Mixed Race Studies

The Problem Isn’t White People — It’s Whiteness, People

Tim Wise
2021-07-12

Tim Wise

Photo by the author (on location), Rage Against the Machine/The Umma Chroma video shoot, Watertown, TN. 10/17/20

Anti-racists aren’t trying to make anyone feel bad. It’s called a systemic analysis for a reason

Amid the backlash to anti-racist teaching and activism — symbolized by the assault on Critical Race Theory — one claim stands out as the principal lamentation of aggrieved conservatives. Namely, the idea that anti-racist educators and activists believe white people are inherently racist and oppressive.

You’ll hear it time and again. Those challenging anti-racist curricula insist their children are suffering psychological harm because the materials teach white kids to hate themselves. One parent in Tennessee even has a Go Fund Me to pay for counseling she says her 7-year-old needs after being exposed to in-depth discussions of the Civil War and the misdeeds of white Americans…

Read the entire article here.

Like a Broken Record

Three-Fifths: Voice of Clarity
2021-07-08

Frank Robinson
Austin, Texas

President Johnson ponders Dr. King and the process of getting the Voting Rights Act of 1965 worked out. On reflection, this is more of the déjà vu we are experiencing.

As this generation walks through the social-political minefields of our day we pass anniversaries of notorious race-based mob attacks, riots and massacres: Tulsa’s Greenwood, election day at Ocoee, Wilmington, Rosewood, the infamous Red Summer, and many others. The land is stained with innocent blood. But, how many of today’s issues have we seen, never remedied, and must deal with again and again?

Confronted with factual atrocities, many respond, “That’s all in the past, a tragic, uncomfortable conversation without any relevance, because we are not racists now.” Thus, we deflect and conceal so much that contributes to our present condition. Some don’t want these things remembered or taught in schools. But why are we threatened by facts? Isn’t our denial and ignorance of facts why some saw fine people in Charlottesville, but thugs in Minneapolis?

A devout, but misinformed white friend told me Black leaders lie to their people, “to keep them blaming and hating whites.” He said he could not be a racist, as he has mixed-race grandchildren and a Black friend, a billionaire he golfed with, and if what I said was true, his friend would have told him. I assured him no matter what his Black friend drove, if stopped by the police, his life was in danger…

Read the entire article here.

The Black Lives Matter movement in four E.U. countries

Der Tagesspiegel
Berlin, Germany
2021-07-12

Andrea Dernbach

Graciously translated from German into English for me by Gyavira Lasana.

Black Lives Still Matter: Dass das Leben Schwarzer Menschen weiterhin zähle, war der leicht variierte Titel einer Demonstration. FOTO: FABIAN SOMMER/DPA

The short summer of BLM—and what remains of it. The results varied, but everywhere #blm influenced the debate on racism, says a European study. A comment.

A year has now come and gone since the protests that drove hundreds of thousands onto the streets after the death of the black US citizen George Floyd—and not just in the USA. In Germany, by the end of July 2020, around 200,000 people had demonstrated against racism in their own country, through police, discrimination in public services and against the gauntlet that is their everyday life for the majority of non-white people.

Forgot everything? The last demonstration at the Brandenburg Gate brought just a thousand people, despite relaxed pandemic regulations. Media interest in “Black Lives Matter” also quickly subsided after initial widespread coverage, as a group of researchers from Germany, Poland, Italy and Denmark who investigated the phenomenon a year later for their respective countries have noted.

But this only seems to be the surface when you read what the social scientists from the German Center for Integration and Migration Research in Berlin, the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence, the University of Copenhagen and the Polish Academy of Sciences have compiled in interviews with activists, media analysis and on four maps of protest. In all countries, the short #blm summer has made racism as a topic more visible and black voices more audible than ever.

In Poland protest only in the cities

Even if, as quoted in the research report, it had to be made clear to the enthusiastic newcomers that the black movement in Germany has existed for more than forty years and not merely since May 25, 2020. Now having gained momentum and publicity, anti-racism became, according to the report, “like never before a political topic.” Even for Poland, where the protests were relatively small—limited to major cities such as Warsaw, Kraków, Wroclaw and Katowice—and failed to include outrage over government actions against women’s and gay rights, Black Lives Matter nonetheless made racism a public issue.

Particularly interesting is the comparative view of the two countries with both fascist and colonial pasts: In Italy as well as in Germany, the #blm protests reached the whole country, and both movements related racism to their nations’ past. In the media, on the other hand, and possibly beyond there was resistance to the connection of today’s racism with national history. According to the analysis of the team from Florence, even Italy’s left-liberal and left-wing traditional newspapers have dealt with the US protests in far more detail than with those in Europe and Italy. Even the left-wing Il Manifesto has interpreted the slogan “I can’t breathe,” whispered by the dying Georg Floyd, not as a call against anti-black racism but a jingo for the many who suffered from shortness of breath owing to the pandemic, the climate and the economic crisis.

Racism is often that of “others”

In Germany, the news daily Bild had virtually concealed the topic. The narrative that minorities have been wanting to blow up for decades—that racism has been successfully overcome together with fascism and Nazism—still seems resilient. The editors of Bild had decided that a racist status quo in Germany was not something its readership wanted to see, hear, or read. Interestingly, Alle außer mir, Francesca Melandri’s excellent novel about Italy’s racist Abyssinian War against Ethiopia and its consequences sold 70,000 copies in Germany in one year, while selling over the counter just 10,000 times in Italy. Racism is preferably that of others.

The two countries are also far apart in terms of the response of established politics to #blm. In Italy, the momentum seems to have ebbed before reaching the so-called palazzo, or parliament: “At the political-institutional level, we cannot yet see any effects,” says the research report. In Germany, however, even as BLM was less diverse and counted fewer refugees and fewer active people than in Italy, the movement found exactly the right people for German formal democracy: long-established Afro-Germans with the necessary experience in German politics. For example, they participated in the Chancellor’s Cabinet Committee on Right-Wing Extremism and Anti-Racism, and since then there has also been more money committed black programs and projects.

How long the topic of racism endures at the upper levels of institutions cannot readily be determined. As the researchers also write: For a real verdict on #blm in Europe, a look at the one short summer is too short.

After a Career of Challenging Racial Myths, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva Isn’t Slowing Down

Duke Today
Duke University
Durham, North Carolina
2021-07-07

Eric Ferreri, Senior Writer
Telephone: 919.681.8055

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s body of work has shaped academic and popular discussion of race and inequality.

In 2003, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva published what would prove his seminal work of academic scholarship: Racism Without Racists. In it, the sociologist – then at Texas A&M University – challenged the notion that the United States existed as a color-blind society.

The book made a splash within academia and beyond, setting the table for countless conversations about race, systemic racism and many of the divisions that continue to plague society in the US and elsewhere.

Bonilla-Silva came to Duke in 2005 and since has continued to hammer away at structural racism. Among his most recent publications, a 2020 article – just a few months into COVID-19 – that examined how the pandemic broadened inequities for people in marginalized communities.

A giant in his field, Bonilla-Silva will be honored later this summer with the W.E.B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award from the American Sociological Association.

“While many agree, and some may disagree, with his work, the truth is that his racism theory has become canon – often required on preliminary/area exams and used as the theoretical scaffolding on countless research papers,” said David Embrick, a professor of sociology and Africana Studies at the University of Connecticut who nominated Bonilla-Silva for the award. “Part of the reason is that Bonilla-Silva doesn’t want people to just cite his research, but also to engage with it critically in ways that allow for new racism theories to emerge, to think deeply about any shortcomings and address them, and to take his theories to the next level. So, he’s always encouraging scholars to do more, think bigger and go beyond.”

Bonilla-Silva will receive the award in August. He recently talked with Duke Today about his career and research. Here are excerpts:…

Read the entire interview here.

White Fright: The Sexual Panic at the Heart of America’s Racist History

Basic Books (and imprint of Hachette Book Group)
2020-11-17
368 pages
Hardcover ISBN-13: 9781541646551
eBook ISBN-13: 9781541646544
Audiobook Downloadable ISBN-13: 9781549157721

Jane Daily, Associate Professor of History
University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois

A major new history of the fight for racial equality in America, arguing that fear of black sexuality has undergirded white supremacy from the start.

In White Fright, historian Jane Dailey brilliantly reframes our understanding of the long struggle for African American rights. Those fighting against equality were not motivated only by a sense of innate superiority, as is often supposed, but also by an intense fear of black sexuality.

In this urgent investigation, Dailey examines how white anxiety about interracial sex and marriage found expression in some of the most contentious episodes of American history since Reconstruction: in battles over lynching, in the policing of black troops’ behavior overseas during World War II, in the violent outbursts following the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, and in the tragic story of Emmett Till. The question was finally settled — as a legal matter — with the Court’s definitive 1967 decision in Loving v. Virginia, which declared interracial marriage a “fundamental freedom.” Placing sex at the center of our civil rights history, White Fright offers a bold new take on one of the most confounding threads running through American history.

Don’t let the politics of BLM define mixed-race Americans

The New York Daily News
2021-06-19

Charles Byrd

Mixed-race Americans (Shutterstock/Shutterstock)

Prior to June 12, 1967, anti-miscegenation laws still existed in the southern United States. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned those remaining statutes of segregationist race-consciousness with its landmark “Loving v. Virginia” decision. That case did not magically eradicate racist attitudes towards interracial couples and their progeny, but it did signal yet another milestone in our country’s continuing evolution from a slaveholding society to one that extends the same civil rights and freedoms to all.

The 2020 Census allowed multiracials to again choose multiple boxes instead of being forced to identify solely with one race, yet in the throes of the current Black Lives Matter era, there is a seeming renewed effort to compel mixed Black/white Americans to look in the mirror and acknowledge that, in the face of “relentless white supremacy” particularly on the part of law enforcement, they will always be viewed and treated as Black and nothing else. That rationale runs counter to the philosophy that how one views oneself is more important than societally imposed identities, a worldview that a growing number of mixed-race Americans embrace…

Read the entire article here.

Majority-Minority Myths

Dissent
Spring 2021

Jake Rosenfeld, Professor of Sociology
Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri

Outside a Latinos for Trump campaign rally in Orlando, Florida, in October 2020 (Paul Hennessy/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

It’s time to let go of the belief that changing demographics will bring about a progressive America.

The Great Demographic Illusion: Majority, Minority, and the Expanding American Mainstream
by Richard Alba
Princeton University Press, 2020, 336 pp.

Dangerously Divided: How Race and Class Shape Winning and Losing in American Politics
by Zoltan L. Hajnal
Cambridge University Press, 2020, 362 pp.

The Case for Identity Politics: Polarization, Demographic Change, and Racial Appeals
by Christopher T. Stout
University of Virginia Press, 2020, 268 pp.

In a commencement address at the University of California, San Diego in 1997, President Bill Clinton spoke of a time when white people would no longer constitute a majority in the United States. In the decades since, the idea that growing diversity will bring about a “majority-minority” America in the near future has become a widespread belief across the ideological spectrum, propelled by periodic Census updates, like a report that 2013 marked the first year that more nonwhite babies had been born in the United States than white ones.

There are three major problems with this now-clichéd belief. First, it scares many white people, pushing their political stances toward the right. Numerous studies confirm that merely mentioning the demographic shift is enough to change their political views. As Ezra Klein has written, “The simplest way to activate someone’s identity is to threaten it.” Many white people interpret stories about the imminent reordering of the country’s racial and ethnic hierarchy as a threat.

Second, it leads Democrats astray. Divvying up the nation between whites and nonwhites implies a neat, fixed, and immutable ordering of a complex set of shifting racial and ethnic identities. The corollary—that a shared political identity should bind minorities to a leftist, emancipatory project against white oppression—induces complacency in Democratic Party organizing and policymaking realms, and ignores the varied ethnic and class backgrounds of those who comprise this broad, diverse population.

The 2020 election shook the premise that nonwhite voters shared a liberal political identity, with growing evidence of an across-the-board shift toward the GOP among Latinos and, to a smaller degree, African Americans. But evidence that the “browning of America” may not lead to progressive nirvana predated the election. Bush’s 2004 re-election bid was buoyed by his record performance among Latinos. Since then, between a quarter and a third of Latinos have voted for Republican presidential candidates despite the restrictionist turn in the party’s immigration policies.

Which brings us to the third problem with the majority-minority claim: it’s empirically wrong…

Read the entire article here.

Web Event: The great demographic illusion: Majority, minority, and the expanding American mainstream

American Enterprise Institute
2021-04-19, 12:00-13:30 EDT

The majority-minority thesis contends that increasing demographic change in America will inevitably lead to a nation where minorities replace whites as the majority. In his new book, “The Great Demographic Illusion: Majority, Minority, and the Expanding American Mainstream” (Princeton University Press, 2020), sociologist Richard Alba argues that this narrative distorts ongoing changes because it overlooks the surge of young Americans growing up with one white and one nonwhite parent.

Please join AEI for a panel discussion, moderated by AEI’s Karlyn Bowman, on mixed-race families, US Census definitions, Hispanic identity across generations, personal definitions of race, and the implications for American politics.

Agenda
12:00 PM
Introduction:
Karlyn Bowman, Senior Fellow, AEI

12:05 PM
Presentation:
Richard Alba, Distinguished Professor of Sociology, Graduate Center, City University of New York

12:30 PM
Discussion

Panelists:

• Musa al-Gharbi, Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow in Sociology, Columbia University
• D’Vera Cohn, Senior Writer and Editor, Pew Research Center
• Mark Hugo Lopez, Director, Global Migration and Demography Research, Pew Research Center
• Ruy Teixeira, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress

Moderator:
Karlyn Bowman, Senior Fellow, AEI

1:10 PM
Q&A

1:30 PM
Adjournment

For more information, click here.

The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred

Bold Type Books (an imprint of the Hachette Book Group)
2021-03-09
336 pages
Hardcover ISBN-13: 9781541724709
eBook ISBN-13: 9781541724693
Audiobook ISBN-13: 9781549133961

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy; Core faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies
University of New Hampshire

From a star theoretical physicist, a journey into the world of particle physics and the cosmos — and a call for a more just practice of science.

In The Disordered Cosmos, Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein shares her love for physics, from the Standard Model of Particle Physics and what lies beyond it, to the physics of melanin in skin, to the latest theories of dark matter — all with a new spin informed by history, politics, and the wisdom of Star Trek.

One of the leading physicists of her generation, Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is also one of fewer than one hundred Black American women to earn a PhD from a department of physics. Her vision of the cosmos is vibrant, buoyantly non-traditional, and grounded in Black feminist traditions.

Prescod-Weinstein urges us to recognize how science, like most fields, is rife with racism, sexism, and other dehumanizing systems. She lays out a bold new approach to science and society that begins with the belief that we all have a fundamental right to know and love the night sky. The Disordered Cosmos dreams into existence a world that allows everyone to experience and understand the wonders of the universe.

He became the nation’s ninth vice president. She was his enslaved wife.

The Washington Post
2021-02-07

Ronald G. Shafer

Richard Mentor Johnson became vice president in 1837. (Library of Congress)

Her name was Julia Chinn

She was born enslaved and remained that way her entire life, even after she became Richard Mentor Johnson’s “bride.”

Johnson, a Kentucky congressman who eventually became the nation’s ninth vice president in 1837, couldn’t legally marry Julia Chinn. Instead the couple exchanged vows at a local church with a wedding celebration organized by the enslaved people at his family’s plantation in Great Crossing, according to Miriam Biskin, who wrote about Chinn decades ago.

Chinn died nearly four years before Johnson took office. But because of controversy over her, Johnson is the only vice president in American history who failed to receive enough electoral votes to be elected. The Senate voted him into office.

The couple’s story is complicated and fraught, historians say. As an enslaved woman, Chinn could not consent to a relationship, and there’s no record of how she regarded him. Though she wrote to Johnson during his lengthy absences from Kentucky, the letters didn’t survive.

Read the entire article here.