Mixed Race Studies

Did Obama Inspire A Big Debate On Identity? You Weighed In

Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity
National Public Radio
2016-02-23

Leah Donnella

Laurie Avocado/Flickr Creative Commons

Last week, Code Switch raised the curtain on “The Obama Effect,” our quest to understand what the nation’s first black president has to do with the big national conversations on identity and inclusion swirling in full force right now.

That quest began with you. On Friday, we took to Twitter with the hashtag #NPRObamaEffect and asked you to weigh in: If somebody else had come into office on Jan. 20, 2009, do you think we’d be having all these conversations about identity? Has the way you identify yourself as a person of color — or as a white person — changed over the last eight years? Have your personal politics around race shifted post-Obama?

Some people said yes, but weren’t lining up to credit Obama:…

Read the entire article here.

America Is Obsessed With Identity. Thanks, Obama?

Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity
National Public Radio
2016-02-17

Alicia Montgomery

Annette Elizabeth Allen for NPR

When Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, there was a lot of talk about “The Obama Effect”: how the nation’s first black president signaled a new era of racial harmony and understanding.

That didn’t happen. But what did? The Obama family’s tenure in the White House has overlapped a revolution in the way Americans deal with identity. From race to religion, from gender to sexual orientation and beyond, marginalized groups that historically worked and waited for “a seat at the table” increasingly demanded their share of cultural power.

And people who once assumed that they could define what it means to be American were called on to defend their ideas and “check their privilege…

Read the entire article here.

Author, 18, from Williamsburg examines race through his family’s eyes in book

The Virginia Gazette
Williamsburg, Virginia
2016-02-16

Heather Bridges, Contact Reporter

Canaan Kennedy, 18, is a freshman at Virginia Commonwealth University who grew up in Williamsburg. He recently published a book, his first, on family members’ experiences with race. (Heather Bridges / The Virginia Gazette)

Canaan Kennedy just wants to change the world.

He says it casually, as if the conviction is common. That’s the kind of drive Kennedy has, the drive he’s always known. His grandfather co-founded an international nonprofit. His grandmother is an award-winning playwright. His father is a writer, producer and publisher.

But as a biracial 18-year-old, Kennedy is still finding his place in the world he seeks to change.

The Williamsburg native recently wrote and self-published a book, “Struggles to Victory,” examining racism in America through the experiences of his father, grandmother and grandfather as African Americans. Kennedy combines biography, interviews and commentary to share his family’s stories…

Read the entire article here.

A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life

Emory University
2016-02-18

In this Race and Difference Colloquium, Allyson Hobbs, an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Stanford University, discusses her first book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, published by Harvard University Press in October 2014. The book examines the phenomenon of racial passing in the United States from the late eighteenth century to the present. A Chosen Exile won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award for best first book in American History and the Lawrence Levine Award for best book in American cultural history.

The Race and Difference Colloquium Series is sponsored by the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference, which supports research, teaching, and public dialogue that examine race and intersecting dimensions of human difference including but not limited to class, gender, religion, and sexuality.

Allyson Hobbs: A Chosen Exile

Miami University
Room 1 Upham Hall
100 Bishop Circle
Oxford, Ohio 45056
Thursday, 2016-02-25, 17:00 EST (Local Time)

The E.E. McClellan Lecture in History

Allyson Hobbs is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Stanford University. Her book A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, published by Harvard University Press in 2014, examines the phenomenon of racial passing in the United States from the late eighteenth century to the present.

The book is winner of both the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize for the best first book in American history and the Lawrence Levine Prize for best book in American cultural history from the Organization of American Historians.

Between the eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, countless African Americans passed as white, leaving behind families and friends, roots and community. It was a chosen exile, a separation from one racial identity and the leap into another. Hobbs’s revelatory history of passing explores the possibilities and challenges that racial indeterminacy presented to men and women living in a country obsessed with racial distinctions, and also tells a tale of loss.

As racial relations in America have evolved, so has the significance of passing. To pass as white in the antebellum South was to escape the shackles of slavery. After emancipation, many African Americans came to regard passing as a form of betrayal, a selling of one’s birthright. When the initially hopeful period of Reconstruction proved short-lived, passing became an opportunity to defy Jim Crow and strike out on one’s own…

For more information, click here.

The Forgotten Amerasians

Open City
Asian American Writers’ Workshop
2016-02-11

Enrico Dungca

Unwanted in their mothers’ country and unwelcome in their fathers’ homeland, Filipino Amerasians are still in search of a home.

“Do you know your father?” I asked him.

It was a humid, rainy night in Angeles City, some 50 miles north of Manila. I was aboard a jeepney on my way home after partying with friends during a recent trip to the Philippines. He was also a passenger on that jeepney, the most popular mode of public transportation in the Philippines that were originally made from U.S. military jeeps left over from World War II – one of the more visible and enduring vestiges of American military presence in the Philippines.

“My mother is a Filipino, and my father is an American,” Eric said, as he lowered his gaze and kept it fixed on the jeepney floor. He started shaking his head and said he has no recollection of his father, although he often wondered about him — where he lives, if he is still alive, or if he remembers him or if he knew that he existed at all.

His father is a U.S. serviceman, one of the hundreds of thousands of American military men who were stationed in the Philippines since 1898 when the U.S. became the new colonial master of the former Spanish colony. Eric is what Nobel Prize for literature awardee Pearl Buck called an “Amerasian” — born of Asian mothers and sired and abandoned by their American soldier-fathers who were momentarily posted in countries that were either stages or hosts to U.S. military adventures…

Read the entire article here.