Mixed Race Studies

Otis Houston: You agree that it’s important for people to see a black family in the White House, if only to demonstrate that it’s possible. Is it also important for black children to be able to see people who look like them on television, or in movies, or even in television commercials? Is there an importance in people, whatever their background, seeing folks who superficially resemble them included in mainstream media?

Thomas Chatterton Williams: Yeah, there probably is. I’m sure that there is. But one thing that often gets lost in a lot of these debates is that black people have only ever been around 12 percent of the population. So it doesn’t really bother me or my sense of myself if I don’t always see myself. Also — getting back to my own obtuseness or naïveté — I saw myself in Crime and Punishment in a way that I did with very few novels in which the protagonist resembled me and my American contemporary social identity. I saw myself in The Brothers Karamazov. I saw myself in the novels of Roberto Bolaño, and in Borges’s Ficciones set in Buenos Aires. The self is really something that I don’t think can be boiled down to physical appearance, necessarily, or to gender, to epoch, to time or era, to language. The notion that to see myself is to see a mixed race, heterosexual, endomorphic contemporary, I think really reduces what the self is.

I never saw myself more clearly than in the novels of Dostoyevsky when I was in college. No one has ever spoken more to my sense of myself. And I can see myself in Batman. I relate to Bruce Wayne more than I do to the Black Panther, if we have to go into comic books. I don’t want to be glib about it — I understand why a young boy or young girl needing some self-esteem, a young girl seeing Wonder Woman … I get it. But I think we really should not go too far with it, or we risk restricting the self too severely. The self is a multitudinous thing, right?

Otis Houston, “The Singular Power of Writing: A Conversation with Thomas Chatterton Williams,” Los Angeles Review of Books, April 12, 2019. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-singular-power-of-writing-a-conversation-with-thomas-chatterton-williams.

In Maine, a Hidden History on Malaga Island

U.S. News & World Report
2019-06-04

Tamara Kerrill Field, Contributor

People gather to eat during an event at Malaga Island Preserve. Throughout the island, cutouts were erected to evoke the black and mixed-race islanders that were kicked off their settlement in the early 1900s. (Ben McCanna/Portland Press Herald/Getty Images)

An isolated pocket of African American families flourished for a time in Maine, and now their descendants are discovering their past.

PHIPPSBURG, Maine — If it was a sunny day, perhaps a Sunday, Mainers with enough money to buy or rent a boat would cruise by Malaga Island for a peak at the curious inhabitants. It was the beginning of the 20th century, a time of unquestioned racial separation. But here on the little Casco Bay island was a true oddity: blacks, whites and mixed-race people lived together in a cooperative community.

On an average day – according to information gleaned from photographs, excavations and oral tradition – children of every shade played together, men hand fished for cod and women sat with one another, chatting outside the clapboard houses. The gapers bobbing in the bay had almost certainly heard talk of stranger things: rumors of “mentally retarded” mixed-race inhabitants, whisperings that Malaga children had horns and burrowed in tunnels. It was said ashore in Phippsburg that islanders were immoral and savage, that they ate their food uncooked and bore the telltale signs of syphilis.

To this day, in the Casco Bay region, the term “Malagite” is considered a racial slur on a par with the n-word. Descendants of the islanders kept their history secret rather than be associated with both the ugly rumors and the ugly truths about Malaga, truths like the institutionalization of mixed race islanders – considered by the proponents of eugenics to be intellectually and morally defective – at the Maine School for the Feeble-Minded where they were classified as “imbeciles” or “morons.”…

Read the entire article here.

Biologically, We Are All Far More Alike Than Different

Beacon Broadside: A Project of Beacon Press
Boston, Massachusetts
2019-06-04

Christian Coleman, Associate Digital Marketing Manager

A Q&A with Angela Saini

Why are we seeing a resurgence of race science in the twenty-first century? Weren’t we supposed to be over this after World War II? The notion of “race” has been debunked in the world of science and is understood to be a social construct, but the idea of research-based racial differences is still with us—and has been with us since The Enlightenment. Science journalist Angela Saini tells this disturbing history in Superior: The Return of Race Science. Our blog editor Christian Coleman caught up with her to ask her about her book, the inspiration for it, and how to recognize the subtle signs of race science today.

Christian Coleman: Tell us a little bit about the inspiration behind writing Superior.

Angela Saini: For me, this is a book that has been bubbling since I was a child. I became a journalist in the first place because I became involved in antiracism movements at university while studying Engineering. But the time for this book was now, with the rise of the far-right and ethnic nationalism around the world. I wanted to put the rise of intellectual racism in historical and scientific context…

…CC: What are some subtle examples of how we buy into the belief of biological racial differences today?

AS: I think it happens most clearly in medicine and DNA ancestry testing. When doctors tell us that certain groups are more susceptible to certain illnesses, without making clear that this may sometimes just be for cultural or socioeconomic reasons, it suggests we are biologically different. When firms say they can tell us where we are from by analysing our spit, without explaining how they do this or what it actually means, they also reinforce the idea of biological race…

Read the entire interview here.

New Academic Minor in Critical Mixed Race Studies

San Francisco State University
College of Ethnic Studies
1600 Holloway Avenue
San Francisco, California 94132-4100

2019-06-05

Professors Wei Ming Dariotis and Nicole Leopardo have founded a new academic minor in Critical Mixed Race Studies (in the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University. This is the first degree-granting program in the field of mixed race studies in the United States!

Critical Mixed Race Studies emphasizes the mutability of race and the porosity of racial boundaries to critique processes of racialization and social stratification based on race. Critical Mixed Race Studies addresses local and global systemic injustice rooted in systems of racialization.

Total Units for Minor: 18
Introductory Course (3 units)

• ETHS 110: Critical Thinking in the Ethnic Studies Experience^*

Ethnic Focus (9 units)
Choose three courses, no more than one from each of the sections A through D)^*

• Section A: Asian American Studies
  • AAS 301: Asian Americans of Mixed Heritage
  • AAS 330: Nikkei in the United States
• Section B: American Indian Studies
  • American Indian Studies 350/AFRS 350/LTNS 355: Black-Indians in the US
• Section C: Latina/Latino Studies
  • LTNS 380 Afro/Latina/o Diasporas^* (has not been taught in the last 5 years)
  • LTNS 278: History of Latinos in the U.S.
• Section D: Africana
  • AFRS 401: Pan African Black Psychology: A North American, South American and Caribbean Comparison

Comparative/Elective (3 units)
Choose one course from the following)

• RRS 625: Mixed Race Studies⁺
• AAS 522: Transracial Adoptee Experience⁺

Applied Courses (at least 3 units; choose one from below; must be with CMRS Faculty)

• ETHS 685: Projects in Teaching Critical Mixed Race Studies (must be for one of the courses listed above or any course with a; repeatable for 1-4 units)
• ETHS 697: Field Research or Internship in Critical Mixed Race Studies (repeatable for 1-6 units)
• ETHS 699: Special Study^*

Key: ^*Required Course ⁺Elective Course

For more information, click here.

Escaping Culture – Finding Your Place in the World

TheBookPatch (an imprint of Wilshire Press)
2019-04-05
168 pages
6 x 0.4 x 9 inches
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1092860482

Frederico Wilson
Sumner, Washington

Freedom is a mindset more powerful than any assemblage, faction or group.

Born to a Mexican/Yaqui Indian mother, and Mexican/Anglo father, the author shares life-altering events and the people that shaped his mixed-race “American” experience.

For as long as he can remember, identity by choice or force has wrought conflict and contradictions. Who is he? What is he? Where did he come from? Where does he belong? Where is he going?

His surname implies he’s white, but his brown skin begs to differ. Is he Mexican? His Mother’s family tree most certainly is, but his Father’s Celtic, Iberian branch bears his Anglo surname. Is he more culturally white European than ethnically Latino? Is he a Native American, rooted in his beloved Yaqui Abuela? To which ethnic tribe does he belong?

The author asks readers to think of this book as explanatory theater; as a three-act play providing racial and cultural context, commentary, and value to the social interaction paradigms we all share, but often fail to recognize in ourselves and one another.

His essays testify, an authentic telling of naivety, consequence, rebellion, and evolutionary awareness. And of life discovered, marinated in an introspective stew of love, fear, indulgence, compassion, humility, and redemption.

He intends to affirm and provoke, and open our eyes to a world seen through an independent and different colored lens. Let your guard down. Consider his
observations a handshake between friends. Relax in a comfortable chair, have a glass of wine and peruse. He won’t bite. Well, maybe, a little.