Mixed Race Studies

Multiracial representations: Nishime examines Battlestar Galactica

University of Washington
Department of Communications
2010-11-15

Amanda Weber

LeiLani Nishime, Assistant Professor of Communication, is a self-proclaimed science fiction fan, so it seemed natural to her to set her research sights on the TV series Battlestar Galactica. Although science fiction is generally a genre about the future, it often reflects current social issues. Nishime is a scholar on multiracial and interracial studies, Asian American media representations, and Asian American subcultural production. In her study, “Aliens: Narrating U.S. Global Identity Through Transnational Adoption and Interracial Marriage in Battlestar Galactica,” she identifies visual and narrative representations of multiracial people…

Read the entire article and watch a short video clip here.

Appropriating the One-Drop Rule: Family Guy on Reparations

Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture
Volume 7: Open Issue (2010)

Jason Jones
University of Washington

The one-drop rule, or the notion that one drop of African blood renders a person black, once played a vital role in the expansion of the nineteenth-century American slave population and segregation under Jim Crow. Media, communication, and rhetorical studies, however, have yet to consider the extent to which the one-drop rule continues to function in contemporary American discourse on race. There are, nonetheless, scholars in other fields who have turned a critical eye to the one-drop rule and the ways Americans have taken up or challenged the one-drop rule in their language. Ronald Sundstrom studied the obstacles multiracial individuals have encountered in their efforts to assert their multiracial identities in the face of various parties who deny such identities on grounds informed by the one-drop rule and other perspectives that refuse the existence of mixed race (110-116). Joshua Glasgow and his colleagues performed an experiment in which participants were asked to racially classify a woman who looked white and self-identified as such, but discovered that she had a black ancestor; the overwhelming majority of participants categorized her as white (64). However, as Glasgow went on to point out, many Americans identify President Barack Obama as black despite common knowledge of his white mother. Given such observations, it is clear that there are vestiges of the one-drop rule in American racial discourse. But as Michel de Certeau explained, people appropriate discourses to achieve ends that do not always coincide with the ideological implications originally associated with some facet of language use (48). Being no exception, the one-drop rule no longer works to expand the ranks of dehumanized chattel nor does it serve as grounds for the legal removal of peoples from segregated areas, yet many still rely on it, though less rigidly, to identify some biracial Americans as black. The one-drop rule’s discursive utility, however, is not confined to regressive forms of racial identification and has been used for other strategic purposes as is the case in an episode of Seth MacFarlane’s Emmy-nominated Family Guy (“Peter Griffin…”) that parodies the slavery reparations debate, a veritable minefield for anyone willing to partake in the dispute…

Read the entire article here.

Reducing Race: News Themes in the 2008 Primaries

The International Journal of Press/Politics
Volume 15, Number 4 (October 2010)
pages 375-400
DOI: 10.1177/1940161210372962

Catherine R. Squires, Cowles Professor of Journalism, Diversity and Equality
University of Minnesota

Sarah J. Jackson
University of Minnesota

This article presents a content analysis exploring how racial issues were addressed in newspaper and news magazine coverage of the 2008 Democratic primaries. Despite the presence of Latino and biracial candidates, discussion of race was limited by binary racial frames, resulting in the construction of racial groups as competing voting blocs (including frequent references to white voters) and few references to Barack Obama’s biracial heritage. The dominant framing constricted the range of racial issues to matters of interpersonal insensitivity and misguided statements and ignored matters of public policy and racial equity.

Read or purchase the article here.

Fire and Desire: Mixed-Race Movies in the Silent Era

University of Chicago Press
February 2001
352 pages
36 halftones  6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 9780226278742
Paper ISBN: 9780226278759

Jane M. Gaines, Professor of Film Studies
Columbia University School of the Arts

Winner of the Katherine Singer Kovacs Award

In the silent era, American cinema was defined by two separate and parallel industries, with white and black companies producing films for their respective, segregated audiences. Jane Gaines’s highly anticipated new book reconsiders the race films of this era with an ambitious historical and theoretical agenda.

Fire and Desire offers a penetrating look at the black independent film movement during the silent period. Gaines traces the profound influence that D. W. Griffith’s racist epic The Birth of a Nation [(1915)] exerted on black filmmakers such as Oscar Micheaux, the director of the newly recovered Within Our Gates [(1920)]. Beginning with What Happened in the Tunnel [(1903)], a movie that played with race and sex taboos by featuring the first interracial kiss in film [View the short film (00:01:02) by Thomas Edison from 1903-11-06 here.], Gaines also explores the cinematic constitution of self and other through surprise encounters: James Baldwin sees himself in the face of Bette Davis, family resemblance is read in Richard S. Roberts’s portrait of an interracial family, and black film pioneer George P. Johnson looks back on Micheaux.

Given the impossibility of purity and the co-implication of white and black, Fire and Desire ultimately questions the category of “race movies” itself.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Film Dates
• Introduction – The “Race” in Race Movies
• 1. “Green Like Me”
• 2. Desiring Others
• 3. Race Movies: All-Black Everything
• 4. World-Improving Desires
• 5. Fire and Desire
• 6. The Body’s Story
• 7. Race/Riot/Cinema
• Conclusion – Mixed-Race Movies
• Notes
• Index

The Mulatto Cyborg: Imagining a Multiracial Future

Cinema Journal
Volume 44, Number 2 (Winter, 2005)
pages 34-49

Leilani Nishime, Assistant Professor of Communications
University of Washington

Applying the literature of passing to cyborg cinema makes visible the politics of cyborg representations and illuminates contemporary conceptions of mixed-race subjectivity and interpolations of mixed-race bodies. The passing narrative also reveals the constitutive role of melancholy and nostalgia both in creating cyborg cinema and in undermining its subversive potential.

Read the entire article here.

The New Hollywood Racelessness: Only the Fast, Furious, (and Multiracial) Will Survive

Cinema Journal
Volume 44, Number 2, Winter 2005
pages 50-67

Mary C. Beltrán, Associate Professor of Media Studies
University of Texas, Austin

This article interrogates the rise of the “multiculti” action film and the casting of multiracial actors as Hollywood action film protagonists. These trends are examined in light of shifts in U.S. ethnic demographics and youth-oriented popular culture.

Recent Hollywood films such as Romeo Must Die (Andrzej Bartkowiak, 2000) and The Fast and the Furious (Rob Cohen, 2001) are notable for their multiethnic casts and stylized urban settings. Correspondingly, the key to the survival of the protagonists in these “multiculti” action narratives is their ability to thrive in environments defined by cultural border crossings and pastiche. Perhaps not coincidentally, the heroes who command these environments increasingly are played by biracial and multiethnic actors, such as Vin Diesel in The Fast and the Furious and XXX (Rob Cohen, 2002) and Russell Wong, who plays a pivotal role in Romeo Must Die.

This trend reflects contemporary shifts in U.S. ethnic demographics and ethnic identity, while subtly reinforcing notions of white centrism that are the legacy of the urban action movie. In particular, as I shall argue, the new, ethnically ambiguous protagonist embodies contemporary concerns regarding ethnicity and race relations with respect to the nation’s burgeoning cultural creolization and multiethnic population. The analysis presented here shall be situated in the history of Hollywood representations of the multiethnic inner city, as well as in relation to shifts in the country’s ethnic demographics, cultural interests, and popular culture…

Read the entire article here.

Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century

W. W. Norton and Company
April 2010
590 pages
6.2 × 9.3 in
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-393-93070-2

Hazel Rose Markus (Editor)
Stanford University

Paula M. L. Moya (Editor)
Stanford University

A collection of new essays, written by a team of interdisciplinary authors, that gives a comprehensive introduction to race and ethnicity.

In Doing Race, scholars from across the disciplines have written original essays on race and ethnicity aimed at an undergraduate audience. The book provides a practical response to the view, common in American debates, that race and ethnicity no longer matter, or that race and ethnicity should not be taken into account when deciding how to structure society and formulate public policy. It also answers the question of why race and ethnicity play such a large role in fueling violence around the globe.

Doing Race shows that race and ethnicity matter because they are important resources in answering the fundamental, even universal “Who am I?” and “Who are we?” questions. It demonstrates how understanding how identities are shaped by race and ethnicity is central to understanding individual and collective behavior in the United States and throughout the world.

Drawing on the latest science and scholarship, these original essays provide undergraduates with an effective framework for understanding the persistence of racial inequalities and problems in the 21st century.

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Doing Race

Hazel Rose Markus

and

Paula M. L. Moya

Part I: Inventing Race and Ethnicity

• Defining Race and Ethnicity: The Constitution, the Court, and the Census, C. Matthew Snipp, Sociology
• Models of American Ethnic Relations: Hierarchy, Assimilation, and Pluralism, George Fredrickson, History
• The Biology of Ancestry: DNA, Genomic Variation, and Race, Marcus W. Feldman, Biology
• Which Differences Make a Difference? Race, Health, and DNA, Barbara Koenig, Medical Anthropology

Part II: Racing Difference

• The Jew as the Original ‘Other’: Difference, Antisemitism, and Race, Aron Rodrigue, History
• Knowing the ‘Other’: Arabs, Islam, and the West, Joel Beinin, History
• Eternally Foreign: Asian Americans, History, and Race, Gordon H. Chang, History
• A Thoroughly Modern Concept: Ethnic Cleansing, Genocide, and the State, Norman M. Naimark, History

Part III: Institutionalizing Difference

• Race in the News: Stereotypes, Political Campaigns, and Market-Based Journalism, Shanto Iyengar, Communication and Political Science
• Going Back to Compton: Real Estate, Racial Politics, and Black-Brown Relations, Albert M. Camarillo, History
• Structured for Failure: Race, Resources, and Student Achievement, Linda Darling-Hammond, Education
• Racialized Mass Incarceration: Poverty, Prejudice, and Punishment, Lawrence D. Bobo and Victor Thompson, Sociology

Part IV: Racing Identity

• Who Am I? Race, Ethnicity, and Identity, Hazel Rose Markus, Psychology
• In the Air Between Us: Stereotypes, Identity, and Achievement, Claude M. Steele, Psychology
• Ways of Being White: Privilege, Stigma, and Transcendence, Monica McDermott, Sociology
• Blacks as Criminal, Blacks as Apes: Race, Representation, and Social Justice, Jennifer L. Eberhardt, Psychology
• We’re Honoring You Dude: Myths, Mascots, and American Indians, Stephanie Fryberg and Alisha Watts, Psychology

Part V: Re-presenting Reality

• Another Way to Be: Women of Color, Literature, and Myth, Paula M. L. Moya, English
• Hiphop and Race: Blackness, Language, and Creativity, Marcyliena Morgan and Dawn-Elissa Fischer, African and African American Studies and Africana Studies
• The ‘Ethno-Ambiguo Hostility Syndrome’: Mixed-Race, Identity, and Popular Culture, Michele Elam, English
• ‘We wear the mask’: Performance, Social Dramas, and Race, Harry Elam, Drama

ART & DESIGN FACULTY – Shelleen Greene awarded IRE Faculty Diversity Research Award

Peck School of The Arts News
University of Wisconsin, Madison
2010-06-15

The award will allow Assistant Professor Shelleen Greene to complete her book project, Equivocal Subjects: Mixed-Race Identity in the Italian Cinema. The book examines the representation of mixed-race subjects of Italian and African descent in the Italian cinema, arguing that the changing cultural representations of mixed-race identity reveal shifts in the country’s conceptual paradigms of race and nation. Greene’s work further contends that these representations of mixed-race identity inform African diasporic filmmakers seeking to “write” the history of post-colonial Italy as a means of narrating African disaporic identity formation in the present era of global migration…

Read the entire article here.

What’s at stake in claims of “post-racial” media?

FlowTV
Department of Radio, Television, and Film at the University of Texas at Austin
2010-06-03

Mary C. Beltrán, Associate Professor of Media Studies
University of Texas, Austin

Tracy Morgan, comedic actor best known for his role as comedic performer Tracy Jordan on the NBC series 30 Rock (2006+), trumpeted America’s supposed post-racial identity at the Golden Globe Awards in January 2009. When 30 Rock was awarded Best Musical or Comedy Television Series, he gleefully snatched the statuette from Tina Fey, creator and star of the series, quipping, “Tina Fey and I had an agreement that if Barack Obama won, I would speak for the show from now on.” He continued, “Welcome to post-racial America! I am the face of post-racial America. Deal with it, Cate Blanchett! We’d like to thank the Hollywood Foreign Press … especially me, ’cause a black man can’t get no love at the Emmys. I love you, Europe! That’s what’s up!”…

…Unsurprisingly, when used in description of media trends, post-racial has taken on differing meanings both for scholars and media professionals. For one, it’s been used as shorthand to describe purported progress in ethnic/racial inclusion in employment and casting, as appears to be at least part of what Morgan had in mind in his claim that he is the face of post-racial America. In fact, a fair number of television series and films now integrate a few characters of color into their casts (notably, this was described recently by the Hollywood Reporter as perhaps due in part to an “Obama effect”), and we’ve witnessed a growing number of non-white and mixed race stars. Important to note and study, a major catalyst of these shifts is a turn away from niche productions targeting African American or Latina/o audiences to media texts that aim instead to appeal to a broad, multicultural audience. Arguably this does not make these texts post-racial (Dale Hudson’s concept of “multicultural whiteness” comes closer to describing this trend in relation to the continuing centrism of whiteness), but does raise the need for new methodological tools and theoretical frameworks for studying ethnic and racial representation in this supposed post-racial era. Also important to take into consideration is the continuing and sometimes growing underrepresentation of creative professionals of color behind the screen in tandem with “post-racial” shifts.

There is a need in such study to also take note of the casting and portrayal of mixed-race actors and individuals in Hollywood media productions. I’ve noted in my own work that the rhetoric of post-race has followed in the wake of the rising vogue for mixed-race and racially ambiguous actors and models since the 1990s. The “raceless” or “ethnically ambiguous” aesthetic (as I and journalist Ruth La Ferla described this trend, respectively), particularly noticeable in contemporary tween programming and stardom, is an important strand of contemporary media formations that at times falls into descriptions of post-racial trends. Given that mixed-race representation does offer the potential to highlight the constructed nature of race and fissures in racial boundaries, as Camilla Fojas and I discuss in the introduction to Mixed Race Hollywood, this will be an important site of study in relation to the implications of contemporary trends in ethnic and racial representation…

Read the entire article here.

Home on the Range: Kids, Visual Culture, and Cognitive Equity

Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies
Volume 9, Number 2 (April 2009)
pages 141-148
DOI: 10.1177/1532708608326606

Lorna Roth, Associate Professor of Communication Studies
Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

This essay focuses on Binney and Smith’s creation and marketing of Crayola fleshtone art products from the late 1950s until the mid-1990s, analyzing the company’s shifting nomenclature—from “flesh” to “peach” to its multicultural collection. After reflecting on the significance of Crayola’s color adjustment for children’s sociocultural and aesthetic development and for teacher’s pedagogical repertoires around diversity issues, I introduce an original notion–cognitive equity. I propose this as a refined way of understanding racial and cultural equity issues that don’t just revolve around statistics and access to institutions, but also inscribes a new normative vision of skin color equity directly into technologies, products, and body representations in a range of visual media. At the very early stage of children’s cognitive development when stereotypes and racisms are being formed, this would be a particularly intelligent design strategy in which to reinforce multiculturalism and multiracialism in all aspects of their visual culture and the commodities that are available to them.

Read or purchase the article here.