Mixed Race Studies

Census Data Presents Rise in Multiracial Population of Youths

The New York Times
2011-03-24

Susan Saulny, National Correspondent

WASHINGTON — Among American children, the multiracial population has increased almost 50 percent, to 4.2 million, since 2000, making it the fastest growing youth group in the country. The number of people of all ages who identified themselves as both white and black soared by 134 percent since 2000 to 1.8 million people, according to census data released Thursday.

Census 2010 is the first comprehensive accounting of how the multiracial population has changed over 10 years, since statistics were first collected about it in 2000. It has allowed demographers, for the first time, to make comparisons using the mixed-race group—a segment of society whose precise contours and nuances were largely unknown for generations. The data shows that the multiracial population is overwhelmingly young, and that, among the races, American Indians and Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders are the most likely to report being of more than one race. Blacks and whites are the least likely.

In what experts view as a significant change from 2000, the most common racial combination is black and white. Ten years ago, it was white and “some other race”—a designation overwhelmingly used by people of Hispanic origin, which is considered by the government to be an ethnicity not a race.

“I think this marks a truly profound shift in the way Americans, particularly African-Americans, think about race and about their heritage,” said C. Matthew Snipp, a professor in the sociology department at Stanford University…

Read the entire article here.

Seeing Black Women Anew through Lesbian Desire in Nella Larsen’s Passing

Rocky Mountain Review
Rocky Mountain Language Association
Volume 60, Number 1 (Spring 2006)
pages 25-52

H. Jordan Landry, Professor of English
University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh

Beginning in the 1910s and 1920s, a series of novels advocate that African Americans commit themselves to “loving blackness,” as bell hooks calls African-American ethnic pride (9-10). By loving blackness, the novels promise, African Americans will advance African-American culture, overcome internalized racism, and achieve emotional stability. Together, these novels create a powerful, early 20th-century discourse about embracing ethnic pride and resisting assimilation into white culture.

Unfortunately, this discourse champions its iconoclastic ideas about race by invoking conventional images of women’s gender and sexuality. The popular literary figure of the “mulatto” woman and her role in the triangle of desire, the literary device structuring almost all narrative in the Western literary tradition (Sedgwick 1-20; Girard 1-38), become central to this discourse. The mulatto woman plays one of two roles in the discourse’s triangles of desire. In the first, she conforms to the most conventional form of femininity imaginable and woos the black man toward ethnic pride. According to this discourse, the mulatto woman’s extreme femininity bolsters the black man’s masculinity, confirming his sense of superiority, power, and control. This ego boost endows the black man with the capacity to take pride in African-American culture and contribute to it rather than assimilating into white society. In the second, the mulatto woman defies all the sex and gender norms of dominant culture and lures the black man into vassalage to whiteness. Her rebellion against predefined sex and gender roles feminizes her partner, thereby seducing him into false servility. Since this discourse defines conventional femininity as sexual loyalty, submission, and homage to a black man, the way for the mulatto woman to express ethnic pride is not simply through loving a black man but actually through subordinating herself to one. Of course, embracing inferiority is a limited form of pride indeed. In addition to representing mulatto women’s submission as positive, this early 20th-century literary discourse blames assimilation on mulatto women’s pursuit of freedom from gender and sexual strictures. Thus, mulatto women must regulate their gender and sexuality for ethnic pride to burgeon, and their failure to do so spells a threat to the continuation of African-American culture.

These images of mulatto women circulate widely from the 1910s to the 1920s due to a shift in interest among African-American writers. Whereas late 19th- and turn-of-the-century African-American literature often stressed the need for white culture to accept African Americans, by the 1910s and 1920s, African-American writers began to encourage pride in both African and African-American traditions separate from white culture. This dramatic shift in values results in a corresponding change in representations of mulatto women. Through the two stereotypical roles allotted to mulatto women, writers weight the major “choice” within the erotic triangle—that of ethnic pride or assimilation—with gendered meanings.

In Passing, Larsen reveals that these two dominant fictions about mulatto women effectively regulate women of mixed ethnicity’s performance of gender identity causing them to enact a normative version of femininity. According to Larsen, the two fictions encourage self-regulation by escalating these women’s anxiety. As a result, the women become more aware of others’ external policing of their behavior and, in reaction, internalize these judgments and police themselves. In Larsen’s work, women of mixed ethnicity fear being defined by other African Americans as race traitors if they resist sexual and gender norms. Yet, their attempts to live up to a fictionalized ideal of femininity increases their sense of failure and self-blame as they find it impossible to conform themselves continually to such an image. Moreover, according to Larsen, the more women of mixed ethnicity invest in mulatto female stereotypes, the more they blame each other for and exonerate men from ethnic and sexual betrayal. In Passing, Larsen questions this construction of mulatto women as race and sexual traitors by tracing such blame back to the contemporary literary discourse that imagines racial uplift as dependent on women’s containment…

Read the entire article here.

Chesnutt and Realism: A Study of the Novels [Review]

Rocky Mountain Review
Rocky Mountain Language Association
Volume 61, Number 1 (Spring 2007)
pages 41-43

Susana M. Morris, Assistant Professor of English
Auburn University

Ryan Simmons. Chesnutt and Realism: A Study of the Novels. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006. 198p.

Ryan Simmons’ Chesnutt and Realism: A Study of the Novels is a timely work that proposes a key paradigm shift in critical studies about Charles W. Chesnutt. Simmons argues that all too often Chesnutt is on the periphery of studies on realism when he should be considered as a major contributor to the genre, alongside William Dean Howells, Henry James, and others. Nonetheless, Simmons’ goal is not to simply judge Chesnutt against canonical white authors. Rather, Simmons contends that criticism should recognize Chesnutt for his challenge to white readers to reconsider their racial politics and his life-long career goal to determine the best way to sway an often indifferent mainstream audience. For Simmons, labeling Chesnutt as a realist is not posthumous classification, but rather a recognition of how Chesnutt viewed himself as a writer…

…Simmons explores the “tragic mulatta” in the posthumously released novella Mandy Oxendine and The House Behind the Cedars and argues that while these texts may, on the surface, recycle the oft-told tragic nature of the mixed raced woman, they actually reveal a more complex negotiation about race, identity, and community. characters in these texts upset rigid classifications of race and, for Chesnutt, the very possibility of the passing motif illustrates both “cultural fluidity” and the fragility of the foundations of race-based discrimination (78). Thus, these works are part of Chesnutt’s mission to have his readers recognize that while they cannot change the history of slavery and oppression, they do have the power to not let these circumstances overdetermine their society’s future. While Simmons champions Mandy Oxendine and The House Behind the Cedars as complex renderings of race, he does, however, finds fault with what he sees as Chesnutt’s inability to forward solutions to the problems that he documents. This critique is a running commentary for Simmons and he cites it as one of Chesnutt’s major critical shortcomings…

Read the entire review here.

Chesnutt and Realism: A Study of the Novel

The University of Alabama Press
2006
208 pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8173-1520-7
E-Book ISBN: 978-0-8173-8228-5

Ryan Simmons

An important examination of Charles Chesnutt as a practitioner of realism.
 
With the release of previously unpublished novels and a recent proliferation of critical studies on his life and work, Charles W. Chesnutt (1858–1932) has emerged as a major American writer of his time—the age of Howells, Twain, and Wharton. In Chesnutt and Realism, Ryan Simmons breaks new ground by theorizing how understandings of literary realism have shaped, and can continue to shape, the reception of Chesnutt’s work.
 
Although Chesnutt is typically acknowledged as the most prominent African American writer of the realist period, little attention has been paid to the central question of this study: what does it mean to call Chesnutt a realist? A writer whose career was circumscribed by the dismal racial politics of his era, Chesnutt refused to conform to literary conventions for depicting race. Nor did he use his imaginative skills to evade the realities he and other African Americans faced. Rather, he experimented with ways of portraying reality that could elicit an appropriate, proportionate response to it, as Simmons demonstrates in extended readings of each of Chestnutt’s novels, including important unpublished works that have been overlooked by previous critics.
 
Chesnutt and Realism also addresses a curiously neglected subject in American literary studies—the relationship between American literary realism and race. By taking Chesnutt seriously as a contributor to realism, this book articulates the strategies by which one African American intellectual helped to define the discourses that influenced his fate.

Multicultural Artist and Educator to Speak at UVU

Utah Valley University
Orem, Utah
2011-03-24

Jim Rayburn

Louie Gong, a nationally-recognized artist and mixed-heritage advocate, will speak at Utah Valley University on March 31 at 2 p.m. at the Sorensen Student Center, room 206A.

Gong—of Nooksack, Squamish, Chinese, French and Scottish descent—is known best for his custom-designed Vans and Converse shoes and is a national leader in the discourse about mixed-race identity. He is a self-taught artist whose mash-up of traditional and pop culture influences is resonating with people all over the world. His Coast Salish-style artwork is especially popular with skateboarders…

…His remarks on March 31 will be centered on the realities of modern society while maintaining one’s cultural heritage…

Read the entire press release here.

Mixed Dreams: Exploring “Multi” Experiences in the U.S.

EXCO (Experimental College)
Spring 2011
Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio

Nicole Asong Nfonoyim

The experiences and identities of mixed-race people in the United States have often been marginalized if not rendered invisible, silenced and subsumed under the dominant black-white binary. While mixed identities have been part of U.S. history since the nation’s birth, the year 2010 marked only the second time in U.S. history that Americans will be able to check more than one racial/ethnic category in the census. From the overwhelming 6.8 million individuals who checked “more than one box” in the 2000 U.S. Census to the election of President Barack Obama (a self-proclaimed “mutt”)—“multi”* Americans are gaining unprecedented visibility in the 21st century. With this visibility, however comes inevitable scrutiny and ambivalence as evidenced by debates over Obama’s racial identity as well as the mixed racial ancestry of the growing number of U.S-born Latino/as who are gaining considerable social and political ground. With a nation so obsessed with race and yet as intent on hastening a post-racial era on the backs of Americans of color, re-imagining conceptions of race and mixed identities has never been more important.

This course will provide an introduction to contemporary discussions, debates and narratives surrounding multi America. By reading and discussing scholarly, literary, editorial, and visual texts we will critically examine the spaces multi people occupy in the U.S. as well as the identity politics and perspectives that mark these experiences. We will also explore the growing narratives and spaces being created to build communities and express multi subjectivities. Through class discussions, assignments and a final project, students will also be encouraged to explore their own identities and subjectivities as they relate to larger discourses and narratives around race and intersecting identities.

Oberlin’s Experimental College (ExCo) is a student-run initiative that allows all members of the Oberlin community to teach and take courses outside the scope of the college’s traditional curriculum. With its flexible nature, the program reflects the current intellectual, social, and aesthetic trends of the Oberlin community, providing opportunities to explore or expand upon subject matter beyond the usual course offerings.

For more information, click here.