Mixed Race Studies

ETHN 115 – Biracial+Multiracial Iden (3 Units)

Sacramento State University
Spring 2010

Examination of biracial/multiracial populations, their social histories, social experiences and social identities within various sociological and social psychological theoretical frameworks. An exploration of the relationship biracial/multiracial groups have had, and continue to have, with the larger white majority and monoracially identified minorities.

AAST 398M – Multi-Racial Asian Americans

University of Maryland
Spring 2010

The multiracial American population is increasing exponentially, as are available services and organizations to support it. With these shifts in mind, this class will examine multiracial America yesterday, today, and tomorrow, with an emphasis on multiracial Asian America in particular. Some questions of interest: what is the public consciousness of multiracial peoples? What is public policy regarding multiracial peoples? How do multiracial peoples view their struggles for identity, equity, and community? What “infrastructure” exists to support the multiracial population, and in what ways does it provide or fail to provide support? Having identified the crucial issues facing multiracial America, the class will culminate in collaborative projects to address them.

Sixth Annual Ray Warren Multicultural Symposium (2009): Mixed: The Politics of Hybrid Identities

Lewis and Clark College
Portland, Oregon
2009-11-11 through 2009-11-13

Events

• “Obama and the Biracial Factor: Race, Sexuality, and the Battle for a New America” – Andrew Jolivétte (Introduced by Brenda Salas Neves, L&C student and symposium co-chair)
• “Secrets of a Mixed Race Child” – Dmae Roberts (Introduced by Parasa Chanramy, L&C student and symposium co-chair)
• Interracial Relationships, Adoption, and Identity – Moderator: Reiko Hillyer with Jiannbin Shiao, Astrid Dabbeni, Nicole Cullen, Hanako Conrad
• Remix: Identities and Artistic Expression – Moderator: Franya Berkman with Dmae Roberts, Gerardo Calderón, Nelda Reyes, Christabel Escarez and Nico Jose
• “The Future of Multiracial Politics” – Kim Williams (Introduced by Chris Wendt)
• Indigeneity and Cultural Exchange – Moderator: Elliott Young with Se-ah-dom Edmo, Tana Atchley, Muki Hansteen Izora, L&C students Lu’u Nakanelua and Allison Perry
• Nation-Building and Mixed Populations – Moderator: Rich Peck with Oren Kosansky, Cari Coe, Osaebea Amoako, Tim Moore
• Race Monologues – Identity: According to Whom? (Introduced by Parasa Chanramy) with L&C students Christabel Escarez, Adrian Guerrero, Temesghen Habte, Christina Herring, Jessica Houston, Nico Jose, Yollie Keeton, Rhea Manley, Jasin Nazim,Goldann Salazar, Jared Schy, and Madelyn Troiano

Dispatches from the Color Line: The Press and Multiracial America

State University of New York Press
July 2007
295 pages
Hardcover ISBN10: 0-7914-7099-7; ISBN13: 978-0-7914-7099-2
Paperback ISBN10: 0-7914-7100-4; ISBN13: 978-0-7914-7100-5

Catherine R. Squires, Cowles Professor of Journalism, Diversity and Equality
University of Minnesota

Explores contemporary news media coverage of multiracial people and identities.

When modern news media choose to focus attention on people of multiracial descent, how does this fit with broader contemporary and historical racial discourses? Do these news narratives complicate common understandings of race and race relations? Dispatches from the Color Line explores these issues by examining contemporary news media coverage of multiracial people and identities. Catherine R. Squires looks at how journalists utilize information from many sources—including politicians, bureaucrats, activists, scholars, demographers, and marketers—to link multiracial identity to particular racial norms, policy preferences, and cultural trends. She considers individuals who were accused (rightly or wrongly) of misrepresenting their racial identity to the public for personal gain, and also compares the new racial categories of Census 2000 as reported in Black owned, Asian American owned, and mainstream newspapers. These comparisons reveal how a new racial group is framed in mass media, and how different media sources reinforce or challenge long-standing assumptions about racial identity and belonging in the United States.

Sci fi offers surprising insights on race

The Brandeis Hoot
Brandeis University
2009-03-06

Marissa Lainzi

Months and months of wading through red ink, volleying e-mails, coordinating, coordinating, and coordinating came to fruition for the Mixed Heritage Club on Friday night, as their much-anticipated speaker, Eric Hamako, gave the talk, “Monsters, Messiahs, or Something Else?” a discussion of mixed race issues in sci-fi movies.

Hamako, a doctoral student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, intrigued the audience with his observations and theories regarding the portrayal of the “new” and “old” mixed race ideals in popular entertainment. Citing the movies Blade and Underworld, Hamako explained the portrayal of mixed-race people as “monsters” or “messiahs”—with vampires, humans, and werewolves becoming the racial metaphors.

The “monster” depiction of mixed-race people, Hamako explained, comes from the “old” conception of mixed race, which presented mixed-race people as deformed, immoral, or somehow wrong or inhuman. The “new” conception of mixed race, on the other hand, presents opposite stereotypes—that mixed-race people are beautiful, genetically superior, and the easy way to quash racism. Hamako calls this the “messiah” depiction.

Using clips from “Underworld,” Hamako showed the movie’s symbolic pitting of the new messiah version of mixed race against the old monster version. Hamako said that this is a way of injecting the new stereotypes about mixed race into the audience’s mind and attempting to justify forgetting that the old stereotypes existed by symbolically destroying them…

Read the entire article here.

Race Bending: “Mixed” Youth Practicing Strategic Racialization in California

Anthropology & Education Quarterly
Volume 35 Issue 1 (March 2004)
Pages 30-52
DOI: 10.1525/aeq.2004.35.1.30

Mica Pollock, Associate Professor of Education
Harvard University

As more U.S. youth claim “mixed” heritages, some adults are proposing to erase race words altogether from the nation’s inequality analysis. Yet such proposals, as detailed ethnography shows, ignore the complex realities of continuing racialized practice. At an urban California high school in the 1990s, “mixed” youth strategically employed simple “race” categories to describe themselves and inequality orders, even as they regularly challenged these very labels’ accuracy. In so “bending” race categories, these youth modeled a practical and theoretical strategy crucial for dealing thoughtfully with race in 21st century America.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Inheritability of Identity: Children’s Understanding of the Cultural Biology of Race

Child Development
Volume 66 Issue 5 (October 1995)
Pages 1418 – 1437
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.1995.tb00943.x

Lawrence A. Hirschfeld, Professor, Anthropology & Psychology
Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts

4 experiments explored adult and grade school children’s beliefs about inheritability of identity, particularly the “one-drop rule” that defines children of mixed-race parents as belonging to the racial category of the minority parent. In Study 1, 8- and 12-year-olds (N=32) and adults (N=43) were asked the category membership of mixed-race children and the degree to which they resembled each parent. Study 2 investigated whether the same-aged children (N=36) and adults (N=18) expected mixed-race children to have white, black, or intermediate features. Study 3 explored children’s (N=46) expectations about the inheritability of the same properties in animals. Older children, like adults, were found to believe that mixed-race children have black racial features. Adults additionally believe that such children inherit the categorical identity of the minority parent. Study 4 repeated the same tasks with black and white children (N=39) attending an integrated school. Unlike children attending a predominantly white school, children in the integrated school (regardless of race) expect mixed-race children to have intermediate racial features.

Nobody’s Son: Notes from an American Life

University of Arizona Press
1998
188 pages
5.0 x 8.0
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8165-2270-5

Luis Alberto Urrea

Here’s a story about a family that comes from Tijuana and settles into the ‘hood, hoping for the American Dream.

…I’m not saying it’s our story. I’m not saying it isn’t. It might be yours. “How do you tell a story that cannot be told?” writes Luis Alberto Urrea in this potent memoir of a childhood divided. Born in Tijuana to a Mexican father and an Anglo mother from Staten Island, Urrea moved to San Diego when he was three. His childhood was a mix of opposites, a clash of cultures and languages. In prose that seethes with energy and crackles with dark humor, Urrea tells a story that is both troubling and wildly entertaining. Urrea endured violence and fear in the black and Mexican barrio of his youth. But the true battlefield was inside his home, where his parents waged daily war over their son’s ethnicity. “You are not a Mexican!” his mother once screamed at him. “Why can’t you be called Louis instead of Luis?” He suffers disease and abuse and he learns brutal lessons about machismo. But there are gentler moments as well: a simple interlude with his father, sitting on the back of a bakery truck; witnessing the ultimate gesture of tenderness between the godparents who taught him the magical power of love. “I am nobody’s son. I am everybody’s brother,” writes Urrea. His story is unique, but it is not unlike thousands of other stories being played out across the United States, stories of other Americans who have waged war—both in the political arena and in their own homes—to claim their own personal and cultural identity. It is a story of what it means to belong to a nation that is sometimes painfully multicultural, where even the language both separates and unites us. Brutally honest and deeply moving, Nobody’s Son is a testament to the borders that divide us all.

Read an excerpt here.

Feminist Readings of Native American Literature: Coming to Voice

University of Arizona Press
1998
181 pages
6.0 x 9.0
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8165-1633-9

Kathleen M. Donovan, Professor and Department Head of English
South Dakota State University, Brookings

Who in a society can speak, and under what circumstances? These questions are at the heart of both Native American literature and feminist literary and cultural theory. Despite the recent explosion of publication in each of these fields, almost nothing has been written to date that explores the links between the two. With Feminist Readings of Native American Literature, Kathleen Donovan takes an important first step in examining how studies in these two fields inform and influence one another. Focusing on the works of N. Scott Momaday, Joy Harjo, Paula Gunn Allen, and others, Donovan analyzes the texts of these well-known writers, weaving a supporting web of feminist criticism throughout. With careful and gracefully offered insights, the book explores the reciprocally illuminating nature of culture and gender issues. The author demonstrates how Canadian women of mixed-blood ancestry achieve a voice through autobiographies and autobiographical novels. Using a framework of feminist reader response theory, she considers an underlying misogyny in the writings of N. Scott Momaday. And in examining commonalities between specific cultures, she discusses how two women of color, Paula Gunn Allen and Toni Morrison, explore representations of femaleness in their respective cultures. By synthesizing a broad spectrum of critical writing that overlaps women’s voices and Native American literature, Donovan expands on the frame of dialogue within feminist literary and cultural theory. Drawing on the related fields of ethnography, ethnopoetics, ecofeminism, and post-colonialism, Feminist Readings of Native American Literature offers the first systematic study of the intersection between two dynamic arenas in literary studies today.

Read an excerpt here.

Itch Like Crazy

University of Arizona Press
2002
121 pages
6.0 x 9.0
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8165-2177-7

Wendy Rose

Among Native American writers of mixed-blood heritage, few have expressed their concerns with personal identity with as much passion as Wendy Rose. A mainstay among American Indian poets whose work addresses these issues, she is a writer with whom readers of diverse ethnic backgrounds have consistently identified. In her latest work, Rose returns to these major motifs while exploring a new dimension: using poetry as a tool to delve into the buried secrets of family history—and all of American history as well. Confronting questions of personal history that itch like crazy—the irritations that drive human existence—she acknowledges and pays tribute to her Indian and European ancestors without hiding her anger with American society. Rose’s poems are strong political and social statements that have a distinctly narrative flavor. Here are Europeans who first set foot on America’s shores while Taíno Indians greeted them as if they were visiting neighbors; Hopi and Miwok “Clan Mothers, grand-daughters, all those the missionaries erased”; and European forebears who as settlers pushed their way relentlessly west. Through her vivid imagery, she speaks to and for these ancestors with a sense of loss and an itching caused by the biases provoked by ethnic chauvinism. Itch Like Crazy is a finely crafted literary work that is also a manifesto addressing contacts and conflicts in the history of Indian-white relations. By presenting another view of U.S. history and its impact on the Native Americans who are her ancestors, it offers a new appreciation of the issue of “tribal identity” that too often faces Native peoples of the Americas—and is too often misunderstood by Euro-American society.

Read an excerpt here.