Mixed Race Studies

Interview with PhD Student Karla Lucht: Children’s Literature about Mixed-Race Asian Americans/Canadians

The Center for Children’s Books
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
February 2013

Tad Andracki, CCB Outreach Coordinator

“Everyone deserves to see themselves represented in a book. And a good book at that.”

GSLIS doctoral student Karla Lucht visited the School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies at the University of British Columbia as part of the iSchool Doctoral Student Exchange Program in November 2012. The CCB decided to meet with Karla to discuss her trip and her research. Lucht describes her research as looking at the representations of mixed-race Asian Americans and Canadians in youth literature with a critical race theory lens.

Why do you see your research as important to the field of youth services and children’s literature? Why is it important?

To start with, there’s a gap in this research with lots of underrepresented groups, but with mixed-race people especially. Everyone deserves to see themselves represented in a book… and a good book at that. In the past, we’ve seen some books about mixed-race people, but a lot of them weren’t good. I’m trying to fill in those gaps.

What are some challenges you see in your particular field of research? What are some opportunities?

One primary challenge is just finding titles, especially using subject headings. The Library of Congress Subject Heading that’s closest to my work is Racially Mixed People–Fiction, which isn’t very descriptive. I’ve been sifting through books with that heading. I’m also trying other keywords—adoption, immigration, multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural–and then looking at the books to see if they have the content I’m interested in.

Another problem is that, especially in the late 1980s and the 90s, a lot of the YA books on this topic are a bit problematic and poorly written. You find books that really invest in Othering a character’s Asian side and putting whiteness on a pedestal. In those books, the character vists the Asian side of the family, and it’s always a big problem–the Asianness is “too weird” or something…

Read the entire interview here.

Mixed feelings

NOW.
2012-06-30

NOW is the online source for news, features, analysis and much more, covering Lebanon, the Lebanese diaspora and the Middle East.

“The people photographed are so beautiful they make you feel like having mixed race babies,” said Kevork Baboyan, one of many attendees at Wednesday’s opening of the photography exhibition, Mixed Feelings.

Over the years, racism has slowly but steadily started to raise eyebrows in Lebanon, a country that is infamous for abusing migrant domestic workers and discriminating against refugees and other groups of society. Rarely, however, has anyone addressed racism between Lebanese until Lebanese-Nigerian activist Nisreen Kaj sought – in collaboration with Beirut-based Polish photographer Marta Bogdanska — to explore the concepts of race and identity.

“Living in Beirut as a black Lebanese has [clearly highlighted] the hierarchy of skin color and ethnicity in the country,” Kaj told NOW Extra. “This reality has gotten under my skin, which is only a figure of speech, for it is in fact about the surface, about the skin, about the way we perceive identity, race, and ethnicity.”

Opening at Hamra’s Dar al-Musawwir, the launch combined images and interviews of some 30 Lebanese from African and Asian descent and was produced in cooperation with the Heinrich Böll Foundation, Middle East Office…

…When asked whether racism was more prevalent in Lebanon as compared to other Arab nations, Khoury said it was “particularly [widespread] here, but this is exhibit is a start.”

“They see my car keys and can’t believe I own a car… so [people at the supermarket] follow me to see whether or not it’s actually possible,” said Khoury’s mother laughingly, recounting the incident with equal humor and frustration…

Read the entire article here.

Possibilities Abound in a Nation That Is Diverse, CNN Journalist Says

Yale News
2009-11-20

Susan Gonzalez

When CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien was growing up, her mother in­structed her never to let anyone tell her that she wasn’t black or Hispanic because of her mixed ethnic and racial heritage.

So, when she was asked to identify her race on official forms, O’Brien — the daughter of a black Cuban mother and an Irish-Australian father — refused to check just one box, even when making a single selection was required, she told a packed auditorium in the Law School’s Levinson Auditorium during her Poynter Fellowship Lecture on Nov. 10.

America’s value lies in its diversity, O’Brien said, and that mixture of races and ethnicities should never be viewed as a “problem.”…

…Likewise, when O’Brien — also a Harvard graduate — was first applying for jobs as a journalist, one news director told her that there was only one spot open for a black person but that she wasn’t dark enough to qualify. Another news director asked if she would consider changing her name because it was too difficult to pronounce. On both occasions, her mother pointed out that these were jobs her daughter wouldn’t want anyway.

O’Brien said that her parents served as examples of perseverance who encouraged their children to look beyond challenges and focus on possibilities, instilling in them this message: “Dream and do what you want; push and achieve what you want; go and get what you want.”

Her own children, the journalist said, have become so used to diversity in their lives that they were shocked to discover that Barack Obama is America’s first black president.

“Diversity to me is an opportunity to think differently and to see differently,” she told her audience…

Read the entire article here.

Japanese-Brazilian Music and Ethnic Identity in the Post-Dekasegi Era: A lecture by Shanna Lorenz

Barnard College, Columbia University
Sulzberger Parlor, 3rd Floor Barnard Hall
3009 Broadway, New York, New York
2013-02-28, 18:00 EST (Local Time)

Shanna Lorenz, Assistant Professor, Music; Advisory Committee, Latino/a and Latin American Studies
Occidental College, Los Angeles

This talk explores how circular migration between Brazil and Japan since 1990 has led Japanese-Brazilians to push back against the stereotypes that have circumscribed their participation in Brazilian society and, in some cases, to assert more forcefully their allegiance with the Brazilian nation. At the forefront of these social changes, musicians are using their art to redefine perceptions of the Nikkei community in Brazil, reshaping the musical resources and national mythologies of Japan and Brazil.

For more information, click here.

It’s all in the mix

NOW
2009-05-22

NOW is the online source for news, features, analysis and much more, covering Lebanon, the Lebanese diaspora and the Middle East.

“I am apartment hunting with Hala who looks like a cheap whore,” read the text message that Hala’s friend accidently sent to her while they were walking together.  Hala, who is 27 and has a Nigerian mother and a Lebanese father, was shocked and ended up giving this “friend,” who is gay, a two-hour lecture. “For someone who is gay, who goes on saying Lebanon is not accommodating gay people, you’re just a typical Lebanese in the end,” she told him.
 
Ever since Hala’s decision to move from Nigeria to Lebanon for her studies at the American University of Science and Technology (AUST), each day has been a battle. The color of her skin is the reason why.
 
Most African women in Lebanon come from Ethiopia. According to Tsega Berhan, who works at the Ethiopian Consulate in Lebanon, an estimated 55,000 Ethiopian domestic workers live in Lebanon, and their brown skin resembles Hala’s. Ethiopians are often seen as either maids or prostitutes – the two occupations most looked down on in Lebanon – and for this reason, Hala faces racism and harassment on a day-to-day basis.

While Hala is constantly hurt by people’s words, she believes that coming to Lebanon at the age of 20 helped her to cope. She did not try to change herself for the sake of others’ perceptions, but instead started to surround herself with circles of trusted friends who accept her as she is. However, Hala’s strategy only goes so far…

…Hala’s skin has colored her love life as well. While she had dated Lebanese men before, it never developed into anything serious. “I have a lot of guy friends, but at the same time, it’s so funny because none of my guy friends would ever date a black girl. They’re not racist, but because they have racist families, they don’t want the headache.”

When she went to a guy friend’s house, his mother looked at her with a suspicious eye and asked her neighbor, who was sitting next to her, her opinion of Hala. The neighbor told Hala to turn her face, scrutinized her from head to toe, and then commented in Arabic, “She would look better if she washes the dirt off her body.” Hala caught the comment and never went to the house again. After this and other similar incidents, Hala learned that her father would have never married her mother had they met in Lebanon.
 
Taking it day by day
 
“I do feel Lebanese but it’s not in a typical way. You’re more aware of your differences. In Lebanon, I have to mention that I’m half-Filipino, but when I’m in the Philippines… I have to tell [relatives] I am half-Lebanese… People pick out the differences before they look at the similarities,” says Gaby, who is 19. He spent most of his life in Lebanon with a loving, stable family composed of a Filipina mother, a Lebanese father and three brothers. His parents met in Saudi Arabia more than 20 years ago, when his mother was working as a nurse there and his father was on a business trip.

For Gaby, growing up in Lebanon and dealing with racism has never been as dramatic as it was for Hala. He says he never really experienced confusion about his identity as a child or adolescent, even when he was made fun of for being different. “As a person, you don’t really analyze your situation so much and say you’re confused. What am I going to do? You just sort of live normally,” he says, adding that having three brothers also helped.

Perhaps because he doesn’t get sexually harassed as women of color do, Gaby views Lebanese as “respectful” of diversity and sees their racist comments as coming “offhand,” rather than intentionally. Nonetheless, he knows how his Filipina mother, who comes from a country that has over 30,000 nationals working as live-in maids in Lebanon, “gets a lot of crap.”

“Sometimes, someone would come over to the house, selling something or whatever, and my mom would answer the door. And then they’d ask to see the Madame.” Gaby has also grown up seeing his father defend his mother when confronted with racist comments. His parents never directly told him, but seeing this, he says, “I realized in a subtle way that you should fight back. But you don’t let it get to you….You can take [being mixed] as a disability, but I don’t think I ever took it as that.”…

Read the entire article here.

Sabrina Jacobucci: “Mixed race children often face the same issues black mono-heritage children face. No matter their skin tone, they are seen as black and therefore it is healthier and more empowering for them to identify as such, without denying their dual heritage at the same time. A racist is not going to ask them whether they are mixed-race.”

Stephen Ogongo, “There are Italians with black skin,” Africa News, May 28, 2010. http://www.africa-news.eu/africans-abroad/africans-in-italy/747-there-are-italians-with-black-skin.html.

US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey on the legacy of the Civil War

The Washington Post
2013-01-30

Ron Charles

One hundred and fifty years later, Americans are still fighting the Civil War, US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey said at the Library of Congress on Wednesday. The field of battle is now historical memory, and gatling guns have been replaced by symbols, but the contest over what sort of nation this will be — and was — continues, according to the 46-year-old poet.

Before a standing-room-only crowd of 300 people, Trethewey focused her remarks on Walt Whitman’s complicated response to black soldiers. Her lecture — in association with the Library’s “Civil War in America” exhibit — elegantly blended scholarship, cultural criticism and poetry…

…When she toured historic sites in her native Mississippi, where “the dead stand up in stone,” she found the same act of erasure still being carried out by memorials, plaques and even tour guides working for the Park Service. The record is “rife with omission and embellishment” that keeps “blacks relegated to the margins of historical memory,” she said. The Daughters of the Confederacy worked diligently to make sure that Americans remember the Civil War “only in terms of states’ rights, not in terms of slavery.”

Trethewey’s lecture this week was a kind of homecoming. Ten years ago, she conducted research on black soldiers in the Library of Congress and composed parts of her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, “Native Guard,” in the Main Reading Room. Her most recent collection, “Thrall,” explores her life as the daughter of an African American woman and a white man, the poet Eric Trethewey…

Read the entire article here.

Beyond Black and White: When Going Beyond May Take Us Out of Bounds

Journal of Black Studies
Volume 44, Number 2 (March 2013)
pages 158-181
DOI: 10.1177/0021934712471533

Katerina Deliovsky, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario

Tamari Kitossa, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario

This article examines a selection of the North American scholarly research that calls for “moving beyond” a “Black/White binary paradigm.” Some scholars suggest this paradigm limits or obscures a complex understanding of the historical record on race, racism, and racialization for Asian, Latina/o, Mexican, and Native Americans. On the face of it, the notion of a Black/White binary paradigm and the call to move beyond appears persuasive. The discourse of a Black/White binary paradigm, however, confuses, misnames, and simplifies the historical and contemporary experiences structured within what is, in fact, the racially incorporative matrix of a black/white Manicheanism. We assert this call sets up blackness and, by extension, people socially defined as “black” as impediments to multiracial coalition building. As a result, “moving beyond” is epistemologically faulty and politically harmful for African-descended people because it is based on “bad faith” toward blackness.

Read or purchase the article here.

‘Romance of Race’ reveals rich cultural history

BGSU News
Bowling Green, Ohio
Thursday, 2013-02-14

A new book by Dr. Jolie Sheffer is further confirmation that one should never doubt the power of the pen. “The Romance of Race: Incest, Miscegenation, and Multiculturalism in the United States, 1890-1930,” published in January by Rutgers University Press, explains the role of minority women writers and reformers in the creation of modern American multiculturalism.

Like their male counterparts Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo in Europe, these authors provided their largely middle-class, female readers an intimate and sympathetic look at people with whose lives they were otherwise unfamiliar. Through stories of romances between white men and minority women told in human terms, authors such as María Cristina Mena, Mourning Dove, Onoto Watanna and Pauline Hopkins created a vision of the United States as a mixed-race, even incestuous nation, says Sheffer, English and American culture studies…

Read the entire article here.

An evening wtih Lawrence Hill

Central YMCA
20 Grosvenor Street
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Thursday, 2013-02-21, 18:30-21:00 EST (Local Time)

RSVP Deadline: 2013-02-19

Join us for an evening celebrating Black History Month with renowned Canadian author, Lawrence Hill.

Lawrence Hill has written a number of award winning books including The Book of Negroes….

For more information, click here.