Mixed Race Studies

Johanna Workman 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 Heidi W. Durrow
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #192-Johanna Workman
When: Wednesday, 2011-02-09, 22:00Z (17:00 EST, 16:00 CST, 14:00 PST)

Johanna Workman

Dr. Johanna Workman recently received her doctorate in clinical psychology from Alliant International University, San Diego. She has worked in the mental health field for 20 years in a variety of treatment settings and modalities, including: outpatient psychotherapy, school counseling, inpatient psychiatric hospitalization, and residential substance abuse treatment. Her dissertation study investigated biracial daughter’s perceptions of self-mother relationships and body image. With a Black Caribbean mother, and a White British father, Dr. Workman was born in England and spent her early childhood years there before immigrating to the United States with her family.

Dr. Rainier Spencer to be Guest on MSNBC NewsNation with Tamron Hall

NewsNation
MSNBC TV
Wednesday, 2011-02-02, 19:00-20:00Z (14:00-15:00 EST, 11:00-12:00 PST) (Recheduled due to a White House news conference on the situation in Egypt from 2011-01-31.)

Tamron Hall, Host

Rainier Spencer, Director and Professor of Afro-American Studies; Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Dr. Spencer is the author of the new book, Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix (2011) in where he argues cogently, and forcefully, that the deconstruction of race promised by the American Multiracial Identity Movement will remain an illusion of wishful thinking unless we truly address the racist baggage that serves tenaciously to conserve the present racial order.

View the video here.

Selected bibliography:

• “Mixed-Race Chic,” The Chronicle Review, May 19, 2009.
• Challenging Multiracial ldentity. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2006.
• Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999.

Greg Carter 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 Heidi W. Durrow
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #191-Greg Carter
When: Wednesday, 2011-02-02, 22:00Z (17:00 EST, 16:00 CST, 14:00 PST)

Greg Carter, Assistant Professor of History
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Greg Carter is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His book, The United States of the United Races, a survey of positive ideas about racial mixing in the United States is forthcoming from New York University Press.

PSU MFA Monday Lecture Series: Laylah Ali

Portland State University Campus (at the corner of SW Broadway & Hall)
Shattuck Hall Annex
1914 SW Park Ave, Room 198
Portland, Oregon
2011-01-31, 19:30-20:30 PST (Local Time)

Laylah Ali, Associate Professor of Art
Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts

Free to the public

Laylah Ali was born in Buffalo, New York in 1968, and lives and works in Williamstown, Massachusetts. She received a BA from Williams College and a MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Laylah Ali has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; ICA, Boston; MCA Chicago; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; and MASS MoCA, among others. Her work was exhibited at the Venice Biennale (2003) and the Whitney Biennial (2004).

PSUs Art Dept. offers free public Art lectures almost every Monday night of the school year. Local, National and International, interdisciplinary artists visit Portland to speak about their work.

The PMMNLS is supported in part by: PICA, Portland Center for Public Humanities, Wealth Underground Farm, Bear Deluxe Magazine, Northwest Film Center. If you or your organization is interested in becoming supporters of the PMMNLS please contact the art department.

For a complete list of MFA Monday Night Lectures please click here.

Arnold K. Ho & Dr. Jim Sidanius to be Featured Guests 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 Heidi W. Durrow
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #188 – Arnold K. Ho & Dr. Jim Sidanius
When: Wednesday, 2011-01-12, 22:00Z (17:00 EST, 16:00 CST, 14:00 PST)

Arnold K. Ho
Department of Psychology
Harvard University

Jim Sidanius, Professor of Psychology and African and African American Studies
Harvard University

Jim Sidanius is a Professor in the departments of Psychology and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He has published more than 150 scientific papers and books discussing the political psychology of gender, group conflict, institutional discrimination and the evolutionary psychology of intergroup prejudice.

Arnold K. Ho is interested in social perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs that function to maintain social hierarchies.  In one line of research, he examines the perception of multiracial individuals and its implications for racial hierarchies.  In another line of research, he examines hierarchy enhancing attitudes and beliefs and individual differences in the preference for group-based hierarchy (i.e., social dominance orientation).

Selected Bibliography:

• “Evidence for hypodescent and racial hierarchy in the categorization and perception of biracial individuals,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, (2011), DOI: 10.1037/a0021562.

Listen to the episode here.

A Free Man of Color [Theater Review]

The Faster Times
2010-11-18

Johnathon Mandell

Opening Date: 2010-11-18
Closing Date: 2011-01-09

Written by John Guare
Directed by George C. Wolfe

As “A Free Man of Color” begins, its hero, an ex-slave, is a bewigged, bejeweled fop who is the wealthiest and most sexually desirable man in New Orleans. Like the character, the play seems to have everything going for it: deeply talented creators, an exciting cast, splendid costumes, a fascinating period in American history. By the end of the play, the character has been destroyed, in a harrowing half hour that is the dramatic and theatrical highlight of the piece. Long before that end, however, the average theatergoer is likely to feel let down by John Guare’s new play. If it frustrates our expectations, “A Free Man of Color”—ambitious, inventive, daring, sprawling—is an honorable failure with much to recommend it, even while it is difficult to sit through.

Set largely in New Orleans between 1801 and 1806, but wandering around the world, the play, which has now opened at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, presents the complex intrigue surrounding the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the United States, and imagines the effects of these actual historical events on fictitious characters.

The historical tidbits sprinkled throughout the play are tantalizing, especially those with contemporary parallels. To pick one of the more obscure examples: If the 21st century has civil unions for gay people, early 19th century New Orleans had plaçage, an arrangement between a white man and a woman of color…

Read the entire review here.

The Quadroon Ball on stage one week only Oct. 13-17 [2010]

Lone Star College
The Woodlands, Texas
2010-09-22

Lone Star College-CyFair Drama Department presents Damon Wright’s play “The Quadroon Ball” on stage Oct. 13 through Oct. 17 [2010].

“The Quadroon Ball” is a moving drama taking place in New Orleans just prior to the Civil War.  It focuses on the women of mixed race who were prized for their beauty and yet regarded as second-class citizens, said LSC-CyFair Director Ron Jones. The play traces the life of a beautiful Quadroon woman (one quarter black and three quarters white) whose life is affected both by the man of royalty who loves her and the presence of slavery in society.

With a cast of 22 community and college actors, this poignant and elegant story begins as Jeanette is introduced at a cotillion for women of her stature and continues for 20 years, marking her rise to fame and her ultimate demise.

According to The New York Times, “Damon Wright’s ‘The Quadroon Ball’ is an intelligent, affecting new play about race, family, honor and freedom.”  Jones adds that this play is for mature audiences only due to adult subject matter and graphic language.

Applying Self-Discrepancy Theory to Biracial Identity and Adjustment: A Proposed Study

Social-Personality Brown Bag Series
University of California, Davis
Location: Young 166
2010-11-08, 12:10-13:30 PST (Local Time)

Lauren Berger

Research suggests that biracials may have poorer mental health than monoracials and a recent meta-analysis (Shih & Sanchez, 2005) cites a lack of research testing potential mediators of the link between biracial identity and adjustment. The proposed study aims to examine Higgin’s Self-Discrepancy Theory (1987, 1989) model of vulnerability as one such mediator of the relationship. Discrepancies between self-state representations have been found to be related to different kinds of emotional distress and self-esteem.  We hypothesize that both internal and external (dis-confirming feedback from others) identity discrepancies will be related to lower levels of biracial adjustment. The extent to which the individual is comfortable with conflicting messages will also be examined as a moderator. Some aspects of the study are not yet finalized and feedback/comments would be much appreciated!

Métis, mixed-ness and music: Aboriginal-Ukrainian encounters and cultural production on the Canadian prairies

The Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies
University of Washington
Canadian Studies Center
Walker-Ames Room, Kane Hall
Wednesday, 2011-04-20 19:00 PDT (Local Time)

Marcia Ostashewski, Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Canadian Studies

Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal intermarriages, often described as “mixed-race,” have been the focus of historians and anthropologists, and represent an important legacy of the colonial pasts and present of both the United States and Canada which require further investigation. As an ethnomusicologist, Ostashewski is investigating a legacy of Aboriginal/Eastern European settler encounters and relations in music, dance and related expressive culture on the Canadian prairies. In this presentation, she focuses on Alberta-based musician Arnie Strynadka, “The Uke-Cree Fiddler”—looking at the ways in which his musical life and performance represent a particular encounter and fusion of ethnicities, examining experiences of hybridity and intercultural relations in the context of this unique, western Canadian musical life.

For more information, click here.

Journeys in Multiracial America

C-SPAN
Elliot Bay Book Company
Seattle, Washington
2007-01-27

Elliott Lewis

Journalist Elliott Lewis discusses his life as a biracial American at Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle. In his memior Fade: My Journeys in Multiracial America, the author explains that while he was raised with two parents of mixed racial heritage who identified themselves as black, he eventually evolved into a biracial self-identity. The book also examines transracial adoption, interracial dating and immigration through the eyes of several multiracial people.

Elliott Lewis is a freelance television news reporter in Washington, DC. He has worked for CNN Headline News, BET, Associated Press Television, WJLA-TV, and the Washington bureaus of Tribune Broadcasting and Hearst-Argyle Television. Mr. Lewis is a member of the National Association of Black Journalists and currently serves on their Board of Directors.