Mixed Race Studies

Hapa is a Hawaiian term used to describe a person of mixed Asian or Pacific Islander racial/ethnic heritage.

Wikipedia

…A major deficiency in multiracial scholarship has been the lack of historical context, together with the concomitant error of viewing mixed-race identity as an exclusively recent phenomenon…

Rainier Spencer, Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States, 1999-08-12

Racing to Theory or Retheorizing Race? Understanding the Struggle to Build a Multiracial Identity Theory

Journal of Social Issues
2009
Volume 65, Number 1
pp. 13–34

Kerry Ann Rockquemore, Associate Professor
University of Illinois at Chicago

David L. Brunsma, Professor of Sociology
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Daniel J. Delgado
University of Missouri-Columbia

Empirical research on the growing multiracial population in the United States has focused largely on the documentation of racial identification, analysis of psychological adjustment, and understanding the broader political consequences of mixed-race identification. Efforts toward theory construction on multiracial identity development, however, have been largely disconnected from empirical data, mired in disciplinary debates, and bound by historically specific assumptions about race and racial group membership. This study provides a critical overview of multiracial identity development theories, examines the links between theory and research, explores the challenges to multiracial identity theory construction, and proposes considerations for future directions in theorizing racial identity development among the mixed-race population.

Read the entire article for free here.

The Tragic Mulatta Plays the Tragic Muse

Victorian Literature and Culture
Volume 37, Issue 2 (June 2009)
pages 501-522
DOI: 10.1017/S1060150309090317

Kimberly Snyder Manganellia, Assistant Professor of 19th-Century British and American Literature
Clemson University

Marie Lavington, the runaway octoroon slave in Charles Kingsley‘s little-read novel Two Years Ago (1857), makes this declaration of independence in a letter to Tom Thurnall, the novel’s hero. Though Tom helped her escape to a Canadian Quaker community, Marie has tired of the “staid and sober” (122; vol. 1, ch. 5) lifestyle of a Quakeress.  She reenters the public marketplace by refashioning herself into the Italian diva, La Cordifiamma.  Marie’s ascent to the stage as La Cordifiamma marks the construction of a new female body in the mid-nineteenth century: the Tragic Mulatta who becomes a Tragic Muse.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Browning of America and the Evasion of Social Justice (Review)
by Ronald R. Sundstrom

SUNY Press
2008, 190pp., $24.95 (pbk.)
ISBN: 9780791475867

Notre Dame Philisophical Reviews
2009-06-29

Reviewed by Lucius T. Outlaw (Jr.)
Vanderbilt University

The United States is undergoing the most profound demographic changes in the country’s history so that in a few decades, if not sooner, persons identified (and identifying themselves) as white and tracing their ancestry to Europe will have become part of the nation’s racial and ethnic plurality, no longer its numerically dominant racial group. This historic development portends others equally historic and transformative, among these the gradual — possibly even dramatic — displacement of white people as the dominating group politically, economically, socially, even culturally…

…Some persons envision a United States no longer ordered by racial or ethnic considerations, where color-consciousness has been dissipated by practicing color-blindness, and by the demographic predominance of “brown” Americans to such an extent that the sorting of persons into hierarchically valued, color-coded racial and ethnic groups will not have a demographic basis.  Such was the wish of Frederick Douglass: that the nation’s racial population groups would intermingle and interbreed — in his words “amalgamate’ — to such an extent that a new “blended” race, neither black nor white, would emerge and rescue our country from the scourge of color-conscious, color-valuing racialisms and racisms…

…In the midst of all of the many aspects of invidious racial and ethnic oppressions that have been devised and practiced across the history of the United States, the aspect most sensitive and productive of the most grotesque violence has been that having to do with the most intimate and consequential of human involvements: intimate relations, intimate sexual relations especially, between persons of different and differently ranked racial groups. These are subjects, Sundstrom argues, that have been systematically avoided by contemporary thinkers who wrestle with race matters. He would have us stop avoiding the subject, not least because of the foundational importance of intimate relations for the formation and continuation of polities. Without such relationships, there can be no polities. There can be no resolution of our racial and ethnic difficulties without being forthright about intimate and sexual interracial matters.  These, argues Sundstrom, must not be relegated to the realm of privacy and thus put off limits to philosophers and theorists of the social and political. Moreover, he would not have these matters be wedded to the “browning of America” as their presumed resolution, as Frederick Douglass had hoped out of anguished alienation and desperation. Chapter four, “Interracial Intimacies: Racism and the Political Romance of the Browning of America” is required reading for us all, if social justice is not to be evaded.

So, too, chapter 5, “Responsible Multiracial Politics”. Here the reader will experience, as well as come to understand, the personal existential weight and philosophical significance for Sundstrom of political endeavours for persons whose identities are neither easily nor accurately given fulfilling, coherent, authentic, and healthy articulation and lived-experience if forced into a seemingly singular, unitary, and thus supposedly harmonious racial designation. Persons who are descendants of multiracial, multiethnic unions — even when the races and ethnic groups are understood as social, rather than biological, constructs — need the terms and concepts by which they can identify, identify with, and live their important various heritages, by which they can, in all appropriate instances, ‘remember their grandmothers’.  Needed, too, are modes of politics that sanction and nurture this important existential work as another crucial aspect of multiracial, multiethnic democratic polities, modes of politics by which persons of complex identities can be made ready for and welcomed to shared and responsible political life.  Social justice without evasion…

Read the entire review here.

Re-Mix: Rethinking the use of ‘Hapa’ in Mixedrace Asian/Pacific Islander American Community Organizing

McNair Journal
Fall 2005

Angela S. Taniguchi, McNair Scholar
Washington State University

Linda Heidenreich, Chair and Associate Professor
Department of Women’s Studies
Washington State University

The term Hapa is Hawaiian in origin and roughly means ‘half’. Recently, many mixedrace Asian/Pacific Islanders on the mainland began identifying with and using the term Hapa to create organizations specific to their needs.  Largely recognized as a “California phenomenon,” the number of Asian-descent multiracials identifying as Hapa is ever increasing.  Here I investigate the use of the term Hapa historically, as well as its current use in California.  I then discuss the potential political implications of Mixedrace Asian/Pacific Islanders coalescing under the term.

Read the entire article here.

Mix-d: uk: A Look at Mixed-Race Identities

Pelican Press, Manchester, United Kingdom
September 2008
32 pages
ISBN: 978-0-9559505-0-6

Bradley Lincoln, Editor & Designer

Richard Milnes, Photographer

Mix-d: uk is a publication looking at mixed race identities from the Multiple Heritage Project [now mix-d] and the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Education Trust. It celebrates the UK’s diverse Multiple Heritage population through portraits of people of mixed background. This beautiful book is a positive representation of this growing population with personal quotes reflecting the multiple heritage experience.

You may order the book here.

Raising Chicanos in the Great White North: A White Mother’s Muse

Qualitative Inquiry
Volume 15, Number 7, (July 2009)
pages 1155-1177
DOI: 10.1177/1077800409338033

Traci Fordham-Hernández, Assistant Professor of Performance and Communication Arts
St. Lawrence University, Canton, NY

This article explores paradoxes in being the White mother of Mexican American children and discusses how some of its attendant issues contrast one another.  The author, an American scholar, believes she is taught to think and to write, not from the heart, but from a detached and “objective,” cerebral cortex, and she sees the places, the prism through which the world is seen, are constantly shifting.  The author writes of liminality and simultaneity, “I’m ‘swimming in the sea’ as both the swimmer, struggling, and part of the sea, itself, pulling myself under, drowning in between-ness . . .”  The headings, “From the Shore,” provide a detached, theoretical reflection upon the author’s experiences as a White mother of mixed-race children: “I’m standing on the banks, looking into my experiences and speaking from my ’head’,” and the headings, “In the Sea,” provide stories: “I’m immersed in the depths of my experiences and reflecting from my ‘heart’.”

Read or purchase the article here.

Dr. Maria P. P. Root 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, Heidi W. Durrow
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #113 – Maria P. P. Root, Ph.D.
Wednesday, 2009-08-07, 21:00Z (17:00 EDT, 14:00 PDT)

Maria P. P. Root, Ph.D.

Maria P. P. Root, Ph.D., born in Manila, Philippines, grew up in Los Angeles, California. She graduated from the University of California at Riverside in 1977 with degrees in Psychology and Sociology. She subsequently attended Claremont University in Claremont, California receiving her Masters degree in Cognitive Psychology in 1979. She completed her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at the University of Washington in Seattle in 1983 with an emphasis in minority mental health. Dr. Root resides in Seattle, Washington where she is an independent scholar and clinical psychologist. She has been in practice for over 20 years. Her general practice focuses on adult and adolescent treatment therapy, which includes working with families and couples. Dr. Root’s working areas of knowledge are broad with emphasis on culturally competent practice, life transition issues, trauma, ethnic and racial identity, workplace stress and harassment, and disordered eating. In the early 1980s, she established a group treatment program for bulimia that grew out of her dissertation work. Subsequently, she trained other professionals to recognize and treat people with a range of disordered eating symptoms. She continues to treat people with eating disorders. Dr. Root’s practice also includes formal psychological evaluation. She works as a consultant to several law enforcement departments. She also works as an expert witness in forensic settings performing evaluations and offering expert testimony in matters that require cultural competence and/or knowledge of racism or ethnocentrism. Dr. Root is a trainer, educator, and public speaker on the topics of multiracial families, multiracial identity, cultural competence, trauma, work place harassment, and disordered eating. She has provided lectures and training in New Zealand, England, the Netherlands, Canada, and the United States for major universities, professional organizations, grassroots community groups, and student organizations. Dr. Root’s publications cover the areas of trauma, cultural assessment, multiracial identity, feminist therapy, and eating disorders. One of the leading authorities in the field of racial and ethnic identity, Dr. Root published the first contemporary volume on mixed race people, Racially Mixed People in America (1992). Including this book, she has edited two award-winning books on multiracial people and produced the foundational Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People. The U.S. Census referred to these texts in their deliberations that resulted in an historic  “check more than one” format to the race question for the 2000 census. Dr. Root is past-President of the Washington State Psychological Association and the recipient of national and international awards from professional and community organizations. She is also a clay artist, and maintains a website about her work at Primitiva Pottery and Tile.

Listen to the episode here. Download the episode here.