Mixed Race Studies

What If Everything You Know About Race Is Wrong?

Texas Public Radio
San Antonio, Texas
2015-01-15

Jack Morgan, Arts and Culture Reporter

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni

A one-woman show is coming to the Tobin Center and it’s probably unlike anything you’ve ever seen. It’s called “One Drop of Love.” starring Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni, produced by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon.

“How did you get mixed up with Ben Affleck and Matt Damon?” I asked.

(Laughs) “I think I met Matt when I was about 12 and Ben when we started high school together,” DiGiovanni told me. “And we did theater—we had a very wonderful theater program at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School. And these two guys are such wonderful human beings.”

A year ago, DiGiovanni first produced this one-woman show for a Master of Fine Arts degree thesis performance.

“Ben came and saw my thesis performance and just said afterwards ‘I think this is really great and important and I’d like to help you get it to a wider audience.’”

Matt Damon also saw it and agreed with his friend. Thus DiGiovanni’s tour was conceived. So exactly what is One Drop of Love? It’s talking about one of this country’s most difficult subjects: race.

“I never know what kinds of experiences the people in the audience have had with race and racism,” DiGiovanni explains.

The whole show revolves around this premise.

“I start off the show as the character from a 1790 census, on which there were only three racial categories.”

In her show, she goes around her audience, linking audience members to one of those racial categories.

Walking through an audience, she names them: “Okay, white…black…mulatto…Chinese? Yes, hello…quadroon…no, I see you! An Indian…”

It’s one part history, one part performance art.

“There are people who look at me and shake their head and say ‘no, that’s not what I am!’ Which is very much the point, because that’s how the census was counted until 1970. A census worker would just go around and guess the race of the person they were looking at.”

She says race, in a sense, isn’t even real…

Read the entire article here. Listen to the interview (00:03:34) here.

One Drop of Love

Tobin Center for the Performing Arts
Carlos Alvarez Studio Theater
100 Auditorium Circle
San Antonio, Texas 78205
2015-01-17, 14:00 CST and 20:00 CST (Local Time)

BMW OF SAN ANTONIO SIGNATURE SERIES
“Amazing performance, staging, autobiography and artistry, and an amazing meditation on race and examination of America.” – Ben Affleck, 2013 Academy Award for Best Picture: Argo

“One Drop of Love is beautiful and brave. Cox DiGiovanni’s honesty, insight, dedication, and love are an inspiration. She takes us into the intimate places where family, race, love, and pain intertwine. In this sometimes searing, sometimes funny, and always smart play she shows us both the terrible things we do to those we love and a way forward to a better future.” – Paul Spickard, professor of history at University of California, Santa Barbara

How does our belief in ‘race’ affect our most intimate relationships? One Drop of Love is a solo performance exploring family, race, love and pain – and a path towards reconciliation. The show is produced by Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and the show’s writer/performer Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni.

For more information, click here.

Toward a Sociology of Race and Ethnicity

Sociology of Race and Ethnicity
Volume 1, Number 1
pages 1-9
DOI: 10.1177/2332649214562028

David L. Brunsma, Professor of Sociology
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia

David G. Embrick, Associate Professor of Sociology
Loyola University, Chicago, Chicago, Illinois

Megan Nanney
Department of Sociology
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia

“The ideal that I visualize for SREM is that it will constantly seek to maintain and develop the highest levels of interest in, scholarly-concern about, and professional focus upon, all aspects of racial and ethnic minorities within the sociological domain.”

—Charles U. Smith, 1980 Founder of SREM

“Much more needs to be done, and I am certain that we have both tapped and untapped resources within our Section membership.”

—Loretta J. Williams, 1981 Chair of SREM

Introduction

In 1981, the Chair-Elect of the Section of Racial and Ethnic Minorities (SREM) of the American Sociological Association (ASA), Loretta J. Williams, succeeding the section’s founder, Charles U. Smith, wrote in the section newsletter, Remarks (short for Racial & Ethnic Minorities Announcements Reminders Kudos Statements), about a Spring 1981 issue of Daedalus that sounded a national call for a “greater working knowledge of racial and ethnic identity issues.” Williams continues to report on the article as well as the then recent spring issue of Annals, writing, “Little is known of the myriad forms of racial and ethnic relations of other groups within the U.S. and beyond. Conceptualizations of race relations exclusively based on data and theories relating to black/white conditions in the U.S. are insufficient” (Williams 1981:1). The opening quote represents one of the clarion calls from the founding leadership of SREM to the members of an urgent need for a sociology of race and ethnicity and that SREM members have the methodological tools, theoretical acuity, and epistemological breadth to breathe it to life. SREM has served as the social and professional space for sociologists focused on issues of race and ethnicity for over 35 years now. Throughout those decades, and up until now, SREM has lacked a home to publish, debate, and build that sociology of race and ethnicity. Welcome home. Welcome to the inaugural issue of The Sociology of Race and Ethnicity!…

Read the entire introductory article here.

Hawaii As ‘Racial Paradise’? Bid For Obama Library Invokes A Complex Past

Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity
National Public Radio
2015-01-15

Ellen Wu, Associate Professor of History
Indiana University

Sometime in March, President Obama is expected to announce his choice of the institution that will hold his presidential archive. Vying for the honor (and the money that comes with it) are the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Columbia University in New York, and the University of Hawai’i (the Hawaiian language spelling of the state’s name). So heated has the competition been that some have called it the “next big presidential race before the 2016 presidential race.”

The front-runner status of both Windy City schools is now in question. The University of Chicago may lack exclusive ownership rights to the proposed sites, while the University of Illinois anticipates future leadership changes.

Yet media reports still cast Hawaii as the underdog. Its fundraising capabilities are out-muscled by the others. Its location is too remote by mainland standards.

But don’t be surprised if Hawaii comes out on top, because the island has a compelling advantage: It’s the one place in the U.S. that has long been imagined as a “racial paradise.”

Liberal white missionaries and sociologists invented this fiction in the early 20th century to convince the nation that Hawaii’s significant Asian population was capable of assimilating harmoniously into American life. Asian laborers were the backbone of the islands’ industrial sugar plantation workforce. By 1945, Life pronounced Hawaii “the world’s most successful experiment in mixed breeding … unmatched … for interracial tolerance and affection.” Today, the “Aloha State” is widely celebrated as the most racially and ethnically diverse in the country, where hapas and multiracial families are the norm. The Root recently named Hawaii one of “The Five Best States for Black People.”…

Read the entire article here.