Mixed Race Studies

Emerging Voices in Academia: Critical Mixed Race Theory

Little Theater, Building 1200
Nappa Vally College
Napa, California
2011-09-22, 16:00 PDT (Local Time)

Andrew Jolivétte, Associate Professor of American Indian Studies (Also see biographies at Speak Out! and Native Wiki.)
Center for Health Disparities Research and Training
San Fransisco State University

Dr. Andrew Jolivétte is an accomplished educator, writer, speaker, and social/cultural critic. His work spans many different social and political arenas – from education reform and LGBT/Queer community of color identity issues to mixed-race identity, critical whiteness studies, gay marriage, and AIDS disparities among people of color. Jolivétte is currently an assistant professor in the American Indian Studies Department and also teaches in the Ethnic Studies Program at San Francisco State University. He recently completed a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship through the National Academy of Sciences. Professor Jolivétte is a mixed-race studies specialist with a particular interest in Comparative Race Relations, Creole studies, Black-Indians, critical mixed-race movement building, and mixed-race health disparities. He is the author of, Obama and the Biracial Factor: The Battle for a New American Majority (Policy Press, February 2012), Cultural Representation in Native America (AltaMira Press, July 2006) which is a part of the Contemporary Native American Communities Series and Louisiana Creoles: Cultural Recovery and Mixed Race Native American Identity (Lexington Books, January 2007).

For more information, click here.

The Stakes of Race, Color, & Belonging

Thursday Afternoon Forum Series
University of California, Berkeley
Center for Race and Gender
691 Barrows
Thursday, 2011-09-29, 16:00-17:30 PDT (Local Time)

Skin Tone Stratification Among Black Americans, 2001-2003
Ellis Monk Jr., Sociology

“I’m Mixed and Mixed”: Narrating Identities of Individuals with Mexican and Other Ancestries
Jessie Turner, Ethnic Studies

For more information, click here.

Preview Of Essential Guide To Working With Mixed-Race Young People

Manchester Metropolitan University
Tuesday, 2011-10-04, 10:00-12:30 BST (Local Time)
Thursday, 2011-10-06, 10:00-12:30 BST (Local Time)

‘Political Correctness’ has gone wrong. Let us help you talk about the subject in a practical and productive way. Come along to our next training session!!

Who we are:

Mix-d: is the social enterprise that for the last six years has developed the UK agenda for professionals who work with mixed race young people. Our activities span schools, colleges, universities, social services departments, youth work, the criminal justice system, community groups and the training sector.

We have engaged with 1,000s of young people, their parents, policy makers and politicians. We are currently working with colleagues in the U.S. and France and recently submitted in person a draft manifesto for working with mixed race young people to the European Commission in Brussels.

The Mix-d: approach has influenced policy and practice by collaborating with practitioners, politicians and, most importantly, young people to challenges stereotypes, change the language and debunk the myths and historical assumptions about what it means to be “mixed-race.”

This special half-day session will:

• Give you deep & privileged first access to the resource.
• Bring you totally up to speed with leading edge theory and practice.
• Invite your feedback and input on final version of resource.

Benefits to Professionals:

• Offers guidance on uses of Mix-d: resources and philosophy
• Offers guidance on supporting young people who are exploring / struggling with racial identity
• Provides guidance for tackling the unseen issues which affect mixed-race young people and how to represent their needs in your organisation.
• Provides practical responses to challenging comments form a young person regarding race / identity and tips on how to engage in a positive and constructive way

For more information, click here.

Victoria Bynum to be Featured Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

Mixed Chicks Chat (The only live weekly show about being racially and culturally mixed. Also, founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival) Hosted by Fanshen Cox and Jennifer Frappier
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #220-Victoria Bynum
When: Wednesday, 2011-08-10, 21:00Z (17:00 EDT, 16:00 CDT, 14:00 PDT)

Victoria E. Bynum, Emeritus Professor of History
Texas State University, San Marcos

Professor Victoria Bynum, a graduate of the University of California, San Diego, is a historian of gender, race, and class relations in the Civil War Era South. Her blog, Renegade South, and her numerous publications feature true stories about mixed-race families, anti-Confederate guerrillas, and other unconventional Southerners.

Listen to the episode here or download it here (00:35:59, 14.4 MB).

Selected Bibliography

• The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.
• The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War.  The Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies.  Chapel Hill & London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001.  xvi + 316 pp. Tables, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. (hardcover).  ISBN 0-878-2636-7.
• “Race and the ‘One Drop Rule’ in the Post-Reconstruction South,” Renegade South: Histories of Unconventional Southerners on March 17, 2009, http://renegadesouth.wordpress.com/2009/03/17/race-and-the-one-drop-rule-in-the-post-reconstruction-south/.
• “‘White Negroes’ in Segregated Mississippi: Miscegenation, Racial Identity, and the Law,” The Journal of Southern History, Volume 64, Number 2 (May, 1998): 247-276.

Roundtable with Fanshen Cox, Dr. Ulli Ryder, and Dr. Marcia Dawkins

Blogtalk Radio
Tuesday, 2011-08-09, 22:00Z (18:00 EDT)

Michelle McCrary, Host
Is That Your Child?

Fanshen Cox, Actress, Educator, Founder and Producer of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival, co-host Mixed Chicks Chat

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

Ulli K. Ryder, Visiting Scholar
Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America
Brown University

From the New York Times to CNN to Hollywood actresses, it seems that everyone is talking about mixed race people and interracial relationships. Amidst the celebratory tones of much of this coverage and ill-advised celebrations of a “post-racial” America,  there seems to be a slow-burning backlash. 

The mainstream’s problematic framing of mixed race identity and of the “mixed experience” seems to be stoking the fires of this discontent.  In this podcast roundtable hosted by ITYC, we hope analyze the mainstream coverage of mixedness and multiracial identity to find out where it goes off the rails and what, if anything, it gets right.  This podcast roundtable is only a small piece of the kind of meaningful exchange we hope that people will continue to have about the issue both on and offline.

Each of our panelists will share their personal experiences with the mainstream treatment of multiracial/mixed identity as well as any backlash they’ve experienced.   They’ll also offer some strategies for having more nuanced, contextual  conversations about “the mixed experience.”

To download the audio of the roundtable discussion, click here (01:01:12, 14MB).

Jordan Clarke: “Something In-between” @ Hang Man Gallery

Hang Man Gallery
756 Queen Street East
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Open Tuesday-Sunday, 12:00-17:00 ET (Local Time)

Exhibit Duration: 2011-09-06 through 2011-09-25
Opening Reception: 2011-09-08, 19:00-21:00 EDT (Local Time)

Jordan Clarke

Artist Jordan Clarke explores her mixed-race identity through paintings of self-portraiture. This series looks at being “in-between” as both a physical and psychological state for bi-racial women of the 21st century, where there is constant pressure to assume predetermined racial and gender roles created by society.
 
Clarke most recently received a grant from the Ontario Arts Council.  In 2008, she studied at the Academy of Realist Art in Toronto, completing the Drawing curriculum in 2009.  In 2007, she graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design, where she received a BFA majoring in Drawing and Painting.  While attending OCAD, she received the opportunity to participate in the off-campus studies program in Florence, Italy from 2005-2006.

For more information, click here.

Geteilte Geschichte: The Black Experience in Germany and the U.S.

The German Historical Institute
1607 New Hampshire Avenue, NW
Washington, D.C.
Thursday, 2011-08-19, 18:00-20:00 EDT (Local Time)

RSVP (acceptances only) by August 12, 2011
Telephone: 202-387-3355, FAX: 202-387-6437
E-Mail: events@ghi-dc.org

Noah Sow

Noah Sow is an acclaimed journalist, musician, and producer. In 2001, she founded der braune mob e.V., the first anti-racist German media watch organization (www.derbraunemob.de). Her latest book Deutschland Black & White is based on her extensive experiences as an anti-racism activist.

Her lecture will be the public keynote address of the First Annual Convention of the Black German Cultural Society, NJ. to be held from August 19 to 21, 2011, at the GHI.

In cooperation with the Black German Cultural Society, NJ. (A New Jersey nonprofit organization) and the Humanities Council of Washington, DC.

For more information, click here.

“Roots Germania” A Personal Search for Identity (Film Screening and Panel Discussion)

The German Historical Institute
1607 New Hampshire Avenue, NW
Washington, D.C.
Thursday, 2011-08-18, 18:00-20:00 EDT (Local Time)

RSVP (acceptances only) by August 12, 2011
Telephone: 202-387-3355, FAX: 202-387-6437
E-Mail: events@ghi-dc.org

The Grimme award nominated documentary “Roots Germania” was directed by Mo Asumang, the daughter of a German and Ghanaian. She decided to search for her own roots and identity, after she received a death threat by the neo-Nazi band White Aryan Rebels, who sing in one song: “This bullet is for you, Mo Asumang.” Her search leads her through Germany and then to Ghana, where she speaks with family and friends, but she also engages with NPD party representatives and racist groups to ask questions many would not dare to ask.

In cooperation with the Black German Cultural Society, NJ (A New Jersey nonprofit organization) and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation.

For more information, click here.

Sex, Blood, and Hybridity: The Discourse of Racial Anxiety in Antebellum Writing

Northeast Modern Language Association
NeMLA 2012 Convention
Rochester, New York
2012-03-15 through 2012-03-18

This panel seeks to investigate how antebellum literary texts worked dialectically with the new racial science of ethnology to respond to the dominant racial ideologies of the day. Topics and/or critical paradigms can include, but are certainly not limited to: miscegenation, disease, politics, erotics, gender, feminism, science, politics, class, trauma, critical race/queer theory, reception theory, and reader-response.

In antebellum America, the notion of ‘blood’ as ‘race’ maintained a strong hold over the 19th century literary imagination. This panel will examine how antebellum literary texts worked dialectically with the new racial science of ethnology to respond to the dominant racial ideologies of the day. Mid-century works by authors as varied as Frederick Douglass, Louisa May Alcott, Herman Melville, Lydia Maria Child, and Frances E. W. Harper illustrated very clearly the instability of racial classification and its resultant sexual anxieties. Rather than phenotype, references to ‘white’ blood and ‘black’ blood came to be regarded as the primary signifiers of racial traits. The enduring fascination of white Americans with the mathematical fractionalization of blood was evident in the creation and use of words such as octoroon, quadroon, and mulatto in the titles of magazine articles, books, and pamphlets while, at the same time, actual skin color would become an increasingly invisible signifier of race. Among the anthropologists, anatomists, ethnologists, and naturalists who led the drive for racial classification in the mid-19th century were polygenists such as Josiah C. Nott, Samuel Cartwright, George Glidden, and others. Alabama physician Nott’s 1844 Two Lectures on the Natural History of the Caucasian and Negro Races and 1854 Types of Mankind cut to the heart of race-based ‘scientific’ writing during the19th century. Nott’s hypothesis that mulattoes, as the offspring of interracial sexual couplings—termed ‘faulty stock’—could not be self-sustaining was never scientifically tested. In addition, the continued emphasis on the supposed degeneracy and diseased blood caused by race-mixing betrayed a degree of hysteria disproportionate to the actual numbers of the unions. This panel is significant in that it seeks a fresh investigation of paradigms through which antebellum literary texts can be read as directly responding to the new science and ideology of ethnology. Topics and/or critical paradigms can include, but are certainly not limited to: miscegenation, disease, politics, erotics, gender, feminism, science, politics, class, trauma, critical race/queer theory, reception theory, and reader-response. Send 1-page abstract and brief bio as Word attachment to Rebecca Williams, rebelwill7@gmail.com, with ‘NEMLA’ in subject line.

For more information, click here.

Intermarriage and racial amalgamation in the United States

Biodemography and Social Biology
Volume 14, Issue 2 (1967)
pages 112-120
DOI: 10.1080/19485565.1967.9987710

David M. Heer, Professor Emeritus of Sociology
University of Southern California

Within the last few years tremendous popular interest has been aroused in the subject of Negro-white intermarriage. Fifteen years ago Negro protest leaders claimed they were interested only in jobs and votes and consequently downplayed talk of intermarriage. Moreover, conservative whites were comforted by Gunnar Myrdal’s report that although the ban on intermarriage was for them the most important aspect of the caste system, Negroes considered it the least important of the various discriminations they were forced to suffer. Very recently, however, the attitude on the part of many Negro leaders toward intermarriage has changed. Increasingly, such leaders, particularly the younger ones, are saying, “Why not?”

Earlier, most Negro thinking tended to isolate political and economic discriminations from the social discriminations symbolized, par excellence, by white attitudes toward racial intermarriage. However, in the writer’s opinion, such thinking represented faulty sociological analysis. A more thorough view of the situation reveals that restrictions on racial intermarriage may well be closely linked to the economic discrimination that Negroes in our society must endure. Davis (1949) has listed the main social functions of the family as the reproduction, maintenance, placement, and socialization of the young. Let us focus our attention on the placement function of the family in the contemporary United Stales, i.e. on the consequences which birth into a given family has for the youngsters future social position. Let us first remember that the transfer of wealth in our society is largely accomplished by bequeathal from one family member to another. The possession of wealth in our society not only entitles one to receive regular monetary interest; it is also a source of power, credit, and prestige. Secondly, it must be recognized that although universalism is the predominant criterion for the matching of job applicants to job vacancies in our society, particularism is quite important for many segments of it. In particular, in the building trades, jobs cannot be obtained without admittance to the union’s apprenticeship program and in many instances it is almost impossible to obtain entree into the apprenticeship program unless one is a son or other close relative of a union member. Third, social science research has established that entree to elite positions in our society is most easily obtained by those who grow up from birth in a family having relatively high status.  Birth in a high status family, of course, provides the financial means for obtaining advanced education. In addition, however, it is invaluable for giving one a sense of familiarity with the activities and functioning of high status society. This familiarity not only reduces the fear of interpersonal contacts in such a society but also increases the motivation to become a full participant…

Read or purchase the article here.