Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

recent posts

about

  • On Race and Medicine

    On Race and Medicine

    The Scientist: Exploring Lie, Inspiring Innovation
    Volume 28, Issue 2 (Febuary 2014)

    Keith Norris, M.D., Ph.D., Professor, College of Medicine and Science
    David Geffen School of Medicine
    University of California, Los Angeles

    Until health care becomes truly personalized, race and ethnicity will continue to be important clues guiding medical treatments.

    Clinical trials were traditionally conducted using predominately white male subjects. However, the 1993 National Institutes of Health (NIH) Revitalization Act required that all NIH-funded research involving human subjects, including clinical trials, have as diverse a participant cohort as possible, unless there were strongly justifiable reasons to do otherwise (e.g., limiting the study of uterine cancer to female subjects). One of the most significant advantages to the inclusion of diversity in clinical studies is that it enables the early detection of differences in the safety and efficacy of interventions among heterogeneous patient subgroups.

    Most clinical trials, as well as large observational studies, now perform an elaborate set of statistical adjustments to account for the impact of key cohort characteristics such as age, gender, and race/ethnicity on study outcomes. Despite these sophisticated analyses, it is still uncertain whether these characteristics can accurately predict treatment response in an individual patient. While age and gender are strongly associated with biological differences that may have a significant impact on disease susceptibility and treatment response—and are thus carefully controlled for, sometimes by excluding certain groups such as children and/or elderly from trials—the role of race/ethnicity is far less clear. Indeed, unlike the case with age or gender, race has no consensus criteria for definition…

    …At the same time, we must be mindful that generalizations filtered through the lens of race/ethnicity and other sociodemographic factors should not be used indiscriminately. In the setting of increasing admixture within and across racial/ethnic groups in a diversifying United States, there is a lack of concordance between today’s patients and traditional racial stereotypes. Fortunately, genomic data are already beginning to predict disease risk and treatment response, and advances will no doubt continue to improve their accuracy. The ultimate goal is to arrive at a point where medicine becomes so personalized that it is driven from a “fingerprint” of one’s biologic makeup, not from racial typecasting…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Advancing Health Through A Racial Lens: The New Biopolitics of Race, Health, and Justice

    Advancing Health Through A Racial Lens: The New Biopolitics of Race, Health, and Justice

    University of Maryland, College Park
    Stamp Student Union
    Banneker Room 2212
    Thursday, 2014-02-20, 12:30-15:00 EST (Local Time)

    Moderated by:

    Dorothy Roberts J.D., Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology, and the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
    University of Pennsylvania

    Dorothy Roberts holds appointments in the Law School and Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology. An internationally recognized scholar, public intellectual, and social justice advocate, she has written and lectured extensively on the interplay of gender, race, and class in legal issues and has been a leader in transforming public thinking and policy on reproductive health, child welfare, and bioethics. Professor Roberts is author of Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (1997); Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (2002); and Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (2011). Among her many public interest activities, Roberts serves as chair of the board of directors of the Black Women’s Health Imperative.

    Distinguished University of Maryland Panelists:

    “Racial Coping in African American Mothers & Adolescents”
    Mia A. Smith Bynum, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Family Science

    “Treating Difference: Race, Risk, and the Politics of HIV/AIDs Prevention”
    Thurka Sangaramoorthy, Ph.D., MPH, Assistant Professor of Anthropology

    “Addressing Racial Disparities in Cardiovascular Disease: Directions for the Patient Protection and Affordability Care Act”
    Gneisha Y. Dinwiddie, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of African American Studies

    For more information, click here or here.

  • Mixed Roots Stories~ What’s Yours?

    Mixed Roots Stories~ What’s Yours?

    Mixed Race Radio
    Blog Talk Radio
    2014-02-19, 17:00Z (12:00 EDT)

    Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

    Join us today as we meet the visionaries behind Mixed Roots Stories: Chandra Crudup, Mark Edwards and our very own, Fanshen Cox. Mixed Roots Stories (MXRS) is a new resource for teaching and learning about the Mixed Experience and is a creative and dynamic online and physical California Not-For-Profit dedicated to promoting artists and stories of all kinds that address Mixed experiences. “We are an interactive community, so input and collaboration with others is essential to our mission of Celebrating and Strengthening Diverse Mixed Communities through the Power of Sharing Stories.”

    AND THIS IS WHERE YOU COME IN:

    There are a number of collaborative opportunities:

    • YOU CAN Promote story ideas on the Mixed Roots Stories website
    • YOU CAN Partner to plan and implement an event (for example MXRS is partnering with the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference in bringing arts and cultural programming to the 2014 conference)
    • YOU CAN Share the MXRS podcast
    • YOU CAN Participate in the selection of the Mixed Roots Stories logo

    PLEASE CALL IN TO SHARE YOUR MIXED ROOTS STORY.

    Mixed Roots Stories’ very own: Chandra, Mark and Fanshen will join us to take your calls and tell us all about this amazing new resource.

    WON’T YOU JOIN US?

  • Color Without Complex: A Conversation w/ Michaela Angela Davis & Dr. Yaba Blay

    Color Without Complex: A Conversation w/ Michaela Angela Davis & Dr. Yaba Blay

    New York University, Washington, D.C.
    Abramson Family Auditorium
    1307 L Street, N.W.
    Washington, D.C. 20005
    Tuesday, 2014-02-18, 18:30 EST (Local Time)

    Michaela Angela Davis

    Yaba Blay, Ph.D., Professor of Africana Studies and Women’s & Gender Studies
    Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

    What exactly is Blackness? What does it mean to be Black? Is Blackness a matter of biology or consciousness? Who determines who is Black and who is not? Who’s Black, who’s not, and who cares? This discussion seeks to challenge narrow perceptions of Blackness as both an identity and lived reality.

    Video streaming by Ustream

    For more information, contact: NYU Washington DC Events at nyuwashingtondcevents@nyu.edu or 202-654-8300.

  • Continuous Frieze Bordering Red

    Continuous Frieze Bordering Red

    Fordham University Press
    April 2012
    78 pages
    8 1/2 x 8 1/2
    Hardcover ISBN: 9780823243044
    Paperback ISBN: 9780823243051

    Michelle Naka Pierce, Associate Professor
    Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics
    Naropa University, Boulder, Colorado

    Continuous Frieze Bordering Red documents the migratory patterns of an Other, as she travels between countries, languages, seasons, and shifting identities. A narrative on hybridity, the text explores [dis]location as a cultural swerve while it interrogates Rothko’s red: his bricked-in, water-damaged windows [floating borders], which reflect unstable cultural borders to the hybrid. A person of mixed race [hybrid, mongrel, mutt] traverses these “invisible” cultural borders repeatedly. Border identity comes with flux, instability, and vibrational pulls. An Other is marked as someone who does not belong. She is always a foreigner: when traveling and when at “home.” She is cast aside, bracketed from the dominant culture. She is [neither][nor][both]. She exists in a liminal space: in place and displaced simultaneously. That is, her identity and body are peripatetic, which is reflected in the continuous horizontal frieze. The reader must literally cross the borders of each page in order to navigate each line of text, leaving the reader in constant motion as well. The poem also functions as an ekphrasis of Rothko’s Seagram murals: Rothko writes that the paintings make the observers “feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up.” The hybrid is confined and isolated. Even though the Other is estranged from herself and desires a sense of cultural belonging, she ultimately wants to “acknowledge this scar tissue and proceed” so that she is not held to false measures of “purity.” Continuous Frieze Bordering Red attempts to move away from pejorative definitions of “hybrid” and embrace the monstrous self.

  • A Breezy Chameleon, Blurring Social Borders

    A Breezy Chameleon, Blurring Social Borders

    The New York Times
    2014-02-16

    Jennifer Schuessler, Staff Editor

    When the literary scholar George Hutchinson was in the archives at Howard University one afternoon a decade ago, he thought he knew which story of a neglected African-American woman writer he was chasing.

    He was at work on a biography of Nella Larsen, whose classic Harlem Renaissance novel “Passing” was rediscovered in the 1970s. But while poking around, Mr. Hutchinson noticed a listing for the papers of Anita Thompson Dickinson Reynolds, an obscure contemporary of Larsen’s, and decided to take a look.

    There, amid a jumble of letters and cassette tapes, lay an unpublished memoir breezily recounting the Zelig-like adventures of a woman who had starred in some of the first black films made in Hollywood, mingled with the Harlem Renaissance elite, been drawn by Man Ray and Matisse in Paris and touched down in Spain during its Civil War, before packing up her Chanel dresses and heading home to a more conventional life as a psychologist.

    It was a story of passing stranger than anything Larsen had imagined, recounted with uncommon sexual frankness and blithe disregard for racial barriers. “I was fascinated by the way she threaded together all these different worlds, with this total nonchalance,” Mr. Hutchinson said in a recent interview. “I had never read anything like it.”

    Previously, Reynolds’s name had survived mainly in a few scattered footnotes. But now, Harvard University Press is publishing her memoir, as “American Cocktail: A ‘Colored Girl’ in the World.”…

    Read the entire book review here.

  • Who Gets to Be A POC?: Self-Identifying & Privilege

    Who Gets to Be A POC?: Self-Identifying & Privilege

    Mixed Dreams: towards a radical multiracial/ethnic movement
    2014-02-09

    Nicole Nfonoyim de Hara

    This post is in response to a great question a friend asked about how the wonderful new book (1)ne Drop:Shifting the Lens on Race by Dr. Yaba Blay and Noelle Théard, featuring portraits of individuals who identify as “Black” speaks to an article entitled “4 Ways to Push Back on Your Privilege” by one of my favorite bloggers, Mia McKenzie (aka Black Girl Dangerous). Many portraits in (1)ne Drop may raise a few eyebrows. Take the portrait of ‘Zun Lee‘ on the right. He says:

    “When I applied to grad school or for jobs, all of a sudden the boxes come up. I had to make a choice, so for the first time, I checked ‘Black.’ And I didn’t think long about it because for me, it was based on personal circumstance. I just chose the box that I felt most at home with because I didn’t relate to any of the other options. From then on, if I were asked, I would answer, ‘I’m Black.’ Of course, people told me I couldn’t do that — that I couldn’t choose that box. But I had spent all of my life being pushed away by people. In Germany, I wasn’t even given the option to check anything because I wasn’t welcomed there. I had no box. For the first time, I was being given the option to identify myself. Now I had a box, and I was happy in that little box.”

    Is it okay for Zun Lee to identify as black? He doesn’t self-identify in his quote as “Asian.” Should we, the viewers and readers see him and insist that he must be “Asian” or at the very least “not black?”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Obama and the Oscars: Lights, Camera, Nationalism! A Symposium About The “Obama Effect” On Film Culture

    Obama and the Oscars: Lights, Camera, Nationalism! A Symposium About The “Obama Effect” On Film Culture

    DePaul University
    Richardson Library
    Rosati Room 300
    2350 North Kenmore Avenue
    Chicago, Illinois
    Friday, 2014-02-28, 16:00-19:00 CST (Local Time)

    Moderated by:

    Daniel McNeil, Ida B. Wells-Barnett Professor of African and Black Diaspora Studies
    DePaul University

    Speakers:

    George Elliott Clarke, Associate Professor of English
    University of Toronto and Harvard University

    Jasmine Nichole Cobb, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies
    Northwestern University

    Charles Coleman, Film Programmer
    Facets Cinémathèque, Chicago, Illinois

    Armond White, Editor and Film Critic
    City Arts, New York, New York

    During the run up to the 2014 Oscars, film producers and executives have claimed that the election and re-election of President Barack Obama has erased racial lines and created a better country. They have also linked the ‘Obama effect’ to a spate of daring films about slavery and racial discrimination in the American past. This symposium brings together leading academics, critics, and film programmers to discuss the production, distribution and marketing of films in the age of Obama, as well as the ways in which Oscar-nominated films address the history of America and the Atlantic world.

    Free and open to the public.

  • Walking Down The Widening Aisle Of Interracial Marriages

    Walking Down The Widening Aisle Of Interracial Marriages

    Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity
    Weekend Edition Saturday
    National Public Radio
    2014-02-15

    Hansi Lo Wang

    Editor’s Note: Code Switch has been engaged in a month-long exploration of romance across racial and cultural lines. Follow the Twitter conversation via the hashtag #xculturelove.

    The numbers are small but growing.

    More than 5.3 million marriages in the U.S. are between husbands and wives of different races or ethnicities. According to the 2010 Census, they make up one in 10 marriages between opposite-sex couples, marking a 28-percent increase since 2000…

    Listen to the story here. Download the audio here. Read the transcript here.

  • Who intermarries in Britain? Explaining ethnic diversity in intermarriage patterns

    Who intermarries in Britain? Explaining ethnic diversity in intermarriage patterns

    The British Journal of Sociology
    Volume 61, Issue 2 (June 2010)
    pages 275–305
    DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-4446.2010.01313.x

    Raya Muttarak, Visiting Fellow
    Department of Political and Social Sciences
    European University Institute

    Anthony Heath, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Emeritus Fellow of Nuffield College
    University of Oxford

    This paper investigates trends, patterns and determinants of intermarriage (and partnership) comparing patterns among men and women and among different ethnic groups in Britain. We distinguish between endogamous (co-ethnic), majority/minority and minority/minority marriages. Hypotheses are derived from the theoretical literatures on assimilation, segmented assimilation and opportunity structures. The empirical analysis is based on the 1988–2006 General Household Surveys (N = 115,494). Consistent with assimilation theory we find that, for all ethnic minority groups, the propensity to intermarry is higher in the second generation than in the first. Consistent with ideas drawn from segmented assimilation theory, we also find that substantial differences in propensity to form majority/minority marriages persist after controls for individual characteristics such as age, educational level, generation and length of residence in Britain, with men and women of Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi background having higher propensities to form endogamous partnerships. However, we also find that opportunity structures affect intermarriage propensities for all groups alike, with individuals in more diverse residential areas (as measured by the ratio of majority to minority residents in the area) having higher likelihood to form majority/minority partnerships. We conclude then that, beginning from very different starting points, all groups, both minority and the majority groups exhibit common patterns of generational change and response to opportunity structures. Even the groups that are believed to have the strongest community structures and the strongest norms supporting endogamy appear to be experiencing increasing exogamy in the second generation and in more diverse residential settings. This suggests that a weak rather than a strong version of segmented assimilation provides the best account of British patterns.

    Read or purchase the article here.