Mixed Race Studies

Reflections on Multiracial Identity on Another Thanksgiving Passed

Black Agenda Report: News, information and analysis from the black left.
2015-12-01

Danny Haiphong

The U.S. imperial domain floats on raw force and fairy tales. One myth “paints the U.S. as a safe haven for people of different backgrounds instead of the genocidal settler state that it is.” Another tale holds that multi-racial identity “carries with it new experiences with racism not yet easily understood or dealt with.” The truth is, the U.S.is racist to the core, and “proponents of multiracial identity possess little interest in solidarity.”

Over the last few years, much discussion has occurred in the US corporate media around the demographic shift in the US. Reports have verified that white Americans will be minorities in the general population after 2042. This impending change has struck fear in the eyes of the racist, rightwing sector of society and romanticism in the minds of the racist, white liberal sector of society. The right has responded with racist terror while self-identified white liberals have found new ways to boast of the so-called “progress” of US capitalist society. Multiracial identity has been a key concept recently devised to sanitize the racial political order of the US.

The politics of multiracial identity are a product of the same liberal mythology so embedded in the Thanksgiving holiday. This ideology, promoted by the liberal sector of the ruling class, celebrates Thanksgiving as proof that the US is a “nation of immigrants.” Thanksgiving positions the US as a cooperative society. The fairy tale paints the US as a safe haven for people of different backgrounds instead of the genocidal settler state that it is.

Similarly, multiracial identity has been featured in corporate media such as the New York Times as a product of an increasingly tolerant, diverse US Empire. The US corporate media is quick to cite how more self-identified “Americans” are marrying between racial groups and how migrations of peoples from Africa, Asia, and Latin America have increased as well. These developments are indeed fact. However, the past and present exploitation that underlies their meaning is left out of the discussion in the same manner that the continued plight and resistance of indigenous peoples is left out of the Thanksgiving narrative…

Read the entire article here.

Chasing Daybreak: A Film About Mixed Race in America

University of Michigan
Shapiro Undergraduate Library
919 South University Avenue
Screening Room 2160
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1185
2016-01-19, 12:00-14:00 CST (Local Time)

Karen E Downing, Host Contact

This is one of a year-long series of events that explore what it means to be multiracial in a monoracially conceived world.

In 2005, the MAVIN Foundation, the nation’s largest mixed race organization, sponsored the Generation MIX National Awareness Tour to raise awareness of America’s multiracial baby boom. Chasing Daybreak (2006, 71 min.) follows the five Generation MIX crew members as they travel 10,000 miles across the country in a 26-foot R.V. and spark discussions on race, mixed race and diversity. As the crew meets with hundreds of people from U.S. Senator Barack Obama to Bubba the tow truck driver, they share their hopes, fears and aspirations for the future of race in America.

The screening will be followed by a discussion. For more information, click here.

Are multiracial millennials leading the way towards an inclusive society?

MPR News with Kerri Miller
Minnesota Public Radio
Tuesday, 2015-08-25, 14:00Z (09:00 CDT, 10:00 EDT)

Kerri Miller, Host

Jose Santos, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Metropolitan State University, St. Paul, Minnesota

Rainier Spencer, Vice Provost for Academic Affairs; Associate Vice President for Diversity Initiatives; Chief Diversity Officer
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

“Demographically, multiracial Americans are younger—and strikingly so—than the country as a whole. According to Pew Research Center analysis of the 2013 American Community Survey, the median age of all multiracial Americans is 19, compared with 38 for single-race Americans,” —Pew Research Center.

While the nation’s multiracial population is growing – does that make our culture more understanding of issues of diversity?

MPR News host Kerri Miller hosts an engaging discussion on this question with her guests, callers and online commenters.

Listen to the interview (00:41:36) here. Download the interview here.

OPINION: Mixed raced children will not fix racism

Eyewitness News
Johannesburg/Cape Town, South Africa
2015-12-02

Danielle Bowler

Images courtesy of Tarryn Hatchett.

Danielle Bowler says being a visibly mixed-raced person is often to encounter yourself as a perpetual question.

Logging onto social media last week, I came across a meme that is frequently posted without interrogation of what it means or implies. ‘End Racism. Have mixed babies’. The images that appeared alongside these words are of light-skinned children, with blue eyes or masses of curls. A popular idea of what mixed raced children look like. A popular ‘type’ that is favoured, because of an appearance that is close to white, yet simultaneously ‘exotic’ and ‘other’.

The problematic idea that we can fix racism through outbreeding it, shares a similar logic with the notion that mixed babies are cuter, and the assumption that if we date, marry or befriend people across racial lines we cannot still be racist. It ignores how we can and often do make exceptions out of people who we are in intimate relationships or friendships with.

As Ella Sackville Adjei points out in her story about her ‘racist one night stand’, ‘racists don’t wear badges’ and not being racist is not as simple as being intimate with someone of another race to you. But it also ignores the fact that those mixed raced children are born into a world structured by race.

But the idea that we can fix racism through making everyone visibly mixed still has currency. Despite the existence of mixed raced people and race-homogenous societies in the world, where race still matters. Despite evidence that race’s logic runs deep. Despite reality…

Read the entire article here.

Love in the face of racism: Being an interracial family

Cable News Network (CNN)
2015-11-25

Jareen Imam, Social Discovery Producer

CNN)—When Karen Garsee picked her 5-year-old daughter up from kindergarten in September, she wasn’t prepared for what Kaylee had to say.

The kids at school wouldn’t play with me today.

Why?

Because I’m brown.

Those words struck Garsee right in the heart. Being white, she didn’t know what she could say to make her daughter feel better. At that moment, they simply embraced.

“I didn’t think kids at that age really thought about other kids being different,” Garsee says.

That wouldn’t be the last time the schoolchildren didn’t want to play with Kaylee.

“We live in the South and racism is loud and it’s still out there,” Garsee says.

A CNN/Kaiser Family Foundation Poll on race found that about half (49%) of Americans say racism is a big problem in our society. Compare that to 2011 when 28% said racism was a big problem. And in 1995, shortly after the O.J. Simpson trial and a couple of years after the race riots in Los Angeles, 41% of people said racism was a big societal problem…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed-race marriages a reflection of multicultural Blacktown

The Daily Telegraph
Surry Hills, New South Wales, Australia
2015-12-01

Nick Houghton

Joanne Vella, Editor
Blacktown Advocate

• Quakers Hill one of Blacktown’s most livable suburbs
• Iranian migrant calls ‘multicultural tolerant’ Australia home

WHEN Stephen Zahra went on a four-week holiday to Vietnam in 2006, little did he know how life changing the trip would be.

His love for Vietnam inspired him to quit his job and move permanently to the southeast east Asian nation.

It was a decision which would lead him to the love of his life, his wife Dao Nguyen, and the start of his present day life back in Australia as a happily married father of daughter Hayley.

Stephen, a second generation Maltese, and Vietnamese Dao are the changing face of Australian families and the multicultural melting pot which is Blacktown.

“Our wedding day in Ho Chi Minh City was probably the biggest reminder how big the mix of cultures is between Dao and myself,” Stephen said.

“My family flew over for the wedding and despite having no ability to speak Vietnamese with Dao’s family found a way to communicate and make the day truly memorable…

Read the entire article here.

Afro-Latinas Work for Cultural Survival

teleSUR
2015-03-20

Mai’a Williams
Quito, Ecuador

In recent years, there has been a resurgence of Afro-Latino youth in the U.S. rooting themselves, their families and their communities in their African heritages as a way to create cultures of resistance to the dominant narratives of colonization and white supremacy.

These movements have been for the most part led by Afro-Latina women who live within the intersections of oppression, gender, class, race, and immigration. They take inspiration from the past, as well as the future. And they work to co-create cultures that can fight against the overwhelming tide of erasure of their own African diasporic existences.The work of embracing Afro-Latino identity is a work for cultural survival and connection.

The U.S. Census Bureau reported that in 2010, 2.5 percent of the 54 million Latinos living in the United States co-identified as black. Many Latinos say that number is a significant undercount. Nicholas Jones, chief of the Bureau’s Racial Statistics Branch said, “I believe that what we’re hearing from the Afro-Latino community is that they do not believe that those numbers accurately illustrate the Afro-Latino community presence in the United States, and that’s the dialogue that we’re having.”

In the same census, over half of Latinos also identified themselves as white and 36 percent marked themselves as “some other race.”…

Read the entire article here.

The challenges of being multiracial

The Santa Fe New Mexican
2015-11-16

Sakara Griffith, Sophomore
Santa Fe High School, Santa Fe, New Mexico

There is a photo of a black family featuring smiling faces of joy, with some of the participants wearing ugly, matching sweaters that grandma knitted and a brother and sister caught on camera fighting over who gets to sit in the front.

And in the center of the photo is a girl with green eyes, tan skin and blond curly hair. She is Santa Fe High School sophomore Irie Charity, whose racial background is a mix of African, Hawaiian and German.

“Yup, I’m the white words on the chalkboard in that picture,” Charity said. She said everyone knows she is of “mixed” race.

Brandi Wells, program adviser for the African American Student Services program at The University of New Mexico, said coming from two different racial backgrounds impacts even the most minute details of your home life.

She should know, as she is a mix of African-American and Hispanic.

“Even your menu at home becomes huge, like I grew up eating fried chicken and enchiladas. I was eating jambalaya one day and beans and chile the next,” Wells said.

Is growing up with a mix of two (or more) racial and cultural backgrounds difficult? Wells thinks so.

“America’s not ready to handle mixed people,” she said…

Read the entire article here.

Living Room – March 26, 2010

Living Room
94.1 KPFA
Berkeley, California
2010-03-26

LIVING ROOM Friday 26 March 2010 Healthcare eternal battle; Blended Nation. Healthcare insurance reform has passed—sort of; yet more hurdles continue to be erected. We look at reality. PLUS: the reality of race, as a blend, not an absolute. With host Kris Welch, noon to one.

Guests:

Ellen Shaffer, co-dir Center for Policy Analysis
Prof. Robt. Schapiro, Emory University School of Law
Enzo Pastore, health policy specialist, Progressive States Network
Michael Lighty, California Nurses Association

Mike Tauber, Pamela Singh, co-authors “Blended Nation: Portraits and Interviews of Mixed-Race America”

Listen to the episode here. Download the episode here.

Census Bureau Statement on Classifying Filipinos

United States Census Bureau
2015-11-09
Release Number: CB15-RTQ.26

Public Information Office: 301-763-3030

NOV. 9, 2015 — The Census Bureau has no current plans to classify Filipinos outside of the Asian race category. Filipinos are classified as Asian on Census Bureau forms based on the Office of Management and Budget’s definition, which specifically states that people whose origins are from the Philippine Islands are part of the category Asian.

According to OMB, Asian refers to a person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent, including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand and Vietnam.

At this time, the Census Bureau is conducting the 2015 National Content Test and is testing the design of the race question for the 2020 Census. This test will frame the recommendations for the 2020 Census race question, which has Filipino as an example under the Asian category.