Mixed Race Studies

Sugar in the Blood: A Family’s Story of Slavery and Empire

Knopf
2013-01-22
384 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-307-27283-6
eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-96115-0

Andrea Stuart

In the late 1630s, lured by the promise of the New World, Andrea Stuart’s earliest known maternal ancestor, George Ashby, set sail from England to settle in Barbados. He fell into the life of a sugar plantation owner by mere chance, but by the time he harvested his first crop, a revolution was fully under way: the farming of sugar cane, and the swiftly increasing demands for sugar worldwide, would not only lift George Ashby from abject poverty and shape the lives of his descendants, but it would also bind together ambitious white entrepreneurs and enslaved black workers in a strangling embrace. Stuart uses her own family story—from the seventeenth century through the present—as the pivot for this epic tale of migration, settlement, survival, slavery and the making of the Americas.

 As it grew, the sugar trade enriched Europe as never before, financing the Industrial Revolution and fuelling the Enlightenment. And, as well, it became the basis of many economies in South America, played an important part in the evolution of the United States as a world power and transformed the Caribbean into an archipelago of riches. But this sweet and hugely profitable trade—“white gold,” as it was known—had profoundly less palatable consequences in its precipitation of the enslavement of Africans to work the fields on the islands and, ultimately, throughout the American continents. Interspersing the tectonic shifts of colonial history with her family’s experience, Stuart explores the interconnected themes of settlement, sugar and slavery with extraordinary subtlety and sensitivity. In examining how these forces shaped her own family—its genealogy, intimate relationships, circumstances of birth, varying hues of skin—she illuminates how her family, among millions of others like it, in turn transformed the society in which they lived, and how that interchange continues to this day. Shifting between personal and global history, Stuart gives us a deepened understanding of the connections between continents, between black and white, between men and women, between the free and the enslaved. It is a story brought to life with riveting and unparalleled immediacy, a story of fundamental importance to the making of our world.

Betwixt and Between: Embracing the Borderlands of My Mixed Heritage

Discover Nikkei
2013-01-23

Mari L’Esperance

For weeks I resisted beginning work on this essay. Then, synchronistically, I encountered two pieces at Discover Nikkei that helped me get started. The first was Nancy Matsumoto’s excellent review (December 26, 2012) of Nikkei/Hapa psychologist Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu’s latest book When Half is Whole: Multiethnic Asian American Identities, and the second was a first-person essay (January 3, 2013) by Los Angeles-based food writer, soba maker/purveyor, and Common Grains founder Sonoko Sakai.

In her review, Matsumoto writes that Murphy-Shigematsu’s lifework explores “the complex issue of identity among mixed-race Asians… With subtleness and great empathy he guides us through what he calls ‘the borderlands’ where transnational and multiethnic identities are formed”. Eureka! The symbolism and psychology of “borderlands”—both internal and external—have been my own preoccupation for years, as a poet, writer, and woman of mixed Japanese ancestry.

I was similarly inspired by, and felt a kinship with, Sakai through her account of her experience as a woman born in New York to Japanese parents and raised in several different places in the West and Japan, including my mother’s hometown of Kamakura. Eventually Sakai settled in Los Angeles, where she leads workshops and writes about food as a source of constancy, connection, and physical and spiritual sustenance. Reading these two pieces helped me to integrate the threads of my own history and my struggle over the years to define my identity in the world…

…I am the daughter of a Japanese mother and a New Englander father of French Canadian and Abenaki Missisquoi Indian ancestry. Months after I was born in Kobe in the 1960s, my father moved us to Southern California and then on to Santa Barbara, Guam, and Tokyo. This regular uprooting, combined with my bicultural upbringing, contributed to my feelings of otherness…

Read the entire article here.

Clearly Invisible, by Marcia Alesan Dawkins

The Christian Century: Thinking Critically. Living Faithfully.
2013-01-23

Rachel Stone

The one time I visited my maternal grandfather’s house, we had planned to stay four days. I was ten and had seen my grandfather just once before in my life. I don’t recall if he ever spoke to me, but my mother and I are fairly certain that he never called me by my name. That was probably a matter of principle for him—Rachel being a Hebrew name and he being an active anti-Semite.

In the spaces around his desk where family photos might have hung were portraits of Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler. When I put my summer shorts and T-shirts in the creaky oak dresser of the guest room, there was a red, white and black swastika armband in the drawer. We stayed for the night but left the next morning. I never saw him again.

As strange as that story is, the stranger part is this: my grandfather was Jewish, a fact that seems to have been unknown or ignored by the white supremacist groups to which he belonged. He was a Jew passing as a white Christian separatist.

But what about me? My mother became a Christian in her teens after a thoroughly secular upbringing, and my dad was raised Catholic and is now a Baptist pastor. I’m told I don’t look Jewish, or at least that I don’t have a “Jewish nose.” So am I Jewish? Am I passing? Does it matter?

In Clearly Invisible, Marcia Alesan Dawkins explores passing—presenting oneself as a member of a racial group to which one does not belong. Dawkins argues that passing is a rhetorical act that “forces us to think and rethink what, exactly, makes a person black, white or ‘other,’ and why we care.” She articulates a critical vocabulary of 13 “passwords” that can help us understand passing as “a form of rhetoric that is racially sincere, compatible with reasoned deliberative discourse, and expresses what fits rightly when people do not fit rightly with the world around them.”…

Read the entire review here.

The liberation of Barack Obama

The Washington Post
2013-01-20

E. J. Dionne Jr., Opinion Writer

Barack Hussein Obama can begin his second term liberated by the confidence that he is already a landmark figure in American history. His task is not to manufacture a legacy but to leave his successors a nation that is more tranquil because it finally resolved arguments that roiled it for decades.

Whatever happens in the next four years, Obama will forever be our first African American president, and our first biracial president. He has won two successive popular-vote majorities. Andrew Jackson and Franklin Roosevelt, both of them icons, are the only other Democrats who managed this.

Obama fought for and signed a sweeping health-care law, an accomplishment matched only by Lyndon Johnson’s Medicare. He led the country out of the worst economic calamity since the Great Depression. Restoring growth will count for more on the historical scales than petty arguments over what his stimulus program achieved. He ended one unpopular war and is preparing to close another…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Michael Jeffries on the Cultural Significance of President Obama

Wellesley College News
Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts
2013-01-18

New Book by Wellesley American Studies Professor Tackles Race in America

Michael Jeffries, Knafel Assistant Professor of Social Sciences and Assistant Professor of American Studies, studies race, gender, politics, identity, and popular culture. His new book, Paint the White House Black: Barack Obama and the Meaning of Race in America, looks at how race relies on other social forces, like gender and class, for its meaning and impact.

The book features discussions of race and nationhood, discourses of “biracialism” and Obama’s mixed heritage, the purported emergence of a “post-racial society,” and popular symbols of Michelle Obama as a modern black woman; we asked him about some of those themes.

Your book focuses on “an understanding of how race works in America” rather than emphasizing the details of President Obama’s political career; why is it important for the reader to think about the topic this way?

We need to move away from “great man” or “great woman” explanations for historical change. President Obama is a supremely talented politician, and an important thinker and speaker in many ways, but he operates within all sorts of constraints. Likewise, our impressions of the president are constrained by our cultural context—the language we use, the images we see, and the stories that are amplified by media outlets become the raw material for building our own personal models of Barack Obama. The way we talk and think about race is obviously a major factor in all this, but race is such a contentious and taboo topic that racial discussion is fraught with missteps and misunderstandings. The only way to get a grip on Obama-mania and effectively counteract racism is to force ourselves to think about race in concert with other ideas, like class and gender…

Read the entire interview here.

Paint the White House Black: Barack Obama and the Meaning of Race in America

Stanford University Press
2013
224 pages
2 tables
Cloth ISBN: 9780804780957
Paper ISBN: 9780804780964
E-book ISBN: 9780804785570

Michael P. Jeffries, Sidney R. Knafel Assistant Professor of American Studies
Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts

Barack Obama’s election as the first black president in American history forced a reconsideration of racial reality and possibility. It also incited an outpouring of discussion and analysis of Obama’s personal and political exploits. Paint the White House Black fills a significant void in Obama-themed debate, shifting the emphasis from the details of Obama’s political career to an understanding of how race works in America. In this groundbreaking book, race, rather than Obama, is the central focus.

Michael P. Jeffries approaches Obama’s election and administration as common cultural ground for thinking about race. He uncovers contemporary stereotypes and anxieties by examining historically rooted conceptions of race and nationhood, discourses of “biracialism” and Obama’s mixed heritage, the purported emergence of a “post-racial society,” and popular symbols of Michelle Obama as a modern black woman. In so doing, Jeffries casts new light on how we think about race and enables us to see how race, in turn, operates within our daily lives.

Race is a difficult concept to grasp, with outbursts and silences that disguise its relationships with a host of other phenomena. Using Barack Obama as its point of departure, Paint the White House Black boldly aims to understand race by tracing the web of interactions that bind it to other social and historical forces.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• CHAPTER 1: THROUGH THE FOG
• CHAPTER 2: MY (FOUNDING) FATHER’S SON: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Inheritance
• CHAPTER 3: “MUTTS LIKE Me”: Barack Obama, Tragic Mulattos, and Cool Mixed-Race Millennial
• CHAPTER 4: POSTRACIALISM RECONSIDERED: Class, the Black Counterpublic, and the End of Black Politics
• CHAPTER 5: THE PERILS OF BEING SUPERWOMAN: Michelle Obama’s Public Image
• CHAPTER 6: A PLACE CALLED “OBAMA”
• Appendix I. A Discussion of Racial Inequality
• Appendix II. Interviewing Multiracial Students
• Notes
• Index

The ironic consequences of Obama’s election: Decreased support for social justice

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
Volume 45, Issue 3 (May 2009)
pages 556–559
DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2009.01.006

Cheryl R. Kaiser, Associate Professor of Psychology
University of Washington

Benjamin J. Drury
Department of Psychology
University of Washington

Kerry E. Spalding
Department of Psychology
University of Washington

Sapna Cheryan, Assistant Professor of Psychology
University of Washington

Laurie T. O’Brien, Associate Professor of Psychology
Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana

Do Americans think that, because of Barack Obama’s election, affirmative action and other policies that address racial injustice are no longer necessary? In this study, we examined this question by assessing participants’ perceptions of racial progress and support for remedying racial injustice both prior to and after Barack Obama’s presidential victory. Following the election, participants increased their perception that racism is less of a problem in the US today than in times past. They also expressed less support for policies designed to address racial inequality. Given the continued prevalence of racial disparities in virtually all aspects of American society, these results raise important implications for the status of policies aimed at eliminating racial injustice.

Read the entire article here.

What should Multiracial people learn? Learning goals for anti-(mono)racist education

Paper presented at the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference
DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois
2012-11-01
6 pages

Eric Hamako
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Political education has played important roles in many social movements. Philosopher Ronald Sundstrom has argued that Multiracial activists and community organizers have a responsibility to set an expressly anti-racist agenda for Multiracial social movements. However, a coherent anti-racist agenda—and the political education curricula needed to support it—has yet to solidly materialize in Multiracial movements. So, I asked Multiracial activists who teach about racism, “What learning goals would you set for Multiracial participants in anti-racist education?” In this paper, based on my dissertation research, I present some of the key learning goals proposed by my participants. Then, I offer my thoughts about those learning goals and suggest new directions for teaching Multiracial people about racism and anti-racism.

Read the entire paper here.

“I Got Indian in my Family”~A Discussion on Indian Identity

Mixed Race Radio
2013-01-23, 17:00Z (12:00 EST)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

Dwanna L. Robertson
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

On today’s episode of Mixed Race Radio we will speak with Dwanna L. Robertson and discuss issues of Identity: What does it mean to be Indian in today’s society?

Dwanna is a citizen of the Muscogee Creek Nation of Oklahoma, a public sociologist, an Indigenous rights advocate, and a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst having earned with two prior master’s degrees—an MBA and a Master of Science in Sociology.

Currently, she represents over 2600+ graduate students of color as the appointed ALANA (African-, Latin-, Asian-, and Native-American) – graduate student representative for the Faculty Senate Council Committee on the Status of Diversity for UMass-Amherst.

Dwanna writes for Indian Country Today Media Network and speaks (by invitation) at universities and other organizations and forums about the complexities of Indigenous identity in the United States.

Dwanna has authored or co-authored pieces in American Indian Culture and Research Journal, European Sociological Review, Research in the Sociology of Work, and Oxford Encyclopedia of American Business, Labor, and Economic History. Her research focuses on the reproduction of social inequality, particularly for American Indians. Her current project examines the problematic processes around American Indian identity within the structures of public policy and the media.

Dwanna will share her expertise with us while educating our listeners on the federal government’s approach to many issues, old and new.

For more information, click here.

Methodologies of Socio-Cultural Classification: Contexutalizing the Casta Painting (1710-1800) as a Product of Time

Undergraduate Journal of Gender and Women’s Studies
Volume 1, Issue 1 (2012)
17 pages

Pooja Chaudhuri
University of California, Berkeley

The “casta painting” appeared in the early 18th century Colonial Mexico (New Spain). The paintings illustrated different offspring produced from sexual unions between men and women of Spanish, native Indian and African descent in the Americas. Series of casta paintings came in sets of typically sixteen panels, each featuring a mixed race couple and their one or sometimes, two children over a period of multiple generations. The viewer’s attention is drawn to phenotypic distinctions like skin color, styles of clothing and posture, all of which serve to racially distinguish each figure. The casta paintings were generally produced by criollo (creole) painters, a term used to refer to Spaniards who were born and raised in Spanish America. The paintings served to an extent, the viewing pleasure of creole elites in colonial Mexico, as well as in the Iberian Peninsula. Some casta paintings were commissioned by colonial officials who intended to take them back to Spain. Other sets were exhibited at the Royal Cabinet of Natural History, founded by Charles III in Madrid to display a plethora of objects and cultural artifacts from overseas territories belonging to the Castilian Crown. Over the course of the century, the paintings developed into elaborate taxonomic and ethnographic projects.

Conceptions of raza, or race are central to situating casta paintings in the history of Colonial Mexico. For the Spanish, ‘raza’ converged with views on religion, occupation, gender and the separate functions of male and female bodies. Such complex vocabularies of race were articulated in the casta paintings as mestizaje, or race mixing between people of Indian, African, Spanish and Mixed descent in the Colonial Mexico. Not only do these paintings visually depict intimate spheres between people living in the colony, they point to a greater colonial preoccupation with classifying and categorizing reproductive outcomes from sex across racial boundaries. Granted that the paintings circulated as artifacts of popular culture in elite Spanish circles, they relied on a system of racial logic that developed over the course of centuries as the Spanish encountered new ideas, people, and places.

Furthermore, casta paintings represent a map making project that place racialized bodies of men, women, and children as points of reference in a larger narrative of human action. Each painting serves as a stage for exposing narratives of race mixing, which were informed by a range of historical processes and changing discourses on gender, race, class and sexuality. This analysis of casta paintings posits them as maps of socio-cultural, racial, and gendered hierarchy. In addition, the paintings are targeted towards an elite Spanish audience and serve as instructive maps of both desirable and undesirable mixed race combinations. Their didactic purpose points to a desire on the part of painters to classify the population of Colonial Mexico within a map of sexual reproduction thereby, endorsing the colonial management of the most intimate relations among men and women in the colony.

Over the course of different time periods, the term, ‘race’ has been woven with ideas of gender and class. In its modern twentieth century usage, race developed from biological explanations that defined it as a cluster of genetic characteristics linking a group of people together. Genetic similarities within a group are thought to determine phenotype like skin color, hair texture, and body structure. Ian F. Haney Lopéz argues against the idea that “racial divisions reflect fundamental genetic differences.” Lopéz cites several scientific findings which have shown that variations between two or more different populations (or, intragroup differences) exceed variations within a ‘racial’ group (or, intergroup differences). This argument supports the view that race is not biologically determined but socially and historically constructed. In other words, the notion of race as a social construct suggests that different racial systems rely on interactions between humans rather than on natural distinctions.

Moreover, because ideas about race have changed over time, racial logic has significantly transformed the ‘social fabric’ of different histories. Gender, class and sexuality are integral to this ‘social fabric’. Race is therefore not a strictly genetic category and is instead enmeshed with gender, class and long histories of colonization; at different points in time the term has been associated more with either the biological or the social. This understanding of race as a fluid category presents important insight into looking at the casta painting as a methodology of socio-cultural classification…

Read the entire article here.