Mixed Race Studies

‘Doing the right thing’: transracial adoption in the USA

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 36, Issue 8 (August 2013)
Special Issue: Mothering Across Racialised Boundaries
pages 1273-1291
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2013.776698

Ravinder Barn, Professor of Social Policy and Social Work
Royal Holloway, University of London

Racial/cultural identity and parental cultural competence in transracial adoption (TRA) are subjects of fierce debate and discussion in contemporary western societies. The ongoing practice of TRA has led to a polarization that either supports or berates the suitability of the environment provided in such homes. The external scrutiny invariably creates doubt among white adoptive parents as to whether they are ‘doing the right thing’. By drawing upon extant literature and original qualitative research carried out in New York, this paper explores adoptive mothers’ conceptualization and understanding of racial/ethnic socialisation (RES). The paper puts forward three discursive approaches. It is argued that the ways in which white adoptive mothers understand and experience diversity influences their approach to RES, which in turn is mediated through family and community networks and societal discourses on race, power and hierarchy.

Read or purchase the article here.

Narratives from a Nottingham council estate: a story of white working-class mothers with mixed-race children

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 36, Issue 8 (August 2013)
Special Issue: Mothering Across Racialised Boundaries
pages 1342-1358
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2013.776698

Lisa McKenzie, Research Fellow, Faculty of Social Sciences
University of Nottingham

This paper introduces a group of white working-class women living on a council estate in the UK drawing on an ethnographic study conducted between 2005 and 2009, examining the impact of class inequality and a stigmatized living space in an ethnically diverse urban neighbourhood. All of the women are mothers and have mixed-race children; they reside on the St Ann’s estate in Nottingham, an inner-city neighbourhood that has been subject to poor housing, poverty and unemployment for many generations. The women who live on this estate say that they suffer from negative stereotypes and stigmatization because of the notoriety of the estate, because they are working class and because they have had sexual relationships with black men. However, there is a sense of connectedness to the estate and there are strong cultural meanings that are heavily influenced by the West Indian community. This paper then highlights the importance of place when focusing upon families, class inequality and intercultural relationships.

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The Colors of Zion: Blacks, Jews, and Irish from 1845 to 1945

Harvard University Press
February 2011
272 pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
20 halftones
Hardcover ISBN: 9780674057012

George Bornstein, C. A. Patrides Professor of Literature, Emeritus
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

A major reevaluation of relationships among Blacks, Jews, and Irish in the years between the Irish Famine and the end of World War II, The Colors of Zion argues that the cooperative efforts and sympathies among these three groups, each persecuted and subjugated in its own way, was much greater than often acknowledged today. For the Black, Jewish, and Irish writers, poets, musicians, and politicians at the center of this transatlantic study, a sense of shared wrongs inspired repeated outpourings of sympathy. If what they have to say now surprises us, it is because our current constructions of interracial and ethnic relations have overemphasized conflict and division. As George Bornstein says in his Introduction, he chooses “to let the principals speak for themselves.”

While acknowledging past conflicts and tensions, Bornstein insists on recovering the “lost connections” through which these groups frequently defined their plights as well as their aspirations. In doing so, he examines a wide range of materials, including immigration laws, lynching, hostile race theorists, Nazis and Klansmen, discriminatory university practices, and Jewish publishing houses alongside popular plays like The Melting Pot and Abie’s Irish Rose, canonical novels like Ulysses and Daniel Deronda, music from slave spirituals to jazz, poetry, and early films such as The Jazz Singer. The models of brotherhood that extended beyond ethnocentrism a century ago, the author argues, might do so once again today, if only we bear them in mind. He also urges us to move beyond arbitrary and invidious categories of race and ethnicity.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Races
• 2. Diasporas and Nationalisms
• 3. Melting Pots
• 4. Popular and Institutional Cultures
• 5. The Gathering Storm: The 1930s and World War II
• Notes
• Index

Akala: Dynamite by any other name…

The Guardian
The Observer
2013-06-01

Kate Mossman

Rapper, adapter of Shakespeare and brother of Ms Dynamite, Akala is on a mission to correct a few misconceptions

A few weeks ago in these pages, Birmingham rapper Lady Leshurr asked why there had been no high-profile female rappers in the UK since Ms Dynamite. Akala seems a good person to consult – one, because he’s her brother, and two, because you can ask Akala just about anything and you’ll get a pretty comprehensive answer. In the course of 68 minutes in a London community centre under the Westway, he talks about 16th-century explorers, Biggie Smalls, the universities of 13th-century Timbuktu, tai chi, the Black Wall Street of Oklahoma, the African city portraits of Olfert Dapper, Eminem, peanuts, Napoleon’s generals, traffic lights and golf. But back to Ms Dynamite.

“I remember the Daily Mail wrote an article about my sister at the time,” he says, “and essentially their argument was, ‘Well, she’s not really black, is she – she’s quite clever and she’s got a white mum!’ It was so funny the way they tried to co-opt us. Remember that big story about Bob Marley and his ‘white dad’ last year? He was unequivocally black power, but he’s rewritten as this fun-loving Rasta. Mark Duggan [the Tottenham man shot by police in August 2011] was also mixed race, but no one’s ever going to co-opt Mark Duggan!”…

Read the entire article here.

Mental health service use by adolescents of Indian and White origin

Archives of Disease in Childhood
Published online: 2013-07-29
DOI: 10.1136/archdischild-2013-303772

Panos Vostanis, Professor of Psychology
University of Leicester

Nadzeya Svirydzenka, Research Assistant
Department of Psychology
University of Leicester

Pat Dugard, Independent Senior Statistician
King’s Lynne, United Kingdom

Swaran Singh, Professor of Social and Community Psychiatry
University of Warwick, Coventry

Nisha Dogra, Professor of Psychology
University of Leicester

Background Despite the available epidemiological evidence on the prevalence of mental health problems in childhood and adolescence, there is limited knowledge on whether there are differences in the level of need and service utilisation by young ethnic minority groups.

Methods Adolescents of 13–15 years from nine schools in two English cities in which children of Indian ethnicity were over-represented (n=2900), completed rating scales on different types of mental health problems, contacts with services and informal supports.

Results Indian adolescents scored significantly lower on general mental health and depression symptoms. They were also less likely than White adolescents to self-report having mental health problems, even for a similar level of need. Among those with mental health scores within the clinical range, Indian adolescents were less likely to have visited specialist services. Instead, they were more likely to first approach family members, teachers or general practitioners.

Conclusions Rather than a blanket approach being applied to policy and service planning to meet the needs of diverse communities of young people, more specific evidence needs to be gained about patterns of referrals of minority groups and their strategy of accessing supportive adults.

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Multiracial Daughters of Asian Immigrants: Identity and Agency

Women & Therapy
Volume 36,  Issue 3-4, 2013
Special Issue: Women and Immigration
pages 268-285
DOI: 10.1080/02703149.2013.797776

Leilani Salvo Crane
Counseling and Psychological Services
University of Pennsylvania

Multiracial daughters of Asian immigrants must navigate complex pathways to adulthood, self-efficacy, and self-concept. Frequently they are required by family and society to bridge the cultural divide among a variety of Asian and American norms. Conflicting loyalties at times manifest as psychological struggles, which the daughter may be unable to resolve without therapeutic intervention. This article describes a culturally responsive approach to therapeutic intervention that takes into account both developmental and multiracial identity models, along with specific tools for exploring the complexities of cultural background, familial expectations, and issues of power and oppression. Both Hays’ ADDRESSING model (2001, 2009) and construction of the genogram are used to explore individual differences. Case examples are presented to illustrate interventions.

Daughters of Asian immigrants must navigate complex pathways to adulthood, self-efficacy, and self-view. As noted in the Handbook of Girls’ and Women’s Psychological Health (Worell & Goodheart, 2006), immigrant women and their children must be considered within the family system, rather than as Isolated individuals (Goodheart, 2006). Those with disempowered and or traumatized parents travel an especially difficult road due. in part, to the absence of multiracial role models with whom to identify, as well as to frequently conflicting cultural demands. Multiracial daughters of at least one Asian immigrant parent frequently face demands from family of origin to lie closely connected to family…

Read or purchase the article here.

Trayvon Martin Could Have Been Me: A Watershed Moment for the U.S.

Racism Review
2013-07-21

Joe Feagin, Ella C. McFadden Professor of Sociology
Texas A & M University

President Obama’s poignant comments on the white-racist discrimination that Black men regularly face were pathbreaking for this country. First, in the history of the U.S. never has such a high government official so forthrightly called out key elements of white racism and condemned persisting patterns of racial harassment and profiling of Black boys and men.

Secondly, Obama’s commentary, together with his speech during the 2008 election, mark the first time that whites and many other nonblack Americans have heard important elements of the Black counter-frame to the centuries-old white racial framing of this society—at least not from such a “bully pulpit,” as Teddy Roosevelt put it.

One cannot imagine any white president saying, or being able to say, what Obama has said in his two explicit commentaries on U.S. racism. He certainly did not say enough about this racism, but his commentaries so far have been pathbreaking, especially for a white population much of which is in terminal denial of that racism.

Obama assessed the killing of Trayvon Martin from a Black perspective, one rarely taken seriously by most white Americans. Now, for a time, it has to be taken seriously and provides the basis to expand on his analysis later on…

Read the entire article here.

They Wouldn’t Allow Us to Use Daddy’s Last Name: A Family Historian’s Curiosity Leads to Revolutionary Results

Bayou Talk Newspaper
Volume 25, Number 7 (July 2013)
pages 1-8

Anita R. Paul

Most family history researchers know that surnames are an important key to finding ancestors. They also know that names can often lead to dead ends due to misspellings and other misinformation. For Michael N. Henderson, a retired Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Navy, the spelling of a family surname sparked his curiosity and eventually led to a nearly 30-year journey to uncover a hidden truth about his Louisiana roots.

“It all began when I was a kid,” recalls Henderson, a native of Algiers—a neighborhood in New Orleans, Louisiana—who now lives near Atlanta, Georgia. “I asked my mom why her mother’s maiden name was spelled Mathieu instead of Matthew.” She credited it to the family being Louisiana Creole and simply chose to spell the surname that way. Fortunately for Henderson, that answer did not satisfy him, so he sought a more suitable explanation. In the midst of his searching, which became a hobby and eventually an obsession during much of his naval career, he uncovered one fact after another about his family’s history and soon became the family historian, a role that did not always meet with genuine excitement from his relatives.

“When you start digging into the past, some family members get nervous. They’re afraid you might uncover some deep, dark secret that’s been buried for generations,” Henderson explains. Others, mostly those of the younger generation, simply shrugged off Henderson’s many attempts to share his findings. “My nieces and nephews have never been keen on listening to my ancestral stories, except, of course, when the time came for a school project.”

As his genealogy research continued, a conversation with a distant cousin opened a genealogical can of worms that caused Henderson to delve deeply into the unique three-tiered social structure of French and Spanish colonial Louisiana. He studied the Code Noir (Black Code) that regulated relationships between Europeans, Native American and African enslaved people, and the distinct class of free people of color…

…Uncovering this relationship revealed the answer to a haunting statement that had been in Henderson’s family for generations: “They wouldn’t allow us to use Daddy’s last name.” As Henderson discovered, Agnes assumed the first name of her French consort, Mathieu, as her own surname and passed it on to their mixed-race children and the generations following. This answered the question about the spelling of Henderson’s maternal grandmother’s surname and consequently exposed the answer to the generations-long lament about not being able to use “Daddy’s last name.”…

Read the entire article here.

An Interview with Lise Funderburg

Hot Metal Bridge: published by Writing MFA students at the University of Pittsburgh
Spring 2009 (All The Way Down)

Interview by Liberty Hultberg

Lise Funderburg is the author of Black, White, Other: Biracial Americans Talk About Race and Identity (1994) and the memoir Pig Candy (2008), which has been described as part memoir, part travelogue, and part social history, about race, mortality, filial duty…and barbecue. She has written numerous articles for publications including O Magazine, Self Magazine. She is a creative writing instructor at the University of Pennsylvania and resides in Philadelphia.

HMB: What prompted you to write Pig Candy? At what point did you know this needed to be a book?

LF: My dad got sick and almost died. I was in my late thirties, and I realized, suddenly, that he wasn’t going to be around forever. He recovered fully from that incident, but I realized there were things about my father that I just didn’t know because he’d been a very close-to-the-vest kind of person growing up. I wanted to figure out who he was; he was a curious combination of disparate elements. He was hardworking and reliable and charming and funny and unpredictable and cantankerous and mean and abusive. He was a very strict father, but in some ways he didn’t care about formalities at all. So who was this man and what made him tick?

I thought: Here’s this guy who’s so different from me demographically. He’s a man born in the twenties right before the Great Depression into the Jim Crow South in Monticello, a rural Georgia town. He grew up Black, and I grew up a mixed race girl in the integrated North in an urban environment during Civil Rights. There’s so much about what shaped his life that I don’t know anything about and how will I find this out? So I started to interview him. I was already a journalist, so I had this idea that maybe it was a book, but I didn’t really know what form the book was going to take. I interviewed him on safe subjects, which were his jobs; he was such a hardworking person that I thought this was something he’ll talk to me about, and it wouldn’t have the goopy, unpleasant (to him) qualities of emotion…

Read the entire interview here.

Moving forward on race – by understanding our own prism

Embrace Diverse Schools: Beyond celebrating: Debunking myth-perceptions to build strong diverse schools and communities
Welcome to Eileen Kugler’s Blog
2013-07-26

Eileen Kugler

“I don’t get it. Why do we need to be talking about race?” a commenter wrote on a LinkedIn group on diversity and inclusion. In her high school, “everyone got along great and we actually looked down on those who were prejudiced against one race over another.” So she can’t figure what the big issue is right now.

Her authentic comment is just the reason we need to keep discussing – and dealing with race. We each see issues through our own personal prism. That prism is formed by our life’s experiences that include our race, ethnicity, and religion, but also factors such as our family structure and where we grew up, right down to the neighborhood we called home.

President Obama did a courageous job of helping white people to understand what it feels like to be a Black man in this country, even as we are making strides every day…

Read the entire article here.