Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

The election of Barack Obama sent ripples of hope throughout the United States and the international community and seeded the notion that the country had transformed itself into a postracial utopia. Meanwhile, race itself, and racism, permeated political and social arenas nationwide as the American public grappled with the question of why and how much the president’s, or anyone’s, racial and ethnic identity really mattered. This also led to pertinent discussions on the meaning and significance of race and ethnicity in 21st-century U.S. society. Though unified in our thirst for change, America was divided, not necessarily along racial lines but by where we stood on the position of the importance of race and ethnicity as a concept. Some saw racial and ethnic group divides as an important historic institution that formed the basis of a real social hierarchy; others saw these divides as a false notion and a shameful stain on the otherwise polished face of a great nation.

Both the embracing and the backlash surrounding Barack Obama made evident what were still very salient categories in our daily national discourse and experience: color, race, ethnicity, and nationality. Obama’s political opponents weren’t the only ones who called into question the president’s identity; suspicion was evident on both sides of party lines as political figures and the public evaluated their new leader. Could the new president be trusted to represent mainstream America, or would he underhandedly advance black interests? Did he embody real “American” values despite being raised in a nontraditional family by a single mother? What did it mean that the president was also viewed as part of an educated black elite: Was the president black enough? What did it mean that he was rumored to worship amid an Afrocentric congregation: Was he, perhaps, too black? As a child of an interracial marriage, should he be considered black at all? And with ties to relatives in Africa, was he really even an American?

The very public examination of the president’s identity, the dissection of his identity into distinct facets of his life experience, illustrates a critical connection between our individual and collective identities and the broader narrative on what it means to be a part of this nation, to be an American. It also made clear that while the shape and form of racial and ethnic identity today is ever changing, it plays as important and central a role in our lives today as it has in the past. It is not only the way many people in the United States define themselves, it is still very much the way in which we define one another.

Elsie Achugbue, “Introduction” in Multicultural Perspectives on Race, Ethnicity, and Identity, eds. Elizabeth Pathy Salett and Diane R. Koslow (Washington, D.C., NASW Press, 2015). http://www.naswpress.org/publications/diversity/inside/multicultural-perspectives-intro.html.

Mixed emotions: The multiracial student experience at UC Berkeley

Posted in Articles, Campus Life, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, United States on 2011-01-09 13:04Z by Steven

Mixed emotions: The multiracial student experience at UC Berkeley

UC Berkeley News
University of California, Berkeley
2005-03-07

Bonnie Azab Powell, NewsCenter

BERKELEY – “What are you?”

That’s the question Robert Allen, adjunct professor of African American Studies and Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, writes on the chalkboard when students first file in for his “People of Mixed Racial Descent” class. It’s also the question that complete strangers have asked Ai-Ling Malone, a third-year business administration and economics major, all her life; Ai-Ling, whose mom is Chinese and whose dad is African-American, says it has never bothered her. Josh Fisher (Chinese and white), an environmental sciences Ph.D. student, almost never hears it. Third-year industrial engineering major Rey Andrew Perocho Doctora (Filipino and Chinese/Japanese) mostly hears it only from Asian people: “I have Chinese eyes but my skin is dark, so they find it hard to figure me out.”…

…At UC Berkeley, an eye-opening 22.9 percent of all respondents identified themselves as “multi-racial or multi-ethnic” on the 2004 UC Undergraduate Experience Survey. Across the UC system, the average was 25.8 percent. Thanks to the growing numbers of mixed young people, a journey that often begins in college as a personal quest for identity is starting to gather force as a political movement.

It’s a movement still in its infancy, however. The “What are you?” question aside, “mixed” students like Ai-Ling, Josh, Rey, and Amina are struggling with the same question – “Who am I?” – as their monoracial classmates. The difference is, they can face racism on two fronts: both from white-dominated society and, more upsettingly, from their own racial peer groups, for whom they are not “black enough” or “Asian enough.”…

…Much of the academic research on the mixed-race community began at Berkeley. The “People of Mixed Racial Descent” class was the first of its kind in the nation. It was started in 1980 by Terry Wilson, a Berkeley professor of Native American Studies and the son of a Potawatomi Indian father and a white mother. Several of the course’s early teachers, like Ph.D. student Cynthia Nakashima, have gone on to write landmark texts about the multiracial experience.

The class is even more heavily subscribed now. “For many of the students it’s the first chance they’ve had to talk about their experience in a supportive environment,” says Allen. When he teaches the class – alternating with African-American Studies chair Stephen Small – he emphasizes the artificiality of the idea of race, reminding students that it has no scientific basis. In 1998 the Anthropological Association of America actually released a formal statement to that effect: “Evidence from the analysis of genetics (e.g., DNA) indicates that most physical variation, about 94 percent, lies within so-called racial groups.This means that there is greater variation within ‘racial’ groups than between them.”…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: Bonnie A. Powell, Bonnie Azab Powell, Bonnie Powell, Terry Wilson, UC Berkeley News, University of California at Berkeley

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Mixed emotions: The multiracial student experience at UC Berkeley

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