Mixed Race Studies

Advancing Health Through A Racial Lens: The New Biopolitics of Race, Health, and Justice

University of Maryland, College Park
Stamp Student Union
Banneker Room 2212
Thursday, 2014-02-20, 12:30-15:00 EST (Local Time)

Moderated by:

Dorothy Roberts J.D., Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology, and the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania

Dorothy Roberts holds appointments in the Law School and Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology. An internationally recognized scholar, public intellectual, and social justice advocate, she has written and lectured extensively on the interplay of gender, race, and class in legal issues and has been a leader in transforming public thinking and policy on reproductive health, child welfare, and bioethics. Professor Roberts is author of Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (1997); Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (2002); and Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (2011). Among her many public interest activities, Roberts serves as chair of the board of directors of the Black Women’s Health Imperative.

Distinguished University of Maryland Panelists:

“Racial Coping in African American Mothers & Adolescents”
Mia A. Smith Bynum, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Family Science

“Treating Difference: Race, Risk, and the Politics of HIV/AIDs Prevention”
Thurka Sangaramoorthy, Ph.D., MPH, Assistant Professor of Anthropology

“Addressing Racial Disparities in Cardiovascular Disease: Directions for the Patient Protection and Affordability Care Act”
Gneisha Y. Dinwiddie, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of African American Studies

For more information, click here or here.

Mixed Roots Stories~ What’s Yours?

Mixed Race Radio
Blog Talk Radio
2014-02-19, 17:00Z (12:00 EDT)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

Join us today as we meet the visionaries behind Mixed Roots Stories: Chandra Crudup, Mark Edwards and our very own, Fanshen Cox. Mixed Roots Stories (MXRS) is a new resource for teaching and learning about the Mixed Experience and is a creative and dynamic online and physical California Not-For-Profit dedicated to promoting artists and stories of all kinds that address Mixed experiences. “We are an interactive community, so input and collaboration with others is essential to our mission of Celebrating and Strengthening Diverse Mixed Communities through the Power of Sharing Stories.”

AND THIS IS WHERE YOU COME IN:

There are a number of collaborative opportunities:

• YOU CAN Promote story ideas on the Mixed Roots Stories website
• YOU CAN Partner to plan and implement an event (for example MXRS is partnering with the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference in bringing arts and cultural programming to the 2014 conference)
• YOU CAN Share the MXRS podcast
• YOU CAN Participate in the selection of the Mixed Roots Stories logo

PLEASE CALL IN TO SHARE YOUR MIXED ROOTS STORY.

Mixed Roots Stories’ very own: Chandra, Mark and Fanshen will join us to take your calls and tell us all about this amazing new resource.

WON’T YOU JOIN US?

Color Without Complex: A Conversation w/ Michaela Angela Davis & Dr. Yaba Blay

New York University, Washington, D.C.
Abramson Family Auditorium
1307 L Street, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20005
Tuesday, 2014-02-18, 18:30 EST (Local Time)

Michaela Angela Davis

Yaba Blay, Ph.D., Professor of Africana Studies and Women’s & Gender Studies
Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

What exactly is Blackness? What does it mean to be Black? Is Blackness a matter of biology or consciousness? Who determines who is Black and who is not? Who’s Black, who’s not, and who cares? This discussion seeks to challenge narrow perceptions of Blackness as both an identity and lived reality.

Video streaming by Ustream

For more information, contact: NYU Washington DC Events at nyuwashingtondcevents@nyu.edu or 202-654-8300.

Continuous Frieze Bordering Red

Fordham University Press
April 2012
78 pages
8 1/2 x 8 1/2
Hardcover ISBN: 9780823243044
Paperback ISBN: 9780823243051

Michelle Naka Pierce, Associate Professor
Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics
Naropa University, Boulder, Colorado

Continuous Frieze Bordering Red documents the migratory patterns of an Other, as she travels between countries, languages, seasons, and shifting identities. A narrative on hybridity, the text explores [dis]location as a cultural swerve while it interrogates Rothko’s red: his bricked-in, water-damaged windows [floating borders], which reflect unstable cultural borders to the hybrid. A person of mixed race [hybrid, mongrel, mutt] traverses these “invisible” cultural borders repeatedly. Border identity comes with flux, instability, and vibrational pulls. An Other is marked as someone who does not belong. She is always a foreigner: when traveling and when at “home.” She is cast aside, bracketed from the dominant culture. She is [neither][nor][both]. She exists in a liminal space: in place and displaced simultaneously. That is, her identity and body are peripatetic, which is reflected in the continuous horizontal frieze. The reader must literally cross the borders of each page in order to navigate each line of text, leaving the reader in constant motion as well. The poem also functions as an ekphrasis of Rothko’s Seagram murals: Rothko writes that the paintings make the observers “feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up.” The hybrid is confined and isolated. Even though the Other is estranged from herself and desires a sense of cultural belonging, she ultimately wants to “acknowledge this scar tissue and proceed” so that she is not held to false measures of “purity.” Continuous Frieze Bordering Red attempts to move away from pejorative definitions of “hybrid” and embrace the monstrous self.

A Breezy Chameleon, Blurring Social Borders

The New York Times
2014-02-16

Jennifer Schuessler, Staff Editor

When the literary scholar George Hutchinson was in the archives at Howard University one afternoon a decade ago, he thought he knew which story of a neglected African-American woman writer he was chasing.

He was at work on a biography of Nella Larsen, whose classic Harlem Renaissance novel “Passing” was rediscovered in the 1970s. But while poking around, Mr. Hutchinson noticed a listing for the papers of Anita Thompson Dickinson Reynolds, an obscure contemporary of Larsen’s, and decided to take a look.

There, amid a jumble of letters and cassette tapes, lay an unpublished memoir breezily recounting the Zelig-like adventures of a woman who had starred in some of the first black films made in Hollywood, mingled with the Harlem Renaissance elite, been drawn by Man Ray and Matisse in Paris and touched down in Spain during its Civil War, before packing up her Chanel dresses and heading home to a more conventional life as a psychologist.

It was a story of passing stranger than anything Larsen had imagined, recounted with uncommon sexual frankness and blithe disregard for racial barriers. “I was fascinated by the way she threaded together all these different worlds, with this total nonchalance,” Mr. Hutchinson said in a recent interview. “I had never read anything like it.”

Previously, Reynolds’s name had survived mainly in a few scattered footnotes. But now, Harvard University Press is publishing her memoir, as “American Cocktail: A ‘Colored Girl’ in the World.”…

Read the entire book review here.

Who Gets to Be A POC?: Self-Identifying & Privilege

Mixed Dreams: towards a radical multiracial/ethnic movement
2014-02-09

Nicole Nfonoyim de Hara

This post is in response to a great question a friend asked about how the wonderful new book (1)ne Drop:Shifting the Lens on Race by Dr. Yaba Blay and Noelle Théard, featuring portraits of individuals who identify as “Black” speaks to an article entitled “4 Ways to Push Back on Your Privilege” by one of my favorite bloggers, Mia McKenzie (aka Black Girl Dangerous). Many portraits in (1)ne Drop may raise a few eyebrows. Take the portrait of ‘Zun Lee‘ on the right. He says:

“When I applied to grad school or for jobs, all of a sudden the boxes come up. I had to make a choice, so for the first time, I checked ‘Black.’ And I didn’t think long about it because for me, it was based on personal circumstance. I just chose the box that I felt most at home with because I didn’t relate to any of the other options. From then on, if I were asked, I would answer, ‘I’m Black.’ Of course, people told me I couldn’t do that — that I couldn’t choose that box. But I had spent all of my life being pushed away by people. In Germany, I wasn’t even given the option to check anything because I wasn’t welcomed there. I had no box. For the first time, I was being given the option to identify myself. Now I had a box, and I was happy in that little box.”

Is it okay for Zun Lee to identify as black? He doesn’t self-identify in his quote as “Asian.” Should we, the viewers and readers see him and insist that he must be “Asian” or at the very least “not black?”…

Read the entire article here.

Obama and the Oscars: Lights, Camera, Nationalism! A Symposium About The “Obama Effect” On Film Culture

DePaul University
Richardson Library
Rosati Room 300
2350 North Kenmore Avenue
Chicago, Illinois
Friday, 2014-02-28, 16:00-19:00 CST (Local Time)

Moderated by:

Daniel McNeil, Ida B. Wells-Barnett Professor of African and Black Diaspora Studies
DePaul University

Speakers:

George Elliott Clarke, Associate Professor of English
University of Toronto and Harvard University

Jasmine Nichole Cobb, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies
Northwestern University

Charles Coleman, Film Programmer
Facets Cinémathèque, Chicago, Illinois

Armond White, Editor and Film Critic
City Arts, New York, New York

During the run up to the 2014 Oscars, film producers and executives have claimed that the election and re-election of President Barack Obama has erased racial lines and created a better country. They have also linked the ‘Obama effect’ to a spate of daring films about slavery and racial discrimination in the American past. This symposium brings together leading academics, critics, and film programmers to discuss the production, distribution and marketing of films in the age of Obama, as well as the ways in which Oscar-nominated films address the history of America and the Atlantic world.

Free and open to the public.

Walking Down The Widening Aisle Of Interracial Marriages

Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity
Weekend Edition Saturday
National Public Radio
2014-02-15

Hansi Lo Wang

Editor’s Note: Code Switch has been engaged in a month-long exploration of romance across racial and cultural lines. Follow the Twitter conversation via the hashtag #xculturelove.

The numbers are small but growing.

More than 5.3 million marriages in the U.S. are between husbands and wives of different races or ethnicities. According to the 2010 Census, they make up one in 10 marriages between opposite-sex couples, marking a 28-percent increase since 2000…

Listen to the story here. Download the audio here. Read the transcript here.

Who intermarries in Britain? Explaining ethnic diversity in intermarriage patterns

The British Journal of Sociology
Volume 61, Issue 2 (June 2010)
pages 275–305
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-4446.2010.01313.x

Raya Muttarak, Visiting Fellow
Department of Political and Social Sciences
European University Institute

Anthony Heath, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Emeritus Fellow of Nuffield College
University of Oxford

This paper investigates trends, patterns and determinants of intermarriage (and partnership) comparing patterns among men and women and among different ethnic groups in Britain. We distinguish between endogamous (co-ethnic), majority/minority and minority/minority marriages. Hypotheses are derived from the theoretical literatures on assimilation, segmented assimilation and opportunity structures. The empirical analysis is based on the 1988–2006 General Household Surveys (N = 115,494). Consistent with assimilation theory we find that, for all ethnic minority groups, the propensity to intermarry is higher in the second generation than in the first. Consistent with ideas drawn from segmented assimilation theory, we also find that substantial differences in propensity to form majority/minority marriages persist after controls for individual characteristics such as age, educational level, generation and length of residence in Britain, with men and women of Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi background having higher propensities to form endogamous partnerships. However, we also find that opportunity structures affect intermarriage propensities for all groups alike, with individuals in more diverse residential areas (as measured by the ratio of majority to minority residents in the area) having higher likelihood to form majority/minority partnerships. We conclude then that, beginning from very different starting points, all groups, both minority and the majority groups exhibit common patterns of generational change and response to opportunity structures. Even the groups that are believed to have the strongest community structures and the strongest norms supporting endogamy appear to be experiencing increasing exogamy in the second generation and in more diverse residential settings. This suggests that a weak rather than a strong version of segmented assimilation provides the best account of British patterns.

Read or purchase the article here.

Breath of Freedom

The Smithsonian Channel
Premieres Monday, 2014-02-17 20:00 EST

Narrated by Cuba Gooding Jr.

They fought to liberate Germany from Nazi rule, as racism reached unfathomable levels. Their fight would continue back home on American soil. This is the story of the one-million-plus African Americans who fought in World War II. Discover their encounters with hatred, from the enemy and from within their own ranks. Explore this paradoxical chapter in American history through interviews with war heroes, including Colin Powell, Tuskegee ace pilot Roscoe Brown, and Charles Evers, brother of Civil Rights activist and WWII veteran Medgar Evers. [The documentary also features Theodor Michael, author of Deutsch sein und schwarz dazu: Erinnerungen eines Afro-Deutschen [Being German and also Being Black: Memoirs of an Afro-German].]

Watch the exclusive premiere here.