Mixed Race Studies

Situating mixed-race households in neighborhood contexts

University of Georgia
May 2007

Margaret Anne Hudson

Census 2000 counted approximately 1.7 million White/Latino mixed-race/multiethnic households in the US. Unfortunately, most research is limited to similar statistical accounting. Very little research moves beyond frequency counts to describe racial and ethnic identities in White/Latino households or the relationships of White/Latino households to segregated US urban terrain. Thus, this dissertation project is a case-study of the LA geography of White/Mexican households. White/Mexican households are the most numerous White/Latino household-type and, in LA, their population size is equal to that of Black same-race households.

Unlike previous work by geographers, I theoretically examine White/Mexican household locations with regard to racialization theory and feminist and cultural studies notions of difference; not simply race-blind theories about individual-level ethnic assimilation through out-partnerships with Whites. Using geographically-detailed and confidential 1990 census data from one in six LA area households, I link individual and household characteristics with census tracts and use dissimilarity and exposure indices, maps of neighborhood concentration rates, and residential attainment models to measure the segregation, concentration, and neighborhood racial compositions of White/Mexican households relative to: individuals from five non-Latino racial groups, groups of Mexican and other Latino individuals, and White same-race and Mexican co-ethnic households. Dissertation results indicate that neighborhood racial compositions and intra-urban residential geographies of White/Mexican households are in-between those of comparable White same-race and Mexican co-ethnic households. In contrast to White same-race households, White/Mexican households have more Mexican and Other Latino neighbors; relative to Mexican co-ethnic households, White/Mexican households have many more White neighbors. Residential attainment models find that, even after controlling for numerous household-level factors not accounted for in simple residential exposure calculations—i.e., household income and education levels, US or foreign-born nativity, and Spanish language use, etc.—White same-race and Mexican co-ethnic households that are equivalent to White/Mexican households do not share the same racially-defined residential space as White/Mexican households. Complex household-level racial affiliations appear to alter the residential locations of White/Mexican mixed-race households and, unlike predictions from assimilation theory, Mexican partnerships with Whites do not necessarily result in household residential patterns that are exactly like those of White same-race households.

ENLT 252 Mestizas, Halfies, and Others

University of Virginia
Fall 2008

How does your family background affect the way that the way that you see yourself?  How others in the United States see you?  In this class we will investigate novels, short stories, and poems that foreground the multicultural and intercultural make-up of the United States.  Our texts are an alternate form of cultural history: they depict a range of interactions between various immigrant communities and the larger “American” culture, which as it turns out, has no single definition.  Our texts are written by women who are often assigned hyphenated labels to indicate their family origins—Sandra Cisneros is Mexican-American, Diana Abu-Jaber is Jordanian-American, and so on—and many of our works feature protagonists who are of mixed racial and ethnic heritage and who negotiate among several different cultural modes.  Some recurring themes of the course will be the experience of living in between two or more languages (many of the texts incorporate untranslated pieces of languages other than English) and the language act of naming and renaming (for instance in Marilyn Chin’s “How I Got That Name: An Essay on Assimilation.”)  We will see that it is not only the ethically “other” citizens who are influenced by the American experience but indeed that their languages and voices penetrate into and profoundly shape American experience as a whole, both in terms of literary content and in terms of formal accomplishment.

 In the course we will analyze literary moments of cross-cultural contact, stereotyping, and exchange, and our goal during the semester will likewise be to create a small exemplary community in which open exchanges can occur.  We will discuss and critique the terms “mestiza” and “halfie,” among other labels for people of mixed race and mixed cultural experience, and we will compare the use and implications of these colloquial terms to the purposes and political intentions of scholarly definitions by cultural critics such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Lila Abu-Lughod. We will also be strongly interested in questions of literary form.  For instance, what is significant about a novel or poem following a linear narrative characteristic of realism, in other words producing a “straight” take on identity and history?  What is at stake in the poem or novel that takes a more postmodern approach and emphasizes a fractured, heterogeneous, hybrid experience?  Course requirements include regular and well-prepared participation, three papers, email responses to two of the readings, one class presentation, one or two periods leading discussion, and an essay-based final exam.

Possible texts include:

Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (Vintage)
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Aunt Lute Books)
Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (Bantam)
Nella Larson, Passing (Penguin)
Danzy Senna, Caucasia (Riverhead)
Gish Jen, Mona in the Promised Land (Vintage)
Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent (Norton)

The New Racial Dialogue: Arriving at Whiteness in the Age of Obama

Journal of African American Studies
Volume 13, Number 2 (June 2009) (“Joy Unspeakable: The First African American President”)
pages 184-186
DOI: 10.1007/s12111-008-9077-y

David H. Roane

My essay issues a challenge for whites to see the blackness of President-Elect Obama as a reflection of the similar complexity lying within themselves. By acknowledging the otherness within their whiteness, white Americans may finally grant themselves their race in a way that compels their much-needed participation in the national dialogue about race.

With the election of the nation’s first black president, there still remains the following question: how docs the “end” of public or institutional racism translate into an end of the negative biases that exist in private? To put it another way, what will the effect of having elected the nation’s first black president really have on the way people design their schools and neighborhoods, construct their families, and conceive their self-identities? What occurs in the ordinary business of people’s day-to-day life only marks true change.

For any national dialogue about race to move forward in a way that is real and significant—i.e. in a way that is personal—it will need new participants. The Age of Obama should be an age when white people can finally talk about their whiteness, not so much as a social identity (they already know how to do this and know how to leverage this quite well), but instead will come to learn what whiteness means as a culture linked to an ethnicity (something they understand much less). With that said, the problem of the 21st century is still the problem of the color line, only this time its frontier has a new set of pioneers.

So, what exactly is whiteness? Can it carry meaning beyond the typical hegemonic associations it has with the oppression of non-white groups? Can we…

Read or purchase the article here.

AMST 349: Race Across the Americas

Emory University

Seminar exploring the social construction of race comparatively and transnationally, especially the status of the descendants of enslaved Africans and mixed-race individuals in the Caribbean and Latin America.

335. Comparative Studies in Racial and cultural Identities

St. Lawrence University, Canton, New York
Cultural Encounters Courses

 This is a senior seminar designed to fulfill the goals of the Cultural Encounters program: to prompt students to synthesize and re-evaluate their academic study of cultures, their experiential learning off campus and their own social locations and identities. The course content will be a comparative analysis of racial, ethnic and cultural identities; readings will be drawn from literature, contemporary cultural studies theory and philosophy of race, gender and identity, supplemented by films shown outside of class. A significant portion of the readings will be drawn from “critical white studies,” looking at the ways white supremacy has been constructed and maintained in both historically specific and transnational ways. The course will pay particular attention to the interrelations between gender and race in different regions, especially as this is revealed through attitudes toward miscegenation and mixed-race identities. Students will be required to complete and present a major research project and to write a self-reflective analysis of their own identities and locations.