Mixed Race Studies

Can a Dress Shirt Be Racist?

Backchannel
2016-03-31

Moises Velasquez-Manoff

Illustration by Michael Marsicano

A startup finds that asking for certain data improves the fit of its clothes — and lands the company in a cultural minefield

In 2008, an entrepreneur named Seph Skerritt was frustrated with the way he shopped for clothes. Then a student at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, he chafed at the time wasted while trying on garments in stores. Often, he thought, you settled on an ill-fitting item just to get the drudgery over with.

While on an internship in Asia, Skerritt had encountered the effortless magic of having a tailor custom-fit your shirt. Why not improve on that concept, he wondered, with an online service that fitted your shirts by asking you questions, and then mailed you the garments?

He christened his company Proper Cloth. Naysayers told him that when customers input their measurements, they often made mistakes — the idea wouldn’t scale. But Skerritt thought that guessing, even if one’s guesses were occasionally off, was still preferable to the chaos and disappointment experienced in a physical store.

So he set about developing an algorithm that could customize your shirt without needing a tape measure. As a check against errors in customers’ reported measurements, he thought up a list of basic questions — height, weight, and so on — that could serve as indicators of shirt size. Then, using these questions, he made shirts for 30 guys who worked at the New York City tech incubator hosting his startup, called Dogpatch Labs.

When the volunteers tried on their shirts, Skerritt quickly saw what worked and what didn’t. Asking about waist size was insufficient, for example, because it gave no indication of the size of one’s midsection. So Skerritt added a question about how far one’s belly protruded. Other questions were too confusing, like one about how T-shirts fit around your chest and shoulders. Those queries were omitted.

He noticed an odd pattern. In that first batch of 30, the shirts fit best on testers who were Caucasians. They seemed to fit worse, in a predictable way, on people who weren’t Caucasian. All subjects of one ancestry — Asian, say — seemed to require the same general alterations. Skerritt noted the anomaly and added a question on what he called “ethnicity”: Asian, Black, Caucasian, Hispanic, or “I’m not sure.” The question, Skerritt says, has proven invaluable to sizing his customers’ shirts.

There’s no denying the satisfaction of a smartly tailored shirt. But with this one question, the once mundane world of dress shirts is now dabbling in a kind of racial profiling. Are we ready to dredge up centuries of racial strife, simply for a perfect fit?…

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Obama praises wife Michelle’s curves as he sits down with prima ballerina Misty Copeland for interview about body image and growing up black in America

The Daily Mail
London, United Kingdom
2016-03-14

• The president and ballerina interviewed each other for TIME magazine
• Copeland is the first ever African American to be named the principal dancer at the American Ballet Theater
• Obama praised her for being a role model to his young daughters as she breaks barriers with her athletic body type
• Copeland asked Obama for advice on how to stay humble and grounded when one reaches the top of their field

They have a shared history of multiracial families, being raised by single mothers and making it to the top position of their respective fields.

Now President Barack Obama and Prima Ballerina Misty Copeland are sharing a table, discussing their thoughts on women’s body image, affirmative action and growing up black in America.

Copeland, the first African American to be named the principal dancer at the American Ballet Theater, has been breaking barriers in the ballet world with her athletic body type.

And Obama revealed during the TIME interview that it was the likes of Copeland and wife Michelle that were acting as role models for his daughters as they learn the pressures women face today to ‘look a certain way’…

…Copeland said that growing up African American has definitely been a ‘huge obstacle’ but she credited for giving her ‘this fire’ that has made her one of the best in her field.

As both she and the president praised social media for inciting conversation on racism and discrimination in the country, Obama pointed out that more still had to be done…

Read the entire article here.

Fear of Small Numbers: «Brown Babies» in Postwar Italy

Contemporanea
Volume XVIII, Number 4, October-December 2015
pages 537-568
DOI: 10.1409/81438

Silvana Patriarca, Professor of History
Fordham University: The Jesuit University of New York

By drawing in an interdisciplinary fashion on a variety of different sources (some of them archives only recently made available to the public), the essay examines the way children of Italian women and non-white Allied soldiers born in Italy during WWII and in its immediate aftermath were racialized and treated in the postwar years. It shows significant continuities between pre- and postwar ideas about race and «racial hybrids» in various segments of the Italian population and argues that these children were considered a «problem» in spite of their small numbers (rather as happened in Germany and Great Britain in the same years). Because of their origin in «illegitimate» relations, either consensual or forced, and because of the color of their skin, they often encountered hostility and contempt and were seen as not really belonging in the national community even though they were almost always Italian citizens in virtue of ius soli. The Italian case, however, has its own specificity, namely the extent to which prominent figures of the Catholic world, at times former supporters of fascism, were involved in trying to «solve» this socalled «problem». The vicissitudes of these children show the need to further investigate the history of racism in the Italian democratic Republic.

Read or purchase the article here.

Professor Silvana Patriarca’s Research on Race and Nation in Post World War II Italy

History at Fordham University
Fordham University: The Jesuit University of New York
2016-03-31

Aurora Pfefferkorn

Dr. Silvana Patriarca

Professor Silvana Patriarca is a faculty member in the Fordham University History department and specializes in modern Italian history. She is currently exploring the interaction between ideas of nation and “race” and working on a book about the history of racism in post-World War II Italy. Her new book will focus on “mixed-race” children born in Italy during the Allied occupation. These children were born to Italian mothers and non-white Allied soldiers, and were highly racialized in the post-war period.

Dr. Patriarca had initially started her research with a different topic in mind, but became interested in the post-war period when she discovered a lack of scholarship about race and racism in Italy after 1945. She began to focus on the experiences of mix-raced Italian children when she came across a 1961 Italian anthropometric study of a group of mixed-race children born during and right after WWII. The children had been measured in all sorts of invasive way to determine the physical, intellectual, and psychological traits that distinguished them, as if they were a group apart from a racial standpoint. “I found the book offensive and asked myself what do we know about the experiences of these children? I wondered what happened to them at that time and after [these studies were finished]?” Dr. Patriarca said. She saw these racial studies as linked to the large issue of Italian identity, the war experience, and the trauma of defeat. Fascist and racist ideas still circulated throughout Italy after World War II and permeated the scientific community especially. “Of course mentalities are slow to change,” Dr. Patriarca explained “It was troubling that many historians could still not see the intersection of nation and race in the postwar period and the lingering effects of fascism and racism on national identity.”…

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Creole Renegades: Rhetoric of Betrayal and Guilt in the Caribbean Diaspora

University Press of Florida
2014-06-17
240 pages
6.125 x 9.256
Hard Cover ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-4979-3

Bénédicte Boisseron, Associate Professor in French and Francophone Studies
University of Montana

In Creole Renegades, Bénédicte Boisseron looks at exiled Caribbean authors—Edwidge Danticat, Jamaica Kincaid, V. S. Naipaul, Maryse Condé, Dany Laferriére, and more—whose works have been well received in their adopted North American countries but who are often viewed by their home islands as sell-outs, opportunists, or traitors.

These expatriate and second-generation authors refuse to be simple bearers of Caribbean culture, often dramatically distancing themselves from the postcolonial archipelago. Their writing is frequently infused with an enticing sense of cultural, sexual, or racial emancipation, but their deviance is not defiant.

Underscoring the typically ignored contentious relationship between modern diaspora authors and the Caribbean, Boisseron ultimately argues that displacement and creative autonomy are often manifest in guilt and betrayal, central themes that emerge again and again in the work of these writers.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Note on Translations
• Introduction: The Second-Generation Caribbean Diaspora
• 1. Anatole Broyard: Racial Betrayal and the Art of Being Creole
• 2. Maryse Condé’s Histoire de la femme cannibale: Coming Out in the French Antilles
• 3. Edwidge Danticat and Dany Laferrière: Parasitic and Remittance Diaspora
• 4. V. S. Naipaul and Jamaica Kincaid: Rhetoric of National Dis-Allegiance
• 5. Creole versus Bossale Renegade: “Turfism” in the Black Diaspora of the Americas
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

“We Called That Touch”

Boston Review
2016-03-28

Ed Pavlić, Professor of English and Creative Writing
University of Georgia

Race and the Intimate Tangle of American Experience

It might seem to you that I am white. Then again, depending upon how and where we meet—and upon things in your life I know nothing about—it might seem to you that I’m not white. So far, in forty-nine years here, my experience has indicated this much to me. My father came to the United States by way of Canada from what is now Croatia. My mother is a white American liberal from Wisconsin. Many in America would say that, because of the race of my parents, my identity is essentially fixed in those terms, that such matters are innate, inborn. For many on all sides of the color line, this either/or racial paradigm possesses the self-evidence of a law of nature. Yet the social and political machinery necessary to maintain the reality of this illusion proves lethal to men, women, and children everyday.

Nonetheless, contrary to this culture-bound delusion, whiteness is not a natural inheritance. People “believing themselves white” (to borrow a phrase from Ta-Nehisi Coates, who borrowed the idea from James Baldwin) must invest in that belief continually. Whether consciously or not, they must rehearse its prohibitions and privileges all their waking days—in their dreams, even. Our world offers them a great assistance with this and, on average, the dividends paid by this pact with whiteness are real. At the same time, Eula Biss recently argued that this “believing themselves white” business accrues a cost, “White Debt.” It seems to me that she is describing shame even more than debt. Her essay tiptoes around naming the terrible price people believing themselves white pay to sustain that belief.

I confess that, even in the abstract, I have never been able to acquire a knack for honoring the supposed impermeability of American racial categories. Just where is the border in what one says, thinks, imagines, who one loves? Even more, where is the border in how one goes about these things? My racial ambiguity has not only been internal but has been reflected in—perhaps fueled by—the ways that, since childhood, my race has been so frequently “misread,” or far from self-evident. More than once in my twenties, police asked me point blank: Are you black or white? In these previews of often subtler interrogations to come, it always seemed to me that the question was the answer. Yet for years and long after I knew better, and even up until now, I have been afraid to openly analyze the dynamics that have produced these questions. I dealt with them lyrically, both in poems and in life. But in a fearful and tiresome symmetry, this silence and lyrical angularity (like Dickinson’s “tell it slant”) also forced me to treat my condition as if it were a personal psychosis, mine and mine alone, an essential and incommunicable privacy. It’s taught me how necessary privacy is but also how an incommunicable privacy narrows, collapses, becomes a trap…

Read the entire article here.

On Jerusalem Walls, Artist Memorializes Hebrew Israelite Rabbi from Harlem

The Assimilator: Intermarrying high and low culture
Forward
2016-03-31

Sam Kestenbaum, Staff Writer

Wikicommons / Solomon Souza / YouTube

When Rabbi Mordecai Herman would visit the Lower East Side of the 1920s, then teeming with Jewish immigrants from Europe, he cut an intriguing figure.

He was a wizened black rabbi and former sailor from Harlem who spoke Hebrew, some Yiddish, and was a pioneering spiritual leader of the early black Hebrew Israelite movement.

Now, nearly a century after his life’s work, Herman has been memorialized on the streets of Jerusalem — a Jewish homecoming for a forgotten religious figure.

This is thanks to Solomon Souza, an Israeli artist who has transformed Jerusalem’s central Mehane Yehudah market into a pop-up art gallery, emblazoning the enclosed market’s shuttered metal doors with over 150 graffiti portraits of iconic figures like Albert Einstein, Golda Meir, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef and the biblical prophet Moses…

Read the entire article here.

Construction and initial validation of the Multiracial Experiences Measure (MEM)

Journal of Counseling Psychology
Volume 63, Issue 2, March 2016
pages 198-209
DOI: 10.1037/cou0000117

Hyung Chol Yoo, Associate Professor of Asian Pacific American Studies
Arizona State University

Kelly F. Jackson, Associate Professor of Social Work
Arizona State University, Phoenix

Rudy P. Guevarra Jr., Asian Pacific American Studies
Arizona State University, Tempe

Matthew J. Miller

Blair Harrington

This article describes the development and validation of the Multiracial Experiences Measure (MEM): a new measure that assesses uniquely racialized risks and resiliencies experienced by individuals of mixed racial heritage. Across 2 studies, there was evidence for the validation of the 25-item MEM with 5 subscales including Shifting Expressions, Perceived Racial Ambiguity, Creating Third Space, Multicultural Engagement, and Multiracial Discrimination. The 5-subscale structure of the MEM was supported by a combination of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. Evidence of criterion-related validity was partially supported with MEM subscales correlating with measures of racial diversity in one’s social network, color-blind racial attitude, psychological distress, and identity conflict. Evidence of discriminant validity was supported with MEM subscales not correlating with impression management. Implications for future research and suggestions for utilization of the MEM in clinical practice with multiracial adults are discussed.

Read or purchase the article here.

Study finds mixed-race individuals are fastest-growing demographic group, most discriminated against

The Daily Targum: Serving the Rutgers community since 1869. Independent since 1980.
2016-03-31

Samantha Karas

The fastest growing racial group in the United States is mixed-race individuals, but they are also the ones experiencing increasing amounts of prejudice from white people, according to a study conducted by Jonathan Freeman, an assistant professor at New York University.

White individuals with lower interracial exposure tend to exhibit greater prejudice against mixed-race persons, according to the study run through NYU’s Department of Psychology.

“(These individuals) visually process racially ambiguous faces in a more difficult and unpredictable fashion, and this unstable experience translates into negative biases against mixed-race people,” Freeman said in a press release.

The study is interested in exploring attitudes towards mixed-race individuals as a function of racial exposure, said Diana Sanchez, a co-author on the study and an associate professor in the Department of Psychology…

…Laura Chapas, a School of Arts and Sciences senior, said she would assume people in the Rutgers—New Brunswick area would be less biased due to the diverse population.

“What that study indicated is a shame but I’m not surprised that it’s true,” she said.

People are so quick to judge what they don’t understand, she said, and race cannot be confined to just black or white.

“I think those with lower interracial exposure may have a hard time accepting that,” Chapas said.

Dana Campbell, a School of Arts and Sciences senior, said she was not surprised with the findings of the study.

“I agree (with the conclusion). I think that when people who aren’t exposed to other races only see those races as the media portrays them,” Campbell said. “Without any personal experience people have to rely on movies, books, the new, etc. to try to understand race.”

People can confront their own biases by understanding the sources of bias, she said…

Read the entire article here.

‘A black president, yay’: 106-year-old finally meets the Obamas, dances like a schoolgirl

The Washington Post
2016-02-22

Michael E. Miller, Morning Mix Reporter

Virginia McLaurin’s life isn’t easy. Last winter, she battled bedbugs in her D.C. apartment. This year, snowstorm “Snowzilla” trapped her inside for several days.

She also happens to be almost 107 years old.

None of that mattered last week when the centenarian stepped — nay, scampered — into the White House to meet President Obama and the first lady.

With the leader of the free world in one hand and Michelle Obama in the other, McLaurin danced with sheer and utter joy, shaking her hips like a 16-year-old and flashing a smile as bright as the camera flashes going off all around her.

“She’s 106?” the president asked incredulously.

“No, you are not,” scoffed the first lady, before adding: “I want to be like you when I grow up.”

The uplifting moment was also heavy with history, though. After her super-senior shuffle, McLaurin suddenly got serious.

“I thought I would never live to get in the White House,” said McLaurin, who was born in 1909 in South Carolina, worked as a seamstress for most of her life and has been a widow for more than 70 years.

But her amazement went beyond merely making it inside the hallowed building. She was particularly bowled over to be meeting America’s first African American president…

Read the entire article here.