Mixed Race Studies

Color Struck: Essays on Race and Ethnicity in Global Perspective

University Press of America
April 2010
516 pages
Paper ISBN: 0-7618-5064-3 / 978-0-7618-5064-9
Electronic ISBN: 0-7618-5092-9 / 978-0-7618-5092-2

Edited by

Julius O. Adekunle, Professor of History
Monmouth University, West Long Branch, New Jersey

Hettie V. Williams, Lecturer, African American History
Department of History and Anthropology
Monmouth University, West Long Branch, New Jersey

Color Struck: Essays of Race and Ethnicity in Global Perspective is a compilation of expositions on race and ethnicity, written from multiple disciplinary approaches including history, sociology, women’s studies, and anthropology. This book is organized around a topical, chronological framework and is divided into three sections, beginning with the earliest times to the contemporary world. The term “race” has nearly become synonymous with the word “ethnicity,” given the most recent findings in the study of human genetics that have led to the mapping of human DNA. Color Struck attempts to answer questions and provide scholarly insight into issues related to race and ethnicity.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction

Part 1: The First Complex Societies to Modern Times

1. Race, Science, and Human Origins in Africa
Julius O. Adekunle

2. Race and the Rise of the Swahili Culture
Julius O. Adekunle

3. ‘Caste’-[ing] Gender: Caste and Patriarchy in Ancient Hindu Jurisprudence
Indira Jalli

4. Comparative Race and Slavery in Islam, Judaism, and Christianity: Texts, Practices, and Current Implications
Magid Shihade

5. The Dark Craven Jew: Race and Religion in Medieval Europe
James M. Thomas

6. Growth of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Racial Slavery in the New World
Kwaku Osei Tutu

7. The Yellow Lady: Mulatto Women in the Suriname Plantocracy
Hilde Neus

Part 2: Race and Mixed Race in the Americas

8. Critical Mixed Race Studies: New Approaches to Resistance and Social Justice
Andrew Jolivétte

9. Militant Multiraciality: Rejecting Race and Rejecting the Conveniences of Complicity
Rainier Spencer

10. Whiteness Reconstructed: Multiracial Identity as a Category of “New White”
Kerry Ann Rockquemore and David L. Brunsma

11. Conversations in Black and White: The Limitations of Binary Thinking About Race in America
Johanna E. Foster

12. The Necessity of a Multiracial Category in a Race-Conscious Society
Francis Wardle

13. Mixed Race Terminologies in the Americas: Globalizing the Creole in the Twenty First Century
DeMond S. Miller, Jason D. Rivera, and Joel C. Telin

14. Examining the Regional and Multigenerational Context of Creole and American Indian Identity
Andrew Jolivétte

15. Race, Class, and Power: The Politics of Multiraciality in Brazil
G. Reginald Daniel and Gary L. Haddow

16. All Mixed Up: A New Racial Commonsense in Global Perspective
G. Reginald Daniel and Gary L. Haddow

Part 3: Race, Ethnicity, and Conflict in Contemporary Societies

17. Black No More: African Americans and the ‘New’ Race Science
Hettie V. Williams

18. Contesting Identities of Color: African Female Immigrants in the Americas
Philomina Okeke-Ihejirika

19. Burdened Intersections: Black Women and Race, Gender, and Class
Marsha J. Tyson Darling

20. Ethnic Conflicts in the Middle East: A Comparative Analysis of Communal Violence within the Matrix of the Colonial Legacy, Globalization, and Global Stability
Magid Shihade

21. Ethnic Identity in China: The Politics of Cultural Difference
Dru C. Gladney

22. Shangri-la has Forsaken Us: China’s Ethnic Minorities, Identity, and Government Repression
Reza Hasmath

23. The Russian/Chechen Conflict and It’s Consequences
Mariana Tepfenhart

Contributors
Index

Diversity That Matters: A Commitment to Social Justice

CCCC: Supporting and promoting the teaching and study of college composition and communication
2009-06-04

Annette Harris Powell, Assistant Professor of English
Bellarmine University

I teach at a university with a mission grounded in the Catholic Intellectual tradition of faith and reason and focused on the examined life as a way to encourage students to be discerning. We also teach students to become critically engaged in social justice issues that support global sustainability as it embraces “cross-cultural and inter-faith awareness and diversity.” Yet, I frequently get the following student responses to readings:

“I really can’t relate to this experience; it’s very different.”
“These kinds of things don’t really happen here.” Or,
“I don’t really understand why they live like this.”

Commentary such as this is nothing new to me—majority students, in particular, have always been somewhat resistant when asked to reflect on the limits of their own experiences. They continue to be skeptical of, or indifferent to diversity and multiculturalism. This view is doubly complicated by the apparent shifting dynamics of race in this age of “change.” There is growing popular discourse about the imminence of a post-race era. Increasing numbers of both majority students and students of color are now more resistant to “diversity talk,” often asserting that they see no need in dredging up history—“it’s a different day.” The civil rights movement was successful—there is so much more access today…

…Though it’s difficult to say with certainty what accounts for the above responses, economic and class demographics are, I suspect, one indicator. Recently, some scholars (See Jared Sexton’s Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism and Catherine R. Squires’s Dispatches From the Color Line: The Press and Multiracial America) have critiqued multiracialism and its attendant ambiguity as “bridges between the races.” Squires argues that “this ambiguity is about exoticism and intrigue, providing opportunities for consumers to fantasize and speculate about the Other with no expectations of critical consideration of power and racial categories.” This re-positioning of race by many Americans contributes to the conception of race as fluid and neutral. This view is acontextual and ahistorical—race and its underlying societal meaning can be manipulated so that “choice” (the decision to belong/not belong, to be fluid, to move in/out) will maintain the current paradigm of inequality. In the May 29, 2009 issue of The Chronicle Review, Rainier Spencer, a professor of anthropology argues that “what popular wisdom tells us is the supposed twilight of how Americans have thought about race is merely a minor tweaking of the same old racial hierarchy that has kept African-Americans at the bottom of our paradigm since its very inception. Multiracial ideology simply represents the latest means of facilitating and upholding that hierarchy—while claiming quite disingenuously to be doing the opposite” (B5). I would suggest that students and scholars in the field question this facile conception of race…

Read the entire article here.

AAS 436–Politics of Racial Ambiguity
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Fall 2010

Rainier Spencer, Professor and Director, Afro-American Studies Program

Interdisciplinary investigation of contemporary American black/white multiracial identities, including analyses and assessments of the “multiracial identity movement” in the United States.

Multiracial Identity [Movie] to be screened at the  Portland, Maine International Film Festival

Portland, Maine International Film Festival
Saturday, 2010-08-21, 12:00 – 13:30 EDT (Local Time)
Space Gallery
538 Congress Street, Portland, Maine 04101
Phone: 207.828.5600

Year: 2010
Director: Brian Chinhema
Writer: Brian Chinhema
Producer: Brian Chinhema (Abacus Production)
Running Time: 01:22:00

Multiracial people are the fastest growing demographic in America, yet there is no officially political recognition for mixed-race people. Multiracial Identity examines what it means to be multiracial in America and explores the social, political, and religious impact of the multiracial movement.

The film is produced and directed by Brian Chinhema and features commentary from noted scholars, Rainier Spencer, Naomi Zack, Aliya Saperstein, Aaron Gullickson, Susan J. Hayflick and Pastor Randall Sanford.

Even discussing ‘angry black man’ stereotype provokes anger

CNN
2010-06-16

John Blake

(CNN) — Here are some sound bites from the post-racial era:

“The long legged Mac Daddy in the White House is angry this morning. Seems to me we should change the name to the Black House for the next few years. Your news organization obviously is very racist.”

And:

“I don’t care what anyone says. If Obama takes to heart the calls for anger in this crisis all bets are off! White America will dump him right on his black a#s.”

Last week, CNN published an article entitled “Why Obama doesn’t dare become the ‘angry black man’ ” after critics complained that President Obama had not displayed enough anger in response to the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster.

The article quoted scholars on race relations who said many white Americans would be unsettled by Obama losing his temper because he would evoke the stereotype of the angry African-American man.

…The phrase comes as no surprise to Rainier Spencer, director of Afro-American Studies Program at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas.

Spencer said the angry black man stereotype has its origins in slavery. During slavery, white men feared black men like Nat Turner who resisted slavery. They were the black men who led slave insurrections and were sold further South. They were called Bucks.

“There’s the image of the minstrel, the happy, silly Negro who is fun to watch and laugh at. But the other one—the Buck—is the one you have to be careful about,” Spencer said.

The angry black man stereotype persisted after the end of slavery, Spencer said. Black militants in the civil rights movement; today’s black male rap artists—all are equated with some variation of the angry black man, Spencer said.

But Spencer said the angry black man stereotype doesn’t have the bite it once had. Certain black male public figures—Obama, Colin Powell—can display anger…

Why do we have to talk so much about race?

But who says a black man is running the country?

Some readers got miffed because CNN identified Obama as a black president. He’s biracial, they say.

“CNN get your facts straight—he is an angry half-black man! CNN you are a bunch of idiot race-baiters.”

Another:

“Maybe the 50 percent white part of him keeps the 50 percent angry black part calm and collected and on an even keel. Hmmm, that might be worthy of a university study! Could be ground-breaking science here! I’ll bet the guvment’ would even pay for it!”

Spencer, the race scholar from UNLV, said that Obama has already made his identity choice. He identified himself as black on his census form. He is perceived and accepted as black my most African-Americans.

Obama’s racial background doesn’t make him unlike most blacks; it makes him similar to most blacks, Spencer said.

Spencer, who is writing a book on mixed race, said an estimated 90 percent of African-Americans have white ancestors, including Michelle Obama, the first lady.

“It doesn’t make sense to talk about mixed race unless you’re going to include all 30 million African-Americans,” said Spencer, author of the upcoming book, “Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix.”…

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial Identity [Movie], World Premiere Screening

Politics on Film 2010 Festival
Saturday, 2010-05-08, 13:30 EDT (Local Time)
E Street Cinema (Purchase tickets on-line here.)
555 11th Street, NW
Washington, DC

Year: 2010
Director: Brian Chinhema
Writer: Brian Chinhema
Producer: Brian Chinhema (Abacus Production)
Running Time: 01:22:00

Multiracial people are the fastest growing demographic in America, yet there is no officially political recognition for mixed-race people. Multiracial Identity examines what it means to be multiracial in America and explores the social, political, and religious impact of the multiracial movement.

The film is produced and directed by Brian Chinhema and features commentary from noted scholars, Rainier Spencer, Naomi Zack, Aliya Saperstein, Aaron Gullickson, Susan J. Hayflick and Pastor Randall Sanford. 

For more information, click here.  Purchase tickets on-line here.

Who Counts & Who’s Counting? 38th Annual Conference National Association for Ethnic Studies Conference

National Association for Ethnic Studies, Inc.
2010-04-08 through 2010-04-10
L’Enfant Plaza Hotel
Washington, D.C.

Dr. Larry Shinagawa, NAES 2010 Conference Chair

Our theme of “Who Counts and Who’s Counting” signals the importance of Washington, D.C. as a physical, cultural, and social nexus for policy decisions that will shape the 21st Century. With the 2010 Census signaling the dramatic changes that are affecting all ethnic and racial communities in the United States, who is doing the counting and how we construct the discourse and policies of who counts will be central to the future of all residents of the United States and will shape global relations around the world. We hope you will participate in this important dialogue; welcome to NAES 2010 in Washington, D.C.!

A paritial tenative program is below (All times are local EDT):

Session II – Thursday 10:30 – 10:45
Whiteness studies
Heidi Cooper, Emily Drew, Zaid Mahir

Racial classifications and stereotypes
Jamelia Bastien, Bonazzo Claude, Jacco van Sterkenburg

Session III – Thursday 13:30 – 14:45
Black identities
Janet Awokoya, Anne Brubaker, Yanyi Djamba, Mizaba Abedi

Defining Race
Tiffany King, Arturo Nunez, Maisha Wester

Session IV – Thursday 15:00 – 16:15
Beyond the binary of race
Kaysha Corinealdi, José Luis Morín, Jodie Roure

Session IX – Saturday 09:00 – 10:15
European Identities
Daniel Carawan, Jon Keljik, Elizabeth Onasch, Samantha Pockele

The race in “mixed” race? Reiterations of power and identity
Sue-Je Gage, Rainier Spencer, Nicole Truesdell

Review: “Black Gal Swing”: Color, Class, and Category in Globalized Culture [Review of works by Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, Arthur K. Spears, and Rainier Spencer]

American Anthropologist
Volume 103, Issue 1 (March 2001)
pages 208-211
DOI: 10.1525/aa.2001.103.1.208

Fred J. Hay, Professor and Librarian of the W.L. Eury Appalachian Collection Library
Appalachian State University

• Scattered Belongings: Cultural Paradoxes of “Race,” Nation and Gender. Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe. New York: Routledge, 1999. 221 pp.
• Race and Ideology: Language, Symbolism, and Popular Culture. Arthur K. Spears, ed. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1999. 242 pp.
• Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States. Rainier Spencer. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999. 222 pp.

(Son Bonds) Now a yellow gal will kiss you. she will kiss you awful sweet—brownskin gal kiss the same.
(John Estes) What do a black gal do?
(Son Bonds:) But a black gal spit ‘bacco juice, spew snuff all on your lips—oh, loving you just the same.

“Black Gal Swing” Delta Boys, 1941

This lyric speaks to the multiple concerns and issues addressed in these three books. In a few short lines, it depicts and satirizes social distinctions based on phenotype. it mocks the dominant economic class’s insistence on the value of whiteness, it rejects these constructs and in addition flaunts (sociologists Odum and Johnson referred to the blues as “the superlative of the repulsive [Odum and Johnson 1925:166]) its defiance of while American capitalist cultural hegemony. It is a multivocalic, nuanced, and subversive manifesto of cultural affirmation by and for those most reviled, oppressed, and economically deprived. Also, it is brutally honest and humorous. Unfortunately, it is rare for scholarly writing to achieve this level of sophistication or this degree of conciseness.

Ifekwunigwe’s Scattered Belongings (“mixed race” people in England) and Spencer’s Spurious Issues (“mixed race” people in the United States) are revised dissertations (Berkeley and Emory, respectively). Spears’s edited volume Race and Ideology is a collection of essays, by nine scholars, each examining an aspect of how racism is “interconnected and maintained” through “language, symbolism and popular culture” (back chut blurb). Ifekwunigwe, Spencer, and Spears agree on one thing: “race” is not a scientifically valid concept and should be discarded. But on how to achieve the goal of a deracialized social order, and on what intermediate steps should be taken to facilitate progress to that goal, there is little agreement among the three.

Spencer, of white German maternity and black American paternity, grew up in a predominantly black neighborhood in Queens. Ifekwunigwe, of British and Caribbean maternity and Nigerian paternity, was born in Nigeria moved to England when quite young, and then, at the age of ten, moved to “upper middle-class Jewish West Los Angeles” (p. 35). Both authors include family pictures emphasizing the wide range of color and other “racial” traits manifested in their families.

A self-proclaimed “antiracialist” and “antiracial advocate.” Spencer attacks multiracialism on the grounds that biological race does not exist and “social” race—based as it is on outdated concepts of scientific racism and popular readings of phenotype—is also spurious. Spencer argues that without race there would be no racism and that multiracialism is based on the false race concept supporting the hegemonic system of white supremacy. Furthermore, as Spencer notes, if race really existed, most, if not all, Americans would be multiracial.

Spencer’s is a straightforward presentation in which he reconstructs the history of federal racial classification and examines its purpose. He analyzes the ideology and goals of the multiracial movement in the United States, especially of the groups Project Race and the Association of Multiethnic Americans. (Spencer has been a prominent figure in multiracial circles through his column “Spurious Issues” regularly featured in InterRace magazine.) The bottom line is that Spencer is opposed to classifying people by race and adamantly against adding a new category of mixed or multi-race to the federal census. With regret, he acknowledges that for purposes of monitoring the enforcement of civil rights legislation—we must continue to use. for the present, the federal government’s existing racial categories.

Spencer’s argument against muluracialism is sound and well-articulated but, perhaps because of his commitment to antiracialist ideology, Spencer downplays issues of class: he does not acknowledge that the majority of the people in the multirace movement are middle class and committed to upward social mobility. He also downplays Project Race’s denial of and desire to escape from, blackness; ignores recent revitalization movements among what were once disdainfully referred to as “little races” and “tri-racial isolates” (especially the new Melungeon pride crusade); and fails to address issues related to individuals who share a “racial” culture different from their “race” (e.g., R&B legend Johnny Otis, culturally black son of Greek immigrants)…

Read or purchase the article here.

Dr. Rainier Spencer Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

Mixed Chicks Chat (The only live weekly show about being racially and culturally mixed.  Also, founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival)
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #131 – Dr. Rainier Spencer
Wednesday, 2009-12-09  22:00Z

Rainier Spencer, Director and Professor of Afro-American Studies; Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Rainier Spencer is professor and director of Afro-American Studies at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. He has published Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States (Westview, 1999) and Challenging Multiracial Identity (Lynne Rienner, 2006), as well as numerous book chapters and journal articles on multiracial identity.  Based on a philosophical platform of racial skepticism, his work focuses on the uses of biological race and hypodescent by the American Multiracial Identity Movement, arguing that the movement supports rather than deconstructs biological race.

Listen to the episode here. Download the episode here.

Book Review: Spencer, R. (1999). Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States: Boulder, CO: Westview. Spencer, R. (2006). Challenging Multiracial ldentity. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner

Journal of Black Studies
Volume 38, Number 4 (March 2008)
pages 679-683
DOI: 10.1177/0021934706296761

Lewis R. Gordon, Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy, Director of the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought and Director of the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies
Temple University

Rainier Spencer(1999). Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States.
Boulder, CO: Westview.

Rainier Spencer (2006). Challenging Multiracial ldentity.
Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.

These two books have achieved for Rainier Spencer an iconoclastic place in mixed-race studies, which is a wonderful development for a genuine specialist in critical mixedness studies. His argument, in a nutshell, is that mixedrace and multiracial studies suffer from a contradictory set of aims. On one hand, they challenge the tenability of race and its impact on American society. On the other, they present a case for their inclusion in the American racial order. Spencer argues that the projects are not compatible, but even if they were so, there are other contradictions at the heart of the multiracial formulations of mixture offered by many scholars in the field. He points out, as I too have pointed out in my book Her Majesty’s Other Children (1997), that discussions that examine Black-White mixture often fail to acknowledge the already mixed dimension of African American people. As Spencer correctly points out in Challenging Multiracial Identity, by posing mixture against Black Americans, such advocates are in fact posing multiraciality against multiraciality.  In effect, they would have to create a conception of “purity” that erases mixture within one group as the basis of determining mixture for a preferred group. There are also logical problems of descent, which make in effect an offspring genetically connected to a parent in which she or he is considered ontologically different from. Spencer offers historically informed theoretical challenges to the field by exemplifying consistency in his constructivism through his constantly reminding the reader that just as social identities come into being, they can also go out of being. What, in other words, will be the organization of human identities in the future will be a function of the kinds of critical questions and social and political conditions that come to bear on their meaning and being. In this sense, he is building upon what Frantz Fanon [other bio], in Black Skin, White Masks (1967) called sociogenesis; that is, about how the social world produces identities…

Read the entire review here.