Mixed Race Studies

Afua Hirsch: Our parents left Africa – now we are coming home

The Guardian
2012-08-25

Afua Hirsch, West Africa Correspondent

As a child in London, Afua Hirsch was embarrassed by her African roots. Then, in February, she became a ‘returnee’, choosing to live in her parents’ birthplace, Ghana. Her story is echoed across the continent: attracted by economic opportunity and a new sense of optimism, the African diaspora is starting to come back.

When I was a teenager, my mother overheard me telling my peers that I was Jamaican, a clearly absurd statement from a half-Ghanaian, half-English girl whose first name is one of the most common in a major African language.

My mother, born and raised in Ghana, was mortified. Although in part I was living out the now well-documented struggle of mixed race youngsters to grasp their identity, mainly I was just embarrassed. It wasn’t cool to be African in those days and in my ignorant teenage way, I was acting out a much bigger crisis of confidence, one that had been swallowing Africans and spitting them out as permanent economic migrants in Europe and America ever since the end of colonialism…

…For my mother, that was the wake-up call she needed to organise our first trip to the west African land of her birth, an essential re-education in our roots. In 1995, we visited the Ghanaian capital, Accra, for the first time. I remember the usual things that people comment on when visiting equatorial African nations for the first time – the assault of hot air when stepping off the plane, which I confused with engine heat, the smell of spice and smoked fish on the air, and – most significantly for me – the fact that everyone was black. It sounds obvious but I had never really seen officials in uniform – immigration authorities, police, customs officers – with black skin. I don’t think I had realised that there was a world in which black people could be in charge…

Read the entire article here.

AALR Mixed Race Initiative

The Asian American Literary Review
2012-08-26

Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis, co-Editor-in-Chief

Thanks to political organizing, scholarship, and the arts, not to mention media coverage, mixed race has become hyper-visible.  So what’s next?  The Asian American Literary Review (AALR) Mixed Race Initiative, launching this Fall 2012 and running until Spring 2014, won’t simply be a reexamination of race or a survey of mixed voices, important as both are.  We envision our role as that of provocateur—inspiring new conversations and cross-pollinations, pushing into new corners.

The initiative will feature a special issue on mixed race to debut in Fall 2013, all of the contributions for which will be collaborative, “mixed” in nature, bringing together folks across racial and ethnic boundaries, across scholarly disciplines, artistic genres, countries, languages, and generations.  What are the nerve centers of mixed race?  How does mixed race mark fault lines the world over?  We invite you to tell us.  Call-for-papers in early-mid September 2012.

The second phase of the initiative will be an international, multi-institution synchronous teaching program to run in Fall 2013 and Spring 2014.  You agree to teach our special issue as a course text (for anywhere from a week to a month during the allotted time period) and we plug you into a vast network of scholars and students across the world, in classrooms ranging from indigenous studies to cultural psychology, from Latin American Studies to literary studies, from art history to race theory.  We’ll supply a shared online curriculum and coordinate various cross-classroom exchanges, with the goal of staging a real, livetime, region to region and country to country conversation about race and mixed race.  So far classrooms at 40 colleges and universities in five countries have signed on, and we hope yours will join in too.  Let’s work together to make a new model for virtual, transnational education and build new social, civic, and intellectual communities.

If you’d like to learn more about the project, click here.  If you’d like to participate in the teaching program, assist as a volunteer coordinator, or donate in support of the project, please contact us at editors@aalrmag.org.

AALR is a Washington, D.C.-based 501(c)(3) arts nonprofit.

“Native American people is the only race in America that has to prove that they’re Indian,” she [Dwanna L. Robertson] quoted one study participant. “If you’re black and you say, ‘I’m black,’ and nobody will question it. If you’re white, you say, ‘I’m white” and nobody questions it, but if you’re Indian they want to see your CDIB [Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood] card. ‘Well, you say you’re Indian (but) let’s see your card.”…

Carol Berry, “Dwanna L. Robertson: Indian Identity Still Controversial,” Indian Country Today Media Network, (August 28, 2012). http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/08/21/dwanna-l-robertson-indian-identity-still-controversial-130176.

Reconstructing Race

The Western Historical Quarterly
Volume 34, Number 1 (Spring, 2003)
pages 6-26

Elliott West, Distinguished Professor of History
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

During what might be called the Greater Reconstruction, 1846–1877, territorial acquisitions as well as southern slavery forced a new racial dialogue between West and South, unsettled racial relations and presumptions, and finally led to a new racial order encompassing western as well as southern people of color.

I live in a town that doesn’t know where it is. Fayetteville is in northwestern Arkansas—that’s clear enough—but when somebody asks us locals to explain just where in this wide republic that is, things get dicey. The architecture and the lovely fall colors suggest the Midwest. The pace of life, the accents, and the studied eccentricities all speak of the South. Some put us elsewhere. At a party soon after I arrived, I told a colleague’s wife my field of study. “Oh, the West is a wonderful place to live!”she said in her soft Carolinian rhythm. I asked when she had lived there. She looked at me, as if at a slow nephew, and answered: “Why, now.”

Living and working along the seams of national regions is a fine encouragement to wonder about the differences and continuities among them—in appearance, in habits and points of view, and beneath all that, in their histories. Two things I know for sure. The South thinks it is different from the rest of the country, and it is race that southerners use most often to explain their separateness. The tortured relations of black and white, slavery and its rage and guilt, the war that ended slavery and the tormented generations that followed, the centuries-long embrace, intimate and awful on so many levels—all that, we’re told, has set southerners apart and has made the South the central stage of America’s racial drama…

…If anybody back then was curious about the shiftiness of race relations and categories, they should have visited the area where I live now, the area called at the time “the border,” a southwesterly arc of a thousand miles from western Missouri and eastern Kansas down to what is called the border today, the Rio Grande Valley. Here, where South touched West, was a grand display of the seemingly limitless combinations of racial arrangements and identities. Imagine a tour of the border during the fifteen years after the war. We would start in Kansas with a new look at the Exodusters, whose move from South to West was, paradoxically, both a rejection of, and an aggressive claim to, a traditional racial order. We might listen to the freedman J. H. Williamson praising former slaves as the rightful inheritors of manifest destiny. In cultural terms, he was saying, blacks were whites, and out West they would fulfill the promise of Jamestown and Plymouth, saving the wilderness from those who would never do it justice. “The Indians are savage and will not work,” he argued. “We, the negro race, are a working people” who would, he implied, subdue the land and build towns, churches, and schools. Frederick Douglass also reminded white America of the freedman’s privileged status as an insider. The only reason the African American had not been hunted down like the Indian, he told the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1869, was that “he is so close under your arm, that you cannot get at him.” This closeness, however, had made “the Negro . . . more like the white man than the Indian, in his tastes and tendencies, and disposition to accept civilization. . . . You do not see him wearing a blanket, but coats cut in the latest European fashion.” From Kansas we would move southward into Indian Territory among the Creek freedmen. These former slaves argued, to the contrary, that they were Indians, or at least so mixed in blood and history that distinctions were meaningless. The point was worth making, since being Indian meant keeping the political power and an economic stake that mixed blood leaders were trying to take away. Here we might listen to the ex-slave Warrior Rentie ridiculing his mixed blood opponents, those “Indians, or rather would be Indians, . . . who have the strong vein of Negro blood . . . [men] who hardly know whether [they are] black, red or white.”

Next we would travel to central Texas into a variation of what Albert Hurtado calls in California an “intimate frontier” full of households of whites, Indians, blacks, Hispanics, and mixes of all four. We would see this familial snarl helping create new social and legal forms on this piece of the border. This troubled region was the temporary home of Buffalo Soldiers, black and Seminole cavalrymen who fought Plains Indians and who also patrolled southward along our final stop, the national boundary with Mexico. Here we would see these blacks and Indians and black Indians clash with Hispanics moving as always back and forth across this porous border.  If our visit was in 1875 we would see the racial ambiguities mixing with changing politics, with bewildering results. When black troops clashed with Mexican Americans not far from Brownsville, Texas, authorities—Redeemer Democrats hardly known for their Hispanic sympathies—suddenly embraced these locals as noble white citizens most dreadfully abused by degraded black invaders sent by foul Republicans. Philip Sheridan shook his head at the confused identities along the stream that itself was always shifting restlessly in its bed. “It is hard to tell who is who, and what is what, on that border, . . .” he wrote William Sherman. “The state of affairs is about as mixed as the river is indefinite as a boundary line.”…

Read the entire article here.

“Our America” That is Not One: Transnational Black Atlantic Disclosures in Nicolás Guillén and Langston Hughes

Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture
Volume 22, Number 3 (Fall 2000)
pages 87-113
DOI: 10.1353/dis.2000.0007

Monika Kaup, Associate Professor of English
University of Washington

In the past two decades, discontent with the exclusions operative in nationalist frameworks of American and Latin American Studies has placed issues of transnationalism, hybridization, and a diasporic view of cultures at the center of attention. As a provisional academic base for this desire to think more globally, scholars have invented a new tradition, so to speak the transnational and burgeoning field of hemispheric American Studies. Thus, the recent collection, José Martí’s “Our America”: From National to Hemispheric Cultural Studies, calls for such a change of paradigms. In their introduction, the editors single out Cuba, the birthplace of poet and revolutionary José Martí, as a fertile location for their project:

For Cuba lies at the intersection of Our America’s two principal transnational cultural formations: the geocultural system we have come to know as the Black Atlantic and the complex region of interactions among the Spanish, Native American, and English peoples (extending from the Caribbean to California) that we have come to call the Latino Borderlands. (Belnap and Fernández 11)

Cuba’s nationalism, from José Martí and Cuba’s late-19th century Wars of Independence to post-1959 formations under Castro, has always been a mestizo and mulato nationalism. One reason was that in Cuba abolition was not a consequence, but a condition of independence (Sommer, Foundational Fictions 125): in contrast to the U.S. and most of Latin America with the exception of Puerto Rico, Cuba achieved independence only in 1898, thanks to the full participation of Afro-Cubans in the anti-colonial wars against Spain, whose investment in Cuban independence was motivated by their desire for racial justice. Indeed, Cuba’s population in the modern era, “slightly over half Spanish in origin and slightly under half black or mulatto, with a small number of Chinese” (Bethell 20), suggests an encounter of the two distinct NewWorld diasporas known as the “Black Atlantic” and Martí’s Spanish-speaking “Our America” on equal terms.

While the discourse of mestizaje and racial amalgamation nourishes Cuba’s nationalism, and while the notion of cubanidad is built on the myth of racial synthesis, this symbolic reconciliation has repressed actual and continuing conflicts of race and their memory. Indeed, 20th century Cuban history, culture, and literature bear testimony to the uncanny reassertion of resistant diasporic black voices sublated into the dominant mestizaje nationalism. One major purpose of this essay is to examine the relationship between the Black Atlantic and José Martí’s “Our America” cultural formations intersecting in Cuba, as pointed out in the passage quoted above as a troubled and unstable one. Whereas “Our America” stands for the homecoming of Blacks in the interracial nationalism of Martí’s Latin America, the Black Atlantic stands for the continuing homelessness of Blacks in the Americas, and the memory of exile, displacement, and the violence of the Middle Passage…

Read the entire article here.

The Browning of America and the Evasion of Social Justice

SUNY Press
October 2008
200 pages
Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-0-7914-7585-0
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-7914-7586-7

Ronald R. Sundstrom,Professor of Philosophy
University of San Francisco

Considers the effects of the browning of America on philosophical debates over race, racism, and social justice.

This book considers the challenge that the so-called browning of America poses for any discussion of the future of race and social justice. In the philosophy of race there has been little reflection about how the rapid increase in the Latino, Asian American, and mixed-race populations affects the historical demands for racial justice by Native Americans and African Americans. Ronald R. Sundstrom examines how recent demographic shifts bear upon central questions in race theory and social and political philosophy, including color blindness, interracial intimacy, and the future of race.

Sundstrom cautions that rather than getting caught up in romantic reveries about the browning of America, we should remain vigilant that longstanding claims for racial justice not be washed away.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Frederick Douglass’s Political Apostasy
• 2. Color Blindness and the Browning of America
• 3. The Black-White Binary as Racial Anxiety and Demand for Justice
• 4. Interracial Intimicies: Racism and the Political Romance of the Browning of America
• 5. Responsible Multiracial Politics
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index