Mixed Race Studies

Mixed-Race In America

Medium
2017-06-05

Geoff Vasile

A Personal Look at The Psychology and History of Racism

My entire life — all I’ve wanted to do was help others. My career has given me titles such as caretaker and counselor; volunteerism has provided the opportunity for charity in a host of ways. My skill-set is providing comfort and confidence; my tools — empathy and communication. I have saved two lives; been responsible for many others — and counseled too many to count. I am flawed as well — and just like everyone else there are somethings I won’t admit to you as I likely don’t admit them to myself.

An unflagging bridge-person — too often I come across as contrarian; too often due to my intellectual vanity. Still, I like to think this is mostly part of my innate and reinforced desire for impartiality. Romanian, Black, and Korean, I grew up in South Central LA in the late 80s — the backdrop of the crack-epidemic, gang-wars, the LA Riots, and OJ Simpson case were just a few of the over-arching, commonly known conflicts fueled by racial tension. They imbued within me a deep and personal admiration for nuance’s ability to heal. Through both nature and nurture, environment and heritability — this characteristic of seeking resolution is how I like to think of myself; who I am when I’m at my best…

Read the entire article here.

The “Other” Box: A Conversation on Mixed America

Stella Adler Studio of Acting and Radical Evolution
Studio G
31 West 27th Street, Floor 2
New York, New York 10001
Monday, 2017-06-05, 19:00-20:30 EDT (Local Time)

With Lawrence-Mihn Bùi Davis and Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni. Jami Floyd, legal analyst, local host of WNYC’s “All Things Considered,” and a New York City native who is herself multiracial, will serve as moderator for the discussion.

For more information, click here.

Longtown Descendants Breathe New Life Into Historic Mixed-Race Community

WOSU Public Media
WOSU Radio
Columbus, Ohio
2017-05-31

Jerry Kenney

Kaiser family reunion at Longtown. Kaiser Family

In southwest Ohio, about a mile from the Indiana state line, a long-forgotten town with a special place in African American history is struggling to be reborn.

Longtown was established nearly 200 years ago in what is now Greenville. The settlement grew into a thriving mixed-race community and a major stop on the Underground Railroad.

Now, descendants of those pioneering settlers are working to bring Longtown back to life for others to experience.

Longtown’s Founding

In 1818, James Clemens, a freed slave from Rockingham County, Virginia, settled in Darke County, Ohio, with his wife Sophia Sellers and their five children, and began to farm.

“They were the sons and daughters of slave masters,” says historian and Longtown descendant Roane Smothers.

Smothers says some slave owners not only acknowledged the children they bore with slaves but also provided them with financial support. Such was the case with James and Sophia, who purchased land in Ohio with the help of Sellers’ father, he says…

Read the entire article here. Listen to the story (00:05:45) here.

ROR CHASING COLOR: EP 07 | “Multiracial/Mulatto 2.0”

Revolution of Race
Chasing Color
2017-04-11

Dr. Blair Proctor, Expert Host and Ph.D. Doctorate in Sociology

Pamela Lawrence, Moderator, Founder & Creative Director

The 5th Episode for Chasing Color features a ‘taboo’ discussion about the term ‘mulatto’ versus multi-racial & bi-racial.

Dr. Blair Proctor discusses the term ‘mulatto’ the definition and how this term became a racial slur. In addition, Dr. Blair Proctor breaks-down the social issues that lies with the term multi-racial and how this term doesn’t eliminate systemic racism.

Many topics are discussed to flesh out this particular episode such as Taye Diggs, Meghan Markle currently dating Prince Harry including the One-Drop Rule, trans-racial Rachel Dolezal etc.

Nothing is off limits with this hefty controversial discussion that sought to define this term bi-racial and how it stack up against racism and the system of racism in America.

Listen to the episode (01:13:52) here.

How Interracial Love Is Saving America

The New York Times
2017-06-03

Sheryll Cashin, Professor of Law
Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.

Mildred and Richard Loving in 1965. Credit Estate of Grey Villet

As a descendant of slaves and slaveholders, I embody uncomfortable incongruities — just as America does. In “Notes on the State of Virginia,” Thomas Jefferson wrote with anguish about the risks of amalgamation, or interracial sex, to a new nation. Whites were “stained” when they mixed with blacks, whom he speculated were inferior in mind and form.

There was a Strom Thurmond-esque artificiality to this cry for racial purity. Southern patriarchs made an art out of objecting to what was happening under their own noses — or pelvises. As history would prove, human urges, whether violent or amorous, inevitably muddy lines, and master-slave rape and coupling produced many mixed people.

Today, the “ardent integrators” who pursue interracial relationships are motivated by love and are our greatest hope for racial understanding. Although America is in a state of toxic polarity, I am optimistic. Through intimacy across racial lines, a growing class of whites has come to value and empathize with African-Americans and other minorities. They are not dismantling white supremacy so much as chipping away at it…

Read the entire article here.

ROR CHASING COLOR: EP 07 | Blacks Passing as White

Revolution of Race
Chasing Color
2017-05-02

Dr. Blair Proctor, Expert Host and Ph.D. Doctorate in Sociology

Pamela Lawrence, Moderator, Founder & Creative Director

The 7th Episode explores the hidden history with Blacks ‘passing’ as White. From ‘Free People of Color’ to ‘Creoles’ to Lawrence Dennis the so-called founder of American Facism that passed as a white man when all along he was a Black Man.

Dr Proctor breaks-down the entire landscape about Passing by exploring a host of issues like white-tonics and trans-racial and how the system of white supremacy among whites and respectability politics among blacks continues advance the narrative to poison the hearts & minds of human society.

This is longer episode than but worth every minute of discussion with Dr. Proctor which also includes the names of ‘blacks’ passing as white in present day.

Are you unapologetically Black?

ARTICLES OF INTEREST

• Lawrence Dennis
• Science States Hidden Identity
• Who Is Black
• Chosen Exile
• Rachel Dolezal South Africa

Listen to the episode (01:49:27) here.

Mixed Art Conference

Toronto Central Grosvenor St. YMCA Centre
20 Grosvenor Street
Toronto, ON M4Y 2V5, Canada
2017-06-03

“The aim of this multidisciplinary biennial art conference is to co-create an inclusive dialogue about racialized mixed identities and lived realities through an intersectional lens.”

For more information, click here.

A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, by Allyson Hobbs

The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research
Volume 47, 2017 – Issue 2: After Madiba: Black Studies in South Africa
Pages 73-76
DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2017.1295355

Fabian Eggers, MA candidate of North American Studies
John F. Kennedy Institute at Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany

Allyson Hobbs, A Chosen Exile: History of Racial Passing in American Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014)

Read or purchase the review here.

SISS 2017: Race as Kink: Reading Transracial Fetishism – Public Lecture by Dr. Trish Salah

Centre for Feminist Research at York University
Keele Campus
DB0014 (Victor Phillip Dahdaleh Building, formerly Technology Enhanced Learning [TEL] Building)
4700 Keele Street
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3
Telephone: 416-736-2100
Tuesday, 2017-06-06, 10:00-11:30 EDT (Local Time)

Dr. Trish Salah, Assistant Professor
Department of Gender Studies
Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada

Introduced by Dr. John Greyson

In what sense might we speak or think about race as libidinally charged? How do we understand racial identity as erotically invested and in what ways do we see object choice as racially inflected? To what extent are such libidinal economies of identity formation and object choice both ubiquitously alluded to and routinely disavowed? And what are the circumstances under which they present themselves as an occasion for scandal, crisis and conflict?

Drawing upon Freud’s discussion of the place of disavowal in the constitution of desire, this talk is an attempt to think about the persistence, and affective charge, with which analogies between transgender identities and forms of racial passing or cross-identification, increasingly named as “transracialism,” are made.

Dr. Trish Salah is Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender Studies at Queen’s University and the author of two poetry collections, the Lambda award-winning Wanting in Arabic and Lyric Sexology, Vol. 1…

For more information, click here.

Australia’s ‘Stolen Generations’ Tell Their Stories

Lens: Photography, Video and Visual Journalism
The New York Times
2017-05-24

Evelyn Nieves

Margaret Furber was born in Alice Springs, Australia, in 1947. She was placed in St. Mary’s Hostel on the outskirts of town because her mother was not able to take care of her. Her siblings were all sent to the Tiwi Islands. “We were all taken and separated in different ways,” she told the photographer. Nov. 6, 2015. Matthew Sherwood

Alfred Calma was 4 years old when the police snatched him from his mother, never to live with her again. Joyce Napurrula-Schroeder was not quite 2 when it happened to her. Luke Morcom was a newborn, barely a week on this earth.

All had the bad luck of being born “half caste” during Australia’s disastrous experiment with forced assimilation. For 60 years, until 1970, government policies rounded up Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children deemed to be part-white and sent them to boarding schools and church-run missions. Like the Canadian First Nations’ and the United States’ Indian boarding schools that served as its model, Australia’s program aimed to beat out all traces of indigenous culture, often literally.

Run more like penal colonies than schools, these institutions scarred their young wards and their communities for life.

Decades later, when Matthew Sherwood, a Canadian photojournalist, began documenting survivors of the boarding schools — the “stolen generations,” as Australia calls them — they unleashed hellish memories where neglect was the best it ever got…

Read the entire article here.