Mixed Race Studies

Kenji Kuramitsu: Critical Mixed Race Christology at the Reformation Project in Kansas City

The Reformation Project
2015-11-30

Kenji Kuramitsu’s workshop on Critical Mixed Race Christology at the Reformation Project in Kansas City. Recorded November 7, 2015.

To be white is not about your skin color but about your ready socialization into a privileged group membership that defines itself against blackness, a legacy emerging from an understanding of black bodies as fuel, the needed refuse by which a capitalist, slave labor economy can sustain itself. As long as blackness is its opposite point, whiteness is willing to cross all sorts of awkward ethnic lines in strange, irrational ways in order to ensure its survival.

Ryan Kenjii Kuramitsu, “what we talk about when we talk about whiteness,” A Real Rattlesnake Meets His Maker, October 22, 2015. http://arealrattlesnake.com/2015/10/22/what-is-whiteness/.

Playing and Praying at Wild Goose — Student Kenji Kuramitsu

The “CURE” for Your Vocation
McCormick Theological Seminary
Chicago, Illinois
2015-08-26

Ryan Kenji Kuramitsu

I had heard of Wild Goose Festival from friends who had braved the woods in years past, but I wasn’t sure it was my kind of thing. I certainly didn’t expect to be a part of the gathering anytime soon. Then my friend Micky asked me to attend. She wanted to know if I would speak on a panel she was moderating, and invited me to present my own workshop as well.

I didn’t know what I would find in Hot Springs, North Carolina other than spending a few days camping out, thinking about God, smiling, and playing music with a bunch of progressive, hippie Christians, many of whom I was only tangentially connected to on social media. I was nervous, but I wanted to see what this festival was all about, and as a lifelong Boy Scout, I felt like I could handle myself in the woods. I told Micky I would come.

I spent the next few weeks trying to think of something productive to contribute to the “Revolutionary Love and Militant Nonviolence” panel that I would speak on with clergy and racial justice advocates Leah Gunning-Francis, Traci Blackmon, and Ethan Vessley-Flad, publically reflecting on our involvement in the Black Lives Matter movement as the one year anniversary of Mike Brown’s death approaches. For my own workshop, I created an hour long presentation exploring how both traditional theological teachings about Christ and contemporary critical mixed race theory can empower multiethnic and mixed race people to live whole, integrated lives…

Read the entire article here.

what we talk about when we talk about whiteness

A Real Rattlesnake Meets His Maker
2015-10-22

Ryan Kenjii Kuramitsu

(This is part one of a three part series on “what we talk about when we talk about whiteness.”)

Sometimes I engage in conversations about whiteness that make people bristle. Questions are often raised like: so is “white” automatically wrong? Why is “whiteness” evil? Are you saying “white people” are inherently bad? My impression is that there is a bit of talking past one another that happens in these discussions, so it is my hope to define terms and better flesh out my perspective here.

First, it may be helpful to recognize that “whiteness” can be understood as a synonym for white supremacy: the pervasive belief that people can be hierarchically sorted into separate “races” based on what regions of the world their ancestors came from, and that “the white race” is the best of these groups. This is an ideology that is actively enforced through bodily and psychic violence directed towards the groups of people who are assigned immutable “racial” traits and deemed undesirable.

Secondly, we might note that “whiteness” as a social and historical trend has relatively little to do with skin color. Indeed, what constitutes “being white” today is not the same thing as fifty, much less two hundred and fifty years ago. German, Greek, Jewish, Irish, Spanish, and Italian immigrants to the United States are all examples of ethnic groups once rejected for their racial inferiority, considered subordinate, but who are today viewed as an allied coalition of groups under the banner of being fully and simply white…

…To be white is not about your skin color but about your ready socialization into a privileged group membership that defines itself against blackness, a legacy emerging from an understanding of black bodies as fuel, the needed refuse by which a capitalist, slave labor economy can sustain itself. As long as blackness is its opposite point, whiteness is willing to cross all sorts of awkward ethnic lines in strange, irrational ways in order to ensure its survival.

For example, when my father, a Japanese man from the big island of Hawai’i, was told to check “White Other” on his census form when entering the police academy, he was being invited to erase our culture under the guise of a benign, gift-wrapped welcome into social privilege, instructed to do so by defining himself primarily against blackness…

Read the entire article here.