Mixed Race Studies

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.