Mixed Race Studies

Interracial Relationships in the 21st Century

Carolina Academic Press
2009
160 pp
Paper ISBN: 978-1-59460-571-0
LCCN: 2009001612

Earl Smith, Professor of Sociology and Rubin Professor and Director of Ethnic Studies
Wake Forest University

Angela J. Hattery, Professor of Sociology
Wake Forest University

Interracial Relationships in the 21st Century is a unique set of essays—both personal and research based—that explore a variety of issues related to interracial couplings in the 21st Century United States. Edited by Earl Smith and Angela Hattery, professors of sociology at Wake Forest University, this volume brings together the leading scholars in both the social sciences and the humanities who explore interracialities.

The chapters cover a wide range of topics related to navigating interracial relationships, including a chapter by George Yancey and colleagues that focuses on the tensions around interracial relationships in conservative Christian churches, to the role that racism and patriarchy play in shaping intimate partner violence among interracial couples—Smith and Hattery’s own contribution. Kerry Ann Rockquemore and Tracey A. Laszloffy focus on the children of interracial unions and their attempts to negotiate a racial identity. Wei Ming Dariotis uses a personal narrative to explore the discourse and cooption of the term “Hapa” by a variety of Asian Americans. And, Amy Steinbugler offers an examination of the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in her chapter on interracial, same sex couples. Other contributors include Kellina M. Craig-Henderson, Emily J. Hubbard and Amy Smith.

In light of the recent election of the first African American president, Barack Obama, himself a bi-racial individual living in a multi-racial family, this book could not be more timely.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments

The Creolization Reader: Studies in Mixed Identities and Cultures

Routledge
2009-09-10
416 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-49854-8
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-49713-8

Edited by

Robin Cohen, Professor of Development Studies and Director of the International Migration Institute
University of Oxford

Paola Toninato, Research Fellow in Sociology and Italian Studies
University of Warwick

Increasingly, ‘creolization’ is used to analyse ‘cultural complexity’, ‘cosmopolitanism’, ‘hybridity’, ‘syncretism’ and ‘mixture’, prominent and growing characteristics of the global age. The Creolization Reader captures all these meanings. Attention to the ‘creolizing world’ has enormous potential as a suggestive way of describing our complex world and the diverse societies in which we all now live. The Creolization Reader illuminates old creole societies and emerging cultures and identities in many parts of the world. Areas covered include Latin America, the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean, West, South and East Africa, the Pacific and the USA. Our authors provide an authoritative review, conspectus and critique of many aspects of creolization. This book is divided into five main sections covering the following key topics:

• Concepts and Theories
• The Creolized World
• Popular Culture
• Kindred Concepts
• The Creolizing World

Each section begins with a brief introduction summarizing the key arguments of the contributors, while the editors provide a provocative and comprehensive introduction to the debates provoked by creolization theory. The Creolization Reader is multi-disciplinary and includes 28 readings and original contributions drawn mainly from history, sociology, development studies, anthropology and cultural studies.

Table of Contents

PART 1: CONCEPTS AND THEORIES 1. Creolité and the Process of Creolization 2. Creoles, Capitalism and Colonialism 3. Creolization and its Discontents 4. Creolization and Creativity 5. In Praise of Créolité PART 2: THE CREOLIZED WORLD 6. The Creolité Movement: Paradoxes of a French Caribbean Orthodoxy 7. Creolization and Creole Societies 8. Creolization and Globalization in Réunion 9. Ethnicity and Identity: Creoles of Colour in Louisiana 10. Creolization and Nation-Building in the Hispanic Caribbean 11. The Evolution of a Creole Identity in Cape Verde PART 3: POPULAR CULTURE 12. Calypso Reinvents Itself 13. Capoeira: The History of an Afro-Brazilian Martial Art 14. Louisiana Creole Food Culture 15. African Gods in Contemporary Brazil 16. Architectural Creolization 17. Masquerade Politics PART 4: KINDRED CONCEPTS 18. Hybridity in Cultural Theory: Encounters of a Heterogeneous Kind 19. Mestizaje in Latin America 20. Conceiving Transnationalism 21. Conceiving Cosmopolitanism 22. Syncretism and its Synonyms: Reflections on Cultural Mixture PART 5: THE CREOLIZING WORLD 23. A Creolizing South Africa? Mixing, Hybridity and Creolization 24. Sacred Subversions? Syncretic Creoles, the Indo-Caribbean, and ‘Cultures in-between’ 25. Creolization in Transnational Japan-America 26. Creolization and Nation-Building in Indonesia 27. Swahili Creolization: The Case of Dar es Salaam 28. The World in Creolization.

Racial Passing

Ohio State Law Journal
Ohio State University Michael E. Moritz College of Law
Vol. 62: 1145 (2001)
Frank R. Strong Law Forum Lecture

Randall Kennedy, Michael R. Klein Professor of Law
Harvard Law School

I. Passing: A Definition

Passing is a deception that enables a person to adopt certain roles or identities from which he would be barred by prevailing social standards in the absence of his misleading conduct. The classic racial passer in the United States has been the “white Negro”: the individual whose physical appearance allows him to present himself as “white” but whose “black” lineage (typically only a very partial black lineage) makes him a Negro according to dominant racial rules. A passer is distinguishable from the person who is merely mistaken—the person who, having been told that he is white, thinks of himself as white, and holds himself out to be white (though he and everyone else in the locale would deem him to be “black” were the facts of his ancestry known). Gregory Howard Williams was, for a period, such a person. The child of a white mother and a light-skinned Negro man who pretended to be white, Williams assumed that he, too, was white. Not until he was ten years old, when his parents divorced, did Williams and his brother learn that they were “black” according to the custom by which any known Negro ancestry makes a person a Negro. Williams recalls vividly the moment at which he was told of his “new” racial identity:

I never had heard anything crazier in my life! How could Dad tell us such a mean lie? I glanced across the aisle to where he sat grim-faced and erect, staring straight ahead. I saw my father as I had never seen him before. The veil dropped from his face and features. Before my eyes he was transformed from a swarthy Italian to his true self—a high-yellow mulatto. My father was a Negro! We were colored! After ten years in Virginia on the white side of the color line, I knew what that meant. When he held himself out as white before learning of his father’s secret, Williams was simply mistaken. When he occasionally held himself out as white after learning the “true” racial identity of his father, Williams was passing. In other words, as I define the term, passing requires that a person be self-consciously engaged in concealment. Such a person knows about his African American lineage—his black “blood”—and either stays quiet about it, hoping that silence along with his appearance will lead observers to perceive him as white, or expressly asserts that he is white (knowing all the while that he is “black” according to ascendant social understandings).

Estimates regarding the incidence of passing have varied greatly. Walter White claimed that annually “approximately 12,000 white-skinned Negroes disappear” into white society. Roi Ottley asserted that there were five million “white Negroes” in the United States and that forty to fifty thousand passed annually. Professor John H. Burma’s estimates were considerably lower. He posited that some 110,000 blacks lived on the white side of the color line and that between 2,500 and 2,750 passed annually. Given its secretive nature, no one knows for sure the incidence of passing. It is clear, however, that at the middle of the twentieth century, large numbers of African Americans claimed to know people engaged in passing…

Read the entire article/lecture here.

Embracing Ambiguity: Faces of the Future

Cal State Fullerton College of the Arts Main Gallery
2010-01-30 through 2010-03-05
Opening Reception: 2010-01-30, 17:00-20:00, artist will be present
Panel discussion 2010-02-02, 17:00-19:00, artist will be present
800 N. State College Blvd. Fullerton, CA 92831-3547
Phone (657) 278-7750

Curated by Lynn Stromick and Jillian Nakornthap

Featuring

Laura Kina, Professor of Art
DePaul University 

This group exhibition will feature selections from Kina’s Loving Series as well as an essay by Kina in the exhibition catalog – “Half Yella: Embracing Ethno-Racial Ambiguity.”