Mixed Race Studies

1-on-1 with Gopher basketball star Rachel Banham

FOX 9, KMSP-TV
Eden Prairie, Minnesota
2016-02-27

Hobie Artigue, Reporter

MINNEAPOLIS (KMSP) – University of Minnesota senior Rachel Banham has been the best player to watch in the Twin Cities on the basketball court and is the toast of the Big Ten.

Watch Fox 9’s Hobie Artigue hit the court with Banham in a good, old fashioned game of HORSE.

More than the Sum of My Parts: Multiracial Teen Identity Development and Experiences of Appeasement and Objection in a Mono-Racialized Context

University of Minnesota
2013
321 pages

Brynja Elisabeth HalldĂłrsdĂłttir Gudjonsson

Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

This dissertation examines multiracial student cultural awareness and how their experiences provided them insight into their current educational environment. The multiracial students in this study had significant self-awareness and cultural literacy due to their early identity formation and their continued navigation of disparate cultures. Because these students have received little attention in academic research, this dissertation explored multiracial identity in adolescents and the student experiences in a secondary educational context. This ethnographic study explores the students’ experiences through participant observations, in-depth interviews of students, teachers and school administrators, ethnographic reflections and field notes. The dissertation found that students encountered pressures in the school environment which affected their interactions in the school setting with teachers and peers. These encounters could be racially charged, although at times they could be so subtle that adults might not have recognized them as racially charged. In spite of these difficulties the students found supportive teachers and academic success. Based on the study’s findings the dissertation proposed a new lens through which to view multiracial student behavior. Since students were sensitive to others expectations, they mold their behavior to conform to these expectations. Through appeasement and objection the student actively chose how to react to others’ perceptions of them. Appeasement and objection in response to expectations could have stressful impacts on students as they sublimated portions of their identities in order to better fit into their environments.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• List of Tables
• Table of Figures
• Chapter 1
  • Categories of Self
  • Historical Understanding of Mixed Race Individuals
  • Racial Mixing and History
  • Definition of Modern Multiracial Identity
  • Schooling in Central City
  • Racism Entrenched in Schools
  • Research Questions
  • Methodology
  • Author Subjectivity
  • Data Discussion
  • Conclusions and Further Research
• Chapter 2 “My grandmother told me:” Race, History, School and Multiracial Identity Theory
  • In White and Black: Race and Dichotomy in U.S. Social Systems
  • Whiteness: Conception, History and Meaning
  • Black Identity: History and Context
  • Urban Education and Student Experience
  • Equal Education?
  • Multiracial Identity and Schooling
  • Multiracial History
  • Official Categorization of Multiracial and Multi-ethnic People
  • Identity Theory and the Multiracial Student
  • Contemporary Multiracial Identity Models and Theory
  • Conclusion and Research Questions
• Chapter 3: The Elusive Methodology of Critical Ethnography
  • Objective
  • The Ethnographic Frame
  • Embedding Ethnographers
  • Methods
  • Analysis
  • Cultural Politics in the Research
  • School Population
  • Sample Selection
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 4: This Examined Life An Exploration of Identity Creation and Projection for Multiracial Teens
  • Sorting the M&M’s: Seeing Multicultural and Multiracial Students at MWHS
  • Getting to Know You: Seeing Identity Changes
  • The Opportunity to Choose
  • Asking Permission: Finding Mixed Race Students
  • School Choice
  • “What are you?”
  • Friendship Groups
  • Foreclosure of Categorizing
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 5 “You think you’re special light-skind’ed bitch:”Student Interactions and School Curriculum
  • “You don’t just belong:” Finding Place in Social Groups in and out of School
  • Complex Problems with Simple Answers: Student Classroom Experiences
  • “Our history is still not their history too:” Student Connection to School Curriculum
• Chapter 6 “Ear-hustling” and Unsavory Experiences: Micro-aggressions are the Hidden Racial Interactions in School
  • Who is Listening? And What Do They Hear?
  • Micro-aggressions
  • Not Enough: Stepping Outside of the Expected Limits
  • Power and Control: Student Misbehavior and Punishment
  • Sit here not there: How negative attention affects students
  • Punishment: How Did it Affect Multiracial Students?
• Chapter 7 “To thine ownself be true:” Appeasement, Objection and Cultural Compliance
  • Additive Parts: Making up Identity
  • More than Code-switching: When Linguistic Analysis is not Enough
  • Act More White and Play School
  • Assimilation or Acculturation
  • Appeasement or Objection: How Mixed Students Reflect Expectations
  • Repercussions of objection and appeasement
• Chapter 8 Beyond All of the Pieces: What was Missing and Next Steps
  • Recommendations
  • The Matter of Power and Punishment
  • Directions for Future Research
  • The Last Pieces of the Puzzle
• References
• Appendix A: Research protocols
  • Observation protocol
  • Student questions:
  • Teacher questions:
• Appendix B
  • Male participant coding rubric
  • Female participant coding rubrique

Read the entire dissertation here.

Assimilating Hawai‘i: Racial Science in a Colonial “Laboratory,” 1919-1939

University of Minnesota
July 2012
322 pages

Christine Leah Manganaro

A DISSERTATION IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

This dissertation demonstrates how American physical anthropologists and sociologists working in Hawai‘i framed the biological and cultural assimilation of mixed race people and Asian migrants into Americanness as natural rather than ideological, thus naturalizing the islands’ incorporation into the United States as a story about integration rather than colonization. Scientists argued that mixing in this “racial laboratory” improved the quality of the majority non-white population, that migration and colonization were features of a natural historical trajectory of Americanization, and that race relations in the islands were the product of a human ecology that went hand in hand with capitalist development. All of these ideas became the racial common sense that traveled to the continental U.S. and perpetuated American amnesia about empire.

This project revisits the historiography of the supposed retreat of scientific racism and, by closely examining the methods, actual data, and conclusions of scientists whose work shaped their disciplines, demonstrates how racialist thinking persisted in work that has been characterized as either questioning the race concept, as politically progressive, or both. Taking cues from studies of settler colonialism in Hawai‘i and recent debate about the actuality of a retreat of scientific racism in the United States, this dissertation demonstrates how treating assimilation as a natural process that needed to be better understood, rather than a discursive project of colonial governance, legitimated American power in the islands.

During a period when scientists and politicians alike were interested in fitness, degeneracy, and the consequences of immigration and miscegenation as part of debates about national progress, scientists viewed Hawai‘i as a laboratory where they could conduct research on heredity and cultural change that was difficult or impossible to do in the continental United States. American social scientists working in Hawai‘i framed the processes they studied, particularly the assimilation of mixed race people and Asian migrants into American culture and identity, as natural rather than ideological. American scientists with sometimes opposing political orientations such as Louis R. Sullivan and L.C. Dunn concluded that, unlike mixed race people generally and especially “mulattoes,” Chinese-Hawaiian “hybrids” were actually improvements on their supposedly pure parents (chapter 1).

Physical anthropologist Harry Shapiro, in his study of racial plasticity among migrants in a changed environment, developed few concrete findings, but helped establish Hawai‘i as a long-term human research site. Sociologist Romanzo Adams, who was trained at the University of Chicago, produced the history of Hawai‘i as a history of admixture that exaggerated the degree of interracial reproduction and suggested that the territorial population was well on its way to complete biological amalgamation (chapter 3).

Through a series of interviews with couples in interracial marriages and the collection of student papers about identity and racial prejudice, many of which contradicted Adams’ findings and predictions, graduate researcher Margaret M. Lam recorded the testimony of residents who both resisted certain types of racialization as they also participated in the construction and maintenance of racial boundaries and meanings (chapter 4).

Finally, sociologist Andrew Lind, framed social inequality and tense race relations in the territory as a product of competition for jobs and housing, a “natural” feature of “human ecology,” rather than a product of intentional labor control and government decisions (chapter 5). This advanced the idea that social conditions in Hawai‘i were a natural product of modernization rather colonization.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: “Biologically Better” Studies and Hybrids: The Persistence of Racialism in Studies of Race Mixing in Territorial Hawai‘i, 1916-1932
• Chapter 2: A Racial Laboratory for the World: Establishing Studies of Race Mixing, Migration, and Environment in the 1930s
• Chapter 3: Turning a Colony into a Melting Pot: Romanzo Adams’ Interracial Marriage in Hawaii and the Natural History of Hawai‘i’s Americanization, 1919-1937
• Chapter 4: Narrating Colonial Racial Formation: Race Consciousness and Identity in the Vernacular, 1928-1936
• Chapter 5: Defining an “Island Community”: Race Relations as Ecological Succession, 1927-1939
• Conclusion
• Bibliography

Read the entire dissertation here.

‘Perpetual others’: The role of culture, race, and nation in the formation of a mixed-race identity

University of Minnesota
June 2004
275 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3149283
ISBN: 9780496086603

Jacquetta Elizabeth Amdahl

A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

The insistence upon a racial identity for multiracial blacks that is not singularly African American has been problematic throughout American history. The link between a racial identity that publicly acknowledges one’s ties to the African American community and the private ownership of one’s complete ancestry has been one that has been consistently tenuous for blacks of multiracial heritage. However, the first generation of openly multiracial African American artists have utilized their visibility in popular culture, as well as work they do within it, as spaces in which to forcefully assert this link. By consciously embracing and cultivating both public and private racial identities, they have distinguished themselves from the postracialist and even anti-black sentiments espoused by leaders and scholars within the Multiracial Category Movement (MCM).

This project explores the links between cultural expression, racial formation, and political agency through the investigation of the public lives and artistic expression of multiracial artists born between 1964 and 1970. These individuals were chosen because of their proximity to the Loving v. Virginia decision that overturned anti-miscegenation statutes. They are the first generation of officially recognized multiracial African Americans.

The project further examines the links between gender and race in representations of multiracial African Americans, as well as the history of the mixed race black population, and finally, the rise of the Multiracial Category Movement, and multiracial studies. Through these explorations, the inherently political nature of race is uncovered, and the public nature of racial identity is revealed. Finally, it concludes that the need for a fluid and expanded notion of African American identity, rather than the broadening of the definitions of whiteness, is the necessary answer to questions surrounding multiracial African American identities.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Introduction: From African American to Multiracial? Racial Identity and Public Discourse
• Chapter 1: Reports from the ‘Third Space’: The Music and Visual Presence of Mixed Race Artists in Popular Culture
  • The Hughes Brothers
  • Lenny Kravitz
  • Vin Diesel
• Chapter 2:From Tragic Mulatto to Erotically Autonomous Black Woman: Halle Berry’s Journey to Monster’s Ball
• Chapter 3: From Blue Vein Societies to Black Power: The ‘Mulatto Elite’ and the Black/White Binary
  • The Beginnings of Separate but Equal
  • The New Negro
  • The Quest to Solve the ‘American Dilemma’
• Chapter 4: Beyond the Private Realm: The Multiracialist Struggle with Public Racial Identities
  • The Multiracial Category Movement (MCM)
  • Multiracial Studies
  • Postracialists
  • Critical Scholarship lhat Explores Multiracial Issues
• Epilogue: Still ‘A Family Affair’: Implications of a Multiracial African American Identity

Purchase the dissertation here.

Ciphering Nations: Performing Identity in Brazil and the Caribbean
 
University of Minnesota
June 2011
197 pages

Naomi Pueo Wood, Assistant Professor of Spanish
The Colorado College, Colorado Springs, Colorado

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

This dissertation explores the interaction of theories of hybridity, mestizaje, mestiçagem and popular culture representations of national identity in Cuba, Brazil, and Puerto Rico throughout the 20th century. I examine a series of cultural products, including performance, film, and literature, and argue that using the four elements of Hip Hop culture—deejay, emcee, break, graffiti—as a lens for reading draws out the intra- American dialogues and foregrounds the Africanist aesthetic as it informs the formation of national identity in the Americas.

Hip Hop, rather than focus solely on its characteristic hybridity, calls attention to race and to a legacy of fighting racism. Instead of hiding behind miscegenation and aspirations of romanticized hybridity and mixing, it blatantly points out oppressions and introduces them into popular culture through its four components—thus reaching audiences through multiple modalities. Tropes of mestizaje or branqueamento—racial mixing/whitening—depoliticize blackness through official refusal to cite cultural contributions and emphasize instead a whitened blending. Hip Hop points blatantly to persistent social inequalities. Diverse and divergent in their political histories, the geographic and nationally bound sites that form the foci of this study are bound by their contentious relationships to the United States, an emphasis on the Africanist aesthetic, and a rich history of intertextual exchanges. Rather than look at individual nation formation and marginalized bodies’ performances of subversion, this study highlights the common tropes that link these nations and bodies and that privilege an alternative way of constructing history and understanding present day transnational bodies.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Abstract
• Introduction: De-Ciphering
• Chapter 1: Ciphered Nations
• Chapter 2: Defining Nation from the Outside-In: Las Krudas and CĂ©lia Cruz
• Chapter 3: Brasileiras no Palco: Brazilian Women on Stage
• Chapter 4: Breaking Time: Sirena Selena and Fe en disfraz
• Conclusions: Re-Freaking
• Works Cited:

Read the entire dissertation here.

Intimate encounters, Racial Frontiers: Stateless GI babies in South Korea and the United States, 1953-1965

University of Minnesota
June 2010
239 pages

Bongsoo Park

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

This dissertation explores the policy implications of statelessness by examining G.I. babies, born of non-marital sexual relations between U.S. soldiers in South Korea and Korean women between 1953 and 1965. Using English and Korean language documents about adoption and immigration of stateless GI babies, my work shows that statelessness reveals a racially exclusionary vision of national belonging that shaped citizenship policies of both nations. The GI babies’ presence challenged the myth of racial purity and confounded racial categories in both nations. The dissertation seeks to elucidate some limits of Cold War racial liberalism informed by humanitarian concerns for abandoned Korean war orphans but helped maintain racially exclusionary strategies on citizenship conferral that made the children stateless.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Ties That Bind: Making of the Origin of Korean Race
• 2. Technologies of Imperial Rule: The Nationality Act of 1940 in the Age of American Expansionism
• 3. Pitied But Not Entitled: Redemptive Adoption and Limits of Cold War Liberalism
• 4. Making of a National Hero: Alchemy of Race, Blood, and Memory
• Epilogue
• Bibliography

Read the entire dissertation here.

Natasha Trethewey talk

Theater Coffman Memorial Union
University of Minnesota
300 Washington Avenue SE
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455
2011-04-27, 19:30-21:00 CDT (Local Time)

Cost: Free

Natasha Trethewey, Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing
Emory University

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey talks about her family’s experience on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and how it led to her 2010 book Beyond Katrina (The University of Georgia Press). Trethewey is the author of Native Guard: Poems (2006, Houghton Mifflin), Bellocq’s Ophelia (Graywolf, 2002), and Domestic Work (Graywolf, 2000), winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet. She has won Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships, among others, and her poems have appeared in several volumes of The Best American Poetry. She is Professor of English, holding the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry, at Emory University. Reception and booksigning to follow

For more information, click here.

Black (un)like me: scholar Pabst dismantles stereotypes

University of Minnesota
College of Liberal Arts Today
Spring 2002

Judy Woodward

Naomi Pabst (B.A. ’93 summa cum laude, English & African-American Studies) is the intellectual enemy of the stereotype, the easy generalization, and the sweeping statement. As a newly-minted scholar of African-American studies and the history of consciousness, she defines her subject loosely as “what people think of when they say the word ‘black.’”…

…What engages Pabst is what she finds on the margins of the black experience.

It’s a territory that she knows fairly well from personal experience. Although the 33-year-old scholar insists, “I don’t want to reduce what I do to my own experience of marginality,” nevertheless she concedes that, as a biracial child growing up in Canada and Germany, her experience was not typical of conventional definitions of black culture.

But then, her point is that many African-Americans—including black cultural icons—did not have “typical” experiences…

Read the entire article here.