Mixed Race Studies

Reflection: How Multiracial Lives Matter 50 Years After Loving

Creighton Law Review
Volume 50, Number 3 (2017)
pages 718-724

Lauren Sudeall Lucas, Associate Professor of Law
Georgia State University

Black Lives Matter. All Lives Matter. These two statements are both true, but connote very different sentiments in our current political reality. To further complicate matters, in this short reflection piece, I query how multiracial lives matter in the context of this heated social and political discussion about race. As a multiracial person committed to racial justice and sympathetic both to those pushing for recognition of multiracial identity and to those who worry such recognition may undermine larger movements, these are questions I have long grappled with both professionally and personally. Of course, multiracial lives matter—but do they constitute a sub-agenda of the Black Lives Matter movement, or is there an independent agenda the moniker “Multiracial Lives Matter” might represent? If the latter, is there a danger that such an agenda might be co-opted by other forces and used to further unintended purposes, such as the advancement of colorblindness? To the extent that agenda demands unique recognition of multiracial identity, how can it co-exist with broader identity-based racial justice movements?…

Read the entire article here.

Strip Clubs and the Sociology of Racism

Blackfeminisms.com: Centered on feminism & Women of the African Diaspora
May 2017

Melissa C. Brown

Strip clubs and sex work in general have long been studied by feminist scholars. There are two debates in feminism about sex work: radical feminists believe all sex work is exploitation within a patriarchal society. Radical feminists claim sex work exploits all women. Contemporary feminists believe sexual agency does exist. They emphasize empowerment and sexual agency within sexual economies, claiming women can take control in the sex industry. Feminists who argue for a more complicated position suggest focusing on sex workers right transnationally by analyzing both oppression and empowerment for women.

Sociologist Siobhan Brooks studied racial stratification in strip clubs in her 2010 Sexuality Research and Social Policy article:

These debates largely overlook structural racism within the sex industry that makes it difficult for women of color to maximize the benefit of the empowering aspects of sex work sex radical feminists underscore and produces problems not addressed by radical feminists, because sex work in and of itself is often not viewed as a problem by women of color but rather lack of decent shifts, safety, and better monetary gain…

…Taking Black Feminist Thought to the Strip Club

Brooks builds her argument on Patricia Hill Collins’s concept of controlling images. According to Collins, Black women face four: the mammy, the matriarch, the welfare mother and the Jezebel. Jezebel emerged during slavery. Collins argues mass media helps spread these racial ideologies. Black women are defined as sexually aggressive and more sexually available.

Brooks uses ethnography, fieldwork, and participant-observation for the study by interviewing 12 Black and Latina women aged 19 to 45 from NYC and Oakland. According to Brooks, dancers express having to manage racism as men offer money to White women over women of color, leading them to earn less. Some conceal their racial identity or engage in racial passing. Mixed women express being able to perform multiple ethnicities for customers. Darker women have to perform extra emotional labor…

Read the entire article here.

My Skin Is Black, My Name Is Latino (AfroLatinidad As a Layered Blackness)

Medium
2017-07-06

Jose Vilson
New York, New York

A younger me during one of my last visits to the Basílica Catedral Nuestra Señora de la Altagracia, Dominican Republic

I love jumping into cabs in Washington Heights for two reasons: the driver is almost always Dominican (as in Dominican Republic) and the driver is almost always surprised I can speak Spanish. He can have similar facial features, see the waves in my curly hair, and listen to the same music I have on my smartphone. It never matters. The second question is, “Wait, you’re Dominican? What barrio is your mom from?” I tell them the barrio and the cross-streets, and they get vexed. We exchange pleasantries, barbs about the way our music used to be, and elongated vowels before they finally drop me off at my destination.

Something about my blackness wouldn’t allow them to embrace theirs…

Read the entire article here.

Hip Chick Alert puts the spotlight on Tessa Souter

Hip Chick Alert
2017-03-02

Perez

Tessa Souter was born in London to a Trinidadian father and an English mother. She studied piano from the age of 8 until, at 12, her piano teacher heard her voice and encouraged her to take up singing. She learned guitar by ear to accompany herself and began writing songs. She graduated with a degree in English literature from London University and got her first job in journalism at Parents magazine, before going on to freelance as a features writer for, among other British press The Independent, The Times, Elle, Vogue, as well as Australian Elle, Sydney Morning Herald and HQ….

Read the entire article here.

Brazil’s Ongoing Race Problem: Recent Study Uncovers Shocking Treatment of Darker-Skinned Children in Interracial Families

Atlanta Black Star
2017-07-01

D. Amari Jackson

SALVADOR, BRAZIL -Social psychologist finds Black Brazilian children in interracial families face shocking racism. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

“The most shocking story I heard was told by a young woman, a university student who came to see me… she was phenotypically ‘Black’ but her mother was ‘white.’ She told me that when she was little, her mother would sing a lullaby with these words: ‘Plantei uma cenoura no meu quintal / Nasceu uma negrinha de avental / Dança negrinha / Não sei dançar / Pega no chicote, ela dança já’ [I planted a carrot in my backyard. / It sprouted a nigger girl in an apron. / Dance, little nigger girl! / I can’t dance. / Show her the whip, she’ll dance alright.] Her mother’s lullaby wasn’t just racist, it was a slave owner’s song.” — Social psychologist Lia Vainer Schucman from a June 2017 interview with Agência FAPESP in Brazil

Perhaps you’ve heard of the ‘bleach bath,’ a popular process designed to significantly lighten one’s skin. Or maybe the clothespin, the laundry drying device that doubles as a nighttime nasal clamp to narrow the width of what is regarded as a phenotypically Black nose. Here in the 21st century, such tragic racialized practices and psychoses are, unfortunately, still alive and well in countries across the globe.

This acknowledged, there is a common perception that the more racially diverse and interracial a society and its relationships become, the less racism it will endure. It is a questionable line of reasoning particularly prevalent in Brazil where racially mixed societies and families are the norm. It fuels the popular national narrative that racial prejudice cannot exist in South America’s largest country since “somos todos iguais” (“we are all equal”).

A recent study by social psychologist and researcher Lia Vainer Schucman says otherwise. In it, Schucman interviewed interracial families from regions across Brazil willing to discuss the manifestations and impact of racism within their units as part of her postdoctoral work at the University of São Paulo. Sponsored by Agência FAPESP, a media service of the São Paulo Research Foundation, Schucman’s research is the subject of her upcoming book, “Famílias Inter-Raciais: Tensões entre Cor e Amor” (Inter-Racial Families: Tensions Between Color and Love)…

Read the entire article here.

SBU Libraries Black History Month Lecture 2-13-17 Dr. Zebulon Miletsky: “Obama, Post-Racialism and the New American Dilemma”

Stony Brook Library Media Services
2017-02-13 (Published 2017-02-15)

Zebulon Vance Miletsky, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies
Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York

The election of Barack Obama in 2008 as the 44th President of the United States, raised hopes for many that as a country we were entering a post-racial moment, that the twin legacies of oppression and slavery were overcome, not only in the United States, but the world. That same period, however, brought crises of authority caused by neo-liberalism, police violence, and mass incarceration that have consistently set back the very racial progress that Obama’s presidency seemed to inaugurate. Far from being post-racial, the Obama years were a period of constant racial crisis, the repercussions of which were felt daily since the killings of Eric Garner in New York and Michael Brown in Ferguson in the summer of 2014. It took the election of an African American to the nation’s highest office to uncover a level of racial hatred the likes of which we have not seen since the 1960s, requiring an analysis of the relationship between multiracialism and post-racialism, as well as how whiteness operates in the United States, to fully appreciate what has come to pass. The election of Donald Trump as President has been a clear rejection of the post-racial era ushered in by Obama. Much like our more recent experiment in racial democracy, there are parallels between what happened with the overthrow of Reconstruction, America’s startling experiment in biracial democracy after the Civil War and today. The historical roots of the “whitelash” that fueled Trump’s victory lie in a prior racial backlash to an unprecedented attempt to grant African Americans citizenship during the period of Reconstruction. Based on a book chapter-in-progress for a volume on the Black Intellectual Tradition in America, this presentation discusses how the 21st century could potentially mark a new low in American race relations—or a “new American dilemma”.

Dr. Zebulon Vance Miletsky is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and a historian specializing in recent African-American History, Civil Rights and Black Power, Urban History, Mixed Race and Biracial identity, and Hip-Hop Studies. His research interests include: African-Americans in Boston; Northern freedom movements outside of the South; Mixed race history in the U.S. and passing; and the Afro-Latin diaspora. He is the author of numerous articles, reviews, essays and book chapters and is currently working on a manuscript on the civil rights movement in Boston. Ph.D.; African-American Studies with a concentration in History, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 2008.