Mixed Race Studies

Race, Identity, and Medical Genomics in the Obama Age (Lecture by Duana Fullwiley)

Fall 2010 Honors Colloquium: RACE
University of Rhode Island
Edwards Auditorium, URI Kingston Campus
Tuesday, 2010-10-05, 19:00 ET (Local Time); (23:00Z)

Duana Fullwiley, Assistant Professor of African and African American studies and of Medical Anthropology
Harvard University

A series of public programs at the University of Rhode Island presented by the URI Honors Program

Join us! The public is invited to attend this series of free events.

Perceptions about race shape everyday experiences, public policies, opportunities for individual achievement, and relations across racial and ethnic lines. In this colloquium we will explore key issues of race, showing how race still matters.

Watch the lecture below:

Other articles by or about Duana Fullwiley:

• “Race and Genetics: An Attempt to Define the Relationship”
• “Race in a Genetic World”
• “The Biologistical Construction of Race: ‘Admixture’ Technology and the New Genetic Medicine”
• “Racial Categories in Medical Practice: How Useful Are They?”

From “Race in a Genetic World”:

“I am an African American,” says Duana Fullwiley, “but in parts of Africa, I am white.” To do fieldwork as a medical anthropologist in Senegal, she says, “I take a plane to France, a seven- to eight-hour ride. My race changes as I cross the Atlantic. There, I say, ‘Je suis noire,’ and they say, ‘Oh, okay—métisse—you are mixed.’ Then I fly another six to seven hours to Senegal, and I am white. In the space of a day, I can change from African American, to métisse, to tubaab [Wolof for “white/European”]. This is not a joke, or something to laugh at, or to take lightly. It is the kind of social recognition that even two-year-olds who can barely speak understand. ‘Tubaab,’ they say when they greet me.”

Perceptions of Multiracial Individuals: Categorization Effects on the Race Continuum

Society for Personality and Social Psychology 2011 Annual Meeting
San Antonio, Texas
Poster Session G100
Saturday, 2011-01-29
18:15-19:45 (Local Time), Room TBD

Jacqueline M. Chen
University of California, Santa Barbara

David L. Hamilton, Professor of Psychology
University of California, Santa Barbara

We used a psychophysical approach to studying the categorization of biracials. The point-of-subjective-equality (PSE), or the exact ratio of minority-to-white background that is equally likely to be categorized as White or minority, differed for Asian-White and Black-White biracials. Only the PSE for Asian-White biracial suggested hypodescent.

For more information, click here.

Hang Tough, Martina

Frear Ensemble Theatre
Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania
2004-02-27 through 2004-02-29
Saturday at 20:00, Sunday at 14:00

Composed and Performed By: Audrey Pernell
In Collaboration with: Vernice Miller and Jessica Nakamura
Directed by: Vernice Miller
Music: Ralph Denzer

The Department of Theater presents an honors thesis project by Audrey Pernell, directed by Vernice Miller as Artist-in-Residence. Hang Tough, Martina is a work in progress composed and performed by Audrey Pernell ’04 in collaboration with Vernice Miller and Jessica Nakamura ’03. It is an exploration of light-skinned black/biracial black-white identity using a fusion of European and African performance elements, made most evident through the characterization of a contemporary griot-opera-diva.

Fall 2010 Honors Colloquium: RACE

University of Rhode Island
Tuesday evenings, 19:00 ET (Local Time); (23:00Z through November; 00:00Z on Wednesday after November 9).
2010-09-14 through 2010-12-07
Edwards Auditorium, URI Kingston Campus

A series of public programs at the University of Rhode Island presented by the URI Honors Program

Join us! The public is invited to attend this series of free events.

Perceptions about race shape everyday experiences, public policies, opportunities for individual achievement, and relations across racial and ethnic lines. In this colloquium we will explore key issues of race, showing how race still matters.

You will be able to watch the Colloquium live by clicking here or watching below. This link will only work in real time, while the presentation is going on.

Note: the live feed is only active during live events.

Includes noted scholars (Times and dates below are in UTC.  Please read carefully!):

2010-10-05, 23:00Z
Race, Identity, and Medical Genomics in the Obama Age
Duana Fullwiley, Assistant Professor of African and African American studies and of Medical Anthropology
Harvard University

2010-10-12, 23:00Z
The Invisible Weight of Whiteness: The Racial Grammar of Everyday Life in Contemporary America
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Professor of Sociology
Duke University

2010-11-31, 00:00Z
How Black Women’s Stories Complicate Race and Gender Politics
Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Associate Professor of Politics and African American Studies
Princeton University

For more information, click here.

HAFU: a film about the experiences of mixed-race people living in Japan

Hafu Film Sneak Preview in Kyoto
Institut Franco-Japonais du Kansai, Kyoto, Japan
Saturday, 2010-10-23. 19:30 – 22:00 (Local Time)

Filmmakers

Lara Perez Takagi
and
Megumi Nishikura

David Yano (29). David was born in a small village in Ghana, to a Ghanaian mother and a Japanese father. His father, an architect, was in Ghana to build the Noguchi Hideo Memorial when he met David’s mother. After spending 6 years in Ghana, they moved to Tokyo. However due to difficulty of adjusting to their new life in Japan, his parents filed for divorce when he was 10. The next 8 years were spent in an orphanage school in Japan with his two brothers. There he discovered his greatest passion: music and performance. He started modeling when he was a university student and now works as a multitalented TV presenter. Due to his dark complexion, David is regarded by default as a gaijin (foreigner) when people meet him for the first time. However, having spent much of his life in Japan, he feels he acts and identifies as Japanese more than anything else. Despite this claim David, has returned to Ghana once a year since the age of 20. Seeing the dramatic difference between the two countries, David felt the call to use his talents to benefit the people of Ghana. He has set an ambitious goal of raising $30,000 over the course of 8 months in order to build kindergarten back in Ghana. Audiences will watch him as he organizes various fundraisers and events has he struggles to attain his goal.

With an ever increasing movement of people between places in this transnational age, there is a mounting number of mixed-race people in Japan, some visible others not. “Hafu” is the unfolding journey of discovery into the intricacies of mixed-race Japanese and their multicultural experience in modern day Japan. The film follows the lives of five “hafus”—the Japanese term for people who are half-Japanese—and by virtue of the fact that living in Japan, they are forced to explore what it means to be multiracial and multicultural in a nation that once proudly proclaimed itself as the mono-ethnic nation. For some of these hafus Japan is the only home they know, for some living in Japan is an entirely new experience, and others are caught somewhere between two different worlds.

For more information, click here.

CCIE presents Cedar & Bamboo – Film Première and Panel Discussion

University of British Columbia, Point Grey Campus
UBC First Nations Longhouse
Thursday, 2010-10-14, 12:00-14:30 (Local Time)

Sponsored by the Centre for Culture, Identity and Education (CCIE).

There are numerous First Nations in what is now British Columbia and Chinese people arrived on BC’s shores many generations ago. Since then, Indigenous and Chinese people have interacted and forged relationships. Set in Vancouver and other locations in BC, Cedar and Bamboo opens with a survey of the lives of early Chinese immigrants and concentrates on addressing the more recent history of highly complex and troubled issues of interracial relationships and marriages, multiracial identity and identification, alienation and belonging. Its central focus is on the lives of four people of mixed Indigenous and Chinese ancestry and their formation of strong and meaningful identity in spite of the difficulty of reconciling divergent identities, racist laws, the complexities of familial and ethnic acceptance and/or rejection and personal identification with and alienation from Canada and Canadianness, China and Chineseness and First Nations and Indigenous identity. Lil’wat elder Judy Joe reflects on being “abandoned” by her Indigenous mother, being sent to her father’s village in China at age five, being ill treated there as a foreigner and returning to Canada as a teenager to a Vancouver from which she felt completely alienated. Musqueam elder Howard Grant, whose Chinese father worked in the market gardens near his Musqueam mother’s family, reflects on his experiences with both cultures and his principal identification as aboriginal. Siblings Jordie and Hannah Yow, now in their 20s, reflect on growing up “Canadian” in Kamloops with knowledge of being quite multiracial and multiethnic but with virtually no information about either their Chinese grandfather or their Secwempec grandmother.

As a bonus- 1788: A History of Chinese and First Nations Relations in British Columbia, 10 minutes of academic commentary from Professors Henry Yu and Jean Barman of the University of British Columbia and Harley Wylie of Nuu-chah-nulth ancestry on the intersecting histories of First Nations and Chinese people in British Columbia.

For more information, click here.

Texting Obama: Poetics/Politics/Popular Culture

Sponsored by English Research Institute, the Manchester Writing School at MMU and The Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences Research
2010-09-07 through 2010-09-10

Texting Obama: Poetics/Politics/Popular Culture is an Interdisciplinary Humanities and Social Sciences Conference, mapping and exploring the specific historical, political and cultural climates in which Obama(’s) texts operate.

Barack Obama’s presidency is widely seen as the beginning of a new era, not only in world politics but also in global culture, with the present increasingly glossed as the ‘Age of Obama’. Our conference will ask what the terms of this naming might mean by addressing the diverse range of representational forms attached to Obama in contemporary world culture – as a person, icon and phenomenon. The conference will map and explore the specific historical, political and cultural climates in which Obama(’s) texts operate. It will interrogate the signifiers, signs and processes that circulate around Barack Obama, and explore his own contributions and interventions across diverse media. Proposals are invited for papers or panels that engage with these diverse textualities.

Questions might include:

• In what ways do Obama texts ‘travel’ and under what conditions?
• How might travelling theory or diaspora theory engage with Obama texts?
• In what ways might attention to Obama texts interrogate or develop extant or emerging frameworks at work in postcolonial, globalisation, media and cultural studies?
• How might a focus on transnational Obamas include or obscure local or national politics and expressions of black activism?
• How ought we to theorise pronouncements of a ‘post-racial’ America or/and a ‘post-Katrina’ America?

Possible streams might include:

• Postcolonial Obama: Kenya and Indonesia, Globalisation and Cosmopolitanism,
• Aloha Obama! Negotiating Hawaii,
• Obama and African-America
• Rhetoric/Orature /Life writing,
• The Obama Families,
• Screening Obama
• Obama and Hospitality,
• Black and Bi-Racial Masculinities
• Race & Racial Politics
• Obama in Europe
• Publishing/Merchandising Obama
• Ghosting Kennedy
• Race and Fatherhood
• Obama’s 100 days
• Obama in the Academy
• Law and Civil Rights
• Black Activism
• Obama’s Blackberry: New Technologies/Media and Race
• Obama and Popular Culture: Watching The Wire
• Obama and pedagogy

For more information, click here.

New England Identities: Black New England Conference

University of New Hampshire
2009-06-11 thorugh 2009-06-13

New England: Beyond Black & White

Moving beyond rigid racial identities, this year’s conference will explore the contemporary as well as historic interactions between Black and Indigenous communities, the presence of “passing” mixed race individuals, and the more recent immigrant experience, within a New England context. These complex interactions, connections, conflicts, experiences, and resistant efforts of Black, white, Indigenous, and multi-racial citizens will be explored through scholarly research, presentations on books, shared personal stories, and imagery.

The Black New England Conference is a 2-day conference that gathers scholars, teachers, researchers, community members and members of local organizations to share their work and insights on the Black experience past and present in New England. It is both an academic conference and a celebration of Black life and history in New England.

Panel: Exploring the Historical Context for Contemporary Stories of the Mixed Experience

Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival
Japanese American National Musuem
National Center for Democracy, Tateuchi Democracy Forum
2010-06-13, 18:30 to 19:30Z

Moderator

Frank Buckley, Co-Anchor
KTLA Morning News

Panelists

Kelly F. Jackson, Assistant Professor of Social Work
Arizona State University

Farzana Nayani, President
Multiracial Americans of Southern California (MASC)

Larry Aaronson, Retired public school teacher

G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

Listen to part 1 (00:31:12) or download the audio here.
Listen to part 2 (00:31:05) or download the audio here.

The social care system and mixed race young people: placing the individual child at the heart of decision making

People in Harmony
Central London, England
2010-11-11

A one-day conference from People in Harmony which will consider why mixed race young people are over-represented in the care system, how they fare in the system and beyond, and how existing procedures could be improved upon.

About the Conference

The emergence of a sizeable mixed race population provides us with the opportunity to look again at racial stereotyping, and at how public services engage with individuals who do not slot into a single racial group. The need for this is perhaps most acute in the area of looked after children and wider social care – the focus of this conference.

Mixed race young people are over-represented in the care system, which has important implications for their long term prospects. A number of reasons may contribute to explaining this over-representation – social class, cultural differences in attitudes to marriage and long term relationships, widely dispersed family and a consequent lack of informal support structures. However, the tendency of service providers to see ‘black’ children as separate from their white mothers and to question the ability of white mothers to raise ‘black’ children may also play a part.

There have been major disagreements about local authority policies which insist on the right ‘racial match’ between child and adoptive family (based on Children Act 1989 Section 22 (5) (c)). Much evidence suggests that the key to successful placements is not a good racial match, but the young person’s wishes and the warmth of the adoptive family.

This conference will seek to explore these difficult issues with openness and honesty, drawing on research and academic work, and on personal experience. It will provide delegates with an opportunity to consider:

• Whether too much time is spent finding the right label (is it dual heritage rather than mixed race, and does it really matter?).
• Why ‘racial matching’ between young people and adoptive families may have been over-emphasised at the expense of adopted children – has cultural competence simply become a new dogma?
• The direct experience of mixed race young people who have been in the care system.
• Why social class and social heritage means that outcomes are very different among mixed race young people.
• Whether there is sufficient support for parents, especially single parents, of mixed race children – and how this is informed by perception of white mothers with ‘black’ children.
• How the care system – including wider services like education and CAMHS – can work towards better outcomes?

Organisations which book places at this event are invited to take up free exhibition space to encourage an exchange of information and resources.

Certificates of attendance will be available.

For more information, click here.