Mixed Race Studies

At Yale, a Right That Doesn’t Outweigh a Wrong

The New York Times
2016-04-29

Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Peter V & C Vann Woodward Professor of History, African American Studies, and American Studies
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

NEW HAVEN — Yale made a grievous mistake this week when it announced that it would keep the name of an avowed white supremacist, John C. Calhoun, on a residential college, despite decades of vigorous alumni and student protests. The decision to name residential colleges for Benjamin Franklin and Anna Pauline Murray, a black civil rights activist, does nothing to redeem this wrong.

It is not a just compromise to split the difference between Calhoun and Murray; there should be no compromise between such stark contrasts in values. The decision to retain the Calhoun name continues the pain inflicted every day on students who live in a dormitory named for a man distinguished by being one of the country’s most egregious racists.

To be sure, there’s something noteworthy about the contrast between these two figures who now sit across campus from each other. Although they lived in different centuries, Calhoun in the 19th, and Murray in the 20th, in many ways, she lived in — and fought against — the world that he built.

Calhoun, a Yale graduate, congressman and the seventh vice president of the United States, owned dozens of slaves in Fort Hill, S.C. Murray grew up in poverty in Durham, N. C., as the granddaughter of an enslaved woman. Calhoun championed slavery as a “positive good”; Murray’s great-grandmother was raped by her slave master. Calhoun profited immensely from the labor of the enslaved people on his plantation; Murray was a radical labor activist in Harlem during the Great Depression…

Read the entire article here.

‘Our schools are failing mixed raced children’

The Voice
London, England, United Kingdom
2016-04-02

Dinah Moreley

Stereotypical expectations that this group have ‘confused identities’ often mean they experience racism from teachers and fellow pupils

A REPORT by People in Harmony, (PIH) the national charity for mixed race people and families has highlighted the experience of mixed race children in the education system. Stereotypical expectations that this group have ‘confused identities’ often mean they experience racism from teachers and fellow pupils. Here, PIH’s Dinah Morley tells how the report and the seminars it was based on were put together.

IT IS over a decade since People in Harmony (PIH) published Mixed Race and Education: creating an ethos of respect and understanding, a conference report on mixed race children and young people in the education system.

PIH has now revisited the subject of mixed race young people in education in a new report called Mixed Race and Education: 2015 in order to consider ways in which a better dialogue with schools could be achieved to help improve outcomes and to add some substance to a patchy body of research…

…AWARENESS

The debate in April 2015 facilitated by Martin and Asher Hoyles, educators and authors of books on race and culture, was constructed to address four specific topics that had arisen from the earlier seminar.

Racism and discrimination in school was also discussed by the young people and parents. They identified:

• The curriculum content does not acknowledge the mixed race presence.
• A failure to stimulate an awareness of mixed race students and families.
• Schools lack resources needed about mixed race achievers and role models
• Appearance often incorrectly determines how mixed race students are related to.
• Teacher stereotyping leads to incorrect assumptions about students’ backgrounds and needs.
• The default position applied to mixed race people is usually black.
• Others are deciding the terminology used in schools for mixed race people.

It is important for teachers and others to understand the experiences of mixed race people and the fact that lazy racist stereotypes are not helpful in helping children from these backgrounds to settle and to achieve…

Read the entire article here.

I’m the new NUS president – and no, I’m not an antisemitic Isis sympathiser

The Guardian
2016-04-24

Malia Bouattia

‘Some may not agree with my politics and ideologies, but I do believe the student movement has a shared goal.’ Photograph: Vicky Design/NUS website

The accusations being directed at me this week are deeply troubling and false. I want to focus on liberating education and opportunity for all

This week I became the first black woman to be elected president of the National Union of Students, and the first Muslim who will hold this position too. But instead of celebrating and publicising this incredible landmark, the media coverage has been cluttered with stories calling me a racist, an antisemite, an Islamic State sympathiser and more.

The truth is, as those who know me well understand, I’ve always been a strong campaigner against racism and fascism in all its forms. And I’d like to set a few things straight…

Read the entire article here.

Malia Bouattia’s election as NUS president proves deeply divisive

The Guardian
2016-04-22

Jessica Elgot

At the NUS conference, Bouattia won on the first round. Photograph: NUS/PA

Jewish student groups alarmed by her election, but the first black Muslim woman in the role has nerves of steel, and young activists love her for that

It is rare that the election of a student union president merits the flurry of headlines that greeted Malia Bouattia. But her election, as the first black Muslim woman to hold the office, has been one of the most divisive moments in the National Union of Students’ recent history…

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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.

Moral Judgments of Racial Passing

Sponsored Research
Lewis & Clark College
Portland, Oregon
December 2015

The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) has awarded Assistant Professor of Psychology Diana Leonard a grant from the Grants-in-Aid program. These funds will support Dr. Leonard’s new collaborative research project, “Moral Judgments of Racial Passing: Role of perceiver ideology and consequences for social distancing behavior.” Dr. Leonard will collaborate with Lewis & Clark undergraduates and Dr. Paul Conway at Florida State University to accomplish this research. This project will address a current gap in the scientific literature on racial perceptions, and is timely: conversations about racial passing–presenting oneself as a race other than one’s own–have been highlighted in the national media lately. Dr. Leonard’s project will explore moral judgments of racial passers, and how these judgments are shaped by two ideological factors: “social dominance orientation” and “endorsement of colorblind ideology.” This research will ultimately be extended to investigate how racial passers’ perceived motivations and degree of immersion in another racial identity shape judgments of their behavior. More about Dr. Leonard’s research is available here.

MiXed at Cornell Illustrates Diversity of ‘Multiracial Experience’ at Cornell

The Cornell Daily Sun
Ithaca, New York
2016-04-10

Henry Kanengeiser

MiXed at Cornell — a student organization dedicated to creating community among mixed race individuals — will host its first ever Blend Conference in Klarman Hall this weekend.

The two-day conference will focus on the “awareness of the multiracial experience and the community’s marginalization of identity,” and its main themes are engagement and inclusion, according to the organization’s website.

“We wanted to bring together a conference that … brings to light different issues and unique experiences that mixed people have,” said Erika Axe ’18, incoming co-president of MiXed.

Axe said the Blend Conference was established to celebrate every mixed person’s individual identity.

“As an organization we’ve found that we can’t put one definition on what is mixed race because it’s so unique to every person,” she said…

Read the entire article here.

Study finds mixed-race individuals are fastest-growing demographic group, most discriminated against

The Daily Targum: Serving the Rutgers community since 1869. Independent since 1980.
2016-03-31

Samantha Karas

The fastest growing racial group in the United States is mixed-race individuals, but they are also the ones experiencing increasing amounts of prejudice from white people, according to a study conducted by Jonathan Freeman, an assistant professor at New York University.

White individuals with lower interracial exposure tend to exhibit greater prejudice against mixed-race persons, according to the study run through NYU’s Department of Psychology.

“(These individuals) visually process racially ambiguous faces in a more difficult and unpredictable fashion, and this unstable experience translates into negative biases against mixed-race people,” Freeman said in a press release.

The study is interested in exploring attitudes towards mixed-race individuals as a function of racial exposure, said Diana Sanchez, a co-author on the study and an associate professor in the Department of Psychology…

…Laura Chapas, a School of Arts and Sciences senior, said she would assume people in the Rutgers—New Brunswick area would be less biased due to the diverse population.

“What that study indicated is a shame but I’m not surprised that it’s true,” she said.

People are so quick to judge what they don’t understand, she said, and race cannot be confined to just black or white.

“I think those with lower interracial exposure may have a hard time accepting that,” Chapas said.

Dana Campbell, a School of Arts and Sciences senior, said she was not surprised with the findings of the study.

“I agree (with the conclusion). I think that when people who aren’t exposed to other races only see those races as the media portrays them,” Campbell said. “Without any personal experience people have to rely on movies, books, the new, etc. to try to understand race.”

People can confront their own biases by understanding the sources of bias, she said…

Read the entire article here.

What Is Critical Race Theory?

Harvard Magazine
2016-03-22

Marina Bolotnikova

Khiara Bridges Photograph courtesy of Khiara Bridges

RACIAL-JUSTICE ACTIVISTS at Harvard Law School (HLS) won one of the largest public battles over the school’s legacy this month, when the administration agreed to abandon the existing HLS shield. The shield was modeled after the crest of the slaveholding Royall family, whose fortune endowed Harvard’s first law professorship; the shield’s removal was the first of a list of demands issued in December by student group Reclaim Harvard Law School. But HLS has not, so far, acted on the group’s larger, more controversial demands—among them, creating a program in critical race theory, a legal-studies movement with origins at Harvard in the 1970s.

On Monday night, Reclaim HLS hosted a critical race theory teach-in by Khiara Bridges, an associate law professor at Boston University, modeled on how she teaches first-year criminal law. “We’re not pretending that we’re disconnected from the real world,” Bridges said as she opened her presentation, alluding to one of the motivating goals of critical race theory: to link activism with academics. The event took place in the student lounge of Wasserstein Hall, which members of Reclaim HLS have occupied for the last month to create opportunities for learning and discussion, and to bring visibility to their demands…

Read the entire article here.

Multiethnic student group Mixed receives 2016 Perkins Prize

Cornell Chronicle
Ithaca, New York
2016-03-17

Nancy Doolittle

In 2015 members of the student club Mixed at Cornell created the print and digital Cornell Hapa Book Facebook page, featuring photographs and stories of 60 self-identified multiracial students, staff and faculty who answered the question, “What does being mixed mean to you?” The book received more than 8,000 views.

On March 16 in Willard Straight Hall, Mixed was awarded the recently renamed James A. Perkins Prize for Interracial and Intercultural Peace and Harmony by Michael Kotlikoff, provost and acting president, “for its role in supporting and exploring the experience of multiracial/multiethnic individuals.”…

Read the entire article here.