Mixed Race Studies

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

Genealogy
Volume 6, Issue 2 (2022) (Special Issue: Beyond the Frontiers of Mixedness: New Approaches to Intermarriage, Multiethnicity, and Multiracialism)
DOI: 10.3390/genealogy6020032
21 pages

Zarine L. Rocha, Affiliated Researcher
Department of Sociology
National University of Singapore, Singapore

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.

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Improving skin tone representation across Google

Google
2022-05-11

Tulsee Doshi, Head of Product, Responsible AI

Seeing yourself reflected in the world around you — in real life, media or online — is so important. And we know that challenges with image-based technologies and representation on the web have historically left people of color feeling overlooked and misrepresented. Last year, we announced Real Tone for Pixel, which is just one example of our efforts to improve representation of diverse skin tones across Google products.

Today, we’re introducing a next step in our commitment to image equity and improving representation across our products. In partnership with Harvard professor and sociologist Dr. Ellis Monk, we’re releasing a new skin tone scale designed to be more inclusive of the spectrum of skin tones we see in our society. Dr. Monk has been studying how skin tone and colorism affect people’s lives for more than 10 years.

The culmination of Dr. Monk’s research is the Monk Skin Tone (MST) Scale, a 10-shade scale that will be incorporated into various Google products over the coming months. We’re openly releasing the scale so anyone can use it for research and product development. Our goal is for the scale to support inclusive products and research across the industry — we see this as a chance to share, learn and evolve our work with the help of others…

Read the entire article here.

Impact of the forgotten black Europeans

Islington Tribune
London, United Kingdom
2022-05-12

Angela Cobbinah

Scholars, poets, writers, composers… a new book focuses on the wide influence of Africa abroad, writes Angela Cobbinah

ALESSANDRO de Medici, Duke of Florence, virtuoso 18th-century French violinist and composer Joseph Bologne and 1922 world light heavyweight boxing champion Battling Siki from France via Senegal are probably people we know little about, if at all.

They are part of a forgotten European past explored by Olivette Otele in her scholarly book, African Europeans, which travels through time to reveal how trade, war, slavery and colonialism resulted in a black presence in Europe from as far back as the third century.

This is where Otele, professor of the history and memory of slavery at Bristol University, kicks off, telling the story of St Maurice, Egyptian leader of a Roman legion who was famously executed for refusing to crush a Christian revolt in Gaul.

Celebrated as a martyr across Germany, he is clearly represented as an African in a statue at Magdeburg Cathedral and other church iconography.

Black saints and Madonnas appeared across Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries, perhaps Otele speculates, to symbolise the transformative power of the Catholic Church in converting those it considered heathen…

Read the entire review here.

The Box: Looking Back At Daytime’s First Black Leading Actress Ellen Holly

A Hot Set
2020-07-21

Hillary Lynch

Ellen Holly comes from a long line of trailblazers- her family tree includes Susan Smith McKinney Steward, the first Black woman to graduate from medical school in the state of New York (the third in the United States overall) and Sylvanus Smith, the first Black person to address Congress at the Lincoln Memorial– so it’s no surprise that she is a trailblazer herself. Her portrayal of Carla Gray on the Agnes Nixon soap opera One Life to Live marked a major moment in entertainment history, as she became the first Black leading actress in daytime television. Her inclusion on the soap was monumental, giving the daytime television viewing populace a rare opportunity to watch a Black television character in a major, meaningful role.

Carla Gray is first introduced on One Life to Live in 1968 as Carla Benari, an Italian American woman who is on the brink of a complete nervous breakdown. The cause of her mental health issue is later revealed to be from the inner conflict she faces as a light-skinned Black woman who ran away when she was young and has been passing for white ever since. The irony of the role was not lost on Holly, who referenced the fact that Black actresses avoid trying to pass for white. At the same time, this was the only role on camera that was typically awarded to light-skinned Black actresses- and even then, these roles often went to white actresses. Irony aside, Carla Gray was huge. Upon the show’s revelation that the Italian Carla Benari was actually the Black Carla Gray, ratings spiked, and it was clear that Agnes Nixon had struck television gold with her character’s unique storyline…

Read the entire article here.

New History Finally Recognizes Afro-Creole Spiritualists

Religion Dispatches
2016-09-20

Paul Harvey, Distinguished Professor of History
University of Colorado

Emily Clark’s new work, A Luminous Brotherhood, is an extensive study of a subject that has weirdly been neglected in scholarship: the career of the Afro-Creole Spiritualist Cercle Harmonique from 1858 to 1877. Religious studies scholar Clark has thoroughly mined the records of the Cercle, kept at the University of New Orleans, and produced one of the most important recent works I have seen in race and religion in American history.

By focusing on Afro-Creole Spiritualism in New Orleans, we get an extended, as well as intimate, look at how one very particular group, mostly men and free people of color, envisioned their ideal society through the voices of spirit mediums.

In doing so, they drew from French thinkers and historical experiences (including everyone from Rousseau, Robespierre, and Lamennais to the French and Haitian Revolutions), and applied those to the construction of what they referred to as “the Idea”—a republican society that would achieve liberty, equality and fraternity even in an American society burdened by slavery and racism since its birth.

I had a conversation with Clark, reflecting both on the book as well as on broader questions of race, religion and politics…

Read the entire interview here.

Conversations In My Head | Conversations In My Head

Music Xray: 21st century A&R

Artist: Davina Robinson
Album: The Blazing Heart
Title: Conversations In My Head
Year: 2008
Track number: 3
Total tracks: 4
Genres: Rock / Alternative & Punk / Pop

“Powerhouse Rock and Roll Soul” describes Davina Robinson’s blend of rock, funk, soul and wild woman attitude, creating a powerful, fierce, soulful rock style. Davina released her debut EP The Blazing Heart in May 2008, and her first full album, Black Rock Warrior Queen, in November 2011. Davina is from Philadelphia, USA and based in Osaka, Japan.

Lyrics

Are you watching me from afar
Standing over my shoulder
Are you floating above the floor
Sorry that I can’t speak Italian anymore

Many years ago your daughter had a Black boyfriend
When she got pregnant it caused a stir
Everyone said just get rid of it
You were the only one who told her to give birth…

Listen to the song and read the lyrics here.

‘I know I’m Irish and I don’t have to prove that to anybody’

The Irish Times
2022-05-07

Sorcha Pollak, Immigration Reporter

Growing up as a black person with a disability in Dublin, Marguerite Penrose sensed her difference

On June 9th 2020, one week after thousands of young Irish people marched through the streets of Dublin calling for an end to racism and inequality, a new post appeared on the recently established Black and Irish Instagram page.

“My name is Marguerite. I was born in Dublin in 1974. I am a PROUD Irish/Zambian, living in Meath now.”

Marguerite Penrose had never spoken or written publicly about her background. She preferred not to dwell on the first three years of her life which she spent in a mother and baby home on the Navan Road, or her battles with scoliosis throughout her life. She didn’t like remembering the racist remarks outside nightclubs or disapproving stares on the bus. She preferred focusing on the positives – her incredible adopted family and her wonderful friends.

But then she decided to speak out about growing up as a black woman with a disability in Dublin…

Read the entire article here.

Meghan Markle is the biracial hero I’ve always wanted

Quartz
2017-11-28

David Kaufman, Global Lifestyle Editor

Barack Obama may have been a hero to “black America,” but for biracial Americans like myself, the former president never quite felt like the champion we’d waited so long for.

Early on, he seemed like he might be: As the son of a white mother and Kenyan father, Obama vocally touted his unique—and uniquely multi-cultural—background throughout his education, writing and early career. Finally, it seemed, folks like me had found a role model.

Yet when it came time for Obama to shift into “candidate” mode, he clearly calculated that positioning himself as black, rather than biracial, was the wisest way to secure the presidency. Little changed once he entered to Oval Office.

Indeed, despite having as much white heritage as black, Obama formally marked himself African-American on his 2010 Census form. The timing was important: That year, for one of the first times ever, the Census Bureau included a multi-racial category. I was thrilled to check the box—and had naively hoped the President would too.

Nearly a decade later, we now have Meghan Markle, the biracial future bride of Britain’s Prince Harry. Born in California to a Caucasian father and African-American mother, Markle is vocal about her biracial parentage. “I’m half black/half white,” she wrote in a piece for British Elle last year—six simple words that honor her background in a way the former president avoided…

Read the entire article here.

A New Book for Those Who Cling to a “Post-Racial” Christianity

Religion Dispatches
2017-02-17

In The Death of Race, Brian Bantum explores the theological underpinnings of cultural understandings of race and gender.

What inspired you to write The Death of Race?

Truthfully, this wasn’t the book I had wanted to write right now. There is a tendency for theologians who write about race to become penned in. My first book, Redeeming Mulatto: A Theology of Race and Christian Hybridity, is certainly a book about race. But even more, it is a Christology. For my second book, I wanted to write something that would be read apart from the primary lens of race. But then Ferguson happened, then Baltimore, and every successive summer seemed to press the reality of race and the church. There are so many good books that have come from folks in or associated with the Black Lives Matter movement that I wasn’t sure what I could add to the conversation.

But as I taught and read and listened, I began to see how various Christian responses to police brutality—and racism and sexism more broadly—were grounded in various theological stories that shaped American Christians and how they saw the world. At the same time, I was thinking about my three sons, who were 17, 15, and 11 when I started writing. We had been talking about everything that was happening in the world, and I wondered how I could help them understand the Christian story in the midst of this. Why was the world like this, and why does Jesus matter?..

Read the entire interview here.

The untold story of Britain’s first black school teacher

BBC News
2022-04-28

Giancarlo Rinaldi, South Scotland Reporter
BBC Scotland News Website

A small plaque marks the spot where the man believed to be Britain’s first black school teacher educated children in a Scottish village.

Now the story of Tom Jenkins‘ life is being explored as part of the area’s Alchemy Festival, and there are calls for him to receive greater recognition.

Jenkins educated dozens of children between 1814 and 1818 at Teviothead, near Hawick, in the Scottish Borders.

Artist Dr Jade Montserrat has been investigating the links between Hawick and both Jenkins and anti-slavery campaigner Frederick Douglass, who visited the town in 1846.

“I focused in on the significant black presence in Hawick and, more loosely, Hawick’s liberal abolitionist identity as a town,” she said…

…When he was six years old his father, a slave trading chief, handed him to Capt James Swanson.

The son of a waiter from Hawick, Capt Swanson was in command of the slave ship Prudence.

The intention was that Tom Jenkins would be educated in Britain before returning to West Africa…

Read the entire article here.