Mixed Race Studies

Richard Pryor’s Daughter on Growing Up Biracial

WNYC Radio
New York, New York
WNYC News
2013-04-07

Soterios Johnson

April 7, 2013 – Richard Pryor, one of the most influential comedians of all-time, gained pop star status in the 1970’s with his incisive storytelling about issues including race.  Now, his daughter Rain is sharing her take on growing up biracial in ’70s and ’80s Los Angeles, the child of the African-American comic genius and a Jewish go-go dancer.

In her one-woman show, “Fried Chicken and Latkes,” Pryor brings to life the family members, societal pressures and personal experiences that forged her identity at a time when attitudes about race in the U.S. were rapidly changing.

“I really wanted to tell a story about me, so people would get to know who I am,” Pryor said.  “But at the same time really talk about things that were important to me.  And, race was always such a big issue for me, and still is, especially in our country.”…

Read the entire article here. Download the interview here.

The New Normal

The Rafu Shimpo: Los Angeles Japanese Daily News
2013-04-11

Mia Nakaji Monnier, Rafu Staff Writer

Hapa Japan Festival and JANM exhibit celebrate mixed Japanese and Japanese Americans

Outside the newest exhibit at the Japanese American National Museum hangs a banner. Up close, visitors can make out individual pictures—each about the size of a postage stamp. These are family photos: grinning kids in kimono, extended families three rows deep posing in the yard, teenagers gathered around Grandpa and his birthday cake. But take a few steps back, and the photos disappear like the strokes of an impressionist painting. Together, they add up, to make enka star Jero.

Why Jero?

Duncan Williams, one of the curators of the exhibit, “Visible & Invisible: A Hapa Japanese American History,” says Jero represents the future: not just the of Japanese America, but of America in general. Born Jerome White in Pittsburgh, Pa., Jero is mixed— three quarters African American, one quarter Japanese. Yet he’s become famous in Japan for singing traditional enka songs, which he grew up hearing from his Japanese grandmother.

Jero, to Williams, represents the complex identity of a growing group of Americans, whose looks and cultural identifications don’t fit into neat or expected categories. Up close, in those stamp-sized family photos, the kids in kimono have light skin, dark hair; black, white, Latino features. They don’t fit the typical image of Japan, or Japanese America, and yet, statistically, they’re fast becoming the new norm.

“The Japanese American community is now on the cusp of becoming majority multiracial,” said Williams, while leading a tour of the exhibit. By the 2020 Census, the majority of Japanese Americans will be mixed, or Hapa, making “Visible & Invisible” relevant—and, to many Japanese Americans of mixed race or ethnicity, a moving affirmation of their place in the community…

Read the entire article here.

…When Jim and Edna married and settled into the world of Washington County [in 1914], it already had an almost century-old tradition of interracial marriage that led to a large community of mixed-race people who, though a known presence in the county, lived apart from blacks and whites nestled in their own world and culture.  Unlike the rest of Alabama, Washington  County, along with Mobile, maintained three separate school systems: one for whites, one for blacks and one for “those of racially mixed heritage.”…

…Yet, to most white people in Washington County, and some blacks, Jim and Edna Richardson and their children were neither black nor white; they were just known as “those Richardsons.”  The couple refused the local custom of designating their children as racially mixed.  And in spite of the children’s racial designation as white on their birth certificates, they also refused to identify themselves as white in spite of their outward appearance.  Instead, the family existed as an entity unto themselves, living as a black family that moved between the black and white worlds, rather than sealing themselves into the boxes that local people wanted to fit them in.  Perhaps that stand played a role in denying them a place in local history.  Although “those Richardsons” may not be present in the annals of local history, the active oral tradition of the American South has kept their life and times alive among the people…

Eubanks, W. Ralph, The House at the End of the Road: The Story of Three Generations of an Interacial Family in the American South. (New York: HarpersCollins. 2009) 11 & 30.

More than the Sum of My Parts: Multiracial Teen Identity Development and Experiences of Appeasement and Objection in a Mono-Racialized Context

University of Minnesota
2013
321 pages

Brynja Elisabeth Halldórsdóttir Gudjonsson

Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

This dissertation examines multiracial student cultural awareness and how their experiences provided them insight into their current educational environment. The multiracial students in this study had significant self-awareness and cultural literacy due to their early identity formation and their continued navigation of disparate cultures. Because these students have received little attention in academic research, this dissertation explored multiracial identity in adolescents and the student experiences in a secondary educational context. This ethnographic study explores the students’ experiences through participant observations, in-depth interviews of students, teachers and school administrators, ethnographic reflections and field notes. The dissertation found that students encountered pressures in the school environment which affected their interactions in the school setting with teachers and peers. These encounters could be racially charged, although at times they could be so subtle that adults might not have recognized them as racially charged. In spite of these difficulties the students found supportive teachers and academic success. Based on the study’s findings the dissertation proposed a new lens through which to view multiracial student behavior. Since students were sensitive to others expectations, they mold their behavior to conform to these expectations. Through appeasement and objection the student actively chose how to react to others’ perceptions of them. Appeasement and objection in response to expectations could have stressful impacts on students as they sublimated portions of their identities in order to better fit into their environments.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• List of Tables
• Table of Figures
• Chapter 1
  • Categories of Self
  • Historical Understanding of Mixed Race Individuals
  • Racial Mixing and History
  • Definition of Modern Multiracial Identity
  • Schooling in Central City
  • Racism Entrenched in Schools
  • Research Questions
  • Methodology
  • Author Subjectivity
  • Data Discussion
  • Conclusions and Further Research
• Chapter 2 “My grandmother told me:” Race, History, School and Multiracial Identity Theory
  • In White and Black: Race and Dichotomy in U.S. Social Systems
  • Whiteness: Conception, History and Meaning
  • Black Identity: History and Context
  • Urban Education and Student Experience
  • Equal Education?
  • Multiracial Identity and Schooling
  • Multiracial History
  • Official Categorization of Multiracial and Multi-ethnic People
  • Identity Theory and the Multiracial Student
  • Contemporary Multiracial Identity Models and Theory
  • Conclusion and Research Questions
• Chapter 3: The Elusive Methodology of Critical Ethnography
  • Objective
  • The Ethnographic Frame
  • Embedding Ethnographers
  • Methods
  • Analysis
  • Cultural Politics in the Research
  • School Population
  • Sample Selection
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 4: This Examined Life An Exploration of Identity Creation and Projection for Multiracial Teens
  • Sorting the M&M’s: Seeing Multicultural and Multiracial Students at MWHS
  • Getting to Know You: Seeing Identity Changes
  • The Opportunity to Choose
  • Asking Permission: Finding Mixed Race Students
  • School Choice
  • “What are you?”
  • Friendship Groups
  • Foreclosure of Categorizing
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 5 “You think you’re special light-skind’ed bitch:”Student Interactions and School Curriculum
  • “You don’t just belong:” Finding Place in Social Groups in and out of School
  • Complex Problems with Simple Answers: Student Classroom Experiences
  • “Our history is still not their history too:” Student Connection to School Curriculum
• Chapter 6 “Ear-hustling” and Unsavory Experiences: Micro-aggressions are the Hidden Racial Interactions in School
  • Who is Listening? And What Do They Hear?
  • Micro-aggressions
  • Not Enough: Stepping Outside of the Expected Limits
  • Power and Control: Student Misbehavior and Punishment
  • Sit here not there: How negative attention affects students
  • Punishment: How Did it Affect Multiracial Students?
• Chapter 7 “To thine ownself be true:” Appeasement, Objection and Cultural Compliance
  • Additive Parts: Making up Identity
  • More than Code-switching: When Linguistic Analysis is not Enough
  • Act More White and Play School
  • Assimilation or Acculturation
  • Appeasement or Objection: How Mixed Students Reflect Expectations
  • Repercussions of objection and appeasement
• Chapter 8 Beyond All of the Pieces: What was Missing and Next Steps
  • Recommendations
  • The Matter of Power and Punishment
  • Directions for Future Research
  • The Last Pieces of the Puzzle
• References
• Appendix A: Research protocols
  • Observation protocol
  • Student questions:
  • Teacher questions:
• Appendix B
  • Male participant coding rubric
  • Female participant coding rubrique

Read the entire dissertation here.

The Puzzling Whiteness of Brazilian Politicians

Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies
Center for Latin American Studies
University of California, Berkeley
Fall 2012
pages 30-32

Jean Spencer, Outreach and Publications Coordinator
Center for Latin American Studies

Is Brazil really a racial democracy? The idea of racial democracy, originally put forth by the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre in the 1930s, holds that racial discrimination is much more moderate in Brazil than in countries like the United States, due in part to widespread racial mixing. If Brazil is truly a racial democracy, however, why are the city council members in both Salvador and Rio de Janeiro significantly whiter than their electorates? Thad Dunning, an associate professor of Political Science at Yale University, designed a study to discover the reason for this lack of descriptive democracy.

The first problem Dunning faced was a basic one: defining terms. In Brazil, black, white, and brown are in the eye of the beholder. To get “a quick and dirty” baseline for how different politicians are perceived, he conducted an internet survey where participants were asked to assess the race of a random sample of elected officials and unelected candidates using several different scales. In one, candidates were evaluated on a zero-to-10 scale with zero being the lightest and 10 being the darkest; in another, respondents located candidates in one of multiple color categories; and in a third, participants were asked to place the candidates in one of the five categories used by the Brazilian census: branco (white), pardo (brown), preto (black), amarelo (yellow), and indigena (indigenous). In general, Dunning found that there was a good match between the results of the scales, with the pardo category generating the most heterogeneous responses. Comparing the codings of politicians with census data on residents of Salvador and Rio, he also found that whites were heavily overrepresented on the city councils of both cities, just as he had suspected.

But why? Dunning considered three main possibilities: whites hold racist attitudes toward other groups; black and brown voters have internalized disparaging attitudes about their own groups; or voter preferences are more influenced by class than race. To test these hypotheses, Dunning ran an experiment designed to tease out voters’ underlying racial biases. He hired black and white actors to create videos that followed the same format as the free hour of coverage that Brazilian television gives to candidates for city council. In order to compensate for differences in the personal appeal of individual “candidates,” he hired six black and six white actors for each city…

Read the entire article here.