Category: Articles

  • How parents oppress their mixed race children The F-Word Blog: Contemporary UK Feminism 2016-07-20 Nicola Codner Leeds, Yorkshire, United Kingdom As a mixed race woman, whenever I come across articles by monoracial parents about their mixed race children, I tend to get a cold feeling of dread of inside. These articles seem to be in…

  • More than a coming of age story, Danzy Senna’s first novel, “Caucasia” (Riverhead Books, 1998) addresses themes of coming into consciousness within the U.S. ethnoracial landscape. Clearly in dialogue with Nella Larsen’s “Passing” as well as Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” “Caucasia” is a first person narrative where anything that happens to the protagonist, Birdie Lee,…

  • A Tale of Racial Passing and the U.S.-Mexico Border The New Yorker 2016-07-20 Jonathan Blitzer The African-American businessman William Ellis, pictured here around the year 1900, frequently passed as Mexican. COURTESY FANNY JOHNSON-GRIFFIN Some people knew him as William Ellis, and others as Guillermo Eliseo. He could be Mexican, Cuban, or even Hawaiian, depending on…

  • What Scientists Mean When They Say ‘Race’ Is Not Genetic The Huffington Post 2016-02-09 Jacqueline Howard, Senior Science Editor A new paper explains why it can be dangerous to think otherwise. If a team of scientists in Philadelphia and New York have their way, using race to categorize groups of people in biological and genetic…

  • Akala: Dynamite by any other name… The Guardian 2013-06-01 Kate Mossman, Editor and Pop critic New Statesman Akala in Notting Hill last month: ‘In Brixton and Tottenham my sister was worshipped because she was representing a side of intellectual black culture that is never usually acknowledged.’ Photograph: Karen Robinson for the Observer Rapper, adapter of…

  • My Soul Has Found Its Home Jews of Colour Canada: Building community through identity and faith 2016-07-11 Shirley Gindler-Price Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA Out of the 95,000 US Occupation babies born in Germany shortly after WWII, there were approximately 5000 of us, post WWII Afro-German children, so-called Negro mulatto babies, better known as German ‘Brown Babies.’…

  • Biracial Afro-Germans search for their identity in a country where many think that to be German is to be white.

  • Lost kin University of Chicago Magazine May/June 2015 Allyson Hobbs, Assistant Professor of History Stanford University Excerpt from A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life by Allyson Hobbs, published by Harvard University Press. Copyright © 2014 by Allyson Hobbs. Used by permission. All rights reserved. “Going as white” permanently created confusion…

  • Rebooting beyond the idea of Race Mixed Roots Stories 2016-07-06 Temu and Elisabeth Diaab “Remember how we always wanted to write a children’s book?” Elisabeth asked me one morning over coffee. “Let’s do it now, she said.” Our son had just moved into a college dorm, we were juggling two internet businesses, and even considering…

  • Commodification of the Black Body, Sexual Objectification and Social Hierarchies during Slavery The Earlham Historical Journal: An Undergraduate Journal of Historical Inquiry Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana Volume VII: Issue II (Spring 2015) pages 21-43 Iman Cooper The horror of the institution of slavery during the late eighteenth century was not that it displaced millions of…