Mixed Race Studies

Donna Nicol: An Agent of Change for Africana Studies

CSUDH Campus News Center
California State University, Dominguez Hills
Carson, California
2018-03-12

Donna Nicol, associate professor and chair of Africana Studies at CSU Dominguez Hills.

Donna Nicol, associate professor and chair of Africana Studies, arrived at CSUDH in fall 2017. As a faculty member, she teaches Comparative Ethnic and Global Societies. As chair, Nicol is working with her colleagues and the university administration to strengthen the program’s curriculum and bolster its presence on campus and in the region.

A fourth-generation “Comptonite,” Nicol’s deep local roots and unique upbringing in a community-focused family has had a profound effect on her as a researcher and educator. She briefly left South Los Angeles for Ohio State University where she earned a Ph.D. in Social and Cultural Foundations of Education with a specialization in African American higher educational history, and a minor in African American Studies in 2007.

Prior to coming to CSUDH, Nicol was the first woman of color to be promoted and tenured in Women’s Studies at CSU Fullerton. She joined the faculty ranks at Fullerton after spending nearly a decade working in higher education administration, a nontraditional career path that she believes gives her a unique perspective on the ethos of public education, and an advantage as an academic chair…

…Nicol sat down with CSUDH Campus News Center to discuss her unique Compton upbringing, her latest research, and her perspectives regarding the African American experience in higher education.

Q: To get started, can you tell me about your upbringing in Compton, and a little about how it influences you as an educator?

A: My family moved the Compton because it was one of the few places in Los Angeles at the time that allowed African Americans to buy homes. Coming from a military background—my great-grandfather was as an Army doctor during World War I—my great-grandparents didn’t want to go back to the South with mixed-race kids (Filipino and Black). After World War II, they moved to California as did my paternal grandparents who also moved to Compton to avoid racial segregation in the Jim Crow South. We were one of the few families that had the opportunity to go to college. My great-grandfather was a doctor, so he had “cultural capital,” and taught my grandmother how to prepare for college; who passed it on to my mother; who passed it on to me…

Read the entire article here.

One-Dropping and Multi-Dropping: Embracing Contradictions of the Racialized Self (A Personal Journey)

Musings of a Mixed Race Feminist: Random diatribes from a mixed race feminist scholar.

Donna J. Nicol, Associate Professor Women & Gender Studies
California State University, Fullerton

My exploration of my mixed race identity began in my early 20’s after an incident I describe in my blog post entitled “There I Said It: Reflections on Identity from a Feminist Racial Hybrid”. But I didn’t exactly get thrown out of the Black community on Monday and proclaim myself as “mixed race” by Thursday.

My process for coming into my mixed race identity was slow because though I was socially ostracized from many Black peers by my junior year in college for outing myself as a “feminist”,  I was still embraced by other Black people who didn’t feel threatened by my public declaration.  Likewise, in my neighborhood which was predominantly Black but had a good number of Filipinos who settled in the area post World War II, people knew we were a mixed family.  I don’t recall there ever being a situation where people treated me like anyone but a full member of that community.  I think why I experienced this ease was due to the fact that I was raised to be Black with Filipino traditions passed on by my Filipina great-gram. My great-gram placed more emphasis on us keeping her cultural traditions alive rather than insisting we call ourselves Filipino because she was acutely aware of how her mixed race children, grands, and great-grams were judged as Black.  So, I didn’t go around saying I was “part this, or part that” which might have led to harassment or ostracism from the Black community.  I just said I was Black in public and in private, I could be both or neither if I wanted…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Race in Manchester – Intersections of Class and Mixed Race Identity

Musings of a Mixed Race Feminist: Random diatribes from a mixed race feminist scholar.
Tuesday, 2015-03-03

Donna J. Nicol, Associate Professor Women & Gender Studies
California State University, Fullerton

I spent the last three months of 2014 living in Manchester, England helping my mother-in-law through chemotherapy and navigating the National Health Services bureaucratic red tape to secure caregiver support and the like. While I wasn’t able to keep up with this blog, I did manage to work on my first novel and make note of how I was perceived differently than I normally am in the U.S. Now these perceptions draw on my specific interactions so my observations are certainly not generalizable to all but I found the comparisons revealing.

In the African and South Asian (think Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Indian) community of Longsight, being mixed race (as determined by skin color, hair texture and physical markers of mixed race identity) was not as common as in other parts of Manchester which were predominantly white. In Longsight, I felt like the odd person out and though I have traveled to England many times before (mostly London and Manchester), I was not cognizant of being one of the few mixed folks in the bunch until I stayed more than a week in the area. Home to mostly first generation immigrants to the U.K., Longsight appeared to demonstrate a kind of “racial insularity” that I had not experienced in other parts of the city. Mixed race couples were, in fact, quite rare to find…

Read the entire article here.

Why do so many mixed race people excuse white purity ideologies which would not even allow many mixed white/black or white/other people to claim at least half whiteness but readily can tell you the date, time and place when a person of color said something offensive to them about being mixed?

Donna J. Nicol, “Maybe You’re Just An Asshole: The Mixed Race Persecution Complex,” Musings of a Mixed Race Feminist: Random diatribes from a mixed race feminist scholar, July 25, 2014. http://mixedracefeminist.blogspot.com/2014/07/maybe-youre-just-asshole-mixed-race.html.

Maybe You’re Just An Asshole: The Mixed Race Persecution Complex

Musings of a Mixed Race Feminist: Random diatribes from a mixed race feminist scholar.
2014-07-25

Donna J. Nicol, Associate Professor of Africana Studies
California State University, Dominguez Hills

“Black girls are always hatin’ on me. I can’t help it if their man prefers light-skinned pretty women.”

“You have no idea how hard it is to be mixed race.”

I get it. Being mixed race in a mono-racial society is tough. There still isn’t much room for multiplicity in our society. From race categories on forms, to Barack Obama being called the first “Black” president even as he was raised by his white grandparents, to people asking a mixed race person “what are you?” as if being mixed means you are freak, it is undoubtedly hard where it seems people want to force you into a box just to make their lives easier. I get it….I live that same reality on a daily basis but I have also noticed another phenomenon that either few mixed race people acknowledge, understand or are willing to talk about and that is what I call “the mixed race persecution” complex…

Read the entire article here.

Defining Mixed Race Feminism

Musings of a Mixed Race Feminist: Random diatribes from a mixed race feminist scholar.
2014-05-16

Donna J. Nicol, Associate Professor Women & Gender Studies
California State University, Fullerton

…Question of the Day: What is mixed race feminism? Good question given mixed race and gender issues aren’t often brought in conversation together even with the academic use of intersectionality theory.

Let’s start with some basic terminology. I define feminism as a critique on male power with efforts to change it. In essence, for me, feminism is both a theory and a form of activism. This means that feminism is for everyday folks; not just folks with degrees or lots of titles…

…I view one’s claim of being mixed race as a personal choice at self-definition; not simply a matter of DNA. I object to “one-droppist” logic in which a person with any non-white ancestry can not claim to be of Caucasian/European descent. I find it totally illogical that people of color (anyone who is non-white) often play the role of “one-drop” police when the policy and practice of “one-dropping” originated while African Americans were still enslaved and continued through the period of Jim Crow segregation. Why would oppressed people use the oppressors terminology to limit our self-definition is beyond me. I also object to the relative silence from the mixed race community (most prominently found via online forums) in calling out white racism which often forbids mixed race persons from claiming their white ancestry. It is like whiteness is reserved for only “pure bloods” or “mono-racial” white people. Many mixed race people I have encountered say nothing about their experiences with racism from their “white side” but can give you time, date, place and even weather reports when they experience discrimination from non-whites…

Read the entire article here.