Mixed Race Studies

Mixed-Race Women and Epistemologies of Belonging

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies
Volume 31, Number 1, 2010
Pages 142-165
E-ISSN: 1536-0334
Print ISSN: 0160-9009
DOI: 10.5250/fronjwomestud.31.1.142

Silvia Cristina Bettez, Associate Professor
Department of Educational Leadership and Cultural Foundations
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

How is it that people know when they belong and to what they belong? This question, about the epistemology of belonging, carries a particular complexity for mixed-race women. How is it that mixed-race women create a sense of identification with others? What are the unities and disjunctures? What can we understand about epistemologies of belonging through examining how mixed-race women create belonging? Through qualitative work based on the life stories of women of mixed heritage, in this paper I examine how the navigation of hybridity, as it is experienced in the lives of six “hybrid” mixed-race women, illuminates the complexities of identity construction and epistemologies of belonging. I use the term epistemology to signify the nature of knowledge, how we come to know things, in this case knowledge, or knowing, related to belonging. Belonging in human relations is connected to identity, both self-identification and identification with others…

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Ethics of Racial Identity

Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association
108th Annual Conference
2010-11-13 through 2010-11-14
Chaminade University, Honolulu, Hawaii

Presiding Officer: Adebe DeRango-Adem, York University

Barack Obama benefited from the spirit of tolerance that defined Hawaii’s racial climate. This special session envisions a mixed-race literature in the age of Obama that forwards not solely theorizations of what mixed race identities are, but an ethics for treating mixed race identification in literature. It is designed to re-situate mixedness/interraciality within the field of literary inquiry as a question of the ethical treatment of racialized figures.

Think Outside of The Box: Understanding Multiracial Students

Wisconsin Academic Advising Association Conference
Appleton, Wisconsin
2009-09-18
18 pages
Handout: 4 pages

Angela Kellogg, Director of Academic Advising and Career Services
University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point

Overview
Agenda

• Introduction and interest in topic
• Multiracial trivia quiz
• Overview of session
• General multiracial information
• Study: methods and results
• Discussion
• Implications
• Conclusion and questions

Learning Outcomes
As a result of this presentation, participants will:

• Gain information about the findings of the study
• Develop a greater understanding of multiracial identity in the college context
• Increase awareness of critical incidents experienced by multiracial college students
• Consider the implications for serving multiracial students on their respective campuses

View the entire presentation here.  View the handout here.

Ward Helps Biracial Youths on Journey Toward Acceptance

The New York Times
2009-11-09

John Branch

PITTSBURGH — Steelers receiver Hines Ward surrounded himself with old friends at the dinner table on a recent Saturday night. The bond was as obvious as the look on everyone’s faces — half Korean, half something else. The shared experience was far more than skin deep.

There was a boy who was bullied into depression and tried to commit suicide. There was a girl ordered by a teacher to keep her hair pulled back tight, to straighten the natural curls she inherited from her black father. There was another too intimidated by her taunting classmates to board the bus, choosing instead the humiliating and lonely walk to school. There were the boys who were beaten regularly and teased mercilessly. There were college-age girls who broke into tears when telling their stories of growing up biracial in South Korea.

But when they looked around the table, they saw familiarity. And a future…

…“It was hard for me to find my identity,” Ward said. “The black kids didn’t want to hang out with me because I had a Korean mom. The white kids didn’t want to hang out with me because I was black. The Korean kids didn’t want to hang out with me because I was black. It was hard to find friends growing up. And then once I got involved in sports, color didn’t matter.”

But there is no such relief valve for most of the estimated 19,000 biracial children in South Korea. The fast-growing majority of them are Kosians, with a parent from a different Asian country.

The number of Amerasians — those generally with white or black American fathers, often from the military — is slowly shrinking. But their mere appearance leads to harsher discrimination, officials said.

“Korea is traditionally a single blood,” said Wondo Koh, a Korean who met up with the group in Pittsburgh while doing business. “We Koreans are not comfortable with this mixed-blood situation. We have become familiar now, but we did not know how to cope.”…

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Racial Identity and Self-Esteem: Problems Peculiar to Biracial Children

Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry
Volume 24, Issue 2, (March 1985)
Pages 150-153
DOI: 10.1016/S0002-7138(09)60440-4

Michael R. Lyles, M.D.
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry
University of Kentucky College of Medicine

Antronette Yancey, M.D.
University of Kentucky College of Medicine

Candis Grace, M.D.
University of Kentucky College of Medicine

James H. Carter, M.D.
Professor of Psychiatry
Duke University Medical Center

This report illustrates several identity problems peculiar to a child of black and white parentage, who was reared by a white maternal grandmother in the South. The pervasive racial bigotry of the child’s family and community is contrasted with the child’s intrapsychic struggle for positive identity and self-esteem. The course of dynamic psychotherapy with this child is portrayed, with pertinent treatment issues dilineated and recommendations for therapy proposed.

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American demands, African treasures, Mixed possibilities

The African Diaspora Archaeology Network
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
December 2006 Newsletter
ISSN: 1933-8651
16 pages

Daniel R. McNeil, Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies
Newcastle University, United Kingdom

In the 1990s, many Americans sought to cast themselves as heroic defenders of the liberal arts by condemning Afrocentricity. This paper reveals how many such profiteers and schemers were invested in Eurocentricity, but it also critiques Molefi Asante – the man who coined the phrase “Afrocentricity” – and points out his reliance on AfroAmericocentric norms.

…Television history, employed by Gates in his PBS documentary, Wonders of the Ancient World, “while unquestionably powerful . . . is of necessity superficial . . . programmes have to be fast-moving if they are to retain their viewers” (Kershaw 16). Producers often assume that their history programs require a respected narrator and perhaps a charismatic interviewer, as “problems of interpretation tend to muddy the waters, and to leave the viewer confused, baffled or at least unable to decide which of variant interpretations is the most valid” (ibid.). According to cultural critic John Fiske, lumpers (broad synthesizers favoured by lay opinion) are preferred to splitters (narrow specialists favoured by professionals) because television history, like soap opera and sport, should be open and full of contradictions so that it invites “viewer engagement, disagreement, and thus popular productivity” (191). Perhaps ignoring the need to challenge the continuing deference to professors, such as Reisner, who considered Black Africa to be without history, Fiske also thought that televised history “must not preach or teach” (emphasis added; ibid. 196). Yet his comments remain important if curators and “public intellectuals” are to be encouraged to present themselves as possessors of technical competence whose function is to assist subordinate groups to use elite resources in order to make authored statements within the public sphere (Bennett 104). In this fashion, one can applaud Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s attempts to use his position as director of the Du Bois institute at Harvard to encourage to African Americans to enter Ivy League universities, even if one doesn’t support his desire to question Blacks of mixed parentage and/or Caribbean descent that “beat out” Black indigenous middle-class kids on the front page of The New York Times (Rimer and Anderson)…

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