Mixed Race Studies

On the Record: Georgetown and the racial identity of President Patrick Healy

The Georgetown Voice
2010-04-14

Patrick Healy

Matt Sheptuck (COL ’10) is an American Studies major writing his senior thesis, which explores how Georgetown University has perceived Jesuit Father Patrick Healy’s racial identity over the years. In his research Sheptuck found that Healy, whom many of us know as the first African-American President of Georgetown and one of the first black presidents of any major American university, was understood as white for much of the University’s history, until beginning in the 1960s, when Georgetown began to “market” Healy as black.

Sheptuck says he isn’t “overtly condemnatory” of the University’s history, knowing that how they framed Healy was a product of the times. But he proposes that going forward, Georgetown doesn’t need to relegate Healy’s racial identity to the “one-dimensional” white or black designation, and should present him as the complex man he was. He also thinks Georgetown needs to look closely at its relationship with race in America in the past. Intrigued by his research, Vox caught up with Sheptuck on Tuesday to learn more.

Vox Populi: So tell me a little about your thesis.

Matt Sheptuck: I’m looking at how the University’s changing racial conceptualization of Patrick Healy’s identity fit in relation to how the University thought about race in general. And what I’ve found in my research about Healy, who was president from 1874 – 1882, is two main periods from the 1880s, when Healy resigned as president, up to the present, in which the University talked about his racial identity differently…

Read the interview here.

Good riddance to RU’s Powell Hall

The Roanoke Times
Roanoke, Virginia
2010-09-21

Christina Nuckols, Editorial Page Editor

One can, if optimistically predisposed to believe in the inherent honesty and good-natured character of people, accept the story of why Radford University’s arts and music building still bore the name of John Powell until last week.

One might, just barely, trust that university leaders in 1967 chose the name ignorant of Powell’s past, even though the U.S. Supreme Court that same year struck down the Virginia anti-miscegenation law that he had championed.

It’s easier to believe Interim Provost Joe Scartelli when he says he intended to change the name of the building in 2005 after he learned about Powell’s racism, but forgot amid renovation and construction plans…

Read the entire article here.

Mixing kids in school leads to more mixed-race adult relationships

IZA Newsroom
Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit (Institute for the Study of Labor)
Bonn, Germany
2016-11-24

Does the racial mix of students’ classmates affect their behavior later on in life? A new IZA Discussion Paper by Luca Paolo Merlino, Max Friedrich Steinhardt and Liam Wren-Lewis compares American students, contrasting those who happen to be in an age group with fewer blacks in their class compared to other classes in the school.

The study finds that white students with more black classmates are more likely to cohabit and have children with a black partner later on in life. The effect is driven by a change in racial attitudes: These students report less prejudice, and as adults they are less likely to think that race is an important factor within a relationship…

Read the entire article here.

More than Just Friends? School Peers and Adult Interracial Relationships

Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit (Institute for the Study of Labor)
Bonn, Germany
Discussion Paper No. 10319 (October 2016)
40 pages

Luca Paolo Merlino, Associate Professor
Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne

Max F. Steinhardt, Research Fellow
Helmut Schmidt University, IZA, LdA and CELSI

Liam Wren-Lewis, Associate Member
Paris School of Economics and INRA

This paper investigates the impact of individuals’ school peers on their adult romantic relationships. In particular, we consider the effect of quasi-random variation in the share of black students within an individual’s cohort on the percentage of adults’ cohabiting partners that are black. We find that more black peers leads to more relationships with blacks later in life. The results are similar whether relationships begun near or far from school, suggesting that the racial mix of schools has an important and persistent impact on racial attitudes.

Read the entire discussion paper here.

Multiracial college students’ experiences with multiracial microaggressions

Race Ethnicity and Education
Published online 2016-11-07
pages 1-17
DOI: 10.1080/13613324.2016.1248836

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

While research on monoracial college students’ experiences with racial microaggressions increases, minimal, if any, research focuses on multiracial college students’ experiences with racial microaggressions. This manuscript addresses the gap in the literature by focusing on multiracial college students’ experiences with multiracial microaggressions, a type of racial microaggression. Utilizing qualitative data, this study explored 3 different multiracial microaggressions that 10 multiracial women experienced at a historically white institution including, Denial of a Multiracial Reality, Assumption of a Monoracial Identity, and Not (Monoracial)Enough to ‘Fit In.’

Read or purchase the article here.

Helping mixed heritage children develop ‘character and resilience’ in schools

Improving Schools
November 2016, Volume 19, Number 3
pages 197-211
DOI: 10.1177/1365480216650311

Kirstin Lewis
Educational Studies
Goldsmiths, University of London

Recent UK government policy suggests that all schools have a key role to play in building ‘character and resilience’ in children. This article draws on data from a wider research project, exploring the school experiences of mixed White/Black Caribbean and mixed White/Black African children in two London secondary schools. Because data from this project suggest that many children experienced adversity at school, a theoretical framework previously developed by Ungar et al. was used to assess how they coped with adversity and to what extent their schools supported them with it. Findings revealed that although positive relationships with adults were essential, teachers could not offer the necessary support and guidance because they were unaware of mixed heritage children’s needs and any challenges they faced. This article asks whether such a framework might prove useful in supporting teachers to understand what factors develop ‘character and resilience’ and the ways in which they might therefore support children to cope.

Read or purchase the article here.

Mixed race and mixed reactions

Columbia Daily Spectator
2016-10-17

Laura Salgado

“But, like, what are you?”

It’s a question I’m asked pretty often, both inside and outside of Morningside Heights. You’d think that after almost two decades on this planet I’d finally be able to answer it easily, but you’d be wrong. This seemingly innocent query still manages to fill me with dread, discomfort, and anxiety every time I hear it. My heart leaps into my throat, my hands start to sweat, and my words get caught on the tip of my tongue.

I know how most people want me to answer. They expect to hear something simple and comprehensible, like “Hispanic” or “white.” They want to know which box to put me in. Their world is one of simple distinctions, one where everyone fits into only one category…

Read the entire article here.

Being “Dual Heritage” In Modern Britain

HC At Exeter Cornwall
2016-10-11

Stacey Harris, 2nd year Environmental Science Student
Solihull, West Midlands

As many of you may be aware, October is Black History Month, which acts as a platform for education, reflection and a celebration of the trials and triumphs of African and Caribbean communities throughout history. It provides a vital means to raise the voices of minorities whose history is often sorely overlooked.  Every year a different thought-provoking theme is selected for the month, with this year’s being “tackling conscious and unconscious bias”. As a person of dual heritage, this got me thinking about my own intentional and unintentional bias towards my own ethnic background.

After spending 19 years of my life with a very vague understanding of my own family history – merely using the provided census classification of “white black Caribbean” – I suddenly had a bit of an identity crisis, and decided I needed to know more about my heritage in order to solve this. This, in tandem with my impulsive spending habits, led to me undertaking a 23andMe DNA test. The process involved sending away a saliva sample, and then an agonising two month wait until my results were sent back and revealed. I found the whole thing strangely more emotive than I was expecting when I first saw the detailed breakdown of my ancestry, as so much of my history was presented before me in just a few words and numbers…

Read the enitre article here.

Meritocracy in Obama’s Gilded Age

The Chronicle of Higher Education
2016-09-25

Aziz Rana, Professor of Law
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

The Obama administration’s vision of social mobility in America is bound up with a story about higher education. According to this story, elite colleges and universities are engines of American opportunity. They select the most talented and hardworking people, from across all backgrounds, and provide them with the training to achieve even the most “impossibly big dreams,” as Michelle Obama would say. There is truth to this account. Indeed, Barack Obama’s lived experience speaks to the possibility of meritocratic achievement. He is the multiracial child of a single mother from a middle-class background, who through skill and determination made it to top universities and eventually rose to the highest echelon of political power.

But this familiar story of higher education as a spur to social mobility blinds us to both what is pernicious and what is worth defending about the modern American university…

Read the entire article here.

“So, What Are You?”

Columbia Daily Spectator
New York, New York
2016-10-04

Alexandra Peebles and Eliza Solomon

Members of the Mixed Heritage Society at a club meeting. (Jared Orellana / Staff Photographer)

“For me, personally, thinking of myself as defined by race has never really worked, because I don’t fit in with the Asians, [and] I don’t fit in with white people,” Zina Sockwell, a Columbia College senior, explains when asked about her identity as a mixed-heritage student.

Sockwell is half Korean on her mother’s side and a quarter Native American on her father’s side, and she identifies as mixed heritage. Her entire “nuclear family” is Asian, white, and Native American. Growing up, Sockwell did not feel different or perplexed by her mixed background. “I didn’t realize for a long time that I was mixed race—I was just a person, in a family. I was a Sockwell; that’s what was normal,” she says matter-of-factly.

But when Sockwell got to college, things were different. When the Mixed Heritage Society (previously known as the Mixed-Race Students Society) debuted on campus in the spring of 2015, it filled what some saw as a glaring cavity by providing an identity-based discussion space for students like Sockwell. These students don’t identify strictly with one race or ethnicity, and as a result must combat the pressure to define themselves as belonging to one specific culture. The club set out to meet a need for the students who wanted to share their often unique experiences with their fellow “mixed” classmates…

Read the entire article here.