Mixed Race Studies

Multiracial Faculty Members’ Experiences in the Academy

University of California, Los Angeles
Graduate School of Education and Information Studies
2017-01-31

Jessica C. Harris, PhD, Assistant Professor
Department of Higher Education & Organizational Change
University of California, Los Angeles
310-794-4982

Jessica Harris, PhD, from the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is conducting a research study to explore multiracial tenured/tenure track faculty members’ experiences within the academy.

Why is this study being done?

This research will qualitatively explore the academic experiences of mixed race faculty working in U.S. institutions of higher education. While the experiences of monoracial faculty of color are documented in extant literature, there exist no studies, to my knowledge, of the experiences of mixed race faculty in the academy. The study will focus on participants’ experiences with tenure and advancement, teaching, research, service, and other important issues that must be explored in order to better inform inclusive practices that help to recruit and retain mixed race faculty and increase diversity within and across institutions.

What will happen if I take part in this research study?

If you volunteer to participate in this study, the researcher will ask you to do the following:

• Fill out an online demographics questionnaire.
• Participate in an approximately 60-minute individual interview conducted by the lead researcher and/or a graduate student researcher that the lead researcher supervises.
• Individual interviews will take place via Skype, telephone, or the communication software preferred by the participant. The researcher will conduct the interview in a private room.
• Questions within the interview may relate to participants’ experiences with the tenure and advancement process, teaching, pedagogical approach, and research.

How long will I be in the research study?

The demographic form will take about 15 minutes to complete. The individual interview will last approximately 60 minutes. The total time you will dedicate to this research is about 75 minutes. Given the time that lapses between filling out the demographic questionnaire and setting up an interview for the research, you may be an enrolled participant in this research anywhere from a few days to several months.

Are there any potential risks or discomforts that I can expect from this study? Are there any potential benefits if I participate?

Your participation should cause no more discomfort than you would experience in your everyday life. Participation may prove cathartic for participants. The information obtained from the study will help educators and campus leaders gain a better understanding of multiracial peoples’ experiences on the college campus. This will guide inclusive practices on campus. Your identifiable information will not be shared unless (a) it is required by law or university policy, or (b) you give written permission.

Will information about me and my participation be kept confidential?

Any information that is obtained in connection with this study and that can identify you will remain confidential. It will be disclosed only with your permission or as required by law. Confidentiality will be maintained by means of storing information with identifiers in a locked file cabinet in the lead researcher’s office- transcripts, audio files, and demographics forms will be stored under a numerical pseudonym. Your name will only be linked by a numerical code key that will be kept in a separate file cabinet and will only be accessible to two individuals, the lead researcher and the graduate research assistant. Finally, when information is reported out (via publications and conference presentations) all participants and institutions will be given pseudonyms. Other information will be reported back in general, broad categories, e.g. southern institution rather than an institution in Atlanta. All information will be kept in a secure and locked location for use in future research and destroyed within 10 years of the first interview.

What are my rights if I take part in this study?

• You can choose whether or not you want to be in this study, and you may withdraw your consent and discontinue participation at any time.
• You may refuse to answer any questions that you do not want to answer and still remain in the study.

Who can I contact if I have questions about this study?

• The research team: If you have any questions, comments or concerns about the research, you can talk to the one of the researchers. Please contact: Jessica C. Harris at jharris@gseis.ucla.edu or 310-794-4982.
• UCLA Office of the Human Research Protection Program (OHRPP):
  If you have questions about your rights while taking part in this study, or you have concerns or suggestions and you want to talk to someone other than the researchers about the study, please call the OHRPP at (310) 825-7122 or write to:

UCLA Office of the Human Research Protection Program
11000 Kinross Avenue
Suite 211, Box 951694
Los Angeles, California 90095-1694

Multiethnic Women

FEM: UCLA’s Feminist Newsmagazine Since 1973
2015-12-04

Kali Croke

Out of all the things that compose an individual’s identity, one’s culture (defined by similarities in ideals, religion, language, habits, etc.) is perhaps the most significant. While we mostly understand the experiences of people of different singular cultures, oftentimes the experiences of individuals with more than one ethnicity are overlooked or unheard. I sat down with women of multiple ethnicities to better understand how their multiple cultures have shaped their lives, experiences and viewpoints on the world. Below are transcribed excerpts of these conversations…

Read the entire article here.

Multiraciality Enters the University: Mixed Race Identity and Knowledge Production in Higher Education

University of Maryland
2016
DOI: 10.13016/M2QB78

Aaron Allen

“Multiraciality Enters the University: Mixed Race Identity and Knowledge Production in Higher Education,” explores how the category of “mixed race” has underpinned university politics in California, through student organizing, admissions debates, and the development of a new field of study. By treating the concept of privatization as central to both multiraciality and the neoliberal university, this project asks how and in what capacity has the discourses of multiracialism and the growing recognition of mixed race student populations shaped administrative, social, and academic debates at the state’s flagship universities—the University of California at Berkeley and Los Angeles. This project argues that the mixed race population symbolizing so-called “post-racial societies” is fundamentally attached to the concept of self-authorship, which can work to challenge the rights and resources for college students of color. Through a close reading of texts, including archival materials, policy and media debates, and interviews, I assert that the contemporary deployment of mixed race within the US academy represents a particularly post-civil rights development, undergirded by a genealogy of U.S. liberal individualism. This project ultimately reveals the pressing need to rethink ways to disrupt institutionalized racism in the new millennium.

Mixed Student Union Hosts Fourth Annual Heritage Conference

Pacific Ties
University of California, Los Angeles
2016-05-13

Ayesha Sheikh

UCLA’s Mixed Student Union (MSU) hosted their fourth annual Mixed Heritage Conference on April 30 in the James West Alumni Center. The organization’s goal for hosting the conference on campus, according to the organization’s co-director Ariel Pezner, was to spread awareness of mixed identity among student audiences within UCLA as well as circles of mixed groups outside UCLA.

The reach of the organization’s efforts go well beyond the campus, with its connections to several other student organizations such as those at the University of Southern California. Chelsea Strong, co-director of MSU alongside Pezner, shared that the conference was the biggest event hosted by the organization to attract students, staff, and faculty of all backgrounds “to get a chance to learn critically about mixed heritage.” To manifest the appropriate space for this exchange of ideas and learning, prominent speakers from various mixed backgrounds were invited to speak.

The keynote Speaker Dr. Velina Hasu Houston, who wrote her senior thesis at UCLA and received her doctorate from USC, is recognized locally and internationally for her analytical playwriting on genres of mixed heritage, a topic often overlooked as “too uninteresting” for the arts.

The conference brought into projection the importance of using art as a medium to communicate beyond the subjects of the composition itself. Among Dr. Houston’s most renowned works is “Tea, with Music” and “Cinnamon Girl.” She is a leadership force for many organizations such as HapaSC, a mixed heritage organization at USC, and Multiracial Americans of Southern California (MASC), whose mission statement is “to advocate for and foster multiracial community and identity.”….

…Some of the other organizations’ representatives in attendance included Dr. Chandra Crudup, from One Drop of Love and the co-director of Mixed Roots Stories (MRS), who sponsored the conference. In addition to teaching at Arizona State University, Dr. Crudup is also a social worker. She said, “Race is in the face a lot more than in the past,” and that there needs to be a healthy way to deal with social justice issues. She spoke on what a healthy lifestyle looks like, a survival guide to not getting “jaded out by issues that affect life at work and socially.”…

Read the entire article here.

“One Drop of Love”: The Keynote Performance for the Mixed Heritage Conference at UCLA

University of California, Los Angeles
James West Alumni Center
325 Westwood Plaza
Los Angeles, California 90095
Saturday, 2016-04-30 14:30-16:00 PDT (Local Time)

Join us for some or all of this enlightening and affirming conference. One Drop will start at 2:30 pm in the James West Alumni Center.

TICKETS: FREE and open to the public!

We remain so very grateful for your continued support and look forward to sharing One Drop with you.

For more information, click here. To RSVP, click here.

Dorothy Roberts: Fatal Invention: The New Biopolitics of Race

University of California, Los Angeles
School of Law
385 Charles E. Young Drive East
1242 Law Building
Los Angeles, California 90095
2015-02-19, 17:00-18:30 PST (Local Time)
Room: TBD

Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology and the Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania

We are witnessing the emergence of a new biopolitics in the United States that relies on re-inventing race in biological terms using cutting-edge genomic science and biotechnologies. Some scientists are defining race as a biological category written in our genes, while the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries convert the new racial science into race-based products, such as race-specific medicines and ancestry tests, that incorporate false assumptions of racial difference at the genetic level. The genetic understanding of race calls for technological responses to racial disparities while masking the continuing impact of racism in a supposedly post-racial society. Instead, I call for affirming our common humanity by working to end social inequities supported by the political system of race.

For more information, click here.

UCLA receiver Thomas Duarte proud of biracial heritage

Los Angeles Daily News
2013-11-25

Jack Wang, Staff Reporter

The smell hits him three or four blocks away.

Thomas Duarte is coming back from a run around his Orange County neighborhood, and the day is hot enough that the windows of his house have been cracked open.

What that smell actually was, though, depended on the day.

“We always had tamales around,” said the UCLA receiver. “That was probably my favorite. Coming around wintertime, that’s pretty much what I think about when it comes to food around the house.”

Ordinary by itself, but consider some of the other Duarte household favorites: teriyaki chicken, fried rice, sushi. The platter tends to be diverse when you’re the son of a Mexican-American father and a Japanese-American mother.

When Duarte was about five years old, his father Tim brought home a whole, freshly caught albacore that a friend had just fished from the pier. As he cut thin slices on the kitchen counter, Thomas approached eagerly. He ate a piece and loved it.

“If that’s not in the blood, I don’t know what is,” Tim said…

Read the entire article here.

Differences give mixed-heritage students a common bond

The Los Angeles Times
2013-05-27

Larry Gordon

Increasing numbers of college campus clubs give voice to those who don’t fit into the traditional perceptions of race.

No matter what their ancestry or their skin color, many members of UCLA’s Mixed Student Union say they have repeatedly been asked the same question by classmates and strangers curious about an ambiguous racial appearance: “What are you?”
And that shared experience, they say, helps to bond the otherwise extremely diverse group, which is devoted to the rising numbers of students who are biracial and from mixed ethnic heritages.

Jenifer Logia, 20, a UCLA sophomore who is one of the Mixed Student Union’s directors, said much of campus life is defined by distinct ethnic, religious or social groupings. But none comfortably fits someone like her — from a family that blends Nicaraguan, Filipino and Guamanian heritages…

Read the entire article here.

Critical Mixed Race Studies: Research and Teaching on the Margins in the Mainstream

University of California, Los Angeles
Haines Hall 279
Friday, 2013-02-15, 12:00-13:30 PST (Local Time)

G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

In the early 1980s, there emerged several important unpublished doctoral dissertations on multiraciality and the mixed race experience in the United States. Numerous scholarly works were published in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They composed part of the emerging field of Mixed Race Studies although that scholarship did not yet encompass a formally defined area of inquiry. What has changed is that there is now recognition that there is an entire field specifically devoted to the study of multiracial identity and the mixed race experience. Rather than being an abrupt shift or change in the field, that field, Mixed Race Studies, is now being formally defined at a time that beckons scholars to be more critical. That is, this moment calls upon scholars to look back and assess the merit of arguments over the last twenty years and their relevance for future research. This talk seeks to map out this critical turn in Mixed Race Studies and discusses to what extent Critical Mixed Race Studies diverges from previous explorations of the topic, thereby leading to the discovery of new terrain in the field.

Dr. Daniel is Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Barbara. He teaches courses exploring comparative race and ethnic relations and he has numerous publications that explore this topic. Some of his publications include the books entitled More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order (2002) and Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths? (2006), and Machado de Assis: Multiracial Identity and the Brazilian Novelist (2012).

View the flyer here.

Panel to discuss racism and medical issues

The Daily Bruin
University of California, Los Angeles
2012-02-10

Ariana Ricarte

The topic of racism in health care, genetics and other medical issues will be the central point of discussion at a panel in De Neve Auditorium on Saturday [13:00-15:00 PST].

The panel, called “Race in Medicine: A Dangerous Prescription,” will discuss disparities between people of different races in the health care system and the ways a patient’s ethnicity can affect decisions made by doctors and insurance companies. The event is hosted by UCLA’s Mixed Student Union, a student group founded in 2010 that aims to provide a safe and open environment for people of multiracial and multiethnic heritage, said chairwoman Camila Lacques.

The panel will go over topics such as the role of ethnicity in prescription medicine and bone marrow and stem cell transplants. When it comes to transplants, multiracial people have a more difficult time finding matches because of their unique genetic composition, said panelist Athena Asklipiadis…

[Note by Steven F. Riley: Everyone—except their identical twin—has an “unique genetic composition.”  Race is a social, not biological construction and as such, is not linked to genetics. Please read Dorothy Roberts excellent (and sobering) monograph on race and medicine titled, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century for more information.]

…G. Reginald Daniel, a panelist at Saturday’s event and a sociology professor at UC Santa Barbara, said he plans to focus on the positive and negative images applied to multiracial people, as well as talk about the issue in terms of genetic variety.

“I think people need to step out of mono-racial thinking,” Daniel said. “We need to see the connections we have with each other, whether we like it or not.”…

Read the entire article here.