter of the meaning of race. This work also brings the story of the evolution of the race concept to the present by examining the early impact of the genomic sciences on race, and by placing it in a contemporary public health context.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• Preface
• Introduction: The Permanence of Race
• Chapter 1: A Eugenic Foundation
• Chapter 2: Making Race A Biological Difference
• Chapter 3: Race Problems for Biology
• Chapter 4: Consolidating the Biological Race Concept
• Chapter 5: Race in the Molecular Age
• Conclusion: Race, Genomics, and the Public’s Health
• Bibliography

Read the entire dissertation here.

Obama as Anti-American: Visual Folklore in Right-Wing Forwarded E-mails and Construction of Conservative Social Identity

Journal of American Folklore
Volume 125, Number 496, Spring 2012
pages 177-203
DOI: 10.1353/jaf.2012.0018

Margaret Duffy, Associate Professor of Journalism
University of Missouri

Janis Teruggi Page
George Washington University

Rachel Young
Missouri School of Journalism

This paper investigates the group-building potential of forwarded e-mails through a visual analysis of negative images about President Barack Obama. We argue that these e-mails are a form of political digital folklore that may contribute to constructing participants’ individual and group identities. Images amplify the impact and believability of the messages, especially when linked to familiar cultural references and experiences and may lead to increased political polarization and hostility.

Read or purchase the article here.