Mixed Race Studies

Escaping slavery, one family’s story

Free Press Newspapers
Illinois
2016-12-14

Sandy Vasko, Executive Director
Will County Historical Society

Black history in Braidwood starts during the coal strikes of the 1870s. Before that time the only black people this area knew were passing through on the Underground Railroad. Or did they? As I have learned, not all of them kept going. Some decided to stay in one place not to very far from here despite all the troubles and complications that meant.

Let’s start at the beginning with Eliza Wilson. She was born a slave in South Carolina in 1825 and is described as a mullato, in other words she was partly white, and probably her father was her owner. But in those days, one drop of black blood meant you were black. In 1845 we find her in a census as a free woman. How she earned her freedom is unknown, but soon we find her listed in South Carolina register as a slave owner. Blacks owning slaves!?!?! Yes, it seems that it was not uncommon. What is interesting is that the three slaves she owned were 1, 3, and 5 years of age…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed marriages, stubborn racial bias: Discrimination persists for the nonwhite

The New York Daily News
2016-12-09

Tanya Katerí Hernández, Professor of Law
Fordham University

Mildred and Richard Loving (Associated Press)

“I ’m pregnant.” Those are the first two words uttered in the recently released film “Loving.” The poignant opening prompts viewers to consider the most contested social consequence of interracial relationships: mixed-race children.

“Loving” depicts the real-life struggle of Mildred and Richard Loving in the 1960s as they fought to get interracial relationships legally recognized. This battle culminated in the 1967 Supreme Court case of Loving vs. Virginia, which invalidated interracial marriage bans across America.

Interracial marriage has been legal for nearly half a century. But the products of those marriages are subject to discrimination that reveals a great deal about race in America, and the cultural status of those unions.

In my own examination of civil rights cases across employment, housing, public accommodations, education and jury service, I find an increasing number of claimants who identify themselves as multiracial and biracial. The cases frequently describe acts of discrimination accompanied by pointed, derogatory comments about nonwhiteness — and blackness in particular…

Read the entire article here.

On the Record: Georgetown and the racial identity of President Patrick Healy

The Georgetown Voice
2010-04-14

Patrick Healy

Matt Sheptuck (COL ’10) is an American Studies major writing his senior thesis, which explores how Georgetown University has perceived Jesuit Father Patrick Healy’s racial identity over the years. In his research Sheptuck found that Healy, whom many of us know as the first African-American President of Georgetown and one of the first black presidents of any major American university, was understood as white for much of the University’s history, until beginning in the 1960s, when Georgetown began to “market” Healy as black.

Sheptuck says he isn’t “overtly condemnatory” of the University’s history, knowing that how they framed Healy was a product of the times. But he proposes that going forward, Georgetown doesn’t need to relegate Healy’s racial identity to the “one-dimensional” white or black designation, and should present him as the complex man he was. He also thinks Georgetown needs to look closely at its relationship with race in America in the past. Intrigued by his research, Vox caught up with Sheptuck on Tuesday to learn more.

Vox Populi: So tell me a little about your thesis.

Matt Sheptuck: I’m looking at how the University’s changing racial conceptualization of Patrick Healy’s identity fit in relation to how the University thought about race in general. And what I’ve found in my research about Healy, who was president from 1874 – 1882, is two main periods from the 1880s, when Healy resigned as president, up to the present, in which the University talked about his racial identity differently…

Read the interview here.

I worried that it was possible for the symbolic and inspirational aspects of having a black president more than offset by the damages that could be done by the messages delivered by a black president. And it has been damaging to have Barack Obama, a black man speaking from the authoritative platform of the presidency, reinforce the widely held belief that racial inequality in the United States is, in large measure, the direct responsibility of black folk. This has been the deal breaker for me: not merely a silence on white physical and emotional violence directed against black Americans, but the denial of the centrality of American racism in explaining sustained black-white disparity.

William A. Darity, “How Barack Obama Failed Black Americans,” The Atlantic, December 22, 2016. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/12/how-barack-obama-failed-black-americans/511358/.

Honor and Effort: What President Obama Achieved in Eight Years

TIME
2016-12-22

David Von Drehle

Brendan Smialowski—Getty Images Barack Obama smiles while speaking during the 36th annual National Italian American Foundation Gala on Oct. 29, 2011.

Barack Obama entered the White House as something new in American history. He wasn’t chosen on the basis of experience, nor for his role as leader of a party or a movement. He had not been a governor or a general or a veteran legislator. He did not become president by the accident of his predecessor’s death in office.

Obama was elected purely for himself—his message, his persona and what he symbolized. In 48 brief months, he rose from the obscurity of a state legislature to become the first Democrat in more than three decades to win more than half of the popular vote. Messenger and message were inseparable; he offered himself as Exhibit A in the case for hope and change. Obama was a mirror in which millions of people saw their cherished ideals reflected: tolerance, cooperation, equality, justice…

Read the entire article here.

Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History

Duke University Press
2016
232 pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-6248-7
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-6263-0

Stuart Hall (1932–2014)

Edited by:

Jennifer Daryl Slack, Professor of Communication and Cultural Studies
Michigan Technological University

Lawrence Grossberg, Morris David Distinguished Professor of Communication and Cultural Studies
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

The publication of Cultural Studies 1983 is a touchstone event in the history of Cultural Studies and a testament to Stuart Hall’s unparalleled contributions. The eight foundational lectures Hall delivered at the University of Illinois in 1983 introduced North American audiences to a thinker and discipline that would shift the course of critical scholarship. Unavailable until now, these lectures present Hall’s original engagements with the theoretical positions that contributed to the formation of Cultural Studies. Throughout this personally guided tour of Cultural Studies’ intellectual genealogy, Hall discusses the work of Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, and E. P. Thompson; the influence of structuralism; the limitations and possibilities of Marxist theory; and the importance of Althusser and Gramsci. Throughout these theoretical reflections, Hall insists that Cultural Studies aims to provide the means for political change.

Table of Contents

• Editor’s Introduction / Lawrence Grossberg and Jennifer Daryl Slack
• Preface to the Lectures by Stuart Hall, 1988
• Lecture 1. The Formation of Cultural Studies
• Lecture 2. Culturalism
• Lecture 3. Structuralism
• Lecture 4. Rethinking the Base and Superstructure
• Lecture 5. Marxist Structuralism
• Lecture 6. Ideology and Ideological Struggle
• Lecture 7. Domination and Hegemony
• Lecture 8. Culture, Resistance, and Struggle
• References
• Index