Mixed Race Studies – Page 66 – Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

Very Little Is Keeping Doctors From Using Racist Health Formulas

2021-10-10

Very Little Is Keeping Doctors From Using Racist Health Formulas

Wired
2021-10-08

Jyoti Madhusoodanan

Photo-Illustration: Sam Whitney; Getty Images

If nothing in medicine changes, it’s just a matter of time before yet another race-based risk calculator harms people of color.

RECENTLY, TWO LEADING medical associations recommended ending a decades-old practice among doctors: using race as one of the variables to estimate how well a person’s kidneys filter waste out of their bodies. Before, clinicians would look at the levels of a certain chemical in blood, then multiply it by a factor of approximately 1.15 if their patient was Black. Using race to estimate kidney function contributes to delays in dialysis, kidney transplants, and other life-saving care for people of color, especially Black patients.

To make the recent decision, 14 experts spent approximately a year evaluating dozens of alternative options, interviewing patients, and weighing the impact of keeping race in the equation. Their final recommendation ensures the corrected kidney equation is equally precise for everyone, regardless of race.

Yet other risk equations that include race are still being used—including ones that have been used to deny former NFL players’ payouts in a concussion settlement, ones that might contribute to underdiagnosing breast cancer in Black women, and ones that have miscalculated the lung function of Black and Asian patients. Ending the use of race-based multipliers in these and dozens of other calculators will take more than a task force in one medical specialty. It’ll need researchers to not just believe, but act on the knowledge that race is not biology, and for the biomedical research enterprise to implement clearer standards for how these calculators are used. Otherwise, it’s just a matter of time before another tool that wrongly uses race to make decisions about patients’ bodies trickles into clinical care…

Read the entire article here.
The children born to Black American GIs and white British women during Second World War

2021-10-10

The children born to Black American GIs and white British women during Second World War

The Bristol Post
Bristol, England, United Kingdom
2021-10-08

Hannah Simpson

Interracial couples dancing in England during WWII (Image: www.mixedmuseum.org.uk/brown-babies ‘Courtesy of Gregory S. Cooke Collection’)

The children, who came to be known by the British press as the nation’s “Brown Babies”, grew up in post-war Britain

During World War II, around one million American troops arrived in England to prepare for the invasion of Europe and to assist Great Britain in the fight against Nazi Germany.

Of these GIs, 130,000 were African American who landed in cities such as Bristol between 1942 and 1945.

For many Brits, this was their first time meeting a person of colour, but in Bristol, the public were incredibly welcoming to their American visitors, with some pubs such as The Colston Arms refusing to adhere to US segregation practices.

America’s stringent Jim Crow laws were not limited to the United States alone, as the army was officially segregated until 1948…

…Professor of social and cultural history at Anglia Ruskin University, Lucy Bland said: “From all accounts a lot of local people much preferred the Black GIs…

Read the entire article here.
‘Passing’: Rebecca Hall Reveals Personal Link To Directorial Debut – Contenders London

2021-10-10

‘Passing’: Rebecca Hall Reveals Personal Link To Directorial Debut – Contenders London

Hollywood Deadline
2021-10-09

Anna Smith

Diana Lodderhose, Rebecca Hall, Ruth Negga and André Holland
Deadline

Rebecca Hall revealed a personal link to her directorial debut Passing at Deadline’s Contenders Film: London this morning. Joined on stage by stars Ruth Negga and André Holland, she explained why she adapted Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel. “My mother’s from Detroit and her father was African American and passed for white his whole life. When I read the book, it clicked into place: obviously that’s what my grandfather did — for his family, his children’s life.”

Based on Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, writer-director Hall’s Passing explores the lives of two mixed-race childhood friends, Irene (Tessa Thompson) and Clare (Ruth Negga), who reunite as adults. They become involved in each other’s lives and explore how they diverged due to Irene identifying as Black while Clare “passes” as white. Holland, Alexander Skarsgård, Bill Camp and Gbenga Akinnagbe also star in the film, which premiered at Sundance. Netflix acquired the pic in February for nearly $15 million…

Read the entire article here.
In Fanny Hurst’s novel, Delilah’s daughter dreams of working in white restaurants, achieves her dream of passing and marries a white man before escaping America and her identity. In the 1934 movie as well as Sirk’s version Delilah/Annie’s daughter doesn’t get away so cleanly.

2021-10-10

In Fanny Hurst’s novel, Delilah’s daughter dreams of working in white restaurants, achieves her dream of passing and marries a white man before escaping America and her identity. In the 1934 movie as well as Sirk’s version Delilah/Annie’s daughter doesn’t get away so cleanly.

Rick McGinnis, “Leave Them Wanting More: Douglas Sirk and Imitation of Life,” Steyn Online, September 18, 2021. https://www.steynonline.com/11701/leave-them-wanting-more-douglas-sirk.
Race Off: The fantasy of race transformation

2021-10-09

Race Off: The fantasy of race transformation

The Yale Review
2021-09-27

Namwali Serpell, Professor of English
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Genevieve Gaignard, People Make the World Go Round, 2019. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles.

This essay was first delivered in September 2021 as the Finzi-Contini Lecture at Yale University’s Whitney Humanities Center. The Finzi-Contini lectureship was endowed in 1990 by the Honorable Guido Calabresi, Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and former Dean of the Yale Law School, and Dr. Paul Calabresi, in memory of their mother, Bianca Maria Finzi-Contini Calabresi.

WHAT IF YOU COULD change your race? Some disturbing scandals of late have put this hypothetical to the reality test. A cluster of white American academics and activists, all women it seems, have been revealed to have spent years cosplaying a different race—Latinx, North African, black—deceiving their colleagues and comrades. The valedictorian of this recent class of racial fakers remains Rachel Dolezal, the former college instructor, activist, and president of an NAACP chapter, who was outed by a reporter in 2015. She confessed that she was “born white to white parents,” but still declares herself to be “racially human” and culturally black.

Such deceptions are nothing new. Racial hoaxes have been around for a long time, as Laura Browder explains in Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities (2000). In the mid-nineteenth century, P. T. Barnum showcased people of concocted races, such as “the Circassian Beauty,” and promoted a “Negro” who claimed to have discovered “a weed that turns a black person white.” Newspapers at the time called out runaway slave imposters, who went around “soliciting money,” “purchasing relatives and friends.” White writers published fake slave narratives, with some unconscious tells, according to Browder: their narrators tend to discover that slavery is bad (as if this were not obvious) and to betray both “disgust with the African-American body” and “an obsession with physical pain.” As late as the 1920s, the British- born Archibald Stansfeld Belaney disguised himself as Grey Owl, a Native American man. In his 2017 history Bunk, Kevin Young notes that “the hoax regularly steps in when race rears its head—exactly because it too is a fake thing pretending to be real.”…

Read the entire article here.
After Denying Care to Black Natives, Indian Health Service Reverses Policy

2021-10-08

After Denying Care to Black Natives, Indian Health Service Reverses Policy

The New York Times
2021-10-08

Mark Walker and Chris Cameron

LeEtta Osborne-Sampson said a nurse at an Indian Health Service clinic denied her a vaccine because her tribal identification card said she was a Freedmen, a Black Native American in the Seminole Nation. Sue Ogrocki/Associated Press

The shift comes as the Biden administration pressures Native tribes in Oklahoma to desegregate their constitutions to comply with treaty obligations.

The Indian Health Service announced this week that Black Native Americans in the Seminole Nation, known as the Freedmen, will now be eligible for health care through the federal agency, which previously denied them coronavirus vaccinations and other care.

The shift in policy comes as the Biden administration and members of Congress are pressuring the Seminole and other Native tribes in Oklahoma to desegregate their constitutions and include the Freedmen, many of whom are descendants of Black people who had been held as slaves by the tribes, as full and equal citizens of their tribes under post-Civil War treaty obligations.

“The I.H.S.-operated Wewoka Indian Health Clinic provides services to members of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, and personnel at the clinic and other I.H.S. facilities in Oklahoma have been informed that they should provide services to Seminole Freedmen who present at their clinics and hospitals,” the Indian Health Service said in a statement.

The Seminole Nation did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the announcement.

Chuck Hoskin Jr., the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, announced on Friday that his tribe would also start allowing Seminole Freedmen to visit their tribally operated I.H.S. hospital, near Wewoka…

Read the entire article here.
Exploring the Afro-Indigenous experience

2021-10-08

Exploring the Afro-Indigenous experience

Indian Country Today
2021-09-28

Nancy Spears
Gaylord News

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers. (Photo courtesy of Honorée Fanonne Jeffers)

The author’s new novel looks at the history of a Black family in central Georgia

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is a full-tenure professor who’s been teaching nearly two decades in the English department at the University of Oklahoma. The first African American full professor in the history of the department, who is also Afro-Indigenous.

Her new novel explores the Afro-Indigenous experience, an area of literature Jeffers said has been long underrepresented and under-discussed.

The 790-page novel titled “The Love Songs of W.E.B Du Bois” released earlier this year in July explores the two centuries-old history of a Black family in central Georgia who is descended from Afro-Indigenous origin.

She discussed the book at the virtual National Book Festival event with Karen Grigsby Bates, senior correspondent for NPR’s Code Switch on Sept. 23.

Jeffers sat down with Gaylord News to discuss the themes of her book and reflects on how the narrative can translate to social justice issues across minority groups in the US…

Read the entire interview here.

Silvia Foster-Frau, Multiculturalism reporter
Ted Mellnik
Adrián Blanco, Graphics reporter

Steve Majors, in Takoma Park, Md., who is half-Black and half-White, grew up in an all-Black household but is often perceived as White. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)

While still a relatively small part of the population, more Americans than ever identify as multiracial, according to the census

Tony Luna was once again being asked to choose one of his racial identities over the other.

He firmly believed in the anti-racism training his workplace was offering. But the instructor told him he had to pick a group for the program — either the one for White people, or the one for people of color.

Luna is biracial, Filipino and White, a combination that defined his upbringing and sense of self. He has always felt he was either both identities, equally — or in some settings, not fully one or the other.

Multiracial populations increased faster than any single race across the U.S. in the last census. Gains were highest in major metro areas, but the number of people identifying as multiracial also tripled in non-metro areas. Source: 2020 Census

“I felt like it was a false choice, because you’re saying which one are you more comfortable with, your mom or your dad?” Luna, 49, said. “Identity can be based on how people see you, but that can be wrong for mixed people. It’s really based on how you identify, what your experiences are — so many variables go into that.”

More than 33 million Americans — about 1 in 10 — identify as being of two or more races, a number that grew by nearly 25 million people in the past decade, according to the 2020 Census. Multiracial people span all different combinations of races and ethnicities and make up the fastest-growing demographic in the country.

In some cities, the growth is stark. Almost 1.4 million more people each in Los Angeles and New York identified as multiracial in the 2020 Census compared with a decade ago, according to a Washington Post analysis. In Miami, nearly 1.6 million more did so…

Read the entire article here.

Participants needed for study on mixed-race identity

2021-10-08
Participants needed for study on mixed-race identity

Newcastle University
Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom
2021-10-04

Heather Proctor

Do you identify as mixed-race?

If you:
- Are aged 18-30
- Broadly identify as mixed Black/white or mixed Asian/white
- Were predominantly raised in the United Kingdom
Would you like to take part in an interview and focus group exploring the relationship between mixed-race identity and popular culture? Click here to participate.

If you are interested in participating and would like to know more information through an informal chat or email, then please contact me, Heather Proctor, at: h.proctor2@newcastle.ac.uk.
Born into slavery, they rose to be elite New York Jews. A new book tells their story.

2021-10-08

Born into slavery, they rose to be elite New York Jews. A new book tells their story.

Religion News Service
2021-10-05

Yonat Shimron, National Reporter and Senior Editor

“Once We Were Slaves: The Extraordinary Journey of a Multiracial Jewish Family” and author Laura Arnold Leibman. Courtesy images

In her new book, ‘Once We Were Slaves: The Extraordinary Journey of a Multiracial Jewish Family,’ Laura Arnold Leibman shows that Jews were not only slave owners. They were also slaves.

(RNS) — Jews are proud of the biblical story from Exodus that recounts their deliverance from slavery in Egypt in the third century B.C.

But few U.S. Jews consider that some of their ancestors were slaves in the trans-Atlantic slave trade that ended in the 19th century.

In her new book, “Once We Were Slaves: The Extraordinary Journey of a Multiracial Jewish Family,” Laura Arnold Leibman, a Reed College English professor, conclusively shows that Jews, who were typically thought of as white, were not only slave owners. They were also slaves.

Leibman does this by excavating the genealogies of Sarah and Isaac Lopez Brandon, siblings born in the late 18th century to a wealthy Barbadian Jewish businessman and an enslaved woman. The siblings eventually made it New York, where they were able to pass as white. They became accomplished and affluent members of New York City’s oldest Jewish congregation, Shearith Israel.

Sarah and Isaac’s father, Abraham Rodriguez Brandon, was a Sephardic Jew who traced his ancestry to the expulsion of Jews from Spain. He settled in Barbados as part of a Jewish community of between 400 and 500 families that worked on the island’s sugar plantations and refineries.

Brandon secured his children’s manumission fees, and in 1801 they became “free mulattos.” In Barbados, that still meant they could not vote or hold office, or for that matter be married in the island’s synagogue or buried in its cemetery.

But America was kinder to them. Both Sarah and Isaac immigrated to America and married into prominent and wealthy U.S. Jewish families while hiding their past. One granddaughter had no clue about their origins.

Religion News Service talked to Leibman about her discovery of the Brandon genealogy and what it means for the U.S. Jewish community to grapple with its multiracial past and present. The interview was edited for length and clarity…

Read the entire interview here.

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Very Little Is Keeping Doctors From Using Racist Health Formulas

The children born to Black American GIs and white British women during Second World War

‘Passing’: Rebecca Hall Reveals Personal Link To Directorial Debut – Contenders London

In Fanny Hurst’s novel, Delilah’s daughter dreams of working in white restaurants, achieves her dream of passing and marries a white man before escaping America and her identity. In the 1934 movie as well as Sirk’s version Delilah/Annie’s daughter doesn’t get away so cleanly.

Race Off: The fantasy of race transformation

After Denying Care to Black Natives, Indian Health Service Reverses Policy

Exploring the Afro-Indigenous experience

Multiracial Americans could represent America’s future, some say

Participants needed for study on mixed-race identity

Born into slavery, they rose to be elite New York Jews. A new book tells their story.