Mixed Race Studies

Fostering Mixed Race Children: Everyday Experiences of Foster Care

Palgrave Macmillan
June 2016
203 pages
3 b/w illustrations
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-137-54183-3
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-349-71266-3
DOI: 10.1057/978-1-137-54184-0

Fiona Peters, Visiting Researcher
Goldsmiths, University of London, United Kingdom

The ‘mixed race’ classification is known to be a factor of disadvantage in children’s social care and this fastest growing population is more likely than any other ethnic group to experience care admission. How does knowledge of ‘mixedness’ underpin policy and practice? How, when and why is the classification ‘mixed’ a disadvantage? Through narrative interviews with children currently in foster care, Fostering Mixed Race Children examines the impact of care processes on children’s everyday experiences. Peters shows how the ‘mixed race’ classification affects care admission, including both short and long term fostering and care leaving, and shapes the experiences of children in often adverse ways. The book moves away from the psychologising of ‘mixedness’ towards a much-needed sociological analysis of ‘mixedness’ and ‘mixing’ at the intersection of foster care processes.

This book will be of interest to academics and practitioners working with families and children. Peters presents a child-centred narrative focus and offers unique insights into a complex area.

“A Hindu is white although he is black”: Hindu Alterity and the Performativity of Religion and Race between the United States and the Caribbean

Comparative Studies in Society and History
Volume 58, Issue 01, January 2016
pages 181-210
DOI: 10.1017/S0010417515000614

Alexander Rocklin
Department of Religious Studies
Willamette University, Salem, Oregon

This essay uses the controversies surrounding the enigmatic Ismet Ali, a yogi working in Chicago and New York in the 1920s, to illuminate the complexities of how the performativity of religion and race are interrelated. I examine several moments in which Ali’s “authenticity” as Indian is brought into doubt to open up larger questions regarding the global flows of colonial knowledge, racial tropes, and groups of people between India, the United States, and the Caribbean. I explore the ways in which, in the early twentieth-century United States, East Indian “authenticity” only became legible via identificatory practices that engaged with and adapted orientalized stereotypes. The practices of the yogi persona and its sartorial stylings meant to signify “East Indianness” in the United States, particularly the donning of a turban and beard, were one mode through which both South Asian and African Americans repurposed “Hindoo” stereotypes as models for self-formation. By taking on “Hindoo” identities, peoples of color could circumvent the U.S. black/white racial binary and the violence of Jim Crow. This act of racial passing was also an act of religious passing. However, the ways in which identities had to and could be performed changed with context as individuals moved across national and colonial boundaries.

Read or purchase the article here.