Mixed Race Studies

Being Mixed Race in Racially Divided America

Japan Sociology
2015-01-08

Lourdes Fritts

This blog explores life in Japan from a sociological perspective. It is produced by Robert Moorehead and his students at Ritsumeikan University‘s College of International Relations, in Kyoto, Japan.

Much like the way some people do not care about their local sports team, I do not give much thought to my racial identity. This is mostly due to the fact that if I gave my race anymore thought than the occasional ponder, I would be in a constant state of identity crisis. My mother is Japanese-Korean raised in Japan, and my Father is Irish-German-Mexican raised in America. Thus I have christened myself as an “Euro-Mexi-Asian-American”. Fortunately I have been privileged enough in life where I was never made particularly conscious of my race; I have never let my race define me and very few people I’ve met have defined me by it. However, due to recent events in Ferguson, Missouri, I have become unusually conscious of my ethnic background…

Read the entire article here.

Hafu in Japan

Japan Sociology
2013-05-09

Maki Yoshikawa

This blog explores life in Japan from a sociological perspective. It is produced by Robert Moorehead and his students at Ritsumeikan University‘s College of International Relations, in Kyoto, Japan.

In Japan, there are a lot of hafu increasing the number year by year. This is because an increasing number of international marriages.

Probably we imagine people with white or black skin and big eyes. This means we unconsciously imagine non- Asian people. This is the symbol of how we are not get used to see other races in our daily life.

I have been thinking about hafus are little different from foreigners in terms of their identity. Japanese in Japan has no difficulties to define them. Foreigners are often treated as foreigner, however, in their hometown in other countries, they are never treated as foreigner. What about hafu in Japan?…

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Season 2, Episode 11: Writer Thomas Chatterton Williams

The Mixed Experience
2015-01-08

Heidi Durrow, Host

We continue the second part of the season with writer Thomas Chatterton Williams author of Losing My Cool and the newly published essay in Virginia Quarterly Review “Black and Blue and Blond.”

Listen to the episode here. Download the episode here.

Veterans to Remember: Parker David Robbins

We’re History
2014-11-10

Ben Railton, Associate Professor of English and Coordinator of American Studies
Fitchburg State University, Fitchburg, Massachusetts

Thanks principally to the critical and popular success of the film Glory (1989), our collective memory of the Civil War includes African American soldiers (known in their era as United States Colored Troops). But while we might have a sense of those soldiers’ general participation in the war, few individual African American soldiers or officers have made it into our Civil War narratives – which also, and perhaps even more significantly, means that we don’t tend to think about African American Civil War veterans and their experiences and identities beyond the war. Parker David Robbins (1834-1917) is a good candidate to correct those trends.

Robbins doesn’t fit either of the two identities that historians have most consistently linked to the USCT: he was neither an ex-slave nor a free Northern African American. Instead, he was born free in North Carolina, into a mixed-race farming family that included Native American as well as European and African American heritages. By the time the war started, Robbins had begun developing his own North Carolina family and legacy. He was married and running a 100-acre farm on which he paid Confederate taxes. But when he learned of the creation of African American regiments in the Union Army, he crossed into Union territory and enlisted in the 2nd U.S. Colored Cavalry, in which he served until the war’s end. Glory rightly makes a great deal of the unique threats faced by the war’s African American soldiers, and thus of the inspiring bravery they demonstrated simply by joining and staying in the army; Robbins’ abandonment of a settled and comfortable life in order to enlist exemplifies those histories…

Read the entire article here.

The Police, Immigration and the Racial Divide

U.S. News & World Report
2015-01-07

Brad Bannon, President
Bannon Communications Research

Polls on the police treatment of minorities and public approval of Obamacare reflect the ongoing racial split in this country.

Sadly, everything old is new again in race relations in America. Tuesday the headquarters of the Colorado Springs NAACP was bombed. The new movie “Selma” dramatizes the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Police are killing unarmed black Americans. The mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio is at war with his own police officers because he advised his mixed-race son to be wary of them. The majority whip in the House of Representatives, Steve Scalise, a Louisiana Republican, is under fire for speaking at a meeting of a supremacist group associated with [former] Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.

Race never pops up on the radar as a priority in national polls. But racial attitudes add to the polarization of American politics because people use those beliefs to define themselves ideologically. If you ask people why they consider themselves conservatives, they often complain about government handouts to undeserving people. People won’t admit to racism, but you don’t have to probe very deeply to figure out that “welfare cheats” is code for blacks. And when I have discussed Obamacare with people in focus groups, a big concern has been a belief that undocumented Latino immigrants would be eligible for the benefits…

…Why are racial tensions so persistent in a nation that has elected and re-elected a black president? The answer is that demography is destiny. The fabric of American society is changing and some people are fighting a doomed rearguard action to stop the inevitable…

Read the entire article here.

Pharmacogenomics and the Biology of Race

Myles Jackson, Albert Gallatin Research Excellence Professor of the History of Science
New York University

The Huffington Post
2015-01-05

The numerous and impassioned responses to Nicholas Wade’s recently published Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History have once again reminded us of the complexity, ambiguity and perils of writing about the biology of race. In the US one is reminded of the collective sins of our past, including the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century, whereby a disproportionate percentage of people of color and those from lower socio-economic classes were sterilized, and the Tuskegee Study conducted between 1932 and 1972 in which 600 African-American sharecroppers in rural Alabama were purposely not treated for syphilis in order to ascertain information on the long-term effects of the disease. More recently, debates about the biology of race have raged among certain academic circles. While biologists will tell you that humans (other than identical twins, triplets, etc.) do differ from one another genetically — i.e. at the level of the DNA, they will also admit that the difference is rather small. And many (but certainly not all) are loath to label populations, which share the same genetic alleles (or different versions of a gene) as “races.” It turns out there are numerous ways in which one can understand human diversity, including geographic ancestry or responses to environmental selection factors. Sickle cell anemia is a case in point. Identified over a century ago, it was originally thought to be limited to “the Negro race.” As time went on, people from parts of Italy, Greece, Iran, India, and in other diverse locations were identified with the disease…

So why then is race the privileged category used by biomedical researchers in understanding human diversity? There are four sets of institutions that have used race as the primary signify of difference, albeit for very different reasons, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Big Pharma, and personal genomics companies…

…Big Pharma, while initially protesting what it saw as the unwarranted meddling of the government in the affairs of private companies, eventually embraced the move. They quickly realized that race creates markets, as Dorothy Roberts has argued in Fatal Invention (New Press, 2011). In 1996 the US became the second nation (after New Zealand) to permit direct-to-consumer advertising; Big Pharma began to market some of their drugs as race-based, including BiDil, used to treat African Americans with a history of heart attacks and Amaryl, which is used to treat type 2 diabetes in Mexican Americans. Many biomedical researchers have challenged the claims that these medications are more efficacious in one race than in the others…

Read the entire article here.