Mixed Race Studies

Journal of Intercultural Studies: Call for Papers: Special Issue

Journal of Intercultural Studies
2016-11-04

Deadline: 2017-07-31

Studying mixed race in a global perspective is an increasingly important phenomenon. The global economy, growing rates of migration, and rapidly advancing information and communication technologies have brought diverse groups in closer contact in more areas of the globe, even those previously regarded as racially and ethnically homogenous. Intermarried couples and mixed race celebrities are often heralded in media reports as examples of a growing phenomenon where race, culture and colour are argued to no longer matter, even when that is far from the reality. Amidst these widespread claims of a post-racial or colourblind world, the Othering of certain groups and racialized discourse remains, and is often most clear in debates over the possibility or perceived threat of intimacy and sex with racialized Others. In an ever-changing globalised world, mixing across established boundaries of race, ethnicity, religion or tribe can be celebrated, yet it can also be constructed as very dangerous, and these complexities need to be studied globally. While countless academic studies and media reports have been devoted to investigating, documenting and/or explaining this phenomenon of mixed identities and relationships, many questions remain unanswered.

• What does mixed race mean across the globe?
• What are the lived experiences of mixed couples and mixed race individuals in different countries and contexts?
• What are attitudes toward ‘mixing’?
• How do the children of mixed couples identify?
• Is there a way to understand the experiences of mixed people and families in a global context, or is there too much difference – different histories, different populations and different contexts – to find common ground?

Submission Instructions

We are looking for original papers that critically address the issue of mixed race globally from new and innovative perspectives to make up this Special Issue.

Papers to be between 7,000–8,000 words in length, and submitted to https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cjis (when submitting please label your manuscript a ‘Special Issue Paper’).

The Critical Mixed Race special issue will be published early–2018: we are accepting papers up until the 31st July 2017

Editorial information

Guest Editor: Erica Chito Childs, Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Centre

For more information, click here.

What kind of mixed race/ethnicity data is needed for the 2020/21 global population census round: the cases of the UK, USA, and Canada

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Published online: 2017-07-26
pages 1-19
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2017.1346267

Peter J. Aspinall, Emeritus Reader in Population Health
Centre for Health Services Studies
University of Kent, Canterbury, United Kingdom

In western countries the mixed race/ethnicity population is experiencing a rapid increase in numbers and growing diversity, raising challenges for its capture in censuses and surveys. Methods include exact combinations of interest, multi-ticking, and open response, as exemplified by the censuses of England and Wales, the USA and Canada, and Scotland and Northern Ireland, respectively. However, investigations of question face validity, reproducibility of findings, and efficacy of capture reveal quality problems with all three approaches. The low reporting reliability of this population urgently requires research and testing to identify optimal strategies. While there is clearly no one gold standard method of capture and current approaches have developed within national contexts, it is timely to review these methods across the three countries and to make recommendations for the upcoming 2020/21 censuses.

Introduction

Throughout much of the twentieth century the salient view in ethnicity data collection was that people belonged in separate and mutually exclusive racial/ethnic categories,¹ an approach termed ethnic absolutism (Gilroy 2004). This status quo was maintained by some statistical agencies in the UK through the claim that persons of mixed race/ethnicity preferred to identify with a single group (Sillitoe and White 1992). Moreover, in the USA, the “one drop rule” privileged the minority ethnic component in a mixed person’s racial identity, requiring only one race to be assigned to a person (Davis 1991). Mixed persons who utilized “other” categories or unofficially multi-ticked went uncounted. However, as the mixed population began to increase in recent decades and respondents in censuses and surveys demonstrated their wish to self-identify their mixedness in free-text (Aspinall 2010), this approach was no longer sustainable. In consequence, census and other official organizations across the world and especially in western countries have been faced with the challenge of how to count this mixed/multiple population. This has led to the adoption of a plurality of measures (Morning 2008) that belies the complexities with respect to conceptualization and the proliferation in type of mixes or combinations. Moreover, several countries are now approaching their second or third decennial census in which the mixed population has been measured, yielding an evidence base on optimal strategies. It is therefore timely to take stock of these practices and to explore what kind of mixed race/ethnicity data is needed for the upcoming 2020/21 global population census round…

Read the entire article in HTML or PDF format.

I Got a Rapper to Take Me to McDonald’s in His Limo

Lenny Letter
Number 96
2017-07-25

Danzy Senna

Melissa Ling

Novelist Danzy Senna on her chance meeting with rapper Doug E. Fresh after a 1985 concert.

Nineteen eighty-four. That was the year my mother discovered she’d given birth to a two-headed monster. Me and my sister. That was the year we turned fourteen and fifteen. We were only one year apart, Irish twins. Like real twins, we moved through the world as one entity. We spoke in code. We dressed in each other’s clothes. My mother referred to us as “the girls.” We didn’t look very much alike, but our voices were remarkably similar. When my father called the house, he couldn’t tell which of us was on the other line. He confused our names so regularly that it became a kind of new, conjoined name. D’anlucien. Or Lu’anzy.

We hadn’t always been that monster. For my mother, an experimental poet, an unreconstructed socialist who had raised us on the poetry of Bernadette Mayer and the music of Patti Smith, what we became in 1984 was a particularly pointed bad joke. As a white woman raising black children, she’d been righteous and conscious, trying to raise two strong black women. She’d surrounded her daughters with powerful black women, godmothers and aunts, womanist trailblazers. She gave me a copy of The Bluest Eye to read when I was ten.

We weren’t coming out the way she’d planned. At those readings she dragged us to at St. Mark’s Poetry Project in New York all the way from our home base in Boston, we spent our time not listening and instead twisting our Barbie dolls into increasingly pornographic positions, using our little brother’s GI Joe as their soul mate. We found the poetry readings weird as fuck — what kind of gibberish were they spewing up there? All her poet friends seemed drunk to us. We sat side by side in at a dark table at the Ear Inn, sipping our Shirley Temples, giving my mother’s bohemian friends the stank-eye.

My mother looked at us across a table and said, “I don’t think I’ve ever encountered two meaner girls.”…

Read the entire short story here.

Check Out My New Podcast About Being Mixed Up In America

Magic 92.5 FM
San Diego, California
2017-07-25

Xavier The X-Man^®

“Mixed – A person of more than one racial background; usually looks quite distinctive from monoracial people .”

I’m extremely excited about my new podcast “Mixed Up,” it’s a podcast from a multicultural perspective.

A year ago, I decided to let my voice be heard and produce a radio show that truly reflects the views of people who are mixed race in America. I’ve always said my view point on life has always been different than most, bi-cultural point of views in this country are hardly ever represented but that’s about to change with “Mixed Up”.

Along for the ride is my co-host Sheryl Love, she’s half Filipino and Caucasian. Hit the link below and listen to the podcast or find us on Itunes!..

For more information, click here.

Pakistani, white, Sindhi, Canadian, black: What do you identify as?

The Express Tribune
Karachi, Pakistan
2017-07-22

Shanel Khaliq

Jazzmine Raine mother is a third generation Canadian, with Irish, English, Scottish and Spanish bloodlines whereas her father is a second generation Canadian with an Antiguan father and St Lucian mother. PHOTO: KENDA AL YAKOB

With unprecedented levels of immigration, globalisation and the forced displacement of populations worldwide, the intermingling of races, cultures and ethnic groups may become the ‘norm’ in the decades to come. Many countries in the world are now host to a multiplicity of racial groups, particularly countries such as the US and Canada, due to their distinct historical path towards constructing a national identity.

Ironically, over the years, phenomena such as racial profiling have become even more widespread. Is this owed to the ever-changing global order, an increasingly narrow and stringent concept of national security, or is it simply age-old racism disguising itself in new clothes?

In order to protect the purity of races historically, many parts of the world had anti-miscegenation laws in place. The US is one good example where anti-miscegenation laws came under considerable heat for making interracial unions illegal. The ‘one-drop rule’ also persisted in the country for a long time whereby anyone with a single Black ancestor would be considered Black…

…In most parts of the Global North, it is speculated to be the fastest growing group. Nonetheless, scholars such as Minelle Mahtani, warn against the romanticisation of mixed race people as the dawn of a new world since the racialization of bodies continues to persist and affect their experiences even in the Global North, and in a world where even the label ‘mixed’ inevitably evokes the idea of partial ‘Whiteness’ in popular imagination.

Read the entire article here.

Passing for White

Barrington Stoke
2017-05-11
112 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-78112-681-3

Tanya Landman

She must pose as a master to make herself free.

It’s 1848 in the Deep South of America. Rosa is a slave but her owner is also her father and her fair skin means she can ‘pass for white’. With the help of Benjamin, her husband, she disguises herself as a young white man – and Benjamin’s master. In this guise, the two of them must make their way out of the South, avoiding those they have encountered before and holding their nerve over a thousand miles to freedom.

Inspired by the amazing true story of Ellen and William Craft, this is a powerful tale of danger, injustice and unimaginable courage.

Information for Adults: This book has a dyslexia-friendly layout, typeface and paperstock so that even more readers can enjoy it. It has been edited to a reading age of 8.

It features a removable ‘super-readable’ sticker.

Read the first chapter here.

One Woman’s Fight to Claim Her ‘Blackness’ in Brazil

Foreign Policy
2017-07-24

Cleuci de Oliveira
Brasília, Brazil

Illustration by Sofía Bonati

The experience of a young lawyer raises difficult questions about race, belonging, and the bureaucracy of affirmative action in a country lauded for its egalitarian history.

When Maíra Mutti Araújo speaks, she draws out her vowels and pronounces them with a distinctively sharp tone. Her accent is immediately recognizable to Brazilians as typical of Salvador, a coastal city in the country’s northeast that is as famous for its beaches as its rich African heritage. Araújo grew up in Salvador, just like her mom. Her dad, who grew up in a rural town eight hours away, has lived there since college. She has her mom’s features — a broad nose, full lips — and her dad’s nut-brown complexion.

Araújo comes from a bookish family. Her parents met when they were both chemistry majors at a local university — they now work as middle school chemistry teachers. She got her law degree at the Federal University of Bahia, one of the country’s most prestigious. During her time in law school, Araújo began to consider a career in the civil service. She interned at the Federal Attorney General’s Office in Salvador while still a student and took a job as an analyst at the government accountability office in Manaus, in the state of Amazonas, after graduation. Her goal was to eventually become a prosecutor. “I love arguing cases,” Araújo says, “that whole process of taking a case and finding a solution for it.” As a prosecutor, she says, “you’re responsible for propelling the case forward. The outcome depends on your approach.”

In late 2015, Araújo set her sights on an attractive job opening for a prosecutor back in her hometown, in the Salvador municipal department. Everyone encouraged her to apply using a relatively new affirmative action option. “You of all people! You have to do it,” Araújo’s boss at the time told her. “If I had the chance to apply as a quotas candidate, I would totally go for it,” her friends said. “And you do! So apply!”…

…Even before slavery was abolished, the mixed-race Brazilians who resulted from these unions enjoyed freedoms not available to those with darker skin tones. Many thrived as small-scale farmers, for instance, and a few reached stratospheric heights: André Rebouças, whose grandmother had been a slave, rose to become one of Brazil’s most important engineers in the late 19th century. By the turn of the century, a complex hierarchy based on skin color, facial features, hair texture, education, and elocution, among other qualities, came to dominate the Brazilian social contract.

Unlike the United States, post-abolition Brazil did not enact “anti-miscegenation” or “separate but equal” laws, so race relations evolved with relative fluidity. The end result was that, contrary to America, where even a single black ancestor several generations removed marked a person as legally black, Brazilians came to define blackness as a matter of physical appearance. According to the late sociologist Oracy Nogueira — arguably the most influential scholar of Brazilian constructions of race — the American concept of “passing” as white is a moot one in Brazil, where simply looking white makes one so.

The quotas implemented in universities and government departments were born of attempts to push back against this pervasive colorism — the privileging of light skin over dark. Activists stress the importance of black representation in positions of power — particularly by those who, on account of having a darker complexion or markedly black features, do not benefit from a fluid racial identity that could otherwise see them classified as white. Which is why activists’ frustrations have grown over what they argue are light-skinned pardos taking advantage of hard-won affirmative action policies that were not fought for with them in mind…

Read the entire article here.

I’m The Black Mom Of A Kid Who Looks White, & Your Comments Hurt Both Of Us

Romper
2017-07-23

Sa’iyda Shabazz

Courtesy of Sa’iyda Shabazz

When my son was born, he was pretty much as pale as his white dad. We were a bit surprised, but we also knew that’s just how genetics work sometimes. What really surprised us, however, were how people responded to seeing his skin color. No one could believe that I, as a black woman, had birthed such a white baby.

These questions continued throughout his life. People have asked me countless times whether I was my son’s babysitter or nanny, and once, when I was out with a white friend, the waitress asked her questions about him, because it never even entered her mind that he could have been mine. It was heartbreaking, and also infuriating.

Many white moms of mixed kids have told me that my perceptions of how people deal with my mixed kid are wrong, and that I’m being overly sensitive. But as a Black mom with a kid who looks white, I’m seen as taking up space, and I find it incredibly frustrating. No one knows what to do with me. Strangers look at me and then at my son, trying to find enough similarities between us to make the familial connection. Some will be bold enough to ask, “Is he yours?”…

Read the entire article here.

Minnie [Bradley] returned to Omaha in 1904 and made two more appearances in police court before Judge Berka. The first, in March 1904, was as witness against a man named William Warwick, who was accused of assaulting her. The two had gotten into a heated argument when he bragged to her that, due to his light complexion, he often passed as a white man during his travels out west. He also mentioned that he had been in the company of two white women the previous evening. Minnie said William should show more respect for his race and reminded him that his mother was a black woman. His response was to punch her. Judge Berka sentenced him to 30 days in jail.

Shayne Davidson, “Angry in Omaha,” Captured and Exposed: Vintage Photography & True Crime Stories, June 8, 2017. https://capturedandexposed.com/2017/06/08/angry-in-omaha/.

Hypatia’s Editor and Reviews Editor Resign; Authority of Associate Editors “Temporarily Suspended”

Daily Nous: News For and About the Philosophy Profession
2017-07-21

Justin W.

The editor of feminist philosophy journal, Hypatia, Sally Scholz (Villanova University) and the editor of Hypatia Reviews Online, Shelley Wilcox (San Francisco State University), are resigning from their positions in the wake of the controversy surrounding the publication of “In Defense of Transracialism” by Rebecca Tuvel (Rhodes College). Meanwhile, the Board of Directors of Hypatia, the non-profit corporation that owns the journal, is taking “emergency measures to restore the academic integrity of the journal” and has “temporarily suspended the authority of the Associate Editorial Board.”

Readers may recall that the associate editors of Hypatia, responding to criticism on social media of the journal’s decision to publish Tuvel’s article, issued an unofficial apology in which they stated that the article “should not have been published.”…

Read the entire article here.