Mixed Race Studies

Interview with Moogega Cooper

HalfKorean.com: An online community for mixed-race Koreans
2013-04-10

David Lee Sanders

Moogega (무지개) Cooper was a top competitor on season one of TBS’s reality competition show, King of the Nerds. It premiered on TBS in January 2013 and the season just ended in early March 2013.

The King of the Nerds premise: “The series will follow 11 fierce competitors from across the nerd spectrum as they set out to win $100,000 and be crowned the greatest nerd of them all.”

Although she did not win the competition, Moogega did place 5th overall and gained a considerable fan following from her involvement on King of the Nerds.

Her “day job” is as a Planetary Protection Engineer at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a NASA field center. Although the job title may sound a little nerdy, it is quite an interesting and important job in relation to space research and exploration.

We were able to cover some of Moogega’s personal background, her professional career and, of course, discuss her King of the Nerds experience and are pleased to present this interview.

Please note that HalfKorean.com comments/questions are in BOLD.

Background: The Basics on Moogega

Where and when were you born, raised and currently reside?
I was born in 1985 in Southern New Jersey. I was raised there until I was 10 years old. We then all moved to Virginia. Once I finished graduate school in Philadelphia I moved to southern California for my job. I won’t leave southern California at all because I love it here!

How did your parents meet?
They met in Korea. My dad would go there several times to just hang out. He used to be in the military and would go back and forth. He met my mom through mutual friends. I kind of want to get a shirt made that says “Made in Korea” as I was definitely conceived there. They had a small ceremony in Korea and he then brought her back to the United States where they were married in the US…

…Did you grow up around other mixed Koreans or people of mixed heritage?
What was very interesting was that because we were around a lot of military people, there were a lot of mixed heritage people. No one that was mixed exactly like me but I was used to growing up with a rainbow of people.

Did you ever experience any identity issues while growing up?
A lot of people when they look at me and when I reveal to them that I’m half Korean, they say that they don’t see it at all and think that I’m black. I get a lot of people that say that and they try to impose their own classification of my identity and I embrace both sides…

Read the entire interview here.

Scholars also analyze a multiracial movement that emerged around mixed-race identity in the 1990s. Rainier Spencer (2006, 2011) complicates previous scholars’ and activists’ claim that the emergence of multiraciality in the 1990s uncovered a new racial order. As opposed to challenging the racialized structure in the United States, Spencer argues the actions of the American multiracial movement protected Whiteness and was conservative—rather than transformative—of the existing U.S. racial order. Daniel and Castañeda-Liles (2006) similarly posit that the neoconservative rearticulation of racial classification to denote egalitarian ideals of individual choice influenced conservative politicians and policymakers’ push to add multiraciality to formalized methods of racial categorization. Melissa Nobles (2000) extends this pertinent analysis by centering on the discursive context of the multiracial movement. According to Nobles, multiracial public recognition in the midst of ongoing American cultural wars publicly legitimated multiracial visibility and helped disseminate discourse on multiraciality and create an imagined politicized community. Indeed, the emergence of multiracialism in the 1990s also influenced public recognition of multiraciality through increased marketing and commercialization of mixed-race identity and interracial families (DaCosta 2007).

Celeste Vaughan Curington, “Rethinking Multiracial Formation in the United States: Toward an Intersectional Approach,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Volume 2, Number 1 (January 2016), 3. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2332649215591864.

Brazil’s colour bind

The Globe and Mail
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
2015-07-31

Stephanie Nolen, Latin America Correspondent

Brazil is combating many kinds of inequality. But one of the world’s most diverse nations is still just beginning to talk about race

When Daniele de Araújo found out six years ago that she was pregnant, she set out from her small house on a dirt lane in the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro and climbed a mountain. It is not a big mountain, the green slope that rises near her home, but the area is controlled by drug dealers, so she was anxious, hiking up. But she had something really important to ask of God, and she wanted to be somewhere she felt that the magnitude of her request would be clear.

She told God she wanted a girl, and she wanted her to be healthy, but one thing mattered above all: “The baby has to be white.”

Ms. de Araújo knows about the quixotic outcomes of genetics: She has a white mother and a black father, sisters who can pass for white, and a brother nearly as dark-skinned as she is – “I’m really black,” she says. Her husband, Jonatas dos Praseres, also has one black and one white parent, but he is light-skinned – when he reported for his compulsory military service, an officer wrote “white” as his race on the forms.

And so, when their baby arrived, the sight of her filled Ms. de Araújo with relief: Tiny Sarah Ashley was as pink as the sheets she was wrapped in. Best of all, as she grew, it became clear that she had straight hair, not cabelo ruim – “bad hair” – as tightly curled black hair is universally known in Brazil. These days, Sarah Ashley has tawny curls that tumble to the small of her back; they are her mother’s great joy in life. The little girl’s skin tone falls somewhere between those of her parents – but she was light enough for them to register her as “white,” just as they had hoped. (Many official documents in Brazil ask for “race and/or colour” alongside other basic identifying information.)

Ms. de Araújo and Mr. dos Praseres keep the photos from their 2005 wedding in a red velvet album on the lone shelf in their living room. The glossy pictures show family members of a dozen different skin colours, arm in arm, faces crinkled in stiff grins for the posed portraits. There are albums with similar pictures in living rooms all over this country: A full one-third of marriages in Brazil are interracial, said to be the highest rate in the world. (In Canada, despite hugely diverse cities such as Vancouver and Toronto, the rate is under five per cent.) That statistic is the most obvious evidence of how race and colour in Brazil are lived differently than they are in other parts of the world.

But a range of colours cannot disguise a fundamental truth, says Ms. de Araújo: There is a hierarchy, and white is at the top.

Many things are changing in this country. Ms. de Araújo left school as a teenager to work as a maid – about the only option open to a woman with skin as dark as hers – but now she has a professional job in health care and a house of her own, things she could not have imagined 15 years ago. Still, she says, “This is Brazil.” And there is no point being precious about it. Black is beautiful, but white – white is just easier. Even middle-class life can still be a struggle here. And Sarah Ashley’s parents want her life to be easy.

Brazil’s history of colonialism, slavery and dictatorship, followed by tumultuous social change, has produced a country that is at once culturally homogenous and chromatically wildly diverse. It is a cornerstone of national identity that Brazil is racially mixed – more than any country on Earth, Brazilians say. Much less discussed, but equally visible – in every restaurant full of white patrons and black waiters, in every high rise where the black doorman points a black visitor toward the service elevator – is the pervasive racial inequality…

Read the entire article and watch the video here.

President Obama’s Racial Renaissance

The New York Times
2015-08-01

Michael Eric Dyson, Professor of Sociology
Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.

Toyin Odutola

We finally have the president we thought we elected: one who talks directly and forcefully about race and human rights.

When President Obama took the podium at the annual convention of the N.A.A.C.P. in Philadelphia last month, he sounded like the leader I’ve been waiting to hear since his first inauguration in 2009. It was almost as if Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow,” and the former attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr. had hacked his computer and collaborated on his speech.

Many of Mr. Obama’s admirers and critics have hungered for straight talk on race since he his election. But since taking office, the president had been skittish on the subject and had mostly let it lapse into disturbing silence.

As we prepare to mark the first anniversary of the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., this country continues to grapple with what feels like an onslaught of black death.

But now we are doing it with a president — our first African-American president — who has found a confident voice on race…

Read the entire article here.

Pocahontas’ tribe, the Pamunkey of Virginia, finally recognized by U.S.

The Los Angeles Times
2015-08-02

Noah Bierman

Mikayla Deacy, 4, swims with her dog Dakota in the Pamunkey River. As a member of the tribe, Mikayla will be eligible for scholarships and other benefits now that the Pamunkey have received federal recognition. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

The tidal river that surrounds this spit of scrubby land has long functioned like a moat that rises and falls through the day..

A single road connects the reservation’s sycamore, poplars and modest houses with miles of cornfields that separate the tribe from large retail stores and suburban office parks of eastern Virginia.

The Pamunkey have lived on and around these 1,200 acres for centuries, since before their most famous ancestor, Pocahontas, made contact with English colonists in 1607.

“We call this downtown Pamunkey,” said Kim Cook, the 50-year-old granddaughter of Chief Tecumseh Deerfoot Cook.

She smiled. The only noise came from birds chirping among the pines by the old fishing shanties. The only action came when a cousin stopped by to relieve Cook’s 8-year-old son, River Ottigney Cook, of his boredom by taking him on a boat ride…

…Despite that, the tribe long had laws discouraging intermarriage. Marrying anyone who was not white or Indian was forbidden. Women who married whites could not live on the reservation, though men who had white wives could.

It was not until 2012 that tribal leaders fully reversed those laws and allowed women to vote and serve on the tribal council for the first time. (There had been female chiefs into the 18th century.)

The issue threatened the tribe’s federal acknowledgment, drawing opposition from members of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Tribal leaders said the laws pertaining to African Americans were a reflection of Virginia’s racist past that included a ban on interracial marriages — context also noted in the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ acknowledgment report — and were in part a defense against losing their status as a state tribe and being stripped of their land amid racial purity laws…

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial marriages are dispersing across the country

The Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C.
2015-06-18

William H. Frey, Senior Fellow

As I discuss in my book, “Diversity Explosion,” the geographic dispersion of minority populations from traditional melting-pot regions to the rest of the country sets the stage for the dispersion of multiracial marriages as well. To be sure the greatest prevalence of multiracial marriages are in melting-pot states such as Hawaii, where three in 10 marriages are multiracial, as well as Alaska and Oklahoma, where the share is nearly two in 10 (see map)…

Read the entire article here.