Mixed Race Studies

Mixed Race Across the Pacific

University of Southern California
Freshman Seminars
Spring 2013

Duncan Williams, Associate Professor of Religion

In an era when a mixed-race President of the United States proudly proclaims himself as the first Pacific President of America, how might we rethink the study of race in a global, rather than merely a regional, perspective? With the recent changes to the U.S. Census that allows for multiple racial identifications, how might race and race relations be recast when multiplicity, hybridity, and creolization marks everyone from Obama’s half-American/half-Indonesian half-sister to the so-called black golfer Tiger Woods, who is actually primarily Asian?

This course investigates how shifting the paradigm of race studies to the Asia Pacific Americas (Transpacific) experience of race disrupts and reorients the traditionally binary, black/white or white/colored Transatlantic model of race studies in the United States that emerged from a focus on the Transatlantic slave trade. By examining the legacies of Western and Japanese empires in Korea, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands and the legacies of disaporic communities in North and South Americas we will reframe the lens through which we approach race studies. Our second focus is to look at miscegenation, creolization, and how mixed race disrupts simplistic racial category formations. We will study comparative anti-miscegenation laws across transnational boundaries and the role of the offspring of mixed race unions that emerged through migrations, trade flows, and the impact of wars.

Duncan Williams is the chair of the School of Religion and director of the USC Center for Japanese Religions and Culture and the founder of the Hapa Japan Project (a database of mixed-race Japanese people from 1500s to the present) and the Mugen Project (the world’s first online bibliographical database on Buddhism).

Love in black and white

Princeton Alumni Weekly
2009-04-22

Lawrence Otis Graham ’83

Martha Sandweiss examines racial passing in America

Clarence King, a celebrated explorer, geologist, and surveyor in 19th-century America, chose to set that identity aside — and live as a working-class black man during a time of harsh racial segregation in the United States. He did it for love.

King moved back and forth between two sides of the color line: as the very public white, Newport-born, Yale-educated cartographer and researcher of the American West, and at other times as the strangely private man pretending to be a black Pullman train porter and itinerant steelworker (using the alias “James Todd”) who married an African-American woman. Martha Sandweiss, who joined Princeton’s history department this semester, explores King’s double life in her book Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line, published by Penguin Press in February. 

“While racial passing was surely attempted by some light-skinned blacks who wanted to escape the economic disadvantages tied to black life at the time,” explains Sandweiss, “it was virtually unheard-of for whites to voluntarily choose to face social and economic discrimination and live as black people.” But after falling in love with a black nursemaid, Ada Copeland, in 1888, that is what Clarence King did for 13 years. His wife and their five children had no idea that he was, in fact, white, and that he was the famous Clarence King, until he confessed it on his deathbed in 1901…

Read the entire article here.

Woman finds out famous relative was black

The Toronto Star
2011-02-23

Megan Ogilvie, Health Reporter

Growing up in Georgetown, Catherine Slaney knew her great-grandfather had an important and interesting past.

She knew he was a respected doctor and a surgeon in the American Civil War. She knew he was a friend of Abraham Lincoln and had received a gift — the shawl Lincoln wore to his first inauguration — from his widow after the president was killed. She knew he was a coroner in Kent County, Ont., and that he was involved in politics.

But Slaney did not know Dr. Anderson Ruffin Abbott was black…

…The uncle — Slaney’s mother’s brother — knew Abbott was black. His youngest sister, however, had no idea previous generations of her family had passed as white. Or that some family members still kept the secret.

“The family my mother and father knew was white-haired and pale-skinned,” Slaney says. “The question of race just never came up.”

Slaney says finding out Abbott was black cast a new importance on the pieces of history she did know about him. Abbott wasn’t just a doctor — he was the first black Canadian to be a licensed physician. He wasn’t just a coroner — he was the first the first black Canadian to hold the office…

..Slaney turned her research and personal experience into a book, Family Secrets: Crossing the Colour Line, which was published in 2000. She also completed a PhD at the University of Toronto, focusing on racial identity and the practice of passing.

By exploring her past, and finding her black heritage, Slaney says her outlook on the world has expanded…

Read the entire article here.

Being Mixed Race: What are the identity politics of the million-strong ‘Jessica Ennis generation’?

Women of the World Festival
Southbank Centre
2013-03-06 through 2013-03-10

Sunday, 2013-03-10, 12:00-13:00Z
Level 5 Function Room
Royal Festival Hall

Panelists:

Emma Dabiri, Teaching Fellow
Africa Department, School of African and Oriental Studies, London
Visual Sociology Ph.D. Researcher, Goldsmiths University of London

Reya El-Salahi, Radio broadcaster, television presenter, writer and journalist

Kay Montano, Make-up Artist

Chair:

Emine Saner, Feature Writer
The Guardian

In the 2011 census over a million people in the UK classed themselves as ‘mixed race’—but for some, the label is meaningless.

So what are the identity politics of the ‘Jessica Ennis generation’?

Join broadcaster Reya El-Salahi, celebrity make-up artist Kay Montano, and Irish-Nigerian visual sociologist Emma Dabiri as they discuss the joys and challenges of being a dual heritage woman in modern-day Britain.

For more information, click here. Listen to the panel here.

History 101.020: Betwixt and Between in the United States: Boundaries and the People who Defy Them

University of California, Berkeley
Spring 2013

MacKenzie Moore, Visiting Lecturer

This 101 seminar is geared toward any student who wants to study the boundaries among and between people, nations, or states, broadly defined. It is also perfect for those wishing to explore what happens when such barriers are (inevitably) ruptured, questioned, or otherwise revealed to be unstable. Some, but by no means all, possible topics include: immigrant history, Native American/colonial contact, the history of American sexuality, frontier environments, mixed-race communities or individuals, the US/Mexico Borderlands, religious synthesis, or urban communities.  We will begin the semester by exploring theoretical approaches to the question of boundaries and categories and the power that sustains them. We will also discuss what such categories mean to people as they construct communities, nations, and identities. We will then consider specific examples of people who, out of choice or circumstance, defy those boundaries. The rest of the semester will be run as a writing and reading seminar. We will support and encourage each other through peer editing, research partners, and other boundary-crossing activities.

346-Comparative Ethnic Literatures (Reg. No. 22253)

University of Buffalo, The State University of New York
Spring 2013

Susan Muchshima Moynihan, Assistant Professor of English

This course brings together Asian American and African American texts to destabilize our understandings of race; to situate racial formations in political and historical moments marked by the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and national and transnational affiliations; and to consider how literary strategies facilitate political engagement with these issues. The course will proceed in four parts.

Part I “Racial Ambiguity and the Dynamics of Passing” will engage Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars and short stories and essays by Edith Eaton (Sui Sin Far) and Winnifred Eaton (Onoto Watanna) to address how literary representations of the late-19th and early 20th centuries deployed mixed-race identities and attempts to pass within strict racial hierarchies marked by national and international politics…

For more information, click here.

Mixed Race in Britain

Kneeshaw Consulting
2013-03-11

In the 2011 census over a million people in the UK classed themselves as ‘mixed race’ – but for some, the label is unhelpful. The identity politics of the ‘Jessica Ennis generation’ was the subject of a workshop at the Women of the World Festival yesterday at London’s Southbank Centre. The latest data shows that 2.2% of the population are mixed race compared to 1.2% in 2001. Mixed-race is the fastest-growing minority in the UK. With this in mind four young British women of dual heritage talked about their experiences and debated whether having the box of ‘mixed race’ to tick offered them a sense of power or a meaningless classification, no better than ticking the ‘other’ box. Emma Dabiri, an Irish-Nigerian visual sociologist and writer, argued that race does not provide a stable or static concept of identity, but is a social construct. She talked about historical racialisation of identity, and stressed that race mixing does not eliminate racism. She gave examples of the media using images of mixed race people to promote an idea of a hip, cool generation, when in fact the experience of mixed race people, in the wider context of race relations in modern Britain, is complex and brings many challenges…

Read the entire article here.

Barack Obama and the Contest for Identity through Self-Representation: HIST-UA 413

New York University
Spring 2013

Jeffrey Sammons, Professor of History

This course will explore the life and career path of the nation’s first “black” president through a focus on his two autobiographies, which will be studied for their content, style, and grounding in the genre and relationship to select canonical texts of the more distant as well as recent past. The course also will pay close attention to representations by others of Obama by critics, supporters, and neutral commentators through a variety of media from books to film to television and radio to social media. As important as Obama is for his unprecendented political achievements, his multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-national and multi-religious background and experience make him an ideal subject for exploring personal and group identity in a time of apparently increasing concern with Otherness.

AAS 490: Special Topics in Black World Studies: Section 008: Race and “Black Indians”

University of Michigan
Winter 2013
Theme Semester Courses

Tiya Miles, Professor of American Culture, Afroamerican and African Studies, and Native American Studies

This seven week mini course is a special winter 2013 offering for the LSA Theme Semester on Race. The course will introduce students to a range of issues and experiences related to the topic and identity category of “Black Indians.” Popularized in the 1980s by a book of the same title, the term “Black Indians” is often used to identify and describe people of mixed-race African American and Native American ancestry. It is also applied to people with strong bi-cultural connections across these groups who may or may not have Black and native “blood” ties. This class will explore and analyze three major aspects of our subject matter:

1. historical contexts for the interactions of Africans, African Americans and Native Americans;
2. personal experiences stemming from mixed race and bi-cultural Afro-Native identities;
3. meanings and effects of “racial stories” that have been crafted and told about “Black Indians” over time.

Major themes and ideas that will emerge in our discussions include: indigeneity, European and U.S. colonialism, slavery, racial formation and racial hierarchy, mixed-race coupling and family making, tribal sovereignty, personal and community identities, and racial and cultural authenticity.

Textbooks/Other Materials

• Confounding the Color Line, Author: Brooks, James F.
• Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage, Author: written by William Loren Katz.
• Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: the African diaspora in Indian country, Author: edited by Tiya Miles and Sharon P. Holland.
• IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas, Author: general editor, Gabrielle Tayac.

For more information, click here.

SOCI 329-Multiracial America

Rice University
2013-2014

Multiracial America examines the phenomenon of race mixing (e.g. interracial interaction, multiracial identity) from a sociological perspective. The course covers the legal, political, and cultural contexts of interracial interaction and how these impact current understanding of what it means to be “mixed race.” Recommended Prerequisite(s): SOCI 101.