Rejecting Blackness and Claiming Whiteness: Antiblack Whiteness in the Biracial Project

Posted in Books, Chapter, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2013-12-05 19:09Z by Steven

Rejecting Blackness and Claiming Whiteness: Antiblack Whiteness in the Biracial Project

Chapter in: White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism (pages 81-94)

Routledge
2003-08-14
344 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-93583-8
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-93582-1

Edited by:

Ashley W. Doane, Associate Dean for Academic Administration; Professor of Sociology
University of Hartford, West Hartford, Connecticut

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Professor of Sociology
Duke University

Chapter Author:

Minkah Makalani, Assistant Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies
University of Texas, Austin

Over the past fifteen years in the United States, there has emerged a concerted push to reclassify people with one Black and one white parent as biracial. Advocates of this biracial project seek to have people of mixed parentage (PMP) recognized as a distinct, biracial race. They maintain that a biracial identity is more mentally healthy than a Black one and challenges popular notions of race in the United States, therefore making it the basis for “ultimately disabus[ing] Americans of their false beliefs in the biological reality of race” (Zack 2001:34). This will lead society away from racial classifications, hasten racism’s demise, and bring about a color-blind society (Gilanshah 1993; Spickard 2001; Zack 2001). Still, the progressive qualities of a biracial identity are more apparent than real.

The presence of a biracial race would certainly disrupt popular ideas about race, but to suggest it would precipitate the end of racial classifications is spec ulation (Parker and Song 2001). Changing popular ideas about race can occur without addressing racial oppression (Mosley 1997), and abolishing racial classifications to create a color-blind society is more likely to contribute to the persistence of racism than to its demise (Carr 1997; Neville et al. 2000; Bonilla-Silva 2001). Additionally, most arguments for a biracial race ignore the sociohistorical character of race and roots biracialty in biological notions of race “mixture” (powell 1997). This raises serious doubts about the biracial project’s claim to be a progressive social movement. Rather than seeking to overthrow the racialized social system, it is a reactionary political response to the racialization of people of African descent in the United States as Black. Specifically, it uses whiteness to distinguish PMP from African Americans as a new race that would be positioned between Blacks and whites in a reordered, racialized social system.

Several historians have addressed the historical role of whiteness in ordering racial oppression, giving special attention to how white racial identity develops in different racial formations (Roediger 1991; Allen 1994; on racial formations, see Baron 1985; Cha-Jua 2001). Putting these together with other works on race (C. Harris 1993; Malik 1997; Mills 1997), we can see whiteness as primarily a component part of racism. Cheryl Harris (1993:1735) alludes to this when she argues that whiteness is used by whites to maintain a superordinate position in the racial hierarchy: “the state’s official recognition of a racial identity that subordinated Blacks and of privileged rights in property based on race elevated whiteness from a passive attribute to an object of law and a resource deployable at the social, political, and institutional level to maintain control.” This identifies a link between white racial identity and Black subordination and more importantly conceptualizes whiteness as a material object used to maintain white supremacy rather than as merely an aspect of white identity.

This chapter analyzes the biracial project’s deployment of whiteness to argue that PMP constitute a new race. With the role whiteness plays in racism in mind, this accomplishes two things. First, it builds on Cheryl Harris (1993) to argue that whiteness is a dynamic social property that people of color might use to negotiate the racial hierarchy and it cautions against the tendency to essentialize whiteness as something only whites have. Second, it examines the biracial project as a particular instance of people of color using whiteness, by looking at the assertion that PMP are racially distinct from African Americans because whiteness is an immutable biosocial attribute. Using a materialist theory of race and racism, I argue that a biracial race has no social, historical, or cultural basis and that claims for its existence ignore the sociohistorical character of race and conflate racial identity with racial identification. Focusing in part on congressional testimonies on the census, but primarily on biracial-identity Internet Web sites, I examine the arguments of biracial-identity advocates to show how whiteness is deployed as a tool to distance PMP from African Americans politically, socially, and culturally…

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American Sons & Daughters: Mixed Race, Identity in Southern California

Posted in Articles, Campus Life, Media Archive, United States on 2013-12-05 18:32Z by Steven

American Sons & Daughters: Mixed Race, Identity in Southern California

KCET Television
Burbank, California
2013-12-04

Susan Straight, Professor of Creative Writing
University of California, Riverside

This is how we began. I looked out at the 300 faces before me and said, “How many of you in this classroom are often asked, in a bar or a store or at a party, What are you?” Maybe a hundred young people raised their hands, and they couldn’t believe that’s what we would spend ten weeks talking about.

“People will guess, all the time, and they’re never right,” one young woman said.

“People think I’m black because of my hair. But I’m Ashkenazi Jewish,” a young man said.

“People think I’m Asian because of my eyes,” someone else said.

“My son is really light, because he’s Mexican-Irish,” said Arely, who is Mexican-American, standing in front of the class and showing her children from a cell phone photo onto the screens. “But my daughter is darker, since she’s Mexican-Colombian, and everyone talks about that. I already know how hard that’s going to be for her.”

The class is “The Mixed Race Novel and the American Experience.” But of course we didn’t talk only about books — we talked about who we are, how America sees us, how our families see us, and most importantly, how we see ourselves. We talked about America’s ongoing obsession with hair and melanin, about what it means to be undocumented, what it means to be a mother, what it means to witness a murder or to lose a dog. But all those discussions began with what it means to be of mixed racial and cultural heritage, and many students in this class at UC Riverside say this was their first time ever talking about these very personal things in an open forum…

Read the entire article here.

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‘Mixed Race Stereotypes in South African and American Literature’: A Reading

Posted in Africa, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Live Events, Media Archive, South Africa, United States on 2013-12-04 19:03Z by Steven

‘Mixed Race Stereotypes in South African and American Literature’: A Reading

Denison University
A. Blair Knapp Hall
Room 201
300 Ridge Road
Granville, Ohio 43023

Thursday, 2013-12-05, 16:30 EST (Local Time)

The Women’s Studies Program welcomes Diana Mafe.

The Women’s Studies Program welcomes Diana Mafe reading from her new book, Mixed Race Stereotypes in South African and American Literature: Coloring Outside the (Black and White) Lines. In this work, she examines the popular literary stereotype, the tragic mulatto, from a comparative perspective and considers the ways in which specific South African and American writers have used this controversial literary character to challenge the logic of racial categorization.

For more information, click here.

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Representing the Race: A New Political History of African American Literature

Posted in Barack Obama, Books, History, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Monographs, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2013-12-04 02:07Z by Steven

Representing the Race: A New Political History of African American Literature

New York University Press
August 2011
256 pages
Cloth ISBN: 9780814743386
Paper ISBN: 9780814743393

Gene Andrew Jarrett, Professor of English and African American Studies
Boston University

The political value of African American literature has long been a topic of great debate among American writers, both black and white, from Thomas Jefferson to Barack Obama. In his compelling new book, Representing the Race, Gene Andrew Jarrett traces the genealogy of this topic in order to develop an innovative political history of African American literature. Jarrett examines texts of every sort—pamphlets, autobiographies, cultural criticism, poems, short stories, and novels—to parse the myths of authenticity, popular culture, nationalism, and militancy that have come to define African American political activism in recent decades. He argues that unless we show the diverse and complex ways that African American literature has transformed society, political myths will continue to limit our understanding of this intellectual tradition.

Cultural forums ranging from the printing press, schools, and conventions, to parlors, railroad cars, and courtrooms provide the backdrop to this African American literary history, while the foreground is replete with compelling stories, from the debate over racial genius in early American history and the intellectual culture of racial politics after slavery, to the tension between copyright law and free speech in contemporary African American culture, to the political audacity of Barack Obama’s creative writing. Erudite yet accessible, Representing the Race is a bold explanation of what’s at stake in continuing to politicize African American literature in the new millennium.

Contents

  • Preface and Acknowledgments
  • Introduction: Toward a New Political History of African American Literature
  • 1. The Politics of Early African American Literature
  • 2. The Intellectual Culture of Racial Politics after Slavery
  • 3. New Negro Politics from Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance
  • 4. The Geopolitics of African American Autobiography between the World Wars
  • 5. Copyright Law, Free Speech, and the Transformative Value of African American Literature
  • 6. The Political Audacity of Barack Obama’s Literature
  • Epilogue: The Politics of African American Literature after Obama
  • Notes
  • Index
  • About the Author

Introduction: Toward a New Political History of African American Literature

What is the political value of African American literature? This question has united the intellectual interests of American authors as historically far apart as Thomas Jefferson at the end of the eighteenth century and Barack Obama at the start of the twenty-first. Over the past two centuries, it has united the social interests of literary works as different as pamphlets, autobiographies, cultural criticism, poems, short stories, and novels. And it has united the rhetorical interests of intellectual debate occurring in cultural forums as remarkable as the printing press, conventions, schools, parlors, railroad cars, and courtrooms. Certainly, the lists of authors, works, and venues can go on and on, almost in an unwieldy fashion. The challenges facing anyone interested in the opening question, then, are to think about it in systematic and sophisticated ways, to learn from its history, and to understand why it is still salient today.

Measuring the political value of African American literature begins with introducing what Jefferson and Obama have in common. As we all know, both men achieved the highest political office in the United States of America. One of the nation’s “Founding Fathers,” Jefferson was elected its third president in 1801, after having served, most notably, as secretary of state under George Washington and then as vice president under John Adams. Two centuries later, Obama was elected the forty-fourth president in 2008, after having served in the Illinois Senate for the state’s thirteenth district and then in the U.S. Senate for the state of Illinois. Prior to their careers as elected officials, both men wrote books that had been influential in shaping public opinion on the nation’s democratic potential as well as on their own personal, political, and presidential qualifications. In 1776, Jefferson coauthored the Declaration of Independence, and, in 1787, he published an authoritative ethnography of early America, Notes on the State of Virginia. Obama released three bestselling books of autobiographical nonfiction and public policy: in 1995, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance; in 2006, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream; and in 2008, Change We Can Believe In: Barack Obama’s Plan to Renew America’s Promise. Both Jefferson and Obama invested themselves in public service; both proved their commitment to “the life of the mind,” as Hannah Arendt, a political theorist, once put it.

Less obvious, Jefferson and Obama both entered office as “black” presidents—but not in the customary sense of who or what they are. Jefferson’s birth to a white mother from London and a white father from Virginia would suggest that he was white. Obama’s birth to a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya would likewise suggest that he is neither just white nor black yet both. In either case, the terms white and black connote genealogical meanings of “race” that, given our allegedly “postidentitarian” era today, threaten to oversimplify the American identities of these two storied men. Nonetheless, I submit that they were “black” presidents insofar as whom they represented. As Jefferson was running for office, the “three-fifths compromise” or “federal ratio,” thanks to a provision in the U.S. Constitution, granted a man (but not a woman, who could not yet vote) an extra three votes in the House of Representatives and the presidential Electoral College for every five slaves that he owned. The large ownership of slaves in the South accorded this region—and, indirectly, its elected officers or office-seekers—leverage in securing more electoral votes and greater political representation. Jefferson’s election to the presidency benefited from the Southern advantage.

Obama’s election likewise benefited from securing votes from a large swath of the African American electorate. Whereas Jefferson’s candidacy exploited a constitutional loophole that counted slaves while denying them the political entitlements enjoyed by white slaveholders, Obama’s presidential campaign attracted African Americans in unprecedented numbers. The electoral power of African Americans and the political power of his own Democratic Party grew. Drawing on his experience as a community organizer in Chicago, he led staffers, volunteers, and Internet bloggers as they worked to register for the first time many African Americans to vote and as they reminded others how to do so again. The more experienced African American voters were persuaded to cast their ballots early on Election Day and to galvanize others to vote as well. About seventy million Americans voted for Obama in the end, helping him defeat his Republican opponent, John McCain, a senior U.S. senator from Arizona, by about ten million votes. In the history of U.S. presidential elections, Obama earned the biggest percentage and number of “black votes”—over 95 percent and sixteen million, respectively…

Read the entire introduction here.

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Interracial Marriage and the Civil Rights Revolution: A Personal Journey

Posted in Live Events, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2013-12-03 06:13Z by Steven

Interracial Marriage and the Civil Rights Revolution: A Personal Journey

The University of Pennsylvania Provost presents The Inaugural Provost’s Lecture on Diversity
University of Pennsylvania
Annenberg School Room 110
2013-11-13, 17:00-19:00 EST (Local Time)

Dorothy E. Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology; Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania

As far back as I can remember, my father was conducting research for a book on interracial marriage in Chicago.  He died without publishing the work to which he devoted his entire academic career.  Robert E.T. Roberts, an anthropologist at Roosevelt University in downtown Chicago, interviewed more than 600 black-white couples over a period of five decades.  He began in 1937 as a 22-year-old master’s student at University of Chicago, recording the life histories of interracial couples married as early as 1890.  He continued interviewing couples for his Ph.D. dissertation, completed in 1956, the year I was born.  Two years earlier, my father, who was white, married my mother, a black Jamaican immigrant who came to Roosevelt on a scholarship and accompanied him on interviews as his research assistant.  For the remainder of his career, he interviewed hundreds more couples—and then hundreds of their children—until he retired in 1986. 

When my father died in 2002, I inherited 25 boxes of his files on interracial marriage in Chicago—a treasure trove of rare interviews, newspaper clippings, letters, photographs, and handwritten notes.  I found in my possession an untapped archive of extraordinary potential to reveal insights into racial identity and relations in the United States, and I believe I am uniquely qualified to undertake this investigation.  I want to write the book my father never completed from my perspective—as his daughter, whose childhood was dominated by his passion for recording the stories of interracial couples; as the child of interracial parents, who grew up in Hyde Park during the social upheavals of the 1960s; and as a legal scholar and sociologist who has devoted her own career to the study of race and the elimination of racism…

For more information, click here.

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Uncovering records that link the slaveholder and enslaved

Posted in Articles, History, Media Archive, Slavery, United States on 2013-12-03 06:03Z by Steven

Uncovering records that link the slaveholder and enslaved

Examiner.com
2013-12-02

Robin Foster

In “Untangling the slaveholder and enslaved relationships,” several questions were raised about a possible link between Anderson Chick and Pettus Chick after it was discovered that Anderson and his mother, Eliza, lived next door to the Chick family for decades. If you are on a quest to determine if slavery links two family groups in your research, this article will provide clues that may help you.

Oral history

Review the stories about slavery that were passed down in your family. Small clues can point to records that might validate any theories. In the case of Pettus Chick, a great nephew actually shared some information that provided insights about which direction to take next.

According to the story shared, Pettus Chick and Sarah never had any children; he supposedly had a child by an enslaved woman. Pettus and Anderson appear on both the 1870 and 1880 US Censuses living in Goshen Hill, Union County, South Carolina. Pettus did not appear in 1900. Sarah was widowed. So what records would you turn to fill the gap between 1880 and 1900 when Pettus died?…

…While the will alone does not prove Pettus was the father of Anderson, it does validate the theory that Pettus was a former slave owner and had close ties to Eliza and her two oldest children. It also sheds light on why Anderson changed his name between 1880 and 1900 from Eigner to Chick…

Read the entire article here.

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Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun and the City’s Transformative Potential

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Passing, Women on 2013-12-03 05:47Z by Steven

Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun and the City’s Transformative Potential

Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers
Volume 30, Number 2, 2013
pages 265-286
DOI: 10.1353/leg.2013.0031

Catherine Rottenberg, Assistant Professor
Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics and the Gender Studies Program
Ben-Gurion University, Beer-Sheva, Israel

We are mainly indebted to writers of fiction for our more intimate knowledge of contemporary urban life. (3)

Robert E. Park, “The City,” 1925

In a moment of accumulated outrage at the humiliations of everyday racism, Angela Murray, the protagonist of Jessie Redmon Fauset’s 1928 novel Plum Bun, decides to leave what she considers her staid hometown of Philadelphia and launch herself “into a freer, fuller life” that can be had only in a truly great city like New York (80). To avail herself of the greatest possible freedom, she also chooses to cross the color line and pass as white. This is a decisive—if expected—moment in the text, and the rest of the narrative details the various repercussions of Angela’s daring decision to set off as an unfettered woman. Fauset’s novel thus traces Angela’s movement over time and space: from her early years in a respectable black neighborhood in Philadelphia, through her adventures as a young woman passing as a white artist in bohemian Greenwich Village, and eventually to reclaiming her racial identity and moving to Paris to pursue her art. At the novel’s conclusion, Angela is coming into her own as a portrait artist and has been reunited with the love of her life, Anthony Cross.

Set exclusively in various and increasingly cosmopolitan city spaces—from Philadelphia to New York City to Paris—Fauset’s novel participates, at least to some degree, in the “urban aesthetics” of Harlem Renaissance literature that Maria Balshaw details in Looking for Harlem. In her book Balshaw considers the then-nascent discipline of urban sociology as practiced by thinkers such as Robert E. Park, whose words serve as the epigraph to my essay, and Charles S. Johnson. She demonstrates that their progressive ideas about urban space formed an important background to the optimism of the Harlem Renaissance (23). Yet Balshaw does not discuss Fauset’s work at any length, despite the fact that Plum Bun—like Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing—clearly takes part in the ongoing debate about “the embeddedness of African American women in consumer culture and in the city” (97, emphasis added). Because Plum Bun engages in important ways with both urban aesthetics and the concerns of urban sociology, I will demonstrate that the novel can be read as raising crucial and timely questions about the emancipatory potential of urban space for upwardly mobile black women.

By emphasizing the centrality of city space in Plum Bun, I add a new dimension to literary criticism on Fauset while reinforcing Kathleen Pfeiffer’s claim that the novel’s narrative is “neither anachronistic nor marginal” but rather modern, complex, and worthy of serious scholarly attention (80). Susan Tomlinson has convincingly argued that Plum Bun “explores the intersections of race and gender constructions of black and white American women” (90). Angela Murray, Tomlinson suggests, manages to emulate two norms of womanhood: that of the New Negro Woman—characterized by racial pride and sexual respectability—and that of the New Woman—characterized by sexual experimentation and the pursuit of a public career. Yet, according to Tomlinson, not until the novel’s end—when Angela is in Paris, has disclosed her racial identity, and begins to devote herself to her artistic career—”do both gender and racial advancement coalesce in the unified female subject” (90). The impossibility of combining these norms in one female subject in turn reveals their contradictions and mutual exclusivity. Cherene Sherrard-Johnson makes a similar point, suggesting that the passing character as artist is the locus of Fauset’s oscillation between advocating an avant-garde womanhood and endorsing a more conventional New Negro womanhood (Portraits 49). Pfeiffer, on the other hand, examines the narrative in light of its even larger cultural context, suggesting that Fauset uses passing as a way to reflect on “the multivalent transformations in which white American culture at large was then participating” (80). Defending Plum Bun from critics who have summarily dismissed it, Pfeiffer claims that the novel is deeply invested in the larger philosophical question preoccupying contemporaneous US intellectuals, namely, whether “absolute freedom aid[s] or obstruct[s] the development of meaningful identity” (79). Fauset consequently records a general…

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Trope Theory, Cane, and the Metaphysical Case for Genre

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive on 2013-12-03 04:16Z by Steven

Trope Theory, Cane, and the Metaphysical Case for Genre

Genre
Volume 46, Number 3 (Fall 2013)
pages 239-263
DOI: 10.1215/00166928-2345605

Katie Owens-Murphy
Department of English
University of Minnesota, Duluth

Although we rely regularly on genre as a conceptual apparatus for our scholarship and course offerings, genre studies as a theory and methodology has never quite recovered from the opposition of Jacques Derrida, whose well-known essay “The Law of Genre” (1980) accused literary taxonomies of distorting the inherently indeterminate meanings of texts by imposing arbitrary restrictions, or “laws,” on our reading practices. This essay surveys the major objections to genre criticism lodged by its principal critics (especially Derrida) before introducing and advocating “trope theory,” a concept from a branch of analytic philosophy called metaphysics, in response to these objections. It then provides a sustained formal analysis of Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923) to demonstrate trope theory’s superior ability to account for generically hybrid narrative texts and its ability to yield a seemingly infinite number of readings and interpretations.

Read or purchase the article here.

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Scripts of Blackness and the Racial Dynamics of Nationalism in Puerto Rico

Posted in Anthropology, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Media Archive, Papers/Presentations, Social Science, United States on 2013-12-02 22:24Z by Steven

Scripts of Blackness and the Racial Dynamics of Nationalism in Puerto Rico

Papers of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research
University of Puerto Rico, Cayey
Volume 6 (2009)
38 pages

Dr. Isar P. Godreau
Institute of Interdisciplinary Research
University of Puerto Rico, Cayey

National identity, no matter how differently defined, is often constructed through claims to heritage, “roots,” tradition, and descent. In the Western World, these claims, almost inevitably allude to questions of “race.” In Puerto Rico, it is the mixture of the Spanish, the Taíno Indian, and the African, which come to epitomize the racial/traditional substance out of which “the nation” is constructed, defended, and naturalized.

This mixture is often represented by images, statues, murals across the island that display the three racialized representatives, as the precursors of the modern, racially mixed Puerto Rican man or woman. (See Fig. 1).

The Taíno, Spaniard and African “roots” depicted in this national imagery, represent heritage symbols. They do not stand for contemporary ethnic constituencies, such as “Afro-Puerto Ricans”, “Indo-Puerto Ricans” or “Euro-Puerto Ricans.” Rather they are commonly understood as origin groups (roots) – that mixed during the period of Spanish colonization to conform “lo Puertorriqueño” in the present. As the mural says: “Tres Razas: Una Cultura.”

My book-project examines the different meanings Puerto Rican people—namely, intellectuals, politicians, government officials, and community residents—attribute to the black component of that mixture in their on-going process of constructing a Puerto Rican national identity.

Unlike the concept of mestizaje developed in many countries of mainland Latin America, blackness is not completely erased or excluded in discourses about the nation in Puerto Rico. Notions of race-mixture in Puerto Rico are more similar to those that developed in Brazil or Cuba where blackness is simultaneously excluded but also strategically included in the contemporary narrative of nation. Scholarship on race and racism in Afro-Latin America has made clear that the implicit goal of this narrative of mixture is whitening or blanqueamiento. Perhaps, the most obvious evidence of the prevalence of the ideology of blanqueamiento in Puerto Rico is the 2000 census, as only 8% of Puerto Ricans living in the Island declared themselves to be black, while an overwhelming majority of 80.5% identified themselves as white (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2000). Elsewhere (Godreau 2008) I discuss how these results evidence popular understandings of whiteness as an inclusive, flexible, category that can encompass mixture and blackness as an undesirable category that is understood as extreme and pure, not mixed enough. In any case, the point is that—despite the rhetorical inclusion of an African influence in nationalist discourses—a growing body of Puerto Rican scholarship has documented how blackness is often socially marked as an inferior, ugly, dirty, unintelligent, backward identity–that is also reduced to a primitive hyper-sexuality (particularly in the case of black women), equated with disorder, superstition, servitude, danger, and heavily criminalized. Puerto Rican scholars have done important work on these different aspects and manifestations of racism and the exclusion of blackness from nationalist narratives – particularly in the late 1990’s and 2000. (c.f. Alegría and Ríos 2005; Cardona 1997; Díaz-Quiñonez 1985; Findlay 1999; Franco and Ortíz 2004; Giusti 1996; Godreau 2002a, 2002b, 2003; Guerra 1998; Rivera 2003; Rivero 2005; Santiago-Valles 1994, 1995; Santos-Febres 1993; Torres 1998; Zenón-Cruz 1975 among others)…

Read the entire paper here.

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Patterns of self-harm and attempted suicide among white and black/mixed race female prisoners

Posted in Articles, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, United Kingdom on 2013-12-02 18:39Z by Steven

Patterns of self-harm and attempted suicide among white and black/mixed race female prisoners

Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health
Volume 13, Issue 4 (November 2003)
pages 229–240
DOI: 10.1002/cbm.549

Jo Borrill
Division of Neuroscience and Psychological Medicine, Imperial College of Science Technology and Medicine
University of London

Rachel Burnett
Division of Neuroscience and Psychological Medicine, Imperial College of Science Technology and Medicine
University of London

Richard Atkins
Psychology Subject Group
Thames Valley University

Sarah Miller
Division of Neuroscience and Psychological Medicine, Imperial College of Science Technology and Medicine
University of London

Daniel Briggs
Division of Neuroscience and Psychological Medicine, Imperial College of Science Technology and Medicine, University of London

Tim Weaver
Department of Social Science and Medicine, Imperial College of Science Technology and Medicine
University of London

Professor Anthony Maden
Division of Neuroscience and Psychological Medicine, Imperial College of Science Technology and Medicine
University of London

Aim

The aim was to investigate ethnic differences in lifetime self-harm and attempted suicide in women prisoners, and to examine relationships between self-harm, suicide and substance use and dependence.

Background

Previous studies have suggested that there may be ethnic differences in the proportion of prisoners reporting substance misuse, self-harm and attempted suicide, although relatively few minority ethnic women have been studied in the UK. This study examines drug and alcohol dependence in white and black British women in prison, and explores possible associations with self-harm, suicide attempts, and family violence.

Methods

301 women (190 white, 111 black or mixed race) were interviewed in ten prisons from different parts of England. Measures included the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification test (AUDIT), the severity of Dependence Scale (SDS), section C (suicidality) of the MINI International Neuropsychiatric Interview.

Results

Half of the women in the sample reported at least one act of self-harm in their life and 46% reported making a suicide attempt at some time. Lifetime self-harm was associated with a history of harmful drinking and with being a victim of violence, including physical assault, sexual assault and violence from family and friends. Lifetime suicide attempts were associated with reported violence from family or friends. Current high suicide risk was most common among women on remand.

Drug dependence and reported violence from family or friends were both more common amongst white women than black/mixed race women. Self-harm and attempted suicide were generally more common among white women, but black/mixed race women dependent on drugs had the highest proportion of women reporting self-harm. There was tentative support for three-way association between ethnicity, dependence and self-harm; this raises the possibility that drug dependence may be a predictor of self-harm in the black female prison population, which is worthy of further investigation.

Read or purchase the article here.

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