Mixed Race Studies

Colonial Proximities: Crossracial Encounters and Juridical Truths in British Columbia, 1871–1921 (review)

Canadian Journal of Law and Society
Volume 25, Number 1, 2010
E-ISSN: 1911-0227 Print ISSN: 0829-3201
DOI: 10.1353/jls.0.0104

Eve Darian-Smith, Professor of Law and Society
University of California, Santa Barbara

Colonial Proximities is a scholarly, innovative, and illuminating exploration of law, race, and society in the British Columbian colonial periphery. It makes a significant contribution to postcolonial studies in its exploration of the complexities of British settler societies’ engagement with racial differences and of the managing of such differences through a range of laws, strategies of governance, and bio-political techniques. Its singular contribution is to bring together colonial histories of European–Native contact and European dealings with the increasing presence of Chinese immigrant populations, along with the growing and unruly classes of “half-breeds.” Because the author links Native studies with migrant studies and reads these two sites of racial engagement as interconnected and mutually constitutive, the analysis presented is rich and deep, filled with the narratives, constructions, and often conflicting ambiguities of race that preoccupied colonial administrators, missionaries, and legal agents in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Building upon Mary Louise Pratt’s conceptualization of the “contact zone,” where peoples geographically and historically separated are brought into the same social space and forced to confront their mutual relations, Renisa Mawani underscores the interracial and cross-racial dimensions of the contact zone in British Columbia.

Read or purchase the article here.

Second Biennial: Interdisciplinary Conference on Race – Examining Race in the 21st Century

2010-11-11 through 2010-11-13
Monmouth University, West Long Branch, New Jersey

The idea of race continues to be controversial. In spite of different historical developments in various parts of the world, the meaning of race and its significance remains an open issue.

Some of the questions this conference will address are:

• Why do the issues that surround race continue to be important?
• Is race a useful construct?

How are systems of racial classification and identity manifested in social institutions and relationships?
We seek individual papers, panels, workshops, and posters that can include but are not restricted to the following topics:

• Race and identity in different cultures
• Race, gender, ethnicity, color, and class
• Race in the Obama era
• Race and diversity in higher education
• The concept of post-racialism in history and society
• Race and popular culture
• Race and urbanization
• Race change[s]: Racial formation, then and now
• Race and identity in local and global perspective
• Race, continuity, and change
• Implications of racial discourse
• Race and ethnicity: similarities and differences
• Race and power

The deadline for the submission of abstracts is 2010-08-30.

For more information, click here.

Telling “Forgotten” Métis Histories through Family, Community, and Individuals [Book Review]

H-Net Reviews
October 2009

Camie Augustus
University of Saskatchewan

David McNab, Ute Lischke, eds. The Long Journey of a Forgotten People: Métis Identities and Family Histories. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007. viii + 386 pp. (paper), ISBN 978-0-88920-523-9.

“We are still here.” This opening line from The Long Journey of a Forgotten People is fitting for a collection of essays on Métis identity. Although they are, as the editors tell us, “no longer Canada’s forgotten people,” a pre-1980s historiographical tradition in Canada had, indeed, forgotten them by confining them to a secondary role in Canada’s national story. If we were to take our cue from this historiography, the Métis did not survive very long into the twentieth century, and had no history outside the political and economic contributions they made to Canada’s founding—particularly through their involvement in the fur trade and in the creation of Manitoba. The Riel-centrism which subsequently dominated in the literature, at least up to the 1980s, only confirmed the illusion that Métis history was one-dimensional and event-based. Consequently, so many of the stories, histories, and cultural practices of the Métis remained (and still remain) relatively unknown in academic literature. However, more recent changes in both focus and methodology have resulted in a new approach to Métis history. The Long Journey of a Forgotten People, edited by Ute Lischke and David T. McNab, contributes to this growing field with a volume of essays that shifts the perspective from the national and political to the local and cultural by creating history through kinship, genealogy, and biography…

Read the entire review here.

Ethics of Racial Identity

Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association
108th Annual Conference
2010-11-13 through 2010-11-14
Chaminade University, Honolulu, Hawaii

Presiding Officer: Adebe DeRango-Adem, York University

Barack Obama benefited from the spirit of tolerance that defined Hawaii’s racial climate. This special session envisions a mixed-race literature in the age of Obama that forwards not solely theorizations of what mixed race identities are, but an ethics for treating mixed race identification in literature. It is designed to re-situate mixedness/interraciality within the field of literary inquiry as a question of the ethical treatment of racialized figures.

‘Celtic Samurai’ Tells Story of Hapa Family Life

Hokubei.com – North America’s Japanese Newsource
2010-06-18

“Celtic Samurai,” a storytelling program by Dr. Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu on the family life of a Japanese mother and American-born Irish father, will be presented by the Japanese American National Library and the Nichi Bei Weekly on Saturday, June 19, [2010] at 1:30 p.m. in the Union Bank Hospitality Room, located in the Japan Center’s East Mall, Post and Buchanan streets in San Francisco.

The subtitle, “A Boy’s Transcultural Journey Searching for Shamrocks in Zen Gardens,” expresses the playful nature of the stories that illuminate how political, legal and ideological forces influence the lives of families and individual identities

Read the entire article here.

Developing a positive racial identity–challenges for psychotherapists working with black and mixed race adopted adults

The Psychotherapist
Spring 2010
pages 10-12

Esther Ina-Egbe, Psychotherapist, Counsellor and Trainer

In this article, Esther Ina-Egbe argues that psychotherapists need to explore the repetitions and lack of mirroring that may be present in the therapeutic relationship

There is a huge body of knowledge on the development of racial identity. This article has been influenced by notable writers and critics, such as Schwartz, and Armstrong and Slaytor, who have carried out extensive work on this topic. I have also consulted other writers and formed my own opinion and judgments based on my experience in private practice.

What is racial identity?
Before addressing how to develop a positive racial identity, we must first look at what racial identity is. Armstrong and Slaytor consider that children as young as two and a half years old are aware of racial differences, and that development of a positive racial identity does not just happen but must be cultivated. Bath and North-East Somerset Council has defined racial identity as ‘one’s self perception and sense of belonging to a particular group including not only how one describes and defines oneself, but also how one distinguishes oneself from other ethnic groups’. According to this definition, racial and ethnic group differences will certainly impact on children’s social development, although that impact may differ according to age and specific ethnicity. Hence, social context, immediate surroundings and historical heritage are underpinning factors in the development of a child’s race awareness and identity…

…Mixed race heritage
Having a mixed ethnic heritage has a different effect on a child’s development (Herring, 1992), and it is therefore very important to actively help mixed race children acquire a positive self-concept. They need exposure to models of all the ethnicities they embrace. They need to understand what it means to be mixed race and to acquire coping skills linked to their cultures, including ways to deal with racism and discrimination (Wardle, 1987).  Referring to the American experience, where there is dearth of fully integrated, stable and tension-free racially mixed communities, Miller and Rotheram-Borus (1994) advise that ‘families and schools must work hard to provide a supportive community that affirms multi-racialism’. A key factor in the lives of mixed race children and adults is how they are labelled by themselves, their families and society in general. Root (1996) views labels as a motivating factor, stating that ‘labels are important vehicles for self-empowerment as there has been an increase in the self-determination of interracial families’. Many have become active politically to ensure that they are accepted as a group with special concerns separate from other racial or ethnic populations. A recent example is the current president of the USA, Barack Obama.

Mixed race children and adults need to work through internal conflicts and guilt about having to develop an identity that might not incorporate all aspects of their heritage and to resist internalising society’s negative attitudes, mixed racialism and minority status. Ultimately, successful identity formation, or a satisfying feeling of wholeness, requires that mixed race people appreciate and integrate all components of their heritage into their lives (Poston, 1990). Furthermore, while some families help their children develop a biracial identity based on the components of their particular background, it is important for children to take equal pride in all their heritages and to maintain equal connections with all members of their family. According to Pinderhughes (1995), some of these families recognise that their children’s appearance reflects their dual heritage and they want the family’s culture to embody that. However, other families foster their children’s identification with only one race. Single parents, especially, may want to emphasise the culture of their own race because that is what they know best and because their children resemble them (Mills, 1994). Some parents of children with African ancestry may assume that society will consider the children black, so they raise them as black to better prepare them for their treatment in later life (Morrison and Rodgers, 1996). In addition, society may encourage children only to identify with their minority group in an effort to maintain the ‘racial purity’ of whites. Conversely, some mixed race children may be urged to assume a white identity on the assumption that if they can ‘pass’ as white they can avoid experiencing racism (Miller and Rotheram-Borus, 1994)…

Read the entire article here.

2010 Hurst Prize Winner: Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally

Legal History Blog
2010-06-03

Mary L. Dudziak, Judge Edward J. and Ruey L. Guirado Professor of Law, History and Political Science
University of Southern California

Peggy Pascoe, University of Oregon, Department of History, has won the Willard Hurst Prize for 2010 from the Law and Society Association for her new book, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Oxford University Press). Here’s the Prize Committee’s citation:

What Comes Naturally is a comprehensive, interesting, and important sociolegal history that takes us through the history of miscegenation law beyond its commonly accepted geography. It analyzes how by “naturalizing” miscegenation law, politics, religious beliefs and scientific knowledge came together to sustain a set of legal parameters that eventually became policy in the post Civil War world throughout the United States, enhancing and expanding the Black/White race dichotomy, while complicating it in gendered terms. The book is an outstanding contribution richly nuanced and insightful. It expands our understanding of conceptions of race, not only in the South, but elsewhere. It contains as well a superb elucidation of the role that gender played in the process of defining and elaborating on miscegenation…

Read the entire article here.

The Transformation of U.S. Racial and Ethnic Identities in Global Media

Contact Spaces of American Culture: LOCALIZING GLOBAL PHENOMENA
36th International Conference of the Austrian Association for American Studies (AAAS)
Department of American Studies, University of Graz
2009-10-22 through 2009-10-25

Shelleen Greene, Assistant Professor of Digital Studio Practice and Theory
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Through an analysis of the DreamWorks SKG 2008 release Tropic Thunder, this essay investigates how the rhetoric of race and ethnicity in U.S. films is influenced and transformed through their circulation within the global film market. Engaging Arjun Appardurai’s work on
global culture in the digital era, in particular his model of the mediascape, or the production and distribution of images through electronic media platforms that are used to create “imagined worlds”, “narratives of the other” and “protonarratives of possible lives”, I examine contemporary “Hollywood” films that speak not only to industrial shifts, such as film financing as well as film productions across national boundaries, but also to the ways these new circulations lead to a re-consideration of racial and ethnic identities that are no longer bound to the nation-state. Tropic Thunder garnered media attention and controversy for its use of blackface performance. However, I argue that while the film’s reception was mired in discussion of the historical legacy of racial stereotypes in American film, the broader implications of Tropic Thunder’s critique of Hollywood’s hegemonic role within global cinema has remained unexamined. As a pastiche of the Vietnam War film and a satire of the Hollywood film industry, I suggest that Tropic Thunder’s use of blackface performance must be read in light of the film’s ruminations on American cultural imperialism. The film’s meditation on the role of Hollywood in the global film industry can be read through a comparison of the film’s explicit blackface performance (Robert Downey Jr.) and what can be considered its performance of racial drag in the character of Les Grossman (Tom Cruise). Ultimately, films such as Tropic Thunder index a shift in the reception and consumption of racial identities due to their dissemination within the global cinema, but also point to the continued use of racial performance and stereotype to sustain the Hollywood industry in a rapidly transforming and highly competitive global film economy.

…Testified by his own tongue-and-cheek portrayal and response to the performance and film overall, it is evident that Downey Jr.’s performance is markedly different from what was the norm of popular American culture some sixty years ago. Not only should we consider changing notions of race brought about by genetic science, proving that one’s racial identity is arbitrarily related to one’s skin color, but also a radical shift in the American political, social and cultural landscape that has seen the rise and fall of affirmative action, the first census to allow a “mixed-race” designation, and the acknowledgement of race as a construct. We find ourselves in the era of self-reflexive racial performance, as seen in the comedic work of Dave Chappelle, or the emblematic and troubling figure of post-race, Michael Jackson. “Race” is no longer taken as an inherent quality of the subject, but one that can be performed or produced through surgical procedure. That Robert Downey Jr.’s performance speaks to these shifts in the popular conceptualization of race is not surprising…

Read the entire paper here.

Even discussing ‘angry black man’ stereotype provokes anger

CNN
2010-06-16

John Blake

(CNN) — Here are some sound bites from the post-racial era:

“The long legged Mac Daddy in the White House is angry this morning. Seems to me we should change the name to the Black House for the next few years. Your news organization obviously is very racist.”

And:

“I don’t care what anyone says. If Obama takes to heart the calls for anger in this crisis all bets are off! White America will dump him right on his black a#s.”

Last week, CNN published an article entitled “Why Obama doesn’t dare become the ‘angry black man’ ” after critics complained that President Obama had not displayed enough anger in response to the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster.

The article quoted scholars on race relations who said many white Americans would be unsettled by Obama losing his temper because he would evoke the stereotype of the angry African-American man.

…The phrase comes as no surprise to Rainier Spencer, director of Afro-American Studies Program at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas.

Spencer said the angry black man stereotype has its origins in slavery. During slavery, white men feared black men like Nat Turner who resisted slavery. They were the black men who led slave insurrections and were sold further South. They were called Bucks.

“There’s the image of the minstrel, the happy, silly Negro who is fun to watch and laugh at. But the other one—the Buck—is the one you have to be careful about,” Spencer said.

The angry black man stereotype persisted after the end of slavery, Spencer said. Black militants in the civil rights movement; today’s black male rap artists—all are equated with some variation of the angry black man, Spencer said.

But Spencer said the angry black man stereotype doesn’t have the bite it once had. Certain black male public figures—Obama, Colin Powell—can display anger…

Why do we have to talk so much about race?

But who says a black man is running the country?

Some readers got miffed because CNN identified Obama as a black president. He’s biracial, they say.

“CNN get your facts straight—he is an angry half-black man! CNN you are a bunch of idiot race-baiters.”

Another:

“Maybe the 50 percent white part of him keeps the 50 percent angry black part calm and collected and on an even keel. Hmmm, that might be worthy of a university study! Could be ground-breaking science here! I’ll bet the guvment’ would even pay for it!”

Spencer, the race scholar from UNLV, said that Obama has already made his identity choice. He identified himself as black on his census form. He is perceived and accepted as black my most African-Americans.

Obama’s racial background doesn’t make him unlike most blacks; it makes him similar to most blacks, Spencer said.

Spencer, who is writing a book on mixed race, said an estimated 90 percent of African-Americans have white ancestors, including Michelle Obama, the first lady.

“It doesn’t make sense to talk about mixed race unless you’re going to include all 30 million African-Americans,” said Spencer, author of the upcoming book, “Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix.”…

Read the entire article here.

U.S. far from an interracial melting pot

CNN
2010-06-16

Daniel T. Lichter, Ferris family professor in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management, and Professor of Sociology
Cornell University

Ithaca, New York (CNN)—According to a recent report by the Pew Research Center, one of every seven new marriages in 2008 was interracial or interethnic—the highest percentage in U.S. history. The media and blogosphere have been atwitter.

Finally, it seems, we have tangible evidence of America’s entry into a new post-racial society, proof of growing racial tolerance. Intermarriage trends are being celebrated as a positive sign that we have come to think of all Americans as, well, Americans…

…It’s time for everyone—on all sides of this issue—to relax and take a deep breath. The reality is that racial boundaries remain firmly entrenched in American society. They are not likely to go away anytime soon.

We are still far from a melting pot where distinct racial and ethnic groups blend into a multi-ethnic stew…

Read the entire article here.