Mixed Race Studies

Barack Obama Reelection Signals Rise Of New America

The Huffington Post
2012-11-07

Howard Fineman

NEW YORK—President Barack Obama did not just win reelection tonight. His victory signaled the irreversible triumph of a new, 21st-century America: multiracial, multi-ethnic, global in outlook and moving beyond centuries of racial, sexual, marital and religious tradition.

Obama, the mixed-race son of Hawaii by way of Kansas, Indonesia, Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, won reelection in good part because he not only embodied but spoke to that New America, as did the Democratic Party he leads. His victorious coalition spoke for and about him: a good share of the white vote (about 45 percent in Ohio, for example); 70 percent or so of the Latino vote across the country, according to experts; 96 percent of the African-American vote; and large proportions of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.

The Republican Party, by contrast, has been reduced to a rump parliament of Caucasian traditionalism: white, married, church-going—to oversimplify only slightly. “It’s a catastrophe,” said GOP strategist Steve Schmidt. “This is, this will have to be, the last time that the Republican Party tries to win this way.”…

Read the entire article here.

Thank you for making CMRS 2012 and Mixed Roots Midwest a success

Laura Kina
2011-11-04

Laura Kina, Associate Professor Art, Media and Design and Director Asian American Studies
DePaul University

We’ve just finished four days of the Critical Mixed Race Studies conference and Mixed Roots Midwest festival hosted by DePaul University in Chicago, IL. Thank you to all of the volunteers and sponsors who made this possible. I look forward to seeing you again in 2014…

Read the entire article here.

Rejuvenated Obama reelected as president after bruising campaign

The Washington Post
2011-11-07

David A. Fahrenthold

Barack Obama was elected to a second presidential term Tuesday, defeating Republican Mitt Romney by reassembling the political coalition that boosted him to victory four years ago and remaking himself from a hopeful uniter into a determined fighter for middle-class interests.

Obama, the nation’s first African American president, scored a decisive electoral college victory by stringing together a series of narrow wins in hotly contested states. Of the election’s seven major battlegrounds, he won at least six…

Read the entire article here.

Divided U.S. Gives Obama More Time

The New York Times
2012-11-06

Jeff Zeleny and Jim Rutenberg

Barack Hussein Obama was re-elected president of the United States on Tuesday, overcoming powerful economic headwinds, a lock-step resistance to his agenda by Republicans in Congress and an unprecedented torrent of advertising as a divided nation voted to give him more time.

In defeating Mitt Romney, the president carried Colorado, Iowa, Ohio, New Hampshire, Virginia and Wisconsin, a near sweep of the battleground states, and was holding a narrow advantage in Florida. The path to victory for Mr. Romney narrowed as the night wore along, with Mr. Obama winning at least 303 electoral votes.

A cheer of jubilation sounded at the Obama campaign headquarters in Chicago when the television networks began projecting him as the winner at 11:20 p.m., even as the ballots were still being counted in many states where voters had waited in line well into the night. The victory was far narrower than his historic election four years ago, but it was no less dramatic…

…Mr. Obama’s re-election extended his place in history, carrying the tenure of the nation’s first black president into a second term. His path followed a pattern that has been an arc to his political career: faltering when he seemed to be at his strongest — the period before his first debate with Mr. Romney — before he redoubled his efforts to lift himself and his supporters to victory…

Read the entire article here.

President Barack Obama defeats Romney to win re-election

BBC News
2012-11-07

President Barack Obama has been re-elected to a second term, defeating Republican challenger Mitt Romney.

America’s first black president secured more than the 270 votes in the electoral college needed to win.

In his victory speech before supporters in Chicago, Mr Obama said he would talk to Mr Romney about “where we can work together to move this country forward”.

Mr Obama prevailed despite lingering dissatisfaction with the economy and a hard-fought challenge by Mr Romney…

Read the entire article here.

Call for Proposals—Special AALR Issue on Mixed Race

The Asian American Literary Review
1110 Severnview Drive
Crownsville, Maryland 21032
2019-09-17

Editors-in-Chief
Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis
Gerald Maa

Thanks to political organizing, scholarship, and the arts, not to mention media coverage, mixed race has become hyper-visible. So what’s next? AALR’s special issue on mixed race, due out in Fall 2013, 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.

What are the nerve centers of mixed race? How does mixed race mark fault lines the world over? We invite you to be the curators of this special issue, to tell us what about mixed race we need to address—and how.

All contributions to the issue will be collaborative, “mixed” in nature, bringing together folks across racial and ethnic boundaries, across disciplines, genres, countries, languages, and generations. We see the issue as a meeting point for visual artists and writers, filmmakers and activists, students and teachers and scholars of every stripe—an incubator of new ideas and fresh approaches. Multilingual exchanges and formal innovations welcome.

In Fall 2013 and Spring 2014 the issue will be a focal point for a multi-institution synchronous teaching program that connects students and faculty across the world. So far 54 classrooms in universities and colleges in seven countries have signed up. Our goal is an international, livetime, region to region, country to country conversation that builds academic, social, and civic community, a conversation that challenges and grows our understandings of race and mixed race as well as the tools and lenses we use to understand them.

PROPOSAL GUIDELINES

All proposals should briefly outline:

• who would be contributing to your collaborative project, with a 50-100 word bio for each contributor;
• what subject matter your collaborative project would engage;
• how it would engage that subject or set of subjects in terms of disciplinary approach(s), genre(s), and form(s) or format(s); and
• why your proposed project would be vital to the special issue.

We are accepting proposals from fully formed groups; partial groups requesting to be matched with a writer, scholar, activist, visual artist, illustrator, musician, or filmmaker; and individuals requesting to be matched with a group.

Please direct proposals to AALR.MRI.CFP@gmail.com and any questions or inquiries to editors@aalrmag.org. Deadline for proposal submissions is 11/09/2012. We will inform of decisions by mid-December 2012. Final submissions of collaborative projects will be due February 2013.

AALR is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit arts organization. All donations are fully tax-deductible.

Han Suyin Dies; Wrote Sweeping Fiction

The New York Times
2012-11-05

Margalit Fox

Han Suyin, a physician and author known for writing the sweeping novel that became the Hollywood film “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing” and for her outspoken championing of China under Mao Zedong, died on Friday at her home in Lausanne, Switzerland.

As with many aspects of Dr. Han’s life, the precise year of her birth is uncertain, but she was believed to have been 96. Her granddaughter, Karen Shepard, confirmed the death.

The daughter of a Chinese father and a Belgian mother, Dr. Han was born and reared in China but wrote primarily in English and French. In more than two dozen books, including novels, a multivolume memoir and laudatory biographies of Mao and Zhou Enlai, she had the singular task, during the 1950s and afterward, of simultaneously explaining China to the West and the West to China…

…Dr. Han was born on Sept. 12, most likely in 1916, her granddaughter said — not in 1917, as has been reported over the years. The city of her birth is uncertain: it may have been Xinyang, in the Henan Province. Her parents eventually settled in Beijing, where she grew up.

At birth, Dr. Han was given the Chinese name Kuang-Hu Chou; she was also known early on by a Western name believed to have been Rosalie Matilda Chou, though she preferred to call herself Elizabeth. (At the start of her writing career she took the pen name Han Suyin, which she liked to translate as “a common little voice.”)

Growing up as a mixed-race child, Dr. Han later said, she felt she had a foot in each of two words but a secure footing in neither. Her mother, she told The New York Times in 1985, caustically referred to her as “the yellowish object.”…

Read the entire obituary here.

Han Suyin’s Many-Splendored World

The New York Times
1985-01-25

Georgia Dullea

Being remembered as the author of  ”A Many-Splendored Thing,” the semiautobiographical love story of a Eurasian physician and a British journalist in Hong Kong, which inspired a sentimental movie and an even more sentimental song, is a bore, says Han Suyin, 33 years and 16 books after the fact.

In this country, “they still identify me with Jennifer Jones and that song,” the 68-year-old Dr. Han said with a weary smile, ”and I do get bored because, well, I’ve done other things.”

Dr. Han, who lives in Lausanne, Switzerland, was sitting in her pied-à-terre on Beekman Place, drinking beer from a china mug and reflecting on change – both in China and in her own mind.

“I’m a person who changes, who adapts,” she said. “It’s because of my avidity for learning. If tomorrow you prove to me something new, I’ll be quite willing to overturn my ideas because ideas are made to be overturned.”

Exploring Two Cultural Identities

Born in Peking of a Chinese father and Belgian mother, Dr. Han has devoted her literary career to exploring her two cultural identities and to explaining East to West. “Instead of remaining torn and frayed, as so many other people, I come together and now both my worlds have come together,” she said, pressing one palm on the other. “To be quite honest, I was not very happy in a world where China and the West were at odds”…

Read the entire article here.

Social workers ‘at rock bottom’ over issue of race and adoption

The Guardian
2012-11-06

Hugh Muir, Diary Editor

Professional body to tell Lords committee that political stereotyping has hampered efforts to rehome vulnerable children

Morale among social workers has been driven to rock bottom by cuts, targets and ministers making the issue of race and adoption a “political football”, according to the biggest professional association.

A Lords committee will hear claims that politicians fuelled stereotypes for political gain, hampering the efforts of social workers to assist vulnerable children.

Nushra Mansuri, of the British Association of Social Workers, is expected to criticise the education secretary Michael Gove, who accused social workers of condemning black and Asian children to a life in care rather than see them adopted by white couples…

…Baffour, who sits on adoption panels, said trans-racial adoptions are hard to get right. “Race and heritage and culture are important, but ministers seem totally dismissive. A lot of people think the repercussions are going to be very damaging.”…

…Marlene Ellis, a black Londoner raised for 18 years by white foster parents in the home counties, said the complexities should not be underestimated. “It is impossible to come out really clear and comfortable about who you are in a society that still has very clear classifications for race and culture,” she said. “My parents did the best they could do but there are subtle things that happen that erode your confidence. My real memory is loneliness; of not knowing.”But minsters can say, with justification, that some social work professionals and trans-racial adoptees fully back the government’s stance on race and adoption. Jo Bonnett, a black police officer raised in rural Leicestershire and east London by white English adoptive parents, is one of them. “I didn’t find it a negative experience,” she says “I think I was very lucky. I had an older brother who was their birth son; a brilliant childhood and fantastic friends. My challenges came at 17, but when you get to that age, and have been brought up in a loving household, you are strong enough to deal with racism or any issues you might have.”She said the benefits greatly outweigh the drawbacks. “I don’t think race matters in adoption as long as you have loving parents and have all the things a child needs.”

Bonnett, 40, said she and her husband, who is white, tried themselves to adopt a black child. “But we were told the child must be mixed race. Ridiculous!”…

Read the entire article here. Watch the video here.

Racial Framing and Superstorm Sandy: A Black Mother Begs for Help While Her Children Drown

We Are Respectable Negroes
2012-11-04

Chauncey DeVega

Superstorm Sandy has made the divisions of class in the New York City area very clear. The “haves” are able to muster the resources to somehow survive. The “have nots” are left to their own devices.

Superstorm Sandy has also reminded us of how race remains one of the main dividing lines in our society. While naked displays of racism are now outside of the norms of “polite society,” racial micro-aggressions, the day-to-day moments of white racial hostility and animus towards people of color, continue onward.

Racial micro-aggressions can impact the lives of black and brown folks in ways that are “just” inconvenient–the store detective that follows you around while shopping; being asked for ID when using a credit card; when your friends or colleagues “complement” you by saying you are one of “the special” or “good” ones.

Alternatively, these racial micro-aggressions can also be deadly in their outcomes.

Superstorm Sandy has yet to provide an iconic example of white racist media framing such as when during Hurricane Katrina, black people were described as “looters,” and whites, also trying to survive, were captioned in news photos as “looking for food.”

A lack of an iconic moment does not mean that race no longer impacts life outcomes, the safety and health of people of color, or how white society chooses to view (or not) African-Americans as full members of the polity and broader community…

Some other thoughts and questions about racial framing and SuperStorm Sandy:

1. Has racial framing become more or less prominent in the media’s coverage of Superstorm Sandy? I have noticed a good number of photos where people of color are shown in line waiting for gasoline and food. I have not seen many similar images of white people. In discussions of looting, the only stories I have seen have featured black men. Have any of you seen stories about social disorder following Superstorm Sandy in white communities?

2. The white victims of SuperStorm Sandy in Staten Island, and the Jersey Shore in particular, have been framed by the media as “hearty” stalwarts and survivors. In comparison to Hurricane Katrina, why is their decision to stay put after an evacuation order, not being interrogated as that of “irresponsible” people?…

…7. Glenda Moore’s two children were fathered by a white man. In many ways, the multiracial movement is prefaced on gaining white privilege for those people who are of a “mixed race” background in order to create a buffer race and colored class.

The white parentage through their father of those two beautiful black children did not extend any privilege, or sense of white kinship to them, through their mother. The boundaries of white community were not broad enough to save those two children.

The “one drop” rule is real in American society. For example, while some white folks are confused (and even offended) by Barack Obama’s claim to a black identity, this tragic event is more proof that in this society African Americans of a “mixed race” background are still stigmatized by their blackness. In total, White privilege, and their “white” lineage, did not save Glenda Moore’s two children. It left them to drown and die.

Read the entire article here.