Mixed Race Studies

Volunteers Needed for Research Study on Multiracial Women and the Law

Carnegie Mellon University
2021-03-30

Julie Mi-Yeong Kidder, Doctoral Student, Instructor of First Year Writing
Rhetoric Program, Department of English
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Do you identify as a multiracial woman who works in the law? Are you interested in participating in a research study on racial and gender identity in the legal field?

Qualifications:

1. Are at least 18 years old
2. Identify as a woman
3. Identify as two or more races
4. Are actively working or studying in the legal field

1. Participation Involves One 45-90 minute interview over Zoom
2. There is no direct compensation for participation.
3. Participation is voluntary.

For any questions or to schedule your interview session, please email Julie Kidder, Principal Investigator.

How do multiracial people inhabit space when we don’t tick a box?

2021-03-22

Syriah Bailey

I am a multiracial person writing a dissertation exploring the role of national censuses and monitoring forms in tracking multiracial people who are two or more minority races/ethnicities.

My research looks at those who typically select “mixed other” or “any other mixed background” in forms and how we as multiracial people inhabit space when we do not fit inside a tick box.

The first component of the research is a survey open to people of all ages, genders and locations here.

Competencies for Counseling the Multiracial Population: Then, now, and beyond

Thursday, March 25, 2021, 13:00-14:30 EDT

The Competencies for Counseling the Multiracial Population (2015), endorsed and adopted by the American Counseling Association Governing Council in March 2015, were created to continue efforts initiated by the Multiracial/Multiethnic Counseling Concerns Interest Network (MRECC) in awareness, knowledge, and skills related to work with this population. During this session we will hear from the authors of the competencies on its history and ensuing impact and utilization. We will engage in a discussion about salient issues related to multiethnic, multiracial, and transracial adoptee individuals and communities, with an intentional focus on the current sociopolitical context and next steps related to advocacy, leadership, research, counseling, and counselor education.

Learning Objectives

1. Attendees will learn about the history of the Competencies for Counseling the Multiracial Population
2. Attendees will learn about the impact and utilization of the competencies within advocacy, leadership, research, counseling, and counselor education
3. Attendees will learn about, conceptualize, and contextualize multiethnic, multiracial, and transracial adoptee issues within advocacy, leadership, research, counseling, and counselor education

Please visit the MMCG Google Site to view panelist bios here.

To register, click here.

For more information, please contact vpmulti@amcd.info.

Warmly,

Regina Finan, MMCG Vice President

Royally Racist: The Fear Behind the One-Drop Rule to Preserve Whiteness

Beacon Broadside: A Project of Beacon Press
2021-03-11

Yaba Blay

Duchess of Sussex Meghan Markle and Prince Harry are so done with the way the royal family has treated them. We wish the couple and their children all the happiness in the world. Photo credit: Chris Jackson/Getty Images

The ripple effects from the truth bomb of Oprah Winfrey’s interview with Meghan Markle and Prince Harry will take a while to settle. During their two-hour talk, the royal couple revealed the royal family’s concern with how dark the skin of their child, Archie, would be when he was born. Also, Archie will not be granted a title or protection. Put two and two together, and the reason is clear. Racism is a hell of a drug, isn’t it? Not even Markle’s perceived proximity to whiteness, granted to her as a biracial woman, can protect her son. We may live in the woke times of the twenty-first century, but the royal family’s “concern” is a fear is as old as the slave trade their ancestors took part in. As Yaba Blay writes in One Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race, it’s a historical fear, steeped in colonialism, over preserving the purity of whiteness and the superiority ascribed to it.

The US Census reveals much about the country’s perspective on race. It counts people according to how the nation defines people, and historically, those people counted as Black have been those people with any known Black ancestry. Blacks are defined by the one-drop rule. No other racial or ethnic group is defined in this way, nor does any other nation rely upon this formula; the one-drop rule is definitively Black and characteristically American. It should make sense then that the origins of the rule are directly linked to the history of Black people in the United States, and as such, our discussion of the one-drop rule begins during the period of colonial enslavement…

Read the entire article here.

Meghan Markle, The Royal Family, Right Wing Media Animus and The Specter of Deeply Entrenched Racism!

Medium
2021-03-11

Elwood Watson, Ph.D., Professor of African American and Gender Studies, Post-WWII U.S. History
East Tennessee State University

It didn’t take long for the right-wing media, here in America and in Britain, to gin up their propaganda/outrage machine towards Meghan Markle, better known as The Duchess of Sussex. “Unreasonable,” “entitled,” “ungrateful,” “spoiled,” “Liar! Fake Outrage!” “Fights, Camera, Action,” “Megxile,” “So Who is The Royal Racist?” and so on. Hell, perennial Meghan Markle antagonist and fierce critic, Piers Morgan, literally screamed and stomped off of the set of the program Good Morning Britain. It was a meltdown of epic proportions for all to see.

They were savvy enough not to refer to her as “uppity,” a word reserved for Black people who anger racist, White people by taking them out of their comfort zones. These are the Black folks who upset White bigots by “doing their own thing on their own terms” and, in essence, by telling such Whites to “Go to hell!” Some in the right-wing media would have liked to have called her a “n*gger bitch,” though they know that would have resulted in some consequences, even in our current climate of over racial animus…

Read the entire article here.

The children colonial Belgium stole from African mothers

Al Jazeera
2021-02-03

Annette Ekin
Brussels, Belgium

An archive photo showing children at Save, a key institution to which stolen mixed-race children were taken [Courtesy of metisbe.squarespace.com]

Taken from their mothers in what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and Burundi, decades on a group of mixed-race elderly people are fighting the Belgian state for recognition and reparations.

Monique Bitu Bingi, 71, has never forgotten how it happened.

It was 1953 when the white colonials came for her in Babadi, a village in the Kasai region of what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), then a Belgian colony. She was four, the child of a Black Congolese woman and a white Belgian colonial agent. Because she was mixed-race, she would be forced to leave her family and live at a Catholic mission. If she stayed, there would be repercussions: the men – farmers, hunters and protectors of the village – would be forcibly recruited into military duty and taken away. When the time came to leave, her mother was not there to say goodbye. She had left, unable to watch her daughter go.

Monique remembers travelling with her uncle, aunt and grandmother who carried her. She could tell something was wrong from her grandmother’s sadness. They walked west for about two days, crossed a river and slept in cabins used for drying cotton. When they reached Dimbelenge they hitched a ride northwest on a truck carrying the body of a woman who had died in childbirth. It was headed for Katende, in today’s Kasai Central province, where the St Vincent de Paul sisters’ mission was. Monique fell asleep. It must have been a Wednesday because weddings happened on Wednesdays and when she awoke outside the mission she saw a young Congolese couple, the bride dressed in white, and strangers everywhere. But her own family was gone. She remembers walking through the crowd, crying, until an older girl from the mission brought her inside to the others.

Among the countless abuses committed by the Belgian state during its colonial occupation of the Congo from 1908 to 1960, taking over from the exploitative and violent rule of King Leopold II which killed millions of Congolese, and its control from 1922 to 1962 under a League of Nations mandate in Ruanda-Urundi (today Rwanda and Burundi), is the little-known systematic abduction of biracial children from their maternal families…

Read the entire article here.

Yaba Blay | One Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race

Author Events
2021-03-04

Host:

Imani Perry, Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies; Faculty Associate in the Program in Law and Public Affairs and Gender and Sexuality Studies
Princeton University

Referred to by Michael Eric Dyson as “one of the most brilliant and committed critics and advocates writing and thinking and working on behalf of Black people today,” Dr. Yaba Blay is a scholar, activist, and cultural consultant. Focusing on Black women and girls through topics like personal identity and body image, she has launched a number of viral media campaigns, produced the CNN documentary Who is Black in America?, and is an internationally renowned public speaker. Her work has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, Essence, and EBONY, and she has appeared on CNN, BET, and NPR, among other media outlets. In One Drop, Blay questions conventional perceptions of Blackness in order to create and understand a more diverse worldwide community.

Watch the interview here.

I’m mixed race, and sometimes I feel like I don’t belong anywhere

CBC News
British Columbia
2021-03-07

Jeremy Ratt, Associate Producer
CBC Vancouver

My mother is Indigenous, and my dad is white. That makes me mixed — two pieces of me, split right down the middle, writes Jeremy Ratt. (Maggie MacPherson/CBC)

Indigenous people say I don’t look Indigenous, white people say I’m not white. So who am I, really?

It’s hard to be me.

I’m not fishing for sympathy or downplaying the struggles of other people who I recognize have it much worse. I feel safe and loved.

But I have trouble being me, because I really don’t know who “me” is at this moment.

I was born 19 years ago on a cold day at Royal University Hospital in Saskatoon. My mother is fully Indigenous, from the Woodland Cree First Nation in northern Saskatchewan, while my father is Caucasian with various ties to European ancestry. This makes me a person of mixed race. Two pieces of me, split right down the middle.

Ever since I could walk and talk, it became apparent that this background was going to be a major part of me. It was clear that I was different and there was no hiding that. “Apitoscan” was a word I’d always heard when it came to the definition of Métis people. In Woods Cree, it means “half-breed” as well as “Métis.”…

Read the entire article here.

Public Thinker: Chanda Prescod-Weinstein Looks to the Night Sky

Public Thinker
Public Books
2021-03-09

Katherine McKittrick, Professor in Gender Studies and the Graduate Program in Cultural Studies
Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada

Thinking in public demands knowledge, eloquence, and courage. In this interview series, we hear from public scholars about how they found their path and how they communicate to a wide audience.

My notes on The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred, by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, began on small paper squares that were about 10.5 x 10.5 cm. The paper squares allowed me to take fairly concise notes on key themes raised in the book; because of the size of the squares, I could reposition them as I read, which meant the themes were moveable and could change according to the time and place of my reading.

Partway through the book, I moved to lined three-ring paper, because the 10.5 x 10.5 cm thematic organization was stifling. I was losing my way. Thematic categorization—here is spacetime; here is melanin; here is Black feminism; here is, here are, phase(s); here is the one equation; here is diaspora and computing and song and nuclear physics and night sky—delimited the expansive intellectual work Prescod-Weinstein puts forth in this text. The lined three-ring paper offered more space; I was able to write out exact quotations at length and also write out ideas in my own words, mostly thinking about how to imagine the planet through curves and bendability.

Disordered Cosmos is a series of stories (cosmologies) and geometries and temperature variants and rapid expansions; these cosmologies, geometries, temperatures, and expansions are underpinned by racial-sexual violence, punitive evaluation metrics, the living memory of slavery, love, work. Particles, I think, hold everything together.

In her book, Prescod-Weinstein illuminated what I did not know and what I cannot know, and sharpened where I know from; she also showed me that the discipline of physics, and her work as a Black feminist physicist who studies quantum-gravity worlds, can forge meaningful interhuman and interecological and interstellar collaborations.

The kind of collaboration she offers is wide-ranging and painful and expressed through interdisciplinary promise. This is a book about how particle interactions are animated by the plantation. It is a book about how the racist contours of scientific knowledge provide the conditions that enable us to hold on to, and study, the liberatory inventions of Black scientists. It is a book that thinks about how wages and work and Blackness and identificatory politics and physics are entangled, and how this entanglement might, and can, reorient how we care for the planet and for each other. I am out of my depths.

In fall 2020, I had the chance to talk with Prescod-Weinstein about my book, Dear Science, and she gave me all kinds of space and time and energy so that I could share some of my ideas. I read Disordered Cosmos shortly afterward, and she agreed to continue our conversation—this time, with quarks and light dimensions and future-energy-distribution mechanisms, and the Blackness of it all, in mind…

Read the entire interview here.

The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred

Bold Type Books (an imprint of the Hachette Book Group)
2021-03-09
336 pages
Hardcover ISBN-13: 9781541724709
eBook ISBN-13: 9781541724693
Audiobook ISBN-13: 9781549133961

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy; Core faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies
University of New Hampshire

From a star theoretical physicist, a journey into the world of particle physics and the cosmos — and a call for a more just practice of science.

In The Disordered Cosmos, Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein shares her love for physics, from the Standard Model of Particle Physics and what lies beyond it, to the physics of melanin in skin, to the latest theories of dark matter — all with a new spin informed by history, politics, and the wisdom of Star Trek.

One of the leading physicists of her generation, Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is also one of fewer than one hundred Black American women to earn a PhD from a department of physics. Her vision of the cosmos is vibrant, buoyantly non-traditional, and grounded in Black feminist traditions.

Prescod-Weinstein urges us to recognize how science, like most fields, is rife with racism, sexism, and other dehumanizing systems. She lays out a bold new approach to science and society that begins with the belief that we all have a fundamental right to know and love the night sky. The Disordered Cosmos dreams into existence a world that allows everyone to experience and understand the wonders of the universe.