Mixed Race Studies

“The New Kubla Khan: Mixed Race Multi-Nationalism”

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association
2009-05-24

Michele Elam, Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor of English, Professor, Director of African & African American Studies
Stanford University

This paper examines how, and to what ends, people of the “mixed race experience” are being discursively contextualized as posterchildren of the “post-race,” “post-nation” era. As early as 1996, Stanley Crouch was proclaiming that “race is over;” since then, others also have rung race’s death knell: Holland Cotter in a 2001 New York Times piece, for example, has claimed that the time for “ethno-racial identity” is past, that we are now witnessing the coming of “postblack or postethnic art” that represents what Anthony Appiah recently called a “New Cosmopolitanism.” This presentation argues that “mixed race” has emerged in the context of these “post-race” cultural discourses, discourses which suggest, as Belize in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America puts it, that “race, taste and history” are “finally overcome.” Hybridity for many represents “life after race”(Naomi Zack), a step “beyond race” (Dinesh D’Sousa), a gesture “against race”(Paul Gilroy), the “new racial order” (G. Reginald Daniel), a “new frontier”(Maria Root) advanced by a “new people” (Jon Michael Spencer) who are ushering in a new world beyond race, identity, and nation. My presentation examines this problematic representation of mixed race people as post-nation vanguards in both mainstream media and in the field of pop-culture, and the send-up of the idea that “mixed race” people constitute a new nation-beyond-nationalism in Danzy Senna’s novel, Symptomatic (2005).

New Faces in a Changing America: Multiracial Identity in the 21st Century

SAGE Publications, Inc.
Paperback ISBN: 9780761923008
2001
432 pages

Edited by

Loretta I. Winters
California State University, Northridge

Herman L. DeBose
California State University, Northridge

How multiracial people identify themselves can have major consequences on their positions in their families, communities and society. Even the U.S. Census has recognized the rapidly increasing numbers of those who consider themselves multiracial, adding a new racial category to the 2000 Census form: two or more races.

New Faces in a Changing America: Multiracial Identity in the 21st Century examines the multiracial experience, its history and the political issues and consequences surrounding biracial and multiracial identity, bringing together top names in the field to give readers cutting edge views and insights gained from contemporary research.

This important new text follows the trail blazed by Maria Root, who contributes its opening chapter. An introduction places the issues of multiracial identity into context via a discussion of U.S. Census data and debates, providing an overview of the varied readings to come covering such topics as:

• Race as a social, rather than biological, construction
• The Multiracial Movement
• Racial/Ethnic Groups in America and Beyond
• Race, Gender & Hierarchy
• Gang Affiliation and Self-Esteem
• Black/White Interracial Couples and the Beliefs that Help Them to Bridge the Racial Divide

The book concludes with “The Multiracial Movement: Harmony and Discord,” by co-editor Loretta Winters, an epilogue putting the readings into perspective according to three models in the multiracial identity literature: the Multiracial Movement model, the Counter Multiracial movements model and the Ethnic Movement model.

Timely and comprehensive in its range of topics, this is an important resource for many audiences: students in Ethnic Studies, Race Relations and related courses; human service professionals including psychologists, counselors, social workers and school personnel and, importantly, multiracial individuals themselves.

The Sum of Our Parts: Mixed-Heritage Asian Americans

Temple University Press
June 2001
296 pages
7×10
2 tables 4 figures 3 halftones
paper: EAN: 978-1-56639-847-3 (ISBN: 1-56639-847-9)

edited by Teresa Williams-León and Cynthia L. Nakashima, foreword by Michael Omi

Largely as a result of multiracial activism, the US Census for 2000 offers people the unprecedented opportunity to officially identify themselves with more than one racial group. Among Asian-heritage people in this country and elsewhere, racial and ethnic mixing has a long but unacknowledged history. According to the last US Census, nearly one-third of all interracial marriages included an Asian-descent spouse, and intermarriage rates are accelerating. This unique collection of essays focuses on the construction of identity among people of Asian descent who claim multiple heritages.

In the U.S., discussions of race generally center on matters of black and white; mixed heritage Asian Americans usually figure in conversations about race as an undifferentiated ethnic group or as exotic Eurasians. The contributors to this book disrupt the standard discussions by considering people of mixed Asian ethnicities. They also pay particular attention to non-white multiracial identities to decenter whiteness and reflect the experience of individuals or communities who are considered a minority within a minority. With an entire section devoted to the Asian diaspora, The Sum of Our Parts suggests that questions of multiracial and multiethnic identity are surfacing around the globe. This timely and provocative collection articulates them for social scientists and students.

Table of Contents

• Foreword – Michael Omi
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Reconfiguring Race, Rearticulating Ethnicity – Teresa Williams-León and Cynthia L. Nakashima
• Part I: Multiraciality and Asian America: Bridging the Hybrid Past to the Multiracial Present
  • 1. Who Is an Asian? Who Is a Pacific Islander? Monoracialism, Multiracial People, and Asian American Communities – Paul Spickard
  • 2. Possibilities of a Multiracial Asian America – Yen Le Espiritu
  • 3. Servants of Culture: The Symbolic Role of Mixed-Race Asians in American Discourse – Cynthia L. Nakashima
  • 4. “The Coming of the Neo-Hawaiian American Race”: Nationalism and Metaphors of the Melting Pot in Popular Accounts of Mixed-Race Individuals – John Chock Rosa
• Part II: Navigating Sociocultural Terrains of Family and Identity
  • 5. Factors Influencing the Variation in Racial and Ethnic Identity of Mixed-Heritage Persons of Asian Ancestry – Maria P. P. Root
  • 6. Alaska’s Multiracial Asian American Families: Not Just at the Margins – Curtiss Takada Rooks
  • 7. The Diversity of Biracial Individuals: Asian-White and Asian-Minority Biracial Identity – Christine C. Iikima Hall and Trude I. Cooke Turner
  • 8. Black, Japanese, and American: An Asian American Identity Yesterday and Today – Michael C. Thornton and Harold Gates
• Part III: Remapping Political Landscapes and Communities
  • 9. A Rose by Any Other Name: Names, Multiracial/Multiethnic People, and the Politics of Identity – Daniel A. Nakashima
  • 10. Multiracial Comedy as a Commodity in Hawaii – Darby Li Po Price
  • 11. Doing the Mixed-Race Dance: Negotiating Social Spaces Within the Multiracial Vietnamese American Class Typology – Kieu Linh Caroline Valverde
  • 12. The Convergence of Passing Zones: Multiracial Gays, Lesbians, and Bisexuals of Asian Descent – Teresa Williams-León
  • 13. Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall: Mapping Discussions of Feminism, Race, and Beauty in Japanese American Beauty Pageants – Rebecca Chiyoko King
  • 14. Mixed but Not Matched: Multiracial People and the Organization of Health Knowledge – Cathy J. Tashiro
• Part IV: Asian-Descent Multiraciality in Global Perspective
  • 15. “We Paved the Way”: Exemplary Spaces and Mixed Race in Britain – David Parker
  • 16. A Dutch Eurasian Revival? – Mark Taylor Brinsfield
  • 17. Multiethnic Lives and Monoethnic Myths: American-Japanese Amerasians in Japan – Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu
  • 18. The Racial Politics of Being Dogla and of “Asian” Descent in Suriname – Loraine Y. Van Tuyl
  • 19. The Tiger and His Stripes: Thai and American Reactions to Tiger Woods’s (Multi-) “Racial Self” – Loraine Y. Van Tuyl
• Bibliography
• About the Contributors

Is That Your Child? Mothers Talk about Rearing Biracial Children

Lexington Books, imprint of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
November 2008
146pp
Cloth: 0-7391-2763-2 / 978-0-7391-2763-6 
Paper: 0-7391-2764-0 / 978-0-7391-2764-3 

By Marion Kilson and Florence Ladd

“Is That Your Child?” is a question that countless mothers of biracial children encounter whether they are African American or European American, rearing children today or a generation ago, living in the city or in the suburbs, are upper middle class or lower middle class. Social scientists Marion Kilson and Florence Ladd probe mothers’ responses to this query and other challenges that mothers of biracial children encounter.

Organized into four chapters, the book begins with Kilson and Ladd’s initial interview of one another, continues with an overview of the challenges and rewards of raising biracial children gleaned from their interviews with other mothers, presents profiles of mothers highlighting distinctive individual experiences of biracial parenting, and concludes with suggestions of positive biracial parenting strategies.

This book makes a unique contribution to the growing body of literature by and about biracial Americans. Although in the past twenty years biracial Americans like Rebecca Walker, June Cross, and James McBride have written of their person experiences and scholars like Kathleen Korgen, Maria Root, and Ruth Frankenberg have explored aspects of the biracial experience, none has focused on the experiences of a heterogeneous set of black and white mothers of different generations and socioeconomic circumstances as Kilson and Ladd do.

About the Authors
Marion Kilson is an anthropologist and the author of Claiming Place: Biracial Young Adults of the Post-Civil Rights Era (Bergin & Garvey 2000). Florence Ladd is a psychologist and won the Black Caucus of the American Library Association award for her novel, Sarah’s Psalm (Scribner 1997).

Table of Contents

• Foreword
• Chapter 1: The Back Story of Is That Your Child?
• Chapter 2: Challenges and Rewards for Mothers of Biracial Children
• Chapter 3: Profiles of Mothers of Biracial Children
• Chapter 4: Nurturing Biracial Children: Some Lessons Learned
• Appendix I: Interracial Marriages in the United States
• Appendix II: Some Sociological Attributes of Mothers
• Appendix III: Selected Multiracial Resources

Biracial Women in Therapy: Between the Rock of Gender and the Hard Place of Race

Routledge
2004-03-04
280 pages
Hardback ISBN: 9780789021441; Hardback ISBN-10: 0789021447
Paperback ISBN: 9780789021458; Paperback ISBN-10: 0789021455

Editor: Cathy A. Thompson, Psychologist
Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS)
University of California at San Diego

Editor: Angela R. Gillem, Professor & Clinical Psychologist
Arcadia University

Get a unique perspective on the female biracial experience!

Biracial Women in Therapy: Between the Rock of Gender and the Hard Place of Race examines how physical appearance, cultural knowledge, and cultural stereotypes affect the experience of mixed-race women in belonging to, and being accepted within, their cultures. This unique book combines empirical research, theoretical papers, and first-person narrative to address issues relevant to providing therapy to biracial women and girls, helping therapists and counselors develop a treatment framework based on sociocultural factors. Researchers, practitioners, and academics provide insight into the biracial reality, taking multiple aspects of clients’ lives into account rather than looking for simple hierarchies of well-being based on race.

Biracial Women in Therapy is a building block for mental health practitioners in the construction of theory and practice in working with biracial females. The book examines how a biracial women’s racial/ethnic identity intersects with her gender and sexual identity to affect her sense of belonging and acceptance, addressing issues of appearance, social class, disability, power and guilt, and dating and marriage. Topics addressed in the book include:

• the complexities of multiple minority status
• how ethnic differences affect biracial adolescents
• issues encountered by biracial women from a sociohistorical context
• biracial women’s attitudes toward counseling
• stereotypes of marginalization and identity confusion
• a multicultural feminist approach to counseling
• and a first-person narrative of one author’s racial and sexual identity development

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Biracial Women in Therapy: Between the Rock of Gender and the Hard Place of Race
• From Exotic to a Dime a Dozen – Maria P. P. Root
• Utilizing the Strengths of Our Cultures: Therapy with Biracial Women and Girls
• Biracial (Black/White) Women: A Qualitative Study of Racial Attitudes and Beliefs and Their Implications for Therapy
• Understanding and Assisting Black/White Biracial Women in Their Identity Development
• Negotiating Racial Identity: Biracial Women and Interactional Validation
• Dating Practices, Racial Identity, and Psychotherapeutic Needs of Biracial Women
• When Face and Soul Collide: Therapeutic Concerns with Racially Ambiguous and Nonvisible Minority Women
• Counseling Biracial Women: An Intersection of Multiculturalism and Feminism
• Depressive Symptoms and Attitudes Toward Counseling as Predictors of Biracial College Women’s Psychological Help-Seeking Behavior
• Biracial Lesbian and Bisexual Women: Understanding the Unique Aspects and Interactional Processes of Multiple Minority Identities
• Conversations, Not Categories: The Intersection of Biracial and Bisexual Identities
• Out of the Closet but Still in Hiding: Conflicts and Identity Issues for a Black-White Biracial Lesbian
• Therapeutic Considerations in Work with Biracial Girls
• Fitting In and Feeling Good: Patterns of Self-Evaluation and Psychological Stress Among Biracial Adolescent Girls
• Mixed Race Women: One More Mountain to Climb
• Index
• Reference Notes Included