Mixed Race Studies

New Book on Racial Identity by Dr. Yaba Blay to be Released on Black Friday with Launch Party at the Painted Bride

Drexel Now
Drexel University
2013-11-04

News Media Contact: Alex McKechnie, News Officer, University Communications
Phone: 215-895-2705; Mobile: 401-651-7550

On Black Friday, Nov. 29, a new book on racial identity by Drexel University’s Dr. Yaba Blay, one of today’s leading voices on colorism and global skin color politics, will be released from Blay’s recently launched independent press, Black Print Press.

To celebrate the release, a launch party will take place at The Painted Bride Art Center (230 Vine St.) on Nov. 29 from 6 p.m. – 9 p.m. A concurrent photography exhibition is currently on display at The Painted Bride through Dec. 21.

The book, entitled (1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race, seeks to challenge narrow perceptions of what Blackness is and what it looks like. By combining candid narratives and photos from 60 contributors hailing from 25 different countries, the book provides a living testimony to the diversity of Blackness. It is intended to spark dialogue about the intricacies and nuances of racial identity and the influence of skin color politics…

Read the entire press release here.

Diverse Neighborhood Has Mixed Enthusiasm About New York City Mayor’s Race

The New York Times
2013-11-03

Cara Buckley

The last presidential candidate Steve Waldman voted for was Hubert H. Humphrey. The last mayor he cast a ballot for was Edward I. Koch. And he’ll be darned if he is going to break his nonvoting streak by partaking in the mayoral election on Tuesday.

The Republican candidate, Joseph J. Lhota, reminds him too much of Rudolph W. Giuliani, of whom he takes a dim view. The Democratic candidate, Bill de Blasio, strikes him as likely to help people who abuse welfare. Mr. Waldman, a 65-year-old computer supplier, sees the city is on a reverse Robin Hood course — with parking fines, bridge tolls and assorted high taxes — and extracting more dollars from people like him…

…With New York City on the verge of electing a new mayor for the first time in 12 years, the people of Sheepshead Bay, with its mosaic of Russians, Irish, Italians and Jews, have views on the city’s prospects that are as diverse as their neighborhood. The community can at times seem ethnically segmented, but the four-decade-old El Greco serves as an enduring melting pot, and draws hordes of local residents by the boothful each weekend…

…Ms. McField, who works as an accountant for the Administration for Children’s Services, said she yearned for an end to the Police Department’s controversial stop-and-frisk tactics that Mr. de Blasio has vowed to change. Ms. McField said that many of her family members had been harassed by the police, including her husband, John McField, 36, a former corrections officer who recently returned from serving as an Army specialist in Afghanistan.

“Being black in New York, we see a lot of things that other people don’t see,” Ms. McField said as her family tucked into brunch. “It’s emotional for me,” she added, her eyes welling, “It’s targeting.”…

…Yet Luchia Larrazabal, a caregiver who was eating with her daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren, said she pinned her hopes on Mr. de Blasio to help bridge one of the city’s enduring issues — racial schisms. After all, he is white, his wife is black and their two children are biracial.

“Because of the mixed race,” Ms. Larrazabal said, “I look forward to him uniting everyone.”

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial America Makes Census Boxes Obsolete

The Root
2013-11-04

Keli Goff

As the nation becomes more multiracial, some question whether the survey can accurately reflect the country’s true diversity.

Editor’s note: This is the first of three in a series.

(The Root) — In 30 years, America will look very different than it does now. According to analysis of census data, by 2043 white Americans will no longer be a majority. But an equally significant population milestone will arrive in 2020. That is the year in which the next census takes place, and it will be the first one tasked with successfully chronicling the most racially and culturally mixed population in American history.

Governing the nation at the very time the census is grappling with this issue is the country’s first biracial president. Though President Obama has said he identifies as black on the census, there is a growing population of people who may share a similar background but do not wish to identify as he has chosen to. Helping to ensure that these Americans are adequately and accurately counted through his administration’s efforts to perfect a modern census could end up being a significant part of the Obama legacy.

Multiracial Americans are the fastest growing demographic in the country, yet the U.S. Census Bureau has struggled with how to effectively capture the changing racial makeup of America. In his new book What Is Your Race: The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans, Kenneth Prewitt takes the census to task for its many shortcomings when it comes to painting an accurate portrait of America’s racial and cultural landscape. Prewitt, though, is not just any run-of-the-mill critic. He is a former director of the U.S. Census Bureau, where he served from 1998 to 2001.

In an interview with The Root, Prewitt explained that America is unique in its racial categorization and its reasons for categorizing. “We decided why we wanted racial statistics and the purpose of them, and then designed statistics to accomplish those purposes.”…

Read the entire article here.

Blood: The Stuff of Life [Lecture]

The CBC Massey Lectures
CBC Radio-Canada
2013-11-04, 19:00Z (14:00 EST)

Blood is a bold and enduring determinant of identity, race, gender, citizenship and belonging. But should it be? In this visual narrative based on excerpts from the 2013 Massey Lectures, Lawrence Hill explores the scientific and social history of blood, and the ways that it unites and divides us today.

Is Race a Fiction? is a live video stream and chat with author Lawrence Hill, host Paul Kennedy and guests as they examine the ties between blood and culture, nation state and racial identity. This discussion is based Lawrence Hill’s new book Blood:The Stuff of Life where Hill touches on his personal history and the history of race within Canada and internationally.

Panel participants include:

• Lawrence Hill: Blood: The Stuff of Life is Lawrence Hill’s ninth book. His earlier works include the novels Some Great Thing and, and the memoir Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada.
• Hayden King is an Anishinaabe writer, student, teacher, researcher at Ryerson University, McMaster University and Beausoleil First Nation.
• Priscila Uppal is a poet, novelist, playwright and York University Professor in the Department of English.
• Karina Vernon is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto and co-founder and editor of Commodore Books, the first black literary press in western Canada.

For more information, click here.

Mirror, Mirror – Who Is that Woman on TV?

Inter Press Service News Agency
2013-10-21

Fabiana Frayssinet

RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 21 2013 (IPS) – Carla Vilas Boas is of mixed-race descent – African, European and indigenous – like a majority of the population of Brazil. But she spends hours straightening her hair, trying to look more like the blond, blue-eyed women she sees in the mirror of television.

The 32-year-old domestic worker acknowledges that Brazil’s popular telenovelas have started to include characters like her – people from the country’s favelas or shantytowns, who work long workdays for low wages.

But among the actors and the models shown in ads, “there are only a few darker-skinned people among all the blue-eyed blonds. And you wonder: if I buy that shampoo and go to the hairdresser, can I look like that?” she remarked to IPS.

But her hair “never looks that way,” even with the new shampoo or the visit to the hairstylist, and Vilas Boas said that makes her feel “really bad.”

More than half of the women in this country of 200 million people – where over 50 percent of the population identified themselves as black or “mulatto” in the last census – do not identify with the images they see on TV.

Experts say that because of the prejudices reflected in the choice of actors and models, advertisers potentially lose a large segment of consumers…

Read the entire article here.

Written records agree with Melungeon DNA results

Jack Goins’ Melungeon and Appalachian Research
October 2013

William E. Cole
University of Tennessee

Joe Stevenson Looney
University of Tennessee

Written records agree with Core Melungeon DNA Results. The Core Melungeon DNA Project was formed with Family Tree DNA on July 25, 2005. The goal of the project was to determine the origin of the Melungeons and to find matches in the data base. Our project results were submitted to a peer review board and published April 24, 2012 in the Journal of Genetic Genealogy and published by Associated Press reporter Travis Loller in May 2012, the results of the first generation are offspring of Sub-Saharan African men and white women of Northern and central European origin. http://www.jogg.info/72/files/Estes.pdf.

The majority of the male core groups were haplogroup E1b1a Sub-Saharan African and the maternal mtDNA group was European. The first mixed generation was the children from Sub-Saharan African men and white women of Northern and central European origin, the exact date of this mixing is unknown. Some from this first mixed generation eventually intermarried with white settlers in colonial Virginia and took their names. Part of this tri-racial clan may have remained in Colonial Virginia and others migrated to North Carolina who would eventually become known as Melungeons (Calloway Collins told Will Allen Dromgoole the Collins and Gibsons, had stolen those names from white settlers in Virginia where they were living as Indians, before migrating to North Carolina”). Calloway Collins was a great grandson of Benjamin whose origin was African and we also know all Africans took English surnames, even the ones who became slaves…

Read the entire article here.

Blood: The Stuff of Life

House of Anansi Press
2013-10-26
272 pages
5 x 8
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-77089-322-1
eBook ISBN: 978-1-77089-324-5

Lawrence Hill

In this year’s CBC Massey Lectures, bestselling author Lawrence Hill offers a provocative examination of the scientific and social history of blood, and on the ways that it unites and divides us today.

Blood runs red through every person’s arteries and fulfills the same functions in every human being. The study of blood has advanced our understanding of biology and improved medical treatments, but its cultural and social representations have divided us perennially. Blood pulses through religion, literature, and the visual arts. Every time it pools or spills, we learn a little more about what brings human beings together and what pulls us apart. For centuries, perceptions of difference in our blood have separated people on the basis of gender, race, class, and nation. Ideas about blood purity have spawned rules about who gets to belong to a family or cultural group, who enjoys the rights of citizenship and nationality, what privileges one can expect to be granted or denied, whether you inherit poverty or the right to rule over the masses, what constitutes fair play in sport, and what defines a person’s identity.

Blood: The Stuff of Life is a bold meditation on blood as an historical and contemporary marker of identity, belonging, gender, race, class, citizenship, athletic superiority, and nationhood.

Racial Democracy: The Sociological History of a Concept

Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies
Lemann Institute for Brazilian Studies
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
2013-02-15

Antonio Sergio Guimarães, Professor of Sociology
Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil

I will examine the coining, the uses, and meanings of the expression “racial democracy” from the 1930’s onwards including its transformation into an ideal for interracial cohabitation and of political inclusion of Blacks in postwar Brazilian modernity. It will also examine the refusal of the expression by the Black activists of the MNU (Movimento Negro Unificado) in the 1970s and their denunciation of its mythical character, as well as its current uses by anthropologists and sociologists engaged in the critique of identity politics.

Biologically speaking, there’s no such thing as race. As hard as they’ve tried, scientists have never been able to define it. That’s because race is a human creation, not a fact of nature. Like money, it only exists because people accept it as “real.” Races exist because humans invented them.

Why would people invent race? Race was created in America in the late 1600s in order to preserve the land and power of the wealthy. Rich planters in Virginia feared what might happen if indigenous tribes, slaves, and indentured servants united and overthrew them. So, they cut a deal with the poor English colonists. The planters gave the English poor certain rights and privileges denied to all persons of African and Native American descent: the right to never be enslaved, to free speech and assembly, to move about without a pass, to marry without upper-class permission, to change jobs, to acquire property, and to bear arms. In exchange, the English poor agreed to respect the property of the rich, help them seize indigenous lands, and enforce slavery.

This cross-class alliance between the rich and the English poor came to be known as the “white race.” By accepting preferential treatment in an economic system that exploited their labor, too, the white working class tied their wagon to the elite rather than the rest of humanity. This devil’s bargain has undermined freedom and democracy in the U.S. ever since.

Joel Olson, “Whiteness and the 99%,” Bring the Ruckus. (October 20, 2011). http://www.bringtheruckus.org/?q=node%2F146.

Imagining Caribbean Womanhood: Race, Nation and Beauty Competitions, 1929–70

Manchester University Press
October 2013
192 pages
216 x 138 mm
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-7190-8867-4

Rochelle Rowe
University of Exeter

Over fifty years after Jamaican and Trinidadian independence, Imagining Caribbean Womanhood examines the links between beauty and politics in the Anglophone Caribbean, providing a first cultural history of Caribbean beauty competitions, spanning from Kingston to London. It traces the origins and transformation of female beauty contests in the British Caribbean from 1929 to 1970, through the development of cultural nationalism, race-conscious politics and decolonisation.

The beauty contest, a seemingly marginal phenomenon, is used to illuminate the persistence of racial supremacy, the advance of consumer culture and the negotiation of race and nation through the idealised performance of cultured, modern beauty. Modern Caribbean femininity was intended to be politically functional but also commercially viable and subtly eroticised. The lively discussion surrounding beauty competitions, examined in this book, reveals that femininity was used to shape ideas about Caribbean modernity, citizenship, and political and economic freedom. This cultural history of Caribbean beauty competitions will be of value to scholarship on beauty, Caribbean studies, postcolonial studies, gender studies, ‘race’ and racism studies and studies of the body.

Contents

• Introduction: Caribbean beauty competitions in context
• 1. The early ‘Miss Jamaica’ competition: cultural revolution and feminist voices, 1929–1950
• 2. Cleaning up carnival: race, culture and power in the Trinidad ‘Carnival Queen’ beauty competition, 1946–1959
• 3. Parading the ‘crème de la crème’: constructing the contest in Barbados, 1958–1966
• 4. Fashioning ‘Ebony Cinderellas’ and brown icons: Jamaican beauty competitions and the myth of racial democracy, 1955–1964
• 5. ‘Colonisation in reverse’: Claudia Jones, the West Indian Gazette and the ‘Carnival Queen’ contest in London, 1959–1964
• Afterword: a Grenadian ‘Miss World’, 1970
• Bibliography
• Index