Mixed Race Studies

Who Cares for Health Care?

Breaking Through: TEDMED 2015
Palm Springs, California
2015-11-18 through 2015-11-20

Dorothy E. Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology and the Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania

Physician, heal thyself … and while you’re at it, how about healing your field? Every cure starts with accurate diagnosis, so this series of cautionary tales reveals surprising perspectives and under-appreciated challenges facing our health care system. Stories include a renowned patient advocate’s struggle to balance patient empowerment with patient safety; a quality care pioneer’s determination to define empathy as a business asset; a civil rights sociologist’s mission to combat subtle racism within medicine; and a senior economist’s ranking of health as an existential value.

Global scholar, University of Pennsylvania civil rights sociologist, and law professor Dorothy Roberts will expose the myths of race-based medicine.

Interracial relationships and the ‘brown baby’ problem: black GIs, white women and their mixed race offspring in World War II Britain

University of Cambridge
Department of History and Philosophy of Science
Seminar Room 1
Tuesday, 2015-11-17, 17:00-18:30Z

Lucy Bland, Reader in History
Anglia Ruskin University

For more information, click here.

The Color of Love Lecture & Book Signing

University of South Florida
Tampa Library Grace Allen Room, 4th Floor
4202 E. Fowler Ave. LIB122
Tampa, Florida
Monday, 2015-11-16, 11:00-13:00 EST (Local Time)

Dr. Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman, Assistant Professor in Sociology and ISLAC

Examining race and gender, Hordge-Freeman illustrates [in her new book, The Color of Love: Racial Features, Stigma, and Socialization in Black Brazilian Families] the privileges of whiteness, by revealing how those with “blacker” features often experience material and emotional hardships, and how it is connected to the distribution of affection within families. Racial hierarchies may orchestrate family relationships in ways that reflect and reproduce racial inequality at large, but black Brazilian families actively negotiate these hierarchies to assert their citizenship and humanity.

Open to all public. Light refreshments will be served.

For more information, click here.

The Sweet (and Sour) Enchantment of Racism in Post-Racial America

University of South Florida
Patel Center for Global Solutions Auditorium
4202 E Fowler Ave, CGS101
Tampa, Florida 33620
Friday, 2015-11-13, 12:30-13:30 EST (Local Time)

Dr. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva will be on campus on November 13, 2015, for the purpose of discussing his recent works relating to racism, the “Latin Americanization” of racism in the United States, and the connections between these discourses and the topics of citizenship, democracy and human rights. Dr. Bonilla-Silva is an internationally acclaimed scholar and speaker with a history of motivating intellectual thought of young scholars.

USF World is please to co-sponsor this event with the College of Arts and Sciences, the Humanities Institute, the Institute for Latin America and the Caribbean (ISLAC), and the Department of Government and International Affairs (GIA).

Event is free and open to the public.

“My life has gotten white”: Zadie Smith’s Erotics and Ethics of Upward Mobility

C21 Seminar Series 2015-16
Centre for Research in Twenty-first Century Writings
University of Brighton
Falmer Campus
101 Mayfield House
Brighton, United Kingdom
2015-11-09, 17:00-18:30Z

Sarah Brophy, Professor of English and Cultural Studies
McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

In a 2011 Guardian article “Where are Britain’s black authors?,” novelist Catherine Johnson discusses the boom in white-authored stories about “other races and cultures,” suggesting that “the words of a white author are a comfortable buffer, a reassurance that nothing in the story will be too shocking, too hard to understand; the author is like you, and you can trust him or her to tell you this story in familiar terms.” Conspicuously absent from Johnson’s discussion is Zadie Smith, the young mixed race author from North London who burst on to the literary scene with a historic advance contract for the manuscript of the acclaimed White Teeth (2000). How does the case of Smith potentially reroute Johnson’s critique? Building on Zadie Smith’s comments in a publicity interview for her latest novel NW (2012) that “my life has gotten white compared to the life I grew up with. Because of the world I work in—it’s white,” this paper considers the dilemmas of upward mobility and whiteness as they have come to bear on Smith, who articulates and negotiates these pressures in a range of life writing modes (especially personal essays and autobiographical fiction)…

For more information, click here.

Diversity Committee Workshop: Loretta Staples, LCSW: “Both & Neither: Biracial Identities”

The Connecticut Society of Psychoanalytic Psychology
Mt. Carmel Medical & Professional Building
3074 Whitney Avenue, Bldg 1
Hamden, Connecticut 06518
2015-11-14, 10:30-12:30 EST (Local Time)

Loretta Staples, LCSW

The CSPP Diversity Work Group Announces a New Workshop in our series: Through An/Other Lens: Multicultural Perspectives

Loretta Staples, LCSW maintains a private practice in New Haven and is a therapist in addiction services at Rushford in Meriden. She specializes in working with clients on issues of race, class, and gender as they impact identity and well-being.

Despite claims of a “post-racial” society, race persists as a salient cultural dimension through which private and public identities are formed. While public discourse about race in the U.S. continues to focus on black/white racial tension, biracial individuals—representing a varied mix of racial backgrounds—occupy a fast-growing segment of the population, as defined by the U.S. Census.

Individuals of mixed race occupy a realm in which they are “both and neither,” affording unique challenges and opportunities in navigating social realities. These particular adaptive demands impact identity formation, social functioning, and well-being, sometimes adversely, sometimes advantageously.

Therapists, especially those identifying as monoracial, may not recognize biracial clients, or may incorrectly assume certain racial allegiances. Moreover, they may overlook the effects of multivalent racialized experiences on the lives of biracial clients, and on the specific concerns these clients bring to treatment. This workshop provides an informal opportunity to explore biracial identity and considerations for clinical work…

For more information, click here.

Author Meets Reader: Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics and Big Business Recreate Race in the Twenty-First Century by Dorothy Roberts

University of California, Irvine
School of Law
401 E. Peltason Drive
Irvine, California
Room 3500
Monday, 2015-11-02, 18:30 PST (Local Time)

Sponsored by the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy and the Center on Law, Equality and Race’s Perspectives, this special Author Meets Reader event will feature author Dorothy Roberts speaking about her book…

For more information, click here.

Goucher Social Justice Committee Presents: Rosa Clemente

Goucher College
Kelly Lecture Hall
1021 Dulaney Valley Road
Baltimore, Maryland
Thursday, 2015-10-29, 18:00 EDT (Local Time)

Rosa Clemente is a Black Puerto Rican grassroots organizer, hip-hop activist, journalist, and entrepreneur. She was the vice presidential running mate of 2008 Green Party Presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney in the 2008 U.S. Presidential election.

Rosa Clemente will be speaking on the Black Lives Matter Movement, the contours of Afro Latina identity and the Black Radical Tradition.

Co-sponsored by The Center for Race, Equity and Identity.

For more information, click here.

“Little White Lie: A Film about Dual Identity and Family Secrets” with Lacey Schwartz

Taube Center for Jewish Studies
Stanford University
Center For Educational Research (Room 101)
520 Galvez Mall
Stanford, California
2015-10-28, 19:00 PDT (Local Time)

“Between Race and Religion: Contemporary American Jewish Life” series with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.

Lacey Schwartz, an American filmmaker, in conversation with Allyson Hobbs, Assistant Professor of American History at Stanford University

Little White Lie tells Lacey Schwartz’s story of growing up in a typical middle-class Jewish household in Woodstock, NY, with loving parents and a strong sense of her Jewish identity — that is until she discovers that her biological father is actually a black man with whom her mother had an affair. What defines our identity, our family of origin or the family that raises us? Lacey discovers that answering those questions means understanding her parents’ stories as well as her own.

What defines our identity, our family of origin or the family that raises us? How do we come to terms with the sins and mistakes of our parents? Lacey discovers that answering those questions means understanding her parents’ own stories as well as her own. She pieces together her family history and the story of her dual identity using home videos, archival footage, interviews, and episodes from her own life. Little White Lie is a personal documentary about the legacy of family secrets, denial, and redemption.

For more information, click here or here.

Black Mexico: The African Roots in Mexico

Western Connecticut State University
Student Center Theater
181 White Street
Danbury, Connecticut
Wednesday, 2015-10-28, 10:50 EDT (Local Time)

Gloria Arjona, Lecturer in Spanish
California Institute of Technology, Pasadena

In Celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month

Dr. Gloria Arjona, a lecturer at CalTech Pasadena and University of Southern California, will present a live music and multimedia lecture about “Black Mexico: The African Roots in Mexico” at 10:50 a.m. in the Student Center Theater on the WCSU Midtown campus, 181 White St. in Danbury. This Hispanic Heritage Month event will be free and the public is invited.