Mixed Race Studies

“Well, It Is Because He’s Black”: A Critical Analysis of the Black President in Film and Television

Bowling Green State University
August 2011
183 pages

Phillip Lamarr Cunningham

Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

With the election of the United States’ first black president Barack Obama, scholars have begun to examine the myriad of ways Obama has been represented in popular culture. However, before Obama’s election, a black American president had already appeared in popular culture, especially in comedic and sci-fi/disaster films and television series. Thus far, scholars have tread lightly on fictional black presidents in popular culture; however, those who have tend to suggest that these presidents—and the apparent unimportance of their race in these films—are evidence of the post-racial nature of these texts.
 
However, this dissertation argues the contrary. This study’s contention is that, though the black president appears in films and televisions series in which his presidency is presented as evidence of a post-racial America, he actually fails to transcend race. Instead, these black cinematic presidents reaffirm race’s primacy in American culture through consistent portrayals and continued involvement in comedies and disasters. In order to support these assertions, this study first constructs a critical history of the fears of a black presidency, tracing those fears from this nation’s formative years to the present. This history is followed by textual analyses of those films and television series featuring a black president, with an emphasis on showing how the narratives and codes within these films reflect those historic fears.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• INTRODUCTION
  • Filling the Void: Situating the Black President in Film Studies
• CHAPTER I: THE THING SO GREATLY FEARED: HISTORICIZING FEARS OF A BLACK PRESIDENCY
  • Harding, Jefferson, and Lincoln: White Presidents as the First “Black” Presidents
  • Fear of a Black Republic
  • From Impossible to Improbable
  • Jesse Jackson and the Changing Face of Politics
  • Powell for President
  • Return of the Black Cinematic President
• CHAPTER II: BEING BLACK MATTERS: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF THE MAN
  • The Man and the Apparently Declining Significance of Whiteness and Racism
  • Black Militancy as Barrier to Racial Harmony
  • Douglas Dilman: “A Well-Dressed Rebuttal to the Militants”
• CHAPTER III: THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT: BLACK CINEMATIC PRESIDENTS IN CRISIS
  • Fear of a Black President: The Birth of a Nation as Precursor
  • From Deep Impact to 2012: The Black President in Crisis
  • Modern Day Ben Camerons: White Heroes in Black Presidential Films
• CHAPTER IV: THIS COUNTRY IS UPSIDE DOWN! THE ABSURD BLACK CINEMATIC PRESIDENT
  • Not Exactly Ideal Presidents: Rufus Jones for President and Idiocracy
  • “That Ain’t Right”: Black Cinematic Presidents and the Act of “Laughing Mad”
• EPILOGUE: POLITICS AS USUAL: BLACK CINEMATIC PRESIDENTS IN THE OBAMA AGE
• WORKS CITED

Read the entire dissertation here.

Racial/Ethnic Variation in Parenting Styles: The Experience of Multiracial Adolescents

Bowling Green State University
December 2011
57 pages

Amanda N. House

According to the 2009 American Community Survey, 2.4% of the U.S. population consists of individuals who identify as two or more races, or multiracial. Nearly half of this estimate captures children under the age of 18, and the multiracial population continues to grow. There is previous literature on racial identification and friendship networks among multiracials, though little attention has been paid to the family experiences of multiracial children and adolescents. Adolescence is often a difficult life stage, and multiracial adolescents may face more adversity than monoracial adolescents with added identity concerns. Parents may react to these unique challenges by adjusting their parenting behaviors. Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (n = 13,395), the present study examines parenting behaviors and parenting styles among monoracial and multiracial adolescents and extends this research by further dissecting the multiracial group. Results show that among levels of parental warmth, there are no significant differences between monoracial and multiracial adolescents. However, on average, Black adolescents report higher levels of parental control than multiracial adolescents. Among multiracial adolescents, no significant differences were found between multiracial White and multiracial non-White adolescents, or between multiracial Black and multiracial non-Black adolescents, with respect to levels of parental warmth or parental control. Results also show that Asian adolescents are more likely than multiracial adolescents to experience authoritarian parenting than to experience authoritative parenting. Among the multiracial group, multiracial White adolescents are more likely than multiracial non-White adolescents to experience neglectful parenting than to experience authoritative parenting. No significant racial differences were found between multiracial Black and multiracial non-Black adolescents with respect to parenting styles.

Read the entire dissertation here.

The Military Camptown in Retrospect: Multiracial Korean American Subject Formation Along the Black-White Binary

Bowling Green State University
December 2007
116 pages

Perry Dal-nim Miller

Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

This thesis applies theoretical approaches from the sociology of literature and Asian Americanist critique to a study of two novels by multiracial Korean American authors. I investigate themes of multiracial identity and consumption in Heinz Insu Fenkl’s Memories of My Ghost Brother and Nora Okja Keller’s Fox Girl, both set in the 1960’s and 1970’s gijichon or military camptown geography, recreational institutions established around U.S. military installations in the Republic of Korea. I trace the literary production of Korean American subjectivity along a socially constructed dichotomy of blackness and whiteness, examining the novels’ representations of cross-racial interactions in a camptown economy based on the militarized sexual labor of working-class Korean women. I conclude that Black-White binarisms are reproduced in the gijichon through the consumption practices of both American military personnel and Korean gijichon workers, and that retrospective fictional accounts of gijichon multiraciality signal a shift in artistic, scholarly, and popular conceptualizations of Korean American and Asian American group identities.

Table of Contents

• CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER II. SOCIOLOGY OF ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE
• CHAPTER III. WRITING THE MULTIRACIAL SELF: FENKL’S MEMORIES OF MY GHOST BROTHER
• CHAPTER IV. HISTORICAL FICTIONALIZATIONS OF THE GIJICHON: KELLER’S FOX GIRL
• CHAPTER V. CONCLUSION
• WORKS CITED
• APPENDIX A. CHAPTER SYNOPSES OF MEMORIES
• APPENDIX B. CHAPTER SYNOPSES OF FOX GIRL

W.E.B. Du Bois’ oft-quoted problem for the twentieth-century was that of the color line: of racial classification and stratification policed and reproduced by the nation-state, cultural institutions, and hegemonized subjects within these institutions.1 The 2000 U.S. Census form revised racial demarcations to accommodate multiracial self-identification. By offering respondents the option of multiple selections from the categories “White, Black, Asian, some other race, American Indian, and Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander,” the form allowed 6.8 million of 281.4 million respondents to identify themselves as multiracial. Though multiraciality is now institutionally recognized, the individual must still choose from finite combinations of racial categories determined by the state. Given the centuries-old problem of the color line in the United States, what are the implications of the increased public presence of multiracial subjectivity? In contemporaneous fictional works by and about multiracial subjects, what correspondences exist to the state’s regulation of race and multi-race?

In the twenty-first century, the racialization of subjects in and beyond the United States continues to form the basis for structures of social and economic inequality. Omi and Winant define race as “a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies” and racial formation as “the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed.” The significant body of scholarship on the social fallout of racial hierarchy continues to focus primarily on the socio-political binary constructions of blackness and whiteness. This binary is key to understanding the existing historical context for racialized cross-group interaction in the U.S. However, the centrality of the Black-White binary in academic discourses also has the unfortunate consequence of marginalizing other racial groups and actors in the present racial state. Paradigms of race that fail to consider interstices beyond this primary binary thereby compromise the underlying anti-racist project of race scholarship itself. The anti-racist project is rendered incapable of addressing the fault lines and politics of division formed among non-white ethnic groups in the United States. In addition, multiculturalist discourses tend toward triumphalist celebrations of cultural diversity in a Post Civil-Rights Era and ignore the structural and institutional-level consequences of racial difference. The elision of inter- and intra-group relations beyond Black-White functions to conserve discourses, cultural practices, and social and economic processes that maintain the centrality and dominance of whiteness. As Omi and  Winant point out,

As much as the politicians or mainstream media, academic analyses reproduce this distorted model of race [racial dichotomizing] as a largely black-white dichotomy… Too often, today as in the past, when scholars and journalists talk about race relations, they mean relations between African Americans and whites.

The 1990s witnessed increased media and academic attention to the positioning of other ethnic groups in the American racial construct. Omi and Winant suggest a new scenario of racial actors coming into prominence nationally in the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, where “Koreans, African Americans, and Chicanos [were both] victims and victimizers.” In discourses on race in the United States, the model minority is that group poised (or posed) at the threshold separating racial otherness from whiteness. Touted as the apex of economic and assimilationist success to which other minoritized groups could and should aspire, the model minority figure is ostensible evidence of an egalitarian, equal-opportunity society. At the same time, it diverts awareness from the actuality of race-class articulated stratifications that restrict opportunity to those already privileged by class and whiteness. Today Asians in the United States are positioned in that discursive liminality, i.e. the model minority position.

Complex negotiations occur among racialization, systemic, overt, and covert racial discrimination, sedimented prejudice, and conflicting tides of assimilation and the perpetuation of Asian ethnic identities. This thesis analyzes the fiction of two multiracial Korean American writers who explore cross-racial dynamics while departing from model minoritization mythologies. My primary question is how this particular construction of Asian American ethnic subjectivity, that is, the multiracial Korean American, perpetuates Black-White binarisms. In this section, I review pertinent literatures—the historical and social contexts of Asian American literature and of multiracial identity. In both Heinz Insu Fenkl’s Memories of My Ghost Brother and Nora Okja Keller’s Fox Girl, the Black-White binary is manifest in multiracial spaces and bodies and consumption practices. Drawing on the established significance of biography in delineating Asian American social margins, I present one understanding of the Black-White binary as a factor in multiracial Asian American subjectivity. Fenkl and Keller’s novels are fictionalized retrospective accounts of life in recreational districts or gijichon (military camptowns) around U.S. military installations in Korea during the 1960’s and 1970’s. As such, these novels demonstrate the significance of Yellow-Black-White transracial interaction and consumption in national hegemonies.

I will first explain some of the discourse around Asian American as a signifier and panethnic rubric. Espiritu characterizes Asian American panethnicity as an entity coalescing in terms of social movements and political initiatives during and after the 1960’s in an “organizational dimension;” that is, the political and social structures through which Asian American-ness itself is manifested. Historically, the panethnic Asian American movement has fallen far short of encompassing all ethnicities and class backgrounds within the Asian rubric; in addition, the movement has tended to replicate patriarchal structures extant in the larger American culture. According to Yen Le Espiritu, the rubric of “Asian American” not only encompasses a multiplicity of ethnicities, but describes “a highly contested terrain on which Asian American of different racial, cultural, and class backgrounds merge and clash over terms of inclusion.” My thesis locates the works of Fenkl and Keller, and the racially hybridized subjectivities they depict, along this terrain of contestation. Through the implication of the Black-White binary in constructions of multiracial Korean American identity, it is possible to understand the significance of existing race hierarchies on the politics of inclusion and exclusion in Asian American collective and group identities…

Read the entire thesis here.

I’ve got a Story to Tell: Critical Race Theory, Whiteness and Narrative Constructions of Racial and Ethnic Census Categories

Bowling Green State University
December 2010
245 pages

Candice J. LeFlore-Muñoz

A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

This study examines the embedded nature of whiteness in the use of racial and ethnic categories on U.S. census forms. Specifically, this study focuses on people’s perceptions of racial and ethnic categories, how those categories have been historically used on U.S. census forms, and the relationship between this discourse on racial and ethnic categories and elements of whiteness. Like (Nobles, 2000), in this study, I argue that the rhetorical construction of race and ethnicity on census forms is not a trivial matter since the way that we structure these words and categories significantly influences how we understand them. Thus, this study practices critical rhetoric (McKerrow, 1989) and employs the use of critical race theory (Delgado & Stefanic, 2001) to investigate the relationship between the 20 counter narratives and the larger master narrative about racial and ethnic categorization in this country. Throughout this dissertation, I use Omi and Winant’s (1994) racial formation and racial projects to highlight several themes that emerge in the master narrative and counter narratives. By focusing on these themes, this analysis explores past, present, and future racial projects that may emerge in relation to the use of racial and ethnic categories on census forms and elements of whiteness.

Table of Contents

• INTRODUCTION
  • Unveiling Whiteness in Discourse
  • Chapter Breakdown
• CHAPTER ONE: EXPLORING RACE AND ETHNICITY THROUGH THE LENS OF WHITENESS
  • Muddled Memories of a Multiracial Past
  • Situating Race and Ethnicity within Whiteness Studies and Critical Rhetoric
  • Whiteness Studies: An Overview of Scholarship
• CHAPTER TWO: PAST TO PRESENT – TRACES OF RACIAL AND ETHNIC CATEGORIZATION
  • Early Racial Classification Systems
  • Race as a Biological Construction
  • Race as a Social Construction
  • Race, Power, and Dominance
• CHAPTER THREE: RACE, ETHNCIITY, AND THE U.S. CENSUS
  • Upholding Whiteness: Racial and Ethnic Classification on the U.S. Census
  • Self-Identification and Official Racial and Ethnic Categories
  • Check ONE Box: Monoracial Ideology and the U.S. Census
  • Hypodescent Racial Projects and Census Classification
  • Maintaining the Rigid Color Line: Anti-Miscegenation Laws and the U.S. Census
  • Free White Persons: Intersections of Citizenship, Whiteness, and the Census
  • Mark One or More: Census 2000
• CHAPTER FOUR: CRT AND THE PRACTICE OF A CRITICAL RHETORIC
  • Critical Race Theory (CRT)
  • Critical Rhetoric
  • Dismantling Power: Complimentary Aspects of Critical Rhetoric and CRT
  • Telling Whose Stories: Data Collection and Study Design
• CHAPTER FIVE: THE MASTER NARRATIVE
  • Box Checking and Socialization
  • Box Checking and Self-Identity/Self-Esteem
  • Defining Race and Ethnicity
  • Well What are You? Stereotyping, Social Rules, and Racial/Ethnic Categories
• CHAPTER SIX: COUNTER NARRATIVES, CATEGORIES, AND PRIVILEGE: HOW WHITENESS WORKS WITH BOX CHECKING
  • Privilege, Passing, and Box Checking
    • The White Category and Privilege
    • Minority Categories and Privilege
  • Passing for Privilege
    • Skin Color and Privilege
• CHAPTER SEVEN: SHATTERING THE PAST: CRACKS IN THE FOUNDATION OF THE MASTER NARRATIVE
  • What Race What Space?
  • Boxes Not Inclusive
    • Asian Groups – No Hyphen American
    • Cultural and National Identity
    • Boxes Not Inclusive for Whites
    • Boxes Not Inclusive for Latinos
  • Wording & the Use of Negro
• CHAPTER EIGHT: PRESERVING AND DISMANTLING THE AUTHORITY OF WHITENESS
  • Self-Identification, Public Policy, and Civil Rights Legislation
  • The Black/White Binary and Some Other Race
  • Possibilities for Change
    • Color Blindness
    • Honorary Whites and Collective Blacks
    • White Minority or White Majority?
  • Whiteness Deconstructed
    • Boxes Not Inclusive
  • Considerations for the Future
  • What Can Reasonably be Done?
    • Reducing Skepticism & Promoting Intersectionality
    • Limitations & Future Research
• REFERENCES
• APPENDIX A: LIST OF STUDY PARTICIPANTS
• APPENDIX B: RECRUITMENT FLYER
• APPENDIX C: CONSENT FORM
• APPENDIX D: NARRATIVE PROMPT
• APPENDIX E: CENSUS QUESTIONS HANDOUT
• APPENDIX F: INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

Introduction

Wondering…
1st grade: Wondering why my mom calls my light-skinned aunt Black, when I think she looks more White. 3rd grade: Wondering why Black and Native American are not considered mixed… wondering why my father is called Black when he is Native American too…

Acknowledging and Believing…
6th grade: Mutually acknowledging with one of my best friends from 1st grade (who is a White- appearing blond-haired, blue-eyed Native American boy) that we shouldn’t hang around each other because now the kids at school tend to hang out with the people who look like them and we are tired of getting teased. Middle school: Believing the one-drop rule… or that if you are anything mixed with Black, you are just Black. High school: Acknowledging that there are five “official” racial and ethnic categories—White, Black, Asian, Native American, and Latino. Knowing that White always comes first, but not fully understanding why… wondering why it is so easy for me to just say the five categories when there are other racial and ethnic categories out there.

Wondering and Questioning…
College: Being happy about the new Black golfer Tiger Woods even though he doesn’t describe himself as Black, but as multiracial. Wondering why he has to just be Black? Grad School: Being skeptical about all of the media referring to the new president (Barack Obama) as the first Black president… again because he is multiracial… then realizing that he refers to himself as Black. Questioning the very racial and ethnic categories that have framed so much of my life.

Since the first census in 1790, the United States has been a country that is obsessed with labels and the use of racial and ethnic categories. These labels have become a fundamental part of how individuals view the world, and they play a significant role in how reality is constructed. Whether a person identifies as Black or African American, Latina or Hispanic, Asian or Chinese American, these words have roots of significance far beyond the words that appear on the page. These labels carry their historical significance with them every time they are uttered, written, or seen on a page. Thus, given the fact that racial and ethnic labels enjoy widespread use, these terms are important in society and they become a central factor in how individuals craft their identity (Yanow, 2003)….

…Likewise, I also acknowledge the fact that my personal experiences with race and ethnicity have been undoubtedly shaped by their discursive constructions and the embedded nature of whiteness in our language system. As Fanon (1967) points out, “a man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language” (p. 18). In their discussion of the importance of whiteness studies to rhetoric and composition studies, Kennedy, Middleton, and Ratcliff (2005) also highlight this when they point out that whiteness is prevalent in the ways in which it socializes how we talk about groups of people through our racially-inflected language. This reminds me of Lorde‟s (1984) warning that “the master‟s tools will never dismantle the master‟s house” (p. 112).

As a result, I feel that it is necessary to briefly address the problematic nature of using a language system which is inherently shaped by whiteness, while simultaneously maintaining the ultimate goal of trying to deconstruct it. Thus, while I do not systematically place words like race and ethnicity in quotation marks throughout this dissertation, I envision them to be this way in order to serve as a reminder of their socially constructed status and their historical connection to notions of White superiority and pseudo-scientific research. Likewise, this also applies to my use of multiracial and mixed race since they are premised on the idea that pure, distinct racial groups exist that can be mixed and result in multiracial people. Furthermore, I also acknowledge the problematic nature of using words like White, non-White, people of color, other, minority and majority since the use of these terms rhetorically re-centers whiteness and demonstrates how notions of whiteness are normalized in the current language system. Thus, despite my use of people of color, I also envision White as a color even as I search for ways in which to talk about non-White people without re-centering whiteness…

Read the entire dissertation here.