Mixed Race Studies

Kaleidoscope: Redrawing an American Family Tree

University of Arkansas Press
2015-06-01
140 pages
10 images
6″ x 9″
Paper ISBN: 978-1-55728-815-8

Margaret Jones Bolsterli, Emeritus Professor
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

In 2005 Margaret Jones Bolsterli learned that her great-great-grandfather was a free mulatto named Jordan Chavis, who owned an antebellum plantation near Vicksburg, Mississippi. The news was a shock; Bolsterli had heard about the plantation in family stories told during her Arkansas Delta childhood, but Chavis’s name and race had never been mentioned. With further exploration Bolsterli found that when Chavis’s children crossed the Mississippi River between 1859 and 1875 for exile in Arkansas, they passed into the white world, leaving the family’s racial history completely behind.

Kaleidoscope is the story of this discovery, and it is the story, too, of the rise and fall of the Chavis fortunes in Mississippi, from the family’s first appearance on a frontier farm in 1829 to ownership of over a thousand acres and the slaves to work them by 1860. Bolsterli learns that in the 1850s, when all free colored people were ordered to leave Mississippi or be enslaved, Jordan Chavis’s white neighbors successfully petitioned the legislature to allow him to remain, unmolested, even as three of his sons and a daughter moved to Arkansas and Illinois. She learns about the agility with which the old man balanced on a tightrope over chaos to survive the war and then take advantage of the opportunities of newly awarded citizenship during Reconstruction. The story ends with the family’s loss of everything in the 1870s, after one of the exiled sons returns to Mississippi to serve in the Reconstruction legislature and a grandson attempts unsuccessfully to retain possession of the land. In Kaleidoscope, long-silenced truths are revealed, inviting questions about how attitudes toward race might have been different in the family and in America if the truth about this situation and thousands of others like it could have been told before.

The Free State of Jones, Movie Edition: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War

University of North Carolina Press
March 2016
352 pages
32 halftones, 10 maps, 4 tables
appends., notes, bibl., index
Paper ISBN 978-1-4696-2705-2

Victoria E. Bynum, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History
Texas State University, San Marcos

With a New Afterword by the Author

Between late 1863 and mid-1864, an armed band of Confederate deserters battled Confederate cavalry in the Piney Woods region of Jones County, Mississippi. Calling themselves the Knight Company after their captain, Newton Knight, they set up headquarters in the swamps of the Leaf River, where they declared their loyalty to the U.S. government.

The story of the Jones County rebellion is well known among Mississippians, and debate over whether the county actually seceded from the state during the war has smoldered for more than a century. Adding further controversy to the legend is the story of Newt Knight’s interracial romance with his wartime accomplice, Rachel, a slave. From their relationship there developed a mixed-race community that endured long after the Civil War had ended, and the ambiguous racial identity of their descendants confounded the rules of segregated Mississippi well into the twentieth century.

Victoria Bynum traces the origins and legacy of the Jones County uprising from the American Revolution to the modern civil rights movement. In bridging the gap between the legendary and the real Free State of Jones, she shows how the legend–what was told, what was embellished, and what was left out–reveals a great deal about the South’s transition from slavery to segregation; the racial, gender, and class politics of the period; and the contingent nature of history and memory.

In a new afterword, Bynum updates readers on recent scholarship, current issues of race and Southern heritage, and the coming movie that make this Civil War story essential reading.

The Free State of Jones film, starring Matthew McConaughey, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and Keri Russell, will be released in May 2016.

Gender, Race, and Ethnicity in the Workplace: Emerging Issues and Enduring Challenges

Praeger
March 2016
415 pages
6.125 x 9.25
Hardcover ISBN: 9978-1-4408-3369-4
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4408-3370-0

Edited by:

Margaret Foegen Karsten, Professor of Human Resource Management; Internship Coordinator
School of Business
University of Wisconsin, Platteville

For America to prosper, organizations need to address disparate treatment of women and people of color in the workplace.

Insights from professionals in the fields of organizational development and diversity provide practical tools to help employees and managers—regardless of race or gender—collaborate in reaching their workplace potential.

The contributions of more than 30 experts reframe the discussion on gender, race, and ethnicity in the U.S. workforce, examining the complex identity concerns facing workers who fall within minority groups and recommending practical solutions for dealing with workplace inequities. Through focused essays, experts explore new perspectives to persistent challenges and discuss progress made in addressing unequal treatment based on race and gender in the past eight years. This detailed reference explores every aspect of the issue, including mentoring, family leaves, pay inequity, multiracial and transgender identities, community involvement, and illegal harassment.

The first part of the book identifies employment discrimination based on multiracial identity, appearance, and transgender status. The second section unveils the psychology behind harassment on the job; the third section provides strategies for overcoming traditional obstacles for the disenfranchised. The final section discusses updates on laws dealing with the Family and Medical Leave Act. The book closes with success stories of women of color in U.S. leadership roles as well as others achieving success in their professions outside of the country. Accompanying tables, charts, and graphs illustrate the field’s most poignant research, such as the relationship between organizational effectiveness and diversity and the characteristics of those taking family and medical leave.

Features

• Presents new research on the many forms of employment discrimination based on multiracial identity, appearance, and transgender status
• Includes contributions from professionals in the fields of social psychology, law, gender studies, and ethics, among others
• Reveals effective ways for promoting inclusion of women and people of color in today’s global workforce
• Covers the workforce in the public sector, private sector, and military
• Considers the role of social media in helping break through workplace barriers

Finding my roots

Eve’s Perspective: Sharing views one post at a time
2016-02-03

Ashley R. Alexander

Born in 1872 in Maysville, Alabama. Jordan-Woodard is my 3rd great-grandmother.

I couldn’t stop staring at the picture of this young lady. This young mulatto girl from the 19th century, who appears to look white and though there is no expression on her face, I am sure she had a lot of joy and heart aches during that timepoint in her life.

In the quest to find my roots this picture was sent to me. That young lady is my 3rd paternal great grandmother. Jeanette Eugenia Jordan was her name. She was born in 1872 just 7 years after the abolition of slavery…

Read the entire article here.

The Racial Reality of Being Mixed Race

91.3 KBCS Radio
Bellevue, Washington
2016-03-04

Sonya Green, News & Public Affairs Director

What does it mean to mixed race? It’s a term recognized but rarely considered in conversations about race and racial identity. However, it should be since according to reports, multiracial individuals are the fastest growing youth group. Seattle-based author activist, Sharon H. Chang debuts her first book Raising Mixed Race: Multiracial Asian Children In a Post-Racial World. Sonya Green interviewed Sharon. She started by defining what race means.

Listen to the interview (00:17:02) here.

Racialization, between power and knowledge: a postcolonial reading of public health as a discursive practice

Journal of Critical Race Inquiry
Volume 1, Number 2 (2011)

Patrick Cloos
University of Montréal

This paper presents and discusses the interdisciplinary theoretical perspective that has been built from a doctoral research on contemporary notions of ̒ race ̓ in the field of public health in the United States. In this context, ̒ race ̓ was seen as an object that emerged from the discourse, lying between power and knowledge as suggested by Foucault, while public health is an apparatus that put the discourse and the formation of the object into operation. Some authors in the field of postcolonial studies emphasize the representational power associated with the discourse that corresponds to a system of opposition and difference creating a dichotomy and ensuring the domination of some over others. This article argues that ̒ race ̓, as an idea of difference, will persist as long as historical conditions and people allow it.

Read the entire article here.

Beyoncé, Creoles, and Modern Blackness

University of California Press Blog
2016-02-29

Tyina Steptoe, Assistant Professor of History
University of Arizona

Tyina Steptoe is the author of Houston Bound: Culture and Color in a Jim Crow City (2015).

Beyoncé is a black woman. This isn’t exactly earth-shattering news; after all, the 34-year-old, Houston-born entertainer has one of the most recognizable faces in the world. Yet, since the release of the video for her song “Formation” on February 6, an avalanche of tweets and think pieces have heralded the arrival of an unapologetically black Beyoncé.

Set in New Orleans, the “Formation” video features a platinum braid wearing, hot sauce-loving black woman who adores afros and her “Negro nose.” Helmed by award-winning director Melina Masoukas, the clip also prominently features images associated with the Black Live Matter movement. In one scene, a group of militarized police officers stand in front of a dancing, unarmed black boy. Another shot shows a wall tagged with the words “Stop shooting us.” These are not words or images typically associated with Queen Bey.

One day later, Beyoncé’s Super Bowl halftime performance featured a bevy of black female back-up dancers dressed like Black Panthers in berets and afros. Some of the women later posed with a sign that read “Justice 4 Mario Woods.” Woods was a young African American man slain by police officers in San Francisco on December 2, so the display indelibly links Beyoncé to recent protests against police killings. Some white fans reacted angrily. By Monday morning, the hashtag #BoycottBeyonce circulated on social media, and one group of detractors planned a boycott (though that didn’t quite pan out in the way they’d hoped.) “Saturday Night Live” spoofed negative white reaction with a video called “The Day Beyoncé Turned Black.” To her fans and critics, it was clear that Beyoncé has made her racial identity and modern racial politics central to her public image in 2016…

Read the entire article here.

Hollywood’s Obsession With the Bottom Line Is Just Discrimination in Disguise

Cosmopolitan
2016-02-25

Stephanie Allain

Stephanie Allain has worked in Hollywood for more than 30 years, both in and out of the studio system. She’s produced award-winning films including Hustle & Flow, Peeples, Beyond the Lights, and Dear White People. Her next projects include Underground, a film about frat hazing at historically black colleges, for Netflix, and Crushed, a half-hour comedy for Lionsgate/Hulu inspired by the only black-owned family vineyard in Napa. She is also director of the L.A. Film Festival.

In 1990, I interviewed a young man to replace me as a script reader in the story department of Columbia Pictures. That man was 22-year-old John Singleton, and he couldn’t care less about the reader job. Instead, he pitched me his script about three young kids in South Central called Boyz N the Hood. When I got it from his agent, I closed the door to my tiny office and read it cover-to-cover. Up until then, I had been imitating my white mentors, Amy Pascal and Dawn Steel, culling the town for “commercial” scripts. Reading Boyz N the Hood reconnected me to my roots; it blew my mind wide open. There was an entire world of stories that had yet to be told, and as one of the few black women in Hollywood, I was determined to find them.

I was born in New Orleans in 1959 to Creole parents. Racism was insidious at that time in the South, so my father, a biochemist, and my mom, an educator, packed up our Impala in June 1965 and drove my sister and me to Los Angeles. We settled into a modest home near Wilshire Boulevard in the artistic community known as Miracle Mile, near the famous LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art). I think my father hoped we could escape racism by moving us out West and putting us in predominantly white schools, but that was a misguided wish: We reached L.A. just as the Watts rebellion broke out, exposing deep racial tensions in the city…

My colorblind bubble burst in fifth grade when the cute white boy who sat near me leaned across the aisle during a conversation about the Black Power movement and asked if I was a Negro. Somehow, I’d buried my shameful childhood memories of using a clothespin to narrow my nostrils. I’d forgotten how my cousins and I would compare skin color, the lighter ones wondering if we could “pass” like our grandmother was forced to do in her youth for survival…

Read the entire article here.