Half-Caste as Seen Through the Eyes of James Southard

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

There is good reason to expect that in the United States today individuals who identify as multiracial experience negative treatment. Multiracial individuals report encountering discrimination and microaggressive behaviors such as racial exclusion and marginalization, exoticization, invalidation of their racial identities, and racial essentialization.² These behaviors are in part a result of the kinds of racism that all groups of color face, and in part products of monoracism, a system which privileges single-race categories over racial mixing.³ This system leads to the systematic exclusion and reduction of multiracial identities. For example, during much of the history of the United States, the “one-drop rule” (the idea that every person with any black ancestry was to be identified as only black) was both a social and a legal principle that was heavily enforced.”⁴

Monoracism and the discriminatory and microaggressive behavior it produces continue to affect multiracial individuals today. For example, there have been numerous cases of workplace racial discrimination presented to courts by multiracial plaintiffs alleging the violation of Titles VI and VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.⁵ A common type of microaggressive behavior found in many of the court cases was racial essentialization; individuals were assigned to a single, monoracial group by others despite their multiracial background.⁶ For example, multiracial individuals with a black parent are typically described and treated as if they are solely African American.⁷ Even the courts themselves generally describe multiracial people with any black ancestry as simply black. Many scholars who are supporters of the “Personal Identity Equality” approach have critiqued this pattern, arguing that the “misrecognition of one’s identity” is a form of “social subordination,”⁸ although it is not against the law to refuse to acknowledge the racial identity that a person claims.

Mary E. Campbell and Sylvia M. Emmanuel, “On The Edge: Multiracial Groups and Public Policies,” in How Public Policy Impacts Racial Inequality, Josh Grimm and Jaime Loke eds. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019), 96.

Half-Caste as Seen Through the Eyes of James Southard

Half-Caste as Seen Through the Eyes of James Southard

Mixed Race Radio
Blog Talk Radio
2013-06-05, 16:00Z (12:00 EDT)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

James Southard has always been drawn to the creation of authentic stories that are visually and emotionally compelling. His love of music and photography eventually led him to the video business as an Associate Producer working for Quincy Jones’ cable network (NUE-TV) in 2000. Since then, Mr. Southard has worked with clients such as Discovery Channel, HGTV, TV- Guide Channel, as well as several universities and non-profit organizations.

While James is proud of the time he spent as a youth working for his father in a grocery store and as a white-water rafting guide in his early 20s where spent three years working with emotionally challenged youth, James made a mark in his high school when he and his friend, Darrel Satcher started the first black students club.

On Today’s episode of Mixed Race Radio, we will discuss James’ love of Hip Hop and some of the experiences that have shaped him and his ideas of race as a social, rather than a biological, construct since he became a Hip Hop DJ in 1992. James will talk with us about some of his interesting experiences dealing with racism as a man who self-identifies as mixed and how he navigates the concept of race with his family and a community that sometimes feels he…

For more information, click here.

Tags: James Southard, Mixed Race Radio, Tiffany Rae Reid

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 5th, 2013 at 15:40Z and is filed under Audio, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, United States. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Half-Caste as Seen Through the Eyes of James Southard

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