Mixed Race Studies

The Mythic Root of Racism

Sociological Inquiry
Volume 63, Issue 3, July 1993
pages 339–350
DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-682X.1993.tb00314.x

Donal E. Muir, Professor of Sociology
University of Alabama

The term “race” was introduced into science two and a half centuries ago as an arbitrary convenience to describe geographic groupings of humans. These ad hoc racial taxonomies were seized upon, however, as “scientific” justification for slavery and other forms of social, political, and economic oppression. Over the last fifty years, geneticists and biologists have quietly abandoned race as a scientific concept, leaving the general public unaware that racial categories, associated only with culturally selected, physically superficial characteristics, are social rather than genetic. As a result, most individuals remain “racist” in the sense of predicating interaction on racial assignments thought to reflect deep physiological differences. Some of these are conventionally recognized “mean racists.” The remainder, however, could well be considered “kind racists,” for their seeming benign tolerance defines limits to integration, and their unreflective perpetuation of the enabling belief of racism, that races exist physiologically, serves as a wellspring for mean racism during social crises. Many societies are thus much more racist than they appear. Since the belief that others are physically distinct tends to extend social distance and exacerbate hostility, analysts of social conflict ignore this pool of hidden racism at their peril.

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“We’ve had the worst of the hatred that Northern Ireland has to give – sectarian and racist – levelled at us and we just can’t take any more,” she says.

“We are a mixed race family and don’t always blend in. Growing up we became used to stares and taunts, but that was all we had. Naively I thought that Northern Ireland seemed to be changing, more and more people of colour were coming in and we no longer stood out as much.” —Jayne Olorunda

Stephanie Bell, “I couldn’t cope with seeing Sinn Fein’s new MLA on TV or radio… I’d be thinking all the time: your father killed my father,” The Belfast Telegraph, December 16, 2016. http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/i-couldnt-cope-with-seeing-sinn-feins-new-mla-on-tv-or-radio-id-be-thinking-all-the-time-your-father-killed-my-father-35297664.html.

A Comic’s Secret Southern Story

Below The Line
Garden & Gun
2016-12-13

CJ Lotz

A panel from “Krazy Kat.” Courtesy Krazy

Before “The Far Side,” “Calvin and Hobbes,” or even Mickey Mouse, one cartoon stole the show. From 1913 to 1944, a panel called “Krazy Kat” ran in newspapers across the country and counted “Peanuts” creator Charles Schulz and the poet E.E. Cummings among its fans. The strip featured beautiful backgrounds and simply sketched cat and mouse characters that switched between philosophical dialog and slapstick situations—the mouse was forever trying to hit the cat with a brick. But the New Orleans-born artist behind the drawings, George Herriman, was a private man whose life was a mystery. That is until now, with the release of the illustrator’s biography, Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White.

Author Michael Tisserand (also a New Orleanian) spent ten years researching this thorough work that chronicles not only the career of the twentieth century Southern artist, but Herriman’s big secret: He was born to a prominent Creole family in New Orleans and spent his adult years “passing” for white at the newspapers where he worked in New York and Los Angeles. At the time, living as a black man would have threatened his livelihood, his home, and his relationships. We spoke with Tisserand about Herriman’s complicated story and what it means to honor the artist’s legacy today…

Read the entire interview here.

Mixed race couples still face racism in Australia

news.com.au
Sydney, Australia
2016-12-17

Ginger Gorman

Ginger, her husband Don, and their daughter Elsa when she was younger.Source: Supplied

BETWEEN us, my husband and I have got Spanish, Filipino, Chinese, Slovakian, English, Scottish and Irish heritage. In appearance, he’s Asian and I’m caucasian.

This is 2016 and so you wouldn’t even think that was even worth mentioning. But the fact is, reasonably often this affects the way other people treat us.

When we first got together, I just didn’t notice. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say I refused to notice. (Backstory: I spent years at an international school where every second person had mixed-race parents. For me, this was just an everyday occurrence.)

Then one day when our eldest daughter, Elsa, was about 18 months old we took her to the doctor. My husband, Don, was holding Elsa in his arms at the reception counter. In the familiar way of a couple, I was standing to his left and our arms were casually touching.

A lady standing to the right of Don commented on how cute Elsa was and then asked him: “Where’s your wife?”

Don pointed to me and the lady went bright red in the face and started stammering: “Oh, oh.”…

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In the public’s view, Obama will be remembered more for the Affordable Care Act than other aspects of his presidency — including his election as the nation’s first black president. When asked what Obama will be most remembered for, 35% volunteer the 2010 health care law (or mention health care more generally) while 17% say it will be Obama’s election as the first black president.

“Obama Leaves Office on High Note, But Public Has Mixed Views of Accomplishments,” Pew Research Center, December 14, 2016. 5.
http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2016/12/14133019/12-14-16-Obama-legacy-release.pdf.

Mean, Kind Or Non: Which Type Of Racist Are You?

Cognoscenti
WBUR 90.9 FM
Boston, Massachusetts
2016-12-15

Carlos Hoyt, Assistant Professor of Social Work
Wheelock College, Boston, Massachusetts

We have to stop believing and acting as if we can have it both ways, writes Carlos Hoyt: adhering to the notion of race while also trying to end racism. Pictured: Richard Spencer, who leads a movement that mixes racism, white nationalism and populism, speaks at the Texas A&M University campus Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2016, in College Station, Texas. (David J. Phillip/AP)

COMMENTARY

Do you take issue with the following declaration?

“Race is real, race matters, and race is the foundation of identity.”

Let’s break it down. Many people are aware that the concept of race has no biological validity; that it’s a social construct, like gender or money, which are “real” only in so far as we treat them as such. So, in response to the first part of the thesis, many people might say, “Race is a social construct with very real effects.” As such, race certainly matters in myriad ways. As for race as the foundation of identity, many people might reason that, since identity is multi-faceted, race is, indeed, among the factors that comprise it…

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How a mixed-race love affair between an African prince and an Englishwoman caused an international furore

The Daily Telegraph
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
2016-12-16

Marea Donnelly, History writer

Ruth Williams and her husband Prince Seretse Khama in London in 1949.

ONE can only surmise as to whether bank clerk Ruth Williams and her Bechuanaland prince Seretse Khama ever shuffled around the dance floor to The Ink Spots’ hit Prisoner Of Love. United in their affection for the harmonising American doo-wop band, within a year of their meeting at a post-war London dance hall the Ink Spots’ 1946 hit could have been their anthem.

Their black-white romance offended not only their families, but the British and South African governments and the Church of England, which all aggressively opposed their 1948 marriage. Already the subject of a book A Marriage Of Inconvenience, and a film of the same name released in 1990, a new British film about the Khama marriage, A United Kingdom, opens in Sydney on Boxing Day…

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I couldn’t cope with seeing Sinn Fein’s new MLA on TV or radio… I’d be thinking all the time: your father killed my father

The Belfast Telegraph
2016-12-16

Stephanie Bell

Harrowing life: Jayne Olorunda whose father Max Olorunda was killed in an IRA train bomb during the Troubles

Jayne Olorunda’s dad was killed by an IRA bomber whose daughter has been made a Sinn Fein MLA. Jayne tells Stephanie Bell this is the last straw and her family is now set to quit Northern Ireland

News that the daughter of the IRA man who killed her father is to take a seat for Sinn Fein in Stormont has left Belfast author and community worker Jayne Olorunda and her family determined to leave Northern Ireland. The distraught 38-year-old says she couldn’t bear to see new MLA Orlaithi Flynn in the news now that she had been appointed by Sinn Fein to replace Jennifer McCann in the Colin area of west Belfast.

Jayne was only two when her Nigerian-born father Max Olorunda was killed by an IRA incendiary bomb which detonated prematurely in Dunmurry on a train travelling from Ballymena to Belfast in January 1980.

She says her mother Gabrielle (66) has never got over it and to this day suffers from post traumatic stress syndrome.

Orlaithi Flynn

Orlaithi Flynn’s father Patrick Flynn was convicted of double manslaughter and possession of explosives for the attack.

In a heartbreaking interview, Jayne revealed how her family has also suffered years of racial hatred and had planned to leave Northern Ireland last month to try and escape the abuse…

…She has spent most of her life working in the community and has also written a powerful book called Legacy which tells the story of how her family were plagued by racism, poverty and grief after the death of her father.

Her father Max (35), an accountant, had been visiting a client in Ballymena and was on the train when the IRA prematurely detonated a device on January 17, 1980.

The blast engulfed a carriage of the train killing her father, as well as 17-year-old Protestant student Mark Cochrane and one of the bombers, Kevin Delaney (26)…

Gabrielle and Max Olorunda

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Obama Leaves Office on High Note, But Public Has Mixed Views of Accomplishments

Pew Research Center
2016-12-14

72% have favorable opinion of Michelle Obama

With just a few weeks left in Barack Obama’s presidency, Americans’ early judgments of his place in history are more positive than negative. Obama is poised to leave office on a high note: Current assessments of both the president and the first lady are among the most favorable since they arrived in the White House.

At the same time, many express skepticism about whether Obama has been able to make progress on the major problems facing the nation, and whether his accomplishments will outweigh his failures. Democrats and Republicans have distinctly different views on Obama’s legacy, and these partisan divides are greater today than they have been for other recent presidents.

And when asked in an open-ended question what Obama will be most remembered for, more cite the Affordable Care Act – which faces an uncertain future in the Republican-controlled Congress – than anything else…

…In the public’s view, Obama will be remembered more for the Affordable Care Act than other aspects of his presidency — including his election as the nation’s first black president. When asked what Obama will be most remembered for, 35% volunteer the 2010 health care law (or mention health care more generally) while 17% say it will be Obama’s election as the first black president.

Notably, mentions of Obama’s domestic policies, including health care and the economy, account for nearly half (49%) of all responses. By comparison, only 9% point to foreign policy, including just 2% who specifically mention the killing of Osama bin Laden and just 1% who cite U.S. military action against ISIS…

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Feeling Cosmopolitan: Strategic Empathy in Charles W. Chesnutt’s Paul Marchand, F.M.C.

MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States)
Published online: 2016-12-10
DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlw046

Alexa Weik von Mossner, Assistant Professor
University of Klagenfurt, Klagenfurt, Austria

“By modern research the unity of the human race has been proved,” asserts Charles W. Chesnutt in “The Future American” (122). As a black American who was light-skinned enough to pass for white, Chesnutt deeply believed in monogenesis and in the universality of the human experience. It is therefore unsurprising that the racial identities of his fictional characters are often fluid and that many of them display a distinctly cosmopolitan attitude, affirming a common and equal humanity. Matthew Wilson reminds us that while Chesnutt chose to live as an African American in a society that forced its members into clear-cut racial groups, in his writing he “strove for a universal subject position that he perceived as outside of race” (Whiteness xvii). A typical example is Paul Marchand, F.M.C. (1998), one of Chesnutt’s late and long unpublished novels, in which a fair-skinned black man learns that he is biologically white and finds himself faced with the question of whether he should embrace a white identity and abandon his mixed-race wife and children. It has been argued, for example by William Ramsey, that the political efficacy of the novel suffers precisely from Chesnutt’s universalist desire to “exalt humanity above race” (Chesnutt, “Race Problem” 199) because such desire “can restrict the constructive, necessary black social agency that Chesnutt himself agitated for” (Ramsey 39). Even more detrimental in the eyes of many critics is the utter lack of realism in Chesnutt’s celebration of a universal humanism that leads his idealized protagonist to forsake his newly acquired privileges in favor of his mixed-race family and a more authentic and honest life abroad.

However, Chesnutt’s reliance on romantic idealization and other sentimental narrative strategies is in fact crucial for the political charge of his novel, which he conceived in the early 1920s. As…

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