Mixed Race Studies

Hapa Capsulizes Painful Moments from 2016 Asian America in Less than 90 Seconds

AsAmNews
2016-11-27

Louis Chan, AsAmNews National Correspondent

A popular new video out less than a week freezes in time moments in 2016 that highlight the racism and the persistent whitewashing the Asian American community faced throughout the year.

The short A-woke is from multiracial filmmaker Teja Arboleda who grew up in Japan and now lives near Boston.

Arboleda utilizes the trendy mannequin challenge technique of employing actors who pose frozen like mennequins to depict memorable, and in this film, painful scenes from the past…

Read the entire article here.

Crossing the Line: Multiracial Comedians

University of Michigan
Shapiro Undergraduate Library
919 South University Avenue
Screening Room 2160
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1185
2016-01-21, 16:00-17:00 CST (Local Time)

Karen E Downing, Host Contact

This full-length documentary (2007, 59 mins.) analyzes how mixed-race comedians mediate multiracial identities and humor. Crossing lines of racial, ethnic, and cultural acceptability by their very existence, multiracial comedians reveal that meanings of race vary across ethnic combination, gender, place, and time.

The film features the experiences, perspectives, and performances of American comedians of more than one racial ancestry. The timeliness of multiracial comedians’ roles as crossracial mediators is underscored as they provide insight into controversies over how comedians express race (i.e., Michael Richards’ use of the N-word, Rosie O’Donnell’s slurs), and other debated meanings of race in an increasingly diverse society. Exploring these questions exposes the very nature of where pain and laughter come from in a racially divided world.

This is one of a year-long series of events that explore what it means to be multiracial in a monoracially conceived world.

This film will be followed by discussion. For more information, click here.

In the Shadow of Race: Growing Up As A Multiethnic, Multicultural, and “multiracial” American

Routledge
1998
280 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0805825756

Teja Arboleda, President/Creative Director
Entertaining Diversity, Inc.

My father’s father was Filipino-Chinese…
My father’s mother was African American-Native American…
My mother’s father was German-Danish…
My mother’s mother was German…
I was born in Brooklyn, New York, but I grew up in Japan…

For once it’s not just black and white. In this compelling chronicle of his journey through life as a multicultural and multiethnic American, Teja Arboleda uniquely and personally challenges institutionalized notions of race, culture, ethnicity, and class. Arboleda has presented his story around the United States through his one-man performance-lecture Ethnic Man! Now, in this book, he fleshes out the depth of his experience as a culturally and racially mixed American, illustrating throughout the enigma of cultural and racial identity and the American identity crisis.

To facilitate its use as a course text, In the Shadow of Race is offered with a Teacher’s Guide written by Christine Clark. Topics for discussion include:

• the social construction of race
• racial separatism vs. diversity
• racial, ethnic, and cultural identity development
• the politics of racial categorization
• mixed “race” peoples
• cultural identity vs. identity by heritage
• the concept of a “cultural home
• changing identities within cultures

Contents:

• Preface
• Chapter 1: Race Is a Four Letter Word
• Chapter 2: Among the Trees
• Chapter 3: Four Walls and a Cellar
• Chapter 4: Checkmate
• Chapter 5: Carrots?
• Chapter 6: Plastic Armies
• Chapter 7: Old Fence, New Paint
• Chapter 8: Paper Houses, Horses, and Swords
• Chapter 9: Squares in a Circle
• Chapter 10: Shuffle
• Chapter 11: The Connection
• Chapter 12: The Adjustable Pedestal
• Chapter 13: Hokkaido
• Chapter 14: Two Steps Back
• Chapter 15: The Official Proxy
• Chapter 16: “You’re From China, Right?”
• Chapter 17: The Awakening
• Chapter 18: This Land Is Your Land
• Chapter 19: Top of the Hill
• Chapter 20: Letting Go
• Chapter 21: Check One Only
• Chapter 22: Losses
• Chapter 23: The Testimony
• Chapter 24: One
• Chapter 25: Cool Winds Return Home
• Chapter 26: Home
• About the Author
• Ancilary Materials for Educators