Month: July 2015

  • “Canadian-First”: Mixed Race Self-Identification and Canadian Belonging Canadian Ethnic Studies Volume 47, Number 2, 2015 pages 21-44 DOI: 10.1353/ces.2015.0017 Jillian Paragg Department of Sociology University of Alberta Not being read or identified by others as “Canadian” was a common thread in semi-structured in-depth interviews I conducted with 19 young adults of mixed race in a…

  • Early Afro-Mexican Settlers in California C-SPAN: Created by Cable 2015-05-20 Host: California Historical Society Professor Carlos Manuel Salomon, author of Pio Pico: The Last Governor of Mexican California, talked about Mexicans of African descent who were some of the first non-Indian settlers in California. Many came from Sinaloa and Sonora, Mexico, with the Anza Expedition in…

  • Mexico’s hidden people Cable News Network (CNN) 2015-07-10 Abby Reimer, Special to CNN Photograph: Mara Sanchez Renero (CNN)—An estimated 200,000 Africans were brought to Mexico under slavery, which ended in the country in 1829. Yet Afro-Mexicans remain a marginalized and often forgotten part of Mexico’s identity. Photographer Mara Sanchez Renero first learned about Afro-Mexicans as…

  • A Bias More Than Skin Deep The New York Times 2015-07-13 Charles M. Blow I will never forget the October 2013 feature on National Geographic’s website: There was a pair of portraits of olive-skinned, ruby-lipped boys, one with a mane of curly black hair, the other with the tendrils of blond curls falling into his…

  • Well known as an abolitionist stronghold before the Civil War, Massachusetts had taken steps to eliminate slavery as early as the 1780s. Nevertheless, a powerful racial caste system still held sway, reinforced by a law prohibiting “amalgamation”—marriage between whites and blacks. “The Fight for Interracial Marriage Rights in Antebellum Massachusetts” chronicles a grassroots movement to…

  • Dolezal and the Defense of the Community Public Seminar 2015-07-09 Richard Kaplan Reflections on the unique difficulties of passing from white to black in America It strikes me that an incredible amount of media attention and denunciation has focused on a poor, perhaps deluded woman in Spokane, Washington. Rachel Dolezal’s crime was to lie and…

  • Historian Allyson Hobbs on the History of Racial Passing The 7th Avenue Project: Thinking Persons’ Radio 2015-06-28 Robert Pollie, Host, Creator and Producer The recent case of Rachel Dolezal – the “black” activist outed as white – may have seemed novel, but she’s actually part of an old tradition of racial passing in this country.…

  • Who am I? Who do you think I am? Stability of racial/ethnic self-identification among youth in foster care and concordance with agency categorization Children and Youth Services Review Volume 56, September 2015 pages 61–67 DOI: 10.1016/j.childyouth.2015.06.011 Jessica Schmidt Regional Research Institute for Human Services Portland State University, Portland, Oregon Shanti Dubey Regional Research Institute for…

  • ‘Mestizo’ and ‘mulatto’: Mixed-race identities among U.S. Hispanics Pew Research Center 2015-07-10 Ana Gonzalez-Barrera, Research Associate For many Americans, the term “mixed race” brings to mind a biracial experience of having one parent black and another white, or perhaps one white and the other Asian. But for many U.S. Latinos, mixed-race identity takes on a…

  • From ‘blood quantum’ to multiracial bill of rights, Dolezal saga ignites talk of identity The Seattle Times 2015-06-17 Nina Shapiro, Seattle Times staff reporter The endless fascination with the Rachel Dolezal story reveals our hunger to talk about racial identity in all its complexity. When Amanda Erekson was in her early 20s, a friend introduced…