Category: Articles

  • Room For Debate: The ‘Two or More Races’ Dilemma The New York Times 2011-02-13 In Room for Debate, The New York Times invites knowledgeable outside contributors to discuss news events and other timely issues. Introduction An article in a Times series on the growing mixed-race population in the United States describes a debate over new…

  • Race, Sex and the Trials of a Young Explorer The New York Times 2011-02-13 Richard Conniff In 1859, Paul Du Chaillu, a young explorer of French origin and adopted American nationality, wandered out of the jungle after a four-year expedition in Gabon.  He brought with him complete specimens of 20 gorillas, an animal almost unknown…

  • Hollywood’s Whiteout The New York Times 2011-02-11 Manohla Dargis A. O. Scott CRAMMED into this year’s field of 10 best picture Oscar nominees are British aristocrats, Volvo-driving Los Angeles lesbians, a flock of swans, a gaggle of Harvard computer geeks, clans of Massachusetts fighters and Missouri meth dealers, as well as 19th-century bounty hunters, dream…

  • Noting that free people of color never fully escaped the degrading effects of race-based slavery, David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine offer fourteen essays that explore women’s experiences of race, gender, and class in the slaveholding societies of the United States, the Caribbean, and South America.

  • Determining the (In)Determinable: Race in Brazil and the United States Michigan Journal of Race & Law Volume 14, Issue 2 (Spring 2009) pages 143-195 D. Wendy Greene, Assistant Professor of Law Cumberland School of Law, Samford University, Birmingham, Alabama Recently, the Brazilian states of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Mato Grasso du Sol have implemented…

  • Racial Purity and Interracial Sex in the Law of Colonial and Antebellum Virginia Georgetown Law Review Volume 77, Number 6 (August 1989) pages 1967-2029 A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., Judge (1928-1998) United States Court of Appeals (3rd Circuit) Barbara K. Kopytoff, Professor of Law (1938-1999) University of Pennsylvania I. Introduction There is probably no better place…

  • All Things Being Equal: The Promise of Affirmative Efforts to Eradicate Color-Coded Inequality in the United States and Brazil National Black Law Journal Volume 21, Number 3 (2009) 41 pages Tanya M. Washington, Associate Professor of Law Georgia State University The contrasted contexts of the United States and Brazil provide an intellectually fascinating framework for…

  • Counting by Race Can Throw Off Some Numbers The New York Times 2009-02-11 Susan Saulny, National Correspondent Race Remixed: The Pigeonhole Problem. Articles in this series explore the growing number of mixed-race Americans. The federal Department of Education would categorize Michelle López-Mullins—a university student who is of Peruvian, Chinese, Irish, Shawnee and Cherokee descent—as “Hispanic.”…

  • Halle Berry and Nahla: Not So Mixed, Not So Happy The Huffington Post 2011-02-09 Marcia Dawkins, Visiting Scholar Brown University As we await the results of the 2010 Census it’s tempting to think that our growing comfort with categorizing people as multiracial has erased racism and the fear of interracial relations. But in a recent…

  • Where the interracials may take us Los Angeles Times 2010-09-21 Eli Steele Of all Americans, they represent the best opportunity to end identity politics and point America back to its tradition of individualism. We may be in the midst of an interracial baby boom. A recent Pew Research Center study reported that interracial marriages rose…