Mixed Race Studies Research Articles

The changing faces of racism: Tracing the racial state through mixed-race categories in South Korea

This paper examines the emergence and development of mixed-race categories in South Korea in the context of the shift in the state's governing practices from the postwar period to the present. In particular, “mixed-race” serves as a conceptual framework for tracing the formation of Korea's racial state with respect to the distinct categories of Amerasians and the children of multicultural families. Drawing on theoretical approaches to racism, racial state, and biopower, I examine the treatment of mixed-race individuals in the regulation of the Korean population since the middle of the previous century. I document a shift in the subject-positions of these individuals from the status of homo sacer to that of homo economicus, each of which is associated with distinct modes of racism. The findings presented here have implications for critical mixed-race studies in Korea and East Asia more broadly and for expanding the understanding of the nexus of race, state, and power.

Power, Painting, and Poetry: Mixed-Race Ekphrasis in Natasha Trethewey's Thrall

Abstract: This article contributes to scholarly conversations about ekphrasis by combining the field of mixed-race studies with ekphrastic concerns in a term I have coined "mixed-race ekphrasis." The ekphrastic strategy employed by Natasha Trethewey in her poetry might most aptly be termed mixed-race ekphrasis, and thus I will unpack this term through close readings of her book of poetry Thrall (2012). In particular, Trethewey's renderings of the historical art form of Mexican casta paintings connect issues of mixed-race identity across the visual and the textual and encourage links between nationalized and historical conceptions of race. Despite being produced hundreds of years ago, these paintings still reflect the social categorization and hegemonic power in current race relations and notions of white supremacy. I argue that Trethewey uses mixed-race ekphrasis in her casta painting poems to reclaim the agency of (self-)representation of mixed-race people by (re)negotiating race-related power relationships and critically addressing mixed-race classifications.

Toward A U.S. AsianLatinx Intervention in Critical Mixed Race Studies and Interethnic Relations

Diasporic intimacies between Asian and Latinx groups have converged across the world for centuries; the mixing of these cultures and, as a result, mixed individuals are the effect of centuries of interactions with each other. In this article, I review the literature across Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) and Asian and Latinx interethnic relations to situate an AsianLatinx intervention to understand how AsianLatinxs have continually been relegated to the subaltern despite their strong presence in the U.S. I argue that it is necessary to center the AsianLatinx lived experience to understand the interconnectedness of global Asian and Latinx communities. An AsianLatinx intervention disrupts monoracial frameworks of diaspora, mixed identity and interethnic relations to (re)imagine a reality that situates the complexities of mixedness tangential to racialization processes, identity formation and transnationalism.

Remi Joseph-Salisbury. Black Mixed-Race Men: Transatlanticity, Hybridity, and ‘Post-Racial’ Resilience

Deepens critical mixed race studies as a transdisciplinary endeavor and also takes a transnational turn by bringing into conversation voices from both sides of the Atlantic. This is particularly the case in terms of the relationship between ongoing structures of White supremacy and the situation of Black mixed-race men, subjects whom he situates not apart from Blackness but within its political and cultural formation.

Editor's Note

Numerous scholarly works have been published on the topic of multiraciality and mixed-race experiences in the United States and Great Britain. There has historically been limited research on Nordic Europe. This analysis contextualizes the importance of the articles in this special issue, which seek to help further research on Nordic Europe in terms of critical mixed race studies. 

Zélie Asava. Mixed-Race Cinemas: Multiracial Dynamics in America and France

A transnational film studies and mixed race studies analysis comparing French and American cinemas, which have had significant international exposure and have constantly strengthened exchanges between their national talents.

Mengzi Pang. Family, Identity and Mixedness: Exploring ‘Mixed-Race’ Identities in Scotland

Provides insight into the experiences of the Scottish mixed-race population.The author’s study is timely as the majority of British mixed-race scholarship has tended to emanate from England. This also further aligns with the transnational focus of the field of critical mixed race studies, which seeks to incorporate notions of diaspora and to promote understandings of mixed-race experiences across different national contexts.

7 To Be Hybrid Anticipates the Future: Multiracial and Multiethnic Community and Activism

7 To Be Hybrid Anticipates the FutureMultiracial and Multiethnic Community and Activism Lily Anne Welty Tamai (bio) Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) wrote in his application for the Guggenheim Fellowship that he received in 1927, "My father … has long been known as an interpreter of the East to the West, through poetry. I wish to do the same with sculpture."1 Nearly eighty years later, a fourth-generation Japanese American mixed-race writer, Akemi Johnson, reflected upon her family's mixed-race identity: "By my generation, Yonsei, the climate was safe enough for me to examine that learned shame and reclaim some of our lost cultural identity. It's a multigenerational, cyclical story that seems classically American."2 Throughout the twentieth century, but to a greater extent, since the late 1970s and early 1980s, multiracial and multiethnic AAPI scholars, activists, artists, and writers like Noguchi and Johnson carved out a space for themselves inside and outside the academy to research and to legitimize the mixed-race community. Humanities, the social sciences, and fields within ethnic studies, specifically Asian American studies and African American studies, largely became the intellectual home for mixed-race scholars and scholarship. Organizations like the Multiracial Americans of Southern California, founded in 1986, and Hapa Issues Forum, founded in 1992 at UC Berkeley, began in the early days of the multiracial movement, addressing the needs of the community on the West Coast.3 Later, community organizations like Loving Day in New York City, launched in 2004, and MidWest Mixed, founded in Minneapolis in 2014, [End Page 229] helped to reach out to diverse communities in different geographies.4 Even in Vancouver, Canada, Hapa-palooza, founded in 2011, hosted events and raised awareness around diverse and mixed-race issues.5 Scholars of Asian American studies presented countless papers on research pertaining to multiracial and multiethnic AAPIs at the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) conferences over the years, and a multiracial caucus group meets regularly at the annual meeting. In 2010, the Critical Mixed Race Studies Association (CMRS) formed, and in 2014, founded the Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies to broaden the dialogue to focus on the needs of the growing scholarship about the multiracial and multiethnic community.6 Both AAAS and CMRS provided the space and support for multiracial and multiethnic representation and legitimacy in the academy, yet mixed-race people, their presence in the community, and their activism existed long before the formation of these organizations. At the beginnings of Asian America, the mixed-race AAPI community was a part of Hawai`i and the United States, doing this work all along.7 Even with the social stigma associated with interracial marriage and multiraciality, people like Edith Maude Eaton inserted mixed-race themes into their writing, and Isamu Noguchi made art that reflected their multiplicity. This essay examines how multiracial activists, writers, and artists consistently created work to make a place for themselves and at times demanded inclusion into the AAPI community and the national fabric before and after Asian American became a collective political identity. I argue that mixed-race history is Asian American history. Despite mixed-race people's presence in these spaces, monoracial communities continue to racialize mixed-race members as outsiders, as conditional members of the broader AAPI community, or even as a new hybrid race. I discuss some of the issues of importance for multiracial and multiethnic people within Asian American studies, including the politics of intermarriage, blood quantum, decentering whiteness, health, religion, and adoption. Multiracial AAPIs have been a part of the AAPI community since the first generations of families formed in the United States, and today are a part of each AAPI ethnic subgroup. Multiracial Americans are one of the fastest growing populations within the Asian American Pacific Islander community.8 According to the US Census, between 2000 and 2010, the numbers of White and Black multiracial persons doubled, while the number of multiracial White-Asian Americans increased by 87 percent. If current rates of population growth continue, census data predict that by 2030 the Japanese American subgroup will be a majority multiracial.9 It is projected that by 2040, nearly 55 percent of the subgroup Native Hawaiian...

Clinical Sociology and Mixedness: Towards Applying Critical Mixed Race Theory in Everyday Life

Research on mixed racial and ethnic identities has developed rapidly over the past decades, increasing in theoretical scope and depth, and exploring mixedness across a growing range of national and social contexts. Recent research has highlighted the huge variations and shifts in conceptions of mixedness around the world, and the different pathways to understanding what it means to be mixed through migration, development, postcolonialism and different forms of nation-building. This paper seeks to connect theory to practice, approaching mixedness through the lens of clinical sociology, applying sociological theory on the ground and exploring the utility of critical mixed race studies in everyday life. Clinical sociology as a practice is first outlined, juxtaposed against the development in theorizing around mixed racial and ethnic identities on an international level. The paper then looks at some possibilities for practical impact: by acknowledging the complexity of mixedness and everyday life, research on mixed identities can go beyond the development of theory and case description, with applied and clinical impacts ranging from the level of the individual to the level of the state. Research on mixedness worldwide illustrates the diversity inherent within ideas of mixing, and the micro, meso and macro applications and potential outcomes of such theories. This paper draws on new and shifting conceptions of mixedness, emphasizing that the sociology of mixedness can have considerable value in effecting positive social change: positioning the (mixed) individual within the (mixed) society and allowing sociology to become action. The development and use of theories around mixedness emphasize the importance of clinical sociology as a practice: a reason for theory, connecting the abstract to the everyday.

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.

“And This Is What He Did”

Abstract This article asks how the category of “mixed race” can help us think through the recent spate of violence against Asian Americans, culminating in the Atlanta mass shootings of March 2021. It further reflects on a tension within mixed-race studies: whereas mixed-race theory, in its embrace of anti-essentialism and hybridity, bespeaks a certain hope and optimism, mixed race as a lens through which to view history brings us inescapably to violence. Tracing how the concept of mixed race threads through a history of violence in this country, the article demonstrates how misogyny and racial hatred toward Asians have long been intertwined. Recent anti-Asian hate crimes surface the continuities in the targeting of Asians as a source of pollution and contagion, and in representations of Asian women as a source of sexual “temptation” that must be restricted, prohibited, or eliminated. Finally, it is argued that the turn away from the post-racialism of the Obama era and the rise of a new white nationalism call our attention to a fundamental flaw in the very premise of mixed-race theory: that is, the category of “mixed race” simultaneously unlocks the liberatory potential of nonbinary identities and reifies the problematic category of race itself.

Review: Crying in H Mart: A Memoir, by Michelle Zauner

Review: <i>Crying in H Mart: A Memoir</i>, by Michelle Zauner

How Cross-Discipline Understanding and Communication Can Improve Research on Multiracial Populations

One of the strengths of Critical Mixed Race Studies is that it represents research methodologies and frameworks from multiple disciplines across the social sciences and humanities. However, if these disciplines are not in dialogue with each other, that benefit may be lost. Here, we use psychological and sociological research on Multiracial populations as examples to argue how strict disciplinarity and methodological trends may limit scientific production. We propose that reading and citing work across disciplines, expanding methodological training, and rejecting hegemonic “white logic” assumptions about what is “publishable” can enhance Multiracial research. First, the ability to cite effectively across disciplines will shorten the time it takes for new theories to be developed that focus on empirically underrepresented populations. Secondly, increasing understanding of both quantitative and qualitative methods will allow more effective reading between disciplines while also creating opportunities to engage with both causality and the richness of experiences that comprise being Multiracial. Finally, these changes would then situate scholars to be more effective reviewers, thereby enhancing the peer-reviewed publication process to one that routinely rejects color evasive racist practices that privilege work on majority populations.

Structural Racism

Structural Racism

Shades of Gray: Writing the New American Multiracialism, by Molly Littlewood Mckibbin

Reviewed by: Shades of Gray: Writing the New American Multiracialism by Molly Littlewood McKibbin Wendy Braun (bio) MOLLY LITTLEWOOD MCKIBBIN, Shades of Gray: Writing the New American Multiracialism. University of Nebraska Press, 2018. xi + 331 pp. ISBN 9780803296817. Mixed-race people have always existed, but are treated as an emerging phenomenon. While multicultural studies investigates the experiences and perceptions of mixed-race individuals from past to present, it has often fallen short of analyzing the role Whiteness plays in the construction of mixed-race identities, thereby leaving Whiteness unchallenged as a hegemonic racial category. Molly Littlewood McKibben fills this chasm in mixed-race studies by analyzing six texts that include an interracial protagonist with both Black and White parentage and in doing so, incorporates a more overt examination of Whiteness in the construction of racial identity and how this is depicted in contemporary multiracial literature. McKibben begins her monograph by clearly outlining her working definitions and providing a detailed primer of mixed-race history in the United States. This is important for two main reasons: it demonstrates the slipperiness of racial terms and highlights the often contradictory and ever-evolving ways these labels have been used socially, legally, and scientifically over time. In addition, McKibben notes that multicultural scholars often neglect to make clear their definitions or uncritically slip from one connotation to another, which does little to clear up misconceptions of race and inconsistencies in racial theory. The sample of texts, while analyzing mixed-race Black and White identity, also trouble the concept of Whiteness in ways previously unexamined. Whereas early mixed-race literature focused on the tragic mulatto/a character (an individual denied identity and community) or passing narratives (individuals choosing a tenuous and dangerous inclusion into White society), more contemporary iterations have focused on those same individuals forming racial identity and establishing community through Black pride and political activism. McKibben has chosen first-person coming-of-age narratives that reveal racial identity formation for mixed-race individuals, where the characters also explore their understanding of [End Page 145] both Blackness and Whiteness and what that means for their interracial identities. These texts include Danzy Senna’s Caucasia (1998), Rebecca Walker’s Black White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self (2001), Emily Raboteau’s The Professor’s Daughter (2005), Rachel Harper’s Brass Ankle Blues (2006), and Heidi Durrow’s The Girl Who Fell from the Sky (2010). In chapter 1, McKibben focuses on the works of Harper, Raboteau, Senna, and Walker. In these narratives, the protagonists do not want to default to the one-drop rule of Blackness and do not view Black pride as simultaneously denying the White part of their identities. However, their racial formation is often molded and even impeded by those around them, including family and friends, as well as the imposing gaze of strangers and acquaintances. These texts highlight the limitations of US racial terminology, especially for mixed-race individuals. Whereas the tragic mulatto/a figure emphasized the mental fracture of the Black-White multiracial person, these more contemporary texts expose that the problem lies with the “pathology of the country” (p. 74). Chapter 2 centers on the works of Senna and Walker, which explore ethnic Whiteness and highlight it as a constructed and performed identity. The narratives, which incorporate Latinx and Jewish identities, respectively, destabilize Whiteness as a homogenous, unracialized, and invisible category—one that is “pure” and somehow incompatible with Blackness. Building on this notion, chapter 3 focuses on the works of Harper, Raboteau, Walker, and Senna, who discuss multiethnic Blackness and colorism as Black identity is pitted against White in the lives of Black-White multiracials. These texts also demonstrate how psychologically and emotionally taxing it is for mixed-race individuals to navigate their own racial identities under daily microaggressions and cultural pathology. The protagonists learn the importance of diverse communities where they are less likely to have to defend or justify their mixed-raced identities. It is in these spaces that the characters often learn more inclusive vocabulary that encapsulates their identity, and they are less likely to feel that they have to identify monoracially. This marks a point in the multi-racial coming-of-age narrative...

Mapping Black mixed-race Birmingham: Place, locality and identity

Utilizing narrations of urban space derived from interviews with 37 Mixed White and Black Caribbean people in the UK’s second-largest city, Birmingham, this article argues that place should be central to the theorization of mixed-race. Whilst Critical Mixed-Race Studies tends to privilege racial identity as the defining feature of the mixed-race experience, this article argues that mixed-race subjects identify with and through their respective localities to cultivate and perform their racialized identities. Drawing on personalized mental maps and routes through the city, the discussion sheds light on how conceptualizations of neighbourhood and territory are entangled with expressions of racial identity and belonging. By showing how the local histories, identities and characters of places come to be written on the bodies of mixed-race subjects, I demonstrate the power that place has in organizing social life and shaping identities. In doing so the article warns against the critical absence of place, and particularly the local, in empirical analyses of mixed-race identity. It suggests that for the development of de-essentialist understandings of mixedness which exist outside the realm of personal identifications, it is necessary to engage critically with place as an analytical framework.

Dissolution of Racial Boundaries

As the field of mixed-race studies continues to expand, my article adds to this growth by analyzing the representation of mixed-race children in Natasha Trethewey's Thrall in relation to the corresponding Mexican casta paintings she refers to. I explore how Trethewey uses diction and etymology in Thrall by performing close readings of her Mexican casta painting poems. Throughout my analysis, I pay special attention to how aspects of knowledge and colonialism affect the portrayal of these mixed-race offspring. The aim of this article is to demonstrate that Trethewey skillfully uses diction and etymology to emphasize the relationship between knowledge and power, particularly with regard to the representation of mixed-race people in society. Trethewey intertwines mixed-race representation and experiences that seem disparate—her poems cross geographical, temporal, and spatial boundaries—in order to illustrate how mixed-race peoples' positioning and representation in society often transcends such boundaries while additionally critically assessing power dynamics controlling said representation. Accordingly, by closely examining the representation of mixed-race people and miscegenation in art and poetry, this article sheds a new light on how meaning can be developed between races and cultures and stresses how colonialism and knowledge can be connected to contextualizing difference across time and space.

All Mixed up: Multi/Racial Liberation and Compassion-Based Activism

This paper seeks to identify pathways of liberation amidst contemporary challenges faced by those who identify as multiracial by re-imagining various approaches to confronting racial oppression through compassion-based activism. The primary question of this study focuses on how compassion (as broadly understood by and across the world’s spiritual traditions) might sustain, invigorate, or be adapted to aid the struggle for racial justice in the United States. This paper begins with reviewing theories from critical mixed race studies and brings them into dialogue with the eight themes of compassion-based activism. The results of this interdisciplinary study provide both the promises and challenges to a compassion-based approach when it comes to multi/racial liberation and proposes a reinterpretation that centers multi/racial experiences.

Revisiting the Marginal Man: Bridging Immigration Scholarship and Mixed-Race Studies

Immigrant and multiracial populations have both attracted attention for their significant impact on the demographic makeup of the United States. The anticipation of their continued growth raises important questions about how their increasing representation may alter the racial hierarchy. Although immigration scholarship frequently interprets intermarriage and multiracial identity as markers of assimilation, a large disconnect exists between the fields of immigration and mixed-race studies. This article bridges the gap between the two areas of scholarship by tracing their sociological origins to a shared theoretical progenitor: the marginal man. Through narrow interpretations of the resolution to experiences of marginality, the assimilation paradigm has largely failed to take into consideration the implications of multiracial identity, examining it only as transitive state assessed primarily through parental identification or within existing frameworks of immigrant identity. Based on interviews with 26 multiracial adults who have at least one immigrant parent, this study examines the meaning, content, and salience of multiracial identity for analyses of assimilation. Although much scholarship is concerned with the eroding and expanding boundaries of whiteness, this research analyzes how both part-white and nonwhite multiracial children of immigrant experiences contribute to understanding the role of multiraciality in blurring, crossing, or disrupting the boundaries that divide racial groups. The findings indicate that multiracial identity assertion was a mechanism for study participants to claim connection and belonging to multiple ethnoracial groups, rather than be rendered marginalized, distant, or partial with respect to their immigrant heritage(s).

Black/white mixed-race experiences of race and racism in Poland

ABSTRACT Whilst literature on race and ethnicity in Poland is growing, it has yet to fully grapple with the diverse range of racial identities in Poland. Simultaneously, despite calls for Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) to develop into a more global field, there remains a paucity of literature focusing on racial mixedness in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), and no substantive consideration of the lived experiences of mixed-race people in Poland. Taking these absences as our entry point, we bring Critical Mixed Race Studies into conversation with pieces of literature on race and ethnicity in Poland in order to extend the theoretical and empirical terrain of both fields. Drawing upon data from interviews conducted with black/white mixed-race people in Poland, this article casts light on the lives of this nascent group, and specifically on their experiences of racism and exclusion in a society imagined as homogenously white.