Mixed Race Studies

Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective: “Colorblind?: The Contradictions of Racial Classification”

Seminar Series: Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective
University of California, Merced
California Room
5200 North Lake Rd.
Merced, California 95343
2013-09-19, 10:30 PDT (Local Time)

Michael Omi, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies
University of California, Berkeley

The dominant racial ideology of colorblindness in the United States holds that the most effective anti-racist policy, and practice, is to ignore race. Issues continue to arise, however, that present a set of contradictions for colorblind ideology by “noticing” race. On-going debates about racial data collection by the state and the “rebiologization” of race in biomedical research and DNA sampling illustrate, in different ways, the inherently problematic character of racial classification.

Michael Omi is associate professor of Ethnic Studies and the associate director of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society (HIFIS) at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the co-author of Racial Formation in the United States, a groundbreaking work that transformed how we understand the social and historical forces that give race its changing meaning over time and place. Professor Omi’s research interests include racial theory and politics, racial/ethnic classification and the census, Asians Americans and racial stratification, and racist and anti-racist social movements. He is a recipient of UC Berkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award—an honor bestowed on only 240 Berkeley faculty members since the award’s inception in 1959.

The seminar series “Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective” is organized by Tanya Golash-Boza, Nigel Hatton, and David Torres-Rouff. The event is co-sponsored by the UC Center for New Racial Studies, Sociology, and SSHA.

For more information, click here.

Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective: “Race in Motion: Traversing the Transnational Emotionscape of White Beauty in Indonesia”

Seminar Series: Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective
University of California, Merced
California Room
5200 North Lake Rd.
Merced, California 95343
2013-10-31, 10:30 PDT (Local Time)

L. Ayu Saraswati, Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies
University of Hawai‘i, Manoa

In this talk, Saraswati explores how feelings and emotions—Western constructs as well as Indian, Javanese, and Indonesian notions such as rasa and malu—contribute to and are constitutive of transnational and gendered processes of racialization. Employing “affect” theories and feminist cultural studies as a lens through which to analyze a vast range of materials, including the Old Javanese epic poem Ramayana, archival materials, magazine advertisements, commercial products, and numerous interviews with Indonesian women, she argues that it is how emotions come to be attached to certain objects and how they circulate that shape the “emotionscape” of white beauty in Indonesia.

The seminar series “Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective” is organized by Tanya Golash-Boza, Nigel Hatton, and David Torres-Rouff. The event is co-sponsored by the UC Center for New Racial Studies, Sociology, and SSHA.

For more information, click here.

Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective: “The Return of Pseudoscientific Racism? DNA Ancestry Testing, Race, and the New Eugenics Movement”

Seminar Series: Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective
University of California, Merced
California Room
5200 North Lake Rd.
Merced, California 95343
2013-10-17, 10:30 PDT (Local Time)

Paul Spickard, Professor of History
University of California, Santa Barbara

Ancestry.com wants you to swab your cheek and send them a DNA sample and a check.  In return, they promise to tell you who your remote ancestors were.  Eminent literary scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., performs the same miracle on national TV.  Modern genetic technology, they promise, can tell you intimate details about your family’s past.  Professor Spickard’s lecture examines the claims of the DNA ancestry testing industry, compares them to the assumptions and claims of the racialist pseudoscience of the late 19th and early 20th century, evaluates their validity, and suggests what may really be going on with this ancestry testing business.

Paul Spickard is Professor of History and Affiliate Professor of Black Studies, Asian American Studies, East Asian Studies, Religious Studies, and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.  He is author or editor of eighteen books and seventy-odd articles on race, migration, and related topics in the United States, the Pacific, Northeast Asia, and Europe, including:

• Global Mixed Race (in press, due 2014)
• Multiple Identities: Migrants, Ethnicity, and Membership (2013)
• Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race and Colonialism in American History and Identity (2007)
• Is Lighter Better? Skin-Tone Discrimination among Asian Americans (with Joanne Rondilla, 2007)
• Race and Nation: Ethnic Systems in the Modern World (2005)
• Racial Thinking in the United States: Uncompleted Independence (with G. Reginald Daniel, 2004)
• Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in 20th-Century America (1989)

The seminar series “Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective” is organized by Tanya Golash-Boza, Nigel Hatton, and David Torres-Rouff. The event is co-sponsored by the UC Center for New Racial Studies, Sociology, and SSHA.

For more information, click here.

Gladys Zimmerman, Mother Of George Zimmerman, Says Her Family Is ‘Proudly Afro-Peruvian,’ But Do His Black Roots Matter In Trayvon Martin Case?

Latin Times
New York, New York
2013-07-15

David Iaconangelo

As protests mount against the verdict in the trial of George Zimmerman, the question of how the public ought to see Zimmerman’s racial background continues to provoke. Many continue to view him as “white,” as he was described in initial reports. Others have turned to “white Hispanic.”  But in a September 2012 interview on Univision with Jorge Ramos, Zimmerman’s brother Robert spoke out against media characterizations of George as “white,” while George’s mother Gladys said she came from a family that was proud of its Afro-Peruvian roots…

…”In Peru we have a saying that goes, ‘If you don’t have the blood of the Incas, you’ve got the blood of the Mandingas,” which means that if you don’t have Indian blood, you’ve got black blood,” Gladys Zimmerman said on Univision. “In my family we proudly come from the Afro-Peruvian race. My sons know their uncles, they know their aunts, they know their roots and my roots are not white, my roots are Afro-Peruvian.  So they’ve been educated, not just at home as a family, at school.  My sons don’t look at color.”

According to Tanya Golash-Boza, a sociologist at the University of California and the author of “Yo Soy Negro: Blackness in Peru,” Gladys Zimmerman’s description of herself as “Afro-Peruvian” is somewhat unusual.

“The word ‘Afro-Peruvian’ is kind of a new concept in Peru,” she told the Latin Times. “The idea that some people are African-descendent, some people are indigenous-descendent, some people are Hispanic-descendent has some currency in Peru, but it hasn’t really reached down to the level of popular sentiment. Instead, people tend to be identified as black if they have visible African ancestry. If people can look at them and make a guess that their ancestors probably came from Africa—very curly hair, darker skin.”…

Read the entire article here.

Latino racial choices: the effects of skin colour and discrimination on Latinos’ and Latinas’ racial self-identifications

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 31, Issue 5, 2008
pages 899-934
DOI: 10.1080/01419870701568858

Tanya Golash-Boza, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Merced

William Darity, Jr., Arts & Sciences Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics
Duke University

Are predictions that Hispanics will make up 25 per cent of the US population in 2050 reliable? The authors of this paper argue that these and other predictions are problematic insofar as they do not account for the volatile nature of Latino racial and ethnic identifications. In this light, the authors propose a theoretical framework that can be used to predict Latinos’ and Latinas’ racial choices. This framework is tested using two distinct datasets – the 1989 Latino National Political Survey and the 2002 National Survey of Latinos. The results from the analyses of both of these surveys lend credence to the authors’ claims that Latinas’ and Latinos’ skin colour and experiences of discrimination affect whether people from Latin America and their descendants who live in the US will choose to identify racially as black, white or Latina/o.

Read or purchase the article here.

Does Whitening Happen? Distinguishing between Race and Color Labels in an African-Descended Community in Peru

Social Problems
Volume 57, Number 1 (February 2010)
pages 138-156
DOI: 10.1525/sp.2010.57.1.138

Tanya Golash-Boza, Professor of Sociology and American Studies
Kansas University

This article explores how race and color labels are used to describe people in an Afro-Peruvian community. This article is based on analyses of 88 interviews and 18 months of fieldwork in an African-descended community in Peru. The analyses of these data reveal that, if we consider race and color to be conceptually distinct, there is no “mulatto escape hatch,” no social or cultural whitening, and no continuum of racial categories in the black Peruvian community under study. This article considers the implications of drawing a conceptual distinction between race and color for research on racial classifications in Latin America.

Read the entire article here.