Mixed Race Studies

University of Missouri Press to Shut Down in July

Riverfront Times
St. Louis, Missouri
2012-05-25

Aimee Levitt

The Post-Dispatch was not the only publishing institution in Missouri to have a bad week. Yesterday morning, Tim Wolfe, the president of the University of Missouri system, announced plans to shut down the University of Missouri Press.

 The news came as a complete surprise to the ten-member staff, editor in chief Clair Wilcox told the Columbia Daily Tribune.

It was true the press, which was partially funded by a $400,000 annual subsidy from the university system, had continued to operate with a deficit even after seven employees had been laid off three years ago, but who expects a university press to be a major money-making operation?

The purpose of the U of M Press, founded in 1958, was to showcase scholarly work about Missouri and its people which would be ignored by more commercial publishers. The current catalog, likely to be the press’s last, features a memoir by a Bootheel farmer, a study of old-time Missouri fiddlers, histories of the Missouri State Penitentiary and a Civil War draft resistance movement and biographies of Satchel Paige and the folklorist Mary Alicia Owen (the last with the tantalizing title Voodoo Priests, Noble Savages and Ozark Gypsies)…

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Obama’s election changed racial identity of black students

Chronicle Online
Cornell University
2012-02-16

Karene Booker, Extension Support Specialist
Department of Human Development

Barack Obama’s historic election in 2008 stimulated individual and national reflection on race and changed African-American college students’ perceptions of being black, reports a new Cornell study published in Developmental Psychology (47:6).

But how these changes will shape public discourse as the 2012 presidential campaign unfolds or whether the 2012 election outcome will generate similar changes in racial identity is still unknown, say the researchers.

“Obama’s election triggered deep explorations or ‘encounter experiences’ in which these African-Americans [in our study] were challenged to think through the importance and positive value that can be associated with being black,” said Anthony Burrow, assistant professor of human development in Cornell’s College of Human Ecology, co-author of the study with Anthony Ong, associate professor of human development at Cornell, and lead author Thomas Fuller-Rowell, Ph.D. ’10, now a Robert Wood Johnson postdoctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison…

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Changes in racial identity among African American college students following the election of Barack Obama

Developmental Psychology
Volume 47, Number 6 (November 2011)
pages 1608-1618
DOI: 10.1037/a0025284

Thomas E. Fuller-Rowell, Robert Wood Johnson Postdoctoral Fellow
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Anthony L. Burrow, Assistant Professor of Human Development
Cornell University

Anthony D. Ong, Associate Professor of Human Development
Cornell University

The current study considered the influence of the 2008 presidential election on the racial identity of African American college students (Mage = 19.3 years; 26.3% male). The design of the study consisted of 2 components: longitudinal and daily. The longitudinal component assessed 3 dimensions of racial identity (centrality, private regard, and public regard) 2 weeks before and 5 months after the election, and the daily diary component assessed racial identity and identity exploration on the days immediately before and after the election. Daily items measuring identity exploration focused on how much individuals thought about issues relating to their race. Analyses considered the immediate effects of the election on identity exploration and the extent to which changes in exploration were shaped by racial identity measured prior to the election. We also considered immediate and longer term changes in racial identity following the election and the extent to which longer term changes were conditioned by identity exploration. Findings suggest that the election served as an “encounter” experience (Cross, 1991, 1995, pp. 60–61), which led to increases in identity exploration. Moreover, analyses confirmed that changes in identity exploration were most pronounced among those with higher levels of racial centrality. Results also suggest that the election had both an immediate and a longer term influence on racial identity, which in some instances was conditioned by identity exploration.

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Breaking the Race Barrier

360 Magazine
Ithica College
2012-05-02

Danielle Torres

“I’m Puerto Rican.”

That’s usually what I say when people ask a second time where I am from. The first time someone asks me that question I usually say, “I’m from New York.” Then the person rephrases the question, “What are you? What is your background?”

I come from a Puerto Rican family that is short and loud. Actually, I’m a little West Indian, too, on my mother’s side. I also say I’m Hispanic but I have been told that label falls under ethnicity. I’m a little displaced when it comes to the question of race. Growing up, my family used to chuckle about the race section on the Census. We always lingered on that section a bit longer than the others trying to decide what box or boxes we should check off.

In 2009, when I was a freshman at Ithaca College, none of my peers cared about the Census. It was just another survey and spring finals were coming up. Yet, although it was a single sheet of paper, I felt that it was another symbol of young adulthood. It was my turn to decide for myself how I was going to answer the race question. What is Person 1’s race? Mark X one or more boxes. I paused, pen hovering, weighing my options…

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Penn mutliheritage organization experiences re-birth

The Daily Pennsylvanian
2012-04-06

Diana Gonimah

Mixed ethnicity students met to discuss their experiences and Check One’s future

Last night, Penn students came together over their ability to check more than one box under “Ethnicity” on their college applications.

College junior Chris Cruz and Engineering sophomore Ibrahim Ayub hosted a general body meeting to relaunch Check One, a multiracial and multicultural organization that has not met for about a decade on Penn’s campus after being founded in 1995.

Cruz, who served as chair of the United Minorities Council on its previous board, said the purpose of relaunching Check One was to meet a “pressing demand for a space to be created for the multicultural and multiracial community as a great number of Americans identify as multiracial.”

The meeting — which was dubbed “So …What are You?” — attracted a diverse group of Penn students who identified themselves as belonging to more than one ethnicity or culture…

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Multiracial Subject Theory: Lessons in Organizational Praxis

University of Washington
2011
180 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3472097
ISBN: 9781124842813

Claire Elizabeth Fraczek

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington

This dissertation investigates racial complexities in higher education through three distinct papers in which I centralize critical pedagogy, leadership development, and organizational change through the lens of multiracial subject theory. Chapter one considers the merits, strategies and limitations of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) as pedagogical tools in higher education contexts. I demonstrate the ways in which monoracial foundations are imbedded in these two approaches and argue that, through a mixed-race analytic, theorists working in the field of CRT and CWS will be better able to analyze the dynamic interplay of race and racial categorizations in ways that benefit a broad spectrum of diverse students, including a growing multiracial student population.

Building on this platform, chapter two highlights research data from a two-year qualitative case study in which one undergraduate group of ten multiracial students initiated, designed and implemented a college course. Here, I argue that these students developed a critical mixed race praxis through intentional, shared leadership, interdisciplinary content, and regular attention to a larger political agenda. Throughout the paper, I consider two central themes: (1) implications of a shared leadership model on college student development, and (2) practical lessons far organizational interventions in higher education pedagogy.

The third paper shifts from student development to that of higher education administrators who seek to build organizational capacity for justice-conscious leadership. Building on the theoretical and empirical data in the previous papers, chapter three articulates a set of criteria by which to define and measure critical mixed race praxes. Through a series of vignettes located in higher education contexts, I highlight timely moments and opportunities for administrators to leverage their multiple subject positions in ways that inform and contribute to critical leadership practices. My analysis cautions against leadership and policy that rely on fixed identity politics to instead emphasize structural and organizational models as methodological tools for praxis.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• List of Figures
• Introduction
• Chapter One: (Re)thinking Race: Positioning Multiracial Representations within Critical Pedagogy
• Chapter Two: Claiming Mixed Classroom Space: Praxis Lessons from an Undergraduate Student Collective
• Chapter Three: Leadership in Higher Education: Critical Mixed Praxis Lessons
• Conclusion: From Ideology to Methodology: Addressing Race in Higher Education
• References
• Appendix A: Class Syllabus
• Appendix B: Focus Group Interview Protocol

LIST OF FIGURES

1. Critical Race Pedagogies
2. Critical Mixed Praxis

Purchase the dissertation here.

New group aims to create a space for biracial students

Kansas State Collegian
2012-02-14

Jakki Thompson, Assistant News Editor

K-State recently welcomed The Association of Multiracial Biracial Students, an organization for students of mixed races and ethnicities, to campus. AMBS is the first organization of its kind on campus and was founded by Clayton Patrick, freshman in hotel and restaurant management and president of AMBS.
 
“I basically got the idea from my personal story,” Patrick said. “I was adopted and I found out my biological mother was African-American, Native American and Caucasian. I had an obsession from then on with mixed races and the biological differences between races.”
 
Patrick said he read about a multiracial student organization that was started at the University of Maryland in an article printed in The New York Times. He also said he noticed there are many biracial groups at California universities…

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Amy Locklear Hertel to Head American Indian Center at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Indian Country Today
2012-04-29

Tanya Lee

Amy Locklear Hertel, newly-selected director of the American Indian Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was admonished by her grandmother to pursue her education. “Grandmother told me to get all the education you can. What you learn in your head no one can take away. You need to learn all you can and use it to serve your community. I like to think she would be proud of me,” says Locklear Hertel, who starts her new job May 1.

“All the education you can get” so far includes a B.A. in interpersonal communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), a master’s degree in social work and a Juris doctor from Washington University in St. Louis and a nearly-completed Ph.D. from Washington University’s George Warren Brown School of Social Work.
 
Going back to UNC will take Locklear Hertel, her husband and their young children, Ava, 3, and Ahren, 1, back home. “I’ve wanted to go home for years, but the right opportunity never came up. I know my purpose is to serve our tribal communities in North Carolina. When this position became available, I felt like I had been training for it all along, with my interdisciplinary work, advocacy, and research in tribal communities. This job fits my interests and abilities and for me it answers the question, ‘How can I best serve our communities?’” Her family and community have been generous in welcoming her home. “Everybody back home has been wonderful, welcoming us,” she says. “They told me when I left I had to come back to serve in this community.”
 
Locklear Hertel grew up in Fayetteville, North Carolina, a place halfway between her mother’s Coharie and her father’s Lumbee communities that her parents chose so that she and her younger brother would be able to participate in the life of both tribes. Her father worked in a glass factory, and her mother in the Fayetteville school system…

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Affirmative action backed in largely black Brazil

Associated Press
2012-05-04

Bradley Brooks

SAO PAULO (AP) — Brazil’s top court has backed sweeping affirmative action programs used in more than 1,000 universities across this nation, which has more blacks than any country outside Africa yet where a severe gap in education equality between races persists.

The Supreme Court voted 7-1 late Thursday to uphold a federal program that has provided scholarships to hundreds of thousands of black and mixed-race students for university studies since 2005. Its constitutionality was challenged by a right of center party, The Democrats. Three justices abstained from the vote.

The court ruled last week in a separate case that it was constitutional for universities to use racial quotas in determining who is admitted.

“If I didn’t have the scholarship, I wouldn’t be here. It pays my entire tuition,” said 22-year-old student Felipe Nunes, taking a break between classes at the privately run Univerisdade Paulista in Sao Paulo.

Nunes, the mixed-race son of a mechanic, said he’s the first person in his family to attend university. He’s one of 919,000 recipients of a “ProUni” scholarship since 2005. The ProUni program funds studies in private universities for black, mixed race, indigenous and poor students whose primary education was in the public school system…

…Norma Odara, a 20-year-old journalism student at Mackenzie University in Sao Paulo, considers herself black, though her mother is white, and her youthful face embodies Brazil’s mixed heritage.

She’s not the recipient of any government scholarship and her university does not use any sort of quota system, something made clear by the fact Odara was one of the few black students in a sea of whites on Mackenzie’s leafy campus. Still, Odara said quotas and other such programs are only temporary fixes, and that what is needed is more government spending in public grade schools where most black Brazilians study, so that they are better prepared to enter universities on academic merit alone…

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Brazil’s top court backs racial quotas in universities

The Australian
2012-05-01

BRAZIL’s Supreme Court has ruled unanimously that racial quotas used in universities are constitutional and are meant to redress inequalities stemming from centuries of slavery.

The ruling issued by the 10-member court concerned the case of the University of Brasilia which in 2004 set up quotes to reserve 20 per cent of admissions to black, mixed-race and indigenous students…

…The court ruling followed an appeal lodged in 2009 by the right-wing DEM party which argued that the University of Brasilia quota policy ran counter to the principle of equality and fostered racism by creating privileges based on racial criteria.

But the judges countered that quotas were a legitimate method to redress slavery-derived inequalities and discrimination that still continues to affect Afro-Brazilians…

Read the entire article here.