Mixed Race Studies

Locating black mixed-raced males in the black supplementary school movement

Race Ethnicity and Education
Published online 2016-11-08
pages 1-14
DOI: 10.1080/13613324.2016.1248838

Remi Joseph-Salisbury
School of Ethnicity and Racism Studies, School of Sociology and Social Policy
University of Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom

Kehinde Andrews, Associate Professor of Sociology
Birmingham City University, Birmingham, United Kingdom

This article draws upon data from semi-structured interviews conducted with black mixed-race males in the UK and the US, to argue that a revival of the black supplementary school movement could play an important role in the education of black mixed-race males. The article contends that a strong identification with blackness, and a concomitant rejection of the values of mainstream schooling, make black supplementary education a viable intervention for raising the attainment and improving the experiences of black mixed-race males. Whilst blackness was important to participants’ understandings of their lived experiences, this did not engender a disregard for their mixedness. Supplementary schools must therefore find ways of recognising black mixedness within their practice.

Read or purchase the article here.

Colluding, Colliding, and Contending with Norms of Whiteness

Information Age Publising
2016
210 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9781681236919
Hardcover ISBN: 9781681236926
eBook ISBN: 9781681236933

Jennifer L. S. Chandler, Lecturer in Leadership and Interdisciplinary Studies
Arizona State University

Analyzing experiences of White mothers of daughters and sons of color across the U. S., Chandler provides an insider’s view of the complex ways in which Whiteness norms appear and operate. Through uncovering and analyzing Whiteness norms occurring across motherhood stages, Chandler has developed a model of three common ways of interacting with the norms of Whiteness: colluding, colliding, and contending. Chandler’s results suggest that collisions with Whiteness norms are a necessary step to increasing one’s racial literacy which is essential for effective contentions with norms of Whiteness. She proposes steps for applying her model in education settings, which can also be applied in other organizational contexts.

CONTENTS

• Introduction
• CHAPTER I: Model and Supporting Theories
• CHAPTER II: Becoming a Mother
• CHAPTER III: Mothers and Schools
• CHAPTER IV: As Sons and Daughters Mature
• CHAPTER V: Conclusions
• CHAPTER VI: Recommendations
• Appendix A – The Study
• Appendix B – Virginia 1691, ACT XVI
• Appendix C – Notes Regarding Trans racial Adoption
• References

From the Foreword:

In Colluding, Colliding, Contending with Norms of Whiteness, Jennifer Chandler takes on the difficult task of unpacking Whiteness within interracial family structures. Although it is more indirectly related to urban education, she translates her findings into a thoughtful argument about the ways in which White teachers embrace and resist race and racism. Chandler reaches past an analysis of identity tropes and personality dispositions to address the structural and societal factors that make it easier for White women to ignore race, and disobedient for White women to address issues of race. Chandler also problematizes White homogenous communities where race is never perceived as an “their” problem. Members of these communities do not welcome disruptions to the common sense rhetoric that keep these spaces disaffected by racism.

The balance, and often imbalances of how people relate to race become painfully apparent as Chandler carefully constructs her narratives about a diverse set of women. She is both empathetic and critical, generous and harsh, and insider and outsider in her task to portray the myriad experiences of White women who knowingly or ignorantly enter into hostile racial contexts in their families, neighborhoods, and schools. Chandler’s book opens the door for further conversations about how educators can support White female teachers to address their complicity with racism as a step toward becoming better teachers and advocates for students of color in their classrooms.

One Drop of Love: Middle School / High School Educators Guide

One Drop of Love: #TRUTH #JUSTICE #LOVE
2016
13 pages

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni, Playwright, Performer and Producer

Show Overview

What are you? A CRT perspective on the experiences of mixed race persons in ‘post-racial’ America

Race Ethnicity and Education
Volume 18, Issue 1, 2015
pages 1-19
DOI: 10.1080/13613324.2014.911160

Celia Rousseau Anderson, Associate Professor in the Secondary Education Program
Department of Instruction and Curriculum Leadership
University of Memphis, Memphis, Tennessee

In this article, the author employs Critical Race Theory (CRT) to examine the experiences of mixed race individuals in the United States. Drawing on historical and contemporary conditions involving persons of mixed race, the author considers how key ideas from CRT can be useful to frame an analysis of the experiences of multiracial persons in the US. To supplement the analysis, the author also includes fictionalized narratives in the tradition of CRT. In conclusion, the author considers how this examination of mixed race persons might inform K-12 education.

Read or purchase the article here.

Book Review: Mixed-race youth and schooling: the fifth minority

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Published online: 2016-06-01
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2016.1190852

Remi Joseph-Salisbury
University of Leeds

Mixed-race youth and schooling: the fifth minority, by Sandra Winn Tutwiler, Abingdon, Routledge, 2016, xv + 241 pp., £29.95 (paperback), ISBN-13 978-1138021938

Mixed-race youth and schooling offers a welcome contribution to a sparse area of academic inquiry. Making the case that as a group mixed-race individuals are constitutive of the ‘fifth minority’ in the United States, the book is interested in the schooling of children of ’minority/non-minority’ and ‘minority/minority’ parents.

With a primary target audience of school teachers and educationalists, the book of nine chapters is divided into three sections. Section one considers how race constitutes a determinant factor in lived experiences in the United States, and how this implicates mixed-race individuals particularly. In section two, Winn Tutwiler turns to look at how mixed-race children interact with their families, peers, communities and schools and how these interactions impact upon schooling experiences. The third and final section of the book focuses on how mixedness is constructed in the school, and by teachers. This section concludes by outlining how schooling environments can be supportive of mixed-race students.

Chapter one looks at the emergence and permanence of race, white supremacy, and the racial stratification of society. The chapter refutes notions that race is reducible to class before beginning to probe how mixedness impacts upon race discourse and stratification.

Building on this, the second chapter considers how, historically, white supremacist power structures have responded to the potential challenges mixed-race people present to ’societies wanting uncomplicated divisions by race’ (28). This chapter considers different responses to mixedness and explores interesting distinctions between different mixed-race groups. Winn Tutwiler shows that white America has a deep-rooted and abiding moral aversion to racial mixing and historically this engendered a proliferation of anti-miscegenation laws and morals.

In Chapter three, Winn Tutwiler seeks to provide a knowledge base for educators on the processes of racial identity formation for mixed-race youth. This endeavour, Win Tutwiler explains, is essential to countering teachers’ ideas that may be based upon stereotypes and misinformation. Emphasizing the importance for the ‘social, emotional and academic well—being’ of mixed-race youth, this chapter gives an overview of some of the (predominantly) psychological literature on racial identity (57). Winn Tutwiler unpicks what she sees as some often fundamental inadequacies in the application of theories developed for monoracial identities to mixed-race children. Although perhaps understandable due to the predominance in existing literature, this chapter seems to focus heavily on Black-white mixed-race identity and thus it is unclear how widely applicable some of the cited research is to other mixed-race groups.

As the focus shifts slightly to look at how these identities are constituted and lived, chapter four considers the role of the family in the lives of mixed-race…

Read or purchase the review here.

Race, Genetics, Medicine and the Museum

Museums & Social Issues: A Journal of Reflective Discourse
Volume 11, Issue 1, 2016
Special Issue: Special Issue: Museum, Health & Medicine
pages 53-62
DOI: 10.1080/15596893.2015.1131095

Monique Scott, Director of Museum Studies
Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania
Research Associate, Anthropology Department
American Museum of Natural History, New York, New York

The natural history museum has long been invested in educating the public about what it means to be human, including human identity, human ancestry and human diversity. With the recent scientific advances in human genomic research and the public fervor for individual genetic ancestry testing, the museum is now challenged both to keep pace with current scientific research and wrestle with popular scientific thinking that circulates outside the museum. This article considers several strategies that the American Museum of Natural History Museum has used to intervene in public perceptions of “race”, genetics and human health through critical interactive dialogue—the museum as a space for audiences of various ages to investigate and interrogate the science and politics of human identity that accompany this new genetic frontier.

Read or purchase the article here.

What are you: Engaging Parents of Multiracial Children in Preschool

The Huffington Post
2016-05-27

Makai Kellogg, Lead Teacher
School for Friends, Washington, D.C.

“If you can go shopping and be assured that you will not be followed or harassed, step forward.”

There was no more space left. I rushed to the door and opened it so that a white father could continue the Power Shuffle exercise. The parents started on the midline of the room and once a statement was read, either stepped up or back depending on their level of privilege in these circumstances. After two more statements, the parents looked around the room to see who was standing where. Then I asked “Were there any statements that your child would be able to step forward or back for that you did not? How does that make you feel?” The question resonated with the families and their responses prompted lively discussion. Race is difficult to talk about in the United States, a country built on white supremacy and systemic oppression.

I’m trying to change that dynamic one preschooler at a time…

Read the entire article here.

Race & Racisms: A Critical Approach [Gabriel Review]

Tanya Maria Golash-Boza, Race and Racisms: A Critical Approach (New York, London: Oxford University Press, 2014)

Sociology of Race and Ethnicity
Published online before print 2016-04-22
DOI: 10.1177/2332649216645801

Ricardo Gabriel
The Graduate Center
City University of New York

Explaining to students that race is a social construction is one of the biggest challenges faced by all who teach courses on race and ethnicity, humble adjuncts and seasoned professors alike. Furthermore, the constructed and fabricated aspects of race must be balanced with how race and racism have shaped, and continue to shape, our society in concrete ways. Is race “real”? Does systemic racism still exist, or didn’t the civil rights movement take care of all of that? How can there still be racism if we elected a Black president? What about personal responsibility? Even if racism does exist, what can we do about it? These are just some of the questions that typically arise when discussing race and racism in the classroom. How do we explain the continued prevalence of racial inequality in the twenty-first century, in a society that some claim is now “post-“racial? And how do we discuss these issues with students in a way that both stretches their sociological imaginations and encourages a racial justice praxis?

Golash-Boza’s brief edition of Race & Racisms: A Critical Approach takes up this important challenge. Written for the undergraduate*level instructor, its main objective is to “engage students in significant questions related to racial dynamics in the United States and around the world.” From beginning to end. Golash-Boza provides a balanced mix of empirical data, rich theory, and personal narratives as well as useful pedagogical features such as the “Thinking about Racial Justice” sections that facilitate critical thinking.

Chapter 1 provides a concise summary of the scholarship on the origin of the idea that humans can be separated into different racial categories. The greatest strength of this opening chapter is the way it sets the tone for the rest of the book by emphasizing that racial taxonomy and racial ideologies were invented as a justification for colonialism, genocide. and slavery…

Read or purchase the review here.

Toward a critical multiracial theory in education

International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education
Volume 29, Issue 6, 2016
pages 795-813
DOI: 10.1080/09518398.2016.1162870

Jessica C. Harris, Multi-Term Lecturer
Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies
University of Kansas

This manuscript lays the foundation for a critical multiracial theory (MultiCrit) in education. The author uses extant literature and their own research that focused on multiraciality on the college campus to explore how CRT can move toward MultiCrit, which is well-positioned to frame multiracial students’ experiences with race in education.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Arc of a Bad Idea: Understanding and Transcending Race

Oxford University Press
2016-02-18
192 Pages
7 Black and white
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780199386260

Carlos Hoyt, Jr.

• It is written by a person who is intimately familiar with living as an adversely racialized person
• It introduces readers to the non-racial worldview
• It provides first-person narratives of people commonalty ascribed to the black/African American racial category who eschew racial identification altogether.
• It furnishes the concept of racialization as the antidote to normalizing race as a naturally and unavoidable aspect of identity.
• It explains essentialism
• It reconciles the seeming conflict between race-conscious and color-blind ideologies
• It provides a way beyond the problems of race that plague this country

For the vast majority of human existence we did without the idea of race. Since its inception a mere few hundred years ago, and despite the voluminous documentation of the problems associated with living within the racial worldview, we have come to act as if race is something we cannot live without. The Arc of a Bad Idea: Understanding and Transcending Race presents a penetrating, provocative, and promising analysis of and alternative to the hegemonic racial worldview. How race came about, how it evolved into a natural-seeming aspect of human identity, and how racialization, as a habit of the mind, can be broken is presented through the unique and corrective framing of race as a time-bound (versus eternal) concept, the lifespan of which is traceable and the demise of which is predictable. The narratives of individuals who do not subscribe to racial identity despite be ascribed to the black/African American racial category are presented as clear and compelling illustrations of how a non-racial identity and worldview is possible and arguably preferable to the status quo. Our view of and approach to race (in theory, pedagogy, and policy) is so firmly ensconced in a sense of it as inescapable and indispensible that we are in effect shackled to the lethal absurdity we seek to escape. Theorist, teachers, policy-makers and anyone who seeks a transformative perspective on race and racial identity will be challenged, enriched, and empowered by this refreshing treatment of one of our most confounding and consequential dilemmas.

Table of Contents

• Epigraph
• Acknowledgments
• List of Illustrations
• Preface: Lethal Absurdity De Jour
• PART I: UNDERSTANDING RACE
  • 1. Simile, Metaphors and Analogs for Race
  • 2. Same World, Different Worldviews: Not ALL the Black Kids Sat Together in the Cafeteria
  • 3. The Arc of a Bad Idea: Race and Racialization in Five Epochs
• PART II: TRANSCENDING RACE
  • 4. Who Are The Race Transcenders? Narratives of Non-racial Identity Development
  • 5. Race Transcendence, Race Consciousness and Post-race
• PART III: IMPLICATIONS OF THE NONRACIAL WORLDVIEW
  • 6. Race Without Reification: Pedagogy, Practice and Policy from a Non-racial Perspective
  • 7. Beyond the Panopticon: Liberating the Tragic Essentialist and Promoting Racial Disobedience
• Appendixes:
  • Appendix A: Pre-interview Background Information Form
  • Appendix B: Semi-structured Open-ended Interview Questions and Interview Domains Matrix
• References
• Index