Mixed Race Studies

De Blasio Is Elected New York City Mayor

The New York Times
2013-11-05

Michael Barbaro

David W. Chen, City Hall Bureau Chief

Bill de Blasio hugged his son, Dante, at an election night party on Tuesday. Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Bill de Blasio, who transformed himself from a little-known occupant of an obscure office into the fiery voice of New York’s disillusionment with a new gilded age, was elected the city’s 109th mayor on Tuesday..

His overwhelming victory, stretching from the working-class precincts of central Brooklyn to the suburban streets of northwest Queens, amounted to a forceful rejection of the hard-nosed, business-minded style of governance that reigned at City Hall for the past two decades and a sharp leftward turn for the nation’s largest metropolis.

Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat who is the city’s public advocate, defeated his Republican opponent, Joseph J. Lhota, a former chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

It was the most sweeping victory in a mayor’s race since 1985, when Edward I. Koch won by 68 points, and it gave Mr. de Blasio what he said was an unmistakable mandate to pursue his liberal agenda….

…To an unusual degree, he relied on his own biracial family to connect with an increasingly diverse electorate, electrifying voters with a television commercial featuring his charismatic teenage son, Dante, who has a towering Afro…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed race families are becoming more common in advertising

The Oklahoma Daily
University of Oklahoma
Norman, Oklahoma
2013-11-04

The Editorial Board

If an artist was assigned to paint a portrait of the average American family 75 years ago, odds are, he or she would paint a family of one race — typically either white parents with white children or black parents with black children.

Today, however, families are more diverse than ever, and this is a good thing for our country. As our nation progresses toward equality for everyone, regardless of sexuality or race, families are looking a lot more colorful than they used to.

Marriages between spouses of a different race or ethnicity from each other increased to 15.1 percent in 2010, according to a Pew Research report. In that same year, the report states interracial or interethnic marriages in America reached an all-time high of 8.4 percent. If that was in 2010, imagine how many more interracial couples there are today.

The increase in mixed families clearly demonstrates the historical barriers of segregation are crumbling down, but while much of the U.S. is making headway, some Americans are still lagging behind the times, letting their actions and words showcase their ignorant social morality…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

79-173 Freshman Seminar: Barack Obama and the History of Race in America

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Department of History
2013-2014

Well before he was elected the forty-fourth President of the United States, Barack Obama challenged Americans to think anew about the history of race in this country. In this course, we will examine President Obama’s life, writings, and speeches as the foundation for a larger investigation into the history of race and, in particular, the struggle to achieve racial equality within the United States. We will read President Obama’s first biography and several of his key speeches as well as a recent history of the Civil Rights Movement. Our goal will be not only to probe the life and ideas of President Obama but to examine the larger history of race in America. Topics will include the geographic and temporal diversity of the Civil Rights Movement, the shifting meanings of “mixed-race,” race and American foreign policy, the history of racial inequality in housing, education, and employment, affirmative action, and race and immigration.

Trayvon, Postblackness, and the Postrace Dilemma

boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture
Volume 40, Number 3 (Fall 2013)
pages 139-161
DOI: 10.1215/01903659-2367072

Richard Purcell, Assistant Professor of English
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

If President Barack Obama crystallizes the intersection of postrace and postblack idealism, nothing has exposed the fraught relationship between the two than the shooting death of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin on February 26, 2012. What Trayvon Martin’s death has brought to the fore is what contemporary intellectuals are attempting to think when they think postblackness and, for that matter, postrace. What way of understanding race knowledge in our present does postblackness offer us, especially in a postrace era? The answer: both blindness and insight. Through a meditation on the relationship between Trayvon Martin, postrace, and postblackness, this essay aims to demonstrate this blindness and insight. On the one hand, postblackness has the potential to provide a bulwark against the persistent biologisms in contemporary race thinking. Yet, it is also used in our postrace era as a term to indulge in a weaker mode of criticism: debunking—a critical posture that has allowed critics to ignore and even circulate more insidious forms of race thinking.

Read or purchase the article here.