CCIE presents Cedar & Bamboo – Film Première and Panel Discussion

Posted in Anthropology, Asian Diaspora, Canada, History, Identity Development/Psychology, Live Events, New Media, Social Science, Videos on 2010-09-24 02:13Z by Steven

CCIE presents Cedar & Bamboo – Film Première and Panel Discussion

University of British Columbia, Point Grey Campus
UBC First Nations Longhouse
Thursday, 2010-10-14, 12:00-14:30 (Local Time)

Sponsored by the Centre for Culture, Identity and Education (CCIE).

There are numerous First Nations in what is now British Columbia and Chinese people arrived on BC’s shores many generations ago. Since then, Indigenous and Chinese people have interacted and forged relationships. Set in Vancouver and other locations in BC, Cedar and Bamboo opens with a survey of the lives of early Chinese immigrants and concentrates on addressing the more recent history of highly complex and troubled issues of interracial relationships and marriages, multiracial identity and identification, alienation and belonging. Its central focus is on the lives of four people of mixed Indigenous and Chinese ancestry and their formation of strong and meaningful identity in spite of the difficulty of reconciling divergent identities, racist laws, the complexities of familial and ethnic acceptance and/or rejection and personal identification with and alienation from Canada and Canadianness, China and Chineseness and First Nations and Indigenous identity. Lil’wat elder Judy Joe reflects on being “abandoned” by her Indigenous mother, being sent to her father’s village in China at age five, being ill treated there as a foreigner and returning to Canada as a teenager to a Vancouver from which she felt completely alienated. Musqueam elder Howard Grant, whose Chinese father worked in the market gardens near his Musqueam mother’s family, reflects on his experiences with both cultures and his principal identification as aboriginal. Siblings Jordie and Hannah Yow, now in their 20s, reflect on growing up “Canadian” in Kamloops with knowledge of being quite multiracial and multiethnic but with virtually no information about either their Chinese grandfather or their Secwempec grandmother.

As a bonus- 1788: A History of Chinese and First Nations Relations in British Columbia, 10 minutes of academic commentary from Professors Henry Yu and Jean Barman of the University of British Columbia and Harley Wylie of Nuu-chah-nulth ancestry on the intersecting histories of First Nations and Chinese people in British Columbia.

For more information, click here.

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Political partisanship influences perception of biracial candidates’ skin tone

Posted in Articles, Barack Obama, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United States on 2010-09-23 02:31Z by Steven

Political partisanship influences perception of biracial candidates’ skin tone

Proceedings of the National Acadamy of Sciences
Volume 106, Number 48 (2009-12-01)
pages 20168-20173
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0905362106

Eugene M. Caruso, Assistant Professor of Behavioral Science
Booth School of Business, University of Chicago

Nicole L. Mead, Researcher
Tilburg Institute for Behavioral Economics Research
Tilburg University, The Netherlands

Emily Balcetis, Assistant Professor of Psychology
New York University

Edited by Richard E. Nisbett, Theodore M. Newcomb Distinguished University Professor of Psychology
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

People tend to view members of their own political group more positively than members of a competing political group. In this article, we demonstrate that political partisanship influences people’s visual representations of a biracial political candidate’s skin tone. In three studies, participants rated the representativeness of photographs of a hypothetical (Study 1) or real (Barack Obama; Studies 2 and 3) biracial political candidate. Unbeknownst to participants, some of the photographs had been altered to make the candidate’s skin tone either lighter or darker than it was in the original photograph. Participants whose partisanship matched that of the candidate they were evaluating consistently rated the lightened photographs as more representative of the candidate than the darkened photographs, hereas participants whose partisanship did not match that of the candidate showed the opposite pattern. For evaluations of Barack Obama, the extent to which people rated lightened photographs as representative of him was positively correlated with their stated voting intentions and reported voting behavior in the 2008 Presidential election. This effect persisted when controlling for political ideology and racial attitudes. These results suggest that people’s visual representations of others are related to their own preexisting beliefs and to the decisions they make in a consequential context.

Read the entire article here.

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BEYOND ‘OTHER’: A special report.;More Than Identity Rides On a New Racial Category

Posted in Articles, Census/Demographics, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United States on 2010-09-23 02:19Z by Steven

BEYOND ‘OTHER’: A special report.;More Than Identity Rides On a New Racial Category

The New York Times
1996-07-06

Linda Mathews

Edward Cooper, a Portland, Ore., businessman, is black. His wife and business partner, Barbara McIntyre, is white. Their 12-year-old son, Ethan McCooper, is, like his name, a blend of his parents, and harder to classify.

On Ethan’s school forms and other official papers, his parents sometimes check both the “white” and the “black” boxes. If “other” is available, they check that and write in “interracial.” When ordered to choose between “black” and “white,” they resolutely leave the form blank.

What they would like to call the light-skinned, dark-eyed boy with the reddish-brown hair is “multiracial.” They may yet get their way, if the Federal Government yields to growing pressure and adds a “multiracial” category to the census in the year 2000.

“This is an issue that isn’t going away,” said Mary Waters, a Harvard professor of sociology who teaches a course on race. “We’re riding such a big wave of interracial marriages that inevitably there are going to be many more people who can claim a multiracial identity if it’s permitted.”…

Read the entire story here.

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Immigration’s Racial Complexity

Posted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, Census/Demographics, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2010-09-22 22:49Z by Steven

Immigration’s Racial Complexity

The Washington Post
Political Bookworm: Where tomorrow’s must-read political books are discovered today
2010-07-09

Steven E. Levingston

Will today’s Latino and Asian immigrants become incorporated into American society like their European predecessors? Or will race remain a stumbling block to full assimilation? Jennifer Lee and Frank Bean explore these questions in their new book “The Diversity Paradox: Immigration and the Color Line in Twenty-First Century America,” recently released by the Russell Sage Foundation. What they discover is that second-generation Asians and Latinos are not as constrained by racial categories as are African-Americans. A key to the question may lie in the state of intermarriage.

By Jennifer Lee and Frank D. Bean

The United States is more racially diverse than ever before. New non-European immigrant groups such as Latinos and Asians made up only 5 and 1 percent of the nation’s population in 1970, but today, they account for 15 and 5 percent, respectively. According to Census projections, by 2050, they will soar to 30 and 9 percent.

Immigration alone, however, is only one factor contributing to the country’s new diversity. Interracial marriages, which increased from 1 percent in 1960 to 7 percent in 2008, are contributing to this growing diversity. According to a Pew Research Center study released June 3, 1 in 6 marriages in the U.S. is interracial.

Along with the growth in intermarriage is the rise in the number of Americans who chose to identify multiracially. Accounting for just 2.2 percent of the U.S. population in 2008, some analysts project that multiracial Americans will account for 1 in 5 Americans by 2050, and 1 in 3 by 2100. Such trends appear to portend a post-racial society where racial divides are disappearing. However, a closer look at racial group differences tells a bleaker story…

Read the entire article here.

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Sociologist links poverty and employment to racial identity

Posted in Articles, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2010-09-22 22:22Z by Steven

Sociologist links poverty and employment to racial identity

University of California, Irvine
2009-01-05

Laura Rico, University Communications

Andrew Penner studies how social status shapes ethnicity

Andrew Penner studies how perception of race can change, depending on one’s social status.Losing your job or doing jail time can affect how people perceive your racial background, according to a recent study co-authored by Andrew Penner, UC Irvine sociology assistant professor. His research shows people who were identified by others as white were significantly less likely to be seen in the same way over time if they had fallen below the poverty line or spent time in prison. Participants who self-identified as white also were less likely to see themselves the same way if they encountered those hardships. The study suggests that racial identity is fluid and changes with one’s position in society. Penner discussed the impact of his research and why race still matters…

Q: What surprised you most about your findings?

A:  The widespread pattern of our results was surprising. Many people assume that our findings apply only to people who don’t fit readily into racial categories, such as those who are multiracial. But we found that roughly 20 percent of the population experiences at least one change in how they are seen by others, which is much higher than you would expect if this were true only for multiracial people. What we actually found is that once we removed all of the multiracial people from the sample, we still got the same pattern of results. The same thing is true for Hispanics; many people assume that we got this pattern of results because people are not sure how to classify Hispanics, but when we looked only at non-Hispanics, the same pattern emerged. This suggests our results say something more general about definitions and perceptions of race in the U.S…

Read the entire article here.

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How Social Status Shapes Race

Posted in Articles, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2010-09-22 22:06Z by Steven

How Social Status Shapes Race

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Volume 105, Number 50 (2008-12-16)
pages 19628-19630
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0805762105

Andrew M. Penner, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

Aliya Saperstein, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Stanford University

Edited by Michael Hout, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Berkeley

We show that racial perceptions are fluid; how individuals perceive their own race and how they are perceived by others depends in
part on their social position. Using longitudinal data from a representative sample of Americans, we find that individuals who are unemployed, incarcerated, or impoverished are more likely to be seen and identify as black and less likely to be seen and identify as white, regardless of how they were classified or identified previously. This is consistent with the view that race is not a fixed individual attribute, but rather a changeable marker of status.

Read the entire article here.

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One Drop of Blood

Posted in Articles, Census/Demographics, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United States on 2010-09-22 21:28Z by Steven

One Drop of Blood

The New Yorker
1994-07-24

Lawrence Wright, Staff Writer

Washington in the millennial years is a city of warring racial and ethnic groups fighting for recognition, protection, and entitlements. This war has been fought throughout the second half of the twentieth century largely by black Americans. How much this contest has widened, how bitter it has turned, how complex and baffling it is, and how far-reaching its consequences are became evident in a series of congressional hearings that began last year in the obscure House Sub-committee on Census, Statistics, and Postal Personnel, which is chaired by Representative Thomas C. Sawyer, Democrat of Ohio, and concluded in November, 1993.

Although the Sawyer hearings were scarcely reported in the news and were sparsely attended even by other members of the subcommittee, with the exception of Representative Thomas E. Petri, Republican of Wisconsin, they opened what may become the most searching examination of racial questions in this country since the sixties. Related federal agency hearings, and meetings that will be held in Washington and other cities around the country to prepare for the 2000 census, are considering not only modifications of existing racial categories but also the larger question of whether it is proper for the government to classify people according to arbitrary distinctions of skin color and ancestry. This discussion arises at a time when profound debates are occurring in minority communities about the rightfulness of group entitlements, some government officials are questioning the usefulness of race data, and scientists are debating whether race exists at all…

In this battle over racial turf, a disturbing new contender has appeared. “When I received my 1990 census form, I realized that there was no race category for my children,” Susan Graham, who is a white woman married to a black man in Roswell, Georgia, testified. “I called the Census Bureau. After checking with supervisors, the bureau finally gave me their answer: The children should take the race of their mother. When I objected and asked why my children should be classified as their mother’s race only, the Census Bureau representative said to me, in a very hushed voice, ‘Because, in cases like these, we always know who the mother is and not always the father.’”…

…Actual interracial marriages, however, were historically rare. Multiracial children were often marginalized as illegitimate half-breeds who didn’t fit comfortably into any racial community. This was particularly true of the off spring of black-white unions. “In my family, like many families with African-American ancestry, there is a history of multiracial offspring associated with rape and concubinage,” G. Reginald Daniel, who teaches a course in multiracial identity at the University of California at Los Angeles, says. “I was reared in the segregationist South. Both sides of my family have been mixed for at least three generations. I struggled as a child over the question of why I had to exclude my East Indian and Irish and Native American and French ancestry, and could include only African.”…

…Kwame Anthony Appiah, of Harvard’s Philosophy and Afro- American Studies Departments, says, “What the Multiracial category aims for is not people of mixed ancestry, because a majority of Americans are actually products of mixed ancestry. This category goes after people who have parents who are socially recognized as belonging to different races. That’s O.K.–that’s an interesting social category. But then you have to ask what happens to their children. Do we want to have more boxes, depending upon whether they marry back into one group or the other? What are the children of these people supposed to say? I think about these things because–look, my mother is English; my father is Ghanaian. My sisters are married to a Nigerian and a Norwegian. I have nephews who range from blond- haired kids to very black kids. They are all first cousins. Now, according to the American scheme of things, they’re all black-even the guy with blond hair who skis in Oslo. That’s what the one drop rule says. The Multiracial scheme, which is meant to solve anomalies, simply creates more anomalies of its own, and that’s because the fundamental concept–that you should be able to assign every American to one of three or four races reliably-is crazy.”…

…Multiracial people, because they are now both unable and unwilling to be ignored, and because many of them refuse to be confined to traditional racial categories, inevitably undermine the entire concept of race as an irreducible difference between peoples. The continual modulation of racial differences in America is increasing the jumble created by centuries of ethnic intermarriage. The resulting dilemma is a profound one. If we choose to measure the mixing by counting people as Multiracial, we pull the teeth of the civil-rights laws. Are we ready for that? Is it even possible to make changes in the way we count Americans, given the legislative mandates already built into law? “I don’t know,” Sawyer concedes. “At this point, my purpose is not so much to alter the laws that underlie these kinds of questions as to raise the question of whether or not the way in which we currently define who we are reflects the reality of the nation we are and who we are becoming. If it does not, then the policies underlying the terms of measurement are doomed to be flawed. What you measure is what you get.”…

Read the entire article here or here.

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Making Ethnic Choices: California’s Punjabi Mexican Americans

Posted in Anthropology, Books, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Mexico, Monographs, United States on 2010-09-22 16:20Z by Steven

Making Ethnic Choices: California’s Punjabi Mexican Americans

Temple University Press
May 1992
352 page
6×9
Paper EAN: 978-1-56639-202-0, ISBN: 1-56639-202-0
Cloth EAN: 978-0-87722-890-5, ISBN: 0-87722-890-6
Electronic Book: EAN: 978-1-43990-364-3

Karen Isaksen Leonard, Professor of Anthropology
University of California, Irvine

This is a study of the flexibility of ethnic identity. In the early twentieth century, men from India’s Punjab province came to California to work on the land. The new immigrants had few chances to marry. There were very few marriageable Indian women, and miscegenation laws and racial prejudice limited their ability to find white Americans. Discovering an unexpected compatibility, Punjabis married women of Mexican descent and these alliances inspired others as the men introduced their bachelor friends to the sisters and friends of their wives. These biethnic families developed an identity as “Hindus” but also as Americans. Karen Leonard has related theories linking state policies and ethnicity to those applied at the level of marriage and family life. Using written sources and numerous interviews, she invokes gender, generation, class, religion, language, and the dramatic political changes of the 1940s in South Asia and the United States to show how individual and group perceptions of ethnic identity have changed among Punjabi Mexican Americans in rural California.

Read chapter 1 here.

Table of Contents

  • Preface
  • Part I: Introduction
  • Part II: The World of the Pioneers
    • 2. Contexts: California and the Punjab
    • 3. Early Days in the Imperial Valley
    • 4. Marriages and Children
    • 5. Male and Female Networks
    • 6. Conflict and Love in the Marriages
  • Part III: The Construction of Ethnic Identity
    • 7. Childhood in Rural California
    • 8. The Second Generation Comes of Age
    • 9. Political Change and Ethnic Identity
    • 10. Encounters with the Other
    • 11. Contending Voices
  • Appendixes
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Index
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Fire and Desire: Mixed-Race Movies in the Silent Era

Posted in Books, Communications/Media Studies, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Monographs, United States on 2010-09-22 16:15Z by Steven

Fire and Desire: Mixed-Race Movies in the Silent Era

University of Chicago Press
February 2001
352 pages
36 halftones  6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 9780226278742
Paper ISBN: 9780226278759

Jane M. Gaines, Professor of Film Studies
Columbia University School of the Arts

Winner of the Katherine Singer Kovacs Award

In the silent era, American cinema was defined by two separate and parallel industries, with white and black companies producing films for their respective, segregated audiences. Jane Gaines’s highly anticipated new book reconsiders the race films of this era with an ambitious historical and theoretical agenda.

Fire and Desire offers a penetrating look at the black independent film movement during the silent period. Gaines traces the profound influence that D. W. Griffith’s racist epic The Birth of a Nation [(1915)] exerted on black filmmakers such as Oscar Micheaux, the director of the newly recovered Within Our Gates [(1920)]. Beginning with What Happened in the Tunnel [(1903)], a movie that played with race and sex taboos by featuring the first interracial kiss in film [View the short film (00:01:02) by Thomas Edison from 1903-11-06 here.], Gaines also explores the cinematic constitution of self and other through surprise encounters: James Baldwin sees himself in the face of Bette Davis, family resemblance is read in Richard S. Roberts’s portrait of an interracial family, and black film pioneer George P. Johnson looks back on Micheaux.

Given the impossibility of purity and the co-implication of white and black, Fire and Desire ultimately questions the category of “race movies” itself.

Table of Contents

  • List of Illustrations
  • Acknowledgments
  • Note on Film Dates
  • Introduction – The “Race” in Race Movies
  • 1. “Green Like Me”
  • 2. Desiring Others
  • 3. Race Movies: All-Black Everything
  • 4. World-Improving Desires
  • 5. Fire and Desire
  • 6. The Body’s Story
  • 7. Race/Riot/Cinema
  • Conclusion – Mixed-Race Movies
  • Notes
  • Index
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Punjabi Mexican American

Posted in Definitions, Mexico on 2010-09-22 16:02Z by Steven

The Punjabi Mexican American community, the majority of which is localized to Yuba City, California is a distinctive cultural phenomenon holding its roots in a migration pattern that occurred almost a century prior. The first meeting of these cultures occurred in the Imperial Valley in 1907, near the largest irrigation system in the Western hemisphere…

Wikipedia

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