Mixed Race Studies

How Is Biracialism Changing America – And The Jewish community?

RepairLabs: Resources and strategies for volunteer engagement and Jewish Service-Learning
2012-02-10

Diane Tobin, President
Institute for Jewish & Community Research

As the parent of a Black Jewish child, I want my son to feel at home in the Jewish community. It seems to me that it is in our self interest to welcome everyone with open arms, yet it occurs to me that we may need to be sensitive to what Alvin Toffler described in the 70’s as “Future Shock”—the stress and disorientation of too much change in too short a time. I wonder how much time is too short? And, what role does race and ethnicity play in being Jewish in America.
 
Jews are part of American life and are affected by social trends. Taboos around interracial and LGBT unions are diminishing, transracial adoption is increasing, and people see being Jewish as one of many identities…

Read the entire article here.

Welcome! Please Check Your Identity at the Door

RJ.org: News & Views of Reform Jews
2012-06-27

Lacey Schwartz, National Outreach/New York Regional Director
Be’chol Lashon

I just got off the phone with a friend of mine who was planning on enrolling her daughter in a local Hebrew school, a decision she is now reconsidering. Why? After meeting with the school’s principal and expressing her concerns about the unique challenges of race in this setting, the principal smiled and earnestly told her not to worry, “We have had African-American kids before. We are truly a colorblind school.” A nice gesture, but most thoughtful people know color blindness to be negative—and not just for traffic lights and fashion choices. Though well intentioned, dismissing students’ racial identities does not signify acceptance. Yet, in the world of synagogues and Jewish camps, color blindness is often touted as plus.
 
I can appreciate the desire for racial neutrality that motivates people who claim not to see race. To them, it speaks to a vision of a world where the color of one’s skin does not matter. But, as a Black Jewish woman in America, I know this to be wishful thinking. Even if I wanted to discard my racial identity, I can’t. Moreover, I don’t want—nor should I have to—leave a part of my identity at the door when I walk into a JCC or synagogue. I want to be fully present. For me, Jewish peoplehood means including race in the conversation, not pretending it doesn’t exist…

Read the entire article here.

“Mixed-Race in the Bible (“Chino-Chicano” Part II)

Jesus for Revolutionaries: A Blog About Race, Social Justice, and Christianity
2013-01-09

Robert Chao Romero, Associate Professor of Chicana/o Studies and Asian American Studies
University of California, Los Angeles

As an expression of my multiracial struggles, I used to wrestle a lot with the issue of marriage. I used to say to myself: “If I marry someone who’s Mexican, then my kids will be 75% Mexican. They’ll have a solidified racial identity. If I marry someone who is Chinese, then they’ll be 75% Chinese, probably look mostly Asian, and then they might have some identity problems. If I marry someone who’s Anglo, then my kids will probably look Latino, even though they’ll be only 25% Mexican. But they’ll have the last name Romero, so they’ll probably just pass as Latino.” I can’t believe I used to think this way!

In my heart I knew that this was not the right way to be thinking about marriage. Every time I went down this path of reasoning I would end up deeply frustrated, practically to the point of tears. This is led me, one day in law school to cry out to God and say, “God, please help me to understand the topic of race from Your perspective!” The answer to that prayer is what I hope to share with you in the next several blog posts.

After many years of wrestling with my mixed race identity, I feel that God has given me peace, healing, and a deep security in my unique identity. I have discovered a biblically-grounded understanding of race and ethnicity which allows me to be a whole-human being, and which allows me to understand, celebrate, and accept all of who I am. Thank You God. I hope that I might be able to share this understanding with you now, and that what I share might help bring healing to many individuals who have gone through, or are going through, the same struggles I have experienced as a mixed race individual…

Read the entire article here.

In Every Tongue: The Racial & Ethnic Diversity of the Jewish People

Institute for Jewish & Community Research
September 2005
272 pages
ISBN-10: 1893671011; ISBN-13: 978-1893671010

Gary A. Tobin

Diane Tobin

Scott Rubin

Foreword by:

Lewis Gordon, Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy, Director of the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought and Director of the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies
Temple University

2006 Independent Publisher Book Award Finalist for the category “Multicultural Non-Fiction Adult.”

A groundbreaking look at the changing faces of the Jewish people and the implications for the world Jewish community

Jews have always resembled the peoples among whom they live, whether in Africa, Asia, or Europe. Why should American Jews be an exception? In a land where racial and ethnic boundaries are becoming increasingly blurred, the American Jewish community is also shifting. In Every Tongue is both a groundbreaking look at the changing faces of the Jewish people and an examination of the timelessness of those changes. Ranging from distinct communities of African American Jews and adopted children of color in white Jewish families to the growing number of religious seekers of all races who hope to find a home in Judaism, In Every Tongue explores the origins, traditions, challenges, and joys of diverse Jews in America.

This book explodes the myth of a single authentic Judaism and shines a bright light on the thousands of ethnically and racially diverse Jews in the United States who live full and rich Jewish lives. It is impossible to read In Every Tongue without coming away with a deeper respect for and a broader understanding of the Jewish people today. In a time when Jewish community leaders decry the shrinking of the Jewish population, In Every Tongue imagines a vibrant and daring future for the Jewish people: becoming who they have always been.

Table of Contents

• Foreword
• A Synonym for Jewish
• Describing the Tapestry
• Racial and Religious Change in America
• Jewish Diversity in America and the Politics of Race
• The Last Taboo: Interracial Marriage
• Feet in Many Rivers: Navigating Multiple Identities
• Jews Have Always Been Diverse
• Who Is a Jew? Ideology and Bloodlines
• By Choice or by Destiny
• And for Those Too Young to Ask: Transracial Adoption
• Patches of Color, Patches of White
• Toward a More Inclusive Future
• Who Is a Jew, Really?
• Be’chol Lashon: A Visual Journey
• Methodology
• Notes
• Glossary
• Index
• Selected Bibliography

Discovery of his roots leads him to track history of Chinese in Mexico

UCLA Today
Faculty and Staff News
2010-12-06

Letisia Marquez

Growing up in a predominantly white Los Angeles County suburb, Robert Chao Romero, an assistant professor of Chicana and Chicano studies, learned to hide his Chinese background.
 
The son of a Chinese mother and Mexican father, Romero recalled starting the first grade in Hacienda Heights and a classmate telling him an anti-Chinese joke.
 
“It was just a dumb kid’s joke, but it sort of sent the message to me that being Chinese is bad,” he added…

…One tidbit that had always intrigued Romero was that his parents knew a Chinese family who had lived in Mexico for many years. He decided to look into the history of Chinese Mexicans and discovered that although Spanish professors had written about the population, he could not find a book about Chinese Mexicans in English.
 
“The more I explored the topic, the more I realized this is a rich history that’s a forgotten history for the most part,” Romero said. “And I think a large part of the reason it’s forgotten is because it’s a dark chapter, unfortunately.”
 
Years later, Romero completed “The Chinese in Mexico, 1882-1940,” (University of Arizona, 2010) book which details the tragic history of Chinese immigrants in Mexico…

Read the entire article here.

“Chino-Chicano”: A Biblical Framework for Diversity (Part I)

Jesus for Revolutionaries: A Blog About Race, Social Justice, and Christianity
2013-01-03

Robert Chao Romero, Associate Professor of Chicana/o Studies and Asian American Studies
University of California, Los Angeles

I’m a “Chino-Chicano.” I was born in East Los Angeles and raised in the small town of Hacienda Heights. My dad is an immigrant from Chihuahua, Mexico and my mom an immigrant from Hubei in central China. The Romeros lost their family fortune during the Mexican Revolution by siding with Pancho Villa, and eventually immigrated to El Paso, Texas. They moved to East Los Angeles in the 1950’s and we’ve been here in Southern California ever since. My mom’s family immigrated to Los Angeles from China via Hong Kong and Singapore in the 1950’s. My maternal grandfather, Calvin Chao, was a famous pastor in China who launched the first Chinese branch of Intervarsity Christian Fellowship. The Chaos fled their native land because my grandfather was on a communist “hit list.” As an interesting side note, my Mom’s family traces directly back to the founding emperor of the Song Dynasty!

Growing up “mixed,” I had a lot of struggles with racial identity. I was very proud of my Mexican heritage, but at a young age got sent the message that being Chinese was a bad thing. On the first day of first grade a kid walked up to me, pretended to hold an imaginary refrigerator in his hands, and said, “Here’s a refrigerator, open it up. Here’s a coke, drink it. Me Chinese, me play joke, me do pee-pee in your Coke.” Kids are so mean.  I was so scarred by that event that I denied my Chinese heritage for the next 18 years.  Once I even remember telling a friend that my mom was our housekeeper because I was embarrassed that she came to pick me up from school…

Read the entire article here.

Eric Garcetti invokes Latino-Jewish ancestry in mayor’s race

The Los Angeles Times
2013-01-02

Michael Finnegan

Working a recent breakfast gathering of business owners in Northridge, Los Angeles mayoral contender Eric Garcetti introduced himself in Hindi when a Sikh businessman approached.

A few hours later, Garcetti donned a colorful Peruvian headpiece with ear flaps as he spoke Spanish with immigrants on the steps of City Hall, part of a show of solidarity for designating a stretch of Hollywood’s Vine Street as “Peru Village.”

After lunch, Garcetti joined rabbis at a City Hall menorah lighting. Wearing a yarmulke, the Hollywood-area councilman sang Hanukkah songs in Hebrew, English and Spanish. “Toda la familia,” Garcetti said as the group huddled for a photo.

A top contender to succeed Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Garcetti prides himself on his ease with the city’s diverse cultures. He sees his mixed ancestry (“I have an Italian last name, and I’m half Mexican and half Jewish,” he says) as a powerful part of his appeal in a city where voters for decades have split along racial and ethnic lines in mayoral elections…

Read the entire article here.

Changing Families

Sh’ma: A Journal of Jewish Ideas
December 2007

Caryn Aviv, Senior Instructor in Secular Jewish Society & Civilization
University of Colorado, Boulder

A Different Sexual Revolution

The Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism, by Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, Indiana University Press, 2007. 320 pages

The Family Flamboyant: Race Politics, Queer Families, Jewish Lives, by Marla Brettschneider, SUNY Press, 2006. 232 pages

Two new books provide food for thought about contemporary Jewish identities in the United States. The Family Flamboyant: Race Politics, Queer Families, Jewish Lives by Marla Brettschneider, and The Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism, by Melanie Kaye Kantrowitz, have much in common. Both books are informed by the authors’ deep commitment to social justice, their insights as Ashkenazi Jewish lesbians, and their experiences as coalition organizers. And both authors offer a nuanced, passionate, and sophisticated analysis of slippery Jewish identities in relationship to racial politics and inequality in the United States.

Each author inserts compelling autobiographical experiences into their political analyses. Brettschneider reveals the unsavory and overt racism and homophobia of the adoption system in the United States based on her own experiences of trying to adopt as an outspoken Jewish lesbian. Kaye/Kantrowitz draws upon her experiences of living in diverse places in the U.S., her struggles for racial and economic justice, and her memories of growing up in a secular, Yiddish-inflected family in Brooklyn. And both books provide meticulously documented empirical and theoretical evidence for the arguments they advance, offering a veritable bibliographic trove of resources for scholars and lay readers interested in these literatures…

Read the entire review here.

The Family Flamboyant: Race Politics, Queer Families, Jewish Lives

SUNY Press
October 2006
244 pages
Hardback ISBN10: 0-7914-6893-3; ISBN13: 978-0-7914-6893-7
Paperback ISBN10: 0-7914-6894-1; ISBN13: 978-0-7914-6894-4
eBook ISBN10: 0-7914-8106-9; ISBN13: 978-0-7914-8106-6

Marla Brettschneider, Professor of Political Philosophy, Feminist Theory, Political Science & Women’s Studies
University of New Hampshire

Winner of a Bronze Medal in the Gay/Lesbian Category of the 2007 Independent Publisher Book Awards

Interrogates the normative heterosexual family from feminist, Jewish, and queer perspectives.

The Family Flamboyant is a graceful and lucid account of the many routes to family formation. Weaving together personal experience and political analysis in an examination of how race, gender, sexuality, class, and other hierarchies function in family politics, Marla Brettschneider draws on her own experience in a Jewish, multiracial, adoptive, queer family in order to theorize about the layered realities that characterize families in the United States today. Brettschneider uses critical race politics, feminist insight, class-based analysis, and queer theory to offer a distinct and distinctly Jewish contribution to both the family debates and the larger project of justice politics.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: K-I-S-S-I-N-G
• 1. Whitens Whites, Keeps Colors Bright: Jewish Families Queering the Race Project
• 2. Jew Dykes Adopting Children: A Guide to the Perplexed
• 3. Going Natural: The Family Has No Clothes
• 4. Questing for Heart in a Heartless World: Jewish Feminist Ruminations on Monogamy and Marriage
• Epilogue: Justice and La Vida Jew . . . in Technicolor Queer
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Intermarriage and Multicultural Families

My Jewish Learning
2012-12-13

Ruth Abusch-Magder, Rabbi-in-Residence
Be’chol Lashon, San Francisco, California

Like it or not, intermarriage is a fact in Jewish life.

And for the most part the Jewish community has learned to live with it. Sure, different movements deal with it differently. Sure, some congregations are more adept and accommodating. But from Renewal to Orthodox we no longer assume that a Jew by birth will marry another Jew by birth.
 
But as demographics shift in the United States, the nature of intermarriage is changing too. And the Jewish community will need to adapt if it hopes to continue to create spaces for these new Jewish families.
 
In particular, my concern is with multiracial and multicultural families. There is nothing new about Jews from all racial and ethnic backgrounds. There were Jews in Ethiopia centuries before there were Jews in Poland and Jews in India before there were Jews in Spain. Jewish institutional life in the United States, however, has largely been built on the presumption that Jews are white. And our welcome to interfaith couples has similarly assumed that intermarriages between one white Jew and one white non-Jew…

Read the entire article here.