Mixed Race Studies

“I See Me with Rebecca Carroll”

Black America
CUNY TV, New York, New York
2021-02-08

Carol Jenkins, Hosts

Rebecca Carroll talks with us about her latest book, “Surviving the White Gaze: A Memoir” that walks us through her struggle with race and identity as she navigates life in a white world.

Black America is an in-depth conversation that explores what it means to be Black in America. The show profiles Black activists, academics, business leaders, sports figures, elected officials, artists and writers to gauge this experience in a time of both turbulence and breakthroughs.

Black America is hosted by Carol Jenkins, Emmy award winning New York City journalist, and founding president of The Women’s Media Center.

Natalie Morris: “Ideas of mixedness are binary and centred around whiteness”

Substack
2021-04-19

Isabella Silvers

Hi, welcome back to Mixed Messages! This week I’m speaking to journalist and author Natalie Morris, who is of Jamaican and white British heritage. I first came across Natalie with Mixed Up, a series on Metro exploring the nuances of mixed identity. Continuing this vital conversation, Natalie has just released her first book, Mixed/Other: Explorations of Multiraciality in Modern Britain. Read on to hear Natalie share her own experiences, plus what she hopes everyone can take from her important work.

The author of Mixed/Other on the duality of holding two truths simultaneously and the isolation of being mixed

How do you define your ethnicity?

My dad’s family is Jamaican and my mum is white British, so I say I say mixed or mixed and Black. I’m trying to move away from ‘mixed-race’ as it implies a kind of essentialism.

The terminology changes and develops, which is good, but it can be tricky to keep up with that. There’s no wrong or right way to describe yourself, but it’s important to be open to those changes. It’s important that people also listen to what mixed people want – so many things are forced on you when you’re mixed, and it can be hard to push back against that…

Read the entire interview here.

Why celebrating ‘mixed-race beauty’ has its problematic side

The Guardian
2021-04-08

Natalie Morris

Kim Kardashian West at a Paris Fashion Week event on 2 March 2020. Photograph: Marc Piasecki/WireImage

The trend personified by the Kardashians is driven by the aesthetics of ambiguity – and proximity to whiteness

I was insecure about how I looked when I was younger. My hair was frizzy and embarrassingly enormous. My bum stuck out too much. My lips were too big. My thighs were too big.

Everything about me – specifically my racialised features as a Black mixed woman – felt “too much”. I remember the distinct feeling of wanting to shrink myself, melt myself down into something neater, smaller, sleeker – which is how I saw my white friends, and the beautiful white people on TV.

Then, in my early 20s, soon after moving to London from my home in Manchester, I began to notice a shift in how beauty was being represented. Suddenly, faces, hair and bodies that looked like mine were plastered on shop windows, grinning down from billboards, smizing (smiling with their eyes) from the pages of magazines. Every other TV ad featured mixed models or an interracial family.

White influencers began plumping their lips, baking their skin, braiding their hair, even undergoing invasive surgical procedures to create curves where none existed. The things about myself I had wanted to disguise or alter in my youth were now in vogue – and I struggled to get my head around that. How did it become “trendy” to look like me? And should I feel pleased about it?…

Read the entire article here.

Obamas Respond To Daunte Wright Shooting With A Plea For Police Reform

The Huffington Post
2021-04-13

Ryan Grenoble, National Reporter

“Our hearts are heavy over yet another shooting of a Black man, Daunte Wright, at the hands of police,” the former president and first lady wrote.

Former President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama on Tuesday responded to the killing of 20-year-old Daunte Wright with a call to “reimagine policing” in America, noting with some incredulity that Wright’s needless death came as jurors heard arguments in the trial of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd barely 10 miles away.

“Our hearts are heavy over yet another shooting of a Black man, Daunte Wright, at the hands of police,” the two said in a written statement.

“The fact that this could happen even as the city of Minneapolis is going through the trial of Derek Chauvin and reliving the heart-wrenching murder of George Floyd indicates not just how important it is to conduct a full and transparent investigation, but also just how badly we need to reimagine policing and public safety in this country.”…

Read the entire article here.

Web Event: The great demographic illusion: Majority, minority, and the expanding American mainstream

American Enterprise Institute
2021-04-19, 12:00-13:30 EDT

The majority-minority thesis contends that increasing demographic change in America will inevitably lead to a nation where minorities replace whites as the majority. In his new book, “The Great Demographic Illusion: Majority, Minority, and the Expanding American Mainstream” (Princeton University Press, 2020), sociologist Richard Alba argues that this narrative distorts ongoing changes because it overlooks the surge of young Americans growing up with one white and one nonwhite parent.

Please join AEI for a panel discussion, moderated by AEI’s Karlyn Bowman, on mixed-race families, US Census definitions, Hispanic identity across generations, personal definitions of race, and the implications for American politics.

Agenda
12:00 PM
Introduction:
Karlyn Bowman, Senior Fellow, AEI

12:05 PM
Presentation:
Richard Alba, Distinguished Professor of Sociology, Graduate Center, City University of New York

12:30 PM
Discussion

Panelists:

• Musa al-Gharbi, Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow in Sociology, Columbia University
• D’Vera Cohn, Senior Writer and Editor, Pew Research Center
• Mark Hugo Lopez, Director, Global Migration and Demography Research, Pew Research Center
• Ruy Teixeira, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress

Moderator:
Karlyn Bowman, Senior Fellow, AEI

1:10 PM
Q&A

1:30 PM
Adjournment

For more information, click here.

Would the Rev. Patrick Healy, Who Passed for White, Want to Be Celebrated as a Black Hero?

Faithfully Magazine
2020-10-13

Alexandria Griffin, Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion
New College of Florida, Sarasota, Florida

Father Patrick Francis Healy, S.J., was the first African American to receive a doctorate degree and the first to be president of a predominantly White university when he became president of Georgetown University in 1872. (Photo: Blake Photography/Public domain)

Patrick Healy never directly addressed questions of what his racial identity might have been in the written record he left behind. However, he wrote on a few occasions about “blacks” or “negroes” in a tone that seems to indicate that he saw them as a group he did not belong to.

In 2015 and 2016, Georgetown University became enmeshed in conversations about race taking place at college campuses across the United States. At Georgetown, conversation centered on the institution’s history with slavery, which had been an integral part of its early years, with much of the labor on campus falling to enslaved people.

The focus was the sale of 272 enslaved African Americans in 1838, a sale undertaken by Jesuits Thomas F. Mulledy and William McSherry with the intent to accrue enough money to pay off some of the school’s debts and keep it open. This sale resulted in the breakup of numerous families, and the majority were sold into the Deep South, where they were subjected to harsher conditions of forced agricultural labor. The sale was controversial at the time but eventually largely faded from the memory of White Catholics. (As Shannen Dee Williams, historian at Villanova University and originator of the Twitter hashtag #BlackHistoryIsCatholicHistory, has pointed out, what many people now think of as new information about religious orders owning enslaved people never faded from the memories of Black Catholics.)

Moreover, discussion also included broader issues around Georgetown’s relationship to slavery, including buildings named after slaveholding faculty, and on what actions might be taken to acknowledge and make amends for this history. A number of initiatives grew out of this; a working group made archival resources on slavery at Georgetown available online and researched the fates of those sold in 1838, the school held an apology ceremony attended by community members and descendants of those sold, and buildings named after Mulledy and McSherry were renamed. Additionally, the school opted to grant descendants of those sold in 1838 preferential admission. More recently, students voted to add a student fee to go toward reparations for descendants of those enslaved at Georgetown. The future of the fee and how or whether it will be implemented remains uncertain. The university has recently committed to raising $400,000 annually toward reparations, which some students feel is too little.

Patrick Francis Healy: Legally Enslaved, Passing for White

One figure has been strangely absent from this conversation: Patrick Francis Healy, the university’s 29th president. In November of 1853, Healy, then a young Jesuit in training, sent a letter to an older Jesuit and mentor, George Fenwick. He wrote from his teaching post at College of the Holy Cross: “Father, I will be candid with you. Placed in a college as I am, are boys who were well acquainted with by sight or hearsay, with me + my brothers, remarks are sometimes made (then if not in my hearing) which wound my very heart. You know to what I refer. The anxiety of mind caused by these is very intense.”…

Read the entire article here.

Rebecca Carroll: “Surviving the White Gaze” & Transracial Adoption | The Daily Social Distancing Show

The Daily Show with Trevor Noah
2021-03-17

Rebecca Carroll discusses her new memoir that examines transracial adoption and forging her own Black identity.

Watch the video here.

Special Issue “Beyond the Frontiers of Mixedness: New Approaches to Intermarriage, Multiethnicity, and Multiracialism”

Genealogy
2021-04-14
Abstract Deadline: 2021-05-31
Manuscript Submission Deadline: 2021-11-30

Professor Dr. Dan Rodriguez-Garcia, Guest Editor and Serra Húnter Associate Professor
Autonomous University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

Dear colleagues,

This Special Issue of Genealogy invites essays on the topic of “Beyond the Frontiers of Mixedness: New Approaches to Intermarriage, Multiethnicity, and Multiracialism.”

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 November 2021.

The field of mixed-race studies has experienced an incredible expansion since the pivotal work of Paul Spickard (1989) and Maria Root (1992, 1995). In the last three decades, we have witnessed numerous publications in this area of study, including edited collections and special issues, which have advanced our knowledge of “mixedness,” an encompassing concept that refers to mixed unions, families, and individuals across national, ethnocultural, racial, religious, and class boundaries as well as to the sociocultural processes involved (Rodríguez-García 2015). As the super-diversification of societies continues, the ever-growing research interest in mixedness can be attributed to scholars’ understanding that such an area of study both reveals existing social boundaries and shows how societies are being transformed. Mixedness can be understood to have a transformative potential in the sense that it disturbs, contests, and may reinvent social norms and established identity categories.

While intermarriage is on the rise and multiracial and multiethnic populations continue to grow worldwide, there are still many areas in which our knowledge of mixedness is limited or nascent. This Special Issue aims to expand our understanding of this complex phenomenon by exploring a variety of under-researched issues in the field, by seeking out research on untrodden topics and implications, and by employing innovative analytical approaches.

This Special Issue is intended to be broad in scope and welcomes innovative contributions across disciplines in the social sciences that may be theoretical or empirically based and that address—but are not limited to—one or more of the following topics:

• New conceptualizations of mixedness, intermarriage, and multiracialism;
• Mixedness beyond race: ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, age, class, micro-locations;
• Intersectional analyses of mixedness;
• New methods and mixed methods applied to the study of mixedness;
• Mixedness and statistics: the challenge of counting and categorizing intermarriage and mixed people;
• Comparative (inter-local/international/inter-continental) analyses of mixedness, including outside European and English-speaking settings;
• Decentering and decolonizing mixedness: multiracial and multiethnic identity formations outside of white-centric constructions;
• Mixedness in super-diverse contexts;
• New forms of cosmopolitanism and creolization;
• Mixedness and the reconceptualization of majority/minority meanings (reshaping the mainstream);
• Mixedness in highly segmented societies;
• Mixedness and religion: interfaith couples, families, and individuals;
• Mixedness, racialization, color blindness, and post-racialism;
• Mixedness and colorism: intraracial discrimination and horizontal hostility;
• Multiracial identifications for understanding racial formation;
• Ethnoracialism: multiracialism and multiethnicity as different or complementary processes;
• Mixedness, discrimination, and resilience/agency;
• Mixedness and whiteness (white privilege, white identities);
• Mixed-race privilege;
• Mixedness and (in)visibility;
• Contextual, multiform, translocational, malleable and shifting mixed identities: fixities and fluidities;
• Kinning in mixed families: raising and socializing multiracial and multiethnic children; inter-generational changes and continuities;
• Multiracial parents of multiracial children;
• Queer, LGBTQ+, same-sex, and transgender interracial and interethnic unions/families;
• Mixed-race masculinities;
• Mixedness and indigenous groups;
• Mixedness involving national ethnic minorities;
• Transracial adoption;
• Mixedness and the impact of COVID-19 (e.g., transnational reconfigurations, discrimination);
• Mixedness and cyberspace (i.e., online identity narratives, dating preferences, and relationships across race and ethnicity);
• Bridging the research-policy divide: working on mixedness with policymakers and third-sector practitioners.

This Special Issue is also interested in contributions that use novel analytical perspectives and methodologies, whether quantitative or qualitative or a combination of both.

For more information, click here.

CMRS Book Talk With Dr. Jasmine Mitchell

Critical Mixed Race Studies
2021-03-08

We’re happy to announce that our first book talk with Dr. Jasmine Mitchell on Imagining the Mulatta: Blackness in U.S. and Brazilian Media is available for you to view on our website and YouTube.

Also, keep a look out for the details of our upcoming book talks! We’ve lined up a couple of recently released books that you’ll love…

Our next one will be with some of the authors from Multiracial Experiences in Higher Education: Contesting Knowledge, Honoring Voice, and Innovating Practice, edited by Drs. Marc P. Johnston-Guerrero and Charmaine L. Wijeyesinghe.

Afterwards, we’ll talk with Drs. Chinelo L. Njaka and Jennifer Patrice Sims on their book, Mixed-Race in the US and UK: Comparing the Past, Present, and Future.

Regé-Jean Page rises above ‘Krypton’ casting controversy: ‘We still fly’

The Los Angeles Times
2021-04-06

Christi Carras, Staff Writer

“Bridgerton” star Regé-Jean Page attends a 2020 Vanity Fair BAFTAs party in London. (Jeff Spicer / Getty Images)

DC Entertainment reportedly passed on “Bridgerton” breakout Regé-Jean Page for a role in Syfy’s “Krypton” after an executive allegedly argued that the series’ lead could not be portrayed by a Black actor.

Before his star skyrocketed with the release of Shonda Rhimes’ hit period drama, Page auditioned to play Superman’s grandfather in the action program, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Despite the “Krypton” creators’ reported desire to diversify the DC Extended Universe, then-DC chief creative officer Geoffrey Johns allegedly said Superman’s grandfather could not be Black.

In a statement paraphrased Tuesday by THR, a rep for Johns defended the casting decision on the grounds that the Hollywood exec “believed fans expected the character to look like a young Henry Cavill,” who is white and plays Superman in the DC films. The starring role in “Krypton,” which ran for two seasons from 2018 to 2019, eventually went to white actor Cameron Cuffe…

Read the entire article here.