Mixed Race Studies

Living Proof: Is Hawaii the Answer?

The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Volume 530, Number 1 (November 1993)
pages 137-154
DOI: 10.1177/0002716293530001010

Glen Grant

Dennis M. Ogawa, Professor and Department Chair of American Studies
University of Hawaii

Hawaii has often been heralded for its relatively harmonious race relations, which encompass a great diversity of Asian and Pacific cultures. As the national concern with respect to multi-culturalism escalates into a debate over the merits of ethnicity versus amalgamation into the American melting pot, an understanding of Hawaii’s social and racial systems may demand greater scrutiny. The living proof that the islands’ people offer is not racial bliss or perfect equality but an example of how the perpetuation of ethnic identities can actually enhance race relations within the limits of a social setting marked by (1) the historical development of diverse ethnic groups without the presence of a racial or cultural majority; (2) the adherence to the values of tolerance represented in the Polynesian concept of aloha kanaka, an open love for human beings; and (3) the integration of Pacific, Asian, European, and Anglo-American groups into a new local culture.

Read or purchase the article here.

Dislocating the Color Line: Identity, Hybridity, and Singularity in African-American Narrative

Stanford University Press
1997
280 pages
Cloth ISBN-10: 0804727740; ISBN-13: 9780804727747
Paper ISBN-10: 0804727759; ISBN-13: 9780804727754

Samira Kawash, Associate Professor Women’s and Gender Studies
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Inquiries into the meaning and force of race in American culture have largely focused on questions of identity and difference—What does it mean to have a racial identity? What constitutes racial difference? Such questions assume the basic principle of racial division, which todays seems to be becoming an increasingly bitter and seemingly irreparable chasm between black and white.

This book confronts this contemporary problem by shifting the focus of analysis from understanding differences to analyzing division. It provides a historical context for the recent resurgence of racial division by tracing the path of the color line as it appears in the narrative writings of African-Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In readings of slave narratives, “passing novels,” and the writings of Charles Chesnutt and Zora Neale Hurston, the author asks: What is the work of division? How does division work?

The history of the color line in the United States is coeval with that of the nation. The author suggests that throughout this history, the color line has not functioned simply to name biological or cultural difference, but more important, it has served as a principle of division, classification, and order. In this way, the color line marks the inseparability of knowledge and power in a racially demarcated society. The author shows how, from the time of slavery to today, the color line has figured as the locus of such central tenets of American political life as citizenship, subjectivity, community, law, freedom, and justice.

This book seeks not only to understand, but also to bring critical pressure on the interpretations, practices, and assumptions that correspond to and buttress representations of racial difference. The work of dislocating the color line lies in uncovering the uncertainty, the incoherency, and the discontinuity that the common sense of the color line masks, while at the same time elucidating the pressures that transform the contingent relations of the color line into common sense.

Are Mestizos Hybrids? The Conceptual Politics of Andean Identities

Journal of Latin American Studies
Volume 37, Issue 02
May 2005
pp 259-284
DOI: 10.1017/S0022216X05009004

Marisol de la Cadena, Associate Professor of Anthropology
University of California, Davis

Through a genealogical analysis of the terms mestizo and mestizaje, this article reveals that these voices are doubly hybrid. On the one hand they house an empirical hybridity, built upon eighteenth and nineteenth century racial taxonomies and according to which ‘mestizos’ are non-indigenous individuals, the result of biological or cultural mixtures. Yet, mestizos’ genealogy starts earlier, when ‘mixture’ denoted transgression of the rule of faith, and its statutes of purity. Within this taxonomic regime mestizos could be, at the same time, indigenous. Apparently dominant, racial theories sustained by scientific knowledge mixed with, (rather than cancel) previous faith based racial taxonomies. ‘Mestizo’ thus houses a conceptual hybridity – the mixture of two classificatory regimes – which reveals subordinate alternatives for mestizo subject positions, including forms of indigeneity.

Read the entire article here.

Individuals versus Group? The Moral Conundrum of Blurred Racial Boundaries

Chapter for publication in Social Science and Ethics, ed. Kristen Monroe. Book manuscript being prepared for review.
2008-08-26

Jennifer L. Hochschild, Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government and Professor of African and African American Studies
Harvard University

A classic moral conundrum, especially though not uniquely in liberal polities, is whether a person should choose what is best for him or herself, or whether a person should choose what best advances the interests of the group to which he or she belongs. I explore this conundrum in three related cases – skin color hierarchy among African Americans, multiracialism, and genomics. Each case offers possibilities for blurring, crossing, or even dissolving racial boundaries as they have been understood in the United States for most of the past century. Any such change in a racial boundary might benefit the individual who makes it, and might also diminish the strength or cohesiveness of that person’s group, especially if he or she identifies as African American.

The paper provides evidence showing how and why the conundrum could occur in each of the three cases. It concludes by identifying political situations and policy choices that can exacerbate, or soften, the potential dilemma of having to choose between individual or group benefits.

Read the entire paper here.

Race and Ethnicity: Culture, Identity and Representation

Routledge
2006-03-02
296 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-35124-9
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-35125-6
Trim Size: 234X156

Stephen Spencer, Senior Lecturer in Sociology
Sheffield Hallam University

Broad-ranging and comprehensive, this incisive new textbook examines the shifting meanings of ‘race’ and ethnicity and collates the essential concepts in one indispensable companion volume. From Marxist views to post-colonialism, this book investigates the attendant debates, issues and analyses within the context of global change.

Using international case studies from Australia, Malaysia, the Caribbean, Mexico and the UK and examples of popular imagery that help to explain the more difficult elements of theory, this key text focuses on everyday life issues such as:

• ethnic conflicts and polarized states
• racism(s) and policies of multiculturalism
• diasporas, asylum seekers and refugees
• mixed race and hybrid identity

Incorporating summaries, questions, illustrations, exercises and a glossary of terms, this student-friendly text also puts forward suggestions for further project work. Broad in scope, interactive and accessible, this book is a key resource for undergraduate and postgraduate level students of ‘race’ and ethnicity across the social sciences.

Table of Contents

1. ‘Race’/Ethnicity and Representation
2. The Politics of Naming
3. Colonialism: Invisible Histories
4. Theories
5. Identity: Marginal Voices and the Politics of Difference
6. Major Case Study: Indigenous Australians
7. Conflict
8. Living the Contradiction
9. Futures

Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Third Edition)

Aunt Lute Books
1987
ISBN 1879960125

Gloria Anzaldúa

• Chosen one of the “Best Books of 1987” by Library Journal.
• Selected by Utne Reader as part of its “Alternative Canon” in 1998.
• One of Hungry Mind Review’s “Best 100 Books of the 20th Century”

Rooted in Gloria Anzaldúa’s experience as a Chicana, a lesbian, an activist, and a writer, the groundbreaking essays and poems in this volume profoundly challenge how we think about identity. Borderlands/La Frontera remaps understandings of what a “border” is, seeing it not as a simple divide between here and there, us and them, but as a psychic, social, and cultural terrain that we inhabit, and that inhabits all of us.

New to this edition:

Includes an Introduction by Sonia Saldívar-Hull; an interview with Gloria Anzaldúa; and contributions by Norma Alarcón, Julia Alvarez, Paola Bacchetta, Rusty Barcelo, Norma Elia Cantú, Sandra Cisneros, T. Jackie Cuevas, Claire Joysmith, and AnaLouise Keating.

(Re)constructing multiracial blackness: women’s activism, difference and collective identity in Britain

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 24, Issue 1 (January 2001)
pages 29-49
DOI: 10.1080/014198701750052488

Julia Sudbury, Professor and Department Head of Ethnic Studies
Mills College, Oakland, California

This article analyses the (re)construction of black identity as a multiracial signifier shared by African, Asian and Caribbean women in Britain, from the framework of recent social movement theory. The collective identity approach calls attention to naming as a strategic element of collective action, but has overlooked the experiences of black women at the intersection of multiple systems of oppression. A focus on the process of constructing black womanhood allows us to move beyond static and unidimensional notions of identity to question how and why gendered racialized boundaries are created and maintained. I argue that multiracial blackness should be viewed as an oppositional identity, strategically invoked by black women activists in order to mobilize collective action. Drawing on everyday theorizing by black women, the article examines the shift from the policing of authenticity claims, to a more open and fluid collectivity, and suggests that explicit interrogations of identity are a prerequisite for effective and sustainable alliances between diverse movement participants…

…For African Caribbean women, the ‘pure and narrow defnition’ of blackness (see Faith above) was personified through the figure of the ‘conscious’ or ‘I-tal’ black woman. The ‘I-tal’ woman was a direct refutation of hegemonic constructions of beauty and thus established an alternative ideal of womanhood. She was assumed to have dark skin, unprocessed hair and African phenotype features. In seeking to revalorize these denigrated characteristics, black women activists reified a rigid conceptualization of distinct ‘races’.  One unintentional outcome of this approach is the marginalization of mixed race women (Ifekwunigwe 1997). Exclusionary notions of belonging and community were therefore inherent in women’s oppositional constructions of beauty.

Similar processes characterized a whole array of characteristics and behaviours as black or non-black. A prime area of contestation was that of sexual relationships. Few of the interviewees appeared to view ‘mixed’ relationships as a valid family structure. It was assumed that women who were politically aware would engage in black on black relationships. Accordingly, women who had a white partner were held in suspicion. For example where a woman brought a picture of her new fiancé to a centre, she was at first surrounded by excited women. On seeing the photograph of a white man, the crowds quickly dissipated and women subsequently ignored her…

Read the entire article here.

Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance

The University of Chicago Press
2001
232 pages
6 x 9
Paper ISBN: 9780226536637

Rachel F. Moran, Michael J. Connell Distinguished Professor of Law
University of California, Los Angeles

As late as the 1960s, states could legally punish minorities who either had sex with or married persons outside of their racial groups. In this first comprehensive study of the legal regulation of interracial relationships, Rachel Moran grapples with the consequences of that history, candidly confronting its profound effects on not only conceptions of race and identity, but on ideas about sex, marriage, and family.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• 1. Insights from Interracial Intimacy
• 2. Antimiscegenation Laws and the Enforcement of Racial Boundaries
• 3. Subverting Racial Boundaries: Identity, Ambiguity, and Interracial Intimacy
• 4. Antimiscegenation Laws and Norms of Sexual and Marital Propriety
• 5. Judicial Review of Antimiscegenation Laws: The Long Road to Loving
• 6. Race and Romanticism: The Persistence of Racial Endogamy after Loving
• 7. Race and the Family: The Best Interest of the Child in Interracial Custody and Adoption Disputes
• 8. Race and Identity: The New Multiracialism
• 9. The Lessons of Interracial Intimacy
• Notes
• Index

Interracial Intimacy and the Potential for Social Change

Berkeley Women’s Law Journal
University of California, Berkeley Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper Series
2002
pp. 153-164

Stephanie M. Wildman, Professor of Law and Director of Center for Social Justice and Public Service
Santa Clara University School of Law

Moran, Rachel F.  (2001).  Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
271 pp.

In her review essay Interracial Intimacy and the Potential for Social Change, Stephanie Wildman examines Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance by Rachel F. Moran. Moran’s book investigates the so-called private landscape of race in the context of interracial intimacy. Moran urges the connection between our personal, private views of race and racial issues and the policy decisions society makes in the public realm. Moran explores historic antimiscegenation laws and their role in establishing societal norms and customs, the significance of race in daily life, the legal decisions leading to Loving v. Virginia, and the role of race in custody and adoption decisions. Wildman observes that interracial gay and lesbian relationships represent another area usually viewed as private, yet which implicates the societal landscape. Recognition of the public aspect of personal choice is a necessary element in the fight against bias and the movement toward social change.

Read the entire review/essay here.

Race Law Stories

Foundation Press
2008
624 pages
ISBN-13: 9781599410012

Edited by

Rachel F. Moran, Michael J. Connell Distinguished Professor of Law
University of California, Los Angeles

Devon Wayne Carbado, Professor of Law
University of California, Los Angeles

Race Law Stories brings to life well-known and not-so-well known legal opinions—hidden gems—that address slavery, Native American conquest, Chinese exclusion, Jim Crow, Japanese American internment, immigration, affirmative action, voting rights and employment discrimination. Each story goes beyond legal opinions to explore the historical context of the cases and the worlds of the ordinary people and larger-than-life personalities who drove the litigation process. The book’s multiracial and interdisciplinary approach makes it useful for courses on race and the law and Critical Race Theory both inside and outside the law school as well as for undergraduate and graduate courses in ethnic studies. Each story illuminates the role that the law has played in both creating and combating racial inequality. Race Law Cases, an edited collection of the cases discussed in the Race Law Stories, will be available as a supplement in 2008.

View the Table of Contents here.
Read the introduction here.