So…What Are You, Anyway?

• Pearl Gaskins
• Prof. Jennfer Hochschild
• Eric Hamako

Pearl Fuyo Gaskins

Pearl Fuyo Gaskins is an award-winning journalist with more than 15 years experience interviewing young people and writing about the issues that concern them–from prejudice and peer pressure to divorce and drug abuse. From 1988 to 2000, Pearl worked for New York City-based Scholastic Choices, an educational magazine, and won three awards from the Educational Press Association of America for writing and editing articles for teenagers. Pearl has written for Glencoe/McGraw-Hill textbooks, Time Inc. books, and other publications. She now edits high school and college textbooks.

Pearl received a BA in sociology from the University of California at Berkeley and an MA in journalism from New York University.

Gaskins’s critically acclaimed book What Are You? Voices of Mixed-Race Young People(Henry Holt, 1999) was culled from interviews with 80 multiracial teenagers and young adults across the country. In the book, Pearl, who is racially mixed herself, explores how society’s obsession with race affects people who don’t fit neatly within one racial category.
What Are You was named an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults, a Booklist Editors’ Choice, a Notable Social Studies Trade Book for Young People, and a Bank Street College of Education Best Children’s Book.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Prof. Jennifer Hochschild

Harvard University

Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government and

Professor of African and African American Studies

Harvard College Professor

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jennifer Hochschild studies and teaches about the intersection of American politics and political philosophy — particularly in the areas of race, ethnicity, and immigration — as well as educational and social welfare policies, genomics and politics, and public opinion and political culture.  Most recently, she was a co-author of  Creating a New Racial Order: How Immigration, Multiracialism, Genomics, and the Young Can Remake Race in America (Princeton University Press, 2012) and co-editor of Bringing Outsiders In: Transatlantic Perspectives on Immigrant Political Incorporation (Cornell University Press, 2009).  She also wrote articles, with co-authors, on “Racial Reorganization and the United States Census 1850-1930:  Mulattoes, Half-Breeds, Mixed Parentage, Hindoos, and the Mexican Race,” and “ ‘There’s No One as Irish as Barack O’Bama’: The Politics and Policy of Multiracialism in the United States.”

Professor Hochschild teaches courses on race, ethnicity, and immigration; social welfare policy; and American political ideology.

Eric Hamako

Eric Hamako has been involved in Mixed-Race student- and community-organizing since 2000.  Currently completing his doctorate in Social Justice Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Eric studies how community education can support Mixed-Race people’s political movements and ways to incorporate stronger anti-racist frameworks into those educational efforts.  Eric has taught undergraduate and graduate courses at Stanford University, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Ithaca College, and the Smith College School for Social Work.  As an independent trainer & consultant, Eric has presented on Multiraciality and other social justice issues to universities, professional associations, and community organizations across the United States. His first publication, “For the Movement: Community education supporting Multiracial organizing” appeared in the journal Equity & Excellence in Education in 2006.  His most recent publication, a book chapter titled, “Zombie Orientals ate my brain! Orientalism in contemporary zombie film & fiction.” appeared in an edited volume published by McFarland.  Eric is a Multiracial Asian American man of Japanese and Ashkenazi Jewish heritage, raised upper-middle class in Watsonville, California.