Mixed Race Studies

Looking at Shirley, the Ultimate Norm: Colour Balance, Image Technologies, and Cognitive Equity

Canadian Journal of Communication
Volume 34, Number 1 (2009)
pages 111-136

Lorna Roth, Professor of Communication Studies
Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Until recently, due to a light-skin bias embedded in colour film stock emulsions and digital camera design, the rendering of non-Caucasian skin tones was highly deficient and required the development of compensatory practices and technology improvements to redress its shortcomings. Using the emblematic “Shirley” norm reference card as a central metaphor reflecting the changing state of race relations/aesthetics, this essay analytically traces the colour adjustment processes in the industries of visual representation and identifies some prototypical changes in the field. The author contextualizes the history of these changes using three theoretical categories: the ‘technological unconscious’ (Vaccari, 1981), ‘dysconsciousness’ (King, 2001), and an original concept of ‘cognitive equity,’ which is proposed as an intelligent strategy for creating and promoting equity by inscribing a wider dynamic range of skin tones into image technologies, products, and emergent practices in the visual industries.

Jusqu’à récemment, en raison d’un préjugé favorisant la peau claire dans les films couleurs et dans la conception des caméras numériques, la reproduction des couleurs de peaux non-caucasiennes a été très déficiente, exigeant le développement de diverses techniques de compensation et d’amélioration. Utilisant la carte de référence normative « Shirley » comme métaphore pour refléter l’évolution des rapports entre les races et leurs pratiques esthétiques, cet essai analyse les processus d’ajustement de la couleur dans les industries de la représentation visuelle et identifie certains prototypes de changements dans le domaine. L’auteur situe ces changements historiquement en se rapportant à trois concepts théoriques : « l’inconscient technologique » (Vaccari, 1981), la « dysconscience » (« dysconsciousness » – King, 2001), et un concept original, « l’équité cognitive », proposé comme stratégie intelligente pour créer et promouvoir l’équité en inscrivant un plus grand éventail de couleurs de peau dans les technologies et produits de l’image et dans les pratiques émergeantes des industries visuelles.

Read the entire article here.

Raising a Biracial Child as a Mother of Color

The Atlantic
2015-09-19

Lara N. Dotson-Renta

A mother’s reflection on her own childhood and that of her biracial child—and the inevitable differences of the two.

A few months ago, I was walking home from the bus stop with my eldest daughter during the last week of kindergarten. She was lagging behind as usual, picking up sticks and shiny rocks, when she casually asked, “Mama, are the kids with browner skin more trouble? Why can some of them not read too well? Why do some people think Spanish is not good?”

In that moment, the heart that lives in my stomach jumped, and a mild nausea set in. At six years old, my now first-grade daughter is privileged, more than she understands, in ways that are painful and complicated for me to discern as both a highly educated, upper-middle-class parent, and as a woman of color who did not start out with such advantages.

…My daughter is half white, has a non-Latino last name, and navigates a space in between, of mixed heritage and lineage. She is frequently complemented on how “beautifully tanned” her skin is in the winter. When I say we speak Spanish in the home and our family is together, we are complimented on our efforts to make her bilingual. But, when I am out alone with my two daughters, the youngest yet too little to notice, we are looked askance at for not using English. Sometimes at the park I am mistakenly assumed to be their nanny, suddenly keenly aware of how the sun catches the blond streaks in their hair. It is strange that language can stake so many claims; so often are my children presumed not to be my own…

Read the entire article here.

‘Remnants of Slavery’ column shows racial ignorance

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
2015-09-20

Rebecca Keller
O’Hara Township, Pennsylvania

I’m greatly troubled by Jack Kelly’s historically flawed column “Remnants of Slavery” (Sept. 13) because it falsely enables an often unhearing percentage of the white majority to tell people of color that our modern-day experiences with racism are an illusion.

As a biracial woman who was adopted into a white family and has been raised in white-dominant environments, I have a unique perspective on both racism and white privilege: two things that undeniably exist…

Read the entire letter here.

Whiteness Fractured

Ashgate Publishing
November 2013
256 pages
Includes 1 b&w illustration
234 x 156 mm
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-4094-6357-3

Cynthia Levine-Rasky, Associate Professor of Sociology
Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada

Whiteness Fractured examines the many ways in which whiteness is conceptualized today and how it is understood to operate and to effect social relationships. Exploring the intersections between whiteness, social class, ethnicity and psychosocial phenomena, this book is framed by the question of how whiteness works and what it does. With attention to central concepts and the history of whiteness, it explains the four ways in which whiteness works. In its examination of the outward and inward fractures of whiteness, the book sheds light on both its connections with social class and ethnicity and with the ‘epistemology of ignorance’ and the psychoanalytic.

Representing the long career of whiteness on the one hand and investigating its expansion into new areas on the other, Whiteness Fractured reflects the growing maturity of critical whiteness studies. It undertakes a critical analysis of approaches to whiteness and proposes new directions for future action and enquiry. As such, it will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in race and ethnicity, intersectionality, colonialism and post-colonialism, and cultural studies.

Contents

• Section I. Introduction: Framing whiteness; Theorizing whiteness; Interpreting whiteness and its correlates; Histories of whiteness.
• Section II. Four Ways in which Whiteness Works: Normalization and solipsism; Controlling terms of engagement; Ideological commitments; Exclusionary practices.
• Section III. Outward Fractures: Whiteness and Intersectionality: The rise of intersectionality theory; Intersectionality theory and the analysis of power; Intersections between whiteness and class; Intersections between whiteness and ethnicity; Intersections between whiteness and Jewish ethnicity.
• Section IV. Inward Fractures: the Psychic Life of Whiteness: The emotionality of whiteness; The epistemology of ignorance; The psychic turn; Construction of the other in popular racism; Psychoanalytic themes in the construction of the racialized other.
• Section V. Approaches to Studying Whiteness: Critical-relational-contextual revisited; Whiteness in popular culture; The paradox of action.
• References
• Index

Difference of a Different Kind: Jewish Constructions of Race During the Long Eighteenth Century

University of Pennsylvania Press
2014
280 pages
6 x 9
12 illus.
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8122-4609-4
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-8122-0970-9

Iris Idelson-Shein, Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow
Martin Buber Professur für Jüdische Religionsphilosophie
Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main

European Jews, argues Iris Idelson-Shein, occupied a particular place in the development of modern racial discourse during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Simultaneously inhabitants and outsiders in Europe, considered both foreign and familiar, Jews adopted a complex perspective on otherness and race. Often themselves the objects of anthropological scrutiny, they internalized, adapted, and revised the emerging discourse of racial difference to meet their own ends.

Difference of a Different Kind explores Jewish perceptions and representations of otherness during the formative period in the history of racial thought. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including philosophical and scientific works, halakhic literature, and folktales, Idelson-Shein unfolds the myriad ways in which eighteenth-century Jews imagined the “exotic Other” and how the evolving discourse of racial difference played into the construction of their own identities. Difference of a Different Kind offers an invaluable view into the ways new religious, cultural, and racial identities were imagined and formed at the outset of modernity.

Table of Contents

• Note on Translations and Transliterations
• Introduction
• 1. An East Indian Encounter: Rape and Infanticide in the Memoirs of Glikl Bas Leib
• 2. “And Let him Speak”: Noble and Ignoble Savages in Yehudah Horowitz’s Amudey beyt Yehudah
• 3. Whitewashing Jewish Darkness: Baruch Lindau and the “Species” of Man
• 4. Fantasies of Acculturation: Campe’s Savages in the Service of the Haskalah
• Epilogue. A Terrible Tale: Some Final Thoughts on Jews and Race
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments

What does race do?

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 38, Issue 8, 2015
Special Issue: Ethnic and Racial Studies Review
pages 1401-1406
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2015.1016064

Alana Lentin, Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Social Analysis
University of Western Sydney, Australia

In writing on ‘John Rex’s Main Mistake’, Michael Banton reveals more about Banton than he does about Rex. I use Banton’s discussion of the differences between his own and John Rex’s ‘mistakes’ to explore why, in my view, race continues to have analytical purchase in a purportedly ‘post-racial’ age

Why race?

Michael Banton claims that while he ‘wanted to supersede the use of race in sociology altogether’, Rex argued that its meaning should be expanded to ‘cover other beliefs of a deterministic kind’ (Banton this volume, original emphasis). This was born of Rex’s insistence on the significance of class and colonialism for understanding racial categories. Banton notes Rex’s neglect of other concepts that may have been ‘fit for purpose’, such as ‘gender, faith, or social origin’ (Banton this volume). However, the search for alternatives seems a fruitless one, even for Banton, who has devoted his entire career precisely to attempting to answer the question ‘why race?’

…Race as ordering, as management, sedimentation, sifting, as correction and disciplining, as empowering some while causing others to buckle under that power has always relied on a plurality of processes. Racism’s genocidal impulses have been condemned by those who live by the logics of division that ultimately enable the other’s annihilation. To be clearer: I can be utterly opposed to deaths in police custody while doubting whether I should send my child to the public school in the Aboriginal neighbourhood. So, race, not as wrong-headed theorization of inherent difference, but as a logic that gathers a suite of rationales in its armoury, persists precisely because so much has been invested in dismissing it as unreasonable. This is why Jared Sexton (2008, 27), following Albert Memmi, rightly points to the problem of attempting to unveil racism’s ‘secure foundation’. The arguments of those who call for race to be abandoned because it somehow participates in the reproduction of racism miss the point that there is no way of separating between race and racism as though racism were easily definable in relation to a pre-prescribed series of actions, beliefs or policies. On the contrary, while racism is ‘incoherent, unjustified’, according to Sexton, this does not mean that it is not ‘systemic, structuring and governing for the whole racist complex’ (27). In other words, it is not by treating racism as irrational that that very irrationality dissipates. Rather, as Sexton so presciently remarks, ‘racism does its most essential work in the shadow of the very attempt to explain it’ (27). We can see this most clearly in the workings of the supposedly ‘anti-racist racist states’ that most readers, I wager, inhabit…

Read the entire article here.

Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White

University of Alabama Press
2012
264 pages
illustrated
Quality Paper ISBN: 978-0-8173-5714-6
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8173-8619-1

Lila Quintero Weaver

Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White is an arresting and moving personal story about childhood, race, and identity in the American South, rendered in stunning illustrations by the author, Lila Quintero Weaver.

In 1961, when Lila was five, she and her family emigrated from Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Marion, Alabama, in the heart of Alabama’s Black Belt. As educated, middle-class Latino immigrants in a region that was defined by segregation, the Quinteros occupied a privileged vantage from which to view the racially charged culture they inhabited. Weaver and her family were firsthand witnesses to key moments in the civil rights movement. But Darkroom is her personal story as well: chronicling what it was like being a Latina girl in the Jim Crow South, struggling to understand both a foreign country and the horrors of our nation’s race relations. Weaver, who was neither black nor white, observed very early on the inequalities in the American culture, with its blonde and blue-eyed feminine ideal. Throughout her life, Lila has struggled to find her place in this society and fought against the discrimination around her.

Read chapter four here.

The Science Behind ‘They All Look Alike to Me’

The New York Times
2015-09-20

Rachel L. Swarns

The outcry was immediate and ferocious when a white New York City police officer tackled James Blake, the retired biracial tennis star, while arresting him this month in a case of mistaken identity. The officer mistook Mr. Blake for a black man suspected of credit card fraud, according to the police.

Racism, pure and simple, some said.

But was it?

Scientists, pointing to decades of research, believe something else was at work. They call it the “other-race effect,” a cognitive phenomenon that makes it harder for people of one race to readily recognize or identify individuals of another.

It is not bias or bigotry, the researchers say, that makes it difficult for people to distinguish between people of another race. It is the lack of early and meaningful exposure to other groups that often makes it easier for us to quickly identify and remember people of our own ethnicity or race while we often struggle to do the same for others.

That racially loaded phrase “they all look alike to me,” turns out to be largely scientifically accurate, according to Roy S. Malpass, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Texas at El Paso who has studied the subject since the 1960s. “It has a lot of validity,” he said…

Read the entire article here.

One Drop of Love at Smith College

Smith College
Hallie Flanagan Theater, Theatre Green Room
122 Green Street
Northampton, Massachusetts 01063
Friday, 2015-09-18 and Saturday, 2015-09-19 (Two Performances!)
19:00-21:00 EDT (Local Time)

One Drop of Love is a multimedia solo performance by Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni, incorporating filmed images, photographs and animation to tell the story of how the notion of ‘race’ came to be in the United States and how it affects our most intimate relationships.

Performance followed by a Q & A.

Co-sponsored by the Office of Multicultural Affairs, the Smith College Theater Department, and the Wurtele Center for Work and Life.

Raising Mixed Kids: Family Workshop with Sharon Chang

Hapa-palooza Festival 2015
Heartwood Community Cafe
317 E. Broadway
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Saturday, 2015-09-19, 18:00-20:00 PDT (Local Time)

Sharon H. Chang, author, scholar, sociologist and activist
Multiracial Asian Families

How do we have transformative race conversations with multi-racial children when most grownups aren’t even able to so with each other? Is it possible to create an environment for mixed children that leaves them liberated, informed, and empowered to make change? Research shows children as young as 6 months old are able to categorize people by race. By 4 and 5-years-old children have used racial reasoning to discriminate against their peers. Studies also shows children’s biased attitudes are not directly correlated to those of their parents and caregivers. That’s because our children see and hear everything and racism is woven into the very fabric of society. But what does all this mean for mixed race children growing up across racial boundaries? How can we raise multiracial kids to feel good about themselves in a raced world? Please join Hapa-palooza Festival and parent educator Sharon H. Chang for the North American launch of her new book, Raising Mixed Race, and to dialogue on ways we can healthily talk about race with our mixed children at a time in their lives when it’s most critical.

For more information, click here.