Mixed Race Studies

Young Mr. Obama: Chicago and the Making of a Black President

Bloomsbury Press
2010
288 pages
5 1/2″ x 8 1/4″
Hardback ISBN: 9781608190607

Edward McClelland

Barack Obama’s inspirational politics and personal mythology have overshadowed his fascinating history. Young Mr. Obama gives us the missing chapter: the portrait of the politician as a young leader, often too ambitious for his own good, but still equipped with a rare ability to inspire change. The route to the White House began on the streets of Chicago’s South Side.

Edward McClelland, a veteran Chicago journalist, tells the real story of the first black president’s political education in the capital of the African American political community. Obama’s touch wasn’t always golden, and the unflappable and charismatic campaigner we know today nearly derailed his political career with a disastrous run for Congress in 2000.

Obama learned from his mistakes, and rebuilt his public persona. Young Mr. Obama is a masterpiece of political reporting, peeling away the audacity, the T-shirts, and the inspiring speeches to craft a compelling and surpassingly readable account of how local politics shaped a national leader.

Caribbean Racisms: Connections and Complexities in the Racialization of the Caribbean Region

Palgrave Macmillan
May 2015
216 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9781137287274
Ebook (EPUB) ISBN: 9781137287298
Ebook (PDF) ISBN: 9781137287281

Shirley Anne Tate, Professor of Sociology
Leeds Beckett University, Leeds, United Kingdom

Ian Law, Professor of Racism and Ethnicity Studies
School of Sociology and Social Policy
University of Leeds, United Kingdom

This book identifies and engages with an analysis of racism in the Caribbean region, providing an empirically-based theoretical re-framing of both the racialisation of the globe and evaluation of the prospects for anti-racism and the post-racial.

The thirty contemporary territories of the Caribbean and their differing colonial and post-colonial contexts provide a highly dynamic setting urging a re-assessment of the ways in which contemporary processes of racialisation are working. This book seeks to develop a new account of racialisation in this region, challenging established arguments, propositions and narratives of racial Caribbeanisation.

With new insights into contemporary forms of racialisation in Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Haiti, this will be essential reading for scholars of Race and Ethnicity.

Contents

• Acknowledgements
• About the Authors
• 1 Racial Caribbeanization: Origins and Development
• 2 Racial States in the Post-Emancipation Caribbean
• 3 Mixing, Métissage and Mestizaje
• 4 Whiteness and the Contemporary Caribbean
• 5 The ‘Post-Race Contemporary’ and the Caribbean
• 6 Polyracial Neoliberalism
• Notes
• References
• Index 

Black Magic Woman and Narrative Film: Race, Sex and Afro-Religiosity

Palgrave Macmillan
July 2015
216 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9781137454171
Ebook (EPUB) ISBN: 9781137454195
Ebook (PDF) ISBN: 9781137454188

Montré Aza Missouri, Associate Professor in Film
Howard University, Washington, D.C.

Contributing to emerging scholarship on representations of race, gender, sexuality and religion in film and media, Black Magic Woman focuses on the ‘tragic mulatto‘ stereotype that is conventionally portrayed as a character tormented by issues of racial and cultural ambiguity. Montré Aza Missouri explores the journey of the ‘mulatto‘ from ‘tragic’ to ’empowered’ through the character’s adherence to Yoruba-Atlantic religions such as Cuban Lucumí, Puerto Rican Santería and American Voodoo. From this religious transformation, the ‘tragic mulatto’ becomes the Black Magic Woman, a signifier of a New World cultural identity.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction – From ‘Tragic Mulatto’ to Black Magic Woman: Race, Sex and Religion in Film
• Chapter 1. Womanism and Womanist Gaze
• Chapter 2. Beauty as Power: In/visible Woman and Womanist Film in Daughters of the Dust
• Chapter 3. Passing Strange: Voodoo Queens and Hollywood Fantasy in Eve’s Bayou
• Chapter 4. I’ll Fly Away: Baadasssss Mamas and Third Cinema in Sankofa
• Chapter 5. Not Another West Side Story: Nuyorican Women and New Black Realism in I Like It Like That
• Chapter 6. It Is Easy Being Green: Disney’s Post-Racial Princess and Black Magic Nostalgia in The Princess and the Frog
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index

Cook: Race and the practice of medicine

The Casper Star Tribune
Casper, Wyoming
2015-10-24

Edith Cook

Edith Cook/Perspective

We now know once and for all that race is not a biological phenomenon but a social construct. The Human Genome Project, completed in 2000, established that, genetically, all of us human beings are more than 99.9 percent the same. When the project was completed, geneticist Greg Venter stated that the accomplishment illustrates that “the concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis.”

Astoundingly, racial and ethnic categories have appeared in the patents of gene-related biomedical patents. Drug firms increasingly target “ethnic niche markets” for drug development, promotion, and sale. That’s partly because the National Institute of Health Revitalization Act of 1993 mandates the use of census racial categories. The Food and Drug Modernization Act of 1997 also strongly encourages these outdated practices. The complexities of patent laws add to the problem.

These facts are thoroughly examined in Jonathan Kahn’s “Race in a Bottle.” (He means pill bottle.) Kahn begins with “the story of BiDil.” In the 1980s, BiDil was a drug for everyone; it became racialized “primarily in response to an FDA ruling that placed in jeopardy the value of its owner’s original nonracial patent.”

Soon the commercial aspect of promoting the drug became center stage. Often African Americans are held to white norms, yet health disparities would be more aptly compared to other underserved groups, such as recent immigrants…

Read the entire article here.

309 | Passing in White America

Chicago Humanities Festival
Karla Scherer Endowed Lecture Series for the University of Chicago
Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts
Film Screening Room 201
915 E 60th Street
Chicago, Illinois 60637
Sunday, 2015-10-25; 17:30-18:30 CDT (Local Time)

Between the 18th and 20th centuries, countless African Americans passed as white, leaving behind families, friends, and community. It was, as Stanford historian Allyson Hobbs writes, a chosen exile, a separation from one racial identity and a leap into another. Her work explores the way this racial indeterminacy offered an escape from slavery in the antebellum South and helped defy Jim Crow. But in looking back at both American history and the story of her own family, Hobbs also uncovers the terrible grief, loneliness, and isolation of passing, and the ways it continues to influence our thinking about racial identity and politics.

Presenters:

Allyson Hobbs is Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University and the author of A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life. Allyson received a PhD with distinction from the University of Chicago. Allyson teaches courses on American identity, African American history, African American women’s history, and twentieth century American history. She has received numerous fellowships and teaching awards. She gave a TEDx talk at Stanford, she has appeared on C-Span and National Public Radio, and her work has been featured on cnn.com and slate.com.

For more information, click here.

But the most wrenching reactions to Obama centered on how he did or did not respond to the numerous highly visible acts of violence and injustice against African-Americans during his tenure. Charles Coleman Jr., a civil-rights attorney in New York, talked about two critical moments in Obama’s presidency. “So, George Zimmerman is acquitted,” he says about the man who killed Trayvon Martin. “There is a significant faction of the country that’s at a loss: How do we have a dialogue on this? And the president delivers an incredible speech.” Extemporaneously, from the looks of it. He said Trayvon could have been him 35 years ago. “It represented the pinnacle of where he’s been on race. It was an example of the president speaking to black America as a black American, from within our community. He made us feel like he really does get it.”

Jennifer Senior, “The Paradox of the First Black President,” New York Magazine, October 7, 2015. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/10/paradox-of-the-first-black-president.html.

To be white is not about your skin color but about your ready socialization into a privileged group membership that defines itself against blackness, a legacy emerging from an understanding of black bodies as fuel, the needed refuse by which a capitalist, slave labor economy can sustain itself. As long as blackness is its opposite point, whiteness is willing to cross all sorts of awkward ethnic lines in strange, irrational ways in order to ensure its survival.

Ryan Kenjii Kuramitsu, “what we talk about when we talk about whiteness,” A Real Rattlesnake Meets His Maker, October 22, 2015. http://arealrattlesnake.com/2015/10/22/what-is-whiteness/.

Playing and Praying at Wild Goose — Student Kenji Kuramitsu

The “CURE” for Your Vocation
McCormick Theological Seminary
Chicago, Illinois
2015-08-26

Ryan Kenji Kuramitsu

I had heard of Wild Goose Festival from friends who had braved the woods in years past, but I wasn’t sure it was my kind of thing. I certainly didn’t expect to be a part of the gathering anytime soon. Then my friend Micky asked me to attend. She wanted to know if I would speak on a panel she was moderating, and invited me to present my own workshop as well.

I didn’t know what I would find in Hot Springs, North Carolina other than spending a few days camping out, thinking about God, smiling, and playing music with a bunch of progressive, hippie Christians, many of whom I was only tangentially connected to on social media. I was nervous, but I wanted to see what this festival was all about, and as a lifelong Boy Scout, I felt like I could handle myself in the woods. I told Micky I would come.

I spent the next few weeks trying to think of something productive to contribute to the “Revolutionary Love and Militant Nonviolence” panel that I would speak on with clergy and racial justice advocates Leah Gunning-Francis, Traci Blackmon, and Ethan Vessley-Flad, publically reflecting on our involvement in the Black Lives Matter movement as the one year anniversary of Mike Brown’s death approaches. For my own workshop, I created an hour long presentation exploring how both traditional theological teachings about Christ and contemporary critical mixed race theory can empower multiethnic and mixed race people to live whole, integrated lives…

Read the entire article here.

what we talk about when we talk about whiteness

A Real Rattlesnake Meets His Maker
2015-10-22

Ryan Kenjii Kuramitsu

(This is part one of a three part series on “what we talk about when we talk about whiteness.”)

Sometimes I engage in conversations about whiteness that make people bristle. Questions are often raised like: so is “white” automatically wrong? Why is “whiteness” evil? Are you saying “white people” are inherently bad? My impression is that there is a bit of talking past one another that happens in these discussions, so it is my hope to define terms and better flesh out my perspective here.

First, it may be helpful to recognize that “whiteness” can be understood as a synonym for white supremacy: the pervasive belief that people can be hierarchically sorted into separate “races” based on what regions of the world their ancestors came from, and that “the white race” is the best of these groups. This is an ideology that is actively enforced through bodily and psychic violence directed towards the groups of people who are assigned immutable “racial” traits and deemed undesirable.

Secondly, we might note that “whiteness” as a social and historical trend has relatively little to do with skin color. Indeed, what constitutes “being white” today is not the same thing as fifty, much less two hundred and fifty years ago. German, Greek, Jewish, Irish, Spanish, and Italian immigrants to the United States are all examples of ethnic groups once rejected for their racial inferiority, considered subordinate, but who are today viewed as an allied coalition of groups under the banner of being fully and simply white…

…To be white is not about your skin color but about your ready socialization into a privileged group membership that defines itself against blackness, a legacy emerging from an understanding of black bodies as fuel, the needed refuse by which a capitalist, slave labor economy can sustain itself. As long as blackness is its opposite point, whiteness is willing to cross all sorts of awkward ethnic lines in strange, irrational ways in order to ensure its survival.

For example, when my father, a Japanese man from the big island of Hawai’i, was told to check “White Other” on his census form when entering the police academy, he was being invited to erase our culture under the guise of a benign, gift-wrapped welcome into social privilege, instructed to do so by defining himself primarily against blackness…

Read the entire article here.

The Many Problems With, “I Want Mixed Babies”

Chescaleigh
2015-10-23

Franchesca Ramsey