Category: United States

  • Pinpointing Another Reason That More Hispanics Are Identifying as White The New York Times 2014-06-02 Nate Cohn Recently, I wrote about new research that showed that a net 1.2 million Hispanics changed their racial identification from “some other race” to “white” between the 2000 and 2010 censuses. Manuel Pastor, a professor at the University of…

  • Are Latinos Really Turning White? Latino Voices The Huffington Post 2014-05-29 Manuel Pastor, Professor of Sociology and American Studies University of Southern California Writing for The New York Times, Nate Cohn recently reported that more Hispanics are identifying as white. The piece—which even includes a cute graphic in which a (presumably Latino) man steps from…

  • The Chosen Exile of Racial “Passing:” Allyson Hobbs at TEDxStanford TEDx Talks 2014-05-30 Allyson Hobbs, PhD 2009, speaks about the history of racial passing for TEDx Talks. Using the Emersonian idea of “coming up with the emphatic facts of history in our private experience,” Hobbs tells the story of a cousin who passed for white,…

  • Driving her fashionable Ford roadster from Detroit to Ann Arbor, Elsie Roxborough arrived at the University of Michigan as a freshman fifty years ago last fall. She was the first Negro student to live in a University dormitory. Her classmate Arthur Miller, an aspiring playwright and fellow reporter on the campus newspaper, called her “a…

  • Possessions of Whiteness: Settler Colonialism and Anti-Blackness in the Pacific Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society June 2014 (2014-06-02) Maile Arvin, Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies University of California, Riverside I confess: I avoided watching the 2011 Oscar award-winning movie The Descendants (directed by the acclaimed Alexander Payne of Sideways and Nebraska, starring George Clooney) for…

  • Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: Exploring Dr. Seuss’s Racial Imagination Children’s Literature Volume 42, 2014 pages 71-98 DOI: 10.1353/chl.2014.0019 Philip Nel, Distinguished Professor of English Kansas State University In 1955, Dr. Seuss and William Spaulding—director of Houghton Mifflin’s educational division—stepped into the publisher’s elevator at 2 Park Street in Boston. As Seuss’s biographers…

  • Seeking Roots in Shifting Ground–Dr. Laura Tugman’s topic for 18th Union, June 28 Melungeon Heritage Association: One People, All Colors 2014-05-20 18th Melungeon Union Vardy, Tennessee and Big Stone Gap, Virginia 2014-06-27 through 2014-06-28 Dr. Laura Tugman will discuss her doctoral dissertation, entitled Seeking Roots in Shifting Ground: Ethnic Identity Development and the Melungeons of…

  • Skin Tone Stratification among Black Americans, 2001–2003 Social Forces Volume 92, Number 4, June 2014 pages 1313-1337 Ellis P. Monk Jr., Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar in Sociology University of Chicago In the past few decades, a dedicated collection of scholars have examined the matter of skin tone stratification within the black American population and found that…

  • “You Just Said ‘We’”: The complexity of not being White and not being a person of color. Nick Franco May 2014 Nick Franco, Coordinator for the Student Affairs/SOLES Collaborative University of San Diego This past Tuesday night, I did a mock presentation of my dissertation proposal for my dissertation seminar course. It went fairly well,…

  • Mo Asumang: Confronting racism face-to-face BBC News Magazine 2014-05-13 Mo Asumang is the daughter of a black Ghanaian father and a white German mother. As a well-known TV presenter in Germany she became the target of racist extreme right-wingers and neo-Nazis, who based their attacks on Asumang’s “non-Aryan” background. So she decided to look into…