Month: April 2013

  • “One-Drop: Fact, Fiction, or Fate?” by Dr. Yaba Blay, April 13th at 7pm in Stirn Auditorium Amherst College Stirn Auditorium, Mead Art Museum Amherst, Massachusetts Saturday, 2013-04-13, 19:00 EDT (Local Time) What exactly is Blackness and what does it mean to be Black? Is Blackness a matter of biology or consciousness? Who determines who is…

  • Racialisation in Brazil [Karina Round] Mapping Global Racisms Project (2012- ) University of Leeds Working Papers 10 pages Karina Round This paper is going to explore the processes of racialisation in Brazil, a country were race is supposed to be irrelevant. Racialisation is the dynamic and complex process through which racial categories, concepts and divisions…

  • DNA Ancestry Tests: Simultaneously Powerful and Limited KQED QUEST KQED: Public Media for Northern California 2013-04-08 Dr. Barry Starr, Geneticist-in-Residence Tech Museum of Innovation, San Jose, California Using a common DNA ancestry test, President Obama would be 100% Caucasian. Sometimes genetic tests aren’t as useful as you think they will be. For example, if President…

  • Early America was far more ethnically and racially complex than we have been taught. Some whites were not northern European, some blacks were not sub-Saharan African, and some Indians and some mulattos were not Indians and mulattos… We Melungeons and, indeed, other mixed groups have irrefutable ties not only to northern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, and…

  • Racially, I’m an African-Native American.  Culturally, I’m an aspiring Seminole Maroon descendant. But to the people of America who see me on the street, I’m just another flavor of Black. Phil Wilkes Fixico, “Episode 225 – Phil Wilkes Fixico,” Mixed Chicks Chat, September 14, 2011. (00:09:12-00:09:28). http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-34257/TS-504952.mp3.

  • The peoples of Europe are of such mongrel origin that any attempt at classification according to only two characteristics (colour of eyes and hair) would exclude two-thirds of the population in any region studied; the addition of a third characteristic (cranial formation) would leave us with a still smaller fraction of the population presenting the…

  • W.Va. historian to talk on pre-Civil War slave economy The Charleston Gazette Charleston, West Virginia 2013-04-09 Douglas Imbrogno CHARLESTON, W.Va.—Ending slavery was a moral question that haunted early American history, but it was one inextricably tangled up in economics. While West Virginia was a state born in 1863 out of the tumult over slavery and…

  • Human miscegenation has been and is the subject of infinite debate. Opinions on the subject are conditioned by the views of the disputants on race and racial differences, the opponents of miscegenation starting from the assumption of racial inequality, whereas its defenders take the view that the differences between human groups are not such as…

  • The Politics of “Passing”: American Indians and Racial “Passing” University of Arizona 2004 80 pages Veronica R. Hirsch Introduction How is the racial “passing” behavioral concept applicable to American Indians, and what political forces created the socio-cultural circumstances that prompted this behavior? Beyond these immediate, sociologically-focused questions, what generational impacts does racial “passing” have upon…

  • Race is a true lie and a social construction. The meaning of race, and how different people are located within its shifting boundaries and categories, is a function of the politics of the moment, and the type of “social work” that race does in a given society. Chauncey DeVega, “He Really Just Wants to be…