Mixed Race Studies

Army to appoint first mixed-race officers

Korea Herald
2012-06-11

Yonhap News

The South Korean Army said Monday that two of its cadets with multicultural backgrounds are soon to become non-commissioned officers, the first such cases since the Army’s foundation.

Cadet officers Bae Jun-hyeong, 22, and Han Ki-yeop, 21, will undergo a 12-week training course next month before being appointed as NCOs, Army officials said.

The two cadets said that they will work hard to become respected members of the military and set a good example for the other soldiers.

Both are from multicultural families: Bae’s mother is of Vietnamese origin and Han’s mother is from Japan. This is the first time for anyone from such households to join the ranks of non-commissioned officers in the South Korean military, officials said.

There are currently 179 soldiers from multicultural backgrounds serving in the Army, while there are nine in the Navy and five in the Air Force, according to Army officials…

Read the entire article here.

Why I Remain A Negro

The Saturday Review of Literature
1947-10-11
pages 13-

Walter White, National Secretary
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

THE SCENE was a New York duplex apartment. The people were liberals, economically as well as intellectually well off. They were discussing the race question. I had been invited to speak. One of the women, listening, seemed agitated by something I had said. She scribbled on a piece of paper and handed it to another woman, a woman whose skin was reddish brown,, a woman who was probably colored. “Is Mr. White white or colored?” the message inquired. The other scribbled an answer and passed it back. “I am Mrs. White,” the reply said. The white woman, reading it, became excited. Hastily she penciled a comment: “What a wonderful talk! This is the first time I’ve had the opportunity to hear him.”

I am a Negro. My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me. Not long ago I stood one morning on a subway platform in Harlem. As the train came in I stepped back for safety. My heel came down upon the toe of the man behind me. I turned to apologize to him. He was a Negro, and his face as he stared at me was hard and full of the piled-up bitterness of a thousand lynchings and a million nights in shacks and tenements and “nigger towns.” “Why don’t you look where you’re going?” he said sullenly. “You white folks are always trampling on colored people.” Just then one of my friends came up and asked how the fight had gone in Washington—there was a filibuster against legislation for a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission. The Negro on whose toes I had stepped listened, then spoke to me penitently.

“Are you Walter White of the NAACP? I’m sorry I spoke to you that way. I thought you were white.” I am not white. There is nothing within my mind and heart which tempts me to think I am. Yet I realize acutely that the only characteristic which matters to either the white or the colored race—the appearance of whiteness—is mine. White is the rejection of all color; black is the absorption of  every shade.  There is magic in a white skin; there is tragedy, loneliness, exile, in a black skin. Why then do I insist that I am a Negro, when nothing compels me to do so but myself?…

Read the entire article here.

How Racist Are We? Ask Google

The New York Times
2012-06-09

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

Barack Obama won 52.9 percent of the popular vote in 2008 and 365 electoral votes, 95 more than he needed. Many naturally concluded that prejudice was not a major factor against a black presidential candidate in modern America. My research, a comparison of Americans’ Google searches and their voting patterns, found otherwise. If my results are correct, racial animus cost Mr. Obama many more votes than we may have realized.

Quantifying the effects of racial prejudice on voting is notoriously problematic. Few people admit bias in surveys. So I used a new tool, Google Insights, which tells researchers how often words are searched in different parts of the United States.

Can we really quantify racial prejudice in different parts of the country based solely on how often certain words are used on Google? Not perfectly, but remarkably well. Google, aggregating information from billions of searches, has an uncanny ability to reveal meaningful social patterns. “God” is Googled more often in the Bible Belt, “Lakers” in Los Angeles…

…Yes, Mr. Obama also gained some votes because of his race. But in the general election this effect was comparatively minor. The vast majority of voters for whom Mr. Obama’s race was a positive were liberal, habitual voters who would have voted for any Democratic presidential candidate. Increased support and turnout from African-Americans added only about one percentage point to Mr. Obama’s totals.

If my findings are correct, race could very well prove decisive against Mr. Obama in 2012. Most modern presidential elections are close. Losing even two percentage points lowers the probability of a candidate’s winning the popular vote by a third. And prejudice could cost Mr. Obama crucial states like Ohio, Florida and even Pennsylvania.

There is the possibility, of course, that racial prejudice will play a smaller role in 2012 than it did in 2008, now that the country is familiar with a black president. Some recent events, though, suggest otherwise. I mentioned earlier that the rate of racially charged searches in West Virginia was No. 1 in the country and that the state showed a strong aversion to Mr. Obama in 2008. It recently held its Democratic presidential primary, in which Mr. Obama was challenged by a convicted felon. The felon, who is white, won 41 percent of the vote…

Read the entire article here.

Performance Studies: Interracialism: Performing Mixed Race (H42.2090)

New York University
Department of Social & Cultural Analysis: American Studies

This course will survey the emergent field of  ‘critical mixed race studies’ with a particular emphasis on the black experience in the Americas. How have people of African descent been alternately excluded from and incorporated into discourses of miscegenation and mestizaje? What role has performance played in the construction of racial categories like ‘the mulatto‘ and ‘the one-drop rule‘? How have black people sought to alternately challenge and exploit those constructions? Has the trope of ‘passing‘ helped preserve an essentialist concept of race amidst widespread racial mixing? Do recent developments around the performance of identity point toward a moment in black cultural politics that is leading us ‘beyond passing’? We will read broadly and interdisciplinarily, examining the law, politics, performance, visual culture, literature, critical theory, statistics, sociology, philosophy and anthropology as various sites in which interracialism has historically been staged.

New Laureate Wrestles with Mixed Race

Better Living through Beowulf: How great literature can change your life
2012-06-11

Robin Bates, Professor of English
St. Mary’s College of Maryland

Monday
 
I see that Natasha Trethewey, who teaches creative writing at my graduate alma mater (Emory University), is America’s new poet laureate. Trethewey is mixed race (white father, black mother) and was born in Mississippi in 1966, a time when Jim Crow segregation laws were still in effect. By marrying (they went out of state to do so), her parents broke Mississippi’s miscegenation laws.
 
In an interview several years ago with Fresh Air moderator Terry Gross, Trethewey talked about how people would see her as white when she was with her father and black when she was with her mother. She considered herself black (her mother raised her after her parents divorced), but the following poem shows how children are keenly aware of race distinctions and pick up on the symbolism of color. Trethewey sounds like others with mixed race identities (including Barack Obama), “floundering” in a confusing world where one can flit between sun spots and shadows, flip between black and white…

Read the entire article here.

President Obama’s basketball love affair has roots in Hawaii high school team

The Washington Post
2012-06-09

David Maraniss

To say that President Obama loves basketball understates the role of the sport in his life. He has been devoted to the game for 40 years now, ever since the father he did not know and never saw again gave him his first ball during a brief Christmastime visit. Basketball is central to his self identity. It is global yet American-born, much like him. It is where he found a place of comfort, a family, a mode of expression, a connection from his past to his future. With foundation roots in the Kansas of his white forebears, basketball was also the city game, helping him find his way toward blackness, his introduction to an African American culture that was distant to him when he was young yet his by birthright.

As a teenager growing up in Hawaii,he dreamed the big hoops dream. He had posters of the soaring Dr. J on his bedroom wall. A lefty, he practiced the spin moves of Tiny Archibald. And in the yearbook of an older high school classmate who wanted to be a lawyer, he wrote: “Anyway, been great knowing you and I hope we keep in touch. Good luck in everything you do, and get that law degree. Some day when I am an all-pro basketballer, and I want to sue my team for more money, I’ll call on you. Barry.”

It never happened, of course. But the adolescent known as Barry kept on playing, even after he took back his given name of Barack and went off to college at Occidental, Columbia and Harvard and went into community organizing, then politics in Illinois. He played whenever he could on playgrounds, in fancy sport clubs, at home, on the road. During his first trip back to Honolulu after being elected president, he rounded up a bunch of his old high school pals, got the key to the gym at Punahou School, and went at it. When the pickup game was over, Darryl Gabriel, who had been the star of their championship-winning team, found himself muttering to another former teammate, “Man, Barack is a lot better than Barry ever was!”…

Read the entire article here.

Black and white student ruling in a land of rainbows

University World News
Issue 224, 2012-06-03

Chrissie Long

While there appears to be little question that Brazil’s black community has been at a disadvantage regarding degree attainment, a ruling by the country’s top court upholding affirmative action in universities has sparked debate over whether the initiative will have positive outcomes for race relations.

Some say the impasse lies in socio-economics – not in skin colour – and affirmative action will create a dichotomy in a country where none existed previously. Others believe race quotas in universities are essential for equity.

“It is true that darker-coloured Brazilians are underrepresented in the most prestigious universities and courses. Yet people are excluded from excellent schools in Brazil by their poverty, not their race,” said Peter Fry, a British-born anthropologist and professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro…

…Race definitions are alien

Brazil has the largest number of African descendents of all countries outside the continent.

Approximately 45% of Brazil’s 191 million people consider themselves African Brazilian. Most arrived on slave ships between the 16th and 19th centuries and, over the course of the past 500 years, gradually became part of Brazilian society and the Brazilian identity.

The standard definition of ‘black’ and ‘white’ never existed in Brazil like it has in North American or European cultures, says Brazilian historian at Colorado College Professor Peter Blasenheim.

Due to generations of mixed-race marriages, Brazilians have always considered themselves more of a rainbow, where racial distinctions blur, making skin colour a complicated issue…

Race quotas in universities

Reginald Daniel, a professor of sociology at the University of California – Santa Barbara, reports that this variation in skin colour has already complicated the quota system in Brazil’s universities.

According to a January article in The Economist, two identical twins applied to the Universidade de Brasilia (UnB): one was classified as black, the other as white.

Daniel said UnB began requiring that photographs be reviewed by a commission after situations in which students who appeared white claimed African descent. When this became controversial, UnB began using interviews instead of photographs.

Rio de Janeiro State University, which was one of the first institutions of higher education to adopt a quota system, relied on self-classification but removed ‘pardo’, or brown, from the options so that students either had to select white ‘branco’ or black, ‘negro’…

Read the entire article here.

Miscegenation and “the Dicta of Race and Class”: The Rhinelander Case and Nella Larsen’s Passing

MFS Modern Fiction Studies
Volume 36, Number 4, Winter 1990
DOI: 10.1353/mfs.0.1034
pages 523-529

Mark J. Madigan, Professor / Fulbright Program Advisor in English
Nazareth College, Rochester, New York

The 1986 Rutgers University Press edition of Nella Larsen’s two novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), represents an important step in the resurrection of a neglected writer of the Harlem Renaissance. Larsen was the first African-American woman to win a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing (1930), and both of her novels were highly acclaimed before her literary career ended abruptly in the early 1930s for reasons that are still not wholly clear. There were well-publicized but unproven charges of plagiarism of a short story, yet, like most details of Larsen’s life, the reasons for her disappearance from the literary scene remain a mystery. Larsen wrote no more than the two novels and the one story titled “Sanctuary,” and in 1963 she died in obscurity after working some thirty years as a nurse in Brooklyn.
 
The Rutgers edition has made Larsen’s novels more accessible not only by publishing both in one volume with a substantial introduction but also by annotating references in the text to public figures, events, and parlance of the late 1920s. There is, however, a reference to “the Rhinelander case” in an important paragraph in Passing that remains unidentified in the Rutgers first and second printings and only briefly explained in those following. A deeper understanding of the details of this controversial divorce case not only helps to explicate the paragraph in Larsen’s novel but also provides an important historical subtext for the book and the several other Harlem Renaissance works dealing with racial passing.
 
The title of Larsen’s novel refers to the capability of light-skinned African-Americans to cross, or “pass,” the color line undetected. In writing of racial passing, Larsen worked within a well-established tradition: William Wells Brown, Charles W. Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, and James Weldon Johnson were only a few of the writers who had dealt with this topic before her. Passing, however, is distinguished by its deft presentation of the subject from the perspectives of two mulatto women of the 1920s: Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield. The novel begins in an expensive Chicago restaurant where both women are passing. There, Clare recognizes Irene as a childhood friend and invites her to tea at her home. Irene, the wife of a successful Harlem doctor, keeps the date, but when she meets Clare’s racist white husband—who does not know his wife’s true race—vows never to see her old friend again. The two do meet again, however, when Clare pays a visit to New York City two years later. Despite Irene’s reluctance to rekindle the friendship, Clare makes frequent visits to the Redfields’ apartment, and the plot is complicated when Irene begins to suspect that her husband is having an affair with Clare. Clare’s husband further complicates matters when he learns by chance that his wife is actually a mulatto. Irene then fears that her own husband will leave her if Clare is divorced. The Rhinelander case is mentioned at this crucial point in the narrative, as Irene wonders whether racial deception could be grounds for Clare’s divorce:

What if Bellew should divorce Clare? Could he? There was the Rhinelander case. But in France, in Paris, such things were easy. If he divorced her—If Clare were free—But of all the things that could happen, that was the one she did not want. She must get her mind away from that possibility. She must. (228)

Larsen’s offhand manner of referring to the Rhinelander case assumes a familiarity on the part of her readers, but what was once common knowledge now demands some explanation. The case centered on the marriage of Leonard Kip Rhinelander, a member of one of New York’s oldest and wealthiest families, and Alice B. Jones, a mulatto chambermaid, on 14 October, 1924—just one week after the twenty-two year-old Rhinelander had received a share of his family’s fortune in cash, jewels, real estate, and stocks. The improbable love-affair between the young…

Read or purchase the article here.

SO 3300: ‘Race’and ‘Mixed Race’

Forham University
Spring 2010

The origins of ‘race,’its historic role and social construction are examined. Ancient and modern-day ideas are explored. Contrasts between the United States and Latin American concepts of ‘race’ and ‘mixed race’ are analyzed. Future implications are discussed.

The Future of the ‘Tan Generation’

The Root
2012-06-08

Jenée Desmond-Harris

Browner America: Marcia Alesan Dawkins says an increase in nonwhite births doesn’t mean more social justice.

(The Root)—Recent census data reveal that, for the first time, racial and ethnic minorities make up more than half of all children born in the United States, with 50.4 percent of children under age 1 identified as Hispanic, black, Asian American or members of another ethnic minority group.

In terms of the overall population, African Americans are the second-largest minority group in the nation (after Hispanics), with a 1.6 percent increase between 2010 and 2011. Minorities now make up nearly 37 percent of the overall U.S. population, and it’s predicted that by 2042, a minority of Americans will be non-Hispanic whites.

What do all these numbers mean for our understanding of race, for the issues that affect communities of color and for our very concept of who is a “minority” in this country? The Root has gathered a variety of perspectives on the significance of America’s becoming a browner nation for a series of interviews on whether, and why, we should pay attention to these demographic changes.

For the second in the series, The Root talked to Marcia Alesan Dawkins, visiting scholar at Brown University and author of the forthcoming Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity. She describes her extensive writing on racial identity as an expression of her interest in “how people figure out who they are and how they connect with others,” and has warned against rushing to assume that demographic changes will do away with America’s troubled racial past…

…The Root: Are we going to need a new vocabulary, a new word for “minority,” when minorities become the majority? As more Americans have nonwhite ancestry, will the definition of whiteness itself be affected?

Marcia Dawkins: Yes, on both counts. We are going to need new terms that reflect numerical reality and social-political reality. Part of that implies thinking about what race and ethnicity mean in general and what specific racial and ethnic, and multiracial and multiethnic, identities mean in particular. At the same time, we’ve got to remember that every racial or ethnic community has some issues and experiences in common and is also unique.

For one, these changes mean that the white-black and white-people of color binaries need to be rethought and replaced with a full-color perspective on race and ethnicity. A full-color perspective acknowledges that racial and ethnic mixing has been part of our social fabric since Europeans met and mated with Native Americans; that it continued on through African enslavement and segregation and Asian exclusion and internment; that it progressed with increased rates of Hispanic immigration and is still with us as increasing numbers of interracial and multiracial couples get together and have children today. A full-color perspective must also acknowledge that racial and ethnic mixing has been occurring for centuries in same-sex communities as well.

On one hand, sociologists predict that the definition of whiteness will expand to include Hispanic and Asian groups but will always exclude those with African-American descent in order to maintain political and social power. On the other hand, this prediction is reductive because it assumes that only those who will continue to identify as white will be privileged and that those who will continue to identify as black will be non-privileged. It also ignores the fact that, generally speaking, to be African American is to be racially mixed…

Read the entire article here.