Mixed Race Studies

Nevada GOP lawmaker to ‘colored’ colleague: Racism is over because the president is black

Raw Story
2015-03-18

David Ferguson

The Nevada state Assemblywoman who believes that cancer is a “fungus” that can be flushed from the body with saline solution has now said that she believes that racism in her state is a thing of the past.

According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, State Assemblywoman Michelle Fiore (R) said that racism is over, now, so people of color should stop “using the race card” about voter ID laws and other Republican policies that unfairly impact people of color and the poor.

She also congratulated an African-American colleague for being the first “colored” person to graduate from his college.

Fiore is one of the cosponsors of a proposed voter ID law in Nevada which — like all such laws — has been predicted to have an adverse effect on voter turnout by blacks, the elderly and students, all traditionally Democratic voting blocs.

Addressing “peers that are concerned with color,” Fiore went on to congratulate Democratic Assemblyman Harvey J. Munford — an opponent of the voter ID law — for being “the first colored man to graduate from his college.”

“We’re in 2015 and we have a black president, in case anyone didn’t notice,” she added. “So the color and the race issue, I think it’s time that we put that to rest.”…

Read the entire article here.

Tony Terrell Robinson was shot dead by Madison police. This is how it happened

The Guardian
2015-03-13

Oliver Laughland, Senior Reporter
Guardian US

Zoe Sullivan

Robinson as a child. ‘There is something so beautiful about a black kid, especially in America, trying to make it against all odds and fucking up so bad, but then actively trying to better his situation.’ Photograph: Robinson family

Exclusive: Many questions remain about the shooting of the Wisconsin 19-year-old, but accounts from close friends and family paint a picture of a young man turning his life around who needed help that night – and instead wound up another young man of color whose life was tragically cut short

Madison, Wisconsin—Tony Terrell Robinson was born into poverty and spent the last moments of his life bleeding from a gunshot wound, surrounded by no one but local police officers on the porch of his shared apartment…

Read the entire article here.

Was Elliot Rodger Asian American?

Reappropriate.co
2015-03-10

Jenn Reappropriate

For weeks following the Isla Vista shooting, killer Elliot Rodger was described in mainstream media as a young White man. This was a convenient narrative: Rodger was seen as yet another example of the maligned young vengeance-seeking White male outcast (like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold and Adam Lanza): so twisted by violent first-person shooters and sexual-social frustration that he resorted to unthinkable violence.

Yet, for Elliot Rodger, this narrative is complicated by Rodger’s own tangled and confusing relationship with his racial identity: one that defies simple categorization as Rodger being straightforwardly White, or otherwise.

Biologically speaking, Elliot Rodger was biracially White and Asian American. Both Rodger’s biological mother and his step-mother were Asian American, and in his lengthy manifesto, Rodger self-identified as a “beautiful Eurasian”. Upon his death, Rodger was initially identified by law enforcement as an unknown “Asian male”.

Elliot Rodger also viewed his mixed race heritage as elevating him above those he termed as “lowly” “full-blooded Asian” men. In a lengthy 68-page report released last month by the Santa Barbara sheriff’s department, it is revealed that Elliot Rodger frequently conducted Google searches on Adolf Hitler and Naziism. These search terms are consistent with Rodger’s frequent racist web postings that espouse a clear belief in a racial hierarchy which positioned men of colour as sexually and socially inferior to Whites, and which further positioned White women as the most-coveted.

In May of last year, Chauncey DeVega wrote a highly-shared piece for Alternet (“Yes, Elliot Rodger is ‘White’: What the Santa Barbara Shooter Can Teach Us About Race and Masculinity”), where DeVega argues that racial identity is predominantly a performance, and that Whiteness is the specific performance of superiority over other people of colour. Both DeVega and Philip of You Offend Me You Offend My Family reason that Rodger’s rejection of his Asianness coupled with internalization of White supremacy was evidence of his Whiteness…

Read the entire article here.

Bodies Under Re/view? Mediating Racial Blackness

InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture
2013-08-20

Tiffany E. Barber, Adjunct Instructor African and African American Studies
University of Oklahoma

“In our allegedly postracial moment, where simply talking about racism openly is considered an impolitic, if not racist, thing to do, we constantly learn and re-learn racial codes. [. . .] In short, it was Trayvon Martin, not George Zimmerman, who was put on trial. He was tried for the crimes he may have committed and the ones he would have committed had he lived past 17.” – Robin D.G. Kelley, “The U.S. v. Trayvon Martin: How the System Worked”

In a 1995 keynote address titled “On Identity Politics,” critical race theorist Mari J. Matsuda cautions against assumptions “that racial identity is the cause of racial division rather than a product of it.” For Matsuda, critical race theory emerges “[o]ut of the struggle to understand the ways in which mainstream legal consciousness is white, male, Christian, able-bodied, economically privileged, and heterosexual.” That is, how legal consciousness itself signifies a type of whiteness that excludes and marginalizes difference, difference that is seen in opposition to this constructed whiteness – i.e. black and other non-white subjects, queer subjects, women subjects, and so on. Matsuda’s assertions bring into relation a politics of law, race, and gender that persist today, and demand a consideration of what these mediated relationships tell us about histories of identity formation particular to race, gender and sexuality in the U.S….

…To address these questions, I turn to two cases of precedence that establish relations between the U.S. justice system, racial blackness, and visuality. In 1921, Leonard ‘Kip’ Rhinelander, an affluent white male from a wealthy New York family met and courted Alice Beatrice Jones, a working-class woman of mixed-race ancestry. Jones’s fair skin color permitted her to pass for white and it is unclear whether or not she self-identified as white. Over the next few years, Rhinelander and Jones grew closer and shared a number of intimate encounters, at least two of which were known to be sexual. The couple eloped in October 1924 and enjoyed secluded bliss – Rhinelander’s parents did not approve of Jones – until scandal ripped through the relationship. Soon after, Rhinelander filed for an annulment. The charge? Racial fraud; Rhinelander claimed Jones had misrepresented her blackness…

Read the entire article here.

Madison Police Shooting: Not Just About Race Because Victim Was Biracial, Family Says

ABC News
2015-03-09

Meghan Keneally, Digital Reporter

The uncle of the 19-year-old who was fatally shot by a police officer in Madison, Wisconsin, over the weekend said that his nephew “just wanted to be loved.”

Tony Robinson Jr., who was known to his family as Tyrell, was fatally shot by a police officer on Friday and the incident is now the subject of a state Department of Justice investigation.

Robinson’s mother is white and his father is African American, and at a news conference this afternoon, Robinson’s uncle, Turin Carter, spoke out on behalf of the family about how this is a universal issue that should be understood by people of all races…

Read the entire article here.

Wisconsin chief treading carefully after fatal shooting

The Washington Post
2015-03-08

The Associated Press

MADISON, Wis. — Within hours of a white officer shooting an unarmed black man, the police chief of Wisconsin’s capital city was praying with the man’s grandmother, hoping to strike a conciliatory tone and avoid the riots that last year rocked Ferguson, Missouri.

Chief Mike Koval said he knows Madison is being watched across the nation since 19-year-old Tony Robinson’s death Friday evening, and he has gone out of his way to avoid what he once called Ferguson’s “missteps.”

“Folks are angry, resentful, mistrustful, disappointed, shocked, chagrined. I get that,” Koval said Saturday. “People need to tell me squarely how upset they are with the Madison Police Department.”

The contrasts with Ferguson are many…

Read the entire article here.

Identity Entrepreneurs

2015-03-05
87 pages

Nancy Leong, Associate Professor of Law
University of Denver Sturm College of Law

In my previous article Racial Capitalism, I examined the ways in which white individuals and predominantly white institutions derive value from non-white racial identity. This process results in part from our intense social and legal preoccupation with diversity. And it results in the commodification of non-white racial identity, with negative implications for both individuals and society.

This Article picks up where Racial Capitalism left off in three ways. As a foundation, it first expands the concept of racial capitalism to identity categories more generally, explaining that individual in-group members and predominantly in-group institutions—usually individuals or institutions that are white, male, straight, wealthy, and so on—can and do derive value from out-group identities.

Second, the Article turns from the overarching system of identity capitalism to the myriad ways that individual out-group members actively participate in that system. In particular, I examine how out-group members leverage their out-group status to derive social and economic value for themselves. I call such out-group participants identity entrepreneurs. Identity entrepreneurship is neither inherently good nor inherently bad. Rather, it is a complicated phenomenon with both positive and negative consequences.

Finally, the Article considers the appropriate response to identity entrepreneurship. We should design laws and policies to maximize both individual agency and access to information for out-group members. Such reforms would protect individual choice while making clear the consequences of identity entrepreneurship both for individual identity entrepreneurs and for the out-group as a whole. A range of legal doctrines interact with and influence identity entrepreneurship, including employment discrimination under Title VII, rights of privacy and publicity, and intellectual property. Modifying these doctrines to take account of identity entrepreneurship will further progress toward an egalitarian society in which in-group and out-group identities are valued equally.

Read the entire paper here.

Obama, at Selma Memorial, Says, ‘We Know the March Is Not Over Yet’

The New York Times
2015-03-07

Peter Baker, Chief White House Correspondent

Richard Fausset

Doug Mills/The New York Times

SELMA, Ala. — As a new generation struggles over race and power in America, President Obama and a host of political figures from both parties came here on Saturday, to the site of one of the most searing days of the civil rights era, to reflect on how far the country has come and how far it still has to go.

Fifty years after peaceful protesters trying to cross a bridge were beaten by police officers with billy clubs, shocking the nation and leading to passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, the nation’s first African-American president led a bipartisan, multiracial testimonial to the pioneers whose courage helped pave the way for his own election to the highest office of the land.

But coming just days after Mr. Obama’s Justice Department excoriated the police department of Ferguson, Mo., as a hotbed of racist oppression, even as it cleared a white officer in the killing of an unarmed black teenager, the anniversary seemed more than a commemoration of long-ago events on a black-and-white newsreel. Instead, it provided a moment to measure the country’s far narrower, and yet stubbornly persistent, divide in black-and-white reality…

Read the entire article here. Read President Obama’s transcript here.

Urging Persistence on Racial Gains, Obama Recalls Sacrifice in Selma

The New York Times
2015-03-06

Peter Baker, Chief White House Correspondent

Julie Hirschfeld Davis, White House Correspondent

COLUMBIA, S.C. — For the nation’s first African-American president, it was a week of two documents that told the story of a country still grappling with its own history.

The first was a draft speech that President Obama was marking up with his distinctive left-hand scrawl to deliver in Selma, Ala., on Saturday to celebrate a half-century of civil rights gains. The second was a report he received accusing the police in Ferguson, Mo., of systematically discriminating against African-Americans.

More than once, Mr. Obama has credited the courage of protesters in Selma who were confronted by club-wielding state troopers 50 years ago for clearing the way for his own barrier-breaking election as president. But the path from Selma to the Oval Office has also led to Ferguson and back to Selma, a path littered with hope and progress and disappointment and setback…

Read the entire article here.

Man Shot Dead by Police After Scuffle in Wisconsin

The New York Times
2015-03-07

Ashley Southall

A 19-year-old Wisconsin man was shot and killed Friday by a police officer during a scuffle inside an apartment in Madison, police officials said. The shooting prompted protests that continued on Saturday and led officials to call for restraint while the shooting is investigated.

The shooting occurred Friday evening after the police received calls for a man who had committed battery and was jumping in and out of traffic, Michael C. Koval, the Madison chief of police, said. A police officer followed the man to an apartment and forced his way in after hearing a disturbance inside, the chief said. The man then assaulted the officer, who shot the man, according to Chief Koval, who spoke at a news conference in Madison Friday evening.

The officer immediately began rendering first aid, but the man died at a hospital, Chief Koval said. The authorities did not immediately release his name, but his mother identified him as Tony Robinson, an African-American who graduated from high school in 2014.

“My son has never been a violent person,” Andrea Irwin, who identified herself as Mr. Robinson’s mother, told WKOW, a Madison television station. “And to die in such a violent, violent way, it baffles me.”…

Read the entire article here.