Mixed Race Studies

Those Discriminated Against Are Now the Discriminators

Indian Country Today Media Network
2015-12-31

Juilanne Jennings

For some odd and stupid reason many of us continue to be color struck. I really think most of us are ignorant or at the very least forgetful. Black people who look “white” is not a new phenomenon. In the United States, anyone with a trace of African blood, no matter how remote, has been considered black. Following the centuries-long evolution of Eurocentrism, a concept geared to protecting white racial purity and social privilege, race has been constructed and regulated by the “one-drop” rule (i.e., hypodescent), which obligated individuals to identify as black or white, in effect erasing mixed-race individuals from the social landscape. Walter Plecker, first registrar of Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics, serving from 1912 to 1946, had brought racial policies to blood and bone level.

Now, deep into the 21st century, the socially constructed racial ladder continues to keep people of color, including individuals of mixed race, from enjoying the same privileges as Euro-Americans. Moreover, as we try to march forward with new members of a new multiracial movement pointing the way toward equality, those who have been discriminated against are now becoming the discriminators…

Read the entire article here.

The Best “Worst President”: What the Right Gets Wrong About Barack Obama

Dey Street Books (an imprint of HarperCollins)
2016-06-28
336 pages
Trimsize: 5.75 in (w) x 8.25 in (h) x 1.274 in (d)
Hardcover ISBN: 9780062443052
E-book ISBN: 9780062443090

Mark Hannah

Illustrated by Bob Staake

Political analyst and Democratic campaign veteran Mark Hannah and renowned New Yorker illustrator Bob Staake give Barack Obama the victory lap he deserves in this compendium that takes the president’s critics head-on and celebrates the president’s many underappreciated triumphs.

Barack Obama’s election in 2008 was a watershed moment in American history that inspired supporters on the Left—and fired up enemies on the Right. Elected in the midst of multiple crises—a Wall Street meltdown that imperiled the global economy and American troops entangled in two foreign wars—Barack Obama’s presidency promised, from the start, to be one of the most consequential presidencies in modern American history.

Although he stabilized the economy and restored America’s prestige on the global stage, President Obama has been denied the credit he deserves, receiving instead acidic commentary from political opponents such as former Vice President Dick Cheney, who declared that Obama was “the worst president in [his] lifetime”—an accusation that reflects the politics of resentment and recrimination that has come to characterize the president’s critics.

In The “Best Worst” President, Mark Hannah and New Yorker illustrator Bob Staake swiftly and systematically debunk conservative lies and disinformation meant to negate the president’s accomplishments and damage his reputation—baseless charges too often left unchallenged by the national media. The “Best Worst” President is a whip-smart takedown of these half-truths and hypocrisies, each refuted in a smart, witty, fact-based style. Hannah and Staake not only defend the president but showcase his administration’s most surprising and underappreciated triumphs—making clear he truly is the best “worst president” our nation has ever known.

Picking Sides: An Exploratory Documentary on Multiraciality

Arizona State University
December 2015

Amanda Catherine Cavazos

Multiracial individuals are the fastest growing demographic group in the United States. In order to explore and gain insight into how mixed-race individuals understand and negotiate their identity, this project includes a documentary of compiled interviews with multiracial individuals. These interviews seek to address both positive and problematic notions associated with identifying as mixed race/multi-ethnic, including issues that these individuals encounter if, and when, the dominant culture rejects their blended racial heritage. The video format allows individuals to convey the complicated nature of belonging to different groups of people that are hierarchically divided in the United States.

For more information, click here.

Inclusion Policies and the Future of Racial Relations in Brazil

The Futures We Want: Global Sociology and the Struggles for a Better World
3rd ISA Forum of Sociology
2016-07-10 through 2016-07-14
Vienna, Austria

Tuesday, 2016-07-12, 09:30 CEST (Local Time)
Room: Hörsaal 34

Oral Presentation

Valter Silvério, Associate Professor of Sociology
Universidade Federal de Sao Carlos, Brazil

Antonio Guimarães, Professor
Department of Sociology
Universidade de Sao Paulo, Brazil

After the adoption of a new Constitution in 1988, race related issues have been transposed from the private to the public sphere. Affirmative action for blacks, native Brazilians, and the poor have been spread all over the country, and a Federal Affirmative Action statute and program was created. The Statute for Racial Equality was voted into law in Congress and Federal Education Guidelines were altered to include obligatory teaching on race relations, black Brazilian culture, and African history throughout basic education. Besides being a major symbolic break through, these new policies combined have the potential to lower the levels of racial inequality and discrimination that have plagued the country throughout its history.

Nonetheless, this whole process has not been devoid of tensions and contradictions. For example, if the recognition of a black identity put into question the narrative of miscegenation and racial harmony that underpinned Brazil’s national identity for decades. It also challenges sociologists to make sense of these ongoing changes in public policy and of the role of the State in fighting inequality and fostering identity formation. Given that scenario, a central question organizing this panel is: How societies with a history of structural inequality and racial domination can evolve toward a more equal stand and mutual recognition among social groups? Answering this question implies discussing the possible paths opened to improving the status and standing of individuals and groups in a context in which the ideology of racial democracy (or similar national narratives) still holds sway in the minds of many people, including the local elites.

The roundtable aims at addressing the above question from different perspectives, looking into the Brazilian and Latin America current debates and paying attention to the transformations and new challenges faced by these societies.

For more information, click here.

Multiracial People and the Socialization of Their Children in Britain

The Futures We Want: Global Sociology and the Struggles for a Better World
3rd ISA Forum of Sociology
2016-07-10 through 2016-07-14
Vienna, Austria

Tuesday, 2016-07-12, 14:15 CEST (Local Time)
Room: Hörsaal 31

Oral Presentation

Miri Song, Professor of Sociology
University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, United Kingdom

Since ‘Mixed’ was first offered as an option in the ethnicity question in the 2001 England and Wales Census, Britain’s recognition of, and interest in, ‘mixed race’ (or ‘multiracial’) people and families has not abated. Recent studies have focused primarily upon how mixed (young) people identify themselves, or how parents racially identify their multiracial children. But Britain now has a population of multiracial individuals who are themselves parents, about whom we know very little. Despite the growing commonality of mixed people and families, such families can still be subject to forms of racial pathologzation and scrutiny in various settings. Extant studies of multiracial family life (especially in the US) have tended to focus upon interracial couples and their multiracial children, but we now need to look a further generation down – at their grown children. What are the particular concerns which arise for multiracial individuals in Britain who are parents? How do multiracial people who are parents experience and negotiate forms of objectification and/or prejudice from others? Do multiracial people (who are parents) want to steer their children toward a particular kind of socialization, and if so, toward what (and why)? This paper is an in-depth exploration of the ways in which different types of mixed people (South Asian/White, Black/White, East Asian/White) in Britain think about and engage in parenting.

For more information, click here.

The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution

University of North Carolina Press
June 2016
Approx. 640 pages
21 halftones, 1 figs., 7 maps, 33 tables, notes, index
6.125 x 9.25
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-4696-2663-5
Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia

Robert G. Parkinson, Assistant Professor of History
Binghamton University, The State University of New York

When the Revolutionary War began, the odds of a united, continental effort to resist the British seemed nearly impossible. Few on either side of the Atlantic expected thirteen colonies to stick together in a war against their cultural cousins. In this pathbreaking book, Robert Parkinson argues that to unify the patriot side, political and communications leaders linked British tyranny to colonial prejudices, stereotypes, and fears about insurrectionary slaves and violent Indians. Manipulating newspaper networks, Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and their fellow agitators broadcast stories of British agents inciting African Americans and Indians to take up arms against the American rebellion. Using rhetoric like “domestic insurrectionists” and “merciless savages,” the founding fathers rallied the people around a common enemy and made racial prejudice a cornerstone of the new Republic.

In a fresh reading of the founding moment, Parkinson demonstrates the dual projection of the “common cause.” Patriots through both an ideological appeal to popular rights and a wartime movement against a host of British-recruited slaves and Indians forged a racialized, exclusionary model of American citizenship.

Prize-winning Hong Kong-born poet Sarah Howe makes verse of city’s Basic Law

South China Morning Post
2016-07-07

Clare Tyrrell-Morin

Having played down her Chinese side while growing up and studying in the UK, Howe, now at Harvard, has turned to it again as she makes an ‘erasure poem’ out of Hong Kong’s mini-constitution

We meet in a small office on the second floor of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, overlooking a tranquil garden unseen from Harvard University’s main thoroughfares. It’s freezing outside, but the view is spectacular: the bare branches of an ancient tree, contemplated by scholars for generations, silhouetted against a wintry sky. It’s a good view for a poet.

The office belongs to a Radcliffe Fellow, Sarah Howe, who is spending the year here with 50 other artists and scholars. You may not know her name yet, but Howe could become one of Hong Kong’s most celebrated writers.

In December, the 32-year-old won the Sunday Times/Peters Fraser & Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award for authors under the age of 35. The previous month, scientist Stephen Hawking read out a poem, titled “Relativity”, that she had written for him for Britain’s National Poetry Day. And, in January, Howe was presented with the £20,000 (HK$204,000) T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry at a lavish ceremony at the Victoria and Albert Museum, in London.

Her winning collection was “Loop of Jade”, which weaves around her identity as a British-Chinese poet born in Hong Kong. The dualistic, hybrid work dances between the search for her mother’s Chinese roots and subjects as varied as censorship, 14th-century Flemish paintings, evenings in Arizona and the rain in London. The book captures a quest for identity, dislocation and the crossing of waters – themes familiar to many a Hongkonger – yet, equally, it is an exploration of the Western literary canon and the impact Chinese poetry has had on it…

Read the entire article here.