Mixed Race Studies

The President, the Professor, and the Wide Receiver

When the biracial U.S. President Barack Obama visits South Korea tomorrow, he will be visiting a country grappling with its prejudices about race.

Foreign Policy
2009-11-17

James Card

This week, U.S. President Barack Obama, the son of a black father and white mother, is making his landmark visit to Asia, including a Wednesday stop in Seoul, where South Korea is in the midst of a racial reckoning. His visit could have positive repercussions for years to come. Race is a thorny issue in the country, and biracial persons especially so. Both North and South Koreans embrace pure bloodlines, untainted by non-Korean DNA. Biracial children are broadly considered unadoptable, and children and adults of mixed race endure ostracism and bullying. But in the past few years, a number of events and people have made South Koreans reconsider racism and persons of mixed race…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed-race theory for everyone

Mixedness & mixing: New perspectives on mixed-race Britons
A Commission for Racial Equality eConference
2007-09-04 through 2007-09-06

Jin Haritaworn, Assistant Professor in Gender, Race and Environment at the Faculty of Environmental Studies
York University, Canada

What insights does mixed-race theory bear for mixed-race people, our allies, and the professionals who work with us? This paper introduces three lessons which are especially relevant in this time and place.

Table of Contents

Lesson 1: Scandalising the ‘What are you?’ encounter
Lesson 2: The good mix and the bad
Lesson 3: A Mongrel Nation?

Mixed-race theory helps us challenge the voyeuristic entitlement which some people feel to find out intimate things about us. Many of us are used to giving unreciprocated information about our identities, origins and families. We endure this treatment as we know from experience that the person asking ‘Where are you from?’ will not be satisfied with ‘Northampton’. We rarely risk challenging this inappropriate ‘smalltalk’, for fear of being labelled irritating.

Read the entire paper here.

Black Skins, Black Masks: Hybridity, Dialogism, Performativity

Ashgate Publishing
February 2005
188 pages
234 x 156 mm
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-7546-3641-0

Shirley Anne Tate, Professor of Sociology
Leeds Beckett University, Leeds, United Kingdom

Black Skin, Black Masks: Hybridity, Dialogism, Performativity offers a timely exploration of Black identity and its negotiation. The book draws on empirical work recording everyday conversations between Black women: friends, peers and family members. These conversations are discussed in the light of the work of Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, Gerd Baumann, Claire Alexander and others on questions of hybridity, identity, otherness and the development of ‘new ethnicities’. Tate aims to address what she sees as significant omissions in contemporary Black Cultural Studies. She argues that theorists have rarely looked at the process of identity construction in terms of lived-experience; and that they have tended to concentrate on the demise of the essential Black subject, paying little attention to gender.

The book points to a continuation of a ‘politics of the skin’ in Black identities. As such it argues against Bhabha’s claim that essence is not central to hybrid identities. The conversations recorded in the book reveal the ways in which women negotiate the category of Blackness, in what Tate calls a ‘hybridity-of- the-everyday’.

The book introduces a new interpretative vocabulary to look at the ways in which hybridity is orchestrated and fashioned, showing it to be performative, dialogical and dependent on essentialism.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Foucault, Bakhtin, ethnomethodology
• Critical ontologies and racialized gender
• Storied hybridity and gendered readings of ‘Race’
• Beyond hybridity: bodily schema and the ‘Third Space’
• Resisting Black skin
• Hybridity, dialogism, performativity
• Fetishizing community: a politics of skin, homes and belonging
• Conclusion; Bibliography
• Index

Multiracial Identity [Movie], World Premiere Screening

Politics on Film 2010 Festival
Saturday, 2010-05-08, 13:30 EDT (Local Time)
E Street Cinema (Purchase tickets on-line here.)
555 11th Street, NW
Washington, DC

Year: 2010
Director: Brian Chinhema
Writer: Brian Chinhema
Producer: Brian Chinhema (Abacus Production)
Running Time: 01:22:00

Multiracial people are the fastest growing demographic in America, yet there is no officially political recognition for mixed-race people. Multiracial Identity examines what it means to be multiracial in America and explores the social, political, and religious impact of the multiracial movement.

The film is produced and directed by Brian Chinhema and features commentary from noted scholars, Rainier Spencer, Naomi Zack, Aliya Saperstein, Aaron Gullickson, Susan J. Hayflick and Pastor Randall Sanford. 

For more information, click here.  Purchase tickets on-line here.

What Are You? Multi-racial and Bi-racial College Student Experiences [Session Handout]

Association of College Unions International Annual Conference
New York, New York
2010-03-01
13:00Z – 14:15Z
1 March 2010
11 pages

Megan E. Bell, Assistant Director
University Memorial Center
University of Colorado, Boulder

Seven million people checked more than one box to select their ethnicity in the 2000 census. As an increasing number of multiracial students enter campus, it is crucial to understand how identity development for these students is unique. This session will showcase student interviews on video, as well as include dialogue and a gallery exercise.

Read the entire handout here.

Biracial Student Voices: Experiences at predominatly white institutions

The Bulletin
Association of College Unions International
Volume 77, Issue 6 (November 2009)

Willie L. Banks Jr., Associate Dean of Student Life
Cleveland State University

Race is a complex issue for campuses to address. Often, universities tout their diversity by sharing statistics about the respective racial populations present within their study body, all boxes that can be neatly checked: African-American, Asian, Hispanic, etc. While “other” may be used as a catchall, rarely is a category for biracial or multiracial students included in this list. In the January 2002 issue of American Demographics, Alison Stein Wellner reported that 2.4 percent (approximately 6.8 million people) of the total U.S. population were living in households that included two or more races. In the Aug. 8, 2006 issue of Inside Higher Ed, Scott Jaschik indicated the biracial population was increasingly growing and attending institutions of higher education, requiring the need for research reflecting the experiences of these students on college campuses. Biracial students have been on campus for a number of years; however, their voice has not been adequately represented within the literature as Donna M. Talbot described in the 2008 book, “Biracial and Multiracial Students.”

April Jourdan commented in the 2006 Journal of Counseling and Development that the majority of research on minority populations on college campuses focused on monoracial ethnic categories (i.e., Asian, African American, or Hispanic) and not on the lives of biracial or multiracial individuals in higher education.

For many campuses, biracial individuals provide an interesting challenge and pose more questions than answers. Who comprises this population? What are this population’s needs? How can institutions provide resources and services to address those needs? Unfortunately, there is not one answer to these critical questions. Just as biracial individuals are complex and multilayered, so are their needs and experiences.

Earlier this year, a new study was conducted to examine the experiences of biracial students with one parent of African American heritage attending predominantly white institutions in the southern United States. The findings demonstrate some practical strategies that campus professionals can employ to improve the educational environment in which biracial students develop their identities.

Read the entire article here.

Children of the French Empire: Miscegenation and Colonial Society in French West Africa 1895-1960

Oxford University Press
1999
216 pages
Hardback ISBN13: 9780198208198; ISBN10: 0198208197

Owen White, Associate Professor of History
University of Delaware

This book recreates the lives of the children born of relationships between French men and African women from the time France colonized much of West Africa towards the end of the 19th century, until independence in 1960. Set within the context of the history of miscegenation in colonial French West Africa, the study focuses upon the lives and identities of the resulting mixed-race or métis population, and their struggle to overcome the handicaps they faced in a racially divided society. This author has drawn an evaluation of the impact and importance of French racial theories, and offers a critical discussion of colonial policies in such areas as citizenship and education, providing insights into problems of identity in colonial society.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations
Map of French West Africa and Togo
Introduction
1. Miscegenation in French West Africa
2. Abandonment and Intervention
3. Education and Employment
4. Race and Heredity
5. Paternity and the Mother Country
6. Métis and the Search for Social Identity
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index