Mixed Race Studies

Transcending “The Box”: Multiracial Subjects as the New Face of Reality

CSW Update Newsletter
UCLA Center for the Study of Women
February 2008
pages 24-27

Kunti Dudakia

I hate it. I hate the feeling I get when I am forced in online surveys, job applications, or school admissions to check a box to identify my racial background. A feeling of confusion and uncertainty overwhelms me in an internal battle to check just one box.

I am not one box.

I am two. Maybe three or four if I want to be completely accurate. But I wonder: what is the purpose of “the box”? When we check a box, we are claiming a race, an ancestry, and even a status. Race as an organizing principle in society has been a source of hegemony and hierarchy for centuries. Its origins are unknown and unreliable. Historically dominant groups have used race as a basis to divide and distinguish themselves from “the other.” In the United States, the legal and scientific definition of race has continued to alter according to societal standards. In some ways we have moved forward from the “check one box only” of the 1850 census, which included three categories: white, black, and mulatto. However, we still attempt to check one box when many of us are biracial or multiracial. The reality in America is hybridity. In the definition that I use, hybridity means the blending of two or more cultures into a unified whole. Hybrids are chameleons adjusting to the shifting landscapes and isms that may reject nonconformity. Moreover, evidenced by the increasing amount of interracial marriages and ethnically ambiguous subjects is the realization that racial purity is a myth…

…Authenticity is constructed within the racial paradigm as both a marker and tool for inclusion and exclusion. We hear statements like “He isn’t really black” as assumptions based on essentialist ideas of race—usually and unfortunately reinforcing biases, stereotypes, and prejudices. Multiracial subjects are the ‘antithesis of authenticity’ inasmuch as they do not fit into one group or culture. This begs the question, are multiracial subjects changing the landscape of racial classification?…

Read the entire article here.

CRN 47519/47520-Mixed Race Asian Americans

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Fall 2008

Kent Ono, Professor of Asian American Studies, Communication, and Institute of Communications Research

Part of Asian American Ethnic Groups (AAS-450)

This course provides an introduction to the study of mixed race Asian Americans. From discussions of famous mixed race people, such as Tiger Woods, Keanu Reeves, Kristin Kreuk, Dean Cain, and Rob Schneider to research about interracial dating, interracial families, mixed race children, and multiracial activism, the course provides an understanding of theories of race, identity, and culture as they relate to biracial and multiracial Asian Americans. The course provides a theoretical understanding of racial identity formation, focusing at first on more general theories of race, and then moving to the more specific issues of multiracial identity and politics. Analysis of TV, film, and cyberspace images of mixed race Asian Americans will also lead to an understanding of the social context of our everyday experiences. Through readings, lectures, discussions, and course assignments, students will gain a broader understanding of race and its application to people of mixed racial heritage.

AMST130 SC-Multiracial People and Relations in U.S. History

Scripps College, Claremont, California
2013

Matthew Delmont, Assistant Professor of American Studies

This class will explore the conditions and consequences for crossing racial boundaries in the U.S. We will take a multidisciplinary approach, exploring historical, literary, and ethnographic writings along with several feature and documentary film treatments of the subject. We will examine: Relations among Native Americans, whites, and blacks in the colonial era and nineteenth century; the legal formation of race through miscegena­tion cases; the regulation and representation of multiracial themes in film; the concept of mestizaje; contemporary debates surrounding the Mixed-race/Multiracial movement; and the racial identity of the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama.

Plessy as “Passing”: Judicial Responses to Ambiguously Raced Bodies in Plessy v. Ferguson

Law & Society Review
Volume 39, Issue 3 (September 2005)
pages 563–600
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-5893.2005.00234.x

Mark Golub, Assistant Professor of Politics & International Relations
Scripps College, Claremont, California

The Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) is infamous for its doctrine of “separate but equal,” which gave constitutional legitimacy to Jim Crow segregation laws. What is less-known about the case is that the appellant Homer Plessy was, by all appearances, a white man. In the language of the Court, his “one-eighth African blood” was “not discernible in him.” This article analyzes Plessy as a story of racial “passing.” The existence of growing interracial populations in the nineteenth century created difficulties for legislation designed to enforce the separation of the races. Courts were increasingly called upon to determine the racial identity of particular individuals. Seen as a judicial response to racial ambiguity, Plessy demonstrates the law’s role not only in the treatment of racial groups, but also in the construction and maintenance of racial categories.

Read or purchase the article here.

Interrogating Identity Construction: Bodies versus Community in Cynthia Kadohata’s In the Heart of the Valley of Love

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies
Volume 1 (2010)
pages 61-69

Nicole Myoshi Rabin, Instructor of Liberal Arts & Interdisciplinary Studies
Emerson College, Boston. Massachusetts

In an interview for the journal MELUS, Hsiu-chuan Lee claims that Cynthia Kadohata suggests her novel In the Heart of the Valley of Love does not directly take “any specific ethnicity as its central concern,” nor deal explicitly with the “identity issue” (165, 179).  Despite these assertions by the author, In the Heart of the Valley of Love is mainly taught at the university level in Asian American Literature courses.  While Kadohata’s novel has been established within this specific canon of Asian American Literature, her novel deals with issues that resonate among all racial groups. This paper considers the ways in which Kadohata creates an imagined future not wholly detached from issues of race and identity, but where the conceptualization of race-based identity is conceived by means of self-fashioning and self-signifying. In the novel’s “futuristic” American society, concerns of class and the divides of wealth between the white “richtowns” and the multiracial majority may seem to be the central themes, but issues of race and issues of class become conflated in the novel, and Kadohata uses more subtle ways to discuss issues of racial difference.  What Kadohata suggests through her novel In the Heart of the Valley of Love is not that racialized bodies cease to be of importance in American society, but that race as a critical factor in identity formation and categorization must be reframed by self-signification and social interactions.

…Kadohata’s indictment of current racial understanding goes further as Francie, the mixed race narrator, is marginalized by our current monoracial understanding of race as the determinant factor of identity. She says, “I enjoyed the feeling of the heat making my loose shorts billow around my yellow-brown legs—the yellow from my Japanese mother, the brown from my Chinese-black father” (22). Viet Thanh Nguyen suggests in Race and Resistance that Francie embodies “the novel’s conception of nonwhite identity as being a mélange of different ethnic and racial backgrounds” (150). While the narrator does occupy the space of the raced majority within the novel, her value as a mixed race character does not end at being the embodiment of the “novel’s conception” of a “nonwhite identity.” Francie as a mixed-race subject maintains her position as marginalized in our current understanding of racial categorization. Keeping with the notion of the body, Kadohata locates Francie’s indeterminacy in her yellow-brown skin, which is not easily identified as one race or another, until Francie herself declares where she “belongs.” Knowing what races and ethnicities Francie belongs to serves a purpose beyond making her a mixture of incongruent elements of race and therefore some sort of representative of everything “nonwhite” as Nguyen suggests; her “parts” are named, and so while she may embody the majority within the text, she is still marginalized by our current understanding of race along monoracial lines. By making the protagonist a “mélange,” Kadohata renders this multiracial character incapable of being assigned identity by physical racial markers and forces Francie to seek a different means by which she must forge an identity…

Read the entire article here.

“What is In My Blood?”: Contemporary Black Scottishness and the Work of Jackie Kay [Book Chapter]

Literature and Racial Ambiguity
Rodopi B.V.
2002-09-15
328 pages
ISBN-10: 9042014180
ISBN-13: 978-9042014183
pp. 1-25(25)

edited by Teresa Hubal and Neil Brooks

Peter Clandfield, Assistant Professor of English Studies
Nipissing University, North Bay, Ontario, Canada

The work of the Scottish writer Jackie Kay (b. 1961) not only refutes simplistic definitions of race and racial attributes, but also challenges utopian idea(l)s about racial and cultural hybridity as a condition that, in itself, resolves problems arising from racial differences—that is, from dissimilarities, conflicts, and things in between. In her 1985 poem “So you think I’m a mule?,” Kay, who is of mixed black-white (African-British) biological parentage, voices what sounds like an unequivocal rejection of white attempts to theorise about people of obviously complex racial ancestry:

If you Dare mutter mulatto
hover around hybrid
hobble on half-caste
and intellectualize on the
“Mixed race problem”,
I have to tell you:
take your beady eyes offa my skin;
don’t concern yourself with
the  “dialectics of mixtures”;
don’t pull that strange blood crap
on me Great White Mother.
Say I’m no mating of a she-ass and a stallion
no half of this and half of that
to put it plainly purely
I am black (lines 29-43)

This 66-line poem is given in full as an epigraph to Heidi Safia Mirza’s Introduction to Black British Feminism: A Reader (Routledge, 1997), where it serves as a strong statement about the determination of black British women to set their own agendas. In the context of Kay’s own evolving career, though, the poem’s significance is much more ambiguous. While its speaker states emphatically that she is black and is “not mixed up” (line 50) about race, mixedrace voices in Kay’s more recent works are less certain. Without being “mixed up” in the sense of being confused or incoherent, these works delineate complex emergent forms of racial and cultural identity that undermine fixed concepts not only of Britishness, blackness, or black Britishness but also of hybridity itself…

Read the entire chapter here.

AAS 436–Politics of Racial Ambiguity
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Fall 2010

Rainier Spencer, Professor and Director, Afro-American Studies Program

Interdisciplinary investigation of contemporary American black/white multiracial identities, including analyses and assessments of the “multiracial identity movement” in the United States.

AAS 434-Constructions of Racial Ambiguity
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Spring 2010

Rainier Spencer, Professor and Director, Afro-American Studies Program

Interdisciplinary study of miscegenation, mulattos, and passing in the United States. Focuses on the Afro-American context, using historical, literary, and cinematic sources in order to grapple with and gain an understanding of the complexities of American race and mixed-race, both past and present.

Diversity on a Personal Level: A First Look at Multiple Race Population

Indiana Business Review
Summer 2001
pages 6-7

John Besl, Research Demographer
Indiana Business Research Center, Kelley School of Business
Indiana University

For many decades, census data have provided a look at racial diversity in our nation’s communities. But Census 2000 offers a truly innovative look at racial diversity, with counts of persons claiming a heritage of two or more races. Census 2000 race tabulations include six different categories of one race “alone,” and 57 different combinations of these six discrete races. Adding to the mountain of data, the 63 race categories are also cross-tabulated by two origin categories (Hispanic or Not Hispanic). The unprecedented detail afforded by 126 race-origin combinations was made possible (necessary?) by the new “check all that apply” option for identifying race on the Census 2000 questionnaire. Former Census Bureau Director Kenneth Prewitt, the man in charge of the 2000 national headcount, recently expressed his opinion that the most significant historical development from the 2000 census will be the introduction of the multiple race option…

Read the entire article here.

HapaSC: A Place Multiracial Call Home

Campus Circle News
Los Angeles, California
2010-08-16

Stephanie Forshee

Multiracial students at USC [University of Southern California] like Lauren Perez are devoting time to create a place where you can express every part of yourself. HapaSC is an organization of about 30 USC students that raises awareness for “mixed” students on campus and allows them an opportunity to embrace world change.

The phrase “hapa haole” means “half.” The term was originally used to describe people who were half Asian/Pacific Islander and half Caucasian. It has now been shortened to just “hapa.” HapaSC’s purpose is to create awareness for the rapid expansion of multiracial people. 

“We understand that identity is something you can choose and it’s always developing, so we don’t put people in a box,” says Perez, last school year’s public relations officer…

Read the entire article here.