Mixed Race Studies

Researching the Experiences of Multiracial People Having their Racial Group Membership Denied by Others

University of Maryland, College Park
Department of Psychology
2013-08-22

Marisa Franco, Doctoral Student
Counseling Psychology

Greetings!

My name is Marisa Franco and I am a doctoral student in counseling psychology at the University of Maryland. I am conducting a survey examining Multiracial people’s experiences of having their racial group membership denied by others.

I would appreciate if you could participate and/or forward this study to potential participants. We are looking for participants that identify as Multiracial and are over the age of 18.

All participants will have the option of being entered into a raffle to receive one of three $25 gift cards.

To participate in the study, please click here: https://umd.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_8ChXJARNTErFm0l

Prospective participants can click on the link provided above and will be directed to the informed consent document, which includes additional information on study participation. Participation in the study is expected to take approximately 30 minutes.

Participation is confidential and participants may withdraw from the study at any time. If participants have any questions, they may contact me at mgf269@umd.edu.

Thank you.

One Drop of Love: A Multimedia Solo Performance on Racial Identity by Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni at University of Maryland

University of Maryland, College Park
The Stamp (Adele H. Stamp Student Union) [Directions]
Atrium Room
Friday, 2013-03-29, 17:00-19:30 EDT (Local Time)

Sponsored by the Multiracial Biracial Student Association (MBSA), Office of Multicultural Involvement and Community Advocacy (MICA), The Asian American Literary Review, University of Maryland Asian American Studies Program, and Hamsa.

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni, Playwright, Producer, Actress, Educator

Jillian Pagan, Director

Q&A afterwards hosted by:

Steven F. Riley, Founder and Creator
www.MixedRaceStudies.org

One Drop of Love is a solo performance piece that journeys from Boston, Michigan, Los Angeles, and East & West Africa from 1790 to the present as a culturally Mixed woman explores the influence of the One Drop Rule on her family and society.

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni. ©2103, Evan Tamayo

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni is a leading activist concerning mixed race, and is an actor, comedian, producer and educator. One Drop of Love is her MFA thesis, and she will be using footage from her performances to make a documentary.

Admission is free.

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni and Steven F. Riley. ©2012, Laura Kina

Ms. Cox DiGiovanni appeared in the 2013 Academy Award and Golden Globe winning film Argo (2012); co-created, co-produced and co-hosted the award-winning weekly podcast Mixed Chicks Chat (2007-2012); and co-founded and produced the annual Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival^® (2008-20012). For more on Ms. Cox DiGiovanni and One Drop of Love, visit: http://www.onedropoflove.org.

By Custom and By Law: Black Folklore and Racial Representation at the Birth of Jim Crow

University of Maryland, College Park
2006
222 pages

Shirley C. Moody

Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

By Custom and By Law: Black Folklore and Racial Representation at the Birth of Jim Crow establishes folklore as a contested site in the construction of racial identity during the emergence and solidification of legalized racial segregation at the end of the nineteenth century. By examining institutional interests, popular culture performances, and political rhetoric, I demonstrate how representations of black folklore played a seminal role in perpetuating a public discourse of racial difference. Alternately, my work introduces new scholarship examining the counter-narratives posed by nineteenthcentury African American scholars, writers and folklorists who employed folklore in their various academic works and artistic productions as a vehicle to expose
and critique post-Reconstruction racial hierarchies.

In chapter one I reveal how constructions of black folklore in ante- and post-bellum popular culture intersected with emergent white folklore studies to provide a taxonomy for codifying racial difference, while simultaneously designating folklore as the medium through which racial representation would be debated. Chapter two recovers the important, but virtually unacknowledged role of African American folklorists in brokering public and academic access to black folk culture and in providing an alternative to the racist constructions of black folklore prevalent in the post-Reconstruction era. Chapter three re-contextualizes Charles Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman as both a response to the larger national discourse surrounding black folklore and also as part of a concerted effort among black intellectuals to first expose how perceptions of racial realities were constructed through representations of black folklore, and then to redefine the role of black folklore in African American cultural and literary works.

In sum, my dissertation provides a cultural history of a formative moment in the construction of a late nineteenth century racialized discourse that placed representations of black folklore at its center. My research both recovers the neglected role of early black folklorists and writers in studying and interpreting black cultural traditions and asserts the profound significance of representations of black folklore in negotiating the perceptions and practices that have worked to define US racial ideologies in the nineteenth century and beyond.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Chapter I: Folklore at the Birth of Jim Crow
• Chapter II: The Hampton Folklore Society and The Crafting of a Black Folk Aesthetic
• Chapter III: Conjure Justice: Charles Chesnutt and the Stolen Voice
• Conclusion: “We Don’t Remember Enough:” Customary Folklore in Ralph Ellison’s “Flying Home”
• Bibliography

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

• 1. Thomas Rice as Jim Crow (circa 1830)
• 2. The Celebrated Negro Melodies, as Sung by the Virginia Minstrels (Boston, 1843)
• 3. Oliver Scott’s “Refined Negro Minstrels” (1898)
• 4. “The Old Folks at Home”
• 5. “A Hampton Graduate at Home”
• 6. “The Spirit of Hampton”

From page 64:

In a society fraught with racial tensions it would be difficult to overestimate the impact of the popular representations of the black folk, coupled with the intellectual and “scientific” assessments of black folklore, on turn of the century racial politics. As many cultural commentators, past and present, have observed, demarcating racial difference in light of the increasing biological, social and cultural miscegenation came with a host of attendant difficulties. The judges and legislatures who constructed and supported the “one drop rule” recognized the difficulty of visually distinguishing race, realizing that racial identification had to move beyond physical markers. But if discerning race based on physical appearance was difficult, identifying the color of a person’s blood presented an obvious paradox. This dilemma required new indicators of racial identity, and those indicators were found in attention to what were, ostensibly, racially differentiated behaviors, i.e. folk customs. There was an insistence, for example, that blacks could not imitate whites; that the behavioral differences, if not inherent, were so ingrained that they had become “spontaneous” and “natural.” Clearly, dominant interpretations of black minstrelsy as inherent and authentic worked to legitimize segregationist agendas by supplying examples of the kinds of uncivilized behaviors which blacks supposedly exhibited as vastly different from civilized white society.

Read the entire dissertation here.

The Fictive Flapper: A Way of Reading Race and Female Desire in the Novels of Larsen, Hurst, Hurston and Cather

University of Maryland, College Park
2004
391 pages

Traci B. Abbott, Lecturer, English and Media Studies
Bentley University, Waltham, Massachusetts

Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

This study seeks to reevaluate the 1920s icon of assertive female sexuality, the flapper, as represented in the novels of four women writers. Although cultural images often designate, by their very construction, normal and alteritous social categories, I argue that the flapper’s presence and popularity encourage rather than restrict this autonomy for even those female populations she appears to reject, notably lower-class women, nonwhite women, and homosexuals. Specifically, the flapper was predicated upon the cultural practices and beliefs of many of the very groups she was designed to exclude, and therefore her presence attests to the reality of these women’s experiences. Moreover, her emphasis on the liberating potential of sexual autonomy could not be contained within her strictly defined parameters in part because of her success in outlining this potential. Each chapter then focuses upon images of black and white female sexuality in the novels, chosen for their attention to female sexual autonomy within and beyond the flapper’s boundaries as well as the author’s exclusion from the flapper’s parameters.  Nella Larsen’s Passing suggests that the fluidity of female sexual desire cannot be contained within strict dichotomies of race, class, or sexual orientation, and women can manipulate and perhaps even transcend such boundaries. Fannie Hurst’s Imitation of Life offers a critique of the flapper’s excessive emphasis on sexual desirability as defined by conspicuous consumption, maintaining that lower-class white and black women can and should have access to sexual autonomy, while Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston similarly questions the denigration of working-class and non-white women in this model with her affirming view of Janie Woods, but also complicates the cultural presumption that any woman can find autonomy within a heterosexual relationship if such relationships are still defined by conventional notions of gender power. Finally, Willa Cather’s last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, contends modern black and white women have the right to control their own sexual needs within an unusual antebellum setting. Thus, all of these novel provide other models of sexual autonomy besides the white, middle-class, heterosexual flapper while harnessing the flapper’s affirming and popular imagery.

Read the entire dissertation here.

Psychology Study: Is This You? Please Join Us!

University of Maryland, College Park
Psychology Department
Post Date: 2012-12-11

If you have 1 self-identified Black parent and 1 self-identified White parent, and are over the age of 18, we invite you to volunteer to be a part of our research.

• Earn SONA Course Credit or $10 in exchange for an hour of your time.
• Your personal experience can help increase research on an understudied population.
• You will be asked to reflect on personal experiences while blood pressure and heart rate measures are taken

For more information or to sign up to volunteer, please contact the following e-mail address: MFresearchstudy@gmail.com.

FYS 102N – Exploring Mixed Identities

University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Honors College
Summer 2012

Jessica Guzman-Rea

The aim of this course is to move beyond prevalent monoracial discourses by examining identities and experiences from a mixed race/mixed ethnicity perspective. This course explores many topics such as the history of racialization, processes of othering, acceptance and the politics of claiming, the role of education in racial formation (and vice versa), interracial dating, white and non-white mixed identities, transnational and transracial adoptions, and hybridity. This course will be interactive and discussion based.

Cultural Reconstruction: Nation, Race, and the Invention of the American Magazine, 1830-1915

University of Maryland
2003-12-19
504 pages

Reynolds J. Scott-Childress, Assistant Professor of History
New Paltz, State University of New York

Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Cultural Reconstruction asks: How did the U.S. develop a national culture simultaneously unified and fractured by race? The little-examined history of American magazines offers a vital clue. The dissertation’s first part demonstrates how post-Jacksonian American culturists, deeply disturbed by the divisive partisanship of “male” politics, turned to the “female” culture of sentimentality with the hope of creating a coherent and inclusive nation. These culturists believed a nationally circulating magazine would be the medium of that culture. This belief derived from the wide success of the penny press revolution of the 1830s. Cutting against the traditional reading of the penny press, Cultural Reconstruction claims that newspapers were a major proponent of sentimentality but were barred from creating a national audience by their intense local appeal. Antebellum magazinists, from Edgar Allen Poe to James Russell Lowell, attempted to adapt the sentimental worldview of the penny press to a national audience, but were frustrated by a series of cultural rifts expressed chiefly in gendered terms. Part two of the dissertation examines how the post-Civil War magazine furthered the project of sentimentality and became the leading medium of national culture. Responding to the 1870s collapse of Political Reconstruction, editors such as Richard Watson Gilder at the Century employed a series of innovative aesthetic strategiesgreater realism, local color, and regional dialect believing they were creating a cultural panorama of American life. But this project of reconstruction was riven by two fundamentally conflicting visions of American identity: the regional versus the racial. The dissertation explores correspondence between Northern magazinists and white and black Southern authors (George Washington Cable, Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Thomas Nelson Page) to reveal how race won out: Northern editors helped invent and popularize “Southern” memories of the Old South and the Civil War. In the process, the magazines nationalized white Southern conceptions of racial separation and prepared the way for the explosive nationwide reaction to the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation. Cultural Reconstruction shows how twentieth-century American national unity was paradoxically bound up in racial division.

Table of Contents

• Introduction. Forgetting the Magazine: The Birth of a National Culture
• Part I The Rise of Sentimental Public Culture
  • 1. The Fall of the Millennial Nation: The Failure of the Atlantic Cable and the Coming of the Civil War
  • 2. Printing Urban Society: The Social Imagination and the Rise of the Daily Newspaper
  • 3. The Whole Tendency of the Age Is Magazineward: The Post-Jacksonian Magazine and National Culture
• Part II Cultural Reconstruction: The American Magazine
  • 4. Competing for Culture: The Rise of the General Magazine
  • 5. The Evolution of Magazine Culture: Sentimentality, Class, and the Editors of Scribner’s:
  • 6. The Genre of Sentimental Realism: The Thematics, Stylistics, and Form of the Postbellum Magazine
  • 7. Cultural Reconstruction: National Unity and Racial Division in the American Magazine
  • 8. From Local Color to Racial Color: The Century and African American Authors
  • 9. A Hazard of New Cultures
• Bibliography

Read the entire dissertation here.

FYS 102N: Exploring Mixed Identities

University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Fall 2011

The aim of this course is to move beyond prevalent monoracial discourses by examining identities and experiences from a mixed race/mixed ethnicity perspective. This course explores many topics such as the history of racialization, processes of othering, acceptance and the politics of claiming, the role of education in racial formation (and vice versa), interracial dating, white and non-white mixed identities, transnational and transracial adoptions, and hybridity. This course will be interactive and discussion based.

Black? White? Asian? More Young Americans Choose All of the Above

The New York Times
2011-01-29

Susan Saulny, National Correspondent

Race Remixed: A New Sense of Identity. Articles in this series will explore the growing number of mixed-race Americans.

COLLEGE PARK, Md.—In another time or place, the game of “What Are You?” that was played one night last fall at the University of Maryland might have been mean, or menacing: Laura Wood’s peers were picking apart her every feature in an effort to guess her race.

“How many mixtures do you have?” one young man asked above the chatter of about 50 students. With her tan skin and curly brown hair, Ms. Wood’s ancestry could have spanned the globe.

“I’m mixed with two things,” she said politely.

“Are you mulatto?” asked Paul Skym, another student, using a word once tinged with shame that is enjoying a comeback in some young circles. When Ms. Wood confirmed that she is indeed black and white, Mr. Skym, who is Asian and white, boasted, “Now that’s what I’m talking about!” in affirmation of their mutual mixed lineage.

Then the group of friends—formally, the Multiracial and Biracial Student Association—erupted into laughter and cheers, a routine show of their mixed-race pride.

The crop of students moving through college right now includes the largest group of mixed-race people ever to come of age in the United States, and they are only the vanguard: the country is in the midst of a demographic shift driven by immigration and intermarriage…

…No one knows quite how the growth of the multiracial population will change the country. Optimists say the blending of the races is a step toward transcending race, to a place where America is free of bigotry, prejudice and programs like affirmative action.

Pessimists say that a more powerful multiracial movement will lead to more stratification and come at the expense of the number and influence of other minority groups, particularly African-Americans.

And some sociologists say that grouping all multiracial people together glosses over differences in circumstances between someone who is, say, black and Latino, and someone who is Asian and white. (Among interracial couples, white-Asian pairings tend to be better educated and have higher incomes, according to Reynolds Farley, a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan.)

Along those lines, it is telling that the rates of intermarriage are lowest between blacks and whites, indicative of the enduring economic and social distance between them.

Prof. Rainier Spencer, director of the Afro-American Studies Program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and the author of “Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix,” says he believes that there is too much “emotional investment” in the notion of multiracialism as a panacea for the nation’s age-old divisions. “The mixed-race identity is not a transcendence of race, it’s a new tribe,” he said. “A new Balkanization of race.”…

…The Way We Were

Americans mostly think of themselves in singular racial terms. Witness President Obama’s answer to the race question on the 2010 census: Although his mother was white and his father was black, Mr. Obama checked only one box, black, even though he could have checked both races.

Some proportion of the country’s population has been mixed-race since the first white settlers had children with Native Americans. What has changed is how mixed-race Americans are defined and counted…

Read the entire article here.

Racial Choice at Century’s End in Contemporary African American Literature

University of Maryland
2008
161 pages

Kaylen Danielle Tucker

Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2008

This dissertation introduces the term “racial choice” to describe a contemporary idea that racial identity can be chosen or elected, as can the significance and the influence of race on an individual’s identity. Racial choice emerges out of the shifting historical, cultural, and social discussions of race and identity we have witnessed after integration. This dissertation examines the resulting representations of contemporary black identity in African American literature by analyzing texts that were published in the last quarter of the twentieth century and that feature protagonists that come of age during or after integration. Andrea Lee’s Sarah Phillips (1984), Danzy Senna’s Caucasia (1998), and Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle (1996) are representative texts that engage racial choice to register how the racial hierarchy has changed in the late twentieth century and how that change affects the African American literary tradition of race writing. In their attempts to write outside of the existing racial paradigm—using white flight, passing, and satire as narrative strategies—the authors test the racial boundaries of African American literature, finding that writing outside of race is ultimately unachievable.

The introductory chapter explains the cultural, literary, and scholarly context of my study, arguing that because race matters differently in the late twentieth century contemporary African American literature handles race uniquely. I argue in my first chapter that Lee uses white flight as a narrative form to move Sarah Phillips beyond the influence of racialization and to suggest class as an alibi for racial difference. Continuing this theme amidst the Black Power Movement of the 1970s and the multiracial project of the 1990s, my second chapter analyzes Senna’s Caucasia, which revises the passing narrative form and explores the viability of choosing a biracial identity. In my third chapter, I show how Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle satirizes the African American protest tradition to point up the performativity necessary in maintaining racial binaries and suggests that culture is a more accurate identifier than race.

My concluding chapter argues that though the three novels under study challenge racial categories—and by extension race writing—to different degrees, they all use similar methods to point up the shifting significance of race, racial categories, and racial identity. By historicizing attitudes about racial categories, challenging the dichotomous understanding of race, representing the tensions of racial authenticity, and showing the performativity necessary to maintain racial categories, the novels illustrate the traditional boundaries of racial choice and attempt to stretch the limits of the African American literary tradition.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: The Future American: The “Color Line” and “Racial Choice” at the Millennium
• Chapter One: Integration and White Flight in Andrea Lee’s Sarah Phillips
• Chapter Two: Racial Choice and the Contemporary Passing Paradigm
• Chapter Three: Satire, Performance, and Race in The White Boy Shuffle
• Conclusion: The Future of Racial Identity and African American Literature
• Works Cited

Read the entire dissertation here.