Mixed Race Studies

Whose President Was He?

Politico Magazine
Volume 3, Number 2 (January/February 2016) [The Obama Issue]

Michael Eric Dyson, Professor of Sociology
Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.

Barack Obama brushed aside the critics who hated him for his skin color—but failed to see the racial confrontation they foretold.

“If I spent all my time thinking about it, I’d be paralyzed,” Barack Obama told me. “And frankly, the voters would justifiably say, ‘I need somebody who’s focused on giving me a job, not whether his feelings are hurt.’”

We were sitting in the Oval Office in the summer of 2010, and I had asked the president about the persistence, since the early days of his 2008 campaign, of viciously racist attacks against him. Millions of ordinary white citizens and right-wing critics didn’t cotton to our first black president’s chutzpah in capturing the highest office in the land—and they have been unleashing venom ever since. Signs at early protests spoke volumes: “Obama’s Plan: White Slavery” and “The American Taxpayers Are the Jews for Obama’s Ovens.” Some played on racist stereotypes: “Obama: What You Talkin’ About, Willis? Spend My Money.” Others tagged him “Traitor to the Constitution” and “Sambo,” or played on his ancestral homeland: “Ken-ya Trust Obama?”

This last message was, of course, a hallmark of the birthers, who formalized racist attacks into a movement by claiming that Obama, despite his Hawaiian birth certificate, was born in Kenya—or that he was really a citizen of Indonesia, or that he had dual British and American citizenship at birth. The sick attempt to paint Obama as un-American—a closet socialist, a secret Muslim and a hater of democracy, no less—didn’t stop there, echoing over the years in the feverish rantings of figures like Dinesh D’Souza, who claimed Obama was motivated by “an inherited rage” against American wealth and power from his anti-colonialist Kenyan father. On TV, Glenn Beck asserted that Obama had “a deep-seated hatred for white people,” while Rush Limbaugh spewed a steady stream of invective on his radio show, from playing a song dubbed “Barack the Magic Negro” to claiming that Obama wanted Americans to get Ebola as payback for slavery. The most infamous birther, Donald Trump, questioned, without basis, not just Obama’s birth certificate, but his college transcript and whether he had truly deserved a spot at Harvard Law School…

Read the entire article here.

Proud of Obama’s Presidency, Blacks Are Sad to See Him Go

The New York Times
2016-03-12

Yamiche Alcindor

CHICAGO — In his 30s and 40s, the Rev. C.T. Vivian rode with the Freedom Riders, organized sit-ins in Nashville and worked closely with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Many years later, before the 2008 election, he traveled the country along with other civil rights leaders exclaiming to voters that a Barack Obama presidency was exactly the kind of prize that they had been fighting for all their lives.

All of that came back to him during a meeting at the White House three weeks ago between President Obama and several of those leaders. Mr. Vivian told the president how proud he was of him, and how sad he was to see him go.

And then he began to cry…

…But if seven years under President Obama has opened possibilities for black Americans, many of those interviewed were torn about his lasting impact on race relations.

They were, on one hand, hard-pressed to imagine a white president saying “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,” inviting the Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. and the white police officer who had confronted him to a White House “beer summit,” or singing “Amazing Grace” at the funeral of the pastor who was one of the nine black churchgoers gunned down in Charleston, S.C., last year.

“We are losing a soldier who has actually been through the things that individuals are going through,” said Jakya’s father, Jevon Hobbs, 42. “None of the current candidates,” he said, “know what it’s like to be accosted by the police for no reason.”

On the other hand, they said they did not believe a white president would have heard “You lie!” shouted at him from the floor of Congress; or would have had his birth certificate challenged and then seen a man who challenged it become the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed-Race Politics: Bill de Blasio’s 2013 New York City Mayoral Campaign

University of Michigan
Haven Hall, Room 4701
505 State Street
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Monday, 2016-03-14, 17:30 CDT (Local Time)

Michelle May-Curry
American Culture

Please join the Black Humanities Collective as we workshop a presentation by Michelle May-Curry, a doctoral student in American Culture. Dinner will be served. Though RSVP’s are not required, they are encouraged. Graduate students, undergraduates, and faculty in and outside of the humanities are welcomed to attend.

This paper investigates the ways in which multicultural rhetoric situates black-white mixed-race individuals and their families as a bridge between disparate groups and ideologies. Using Bill de Blasio’s New York City Mayoral campaign in 2013 as a case study, I highlight specific media moments in which de Blasio’s children and his interracial marriage to a black woman are deployed as symbols of political (and by extension, racial) futurity. The key questions of this paper ask: How was mixed-race as a symbol deployed in the de Blasio campaign, particularly in the context of the family? What specifically did mixed-race symbolize in this political sphere? Did de Blasio’s family fight back against essentialized multicultural ideals or simply deploy them to capture the minority vote? In answering these questions I conduct a close reading of de Blasio’s well-known TV advertisement featuring his then 15-year-old son Dante, and put it in conversation with persistent racisms in the form of police brutality, an issue that was central to de Blasio’s campaign. This work engages topics at the intersection of critical mixed-race studies, performance studies, and visual culture, drawing upon and contesting current research that places mixed-race people at the forefront of a changing American demographic and political climate.

For more information, click here.

How Trump Happened

Slate
2016-03-13

Jamelle Bouie, Chief Political Correspondent

It’s not just anger over jobs and immigration. White voters hope Trump will restore the racial hierarchy upended by Barack Obama.

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win,” goes the line attributed to Mahatma Gandhi. Typically, you’ll find this pearl adorning a classroom or splashed across a motivational poster. But last month, on the eve of Super Tuesday—when a dozen states cast ballots for the Republican presidential nomination—you could find it on Donald Trump’s Instagram page, the caption to a photograph of a massive rally in Alabama the day before.

Perverse as it may seem for the belligerent real estate magnate to channel even apocryphal Gandhi wisdom, the line is apt. First, we did ignore him—as a buffoon who wouldn’t survive past the summer. Then, we laughed at him—as a buffoon who wouldn’t survive through fall. Eventually, Republicans began to fight him, terrified of his traction with voters. Now, he’s winning, with more votes and delegates than anyone left in the field. On the eve of another critical Tuesday slate of votes, Trump is on the verge of an even greater victory. Polls show him in command both in the smaller states that will award their delegates proportionally, and in the larger, winner-take-all prizes of Ohio and Florida. By Wednesday morning, Trump could be a stone’s throw from the Republican presidential nomination…

….Race plays a part in each of these analyses, but its role has not yet been central enough to our understanding of Trump’s rise. Not only does he lead a movement of almost exclusively disaffected whites, but he wins his strongest support in states and counties with the greatest amounts of racial polarization. Among white voters, higher levels of racial resentment have been shown to be associated with greater support for Trump.

All of which is to say that we’ve been missing the most important catalyst in Trump’s rise. What caused this fire to burn out of control? The answer, I think, is Barack Obama…

…“The election of the country’s first black president had the ironic upshot of opening the door for old-fashioned racism to influence partisan preferences after it was long thought to be a spent force in American politics,” wrote Brown University political scientist Michael Tesler in a 2013 paper titled “The Return of Old Fashioned Racism to White Americans’ Partisan Preferences in the Early Obama Era.” For Tesler, “old-fashioned racism” isn’t a rhetorical term; it refers to specific beliefs about the biological and cultural inferiority of black Americans. His work suggests that there are some white Americans who, in his words, have “concerns about the leadership of a president from a racial group whom they consider to be intellectually and socially inferior.”…

Read the entire article here.

Should biologists stop grouping us by race?

STAT: Reporting from the frontiers of health and medicine
2016-02-04

Sharon Begley

More than a decade after leading geneticists argued that race is not a true biological category, many studies continue to use it, harming scientific understanding and possibly patients, researchers argued in a provocative essay in Science on Thursday.

“We thought that after the Human Genome Project, with [its leaders] saying it’s time to move beyond race as a biological marker, we would have done that,” said Michael Yudell, a professor in the Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University and coauthor of the Science paper calling on journals and researchers to stop using race as a category in genetics studies. “Yet here we are, and there is evidence things have actually gotten worse in the genomic age.”…

Read the entire article here.

Before People Called Me A Spic, They Called Me A Nigger

Medium
2016-03-11

Pablo Guzmán

It was a throwaway line I used. Deliberately. Speaking to mostly Latino and African-American audiences. Back in the day.

“Before people called me a spic, they called me a nigger.”

And it hit the mark.

The hoots, applause, whistles and laughs let me know. I’d found a nerve. And I intended to probe. When I felt that arrow’s reverb, I launched it again. Aimed squarely at calling out what separates us. Latinos/African-Americans. Even what separates Latinos from ourselves. And. What also ties us together.

Drawing from all my observations. And, experiences (through the ripe old age then of 19. Worldly motherfucker)…

…THE SLAVE SHIP.

Square One. For a good many Latinos, African-Americans, and people of the Caribbean, that is our link. To music, dance, cuisine, religion, history. And, a politics to build upon. We may be different shades of black. But we be Black. African. That one drop thing has truth. Now, we are a New World Black. I mean, we ain’t African. Proud of Africa. But we gone through the looking glass. Among Latinos we’re also Spanish and Indigenous. In some Latinos, the impact of slavery is much more pronounced. Among others in the New World, the European blend could be French, or Dutch, or British or Portuguese. The Indigenous element might be Mayan, or Taino, or Incan, or Muscogee, or Carib or scores of others. But the African element. Is like no other.

My parents and I were born in New York City. My grandparents are from Puerto Rico and Cuba. Except for my paternal grandfather and maternal grandmother we are all dark-skinned. “Obviously” of African descent. But that guaguancó gene is lying within practically all Latinos with raíces in Africa. So, you might be light-skinned, and you might marry a light-skinned Latina, but hello! One of your babies might be a nappy-headed rhumbera. Took my people a while to figure out genetics. There was a lot of fighting at first about where that baby came from…

Now, yeah, I’m joshing a bit. But the truth is that in some families, the dark-skinned ones sometimes caught hell. Yeah, that racist self-hate thing permeated everywhere. But the moms and grandmoms especially, circled protectively. Bien conmigo, negrita. Ten cuidao con mi negrito. As Pedro Pietri said in his epic poem Puerto Rican Obituary

“Aqui to be called Negrito/Means to be called LOVE”…

Read the entire article here.

“Kiss me, my slave owners were Irish”

Medium
2015-03-16

Liam Hogam

As many of you already know, I have engaged with the “we were slaves too!” narrative on multiple forums and platforms for the past few months. Now I plan to explore some of the uncomfortable truths that this mythology tends to obscure. This Saint Patrick’s Day essay will briefly review Ireland’s anti-slavery history before focussing on the more representative and troubling issue of slave ownership among those of Irish descent. What could be more appropriate?

Ireland has a rich anti-slavery history.

Beginning in the fifth century, a former slave to the Irish, Patricius aka Saint Patrick, sent a now famous letter to the Romano-British warlord Coroticus. In this letter, Patricius condemned and excommunicated the soldiers of Coroticus for enslaving his new Christian converts in Ireland and for selling them to non-Christians. This document is one of the earliest anti-slavery texts in existence.

1700s

In the early-eighteenth century, the Irish philosopher Francis Hutcheson was one of the first to break with Aristotle’s theory of “natural slavery” by declaring that natural liberty was a natural right that belonged to all. This ever increasing dissemination and development of enlightenment thought, such as Hutcheson’s, helped to influence the rise of a formidable anti-slavery movement in Ireland, particularly in Dublin and Belfast…

…(i) The ‘Irish’ Slaves

Upon reviewing the various colonial laws pertaining to anti-miscegenation, it is reasonable to conclude that there were voluntary courtships between enslaved black men and free or indentured white women. But the remarkable case of Eleanor Butler illustrates why these unions were rare.

Maryland 1681

Eleanor “Irish Nell” Butler, was an Irish indentured servant who was brought to Maryland by Lord Baltimore in 1661. In 1681 (by then “well free of her indenture”) she choose to marry Charles, who was a black chattel slave. Her punishment for such an indiscretion was that she was to be a slave as long as her husband was alive and that their children were to be slaves. We find that the descendants of Eleanor and Charles were suing for their freedom 100 years later.

But why was Butler punished in this manner? The colonists in Maryland (as in all the other colonies) created racial laws to discourage marriages between white and black, and their 1664 laws stated that

“divers freeborne English women forgettfull of their free Condicon and to the disgrace of our Nation doe intermarry with Negro Slaves”

Lord Baltimore’s remarks to Nell about her fateful decision are revealing of the racism of this era. It is difficult to say if there was anger, concern or bemusement in his voice when he reportedly asked her

“how she would like to go to Bed to a Negro.”

Either way, her defiant reply would have stung..

“I would rather go to Bed to Charles than your lordship.”

Evidently Nell Butler broke the racial line and law out of love not coercion, and it is thus clear that there were rare cases of chattel slaves of Irish descent on their mother’s side.

Conversely, we find that there were many slaves, just like R.R. Madden’s relatives, who had ‘Irish blood’ on their father’s side, i.e. they were the progeny of an Irish slave-master (or his friends or relatives) and his female slave. This is a disturbing chapter that needs to be explored. The rape and sexual abuse of slaves was an infamous practice. Slaves, who were treated as livestock by their white masters and their white supremacist laws, were offered no protection by the State or polity. Slave breeding had become an important consideration for slave owners once the slave trade was banned. Coerced slave breeding between slaves and the rape of slaves by their owners was thus further motivated by the wish to increase the slave population; these slave breeders wanted to extract future capital from present chattel…

Read the entire article here.

Fostering Mixed Race Children: Everyday Experiences of Foster Care

Palgrave Macmillan
June 2016
203 pages
3 b/w illustrations
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-137-54183-3
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-349-71266-3
DOI: 10.1057/978-1-137-54184-0

Fiona Peters, Visiting Researcher
Goldsmiths, University of London, United Kingdom

The ‘mixed race’ classification is known to be a factor of disadvantage in children’s social care and this fastest growing population is more likely than any other ethnic group to experience care admission. How does knowledge of ‘mixedness’ underpin policy and practice? How, when and why is the classification ‘mixed’ a disadvantage? Through narrative interviews with children currently in foster care, Fostering Mixed Race Children examines the impact of care processes on children’s everyday experiences. Peters shows how the ‘mixed race’ classification affects care admission, including both short and long term fostering and care leaving, and shapes the experiences of children in often adverse ways. The book moves away from the psychologising of ‘mixedness’ towards a much-needed sociological analysis of ‘mixedness’ and ‘mixing’ at the intersection of foster care processes.

This book will be of interest to academics and practitioners working with families and children. Peters presents a child-centred narrative focus and offers unique insights into a complex area.

“A Hindu is white although he is black”: Hindu Alterity and the Performativity of Religion and Race between the United States and the Caribbean

Comparative Studies in Society and History
Volume 58, Issue 01, January 2016
pages 181-210
DOI: 10.1017/S0010417515000614

Alexander Rocklin
Department of Religious Studies
Willamette University, Salem, Oregon

This essay uses the controversies surrounding the enigmatic Ismet Ali, a yogi working in Chicago and New York in the 1920s, to illuminate the complexities of how the performativity of religion and race are interrelated. I examine several moments in which Ali’s “authenticity” as Indian is brought into doubt to open up larger questions regarding the global flows of colonial knowledge, racial tropes, and groups of people between India, the United States, and the Caribbean. I explore the ways in which, in the early twentieth-century United States, East Indian “authenticity” only became legible via identificatory practices that engaged with and adapted orientalized stereotypes. The practices of the yogi persona and its sartorial stylings meant to signify “East Indianness” in the United States, particularly the donning of a turban and beard, were one mode through which both South Asian and African Americans repurposed “Hindoo” stereotypes as models for self-formation. By taking on “Hindoo” identities, peoples of color could circumvent the U.S. black/white racial binary and the violence of Jim Crow. This act of racial passing was also an act of religious passing. However, the ways in which identities had to and could be performed changed with context as individuals moved across national and colonial boundaries.

Read or purchase the article here.

Teaching medical students to challenge ‘unscientific’ racial categories

STAT: Reporting from the frontiers of health and medicine
2016-03-10

Ike Swetlitz

Dr. Brooke Cunningham talks about race to medical students at the University of Minnesota. Jenn Ackerman for Stat

MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. — Medical students looking to score high on their board exams sometimes get a bit of uncomfortable advice: Embrace racial stereotypes.

“You see ‘African American,’ automatically just circle ‘sickle cell,’” said Nermine Abdelwahab, a first-year student at the University of Minnesota Medical School, recounting tips she’s heard from older classmates describing the “sad reality” of the tests.

Medical school curricula traditionally leave little room for nuanced discussions about the impact of race and racism on health, physicians and sociologists say. Instead, students learn to see race as a diagnostic shortcut, as lectures, textbooks, and scientific journal articles divide patients by racial categories, reinforcing the idea that race is biological. That mind-set can lead to misdiagnoses, such as treating sickle cell anemia as a largely “black” disease.

“Right now, students are learning an inaccurate and unscientific definition of race,” said Dorothy Roberts, a law and sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who coauthored a recent paper in Science arguing for an end to the use of biological concepts of race in human genetics research.

“It’s simply not true that human beings are naturally divided into genetically distinct races,” Roberts said. “So it is not good medical practice to treat patients that way.”

Change is starting to come, but slowly…

……Cunningham also traced racial stereotypes through centuries of medical science, from an 1850s medical definition of drapetomania — “the disease causing Negroes to run away” — to the modern day, when a mainstream formula to measure kidney function and a common test of lung capacity differ for “whites” and “blacks.”

“I think it’s revolutionary to be teaching that way to first-year medical students,” said Dr. Helena Hansen, a professor with dual appointments in both New York University’s anthropology department and the medical school’s psychiatry department. She said Cunningham is one of a small but growing number of faculty members challenging the status quo.

Hansen said Cunningham’s lecture “fundamentally challenges” a central premise in clinical medicine: that racial categories are well-defined and universally applicable…

Read the entire article here.