Mixed Race Studies

So… What Are You, Anyway?

Harvard Half-Asian People’s Association
Harvard University
2011-03-25 through 2011-03-26

The Harvard Half-Asian People’s Association will host its third annual conference on mixed-race politics and identity issues, “So…What Are You, Anyway?” (SWAYA) on Friday, March 25 and Saturday, March 26, 2011 on the Harvard University campus. The event is open to the public and will feature an array of exciting guest lecturers who will speak on issues involving multiracial identity.

The conference will include lectures given by the Dean of Harvard College and other Harvard College professors, as well as student panels and discussion groups. Last year, the event drew over one hundred students and other guests from colleges and cities around the Boston area.

SWAYA will culminate in a special gala dinner* in honor of the 2010 recipient of the Cultural Pioneer Award, celebrity mixed-race artist Jeff Chiba Stearns, director of the award-winning documentary “One Big Hapa Family”. An international spokesperson on mixed-race identity, Stearns’ short films exploring multiethnic issues have been screened in hundreds of film festivals around the world and have garnered over 33 awards.

For more information, click here.

Adults’ Attitudes Toward Multiracial Children

Journal of Black Psychology
Volume 29, Number 4 (November 2003)
pages 463-480
DOI: 10.1177/0095798403256888

Gayle L. Chesley
Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

William G. Wagner

A between-groups experimental design was used to examine adults’ attitudes toward multiracial children of African descent. The purpose was to determine if the races of the respondent,the child, and the child’ s friends are related to adults’ ratings of children’s self-perception and depressive symptoms. A total of 156 undergraduate students (African American = 78, European American = 78) read a vignette in which the race of the target child (European American, African American, or multiracial) and the child’s friends (European American or African American) were experimentally controlled. Participants assessed the child using a revision of Harter’s Self-Perception Profile for Children and a revised version of Kovacs’s Children’s Depression Inventory—Short Form. Ratings of the child’s global self-worth and depressive symptoms were negatively correlated. The results of a 2 × 2 × 3 MANOVA revealed a significant three-way interaction for the races of the child,the respondent, and the child’s friends on adults’ ratings of the child’s peer acceptance. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Read the entire article here.

Communicating With Children of Interracial/Interethnic Parentage

IUC Journal of Social Work Theory & Practice
Issue 4 (2001/2002)

Toyin Okitikpi

Children of interracial/interethnic parentage are increasing in number throughout Europe yet there has been a wall of silence about how to work with such children. In this discussion the aim is not only to encourage a dialogue about children of interracial/interethnic relationships but also to urge a development of a better understanding of the inner and outer world of such children. The aim is also to highlight and analyse the different issues that welfare professionals need to take into consideration when working with the children. I shall suggest that there is a need to give greater credence to the way people communicate with the children because what is communicated and how it is communicated could affect how the children relate to others, how they develop intellectually, emotionally and psychologically and how they develop their sense of identity. Children of interracial/interethnic parentage are increasing in number throughout Europe yet there has been a wall of silence about how to work with such children. In this discussion the aim is not only to encourage a dialogue about children of interracial/interethnic relationships but also to urge a development of a better understanding of the inner and outer world of such children. The aim is also to highlight and analyse the different issues that welfare professionals need to take into consideration when working with the children. I shall suggest that there is a need to give greater credence to the way people communicate with the children because what is communicated and how it is communicated could affect how the children relate to others, how they develop intellectually, emotionally and psychologically and how they develop their sense of identity.

Read the entire article here.

The House Behind the Cedars

Houghton, Mifflin and Company
1900
294 pages

Electronic Edition
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
1997
Text scanned (OCR) by Jamie Vacca
Text encoded by Natalia Smith and Don Sechler
Filesize: ca. 600KB

Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932)

The electronic edition is a part of the UNC-CH database “A Digitized Library of Southern Literature, Beginnings to 1920.”

• Any hyphens occurring in line breaks have been removed, and the trailing part of a word has been joined to the preceding line.
• All quotation marks and ampersand have been transcribed as entity references.
• All double right and left quotation marks are encoded as ” and ” respectively.
• All single right and left quotation marks are encoded as ‘ and ‘ respectively.
• Indentation in lines has not been preserved.
• Running titles have not been preserved.
• Spell-check and verification made against printed text using Author/Editor (SoftQuad) and Microsoft Word spell checkers.

Summary by Mary Alice Kirkpatrick from 2004:

Perhaps the most influential African American writer of fiction at the turn of the twentieth century, Charles Waddell Chesnutt was born June 20, 1858 to Andrew Jackson Chesnutt and Anna Maria Sampson, free African Americans living in Cleveland, Ohio. He moved with his family to Fayetteville, North Carolina in 1866. He first worked as a schoolteacher in Charlotte and Fayetteville, but, having grown frustrated by the limited opportunities he encountered as a mixed-race individual living in the South, he moved permanenly to Cleveland in the early 1880s. Chesnutt later opened a successful stenography business in Cleveland, having passed the Ohio bar exam in 1887. Eager to focus on his writing full time, Chesnutt closed his stenography firm in late September 1899; however, lagging book sales forced him to reopen the business in 1901.

Chesnutt published the bulk of his writing between 1899 and 1905, including his five book-length works of fiction: two collections of short stories and three novels. Notably, he was the first African American writer whose texts were published predominantly by leading periodicals such as the Atlantic Monthly and The Outlook and major publishers, including Houghton Mifflin and Doubleday. The popular and critical success of his short stories in The Conjure Woman (March 1899) and The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line (fall 1899) set the stage for the 1900 publication of his first novel, The House Behind the Cedars. His second novel, The Marrow of Tradition, was published a year later in 1901. Neither The Marrow of Tradition nor Chesnutt’s final novel, The Colonel’s Dream (1905), sold well. Consequently, his later publications were reduced to only the occasional short story. In 1928, Charles Chesnutt was awarded the Springarn Medal by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in recognition of his literary achievements.

Following numerous revisions throughout the 1890s, The House Behind the Cedars, beginning in August 1900, was serialized in Self-Culture Magazine; Houghton Mifflin later published its book form in October 1900. The House Behind the Cedars, which Chesnutt originally titled “Rena Walden,” scrutinizes the problems afflicting those on both sides of the color line. Highlighting the fluidity of race, Chesnutt focuses on passing, a social practice in which light-skinned African Americans would present themselves as white. Opening in Patesville (Fayetteville), North Carolina, the novel focuses primarily on two siblings, John and Rena Walden, who are African Americans of mixed-race ancestry. Having changed his last name to Warwick and married a white southerner, John works as a prominent attorney in Clarence, South Carolina as a white man. Following his wife’s death, John returns to Patesville, hoping to convince his mother, Miss Molly, to allow his younger sister to return with him and care for his infant son. Allowed to accompany her brother, Rena—under the name Rowena Warwick—seamlessly enters the white social sphere and is soon engaged to the dashing young aristocrat, George Tryon. However, when the truth of her Rena’s racial identity is revealed accidentally, Tryon rejects his betrothed and she falls gravely ill. Rena recovers and goes on to work toward uplifting her race. Nevertheless, Rena’s life ends tragically. Clearly drawing from the “tragic mulatto” tradition, The House Behind the Cedars has been critiqued for its seeming sentimentality; however, Chesnutt’s novel complicates these conventions. His sympathetic portrayal of passing illuminates racism’s pernicious and oppressive effects for both blacks and whites.

Read the entire book here in HTML or XML/TEI format.