Mixed Race Studies

‘Passing’ in colonial Colombia

Havard University Gazette
2009-02-12

Corydon Ireland, Harvard News Office

Racial categories today are self-evident — part of what social scientists might call “socially constructed discourse.” Contemporary people of one race are aware of what other races look like, as well as where they themselves belong in the racial scheme of things.
 
But racial categories were not so firm or reliable while being created centuries ago, in particular in early colonial Latin America. It’s this historical crucible of racial identities that anthropologist and Radcliffe Fellow Joanne Rappaport has chosen to study.
 
She gave a glimpse of her work last week (Feb. 4) during a talk at the Radcliffe Gymnasium, where 80 listeners were drawn in by her intriguing title: “Mischievous Lovers, Hidden Moors, and Cross-Dressers: The Meaning of Passing in Colonial Bogotá.”
 
“Spaniard or a mestizo, mulato, indio, or negro,” said Rappaport to begin. “What did these categories mean?”
 
Or to put it another way, she added, what did race mean to these early modern people?
 
For one, it wasn’t a matter of black and white, said Rappaport — that is, it was more subtle than “the genetic metaphor of bounded populations that has characterized the (pseudo) scientific discourse of race since the 19th century.”
 
The word “white” seldom appears in the 16th and 17th century Latin American and Spanish documents she has pored over, she said. Europeans were instead identified by where they were from — Spain, France, or England, for instance. And in what is now present-day Colombia, people were identified not so much by racial categories but more often as citizens — vecinos — of a particular town or city.
 
More important than “white” was the designation “noble,” said Rappaport, who teaches at Georgetown University. “It takes us out of a narrowly racial mindset.”…

…Rappaport, a frequent scholarly traveler to old archives in Spain and Latin America, is using many ways to study the emergence of racial identity in early colonial societies. She’s looking at phenotype and physiognomy as they were used in legal documents 400 years ago and more; at how the moral attributes of racially mixed groups were described; and how these attributes were challenged by the literature of the day…

Read the entire article here.

Under the skin

Havard University Gazette
2012-10-12

Aaron Lester, Harvard Correspondent

Deep experience informs panelists’ views on mixed-race life in U.S.

When Carmen Fields’ future husband asked her to meet his mother, Fields refused. “No way. I didn’t want to be the reason she opened up the front door and dropped the Easter ham,” she told a Harvard audience on Wednesday.
 
An African-American whose spouse is white, Fields knows from experience that life in the United States holds unique challenges for mixed-race couples and their children.
 
Fields and fellow panel members — among them College junior Eliza Nguyen —addressed some of those issues during a discussion called “American Masala: Race Mixing, the Spice of Life or Watering Down Cultures?” at the Student Organization Center at Hilles.

Nguyen, president of the Harvard Half Asian People’s Association (HAPA), distinctly remembers the moment it dawned on her that she was neither white, like her mother, nor Vietnamese, like her father. “I was in the fourth grade, taking a standardized test. And they had that box you were supposed to check off.” There was no box for biracial, and she was instructed to check only one. Nguyen, perplexed, asked her teacher which box to check. She was the only nonwhite student in her school. “Asian, of course,” her teacher told her. “I was confused,” said Nguyen. “Who am I?”…

Read the entire article here.

Student-Organized Conference To Focus on ‘Mixed-Race Experience’

Havard University Gazette
2000-04-13

Ken Gewertz, Gazette Staff

For many of us, food can be a powerful reminder of who we are and where we come from.

But the foods that Rebecca Weisinger ’02 remembers from her family dinner table were a little different from most.

“Sometimes my mom would make Chinese dishes and then add potatoes to them, or she would serve sauerkraut on the side,” Weisinger said

This combination of cuisines seemed natural in Weisinger’s family because her mother is a Chinese-American from Hawaii and her father a German-American from Wisconsin. The two met when they were students at M.I.T.

This makes Weisinger a mixed-race American, one of a rapidly expanding group that has been receiving considerable attention of late. According to one estimate, mixed-race births are increasing at a rate 260 times as fast as all births combined. In some urban centers, one in every six babies is multiracial. Census experts estimate that by 2050, there will be over 27 million biracial and multiracial Americans…

Read the entire article here.

Black Pride, Democratic Politics: Can They Be Separated in Blacks’ Support of Obama?

The Associated Press
2012-10-13

Jesse Washington, National Writer, Race and Ethnicity

Surviving slavery, segregation and discrimination has forged a special pride in African-Americans. Now some are saying this hard-earned pride has become prejudice in the form of blind loyalty to President Barack Obama.

Are black people supporting Obama mainly because he’s black? If race is just one factor in blacks’ support of Obama, does that make them racist? Can blacks’ support for Obama be compared with white voters who may favor his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, because he’s white?…

Read the entire article here.

My Day at the 5th Annual Mixed Roots Film and Literary Festival

Gino Michael Pellegrini: Education, Amalgamation, Race, Class & Solidarity
2012-10-14

Gino Pellegrini, Adjunct Assistant Professor of English
Pierce College, Woodland Hills, California

Saturday morning, June 16, 2012: I take the Metro from North Hollywood to the Tokyo Arts District in Downtown Los Angeles. My destination is the 5th Annual Mixed Roots Film and Literary Festival at the Japanese American National Museum and the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy. This is a three-day event, but I can be there for just this one day, and my first goal is to meet Steven Riley, the creator of the website, Mixed Race Studies.

I have not attended an event centered upon the mixed experience in many years. I walk through the glass doors. The volunteer staff is welcoming and energetic. The imagery is colorful, ambiguous, and stimulating. The overall vibe is positive and hopeful, and for a moment I am taken aback to how I felt at my first mixed-experience event, the 2000 Harvard-Wellesley Conference on the Mixed Race Experience.

Skeptics say that this type of event, which brings together individuals of diverse mixes and backgrounds, is unsustainable. Do Hapas, blacklicans, latalians, jewasians, and standard black/white multiracials really have that much in common? Apparently many do, and this Festival holds together amazingly well and continues to grow thanks to the diligence, intelligence, and creativity of its founders, Fanshen Cox and Heidi Durrow.

The artists/writers whom I see present or talk to this day have strong personal voices and are very talented at what they do. Overall, their work complicates received understandings of multiracial identity, experience, and art…

Read the entire article here.

Peter Tosh did Not Joke with Words

The Jamaica Gleaner
Jamaica, West Indies
2012-10-14

Carolyn Cooper, Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies
University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica

Shortly after Peter Tosh made his last concert appearance in December 1983, I did an interview with him that was published in Pulse magazine. One of his most powerful declarations was this: “… me don’t run joke wid words.” Tosh was objecting to the way in which the term ‘peace treaty’ was being used so loosely. And he gave a rather irreverent sermon on the subject:

“Claudie Mashup, or weh him want to name, him came to my house once and told me about this project that they had. And dem say that dem going to call it a peace treaty. I a look fe peace. Because to me, peace should have really meant people respecting people, people loving people.

“A man becoming his brother’s keeper. A man can lef him door open an go bout him business and a next man don’t come pop it off. Is so me call peace. A man don’t have gun over the next area an a tell you say him have a border cross ya-so and you can’t come across there.

“So I mek them know me don’t run joke wid words. Every time I see the word ‘peace’, you know where I see it? In the cemetery: ‘Here lies the body of such and such. May he rest in peace.’ So how a guy waan come tell me say him a go have a peace treaty amongst the living, where all the dead rest in wha? Peace? Ah-oh.”

I don’t know if this wicked mashing up Massop’s name was a Tosh original. There are many such examples of witty word play in his lyrics. Poliomyelitis became reggaemylitis, a joyous infection that moves every muscle in the body. The words ‘system’ and ‘situation’ were cleverly transformed by the addition of a well-placed ‘h’ and ‘t’. Tosh evoked the stench of the oppressive dunghills of social injustice and moral corruption that continue to rise up everywhere in Jamaica.

In his dread lecture delivered at the so-called ‘Peace Concert’ in 1978, Tosh chanted down the excremental system: “Four hundred years an de same bucky maasa bizniz. An black inferiority, an brown superiority rule dis lickle black country here fe a long [t]imes. Well, I an I come wid Earthquake, Lightnin an Tunda to break down dese barriers of oppression an drive away transgression and rule equality between humble black people.”

GARVEY’S AFRICAN REDEMPTION

Peter Tosh was an unapologetic advocate of what Marcus Garvey called “African Redemption”. We hear this in his rousing anthem, African, from the 1977 Equal Rights album: “Don’t care where yu come from/As long as you’re a black man/You’re an African.” Not all Jamaicans would agree. Some of us don’t even want to admit that we’re black, let alone African.

In a letter to the editor published in The Gleaner on September 25, Daive Facey asks a revealing question, “Who are ‘blacks’, Ms Cooper?” He already knows the answer: “Many classified as ‘blacks’ based on external features and placed into the 90 per cent majority can easily trace their mixed lineages, and in terms of genealogy are no less Caucasian, Indian or Chinese.”

Mr Facey is quite right. Many clearly black Jamaicans routinely claim ancestors of other races who have left no visible traces of themselves on the body of their supposed relatives. And even in cases where some racial mixing is evident, the African element in the mix is always the half that is never told. Mixed-race Jamaicans are half-Indian; half-Chinese; half-Syrian; half-white. But never half-African!

It is only people of African descent in Jamaica who do not define their racial identity in terms that point to ancestral homelands. Europeans, Chinese, Syrians and Indians are all raced and placed in their very naming. Africans are ‘so-so’ black. Going against the tide, Tosh deliberately chose ‘African’ as a marker of racial identity…

Read the entire article here.

Postdoctoral Scholar Fellowship Trainee [Critical Mixed-Race Studies]

University of Southern California
USC Laboratory and Research Jobs
2012-10-10

The University of Southern California (USC), founded in 1880, is located in the heart of downtown L.A. and is the largest private employer in the City of Los Angeles. As an employee of USC, you will be a part of a world-class research university and a member of the “Trojan Family,” which is comprised of the faculty, students and staff that make the university what it is.

The Center for Japanese Religions and Culture (CJRC) in the Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences at the University of Southern California invites applications for a one-year Andrew Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminars on the Comparative Study of Cultures Postdoctoral Fellowship, beginning Fall 2013. The fellowship has an annual salary of $45,000 with benefits. The field of specialization is Critical Mixed-Race Studies (area and period open). The Fellow will be given research space at CJRC, and will be expected to participate in the Mellon Foundation’s John E. Sawyer Seminar series, “Critical Mixed-Race Studies: A Transpacific Approach,” organized by CJRC. The Fellow must have a Ph.D. in hand, and should be within 5 years of receiving the Ph.D., at the beginning of the appointment. To apply, please submit an application letter, a CV, a brief description of your research (including both the dissertation and current/future projects), and a dossier of three letters of recommendation to Kana Yoshida at: mailto:cjrc@dornsife.usc.edu.

In order to be considered for this position, applicants are also required to submit an electronic application through the USC Jobs Web site, https://jobs.usc.edu/.

Review of applications will begin on Jan. 1, 2013, though applications will be accepted until the position is filled.

USC strongly values diversity and is committed to equal opportunity in employment. Women and men, and members of all racial and ethnic groups, are encouraged to apply.

For more information, click here.