Month: September 2012

  • Irish and Italian Americans came to be considered members of the white race as their assimilation provided them with the material resources that allowed them to move away from the menial labor that was seen as synonymous with being black. Occupational and class mobility along with the loss of ethnic identity allowed these groups to…

  • Four years later, Barack Obama still a mystery in some ways The Dallas Morning News 2012-09-01 From staff and wire reports File: The welcome in Austin in 2007 was warm and Texan for presidential candidate Barack Obama. Still somewhat unknown Even after four years as president, Barack Hussein Obama remains unknown in some ways. He…

  • Latin America and mixed heritage The Prisma: The Multicultural Newspaper Westwood Hill, London, United Kingdom 2012-08-27 Claudio Chipana (Translated by Viv Griffiths) “…we are neither Indian, nor European, but a species lying somewhere in between the legitimate owners of the land and the Spanish usurpers…” Simon Bolivar (Letter from Jamaica). People of mixed heritage, mestizos,…

  • Roots: Saint Lucia’s Hindu Legacy Hinduism Today October/November/December 2012 Gajanan Nataraj Saint Lucia I am a Saint Lucian citizen. I was born in the US Virgin Islands and lived briefly on the mainland (USA), but for the better part of 23 years I was raised on the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia. I am roughly two-quarters…

  • Latinos may get own race category on census form The Seattle Times 2012-08-30 Lornet Turnbull, Staff Reporter Under proposed changes under consideration by the Census Bureau in its once-a-decade census forms, Latino and Hispanic would be added to the list of government-defined races, rather than being listed separately as an ethnicity. And people from the…

  • In 1976, Kentucky state legislator Mae Street Kidd successfully sponsored a resolution ratifying the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution. It was fitting that a black woman should initiate the state’s formal repudiation of slavery; that it was Mrs. Kidd was all the more appropriate.

  • Neville’s and Cook’s solution to the half-caste problem was biological absorption, colloquially called ‘breeding out the colour’. This entailed directing persons of mixed descent into marital unions with white people, so that after several generations of interbreeding all outward signs of Aboriginal ancestry would disappear. It held an incongruent array of aims and means. Absorption…

  • Strangers in Blood: Relocating Race in the Renaissance University of Toronto Press October 2010 272 pages Cloth ISBN: 9781442641402 eBook ISBN: ISBN 9781442660083 Jean E. Feerick, Assistant Professor of English Brown University Strangers in Blood explores, in a range of early modern literature, the association between migration to foreign lands and the moral and physical…

  • Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America (review) Shakespeare Quarterly Volume 63, Number 2 (Summer 2012) pages 244-246 DOI: 10.1353/shq.2012.0017 Virginia Mason Vaughan, Professor of English Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts If you teach Shakespeare’s plays at an American university, college, or secondary school (as I do), and if you’ve ever felt a disconnect between what…

  • Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America Oxford University Press April 2011 240 pages Hardback ISBN13: 9780195385854; ISBN10: 0195385853 Ayanna Thompson, Professor of English Arizona State University Notions, constructions, and performances of race continue to define the contemporary American experience, including America’s relationship to Shakespeare. In Passing Strange, Ayanna Thompson explores the myriad ways U.S.…