Mixed Race Studies

The Strategies of Forbidden Love: Family across Racial Boundaries in Nineteenth-Century North Carolina

Journal of Social History
Volume 47, Issue 3 (Spring 2014)
pages 612-626
DOI: 10.1093/jsh/sht112

Warren E. Milteer Jr.

This article contends that although local beliefs and legal edicts attempted to discourage sexual and familial relationships between women of color and white men in North Carolina, free women of mixed ancestry and white men developed relationships that mimicked legally-sanctioned marriages. These unions often produced children who maintained frequent interaction with both parents. In nineteenth-century Hertford County, North Carolina, free women of mixed ancestry and their white partners developed creative strategies to deal with the legal limitations inherent in their situation. Women and men in these relationships found ways to secure property rights for women and children and developed methods to prevent legal scrutiny of their living arrangements.

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News Nation with Tamron Hall (with guest Yaba Blay)

News Nation with Tamron Hall
2014-02-25

Drexel University Professor Yaba Blay discusses her new book (1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race with host Tamron Hall.

Watch the interview here.

President Obama calls for minority youth outreach programme

BBC News
2014-02-27

US President Barack Obama has called for a national campaign to improve opportunities for black and Hispanic boys and young men.

Called My Brother’s Keeper, his new initiative aims to overcome the socioeconomic conditions keeping such youth from thriving.

The White House said businesses had pledged $150m (£89m) to promote it.

The president said it was an “outrage” that black and Hispanic men in the US fared so much worse than white men.

“I believe the continuing struggles of so many boys and young men – the fact that too many of them are falling by the wayside, dropping out, unemployed, involved in negative behaviour, going to jail, being profiled – this is a moral issue for our country,” Mr Obama said at the White House on Thursday, with more than a dozen black and Hispanic young men and boys standing behind him.

“It’s also an economic issue for our country.”

In a memorandum released on Thursday, the White House said the task force would focus on issues facing boys and young minority men under the age of 25.

Obama’s ‘bad choices’

America’s first black president has generally avoided policies defined by race, the BBC’s Beth McLeod reports from Washington DC, but in an emotional speech Mr Obama said it was an outrage that young Hispanic and African-American men have the odds stacked against them in US society…

…He spoke of visiting a school near his home in Chicago and sharing with the boys there his own experience of growing up without a father, acknowledging to them that he had been angry about that and had made “bad choices” and “got high without always thinking about the harm that it could do”.

“I could see myself in these young men,” Mr Obama told the audience at the White House. “And the only difference is that I grew up in an environment that was a little bit more forgiving, so when I made a mistake the consequences were not as severe.”…

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Dynamic representations of race: processing goals shape race decoding in the fusiform gyri

Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
Volume 9 Issue 3 (March 2014)
pages 326-332
DOI: 10.1093/scan/nss138

Christian Kaul
Department of Psychology and Center for Neural Science
New York University

Kyle G. Ratner
Department of Psychology
New York University

Jay J. Van Bavel, Assistant Professor of Social Psychology
New York University

People perceive and evaluate others on the basis of social categories, such as race, gender and age. Initial processing of targets in terms of visually salient social categories is often characterized as inevitable. In the current study, we investigated the influence of processing goals on the representation of race in the visual processing stream. Participants were assigned to one of two mixed-race teams and categorized faces according to their group membership or skin color. To assess neural representations of race, we employed multivariate pattern analysis to examined neural activity related to the presentation of Black and White faces. As predicted, patterns of neural activity within the early visual cortex and fusiform gyri (FG) could decode the race of face stimuli above chance and were moderated by processing goals. Race decoding in early visual cortex was above chance in both categorization tasks and below chance in a prefrontal control region. More importantly, race decoding was greater in the FG during the group membership vs skin color categorization task. The results suggest that, ironically, explicit racial categorization can diminish the representation of race in the FG. These findings suggest that representations of race are dynamic, reflecting current processing goals.

Read or purchase the article here.