Whiteness, History, and Comments about George Zimmerman

Posted in Articles, History, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2013-11-24 23:44Z by Steven

Whiteness, History, and Comments about George Zimmerman

Andrew Joseph Pegoda, A.B.D.
2013-07-17

Andrew Joseph Pegoda
Department of History
University of Houston

Events and things in history frequently involve what I call the “realms of illogic.” It’s not gonna make sense. “Race” is one of these. This posting is an attempt to address how people are classified as white or not and why Zimmerman is actually “white.” Absolutely no offense is intended by the use of racialized terms here and the various ways I discuss, describe, and classify them. This posting discusses how these racialized terms are used in society and the consequences they have.

In the United States, in most cases with brief exceptions from around the 1860s to the 1920s, people have been socially and politically classified/racialized as either white or black – sometimes Indian, Asian, and more recently Middle Eastern and Hispanic are added in.

Generally, no one literally has white skin. Likewise, people usually do not have skin that is literally black. People, clearly, do have skin color; however, these colors very greatly.

In reference to racialized thoughts, “white” and “black,” then, clearly do not refer to colors. This makes said racialized discourses doubly odd and tricky for the human brain. On the one hand, we know that “race” does not actually exist at all on a biological level. On the other hand, the use of colors to define different races is odd in terms of the signifier, signified, and semantics, for example.

Who is “white” or not “white” is not always cut and dry. Ascribed statuses, achieved statuses, and time and place play a factor. “Whiteness” is something to recognize and something to consider. People have various degrees of whiteness, and this whiteness gives people unfounded, automatic “white privilege.”…

Read the entire article here.

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Race and Medicine

Posted in Anthropology, Course Offerings, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive, United States on 2013-11-24 23:19Z by Steven

Race and Medicine

Princeton University
AAS 403 / ANT 403 (EM)
Spring 2013-2014

Carolyn M. Rouse, Professor of Anthropology

In 1998, then-President Clinton set a national goal that by the year 2010 race, ethnic, and gender disparities in six disease categories would be eliminated. While the agenda, called Healthy People 2010, was a noble effort, many of the goals were not met. This course examines what went wrong. For a final project, students will be asked to propose their own solutions for eliminating health disparities.

Sample reading list:

  • Brian Smedley, ed., Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial & Ethnic Disparities
  • Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid:The Dark History of Medical Experimentation
  • Agustin Fuentes, Race, Monogamy and Other Lies They Told Me
  • Troy Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics
  • Jonathan Kahn, Race in a Bottle: Racialized Medicine in a Post-Genomic Age
  • Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

For more information, click here.

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The Martinican concept of “creoleness”: A multiracial redefinition of culture.

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive on 2013-11-24 03:44Z by Steven

The Martinican concept of “creoleness”: A multiracial redefinition of culture.

Mots Pluriels
Number 7, (July 1998): Third Space and Cross-Cultural Identities—Mestissage – Tiers Espace – Identite

Beverley Ormerod, Associate Professor of French
University of Western Australia

In the 1930s, black and coloured intellectuals from the French Caribbean colonies of Martinique, Guadeloupe and Guyane sought for the first time to define their cultural identity in terms of their historical and racial affiliations with Africa, rather than their political and educational ties with France. During centuries of colonial rule, class barriers had effectively separated darker-skinned from lighter-skinned West Indians; the school system had reinforced European aesthetic norms, and had demanded the repudiation of Creole, the language associated with black slaves, in favour of French. The Négritude movement, inaugurated with L.-G. Damas’ Pigments (1937) and Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Return to my Native Land, 1939), rejected this cultural predominance of France and emphasized the writers’ membership of the African diaspora. To the Martinican Césaire is attributed the neologistic term, Négritude, which stressed the vital importance to the poet’s ideology of his adherence to the black race. He and Damas brandished the terms “Negro”, “Africa”, “instinct” and even “savage” in their verse, delineating a new Caribbean cultural profile in truculent defiance of the prejudices of their likely public. For their message was addressed not only to French readers, but (and perhaps primarily) to the Francophile coloured and black bourgeoisie in the West Indies which had acquiesced in Europe’s dismissal of Africa as a site of racial and cultural inferiority.

For the Caribbean inventors of Negritude, Africa was more than simply an emblem of ethnic authenticity. Their invocation of this distant, unknown continent was intended to heal psychological wounds passed down from the first black West Indians, those generations of Africans exiled from their native lands and forced into captivity in a white-dominated society on the far side of an uncrossable ocean. In praising Africanness, early twentieth-century Caribbean writers were rejecting European stereotypes of race, colour, mental and physical attributes. Their belief in a cosmic connection with Africa expressed the hope of future acceptance in a spiritual homeland. Their blackness of skin, traditionally devalued by the white race, became the passport to kinship with a newly valorized African world of cultural difference.

Where did this leave the substantial part of the Caribbean population that, after centuries of African-European sexual relations and the 19th-century importation of Indian and Chinese labour, was neither white nor black? Césaire, whose demands for social justice were as eloquent in his literary as in his later political career, claims in his Cahier an affinity with all victims of racial oppression, asserting his solidarity with “the Jew-man, the Kaffir-man, the Hindu-man in Calcutta, the Harlem-man who doesn’t vote” – the worldwide victims of prejudice, verbal abuse, famine, torture and pogroms. But, speaking from the viewpoint of a black West Indian, Césaire holds up African culture as the single great alternative to European culture, the sovereign remedy for the alienation provoked by European colonialism. The founders of Negritude make an unspoken assumption that the Caribbean non-white individual will opt to be assimilated into the African cultural sphere. While invoking the Hindu in Calcutta, for example, Césaire does not consider the different cultural position of the large number of West Indians descended from coulis or “East Indian” indented labourers, whose syncretic life-style may combine Eastern religious practices with West Indian social elements. It is noticeable that French Creole, the linguistic link between the diverse elements of the French Caribbean population, is given no role in Negritude. Even standard French, for that matter, has an ambiguous status in the Cahier: linguistically it is a showcase for Césaire’s verbal subtlety and erudition, but thematically it is rejected as Césaire ostentatiously turns away from the French rationalist tradition towards the kinetic energy of African sorcery. African culture is equally embraced by Damas: it is symbolized by the banjo that his Guyanese mother vainly attempts to make him replace by the more socially acceptable violin (“mulattos don’t do that/leave that to blacks“); this imposition is angrily refused by the poet, just as he refuses identification with the white side of his ancestry: “How can they possibly dare/to call me “whitened”/when everything in me/aspires only to be Negro/as black as my Africa/that they stole from me”. Only a rare voice, like that of the mulatto poet Gilbert Gratiant, expresses a divergent view at this time—choosing to celebrate the double fusion (cultural and biological) of Africa and France in his veins, and at the same time making Creole his literary language of choice…

Read the entire article here.

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All in the Family: Interracial Intimacy, Racial Fictions, and the Law

Posted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, Law, Media Archive, United States on 2013-11-23 04:22Z by Steven

All in the Family: Interracial Intimacy, Racial Fictions, and the Law

California Law Review Circuit
Volume 4 (November 2013)
pages 179-186

D. Wendy Greene, Professor of Law
Cumberland School of Law, Samford University, Birmingham, Alabama

Professor Wendy Greene highlights the continued importance of analyzing interracial relationships in the framework of the law in her review of Professor Angela Onwuachi-Willig’s book, According to Our Hearts: Rhinelander v. Rhinelander and the Law of the Multiracial Family. Professor Greene comments that given the Supreme Court’s continued interest in cases involving marital and racial equality, a study of the legal history of interracial marriage in America, like that done by Professor Onwuachi-Willig, is both relevant and essential for understanding fundamental rights jurisprudence.

Read the entire article here.

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The spectre of race in American medicine

Posted in Articles, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive on 2013-11-23 02:02Z by Steven

The spectre of race in American medicine

Medical Humanities
Volume 32, Issue 2 (2013)
pages 137-141
DOI: 10.1136/medhum-2013-010374

Mariam O. Fofana
Department of Epidemiology; Medical Scientist Training Program
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health / Johns Hopkins School of Medicine

Controversies and debates surrounding race have long been a fixture in American medicine. In the past, the biological concept of race—the idea that race is biologically determined and meaningful—has served to justify the institution of slavery and the conduct of unethical research trials. Although these days may seem far behind, contemporary debates over the race-specific approval of drugs and the significance of genetic differences are evidence that race still yields tremendous influence on medical research and clinical practice. In many ways, the use of race in medicine today reflects the internalisation of racial hierarchies borne out of the history of slavery and state-mandated segregation, and there is still much uncertainty over its benefits and harms. Although using race in research can help elucidate disparities, the reflexive use of race as a variable runs the risk of reifying the biological concept of race and blinding researchers to important underlying factors such as socioeconomic status. Similarly, in clinical practice, the use of race in assessing a patient’s risk of certain conditions (eg, sickle cell) turns harmful when the heuristic becomes a rule. Through selected historical and contemporary examples, I aim to show how the biological concept of race that gave rise to past abuses remains alive and harmful, and propose changes in medical education as a potential solution. By learning from the past, today’s physicians will be better armed to discern—and correct—the ways in which contemporary medicine perpetuates historical injustices.

Read or purchase the article here.

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One Big Mixed Race Classroom: New Models for Digital, Transnational, and Cross-Disciplinary Pedagogy

Posted in Live Events, Media Archive, My Articles/Point of View/Activities, Teaching Resources, United States on 2013-11-21 05:03Z by Steven

One Big Mixed Race Classroom: New Models for Digital, Transnational, and Cross-Disciplinary Pedagogy

Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association
Beyond the Logic of Debt, Toward an Ethics of Collective Dissent
2013-11-21 through 2013-11-24

Washington Hilton
1919 Connecticut Avenue, NW
Washington, D.C.

Washington Hilton, Columbia Hall 9 (T)
Friday, 2013-11-22, 12:00-13:45 EST (Local Time)

CHAIR: Asha Nadkarni, Assistant Professor of English
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

PANELISTS:

Zelideth María Rivas, Assistant Professor of Japanese
Marshall University, Huntington, West Virginia

Michele Elam, Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor of English and Olivier Nomellini Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education
Stanford University

Lawrence-Minh B. Davis
University of Maryland, College Park

Catherine Ceniza Choy, Professor Ethnic Studies
University of California, Berkeley

Steven F. Riley, Independent Scholar
MixedRaceStudies.org

In Fall 2013 and Spring 2014, the Mixed Race Initiative, a new digital pedagogy project, will stage a global conversation about mixed race, virtually connecting over 70 classrooms in 9 countries, exploring how notions of race vary—and remain constant—across regions and borders. Transnational and cross-disciplinary in character, the project will exist at once inside and outside of American studies, with numerous participating Americanists and American studies classrooms in dialogue with an even greater number of scholars and students in other fields.

This engages the hows and whys of the initiative, thinking through its guiding theoretical and ethical concerns, its challenges and opportunities. Roundtable participants, all of whom helped develop the project curriculum and/or took part in the teaching program, will discuss their particular points of entry, the cross-disciplinary and transnational work in which they engaged, and how that work has grown or could grow the humanities, American studies, and mixed race studies. How, we might consider, can mixed race pedagogy be a critical means of rethinking American studies—and vice versa?  How can a global initiative, extending beyond U.S. borders and the English language, explore mixed race as a necessarily inter- and transnational subject? What does it mean to teach—and craft curriculum—communally?

For more information, click here.

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Where “Old” and “New” World Color Meet in Multiracial Asian America

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2013-11-21 04:01Z by Steven

Where “Old” and “New” World Color Meet in Multiracial Asian America

Racism Review
2013-11-18

Sharon Chang, Guest blogger
Multiracial Asian Families

Rare indeed is the Asian American who has not heard an aunt or grandmother say something like; ‘Don’t go out in the sun. You’ll get too dark’…[Asian countries have] had long-standing preferences for light skin, especially in women.”

Is Lighter Better? Skin-Tone Discrimination Among Asian Americans

In my continuing research examining the lives of young multiracial Asian children, it has become pretty clear pretty quick that colorism (skin color discrimination of individuals falling within the same racial group) is a major theme. This isn’t a surprise to me, a multiracial Asian woman who grew up constantly scrutinized and measured as more European looking against other Asian peoples. I launched an Amazon hunt and as usual, found very little. In fact almost nothing; only one book addressing colorism in the Asian American community: Is Lighter Better? Skin-Tone Discrimination Among Asian Americans by Joanne L. Rondilla and Paul Spickard (2007) (if you know of more, please send to me).

According to Rondilla & Spickard, colorism in Asia is less about wanting to look European and more a class imperative. “To be light is to be rich, for dark skin comes from working outside in the sun…the yearning to be light is a desire to look like rich Asians, not like Whites” (Rondilla & Spickard, 2007, p.4). A preference for light-skinned beauty existed long before serious encounters with Europeans and Americans, and this desire deeply persists. Though not visibly common in the US, skin lightening products are loudly advertised and mass-consumed all over Asia. And sales are rising. Two million units of skin lightening soap are sold annually in the Philippines. Today, every major cosmetics company has some form of skin lightener (Rondilla & Spickard, 2007).

So what happens when huge numbers of Asian immigrants (430,000 in 2010) and students (6 in 10 international students are from Asia) start arriving Stateside and their colorist/class values meet US racism which has aggressively devalued and violently oppressed dark-skinned people for hundreds of years? What happens when White Perfect (above) meets Jim Crow? “Less yellowish” meets Yellow Peril?…

Where does this leave multiracial Asian Americans born into these overlapping frameworks? I’m afraid that as multiracial Asian Americans, this leaves us poised very precariously at times. Despite what you might imagine, with the recent influx of Asian immigration and Asians marrying out of their ethnic group at a higher rate than any other racial group, multiracial Asian children are not actually that far removed from “old world” prejudices and are often second generation Americans like myself. I have been constantly scanned for Asian versus white features by Asian immigrants and proclaimed “the best of both worlds” leaving me with the uncomfortable, highly racialized feeling there’s something I did or didn’t get that I should be glad about but that one or both of my halves might resent. In my October post “Mixed Heritage and Knowing We Still Have Work To Do,”  I described the race challenges shared by a quarter Asian youth panelist (Black/Asian/white) as part of a local mixed heritage dialogue…

Read the entire article here.

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For Key And Peele, Biracial Roots Bestow Special Comedic ‘Power’

Posted in Articles, Arts, Audio, Media Archive, United States on 2013-11-21 03:49Z by Steven

For Key And Peele, Biracial Roots Bestow Special Comedic ‘Power’

Fresh Air
National Public Radio
2013-11-20

Terry Gross, Host

Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele are the duo behind the Comedy Central sketch comedy show Key & Peele. Each has a white mother and black father, and a lot of their comedy is about race: Perhaps because they’re biracial, they’re perfectly comfortable satirizing white people and African-Americans — as well as everybody else. The New Yorker’s TV critic Emily Nussbaum describes their biracialism as a “Golden Ticket to themes rarely explored on television.”

Peele tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross, “I think the reason both of us became actors is because we did a fair amount of code switching growing up, and still do.”

Key and Peele met in Chicago, where they were part of the improv scene, and later worked together on the sketch comedy series MADtv. Their current show on Comedy Central wraps up its third season on Dec. 18, and has been renewed for a fourth.

Key and Peele tell Gross the stories behind some of their sketches, and their feelings about Saturday Night Live’s lack of female African-American cast members…

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

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The Women

Posted in Books, Media Archive, Novels, Women on 2013-11-21 00:35Z by Steven

The Women

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
1996
160 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
Paperback ISBN: 9780374525293; ISBN10: 0374525293

Hilton Als, Staff Writer
The New Yorker

A New York Times Notable Book

Daring and fiercely original, The Women is at once a memoir, a psychological study, a sociopolitical manifesto, and an incisive adventure in literary criticism. It is conceived as a series of portraits analyzing the role that sexual and racial identity played in the lives and work of the writer’s subjects: his mother, a self-described “Negress,” who would not be defined by the limitations of race and gender; the mother of Malcolm X, whose mixed-race background and eventual descent into madness contributed to her son’s misogyny and racism; brilliant, Harvard-educated Dorothy Dean, who rarely identified with other blacks or women, but deeply empathized with white gay men; and the late Owen Dodson, a poet and dramatist who was female-identified and who played an important role in the author’s own social and intellectual formation.

Hilton Als submits both racial and sexual stereotypes to his inimitable scrutiny with relentless humor and sympathy. The results are exhilarating. The Women is that rarest of books: a memorable work of self-investigation that creates a form of all its own.

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24,000-Year-Old Body Shows Kinship to Europeans and American Indians

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Europe, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation on 2013-11-21 00:16Z by Steven

24,000-Year-Old Body Shows Kinship to Europeans and American Indians

The New York Times
2013-11-20

Nicholas Wade

The genome of a young boy buried at Mal’ta near Lake Baikal in eastern Siberia some 24,000 years ago has turned out to hold two surprises for anthropologists.

The first is that the boy’s DNA matches that of Western Europeans, showing that during the last Ice Age people from Europe had reached farther east across Eurasia than previously supposed. Though none of the Mal’ta boy’s skin or hair survives, his genes suggest he would have had brown hair, brown eyes and freckled skin.

The second surprise is that his DNA also matches a large proportion — about 25 percent — of the DNA of living Native Americans. The first people to arrive in the Americas have long been assumed to have descended from Siberian populations related to East Asians. It now seems that they may be a mixture between the Western Europeans who had reached Siberia and an East Asian population...

…There they lay for some 50 years until they were examined by a team led by Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen. Dr. Willerslev, an expert in analyzing ancient DNA, was seeking to understand the peopling of the Americas by searching for possible source populations in Siberia. He extracted DNA from bone taken from the child’s upper arm, hoping to find ancestry in the East Asian peoples from whom Native Americans are known to be descended…

…The other surprise from the Mal’ta boy’s genome was that it matched to both Europeans and Native Americans but not to East Asians. Dr. Willerslev’s interpretation was that the ancestors of Native Americans had already separated from the East Asian population when they interbred with the people of the Mal’ta culture, and that this admixed population then crossed over the Beringian land bridge that then lay between Siberia and Alaska to become a founding population of Native Americans.

“We estimate that 14 to 38 percent of Native American ancestry may originate through gene flow from this ancient population,” he and colleagues wrote in an article published Wednesday in the journal Nature

Read the entire article here.

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