Mixed Race Studies

Marcia Dawkins to be Featured Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

Mixed Chicks Chat (The only live weekly show about being racially and culturally mixed. Also, founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival) Hosted by Fanshen Cox and Heidi W. Durrow
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #153 – Marcia Dawkins
When: Wednesday, 2010-05-19 22:00Z (18:00 EDT, 15:00 PDT)

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Assistant Professor of Human Communication
California State University, Fullerton

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Ph.D., is a blogger, professor and communication researcher in Los Angeles. Her interests are mixed race identification, politics, popular culture and new media. Her new book, Clearly Invisible:  Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity, looks at racial passing as a viable form of communication. She lectures and consults on these issues at conferences worldwide.

Changing the stereotypes

The Daily
University of Washington
2010-02-25

Kristen Steenbeeke

Sophomores Gabbie Duncalf and Fitsum Misgano were taking a class about mixed race when they first learned about the organization Mixed.

After hearing that the group — which caters specifically to mixed-race students but is open to anyone — was lacking officers, they decided to join during spring quarter of last year. Since then, the club has been an outlet for them to discuss mixed-race topics as well as an opportunity to spend time with other students who identify as mixed.

“As a mixed person, I have always felt hesitant to join monoracial organizations,” said Duncalf, whose mother is Filipino and father is Caucasian. “I feel different, and I don’t know if I fit in there, so I like that with Mixed, I can talk about race in different ways … I can talk to people who feel the same way and who want to change the way we talk about race.”

Discussions about new perceptions of race are important, not only among students but in society as a whole. Ralina Joseph, a communications professor at the UW, has made it her goal to change the way we talk about race, especially by disregarding the idea that multiracialism is a separate entity and using it to “deconstruct notions of race.”

“I think that I would encourage multiracial students to not only identify themselves with a multiracial group, but also to see themselves as a part of their larger racial and ethnic communities,” Joseph said…

Read the entire article here.

The Politics of Biracialism [Issue]

The Black Scholar
Journal of Black Studies and Research
Fall 2009 (2009-09-22)
Volume 39, No. 3/4

Guest Editors:

Laura Chrisman, Professor of English
University of Washington

Habiba Ibrahim, Assistant Professor of English
University of Washington

Ralina Joseph, Assistant Professor of Communications
University of Washington

Why a biracial issue, and why now? As black Americans we have mixed ancestry; one might ask what is gained by giving this obvious fact the attention of a special issue. Rather than focus on this broad history, however, we instead highlight here the situations of first-generation biracial black people. Perhaps this does not simplify matters. Foregrounding their specific experiences, identities, and concerns may stir up the anger of those who feel judged “not black enough” and the anger of those who feel betrayed and devalued by self-identifying biracial individuals. The politics of biracialism, seen this way, are individualistic, diminishing our community’s cohesion. Yet we feel that the time is right for an exploration of the topic. Biracial or multiracial studies is fast-growing and itself extremely varied in its methods, disciplines, and orientation. Acknowledging the important and interesting work that has been produced in the last two decades, we provide a forum for such work. Another factor in our choice of topic is the emergence, in 2008, of Obama as a presidential candidate. Both his blackness and his first generation biracialism have prompted new consideration, within black communities and within the U.S. population as a whole, of the operations and meanings of race, nation, family and community within the U.S.A. This gives us additional incentive to explore biracialism in the present moment. Our moment differs from the fraught late 1990s when the multiracial social movement campaigned for recognition in the 2000 Census, and was opposed by influential black voices. The present adds some confidence and optimism: to profile biracialism now, we suggest, is not to jeopardize black collectivity so much as it is to recognize and join the healthy debates that are flourishing within and beyond black studies…

Table of Contents

• Introduction to “The Politics of Biracialism” / Laura Chrisman
• Interracial Intimacies, Barack Obama, and the Politics of Multiracialism / Kimberly McClain DaCosta
• Review Essay: Performing the Twenty-first Century Tragic Mulatto: Black, White, and Jewish: Autobioraphy of Shifting Self by Rebecca Walker / Ralina Joseph
• Toward Black and Multiracial “Kinship” After 1997, or How a Race Man Became “Cablinasian” / Habiba Ibrahim
• Poetry: “The Art of Loving” / Madeleine Clifford
• Baby janay and Naomi Pabst: Negotiating Race Mixing, Adoption, and Transnationality / Naomi Pabst
• Reframing the National Family: Race Mixing and Re-telling American History / Catherine Squires
• Race, Multiraciality, and Barack Obama: Toward a More Perfect Union? / G. Reginald Daniel
• Books Reviews
  • Amalgamation Schemes: Anti-blackness and the Critique of Multiracialism by Jared Sexton / LeiLani Nishime
  • Dispatches from the Color Line: The Press and Multiracial America  by Catherine R. Squires / Manoucheka Celeste
  • Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon by Jane Rhodes / Madhavi Murty
  • Mixed Race Hollywood Edited by Mary C. Beltrán and Camilla Fojas / Sarita Cannon

Post-Race on America’s Next Top Model

International Communication Association, TBA
2007 Conference
San Francisco, CA
2007-05-23

Ralina L. Joseph, Assistant Professor of Communications, American Ethnic Studies and Women Studies
University of Washington

African American supermodel Tyra Banks’s popular reality show for aspiring young models, America’s Next Top Model, both reflects and produces twenty-first century ideals of post-feminism, a “girl power” moment in which second-wave feminism is antiquated, and post-race, a post-Civil Rights moment in which race is relic. ANTM features a sizable number of women of color contestants who are led by an African American female leader. The show’s explicit message is that racialized and gendered identities are equalized in the “Top Model” space. However, all of the contestants, both women of color and white women, are disciplined so that they must signify hyper-raced, hyper-sexed and essentialized versions of “difference.” At the same time, the contestants must also perform as safe, genteel, and essentially white middle class “Cover Girls.”

In this paper I investigate performances of racial and gender masquerade in a 2004 episode of America’s Next Top Model. This episode features a confluence of race as costume, because the contestants “switch ethnicities” with the help of makeup and wigs, and gender as maternity, because the contestants don milk mustaches and three-year-old children as props. ANTM demonstrates that performances of post-ethnicity and post-feminism are always reliant upon racialized and gendered stereotypes and the logic of capitalism. While the mixed-race contestants are showcased as the most seamless transgressors of racialized and gendered identity, as all of the women slip on race and gender “costumes,” the show illustrates the seductive power of post-identity politics in the twenty first century United States.

…As a graduate student I worked on notions of contemporary mixed-race African-American representations as being particularly emblematic of a post-race and postfeminist excuse that was vital in constructing neo-conservative political measures like California’s 1996 anti-affirmative action measure prop 209 and 2003’s racial privacy initiative prop[osition] 54. Historically and into the new millennium hybridized Black female bodies have been represented as not only sexually available, but also complicit in their exploitation (one of my favorite examples is Halle Berry’s much lauded academy award winning turn in 2001’s Monster’s Ball where she screams out in her sex scene with her death row inmate husband’s prison guard/executioner Billy Bob Thornton, “make me feel good!”). What I’ve been working on post-grad school is how these connected ideologies of post-race and post-feminism operate in other popular culture where mixed-race functions more often as a metaphor. One cite I’ve been investigating is the celebrity of thirty-three year old African American supermodel turned media mogul Tyra Banks and the phenomenon of her reality television show, America’s Next Top Model…

Read the entire article here.

Dispatches from the Color Line: The Press and Multiracial America

State University of New York Press
July 2007
295 pages
Hardcover ISBN10: 0-7914-7099-7; ISBN13: 978-0-7914-7099-2
Paperback ISBN10: 0-7914-7100-4; ISBN13: 978-0-7914-7100-5

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

Explores contemporary news media coverage of multiracial people and identities.

When modern news media choose to focus attention on people of multiracial descent, how does this fit with broader contemporary and historical racial discourses? Do these news narratives complicate common understandings of race and race relations? Dispatches from the Color Line explores these issues by examining contemporary news media coverage of multiracial people and identities. Catherine R. Squires looks at how journalists utilize information from many sources—including politicians, bureaucrats, activists, scholars, demographers, and marketers—to link multiracial identity to particular racial norms, policy preferences, and cultural trends. She considers individuals who were accused (rightly or wrongly) of misrepresenting their racial identity to the public for personal gain, and also compares the new racial categories of Census 2000 as reported in Black owned, Asian American owned, and mainstream newspapers. These comparisons reveal how a new racial group is framed in mass media, and how different media sources reinforce or challenge long-standing assumptions about racial identity and belonging in the United States.

Multiracial Identity in the Post-Civil Rights Era

Social Identities
Volume 11, Issue 5 (September 2005)
pages 531-549
DOI: 10.1080/13504630500408164

Gino Michael Pellegrini, Adjunct Assistant Professor of English
Pierce College, Woodland Hills, California

This article, which utilizes personal experience as well as other perspectives and theories on race and mixed race, suggests that multiracial identity is a manifestation of recent date that differs from traditional conceptions and descriptions of mixed race that conform to the dichotomous and hierarchical logic of the binary racial system. As delineated in this article, the emergence of multiracial identity is properly understood in the context of the post-civil rights era and has been coextensive with multiculturalism, the proliferation of information technologies, and with the emergence of the multiracial political movement in the 1990s. Further, this article suggests that multiracial identity is also in part a by-product of multicultural American universities of the 1980s and 1990s. That is, multiracial identity has to a certain extent taken shape in reaction to the rigid ethnoracial boundaries and discourses that are imposed on mixed race students in the multicultural academy.

Read or purchase the article here.

Mixed Race Hollywood

New York University Press
2008
352 pages
20 illustrations
Paperback ISBN: 9780814799895
Cloth ISBN: 9780814799888

Edited by

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

Camilla Fojas, Associate Professor and Director of Latin American and Latino Studies
DePaul University

A Kansas City Star 2008 Notable Book

Since the early days of Hollywood film, portrayals of interracial romance and of individuals of mixed racial and ethnic heritage have served to highlight and challenge fault lines within Hollywood and the nation’s racial categories and borders. Mixed Race Hollywood is a pioneering compilation of essays on mixed-race romance, individuals, families, and stars in U.S. film and media culture.

Situated at the cutting-edge juncture of ethnic studies and media studies, this collection addresses early mixed-race film characters, Blaxploitation, mixed race in children’s television programming, and the “outing” of mixed-race stars on the Internet, among other issues and contemporary trends in mixed-race representation. The contributors explore this history and current trends from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives in order to better understand the evolving conception of race and ethnicity in contemporary culture.

“I’m Black an’ I’m Proud”: Ruth Negga, Breakfast on Pluto, and Invisible Irelands

Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visible Culture
Issue number 13 (Spring 2009): After Post-Colonialism
University of Rochester, New York

Charlotte McIvor, Lecturer in Drama
National University Ireland, Galway

This article examines Ethiopian-Irish actress Ruth Negga‘s performance in Neil Jordan’s 2005 Breakfast on Pluto in light of recent cultural, racial, and socio-economic shifts in Irish society. How does Negga’s identity as an Irish actress of color influence possible receptions of this film in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland and contest notions of Irishness that have typically been allied only with whiteness?

Roddy Doyle famously posited a relationship between the Irish and African-Americans thus in his 1987 novel The Committments:

–The Irish are the niggers of Europe, lads.
They nearly gasped: it was so true.
–An’ Dubliners are the niggers of Ireland. The culchies have fuckin’ everythin’. An’ the northside Dubliners are the niggers o’ Dublin. —–Say it loud, I’m black an’ I’m proud.
He grinned. He’d impressed himself again.
He’d won them. They couldn’t say anything.

Jimmy Rabitte, band manager, uses this turn of phrase to convince his motley crowd of Dublin Irish musicians to form a soul band, although the phrase was later reimagined in the film as, “The Irish are the blacks of Europe” [emphasis mine]….

…Negga’s performance models an ideal vision of Irish belonging that does not erase the co-mingling of Irish pasts and presents with histories of other peoples. Negga forces the audience towards a contemporary engagement with a transnational Irish history that illuminates the history of a “global Irish” who have now come to the island of Ireland either as returned white Irish emigrants or as would-be citizens who share colonial and European histories with their new neighbors, despite racial and cultural differences. Negga, in an article fittingly entitled, “Ruth Negga, a star without a label,” observes: “For the moment, I don’t have to worry about people trying to fit me into a box. Up until now, there were no mixed-race roles in Ireland. It’s not like in the UK, where these roles do exist and then you are typecast from then on.”…

Charlotte McIvor is a Ph.D. candidate in Performance Studies at University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the production of Irish and Indian (Bengali) colonial and post-colonial nationalism and performance in their transnational and gendered contexts. McIvor’s dissertation is titled “Staging the ‘Global’ Irish: Transnational Genealogies in Irish Performance.” She is a graduate student instructor in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. She has directed several plays at UC Berkeley and in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

Read the entire article here.

Queer in Black and White: Interraciality, Same Sex Desire, and Contemporary African American Culture

Indiana University Press
2009-04-21
152 pages
5 b&w photos, 5.5 x 8.25
ISBN-13: 978-0-253-22109-4

Stefanie K. Dunning, Associate Professor
Miami University, Oxford, Ohio

This book analyzes representative works of African American fiction, film, and music in which interracial desire appears in the context of same sex desire. In close readings of these “texts,” Stefanie K. Dunning explores the ways in which the interracial intersects with queerness, blackness, whiteness, class, and black national identity. She shows that representations of interracial desire do not follow the logic of racial exclusion. Instead they are metaphorical and anti-biological. Rather than diluting race, interracial desire makes race visible. By invoking the interracial, black gay and lesbian artists can remake our conception of blackness.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. “Ironic Soil”: Recuperative Rhythms and Negotiated Nationalism
• 2. “No Tender Mercy”: Same-Sex Desire, Interraciality, and the Black Nation
• 3. (Not) Loving Her: A Locus of Contradictions
• 4. “She’s a B*(u)tch”: Centering Blackness in The Watermelon Woman
• Epilogue: Reading Robert Reid-Pharr
• Notes
• Index

What Does Race Have to Do with Ugly Betty? An Analysis of Privilege and Postracial(?) Representations on a Television Sitcom

Television & New Media
Volume 10, Number 6 (November 2009)
pages 521-535
DOI: 10.1177/1527476409340906

Jennifer Esposito, Associate Professor of Research, Measurement & Statistics
Georgia State University, Atlanta

This article examines ABC’s television comedy Ugly Betty, in particular one episode that explores race-based affirmative action decisions and quotas, to argue that race and racial categories are ever more present in our society and that they need to be. Asserting how and in what ways race “matters” is important in a social and political climate that often suggests race dare not speak its name. Circulating within sociology and education discourse is the notion of a “color-blind society” (meaning that we no longer see color or that the color of one’s skin will not determine his or her life chances).  This idea has been has been recently redefined by the media as “postracial” (meaning that we have moved beyond race and that race no longer structures our thinking or our actions). Either discourse silences talk of racial privilege and disadvantage.  As a discursive racial project, the Ugly Betty text helps reify notions of race and difference.

Read or purchase the article here.