Mixed Race Studies

Why Obama is Black Again

Thinking Twice: RACE
The Stanford Review
2009-01-29

Michele Elam, Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor of English and Olivier Nomellini Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education
Stanford University

Barack Obama’s inauguration was for so many an awe-inspiring, historic and transnational event: It was full of grand pageantry and a good-humored pomp and circumstance that made D.C. the place to be. People were called together in many ways, and one of the more important ways they were asked to unite was over the contentious matter of race.

But it is worthwhile noting that this unlikely racial consensus was achieved through a strategic kind of absenting: Gone from the inaugural coverage were all the hand-wringing equivocations preceding the Democratic nomination about whether Obama’s person and politics went “beyond race” (and if that was a good thing or not), whether he even met the minimum standards for blackness (it was never clear who got to wield this racial measuring stick), or whether he was capitalizing on what novelist Danzy Senna calls the “mulatto millennium” of mixed-race celebrities…

Read the entire article here.

Identity in Education: Future of Minority Studies

Palgrave Macmillan
May 2009
296 pages
ISBN: 978-0-230-60917-4, ISBN10: 0-230-60917-1
6 1/8 x 9-1/4 inches, 296 pages, 

Edited by

Susan Sánchez-Casal, Director
Tufts University / Skidmore College, Madrid

Amie A. Macdonald, Associate Professor of Philosophy
John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York

This edited volume explores the impact of social identity (race, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion and so on) on teaching and learning.  Operating within a realist framework, the contributors to this volume (all of whom are minority scholars) consider ways to productively engage identity in the classroom and at the institutional level, as a means of working toward racial democracy in higher education.  As realists, all authors in the volume hold the theoretical position that identities are both real and constructed, and that identities are always epistemically salient.  Thus the book argues–from diverse disciplinary and educational contexts–that mobilizing identities in academia is a necessary part of progressive (antiracist, feminist, anticolonial) educators’ efforts to transform knowledge-making, to establishcritical access for minority students to higher education, and to create a more just and democratic society.

Introduction—Amie A. Macdonald and Susan Sánchez-Casal

PART I: CRITICAL ACCESS AND PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION
Identity, Realist Pedagogy, and Racial Democracy in Higher Education—Susan Sánchez-Casal and Amie A. Macdonald
What’s Identity Go to Do With It?: Mobilizing Identities in the Multicultural Classroom—Paula M. L. Moya
Fostering Cross-Racial Mentoring: White Faculty and African American Students at Harvard College—Richard Reddick

PART II: CURRICULUM AND IDENTITY
Which America Is Ours?: Martí’s “Truth” and the Foundations of “American Literature”—Michael Hames-García
The Mis-Education of Mixed Race—Michele Elam
Ethnic Studies Requirements and the “White” Dominated Classroom—Kay Yandell
Historicizing difference in The English Patient: The Politics of Identity and (Mis)Recognition—Paulo Lemos Horta

PART III: REALIST PEDAGOGICAL STRATEGIES
Teaching Disclosure: Overcoming the Invisibility of Whiteness in the American Indian Studies Classroom—Sean Kiccumah Teuton
Religious Identities and Communities of Meaning in the Realist Classroom—William Wilkerson
Postethnic America? A Multicultural Training Camp for Americanists and Future EFL teachers—Barbara Bucheneau, Paula Moya, Carola Hecke, J. Nicole Shelton
The Uses of Error: Toward a Realist Methodology of Student Evaluation—John Su

Questions for Maya Soetoro-Ng: All in the Family

The New York Times
2008-01-20

Deborah Solomon

Q: Let’s talk about the Democratic presidential caucuses taking place on Feb. 19, in Hawaii, where Barack Obama was born. Will you be campaigning for your brother?
Yes, of course. I have taken time off from my various teaching jobs in Honolulu and just got back from two months of campaigning. I have a bumper sticker on my car that says: “1-20-09. End of an Error.”…

Do you think of your brother as black?
Yes, because that is how he has named himself. Each of us has a right to name ourselves as we will.

Do you think of yourself as white?
No. I’m half white, half Asian. I think of myself as hybrid. People usually think I’m Latina when they meet me. That’s what made me learn Spanish.

That sort of culturally mixed identity was seen as an anomaly when you were growing up.
Of course, there was a time when that felt like unsteady terrain, and it made me feel vulnerable…

Read the entire interview here.

Research Project on Mixed Race Identity

Are you of a mixed racial background? Do you identify as ‘mixed’ or ‘mixed race’? Do you identify with a mixed racial identity?

This project is being conducted for a Master’s thesis in the Department of Sociology at the University of Alberta.

The purpose of the project is to explore a whole range of perspectives and experiences, and the multiple ways that ‘mixed race’ can be understood.

Male and female participants between 20-30 years of age, who are of ‘mixed racial’ parentage and who grew up in Canada, and who live or have lived in the Edmonton, Alberta area are being recruited.

Interviews will be conducted with participants, and will take approximately one hour.

If you would like to be part of this study, please contact Jillian Paragg at paragg@ualberta.ca or if you know of someone who may be interested in participating, please pass this message on to them.

Seeking Race Transcenders to Participate in Racial Identity Study

Carlos Hoyt, a Ph.D. student at Simmons College in Boston, is currently seeking individuals who are commonly identified as black or African American (including biracial or black-multiethnic), but who do not define themselves according to the social construct of race. Hoyt’s study will give race transcenders the opportunity to describe the factors and paths that led to a sense of self beyond black, bi- or multiracial identity and to an identity orientation that is non-racial.

Race transcenders are aware that society racializes them as black or African American and they are well aware of the effects of race and racism in society, but they do not subscribe to racial categorization or racial identity as part of their sense of self.  This is analogous to someone raised in a religious faith who, at some point, chooses to renounce religion altogether.  Others might know this person as a member of a family or community in a particular religious category, but the individual chooses an identity that does not include such categorization; she or he has become non-religious. The following quotation gives a clear illustration of the race transcendent orientation.

“My journey has taken me past constructions of race, past constructions of mixed race, and into an understanding of human difference that does not include race as a meaningful category (Spencer in Penn, 2002, p.10).”

If you feel that you are a race transcender and would like to share the story of how you arrived at that sense of self, please contact Carlos at hoyt.carlos@gmail.com and/or visit www.RaceTranscenders.com for more information.

Obama’s Mixology

The Root
2008-10-30

Michele Elam, Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor of English and Olivier Nomellini Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education
Stanford University

Give Obama credit for not trying to use his biracial background as an appeal to white working-class voters.

Mix’ology: noun. The art and science of mixings

In these final days of this presidential campaign, John McCain and his supporters have been trying desperately to raise doubts about Barack Obama’s identity. They have called him a terrorist sympathizer, a socialist, an unrepentant liberal. For weeks, their tagline has been “Who is Barack Obama?” The McCain campaign hopes that the question will resonate with the part of the electorate that Obama had putatively most alienated: the white, working class.

For different reasons, this same identity question has also had some traction with people of color, many of whom worry that Obama will usher in what Danzy Senna calls the “mulatto millennium,” especially if it implies that, as some of Obama’s supporters chanted earlier this year, “race doesn’t matter.”…

…But Obama has rejected post-racialism, certainly to the extent it meant identifying as “mixed” rather than “black.” His position was evident as early as 2005, when he told representatives from the MAVIN Foundation, one of the nation’s largest mixed-race advocacy organizations, who had clearly hoped he would be both an icon and legislative whip on their behalf: “I am always cautious about…persons of mixed race focusing so narrowly on their own unique experiences that they are detached from larger struggles, and I think it’s important to try to avoid that sense of exclusivity, and feeling that you’re special in some way.”

As his Indonesian-Caucasian sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, noted, Obama identifies as black not because he is conscripted by the one-drop rule, but because he actively chooses it. He belongs to the black community not only because, historically, mixed people have always belonged, and because black has never been pure; he belongs also, his sister suggests, because of personal commitment and responsibility. The issue may appear moot since race is part choice, part social ascription, and Obama could not simply opt out of the race even if he woke up some morning and chose to. But it remains important that he does not bill himself as “mixed” or “other” even when it might appear politically convenient or grant him cultural glam…

Read the entire article here.

ENGLISH 261E: Mixed Race Literature in the U.S. and South Africa (seminar)

Stanford University
Department of English
Winter Quarter, 2010-2011

Michele Elam, Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor of English and Olivier Nomellini Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education

Grant Parker, Associate Professor of Classics
Stanford Univeristy

As scholar Werner Sollors recently suggested, novels, poems, stories about interracial contacts and mixed race constitute “an orphan literature belonging to no clear ethnic or national tradition.” Yet the theme of mixed race is at the center of many national self-definitions, even in our U.S. post-Civil Rights and South Africa’s post-Apartheid era. This course examines aesthetic engagements with mixed race politics in these trans- and post-national dialogues, beginning in the 1700s and focusing on the 20th and 21st centuries.

If blackness in America has been defined broadly enough to claim me as one of its own, that still leaves the question of why I claim my blackness. I could call myself mixed race or even Latina/Hispanic.  I certainly recognize that I am multi-racial, but I don’t feel a common bond with mixed people simply because we have parents of different racial backgrounds. Equally, I’ve always been unnerved by the categories Latino and Hispanic to describe people from the Spanish Caribbean and parts of Latin America that are heavily populated by people of African descent precisely because they erase/e-race our ties to Africa. The categories Black and Latino/Hispanic are often defined as mutually exclusive on identification forms in the U.S., such that one is instructed to check “Black” provided they are “not of Hispanic origin” and to check “Hispanic – regardless of race”!  Since when has anything in America ever been regardless of race? As history has too often demonstrated this is a calculated attempt to create divisions between black people based on language and country of origin.

Ray, Carina. “Why Do You Call Yourself Black And African?,” The Zeleza Post (July 4, 2009), http://www.africasia.com/services/opinions/opinions.php?ID=2235&title=ray.

Another Way Home: The Tangled Roots of Race in One Chicago Family

University of Chicago Press
2004
200 pages
22 halftones, 5-1/2 x 8-1/2
Cloth ISBN: 9780226318219
Paper ISBN: 9780226318233

Ronne Hartfield

In her prologue to Another Way Home, Ronne Hartfield notes the dearth of stories about African Americans who have occupied the area of mixed race with ease and harmony for generations. Her moving family history is filled with such stories, told in beautifully crafted and unsentimental prose. Spanning most of the twentieth century, Hartfield’s book celebrates the special occasion of being born and reared in a household where miscegenation was the rule rather than the exception—where being a woman of mixed race could be a fundamental source of strength, vitality, and courage.

Hartfield begins with the early life of her mother, Day Shepherd. Born to a wealthy British plantation owner and the mixed-race daughter of a former slave, Day negotiates the complicated circumstances of plantation life in the border country of Louisiana and Mississippi and, as she enters womanhood, the quadroon and octoroon societies of New Orleans. Equally a tale of the Great Migration, Another Way Home traces Day’s journey to Bronzeville, the epicenter of black Chicago during the first half of the twentieth century. Here, through the eyes of Day and, ultimately, her daughter, we witness the bustling city streets and vibrant middle-class culture of this iconic black neighborhood. We also relive crucial moments in African American history as they are experienced by the author’s family and others in Chicago’s South Side black community, from the race riots of 1919 and the Great Depression to the murder of Emmett Till and the dawn of the civil rights movement.

Throughout her book, Hartfield portrays mixed-race Americans navigating the challenges of their lives with resilience and grace, making Another Way Home an intimate and compelling encounter with one family’s response to our racially charged culture.

Read an excerpt here.

Table of Contents

Prologue
1. Alpha: The Long Mysterious Exodus of Death
2. Beginnings: Strange Fates
3. Sacred Wounds
4. On the Place
5. Matriarchy
6. The Lightning Fields
7. New Orleans
8. Day and the City
9. The Ring
10. A Stern Destiny: Chicago Found and Lost
11. The Post-Depression Years
12. Streetcars
13. In the Castle of Our Skin
14. Dining In
15. Go Down the Street
16. Naming the Holy
17. Strange Fruit
18. Our Father’s Freight Train Blues
19. Lifelines
20. Last Years
21. Omega
Epilogue
Acknowledgments

Barack Obama and the Charm of the Stranger

The Zeleza Post
2009-01-25

Francis Njubi Nesbitt, Associate Professor of Africana Studies
San Diego State University

What is source of Barack Obama’s charm? Why was he able to win over whites, blacks and Latinos in a country that is famously partisan? Arguably, there are politicians who are equally gifted but there is seems to be a special aura about Obama.

Commentators have noted how he seems to absorb difference. They project their hopes and dreams on him. He has an aura of objectivity. People trust him. These are all qualities of a particular type of personality referred to in the literature as “the stranger,” “the outsider,” or “the marginal man.”

In an influential essay titled “The Stranger,” the Jewish scholar Georg Simmel argued that the stranger is by nature “no owner of the soil” and thus is able to absorb difference and project an aura of objectivity. Some may be comfortable confessing to the stranger actions and thoughts that hey keep from insiders. According to Simmel: “The stranger may develop charm and significance as long as he is considered a stranger in the eyes of the other, he is not an owner of the soil.”

Both Georg Simmel in “The Stranger,” and his student, Robert E. Park in “Migration and the Marginal Man,” argue that this personality type is often found among people of mixed race or excluded minorities who are caught between two cultures. They are forced to learn both their native ways and the ways of the majority population. W. E. B. Du Bois, Park’s contemporary and also a biracial man, put it eloquently in his famous lament about “double consciousness” that he wished to “merge my double self into a new and truer self.”

The problem, of course, is that it was not possible to resolve this double consciousness because of the one-drop rule that defined biracial individuals as black. The Jewish intellectual in Germany faced the same dilemma. He is caught between cultures, the rural and the urban, the Jewish and the German. One could not be both Jewish and German at the same time just like one could not be black and white at the same time…

Read the entire article here.