Mixed Race Studies

The invention of ‘Hispanics’ created a political force of 27 million strong

Timeline
2017-03-02

Heather Gilligan, Senior Editor

Cesar Chavez (left), leader of the National Farm Workers Association, stands with a group of striking workers in Delano, California, in 1975. (Ted Streshinsky/Getty Images)

Before 1970, they were considered white by the government

On a California morning in 1969, as dawn outlined the nearby mountain ridges in purple, a pickup truck bounced down a dirt road in the Coachella Valley, filled with activists urging farmhands still picking grapes to join a statewide strike for higher wages. “These workers are so afraid of their employers,” labor organizer Dolores Huerta explained to The New York Times.

Meanwhile, on the East Coast, against a backdrop of overcrowded tenements in Spanish Harlem, a radical group of 20-something Puerto Ricans protested unsanitary living conditions by blocking Third Avenue with a garbage fire. The trash they burned had sat on the curb for days, creating a veritable rat-topia, as garbage trucks rumbled along, cleaning up regularly in richer, whiter neighborhoods.

Puerto Ricans and Mexicans like these faced many of the same hardships—including the high rates of poverty that went hand in hand with their experience employment discrimination, dilapidated housing, and substandard schools that were ill-equipped to deal with Spanish-speaking students—but what they lacked was a cohesive political identity, an identifiable voting bloc…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Race Conference reflects on identity

The Daily Trojan
Los Angeles, California
2017-02-26

Erum Jaffrey

Julia Erickson | Daily Trojan Roundtable · Panelists spoke with Maria Root (second from left) to discuss her 25 years of experience in multiracial studies at the fourth annual Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference. The event was hosted by the USC Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture.

When Rudy Guevarra Jr. filled out identification forms in elementary school, he remembers never checking the provided boxes for race. Instead, he drew his own box, and wrote “Mexican-Filipino,” unable to choose one parent’s culture over the other.

Guevarra delivered the keynote address for the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference on Sunday, a speech titled “Borderlands of Multiplicity: Reflections on Intimacies and Fluidity in Critical Mixed Race Studies”. The three-day conference held at USC featured a series of workshops, lectures, panels, movie-screenings and concerts on the topic of “Trans,” coinciding with the Hapa Japan Festival. It was hosted by USC Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture.

An associate professor of Asian Pacific American studies at Arizona State University, Guevarra spoke about his mixed race heritage as a “Mexipino,” or Mexican-Filipino, growing up in the borderland city of San Diego and how that influenced his doctoral research in borderlands, labor history and multiethnic identities…

…The conference fell on the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision that declared anti-interracial marriage laws unconstitutional.

“It’s not just celebrating who we are, but also reflecting on how our multiplicity can enhance the greater good of the communities we work in,” said Chandra Crudup, co-coordinator of the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference…

Read the entire article here.

Call for Papers: Power, Intimacy and the State: Mixed Families in Europe and Beyond

Power, Intimacy and the State: Mixed Families in Europe and Beyond Conference
University of Amsterdam
June 12-13, 2017
2017-01-20

Betty de Hart, Professor of Migration Law
Amsterdam Centre for European Law and Governance (ACELG)
University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

CALL FOR PAPERS (View PDF version here.)

Historically, mixed couples and people of mixed descent have been seen as a problem, in popular culture as well as in academic literature. ‘Ethnically’ and ‘racially’ mixed relationships were described as dominated by power imbalances and as devoid of love. This perspective was brought to bear upon relationships and marriages in colonial times and in times of slavery. Even today, within the context of global migration, mixed couples are often perceived in negative terms, e.g. in discourses on ‘mail order brides’ (marriages between white men and migrant women) or ‘beznez marriages’ (marriages between white women and migrant men).

There is no denying that mixed couples and relations are fraught with power inequalities as they developed in the context of historical and modern-day global inequalities, colonialism, post-colonialism, slavery and racialised hierarchies. However, issues concerning the entanglement of power and privilege with intimate relationships are much more complex than they are often envisioned to be. Since the 1980s, scholars of ‘mixture’ and ‘mixedness’, including critical race and critical mixed race studies, have been questioning this pathologisation of mixed couples and mixed descent. They have called for more nuanced approaches to the lived experiences of mixed couples and persons of mixed descent, that should help us strike a proper balance between an overly negative view on the one hand and an unwarranted romanticised view on the other, which regards mixed relationships and mixed heritage as a means for creating a boundary-less and race-less world.

Hence, this conference addresses questions such as: how we may gain a fuller understanding of the lived experiences of mixed couples, power, and intimacy, without pathologizing and dehumanizing them? This conference aims to approach these questions from international comparative perspectives. How can a balanced view be achieved in the European context, where mixed couples are mostly studied with respect to the contradictory imperative of cultural assimilation on the one hand and respect for cultural difference on the other? And what about other continents such as Africa or Asia?

The conference

The conference seeks to bring together people from different disciplines (ethnic and racial studies, critical (mixed) race studies, history, (post)colonial studies, film and media studies, literature, sociology, anthropology, geography, law, gender studies, sexuality and queer studies, migration studies, et cetera), and from different national backgrounds. We believe that an interdisciplinary and comparative approach is key to gaining the ‘thick’ understanding of mixed relationships that this conference aims at. We especially hope to give a boost to the study of mixture and mixed intimacies in the European context.

The conference is a joint initiative of the Amsterdam Centre of European Law and Governance (University of Amsterdam), and the Maastricht Centre for Gender and Diversity, in cooperation with LovingDay.NL. It will take place on 12 and 13 June 2017, when Loving Day is commemorated as the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Loving v. Virginia American Supreme Court decision, that held that interracial marriage prohibitions were unconstitutional.

Papers may relate to, but are not limited to, the following topics:

1. Mixed couples and persons of mixed heritage navigating power and inequality

In order to study power differentiations within mixed families adequately, obviously, not only race or ethnicity but also gender and class are relevant identity markers. How can an intersectional approach of race, gender and class illuminate power dynamics within mixed families? How do members of mixed families respond to them? Another issue is how youngsters and persons of mixed descent negotiate the different social dynamics and power relations that shape their experiences? How and by what means do they claim the power to define themselves?

2. Activism and NGOs of mixed families and people of mixed descent

Across the globe, mixed couples and people of mixed descent have become activists and established NGOs to facilitate the telling of their stories and to challenge the disempowerment caused by dominant negative, pathologizing understandings of mixed couples and mixture. Who are the persons and parties that speak in the name of mixed families, and what are the interests at stake? What alternative discourses do they put forward? How do stories and experiences of mixed families and persons of mixed heritage matter in public and political debates on multicultural/multiracial societies, and anti-racism? And how does discovering ‘hidden’ historical stories of mixed heritage function in these debates?

3. State and institutional policies shaping power and inequalities

Power dynamics within mixed couples and families are closely intertwined with the power hierarchies of race/ethnicity, gender, and class within society at large. State laws and policies shape identities of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ and determine the definition of who or what is ‘mixed’. State and institutional policies have both struggled to discourage or prevent, and to encourage or even celebrate mixed relationships. If state and institutional policies decide the meaning of difference, how should we understand various meanings of ‘mixed couples’ and ‘mixed descent across Europe and beyond? What are the transnational linkages between continents, colony and metropole, global north and global south? How does the state shape and regulate mixed families and identities and which effects do they have on the internal power dynamics of mixed couples?

4. Performing mixed relationships in the arts, popular culture and news media

In the present and in the past, the arts, popular culture and news media have been enacting specific scripts for mixed relationships, which have confirmed and critiqued perspectives implied in social policies, and state politics. We will study in what ways the arts, popular culture and news media have constructed, mediated and challenged the dominant, problematizing approach to mixed couples and people of mixed descent, as well as unwarranted romantic idealizations of mixed couples as the key to a fair society. What concepts of mixed identity have been produced by these media and how were these perceived by the general public? What were the agencies of mixed individuals and families in dealing with the written texts and visual images about them? And how have these changed through time and across space?

5. Studying mixedness in Europe

Until today, Europe does not have a strong academic tradition in studying mixed couples and mixed descent, as opposed to, for instance, the US or the UK. How can the study of mixedness in Europe be given a boost, and move beyond the exclusive association of mixed couples with the ‘assimilation versus difference’ debate? How is European research linked to dominant, politicized categorizations of what and who is ‘mixed’? How is research in Europe linked to policy perceptions of the social meaning of mixed relationships and mixed heritage? Do European research traditions challenge the binaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’? And what about the heteronormativity of much of the studies on mixed couples and families? How can the development of an interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary approach help us understand the relation between power, intimacy and the state in the European context? How can we take inspiration from the Anglo-American research traditions? And in what ways can we employ approaches from critical race and critical mixed race studies?

Abstracts of maximum 400 words to be submitted before March 1, 2017 at: mixedintimacies-fdr@uva.nl

Check our website for regular updates of conference information and practical matters http://acelg.uva.nl/mixedintimacies

The conference will be held at University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Conference organizers:

• Prof. Betty de Hart Amsterdam, Centre for European Law and Governance (ACELG), University of Amsterdam
• Prof. Lies Wesseling, Maastricht Centre for Gender and Diversity, Maastricht University
• Stichting LovingDay.NL

View in PDF here.

“Obama, Post-Racialism and the New American Dilemma,” a lecture by Dr. Zebulon Vance Miletsky

Frank Melville, Jr. Memorial Library
2nd Floor, E-2340 (Special Collections Seminar Room)
Stony Brook University
Stony Brook, New York 11794
2017-02-13, 14:00-15:00 EST (Local Time)

Zebulon Vance Miletsky, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies
Stony Brook University

The election of Barack Obama in 2008 as the 44th President of the United States, raised hopes for many that as a country we were entering a post-racial moment, that the twin legacies of oppression and slavery were overcome, not only in the United States, but the world. That same period, however, brought crises of authority caused by neo-liberalism, police violence, and mass incarceration that have consistently set back the very racial progress that Obama’s presidency seemed to inaugurate. Far from being post-racial, the Obama years were a period of constant racial crisis, the repercussions of which were felt daily since the killings of Eric Garner in New York and Michael Brown in Ferguson in the summer of 2014. It took the election of an African American to the nation’s highest office to uncover a level of racial hatred the likes of which we have not seen since the 1960s, requiring an analysis of the relationship between multiracialism and post-racialism, as well as how whiteness operates in the United States, to fully appreciate what has come to pass. The election of Donald Trump as President has been a clear rejection of the post-racial era ushered in by Obama. Much like our more recent experiment in racial democracy, there are parallels between what happened with the overthrow of Reconstruction, America’s startling experiment in biracial democracy after the Civil War and today. The historical roots of the “whitelash” that fueled Trump’s victory lie in a prior racial backlash to an unprecedented attempt to grant African Americans citizenship during the period of Reconstruction. Based on a book chapter-in-progress for a volume on the Black Intellectual Tradition in America, this presentation discusses how the 21st century could potentially mark a new low in American race relations—or a “new American dilemma”.

Dr. Zebulon Vance Miletsky is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and a historian specializing in recent African-American History, Civil Rights and Black Power, Urban History, Mixed Race and Biracial identity, and Hip-Hop Studies. His research interests include: African-Americans in Boston; Northern freedom movements outside of the South; Mixed race history in the U.S. and passing; and the Afro-Latin diaspora. He is the author of numerous articles, reviews, essays and book chapters and is currently working on a manuscript on the civil rights movement in Boston. Ph.D.; African-American Studies with a concentration in History, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 2008.

For more information, click here.

Why A New Mixed Race Generation Will Not Solve Racism

BuzzFeed
2017-02-10

Lauren Michele Jackson, BuzzFeed Contributor
Chicago, Illinois

A promotional still from A United Kingdom. Fox Searchlight Pictures

Love may trump hate, but it can’t cure white supremacy.

On January 23, Chrissy Teigen — model, “domestic goddess,” and number one John Legend troll — decided to have some fun with Richard Spencer on Twitter. Now best known as the neo-Nazi who got punched at the January 20 presidential inauguration, Spencer was salving his wounded pride with a “selection of Nelson Mandela quotes. 😉”. The tweet to which Teigen responded, however, was actually a quote from Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung. “I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become,” Spencer tweeted. Teigen’s @reply: “you became someone who was punched in the face.”

When Spencer attempted to embarrass Teigen, implying she was not educated enough to recognize a quote from Mandela (while, again, the quote in question was not from Mandela), Teigen responded with “you are a literally a nazi. I don’t even need to come up with a comeback. Thanks, nazi!” Teigen meanwhile tweeted to her followers sans @reply, “Hey guys, just conversing with a literal nazi over here wyd,” followed by “Nothing I could say will piss him off more than the fact I have a black/asian/white baby. Life is grand.”.

A month prior, Ellen Pompeo of Grey’s Anatomy summoned her black husband and mixed children in a similar maneuver, if under slightly different circumstances. Against criticism she received for her usage of brown emojis in a tweet applauding A&E’s decision to revamp its (now canceled) docuseries on the KKK, Pompeo told followers, “You do realize…being married to a black man and having black children can make you a target from racist white people right? That’s a thing.” In response to one user’s taunt (“SHUT UP, WHITE LADY”) she tweeted, “That’s white lady with a black husband and black children to you babe.”

In their respective contexts, the tweets from Teigen and Pompeo look very different if not completely contradictory. Chrissy Teigen snubs the nose of a professed white supremacist and flounces away with her superstar black husband and multiracial child; Pompeo calls up her black husband and children to deflect criticism. And yet, very similarly, both position interracial relationships — implied in Teigen’s case — and multiracial children as the antidote to racism. That they are both able to invoke this rationale so congruently points to a culture-wide infatuation with interracial relationships and their heteronormative outcome, multiracial children. In advertising, on film, and on TV, there is a common preference for multiracial-looking people, along with the belief that they represent a utopian political future. Why do multiracial children so often function as the antonym for racism? What is the political value of an interracial relationship? The notion that cream-colored babies will save the world is a popular one. Unfortunately, it’s a myth…

Read the entire article here.

The Checkered Past of Brazil’s New Race Court (JWJI Race & Difference Colloquium Series)

Jones Room, Woodruff Library
The James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference
Emory University
Atlanta, Georgia 30322
Monday, 2017-02-06, 12:00-13:30 EST (Local Time)

Ruth Hill, Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Humanities, Professor of Spanish
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee

A categorical crisis around racially-mixed persons has become a legal quagmire in Brazil. In August 2016, the Brazilian government announced the formation of the Racial Court (Tribunal Racial) to confront the steady stream of legal challenges that has beset the racial segment of the country’s Quotas System (Sistema de Cotas). The latter is an affirmative-action program giving preference to the disabled, the economically-disadvantaged, graduates of public schools, and specific racial groups (Amerindians and persons of African ancestry) in government offices and higher education. Litigation and media attention are centered on the program’s interstitial racial category, pardo. The category preto—the straightforward “black” in Brazil until it was jettisoned in educated quarters for negro, “negro”—and the category pardo (of European and an undefined amount of African and/or native origins) are often treated as subsets of the category negro. Still, color not descent is invoked when it is stated that persons “of pardo color” or “preto color” are eligible for the racial quotas for government posts, which are set aside “for negros and pardos.”

Whether colors or categories, where does pardo end and branco (“white”) or negro begin? In other words, when does afrodescendente (“Afro-descendant”) end and branco begin? In this Race and Difference Colloquium, Ruth Hill (Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Humanities, Professor of Spanish, Vanderbilt University) argues that the pardo problem of today streams from the first global and systematic investigation into racial admixture, in the sixteenth century, which came on the heels of legislation to “uplift” Catholic neophytes in the Iberian empires. Those centuries-old arguments over mixed-race neophytes anticipated the moral and legal dilemmas of Brazil’s present-day affirmative-action program.

The Race and Difference Colloquium Series, a weekly event on the Emory University campus, features local and national speakers presenting academic research on contemporary questions of race and intersecting dimensions of difference. The James Weldon Johnson Institute is pleased to have the Robert W. Woodruff Library and the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript and Rare Book Library as major co-sponsors of the Colloquium Series.

On the Precipice of a “Majority-Minority” America: Perceived Status Threat From the Racial Demographic Shift Affects White Americans’ Political Ideology

Psychological Science
Volume 25, Issue 6 (2014-06-01)
pages 1189-1197
DOI: 10.1177/0956797614527113

Maureen A. Craig, Assistant Professor of Psychology
New York University

Jennifer A. Richeson, Philip R. Allen Professor of Psychology
Yale University

The U.S. Census Bureau projects that racial minority groups will make up a majority of the U.S. national population in 2042, effectively creating a so-called majority-minority nation. In four experiments, we explored how salience of such racial demographic shifts affects White Americans’ political-party leanings and expressed political ideology. Study 1 revealed that making California’s majority-minority shift salient led politically unaffiliated White Americans to lean more toward the Republican Party and express greater political conservatism. Studies 2, 3a, and 3b revealed that making the changing national racial demographics salient led White Americans (regardless of political affiliation) to endorse conservative policy positions more strongly. Moreover, the results implicate group-status threat as the mechanism underlying these effects. Taken together, this work suggests that the increasing diversity of the nation may engender a widening partisan divide.

Read the entire article here.

Why white liberals need to figure out how to talk about race

KUOW.org: 94.9 FM, Seattle News & Information
2017-01-06

By Katherine Banwell & Jamala Henderson

Professor Ralina Joseph at the University of Washington says to just start talking about race. University of Washington

Why is race so hard to discuss? Ralina Joseph, founding director of the University of Washington’s Center for Communication, Difference, and Equity, talked about coded racial language, from Seattle liberals to Trump. This is a transcript from her interview, lightly edited for clarity…

Listen to the interview (00:04:12) here.

Exploring Classification of Black-White Biracial Students in Oregon Schools

University of Oregon
December 2012
145 pages

Deana M. James

Presented to the Department of Educational Methodology, Policy, and Leadership  and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Multiracial children constitute one of the fastest growing racial groups in the United States. However, biracial children, in particular Black-White biracial children, often are not recognized in the educational system. For instance, the current classification of Black-White biracial students in the state and federal educational systems is not disaggregated and does not allow for analyses of educational outcomes for this population. Not only is this population invisible in state education data, the demographic data at the school level often fail to represent this population. Not acknowledging multiple heritages dismisses the identity and experiences of students who are multiracial and thus symbolically negates a part of who they are. Additionally, multiracial students may be classified in a single category by administrators for the purposes of schools and funding. This study offers the perspective of administrators and current state and federal policies on this issue as applied to Black-White self-identified children and describes the complexities and relevance of addressing multiracial policies in educational systems. An ecological theoretical framework is used to explore four research questions in this area. Data were collected from seven school district administrators across Oregon through semi-structured interviews and document analysis. Relationships in the data between responses and procedures from the seven sampled school districts are examined. Results suggest that across the seven school districts in this study, implementation of the policies and procedures of racial and ethnic categorization varied substantially. Furthermore, even though this revised race and ethnicity reporting policy was in part created to more accurately represent the multiracial population, it may actually be obscuring the multiple identities of these students. Detailed policy implications are discussed in further details in the Conclusions chapter.

Read the entire dissertation here.

Obama Tapped His Inner Krazy Kat When He Taught Us to Embrace Mutts

The Daily Beast
2017-01-18

Michael Tisserand

Michael Tisserand is the author of Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White.

A self-described ‘mutt,’ Obama encouraged us to think about race in ways that erased the color line. But George Herriman, another mutt, and his creation Krazy Kat were there first.

Read the entire article here.