Mixed-race Families Research Articles

Navigating the Hypervisibility and Invisibility of Mixed-Race Families

U.S. multiracial families are paradoxically regarded as representatives of a post-racial ideal and as anomalies that challenge assumptions. Here, Black-White couples discuss the pressures they feel to “perform” family when facing racial surveillance and erasure.

“Unlawful Intimacy”: Mixed-Race Families, Miscegenation Law, and the Legal Culture of Progressive Era Mississippi

AbstractThis article examines the enforcement of anti-miscegenation law in Progressive Era Mississippi by focusing on a series of unlawful cohabitation prosecutions of interracial couples in Natchez. It situates efforts to police and punish mixed-race families within the broader legal culture of Jim Crow, as politicians, judges, and district attorneys sought stricter enforcement of morals laws, including those barring interracial cohabitation. This article argues that the historic prerogative of white men to choose their sexual and domestic partners undermined the illegality of interracial marriage. Lynching deterred Black men from cohabiting with white women, but prosecutions for “unlawful cohabitation” did not effectively punish white men and Black women who formed lasting partnerships. This article relies on extensive research in local court records that reveal that prosecutions of white men and Black women often resulted in fines and, in many cases, had little effect on these mixed-race families. In Natchez and elsewhere, eugenic ideologies of “white racial purity” were no match for a patriarchal legal culture that gave white men leeway to ignore the law when it suited them, even amid outward denunciations of miscegenation. In Mississippi, many white men did not view relationships between white men and Black women as a clear threat to white supremacy, creating space for some interracial families to survive into the twentieth century.

Interracial couples' experiences with coparenting school-aged mixed-race children.

Fostering positive racial identities in racialized children is associated with several indicators of optimal development. There is little research investigating the socialization processes through which interracial parents meet this need for their mixed-race children. To address this, in-depth interviews were conducted with six couples actively parenting mixed-race children in an urban context. Interpretative phenomenological analysis (Smith et al., 2009) was used to generate rich descriptions of the meaning that interracial couples' made of jointly parenting mixed-race children. This analysis yielded three core transecting themes. First, participants described how joint parenting led to transformative racial identity experiences, both as individuals and couples. Second, participants described how significant experiences with their racially different partner, with their mixed-race children, and with the external world led to the realization of their uniqueness in a racially stratified society. Third, all couples described the process through which they framed their interracial status as a strength for their mixed-race children, emphasizing the benefits of dual racial exposure. This research has exposed the unique needs of mixed-race families in the context of a rapidly shifting sociopolitical climate and period of racial reckoning. The perspectives of these families need to be understood to ensure the provision of culturally sensitive, competent, and affirming practice. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Fragments of an Indian Ocean Life: Aristide Corroller between Islands and Empires

Abstract Born on Ile de France in late 1799 to a French father and a free mixed-race mother from Fort-Dauphin in southeast Madagascar, Aristide Corroller gained an education at Port-Louis but departed to pursue a political career in Madagascar after 1815. Corroller first assisted his maternal uncles to capture the sovereignty of Madagascar's central eastern coast (Ivondro-Tamatave-Foulpointe) but then entered the service of King Radama of Imerina. He rose through the ranks of Radama's service to become commander-in-chief of Antananarivo's armed forces and the second most powerful man of that independent kingdom. His fortunes soured with the death of Radama in July 1828, however. He was placed under house arrest for a time and then returned to govern Tamatave but died there with frustrated ambitions in late 1835, leaving a written account of his achievements on which this article is substantially based. This article employs Corroller's writings found in a library in New Zealand not only to trace his career but to discuss the strategies of his island-hopping family—particularly his maternal ancestors from Madagascar who moved to Ile de France and his maternal uncles who returned to Madagascar—and the careers of European administrators of empire who collected and pored over his work. Corroller's career, mixed-race family, and labors illuminate the contours of life in the western Indian Ocean islands of his time, bringing their migrations, commerce, colonial constraints and opportunities, as well as human interconnections and racial structures, into conversation.

Multiracial Bodies, Multiracial Reproduction

This paper explores the cultural and social dynamics shaping the emergence of a developing phenomenon: the politics of desire shaping an emergent beauty standard appropriated from Blackness, and subsequent fetishization of mixed-race or ethnically ambiguous children. I engage Jared Sexton’s <em>Amalgamation Schemes</em> extensively to theorize contemporary desirability politics which uphold anti-Blackness through promoting a standard of female beauty which is appropriated from but is fundamentally detached from Blackness, and in turn, develop an imaginary of the mixed-race family useful to reifying racial difference. I engage contemporary manifestations of this phenomenon across social media to investigate how the body, the family, desire, and race are constructed relative to the process of multiracial reproduction and the fantasy of multiracialism.

Where I Have Never Been: Migration, Melancholia, and Memory in Asian American Narratives of Return by Patricia Chu

Reviewed by: Where I Have Never Been: Migration, Melancholia, and Memory in Asian American Narratives of Return by Patricia Chu Hong Zeng Patricia Chu. Where I Have Never Been: Migration, Melancholia, and Memory in Asian American Narratives of Return. Temple UP, 2019. ix + 255 pp. Patricia Chu's Where I Have Never Been: Migration, Melancholia, and Memory in Asian American Narratives of Return breaks new ground in Asian American studies in the following senses. First, it is the first book to devote itself exclusively to the study of diasporic Asian American narratives of return, specifically, the narratives of later-generation Asian Americans who visit their parents' and ancestors' homeland. Previously, Asian American studies predominantly focused on diasporic Asian American assimilation efforts, in the vein of postcolonial study: "Asian American Studies, focused on immigration and social justice within the United States, has historically marginalized the stories of educated Chinese who studied here and returned to China" (6). Second, the book's methodology is syncretic and uniquely combines postcolonial study, Sigmund Freud's and Franz Fanon's theories [End Page 593] on melancholy and mourning, and genre studies of autobiography and travel writing. Third, the book explores important critical terms such as racial melancholy, postimperial and postcolonial melancholy, and countermemory and postmemory. The book also discloses the relevance of these terms to Asian American narratives of return. Last, the book provides new insight into Chinese history and Asian American history through its unique lens of the narratives of return, written by diasporic Asian Americans who possess a double vision of two cultures. As a result, the book helps to decolonize the study of Asian history and draw global attention to Asian American culture and identity. An overview of chapters bespeaks the originality of Chu's materials and syncretic research approach. Chapter 1 establishes this syncretic method and introduces the narrative of return as a genre of literary memorial related to other transnational or global Asian American studies. It discusses genre, racial melancholia, postcolonial melancholia, types of return migration, and conventions of travel narration. Chapter 2 studies the historian Josephine Khu's 2001 collection of personal essays written by the children of diasporic Chinese settled around the world. It examines these writers' evolving sense of self, culture, and identity through meeting family in China. Chu perceptively analyzes these narrators' racial melancholia, which arise from conflicts between their cultural legacies and personal choices. Chapter 3 examines Lisa See's On Gold Mountain: The One-hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family, a memoir about the multiple generations of See's mixed-race family. Chu underscores the fictional narrative tools that See employs to distill imagination and personality into the historical archive of family members she had not seen. According to Chu, See's work manifests the typical migration patterns and "Chineseness" (74) of merchant-class Chinese. Chapter 4 and 5 explores the family memoirs of Denise Chong and Winberg and May-lee Chai. Chu studies how Chong's work manifests the racial melancholy that, after arising from her grandparents' (Canadian Chinese laborers) inability to achieve oversea success—by being excluded based on gender from fulfilling careers and being trapped in household chores—was passed onto their descendants. The text both registers and combats this melancholia through narration and countermemory. The Chais' intergenerational story examines the postcolonial melancholy of the narrator's parents. Their parents, educated in the US, went back to China to help with the construction of the country but found that the liberal democratic [End Page 594] ideas they learned from the US could not be applied to China in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, so they ultimately returned to the US. However, their attachment to China formed a chasm with their solely American-educated daughter. Thus, the Chais' parents represent the cultural identity and postcolonial melancholy of diasporic Chinese culture elites. Chapter 6 studies the 1909 memoir of Jung Wing, the first Chinese graduate of an American university, a diplomat who organized the late Qing study-abroad movement. According to Chu, Wing exhibits a deimperialization in his attack of Qing government, as well as a decolonization in his criticism of Western imperialism. Chu argues incisively that Wing's melancholia is...

Racial Illiteracies and Whiteness: Exploring Black Mixed-Race Narrations of Race in the Family

Drawing upon fifty-five interviews with Black mixed-race people located in Britain’s second-largest city, Birmingham, and a nearby satellite town, Bromsgrove, this article critically explores how race, identity, and whiteness, are negotiated in mixed-race families. Whilst existing studies tend to centre upon the experiences of white parents raising their children, in this article, we foreground Black mixed-race perspectives of familial practices. Whiteness can often function as an ever-present non-presence in explorations of mixed identities. We utilise concepts such as white fragility, white complicity and the white gaze to make whiteness visible and to address how racial illiteracies can manifest within everyday family settings. In doing so, we suggest that white family members can, on occasion, participate in processes of white domination even in the smallest everyday acts and conversations that deny, avoid, dismiss and, in some cases, even perpetuate racism. By identifying these moments in Black mixed-race lives, we complicate some of the studies that document the racial literacies of white parents and explore how mistakes are made. We suggest that these encounters can create moments of disjuncture in familial settings that are characterised by a complex layer of love, intimacy and racial difference. By bringing these issues to the fore, we centre the emotional labour it can take on the part of Black mixed-race people to make sense of and resist these experiences whilst simultaneously maintaining closeness within familial relationships.

Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition by Hollis Robbins

Reviewed by: Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition by Hollis Robbins Peter Howarth Hollis Robbins. Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2020. 264 pp. $32.95. In 2018, Hollis Robbins went to hear poet Natasha Trethewey give a prestigious lecture. Trethewey spoke about her mixed-race family, the "racial determinism" of her Southern upbringing, and her fondness for the sonnet, a "received European form" (2). Preempting the inevitable criticism that such forms are endemically white, privileged and male, Trethewey quoted Audre Lorde's warning that the master's tools could be never used to dismantle the master's house, but then added that in her own writing life, "I have turned to such forms to contain the subject-matter necessary to challenge the master narrative." After the applause, Robbins asked a question: "How many sonnets have to be written before someone says she received the form from a Black poet?" (2). Trethewey was silent, and then acknowledged that for her, the sonnet had indeed come from Gwendolyn Brooks, not from Europe. Forms of Contention argues that this has been true for a good while. The sonnet is no longer a form borrowed from Europe or white America but is instead one Black writers now own themselves, given the superb sonnets and sequences written by Brooks, Margaret Walker, Robert Hayden, Terrance Hayes, Marilyn Nelson and Trethewey herself. It also maintains that a distinct Black sonnet-writing tradition has been there all along but has been lost by the nineteenth-century newspaper, the anthologies of the twentieth century, and the late modernism of the Black Arts movement. The result is that a sonnet like Claude McKay's "If We Must Die" is never considered "representative" of influential Black poetry the way Langston Hughes is, and the great number of Black sonnets in newspapers and anthologies are overlooked as inauthentic and genteel. "Too many ancestors have been forgotten," Robbins writes, "too much nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry was banished from the Black poetry canon in the 1960s because it was too 'traditional'" (2). Forms of Contention aims to correct this act of selective memory on both counts. It wants to recover the Black sonneteers from the eighteenth-century onward, and to show that their work forms an authentic tradition of influences, inheritances and rewritings, a multigenerational chain of sonnets. It succeeds admirably at the first task, but to find a "distinct genre" (118) of the African American sonnet is harder work, historically. This is not because Black poets have not brilliantly wrested the form into shapes that express distinctly African American situations and struggles. Robert Hayden's boundary-bursting sonnet "To Frederick Douglass" or Gwendolyn Brooks's "Gay Chaps" sequence about the US Navy officers penned below decks and their fiancées hemmed in at home are among the best sonnets ever written, without doubt. But the act of adapting the sonnet's pleading to new causes is also part of its tradition. Petrarch made the sonnet famous with his addresses of sexual desire and thwarted ambition, but those appeals were soon transformed into wrestlings with God, or demands for political honor to be restored, or from Milton onward, for both. Wordsworth and Southey took over Milton's enjambed lines and used them to thunder against slavery itself. In that sense, African American poets have been fully traditional from the start, Phillis Wheatley's 1768 appeal to King George: Great God, direct, and guard him from on high,And from his head let every evil fly!And may each clime with equal gladness seeA monarch's smile can set his subjects free! [End Page 242] Scholars debate the degree to which her blessing of the King for repealing the hugely unpopular Stamp Act (a tax paying for British troops in the colonies) contains a plea for other kinds of freedom. But given Wheatley's captive status, to write a sonnet to God and the sovereign at all gave the genre new vigor by giving it a new range of causes to plead. The trickier task that Forms of Contention has set itself, though, is to find a self-aware...

Mothering ‘Outsider’ Children: White Women in Black/White Interracial Families in Ireland

The mixed-race family constellation has emerged as a regular feature of the Irish familial landscape. Such a demographic change invariably leads to the increased presence of white women who are mothering across racialised boundaries. Moreover, in the Irish context, the racial category of whiteness is privileged at a structural level and remains a central organising principle of Irishness as a mode of national belonging. This paper, therefore, sets out to address the specific gap in the literature related to the racialised experiences of the white mother of mixed-race (i.e., black African/white Irish) children in contemporary Ireland as these women are, in effect, mothering ‘outsider’ children in a context of white supremacy. More specifically, how does the positioning of these women’s mixed-race children impact their subjectivities as mothers categorised normatively as white and Irish? Framed by critical whiteness literature, this paper draws on in-depth interviews with twelve white Irish mothers. Data analysis broadly revealed three themes as relates to the women’s negotiations of the racialising discourses and practices which impact their family units. Findings suggest that these women no longer occupy the default position of whiteness as a category of racial privilege and a condition of ‘structured invisibility’. Perhaps, most significantly, the lived reality of these women disturbs the hegemonic conflation of the categories white and Irish. This paper, therefore, extends our theoretical understanding of both whiteness and mixed-race studies.

We the Animals and Honoring an Intimate Story of Brutal Love

In this edited interview, psychologists Nisha Gupta and Eric Greene interview filmmaker Jeremiah Zagar about We the Animals (2018), his film adaptation of the novel by Justin Torres. We the Animals is a coming-of-age story of an adolescent boy named Jonah who grows up with rambunctious brothers in a working class mixed-race family in upstate New York, and who must contend with both his volatile father and his emerging queer sexuality. Jonah’s mother and father have a volatile relationship that makes and unmakes the family many times over, often leaving the boys fending for themselves. As his brothers harden and grow into versions of their father, Jonah, who is the youngest, becomes increasingly aware of his desperate need to escape. Driven to the edge, Jonah embraces an imagined world all of his own. In this conversation, Jeremiah describes what it was like to honor novelist Justin’s intimate story by bringing it to screen, depict the nuanced realities of love interlaced with violence within family dynamics, and craft an immersive story that poses more questions than it answers.

Scenes From the Cutting Room Floor: Black Womanhood and the Visual Politics of Mixed Race Family Albums 1918-2020

Scenes From the Cutting Room Floor: Black Womanhood and the Visual Politics of Mixed Race Family Albums 1918-2020

Beyond “Biracial Cool”: Bill de Blasio, Chirlane McCray, and the Politics of the Mixed Race Family

Beyond “Biracial Cool”: Bill de Blasio, Chirlane McCray, and the Politics of the Mixed Race Family

The mixed race Irish family and everyday negotiations of citizenship

In recent years, the mixed race family constellation has emerged as a persistent feature of Irish societal life. An increase in interracial partnering invariably leads to the presence of white women who are parenting children who are ascribed to another race. Yet, nationalist discourses and the incorporation of jus sanguinis principles in constitutional law have constructed a version of Irishness that ‘others’ and excludes the mixed race person. This paper focuses on the white Irish mother and her mixed race (i.e. black African/white Irish) child (ren), as the majority of mixed race families in the State. In fact, this article sets out to provide a novel perspective vis-à-vis the location of the mixed race family in the context of the exclusionary politics of Irish citizenship and how, through their mothering practices, these white women negotiate and challenge dominant ideologies of belonging on behalf of their children. More specifically, this paper examines the mothers’ attempts to establish their children as equal claimants of rights in the Irish public sphere. By drawing on in-depth interviews with twelve white Irish mothers, this paper reveals that the women’s efforts to publicly articulate their mixed race children as legitimate Irish citizens have been largely denied or even, de-politicized. Rather, at the level of citizenship, the racialized insider-outsider dynamic gets reproduced as the political autonomy of such citizens is constrained by notions of phenotype (and bloodline criteria). I further draw attention to the governmental production of these mixed race subjects as ‘failed’ citizens, who must live out their difference silently in the interstitial spaces of the national framework.

Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733–1833 by Daniel Livesay

Reviewed by: Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733–1833 by Daniel Livesay Colleen A. Vasconcellos Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733–1833. By Daniel Livesay. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. vii + 411 pp. Cloth $45, paper $29.99, e-book $29.99. In Children of Uncertain Fortune, Daniel Livesay investigates the lives, experiences, and migrations of 360 mixed-race individuals in a very complex intellectual history of the changing nature of race and family in the British Atlantic world during what he describes as the long eighteenth century. By focusing on a hundred-year period between 1733 and 1833, Livesay expertly demonstrates how the conceptualization of race in the Atlantic world changed from a very fluid idea to one that became increasingly obtuse, as individual households navigated and negotiated both colonial and metropolitan attitudes toward what became normalized as the “Atlantic family.” At the start of Livesay’s analysis, we see white Britons placing their faith upon mixed-race elites who were thought to be the “vanguard of a new type of colonial settlement” (398) in the absence of a large white settler population in Jamaica. Yet, privilege became the exception as the increased passage of laws designed to control a steadily growing free population of color only eroded political rights and limited financial freedom. Marriage reforms and inheritance caps imposed even more barriers to legitimacy, striking a major blow to anyone of African descent living in the empire. After Tacky’s Rebellion ended in June of 1760, ideas of race and family began to narrow even further as abolitionist sentiment against the transatlantic slave trade gained traction in Parliament. The increased migration of mixed-race elites to England further complicated the issue, as they increasingly attended prestigious schools, [End Page 309] took prized apprenticeships, married into prominent families, and ultimately became more visible within polite English society. Negotiations in both public and private spheres based on geographical and genealogical factors encompassed family on both sides of the Atlantic, as concerns of kinship, race, and belonging increasingly challenged Britain’s need to compartmentalize their racial classifications and social hierarchies. By the 1780s, caught in a backlash against enslaved revolt and American independence, migrants of color quickly came to symbolize the breakdown and instability surrounding British hegemony in the Atlantic world. Deemed an improper fit and a stain on English society, their presence was problematic and vexing to white Britons on many levels. Yet, most felt that mixed-race elites compromised the existence of legitimate families and threatened the purity of English culture and society. In the wake of the numerous revolutions and slave revolts spreading throughout the Atlantic during this period, many saw these individuals as being not only a danger to British households, but to Caribbean social stability as well (345). As Livesay notes, open ideas of kinship in the Atlantic meant that “conceptions of race were not singular and unmitigated” (248). Imperial pressures, increased abolitionist sentiment, and complicated family dynamics lead to the whitewashing and rejection of mixed-race family members, as public discourse forced a reconsideration of their place within the larger vision of empire. With each chapter, Livesay exposes the increased anxiety among white Britons, who continuously reorganized and reassessed their ideas and definitions of race and family while struggling to control an ever-changing society moving toward what they feared most—colonial anarchy within an empire in crisis. Interestingly, mixed-race elites seem to come full-circle with emancipation in 1833, once again relied upon by white Britons to help construct a new Jamaica in the absence of a stable white settler community on the island. Yet, while Livesay establishes that mixed-race families were less dependent upon white patronage during this transition from slavery to freedom, and blanket rights began to replace the exemptions and preferential treatment granted before Tacky’s Revolt, class distinctions began to disappear and race became the only defining factor. Prejudice worsened, tolerance faded, and blackness was no longer stratified. In the new post-Emancipation Atlantic, obtuse definitions of black and white guided the debate. Truly Atlantic in scope, Children...

The Civil War on the Rio Grande, 1846–1876 ed. by Roseann Bacha-Garza, Christopher L. Miller, Russell K. Skowronek

Reviewed by: The Civil War on the Rio Grande, 1846–1876 ed. by Roseann Bacha-Garza, Christopher L. Miller, Russell K. Skowronek Richard B. McCaslin The Civil War on the Rio Grande, 1846–1876. Edited by Roseann Bacha-Garza, Christopher L. Miller, and Russell K. Skowronek. The Elma Dill Russell Spencer Series in the West and Southwest. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2019. Pp. xxii, 326. $45.00, ISBN 978-1-62349-719-4.) The Civil War affected all parts of the United States, but much that occurred far from the major battlefields has slipped from public memory. Faculty at universities, curators of local museums, and community members in southern [End Page 183] Texas have been working to reverse that inattention, developing a Civil War trail that stretches through five counties on the lower Rio Grande (Cameron, Hidalgo, Starr, Zapata, and Webb Counties) and Kenedy County immediately to the north. The results include a website with a virtual trail, signs for the actual sites, a Facebook page, classroom materials, and a previous book that tells the story of the project (Christopher L. Miller, Russell K. Skowronek, and Roseann Bacha-Garza, Blue and Gray on the Border: The Rio Grande Valley Civil War Trail [College Station, Tex., 2018]), which describes the trail and discusses African American soldiers. Russell K. Skowronek writes the concluding essay in the book under review. His summary adds little except his useful explanation that the work reflects a “‘cubist’ approach” to “the American Civil War era along the Rio Grande” (p. 292). Cubist he defines, from David Hurst Thomas, as “a combination of oral and documentary history, ethnographic analogy,” and archaeology (p. 271). Together, these approaches should provide a better understanding of the conflict and its impact. In truth, this goal has been only partially achieved. Oral history concerning the Civil War has obvious limitations, but all history is only as good as the written corroboration of different sources. The authors of these essays use some great sources, especially Mary Margaret McAllen, who relies on the archives of the McAllen Ranch. But those familiar with Texas in the Civil War era will find a substantial number of important secondary works missing from the bibliography and endnotes, which contain sources not listed in the bibliography. Standard histories of Texas and the trans-Mississippi theater are absent, as well as studies on such topics as blockade-runners and Reconstruction politics. Biographies of important characters who are mentioned repeatedly—Edmund J. Davis, John S. Ford, José María de Jesús Carbajal, Philip Sheridan, Porfirio Diaz, and Benito Juárez, for example—are not cited. This oversight leads to mistakes, such as misidentifying the regiment of Union cavalry that Davis led, declaring that Davis was governor of Texas in 1875, giving the wrong rank for Ford in 1864, and misstating Texas cotton production. Concerning ethnography, several authors, most notably McAllen and Jerry Thompson, provide good insights on the relations between Tejanos and Anglos. But it is on the topic of African Americans that the work becomes too narrowly focused. Roseann Bacha-Garza has an intriguing essay on three mixed-race families, and W. Stephen McBride and James N. Leiker have interesting essays on African American soldiers during the first years of Reconstruction. Apparently, few of the soldiers stayed in the Rio Grande Valley after their enlistment, yet there were other African Americans who were just as vital in shaping the area. While the figures are misquoted several times in this volume, there were fourteen slaves in Cameron, Hidalgo, and Starr Counties in 1860, and the first two counties also had the largest populations of free black people in Texas at that time. Their stories, as well as those of the slaves, would enrich the ethnographic history of the Rio Grande Valley Civil War Trail. This analysis would be much more useful than repeating uncorroborated stories about the Underground Railroad in Texas and how Ford and Santos Benavides worked as slave hunters. Rolando Garza has worked long and hard on military archaeology in the Rio Grande Valley, but the Palmito Ranch battlefield has yielded little. Only forty of the more than three thousand acres of the site have been...

Black Brother, Black Brother by Jewell Parker Rhodes

Reviewed by: Black Brother, Black Brother by Jewell Parker Rhodes Elizabeth Bush Rhodes, Jewell Parker Black Brother, Black Brother. Little, 2020 [240p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-316-49380-2 $16.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-316-49381-9 $9.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 4-7 Donte’s older brother, Trey, fits in well at elite Middlefield Prep school; he’s athletically talented and as light skinned as Donte and Trey’s white father. Donte, on the other hand, has never gone the athletic route, and his dark skin, inherited from their mother, has made him a target for the fencing team bullies, who think it’s hilarious that the two boys could be brothers. The school is oblivious to—possibly complicit in—the bullying, and when the tacit “blame the victim” policy lands Donte in a juvenile court hearing, he decides to fight back the only way he can truly hurt his abhorrent classmate, Alan—defeat him in fencing. First he has to learn to fence, though, and for that he has to convince a former Black fencing champ, now working at the rec center, to teach him. This is a classic sports story, complete with a washed-out coach with a skeleton in his closet, a nastier-than-sin villain, a romantic interest, and a supportive mixed-race family that must daily find its way through the maze of microaggressions. As usual in classic sports stories, Donte learns some lessons he didn’t count on, including how his own economic privilege appears to other kids of color, and how his own brother struggles to navigate having his back while letting him fight his own battles. Readers who mourn the completion of Jason Reynolds’ Track series will be happy to find Rhodes’ take on revenge and redemption. Copyright © 2020 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

“Fair” Bianca and “Brown” Kate: Shakespeare and the Mixed-Race Family in José Esquea's The Taming of the Shrew

This essay explores the world of a new production of The Taming of the Shrew, still in the earliest stages of development, that will employ non-traditional casting and re-envision Katharina (“as brown in hue / as hazelnuts”), “fair” Bianca, and their father Baptista as members of a mixed-race family. The production is conceptualized, cast, and rehearsed under the guidance of José Esquea, producer/director of the Soñadores Productions Shakespeare series (formerly of Teatro LATEA), a classical theater group that features Latinx, African American and Asian American actors, and mixed-ability casting (the combination of professional and amateur actors from the community).

Is there evidence of ‘whitening’ for Asian/White multiracial people in Britain?

ABSTRACT Growing rates of interracial unions in multi-ethnic societies such as Britain are notable, and point to significant changes in the blurring and possibly shifting nature of ethnic and racial boundaries. Asian Americans who partner with White Americans are assumed to engage in ‘whitening’ – both in terms of their aspirations and their social consequences. Yet little is still known about the aftermath of intermarriage, even in the USA. Drawing on this US literature, this paper considers the whitening thesis in relation to multiracial people in Britain, with a particular focus on Asian/White multiracial people. I draw upon the findings of two British studies – one of multiracial young people in higher education (Aspinall, Peter, and Miri Song. 2013. Mixed Race Identities. London: Palgrave Macmillan), and another of multiracial people who are parents (Song, Miri. 2017. Multiracial Parents: Mixed Race Families, Generational Change and the Future of Race. New York: NYU Press) – to explore these questions. I argue that conceptualizations of part Asian people (in the USA) as leaning toward their White heritages are often unsubstantiated, and deduced primarily from one key factor: their high rates of intermarriage with White spouses. Little attention has been given to part Asian people who try to maintain ties with their Asian ancestries. We must consider the ambivalence, tensions, and contextually variable identifications and practices adopted by multiracial Asian people.

The Remember Balloons by J. Oliveros

Oliveros, Jessie. The Remember Balloons. Illustrated by Dana Wulfekotte, Simon &amp; Schuster Books for Young Children – Simon and Schuster, 2018&#x0D; This beautifully written story tells of a young boy and his dear relationship with his aging Grandfather. Connected through balloons that hold memories and stories, the young boy notices his Grandfather begins to lose his balloons and eventually his memory, even of knowing his beloved grandson. Confused and upset, the young boy cannot understand why this is happening and tries in vain to save his Grandfather’s balloons. Saddened, the boy seeks his parent’s help whereby they show him that he now has a whole new set of balloons—his Grandfather’s. In acquiring these treasured memories, the young boy discovers a new way to be with his Grandfather through retelling him all his old stories.&#x0D; Illustrated in pencil sketch with minimal colour other than the varied and vibrant balloons, Oliveros speaks to children in a beautifully relatable manner about memories and stories and the connections to the people we cherish. It gently acknowledges the difficult changes in relationships as a loved one experiences the changes of aging and memory loss and guides the reader to find new ways to experience their stories and build new connections.&#x0D; The subtle acknowledgement of mixed-race families and friend groups also lends itself to a realistic and contemporary view of family and culture, further strengthening the relatability of this story to a wider readership.&#x0D; Recommended and appropriately written for ages 5-9 years, the book’s themes of keeping our memories close in our varied balloons and maintaining our connections with family even as relationships change, lends itself to a far greater age demographic.&#x0D; Highly recommended: 4 out of 4 stars Reviewer: Deanna Townsend&#x0D; Deanna Townsend is currently an Open Studies student and prospective graduate student with the Master of Library and Information Studies program at the University of Alberta. She is currently working in the Learning Commons/Library of an Elementary-Junior High School with Edmonton Public School Board. Her keen area of interest is in the transformation of school libraries/learning commons to modern, usable education spaces that inspire children to explore and learn beyond the classroom.

Apocalyptic public health: exploring discourses of fatness in childhood ‘obesity’ policy

ABSTRACTRecent ‘obesity’ preventions focus heavily on children, widely regarded as the future of society. The National Child Measurement Programme (NCMP) is a flagship government programme in England that annually measures the Body Mass Index (BMI) of children in Reception (aged 4–5) and Year 6 (aged 10–11) in order to identify ‘at risk’ children and offer advice to parents. Using Foucauldian discourse analysis this study explores how discourses within the programme construct fatness. The NCMP materials contain three key interrelated themes (concerning the hidden threat of ‘obesity’, the burden of ‘obesity’, and bodies that pose a greater risk) that combine to construct a ‘grotesque discourse’ of apocalyptic public health. ‘Obesity’ is constructed as a social and economic catastrophe where certain bodies pose a greater threat than others. We argue that this discourse has the potential to change health service policy in markedly regressive ways that will disproportionately impact working-class, Black, Asian, and mixed race families.