Mixed Race Studies

Jackie Kay’s Quest For Her Roots – Theresa Muñoz

Scottish Review of Books
Volume 6, Issue 3 (2010-08-12)

Theresa Muñoz

Adopted at birth, Jackie Kay discovered neither of her birth parents were who she’d thought they’d be, her new memoir recalls.

“If you have skin my colour” writes Jackie Kay in her memoir Red Dust Road, “you must be a foreigner.” All of her life, people have asked her where she is from. Glasgow, she’d tell them. Then people would inquire, but where are her parents from? Her parents are from Glasgow and Fife, she’d say. But she would also add that she’s adopted and her birth father is Nigerian. “They’d nod,” Kay says, “with a kind of ‘That explains it’ look”.

Since I moved to Scotland, people have asked me where I’m from. “Vancouver, British Columbia,” I reply. Most leave it at that because they have relatives or friends in Canada and would rather discuss them. But others persist: “Where are you really from?” Once, an older gentleman in the library in Dumfries asked if I was from the Far East. “Yes, I live in Edinburgh,” I replied. He left me alone after that.

It’s not that people shouldn’t ask. I’m happy to tell others that both my parents were born in the Philippines and immigrated to Canada, individually, in the Seventies. (They later met in what used to be Simpson’s department store in Toronto.) But the nature of these questions can make you feel like an outsider. As Kay says, “I felt it was being pointed out to me, in a more sophisticated manner, that I didn’t belong in Scotland”.

Other comments are just plain ignorant. Walking down West Princes Street in Glasgow, I passed a man who muttered something about a tan. “Nice tan,” I think he said to me. Kay has also been asked about her tan. In Wigtown a woman asked her and her mother, “Is that lady your daughter? Oh? Your daughter is awful tanned. Is she that colour every day?”

Once or twice things have turned ugly. A fight broke out in Glasgow’s Ashton Lane, when a drunken man asked my Scottish boyfriend where he “bought me”. Kay’s experiences have been much more humiliating. In 1980, during the rise of the British Movement, posters were put up around Stirling University that asked: “Would you be seen with that Irish-Catholic wog called Jackie Kay?” Kay locked herself into her student apartment and was offered police protection.

Racism happens without warning. You never know how to react. Dignity? Fury?…

Read the entire review here.

Respectability Politics: When Mixed Race People Police Each Other

Mixed Race Feminist Blog
2016-03-17

Nicola Codner
Leeds, Yorkshire, United Kingdom

Respectability politics relates to the efforts of people in marginalized groups to convince their own group members to conform to the thoughts, values and practices of those in the dominant group, instead of challenging those in dominant groups about their problematic behaviours. I’ve been thinking about respectability politics a lot lately because frequently I come across this as a social justice blogger, the administrator for a feminist community and a member of various other online feminist groups.

I am pretty upfront in my activism at times. I can be very direct and expressive. I see this as the Jamaican side of my identity. Some English people can struggle to deal with this part of my Jamaican identity because it differs so widely from notions around British respectability, where traits such as politeness and being reserved and accommodating are highly valued. Other groups of people besides those who subscribe to stereotypical English norms can also struggle to deal with some of my ideas and ways of communicating, especially people who think that those in oppressed groups always have to be super nice to members of dominant groups no matter how much oppression has come their way. I do not personally subscribe to the belief that people in marginalized groups always have to be nice and placate their oppressors, or conform to their oppressor’s value systems. This is clearly oppressive in itself. When it comes down to it, I guess I have more of a Malcolm X philosophy in my approach than an Martin Luther King one (not to discredit the work of MLK). What I mean by that is I prefer radical and confrontation methods in my activism much of the time. That’s just me….

…I’ve been trying to figure out why some mixed race people engage in respectability politics. I think this is really just an elaborate defence. Critiquing whiteness can be particularly uncomfortable for some mixed race people, especially those who have some white heritage. For those of us who have some white heritage (my mother is white so I am included here), critiquing whiteness means we have to look at some of our own privileges and also perhaps how some aspects of our upbringing and family life were or are problematic. It’s not an easy journey to go on, but it’s a necessary one in order to dismantle oppression. For some mixed race people examining whiteness can feel like a betrayal of their white family members and perhaps their own identities…

Read the entire article here.

“Whitening” and Whitewashing: Postcolonial Brazil is not an Egalitarian “Rainbow Nation”

The Postcolonialist
2014-03-04

Sarah Lempp

To commemorate the 500th anniversary of its “discovery” by Portuguese sailor Alvares de Cabral in 2000, Brazil officially presented itself as a “rainbow nation” without discrimination or racism; a place where people from various ethnicities live peacefully together. That the “discovery” caused slavery and death for millions of Indigenes and Africans was overlooked. The Portuguese colonization was seen as a “non-imperial act, an exercise of fraternity and intercultural and interethnic democracy”, says Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos.[1]

The German author Stefan Zweig, who fled to Brazil from Nazi Germany, already considered Brazil a paradise characterized by hybridity and said in 1941 that Brazil “has taken the racial problem, that unsettles our European world ad absurdum in the simplest manner: in plainly ignoring its validity.” (translation S.L.)[2] According to Zweig, “for hundreds of years the Brazilian nation relies on the sole principle of free and unrestrained mixing, perfect equality of black and white, brown and yellow. (…) There are no limits to colours, no boundaries, no supercilious hierarchies…”[3]

Hence the image of Brazil as a tolerant, peaceful, “mestiço” nation is not at all new. But it ignores then and still today the multifaceted forms of discrimination and specifically Brazilian shapes of racism…

Read the entire article here.

Russo: Telling my biracial boys the truth

The Cincinnati Enquirer
Cincinnati, Ohio
2016-02-21

Regina Carswell Russo

Hyde Park resident Regina Carswell Russo is a public relations professional, cultural arts ambassador and CEO of RRight Now Communications.

My beautiful sons are blissfully unaware of their blended heritage. More specifically, their blended race. It’s how my husband and I have been raising them. You see, we teach them that they are African-American and Italian, and we teach them about our respective cultures. But we haven’t really taught them about race and color. Each year they get older, I’m faced with the certain reality that if I don’t, the world will.

Don’t get me wrong. My elementary school-aged children know Daddy is Italian and has white skin, and Mommie is African-American and has brown skin. They get that, but they don’t know what it means to be a brown-skinned boy with a white father, or to be a light-skinned male with a black mother in this time of Ferguson, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice and Black Lives Matter. They are just children – pure, innocent and unaware of the different lines people must walk based on their race and color.

And unfortunately, it’s going to have to be me, their African-American mother, who breaks it to them. Their fiercest protector will have to crack the lens through which they view this world, before the world does it, so that I can protect them…

Read the entire article here.

Purchasing Whiteness: Race and Status in Colonial Latin America

Not Even Past: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” —William Faulkner
Department of History
University of Texas at Austin
2015-09-01

Ann Twinam, Professor of History
University of Texas, Austin

Let’s start with a question and a comparison.

What do you think would have happened if a free mulatto — someone of mixed white and African heritage — living in New York or Virginia, had sent a letter to either of the Georges, either King George III (1760-1820) or President George Washington (1789-1797) asking if he might purchase whiteness? Do you think he would have even received a reply, much less transformation to the status of white? The very idea that mulattos could pay to become “whites” or that an English king or a U.S. president might grant such a change seems unbelievable — because it was.

Yet, during the same period in the Spanish empire, such alterations for mulattos –also known as pardos or castas — became possible. This was so, even though the Spanish state had also institutionalized severe discriminations against those of mixed African descent, just as in the British Empire and in the American republic. Laws forbade their practice of numerous occupations including physician, notary, lawyer, priest, the holding of public offices, service in the regular military, entrance to universities, and marriages with whites. Still, it was also possible for Cuban Manuel Baez to receive a royal decree in 1760 that erased “the defect that you suffer from birth and leave you able and capable as if you did not have it, repealing this time in your favor whatever laws, ordinances or constitutions speak otherwise.”…

Read the entire article here.

Good Girls Don’t Date Dead Boys: Toying with Miscegenation in Zombie Films

Journal of Popular Film and Television
Volume 42, Issue 4, 2014
DOI: 10.1080/01956051.2014.881772
pages 176-185

Chera Kee, Assistant Professor of English
Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan

Concerning in-between bodies, zombie films have a unique vantage on miscegenation. Exploring earlier films alongside contemporary romantic comedies, it becomes clear that whereas earlier films shut down symbolic interracial fantasies, contemporary films do not. This isn’t without problems, as some films still rescue zombies from zombiness (and hence, their blackness).

Read or purchase the article here.

Helping mixed-race Asian kids navigate a world that isn’t post-racial

The Seattle Times
2016-03-16

Jerry Large, Columnist

Sharon H. Chang is author of “Raising Mixed Race: Multiracial Children in a Post-Racial World.” (Courtesy of Sheila Addleman)

Seattle author writes about the challenges of raising multiracial Asian children in America and helping then overcome racial biases.

If you have mixed-race kids, teach mixed-race kids or know any mixed-race kids, you should read Sharon Chang’s book. Chang is a local writer and mom who saw a vacuum and tried to fill it with information she wishes her own parents had.

The book is “Raising Mixed Race: Multiracial Asian Children in a Post-Racial World,” and yes, that last phrase is meant tongue in cheek. This definitely is not a post-racial world, and one of the strengths of Chang’s book is that it helps people see how race continues to shape our lives.

Chang grew up in Southern California, the daughter of a Taiwanese father and white American mother. She’s lived in Seattle for 16 years and is married to a man who grew up on Vashon Island. His father is white and his mother is from Japan, so they’ve had lots of conversations about growing up mixed and not having anyone explain how people might react to them, or why.

How does a kid feel when relatives, or strangers, openly comment on their features — “That’s a good nose” or “Too bad about the eyes”? What does a parent say when a child says, “Mommy, I want blond hair”?…

Read the entire article here.

On the Boundaries of Race: Identification of Mixed-heritage Children in the United States, 1960 to 2010

Sociology of Race and Ethnicity
Published online before print 2016-03-17
DOI: 10.1177/2332649216632546

Carolyn A. Liebler, Professor of Sociology
University of Minnesota

Socially constructed race groups have boundaries that define their membership. I study temporal trends and group-specific patterns in race and ancestry responses provided for children of interracial marriages. Common responses indicate contemporary definitions of race groups (and perhaps emerging groups); uncommon responses reveal socially defined limits of race group membership. I leverage dense, nonpublic, Census Bureau data from 1960 to 2010 to do this and include a more diverse set of families, a longer time span, and more accurate estimates than prior research. I find that the location of race group boundaries varies over time and across 11 distinct family types. Since mixed-heritage responses became possible in 1980, they have been common in most groups. Part Asians have almost always been reported as multiracial or mixed ancestry. A number of (non-Asian) mixed-heritage children are described as monoracial on the census form, particularly children with American Indian heritage. Over time, part whites are decreasingly reported as monoracially white (white race with no nonwhite ancestry). Black heritage is reported for part blacks, but monoracial black responses became nonmodal by 1980. Part Pacific Islanders show similarities to part Asians and part American Indians. Given the predominance of multiracial and mixed-ancestry Asian responses since 1980, Asian multiracial may be an emerging socially recognized race category. Black multiracial shows a similar pattern. Monoracial responses (especially common among white–American Indians and black–American Indians) create important but hard-to-measure complexity in groups’ compositions.

Read or purchase the article here.

Critical Mixed Race Studies Is Now An Association

Critical Mixed Race Studies
2016-03-16

Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) is so pleased to announce we are now officially an association! Join us in becoming an inaugural member (membership = conference registration even if you can’t attend). ‪#‎CMRS2017‬ will be held at University of Southern California Feb 24-26, 2017.

Deepest thanks to our fiscal agent Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Chicago for their support in this process!

To join, click here.

“I’m a Dominiyorkian of mixed decent. If you read my book [Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina] you will find that I’m mixed and that I am just one example of the many of how the new world came to be. I’m the genetic evidence that the new world happened. So can’t just turn my back on one side of my culture and just call myself one thing. I feel like I’d be selling out the parts of who I am for better or for worse. Because there are things that we have in our blood that we don’t want to have; that we don’t want to admit. That we don’t want to reconcile with. For example, growing up I always thought as the European man as the aggressor, but when you have European blood running down your veins too, you have to come to terms with that.” —Raquel Cepeda

Richy Rosario, “Interview: Raquel Cepeda On Identity, Race & Hip-Hop,” Vibe, March 16, 2016. http://www.vibe.com/2016/03/interview-raquel-cepeda-on-identity-race-hip-hop/.