Mixed Race Studies

‘One Drop of Love’ star Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni talks race, family and more

The Tampa Bay Times
St. Petersburg, Florida
2014-11-05

Robbyn Mitchell, Times Staff Writer

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni: “Race is like a religion to us.”

It’s been an interesting year in race relations for America. In just over 10 months, there have been communities violently protesting loss of due process, NBA owners losing their teams over racist remarks and anti-immigration zealots blockading school buses full of brown children because they were presumed to be foreign.

It’s a climate — not of change, as was promised by the election of President Barack Obama, but of an overwhelming dedication to fight change.

“People believe in race so strongly they’re faithful to it. Race is like a religion to us,” said Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni, writer and performer of One Drop of Love, a one-woman multimedia show coming to the Straz Center for the Performing Arts Saturday night.

As a woman with parents who identify themselves as different races — her father is black and her mother is white — Cox DiGiovanni says she has the had the privilege to move between two different spheres of American society and decide for herself how she would be defined.

“The way I identify myself is as a culturally mixed woman searching for racial answers,” she said. “I care about justice and that’s more important than racial identity.”…

Read the entire article here.

What ‘White Privilege’ Really Means

The New York Times
2014-11-05

George Yancy, Professor of Philosophy
Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Naomi Zack, Professor of Philosophy
University of Oregon

This is the first in a series of interviews with philosophers on race that I am conducting for The Stone. This week’s conversation is with Naomi Zack, a professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon and the author of “The Ethics and Mores of Race: Equality After the History of Philosophy.”  The interview was conducted by email and edited. — George Yancy

George Yancy: What motivates you to work as a philosopher in the area of race?

Naomi Zack:  I am mainly motivated by a great need to work and not to be bored, and I have a critical bent. I think there is a lot of work to be done concerning race in the United States, and a lot of ignorance and unfairness that still needs to be uncovered and corrected. I received my doctorate in philosophy from Columbia University in 1970 and then became absent from academia until 1990. When I returned it had become possible to write about real issues and apply analytic skills to social ills and other practical forms of injustice. My first book, “Race and Mixed Race” (1991) was an analysis of the incoherence of U.S. black/white racial categories in their failure to allow for mixed race. In “Philosophy of Science and Race,” I examined the lack of a scientific foundation for biological notions of human races, and in “The Ethics and Mores of Race,” I turned to the absence of ideas of universal human equality in the Western philosophical tradition…

…G.Y.: We can safely assume white parents don’t need to have this talk with their children. Do you think white privilege is at work in this context?

N.Z.: The term “white privilege” is misleading. A privilege is special treatment that goes beyond a right. It’s not so much that being white confers privilege but that not being white means being without rights in many cases. Not fearing that the police will kill your child for no reason isn’t a privilege. It’s a right.  But I think that is what “white privilege” is meant to convey, that whites don’t have many of the worries nonwhites, especially blacks, do. I was talking to a white friend of mine earlier today. He has always lived in the New York City area. He couldn’t see how the Michael Brown case had anything to do with him. I guess that would be an example of white privilege.

Other examples of white privilege include all of the ways that whites are unlikely to end up in prison for some of the same things blacks do, not having to worry about skin-color bias, not having to worry about being pulled over by the police while driving or stopped and frisked while walking in predominantly white neighborhoods, having more family wealth because your parents and other forebears were not subject to Jim Crow and slavery. Probably all of the ways in which whites are better off than blacks in our society are forms of white privilege. In the normal course of events, in the fullness of time, these differences will even out. But the sudden killings of innocent, unarmed youth bring it all to a head…

Read the entire interview here.

BEING a mixed-race black person…

Max News: ‘View from the Bottom’ Magazine of Kevin Maxwell
London, United Kingdom
2014-11-05

Kevin Maxwell

I was talking with a black woman earlier, and we happened to get on to the subject of race – something close to my skin, literally.

She said that a lot of mixed-race people only identified as black, when they had experienced racism. I thought, how true.

Prior to my own challenges against racism within the police, I’m unsure how I described myself. I mean, the Government gave me labels on forms like mixed-race because I have a white mother and black father – but, I was just me.

It was the Metropolitan Police which ironically got me to look closer under my skin, at my race and identity.

I wrote in The Nubian Times for the recent Black History Month that, in my challenges against discrimination within Scotland Yard the Met said I wasn’t black (enough) to be discriminated against.

I was like, this is just stupid.

The first thing people see when they meet me is my black skin, and it’s how I identify anyhow too – which, is what is important…

Read the entire article here.

Philosophy of Science and Race

Routledge
2002-09-20
152 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-94164-8
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-94163-1

Naomi Zack, Professor of Philosophy
University of Oregon

Contents

• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Reason and Method
• 1. Philosophical Racial Essentialism: Hume and Kant
• 2. Geography and Ideas of Race
• 3. Phenotypes and Ideas of Race
• 4. Transmisson Genetics and Ideas of Race
• 5. Genealogy and Ideas of Race
• 6. Race and Contemporary Anthropology
• 7. Philishophical and Social Implications
• Notes
• Select Bibliography

The Ethics and Mores of Race: Equality after the History of Philosophy

Rowman & Littlefield
July 2011
216 pages
Size: 6 3/4 x 9 1/2
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-4422-1125-4
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4422-1127-8

Naomi Zack, Professor of Philosophy
University of Oregon

Preeminent philosopher, Naomi Zack, brings us an indispensable work in the ethics of race through an inquiry into the history of moral philosophy. Beginning with Plato and a philosophical tradition that has largely ignored race, The Ethics and Mores of Race: Equality After the History of Philosophy enters into a web of ideas, ethics, and morals that untangle our evolving ideas of racial equality straight into the twenty-first century. The dichotomy between ethics and mores has long aided the separation of what is right with ideas of equality. Zack tackles the co-existence of slavery with the classic moral systems and continues to show how our society has evolved and our mores with it. An ethics of race my not exist yet, but this book gives us twelve discerning requirements to establish it.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Ethics, Mores, and Race
• Chapter 1: Plato and Aristotle’s Invention of Race
• Chapter 2: Cosmopolitan Contributions to an Ethics of Race
• Chapter 3: Natural Law and Inequality
• Chapter 4: Moral Law and Slavery
• Chapter 5: Christian Metaphysics and Inequality
• Chapter 6: Social Contract Theory and the Sovereign Nation State
• Chapter 7: Deontology, Utilitarianism, and Rights
• Conclusion: Egalitarian Humanism and Requirements for an Ethics of Race
• Select Bibliography
• About the Author

Am I ‘black enough’?

Cable News Network (CNN)
2014-10-27

Gene Seymour

Editor’s note: Gene Seymour is a film critic who has written about music, movies and culture for The New York Times, Newsday, Entertainment Weekly and The Washington Post. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the writer.

(CNN) — I am black, though for most of my life, I’ve heard from various people that I wasn’t.

From children with skin the same color as mine saying that my normal speaking voice was somehow faked and that I spoke and therefore acted “like a white man”; from a black woman who berated me for listening to the Beatles in my car because, in her words, their music “wasn’t yours”; from strangers and would-be acquaintances of varied races over several decades who openly wondered if I was something other than African-American because of an eclectic range of interests (Jewish novelists, New Wave French movies, Wallace Stevens’ poetry, etc.) that didn’t quite jibe with whatever was expected from African-Americans.

There was even a liberal white teacher in my high school who suggested to me, straight-faced and with the very best of intentions, that if I was feeling out of place among my fellow black students I should just spend more time around what was then called “the ghetto” and learn how to speak as they would prefer; maybe even to adopt their speech as my own, so as to ….I don’t remember the exact words, but I’m guessing it was to better embody whatever her idea of legitimate blackness was back in the mid-60s.

If you came of age in mid- to late-20th century America when the civil rights movement gave way to growing consciousness of, and pride in being of African descent, the charge from within the black community that you were Not Black Enough was almost as wounding, even debilitating, as a racial epithet from a white person.

Apparently, you can’t even win a Super Bowl as a black quarterback without somebody slurring your authenticity. There were reports swirling around the Internet last week that Russell Wilson, signal caller for the defending NFL champion Seattle Seahawks, was being accused by some of his black teammates of being Not Black Enough. “I don’t even know what that means,” Wilson, who has mixed-race parentage, told a press conference yesterday after his team rallied from a two-week losing streak to beat the Carolina Panthers…

…This fall, what was once a mostly insular discourse among black folks has gone even more public through two cozily familiar entertainment genres: the family sitcom and the campus comedy.

The latter, “Dear White People” is writer-director Justin Simien’s Sundance Film Festival sensation about culture clashes between white and black students (and among black students themselves) at a mythical Ivy League college. There’s a black Big Man On Campus named (what else) Troy, who besides being the son of the dean of students is dating the daughter of the white university president. There’s also a gay nerd-outcast named Lionel, who wears a retrograde Afro hairstyle so big as to be compared to a weather system, listens to Mumford & Sons, loves Robert Altman movies and, as he puts it, “isn’t black enough” for either the black or the white students.

The most radical character is a mixed-race young woman named Sam White, a rabble-rousing radio jock and aspiring filmmaker whose acerbically funny barbs aimed at genteel racial stereotyping at mythical Winchester University sets off a nationalist insurgency among the black students. Yet, as with Lionel, she carries a portfolio of seeming contradictions, such as a white lover and a preference for Ingmar Bergman’s movies over Spike Lee’s…

Read the entire article here.