Mixed Race Studies

What are you: Engaging Parents of Multiracial Children in Preschool

The Huffington Post
2016-05-27

Makai Kellogg, Lead Teacher
School for Friends, Washington, D.C.

“If you can go shopping and be assured that you will not be followed or harassed, step forward.”

There was no more space left. I rushed to the door and opened it so that a white father could continue the Power Shuffle exercise. The parents started on the midline of the room and once a statement was read, either stepped up or back depending on their level of privilege in these circumstances. After two more statements, the parents looked around the room to see who was standing where. Then I asked “Were there any statements that your child would be able to step forward or back for that you did not? How does that make you feel?” The question resonated with the families and their responses prompted lively discussion. Race is difficult to talk about in the United States, a country built on white supremacy and systemic oppression.

I’m trying to change that dynamic one preschooler at a time…

Read the entire article here.

The Story in My DNA

The Huffington Post
2016-05-24

Hope Ferguson

Like many African Americans, I grew up not knowing where I came from. There was no “old country” for us. Obviously, I knew that most slaves were brought from Central and West Africa. I heard family stories about being part Native American – that the Seminole Indians had helped slaves escape from their masters by sheltering them within their tribe. That my grandfather’s mother was half Cherokee, part Scotch-Irish, as well as African. Her long black hair and high cheekbones in the one photo I saw of her bore this out.

For a while, these stories were enough. I believed that I would only really find out, if ever, in the afterlife.

When I was 29, I moved from New York City to Argyle, N.Y., a small upstate farming town that had been settled by Scots. Since Fergusons were on the original patent, I was often asked, while interviewing people by phone as a local reporter, if I was one of the Argyle Fergusons, and I would laugh, and say no, and explain that I was African American, not Scottish.

A few years ago, at a National Association for Black Journalists conference, the company African Ancestry was doing free DNA analyses for some of the attendees as a promotion. I sat transfixed as the African ancestry of various people was teased out; and listened with amazement at how the person displayed some similar traits as their ancestral land … for example, a gift with textiles.

After that, I became more curious about my ancestry…

Read the entire article here.

Why Ethnic Minority Forms Suck for Mixed-Race People

The Huffington Post United Kingdom
2016-04-22

Deborah Chatterjee, Co-founder
SharedCity, London, United Kingdom

There has been a bit of an uproar in Brighton & Hove because children as young as four, are being given the option to leave the gender section on their Primary School application blank if they don’t identify with being strictly male or female.

This has reminded me of how I have often wanted to leave Ethnic Minority Forms blank because I don’t identify with any of the options laid out. Ticking ‘Other’ like I’m something indescribable is the only box that works for me.

My heritage is Indian/Italian so why not tick the ‘White/Asian’ box? Well, it doesn’t feel correct, as the term ‘White’ is so vague in terms of describing my Italian side. And Asian could be Japanese or Korean which are both completely different from being Indian.

It gets even more confusing with my daughters. In order of percentage they are: English, Indian, Italian, Swedish and Irish. Again, ‘White/Asian’ isn’t appropriate and choosing ‘Other’ just seems like an insult. However, unlike young children in Brighton & Hove, my children along with millions of other Mixed-Race kids don’t get the option of leaving the form blank…

Read the entire article here.

6 Afro-Latinos Open Up About What It Means To Be Black And Latino

Latino Voices
The Huffington Post
2016-03-23

Carolina Moreno, Editor

Watch them explain why they’re both and they’re proud!

Too black to be Latino and too Latino to be black is a feeling many Afro-Latinos know too well — but the reality is that these two identities are far from mutually exclusive.

Not only is it possible to be both black and Latino, it’s also fairly common within the Latino community. In the United States 24 percent of Latinos self-identify as Afro-Latino, according to survey results the Pew Research Center released in March.

HuffPost Latino Voices asked six Afro-Latinos to share what it really means to grow-up black and Latino. Because as writer Janel Martinez explains, it can be quite complicated at first…

Read the entire article and watch the video here.

AmbryShare Restores Genes to the Public Domain

The Huffington Post
2016-03-29

Amal Cheema, Biochemistry and Political Science Student
Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts

“As a stage four cancer survivor, I find it shocking that public and private laboratories routinely lock away vital genomic information. That practice is delaying medical progress, causing real human suffering, and it needs to stop.” —Ambry Genetics CEO and founder Charles Dunlop

In its purest form, science seeks to determine how the world works and endeavors to improve the human condition. Yet, the current culture of research undermines this value-system, as institutions across the nation look for ways to capitalize on discoveries. The commodification of information, particularly of the genome, hinders innovation and prevents the discovery of novel drugs and cures., researchers can either seek revenue for their underfunded research or ensure the accessibility of scientific knowledge, but they can’t do both.

It’s not clear whether academic solidarity will prevail, universities increasingly rely upon licensing revenues and keep information proprietary. Although genes can no longer be patented in the U.S. due to the 2013 Supreme Court case, Association for Molecular Pathology et al. v. Myriad Genetics, most researchers perceive little benefit in sharing raw data. They silo their work and therefore, hamper innovation. The solution to this roadblock lies in the new, remediating, and open-access genomic libraries.

Ambry Genetics (Ambry), a leading genetics company, recently revealed its bypass to closed-door labs and patented information. It created a genomic library, AmbryShare, making the DNA data of 10,000 people available online to the public. And it’s the first private company to do so. While Ambry retains copyright, researchers now can easily download the data for free and investigate the genetic determinants of disease…

…Yet AmbryShare is not without its critics. Some fear that the database will lead to false positives and privacy breaches. Bioethicists like Dorothy Roberts of UPenn Law worry about false positives, such as race-specific gene differences. Roberts asserts that society has politically constructed race without a biological basis, and that researchers could support racism by misattributing differences in the genome as evidence of race. Scientists can address this concern by removing the race question from patient profiles…

Read the entire article here.

Photo Series Celebrates The ‘Black Girl Power’ Of Brazilian Women

The Huffington Post
2016-03-02

Zeba Blay, Voices Culture Writer

It highlights women who are Afro-Brazilian and proud.

For the past two years, Brazilian journalist Weudson Ribeiro has been documenting the beauty of Afro-Brazilian women by photographing spontaneous portraits of them in an ongoing project. The result was released this month in a photo essay called “Superafro: O poder da mulher negra” or “Superafro: BLACK GIRL POWER.”

The project, which features candid portraits of black women from Brazil, seeks to highlight women who proudly stand in their own blackness as a political statement.

Ribeiro, a 24-year-old journalist and political scientist based in Brasília, has been taking photos for nearly a decade. He is the only son of mixed-race parents, and says that for a long time he struggled with “understanding and accepting my own blackness.”

“It’s a problem that affects the vast majority of Brazilians as a result of our highly mixed ethnic backgrounds,” Ribeiro told The Huffington Post…

Read the entire article here.

Sage Steele Opens Up About Being A Biracial Woman In Sports Media

The Huffington Post
2015-01-21

Justin Block, Associate Sports Editor

Juliet Spies-Gans, Editorial Fellow, HuffPost

Joe Scarnici via Getty Images Sage Steele speaks onstage at the 2013 espnW: Women + Sports Summit at St. Regis Monarch Beach Resort on Oct. 9, 2013, in Dana Point, California.

The ESPN host talks sexism, racism, NBA Saturday Primetime on ABC and that infamous moment with Bill Simmons

Picture the scene: It’s a sweaty, crowded NFL locker room a handful of miles from the heart of Baltimore, a little over a decade ago. There’s a scrum of reporters, trying to inch closer and closer to the prize interview: Ray Lewis. And as the voices shout over one another, urging the linebacker to look every which way, one journalist’s tone differentiates itself from the rest.

It’s the voice of Sage Steele, and as the only woman amid the horde of media members, the octave of her voice allows her to be the one to grab and hold onto Lewis’ attention.

Today, the 43-year-old Steele is known as both the face and the voice of ABC and ESPN’s NBA Countdown. Come Saturday, she’ll be speaking to millions of us through our TV sets, as the host of the new NBA Saturday Night on ABC package. And come June, she’ll ring in the NBA Finals as emcee of the biggest show of the season, working with names like Jalen Rose and Doug Collins to introduce and analyze the league’s marquee event.

But it hasn’t always been like this for Steele. A self-described army brat bullied throughout high school for her biracial background, Steele has dealt with a unique blend of discrimination in her time. One day she’s too white, the next she’s too black. Her curly, un-styled hair is considered either an asset or a detriment, depending on the week. And even as she has received rave reviews for her work with ESPN, she’s anticipating the day when her increasingly grey locks age her out of her job in a way that simply wouldn’t happen to a man.

In a word, she’s surrounded on all sides by -isms. Ageism, sexism, racism — you name it, Steele has felt it. But today, in her 21st year in the biz, the longtime journalist is able to reflect on her time on studio sets and in locker rooms, and decipher where and when those constant currents of isms, don’ts and can’ts have made her stronger, sharper and more apt for the job.

Steele recently spoke with The Huffington Post about everything from the discrimination she’s faced to her relationship with Stuart Scott, from the importance of having thick skin to that GIF of her and Bill Simmons. She’s spent the last two decades in the trenches — those grimy, Gatorade-stained locker rooms of Indianapolis and Baltimore — and now she’s explaining how she was able to stay on her feet through it all, remaining humble, hungry and happy, no matter what…

Read the entire interview here.

Meet The 63rd Black Woman In American History With A Physics Ph.D.

The Huffington Post
2015-06-24

Nico Pitney

Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is a 32-year-old theoretical astrophysicist. Her academic home is arguably the nation’s most elite physics department, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In one sense, she is among a dying breed. Prescod-Weinstein is a pen-and-paper theorist. “Basically I do calculus all day, on paper,” she told HuffPost. “I’m a little bit of a hold-out. There are things I could be doing by computer that I just like to do by hand.”

But she is also part of a vanguard, a small but growing number of African-American women with doctorates in physics.

Just 83 Black women have received a Ph.D. in physics-related fields in American history, according to a database maintained by physicists Dr. Jami Valentine and Jessica Tucker that was updated last week…

…I think making sure that I remain engaged with my Jewish identity, and particularly the rituals of lighting the Shabbat candles and so forth. I think understanding that all things can’t be sacrificed on the altar of academic career and physics has been really important, and understanding that that balance is not just for my own sake, but is in fact really in some sense in service of doing the physics. I can’t just sit around feeling angry about the number of Black women, or worrying a lot about dark matter. I also have to allow myself to do these other things…

Read the entire interview here.

Black in a Foreign Land: In Defense of Dominican Identity

The Huffington Post
2015-12-17

César Vargas

I was born and raised in the Dominican Republic until I was two months shy of turning 13. The Dominican Republic has a peculiar color metric system–not necessarily on race. So it should go without saying that I wasn’t exposed to the clear cut Americentric, and very binary, concept of race in America until I set foot in the United States.

Since a very young age, I was aware of how both colorism and classism were prevalent back in the island. I noticed how people were treated and often saw how the socioeconomic standing of an individual trumped their color–up to a point if we’re to test folks by the brown paper bag. I’ve said once or twice that a Black man with money is more white than a white poor man. In a third world country where the majority of people are mulattoes, and most of the darker population would be of Haitian descent, you’d be hard pressed not to find people of most shades within families. Some of those family members were better off than others, and often, I’ve found, they could be of any shade.

Of course, like any nation of the world colonized by Europeans, power and wealth is usually concentrated with their descendants, but it would be dishonest to say that most of the power and wealth in the Dominican Republic is owned and controlled solely by its small white population. There are people of color (and visibly so), in most power and entertainment structures. A lot more, I dare say, than most Latin American countries. If we go by the one drop rule, there have been Black public figures, Black businesspeople, Black athletes, Black entertainers, Black generals, Black presidents, and so on. If you put them next to most African Americans, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference…

Read the entire article here.

17 Of The Most Powerful Things Latinos Said In 2015 That Got Us Thinking

The Huffington Post
2015-12-22

Carolina Moreno, Latino Voices Editor

Diversity, immigration, feminism and more — these celebrities covered it all.

Latinos gave us plenty to think about in 2015, and it’s time to revisit some of the best mic drop moments of the year.

From pointing out Hollywood’s lack of diversity to exemplifying the importance of redefining masculinity, there was no shortage of food for thought from wise Latinos. Take a look at what John Leguizamo, Zoe Saldana, America Ferrera, Gina Rodriguez and many more Latinos said that really got us thinking in 2015…

Read the entire article here.