Mixed Race Studies

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.

Barack Obama’s rise marks America’s first multiracial decade

Yahoo News
2009-12-09

Thomas Kelley

Everyone has a day of awakening when it comes to race. For me, it was a cool September day when I was eight years old. My family had recently moved to Colorado from Tennessee and like any child starting a new school, I was nervous. In the administrator’s office, my mother and I waited to go over my files. Nearby was another family—a white mother and a black father with their son and daughter. They were also arriving for their first day and the boy was around my age.

To my surprise, my mother turned to me and quietly told me she was worried for the children. We were living in a predominantly white suburb and she later explained to me that being black in our society was hard enough, but being half black, half white, was even harder. There was greater potential for rejection from both sides of the racial divide. Because of this, she wondered if entering a black-white relationship was always fair to the kids. In some ways, I understood my mother’s reservations, but I was also astonished. The simple reason why is because I’m biracial too, half Asian and half white.

That was more than 25 years ago. Today, the multiracial American has become an undeniable fact of life in the 21st century. From the actress Jessica Alba to the trend-scriber Malcolm Gladwell to the Olympic champion Apolo Anton Ohno, many multiracial Americans have reached superstar status in the last decade. And the biggest phenomenon of them all is President Barack Obama.

This isn’t a new story…

…“I think that President Obama has been trying, with really remarkable skill, to get Americans to begin to think of the United States as a fundamentally multiracial society,” historian Peggy Pascoe says. “And that strikes me as a really important move, partly because it will help dismantle the long history of white supremacy in the United States but also because it will help the United States fit more comfortably in the global world and the 21st century.”…

…For many activists and scholars, racial statistics still present a quandary of sorts. Naomi Zack, a professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon, who is multiracial herself and has written extensively on multiracial issues, acknowledges the 2000 and 2010 Census changes as a key advance. But she also argues for a stand-alone multiracial category and the eventual abolition of “race” itself. She argues that race is not a biological category but a concept, something that the Census acknowledges in its own briefs.

Read the entire article here.

Biracial Identity: Beyond Black and White

The Boston College Chronicle
2003-02-13
Volume 11, Number 11

Sean Smith, Chronicle Editor

Sociologist’s expertise built on experience, not just scholarly inquiry

The man in the next seat had been eyeing her furtively for a while, so Asst. Prof. Kerry Ann Rockquemore (Sociology) figured it was only a matter of time before the question came.

What are you?”

There was neither malice nor menace in her fellow airplane passenger’s voice, but Rockquemore – recalling the event in a recent interview – knew what he was asking: He wanted to know her racial and ethnic background.

The daughter of a black father and white mother, Rockquemore was no stranger to questions and misperceptions about her appearance. That very day, one person had spoken Spanish to her, apparently thinking she was Latina, and a casual remark by the attendant at her flight check-in indicated that he took her for Italian.

“What are you?”…

Read the entire article here.

Through Russwurm’s Eyes: ‘The Conditions and Prospects of Haiti’

Campus News
Bowdoin College
2010-03-01

John B. Russwurm, the College’s first African-American graduate and thought to be the third African-American to graduate from an American college, delivered a commencement address in 1826 that resonates nearly 184 years later.

The speech, “The Condition and Prospects of Haiti,” was delivered 22 years after Haiti won independence from France…

…About John B. Russwurm

Russwurm was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica, the illegitimate son of a white planter and a black slave. His father, John Russwurm, of a wealthy Virginia family, went to Jamaica after completing his education in England. He sent his son, John Brown Russwurm, to Quebec at age eight so that he might receive a good education. Soon after moving to Maine, his father married Susan Blanchard. Russwurm then came to live with his father’s family, where he was accepted by his step-mother as one of her own. Russwurm stayed with the family even after his father died, continuing his education at Hebron Academy in Hebron, Maine. His step-mother and her new husband helped him to enroll at Bowdoin in 1824….

Read the entire article here.
Read Russwurm’s entire speech here.

Passing for White: Race, Religion, and the Healy Family, 1820–1920

University of Massachusetts Press
July 2002
296 pages
6 illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-55849-341-7
Paper ISBN: 978-1-55849-417-6

James M. O’Toole, Clough Professor of History
Boston College, Boston, Massachusets

• An alternate selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club
• Winner of the New England Historical Association Book Award

The remarkable saga of a mixed-race family in nineteenth-century America

Through the prism of one family’s experience, this book explores questions of racial identity, religious tolerance, and black-white “passing” in America. Spanning the century from 1820 to 1920, it tells the story of Michael Morris Healy, a white Irish immigrant planter in Georgia; his African American slave Eliza Clark Healy, who was also his wife; and their nine children. Legally slaves, these brothers and sisters were smuggled north before the Civil War to be educated.

In spite of the hardships imposed by American society on persons of mixed racial heritage, the Healy children achieved considerable success. Rejecting the convention that defined as black anyone with “one drop of Negro blood,” they were able to transform themselves into white Americans. Their unlikely ally in this transition was the Catholic church, as several of them became priests or nuns. One brother served as a bishop in Maine, another as rector of the Cathedral in Boston, and a third as president of Georgetown University. Of the two sisters who became nuns, one was appointed the superior of convents in the United States and Canada. Another brother served for twenty years as a captain in the U.S. Coast Guard, enforcing law and order in the waters off Alaska.

The Healy children’s transition from black to white should not have been possible according to the prevailing understandings of race, but they accomplished it with apparent ease. Relying on their abilities, and in most cases choosing celibacy, which precluded mixed-race offspring, they forged a place for themselves. They also benefited from the support of people in the church and elsewhere. Even those white Americans who knew the family’s background chose to overlook their African ancestry and thereby help them to “get away” with passing.

By exploring the lifelong struggles of the members of the Healy family to redefine themselves in a racially polarized society, this book makes a distinctive contribution to our understanding of the enduring dilemma of race in America.

View a 58 minute-long discussion from 2002-12-04 with the author here.