Mixed Race Studies

City of Alexandria unveils marker to Louisiana’s first African-American governor

KALB-TV News Channel 5
Alexandria, Louisiana
2020-02-25

ALEXANDRIA, La. (City of Alexandria) – Alexandria Mayor Jeffrey W. Hall joined local historic preservation supporters Tuesday afternoon in the Alexander Fulton Mini Park downtown to unveil a historical marker in honor of P.B.S. Pinchback, Louisiana’s first African-American governor.

“It is fitting that we honor P.B.S. Pinchback, the first African-American Governor of Louisiana, during Black History Month,” Hall said. “Gov. Pinchback was a significant force in Louisiana politics during Reconstruction following the Civil War. And he traveled to Alexandria for meetings during his brief time as governor.”

Alexandria Mayor Jeffrey W. Hall (left) and local historian Michael Wynne unveil a historical marker in honor of P.B.S. Pinchback, Louisiana’s first African-American governor Tuesday afternoon. The marker, located in the Alexander Fulton Mini Park in downtown Alexandria, is the first one erected as part of the City of Alexandria’s new historical marker program designed to recognize historical events and people associated with Alexandria.

Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback was born in 1837 in Georgia to a white father, who was a planter, and a black mother who was a former slave. While he could have tried to pass for white, Pinchback embraced his African-American roots. During the Civil War and after the fall of New Orleans, Pinchback recruited the first set of African-American volunteer soldiers for the Union Army in Louisiana known as the 1st Louisiana Native Guards, and he served as its first Captain…

Read the entire story here.

The changing categories the U.S. census has used to measure race

Fact Tank: News in the Number
Pew Research Center
2020-02-25

Anna Brown, Research Associate

The varying ways in which the U.S. government has counted Americans over time offer a glimpse into the country’s past, from the days of slavery to recent waves of immigration. Racial categories, which have been included on every U.S. census since the first one in 1790, have changed from decade to decade, reflecting the politics and science of the times.

It was not until 1960 that people could select their own race. Prior to that, an individual’s race was determined by census takers, known as enumerators. And it was not until 2000 that Americans could choose more than one race to describe themselves, allowing for an estimate of the nation’s multiracial population. In 2020, for the first time, the form asks respondents who choose white or black for their race to give more information about their origins – for example, German, Lebanese, African American or Somali…

Read the entire article here.

I’m 100% black and 100% Japanese and I found my true self at Howard University

The Undefeated
2020-02-25

Arthur Cribbs, ESPN Rhoden Fellow
Los Angeles, California

Arthur Cribbs (center) with father and mother at his high school graduation in Los Angeles in 2017. Arthur Cribbs

Arthur Cribbs is a junior at Howard University and one of six Rhoden Fellows from historically black colleges and universities participating in a yearlong internship with The Undefeated.

I wouldn’t have it any other way

All I had been searching for in a college was a place that I could call home. So when my junior year of high school came around and my guidance counselors began asking me which schools I was considering, my mind was set on one place: Occidental College.

At that point in my life, it checked all the boxes. It was a four-year college with proven success; even President Barack Obama attended the school. It was also close to my home in Los Angeles, about a mile away from my family. I was familiar with the campus and since my two sisters attended the school, I’d spent many nights at the college already. Occidental looked like a place, outside of my home, where I could be comfortable.

Growing up, comfort was something I had constantly been searching for. Whenever I was away from my family, I often felt out of place.

For starters, I am black and Japanese. While my parents raised me to embrace both parts of my heritage, there were not many people with my combination…

Read the entire article here.

Black/white mixed-race experiences of race and racism in Poland

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Published online 2020-02-25
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2020.1729390

Bolaji Balogun
School of Sociology and Social Policy
University of Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom

Remi Joseph-Salisbury, Presidential Fellow in Ethinicty and Inequalities
University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom

Whilst literature on race and ethnicity in Poland is growing, it has yet to fully grapple with the diverse range of racial identities in Poland. Simultaneously, despite calls for Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) to develop into a more global field, there remains a paucity of literature focusing on racial mixedness in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), and no substantive consideration of the lived experiences of mixed-race people in Poland. Taking these absences as our entry point, we bring Critical Mixed Race Studies into conversation with pieces of literature on race and ethnicity in Poland in order to extend the theoretical and empirical terrain of both fields. Drawing upon data from interviews conducted with black/white mixed-race people in Poland, this article casts light on the lives of this nascent group, and specifically on their experiences of racism and exclusion in a society imagined as homogenously white.

Read or purchase the entire article here.