Mixed Race Studies

The New Biopolitics of Race, Health, and Justice

Center For Health and Wellbeing
Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs
001 Robertson Hall
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey
Friday, 2016-11-11, 12:00-13:30 EST (Local Time)

Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology and the Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania

Dorothy Roberts, an acclaimed scholar of race, gender and the law, joined the University of Pennsylvania as its 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Sociology and the Law School where she also holds the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mosell Alexander chair.

Her pathbreaking work in law and public policy focuses on urgent contemporary issues in health, social justice, and bioethics, especially as they impact the lives of women, children and African-Americans. Her major books include Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century (New Press, 2011); Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books, 2002), and Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Pantheon, 1997). She is the author of more than 80 scholarly articles and book chapters, as well as a co-editor of six books on such topics as constitutional law and women and the law.

For more information, click here.

Understanding and Hearing the Afro-Asian Atlantic

Princeton University African American Studies
2016-03-21

Presenters: Tao Leigh Goffe, Kerry Young, Hannah Lowe, Randy Chin, and John Kuo Wei Tchen

A panel exploring the intersections of literature, reggae, and the relationships between the minority Chinese community in the Caribbean and the majority Afro-Caribbean community

This panel will be moderated by Tao Leigh Goffe (Princeton University) and John Kuo Wei Tchen (NYU)

In this dialogue, panelists Randy Chin, Kerry Young, and Hannah Lowe will discuss the African and Asian cultural heritage of the Caribbean in music and writing. Exploring the legacy of enslaved African labor and Chinese indentured labor in the Caribbean, Young and Lowe craft narratives that reconstruct and trouble colonial history. The region’s history cannot be fully understood without listening to its rich musical tradition. Chin will talk about the role of Jamaican Chinese businessmen in the production of reggae music and mobile soundsystems. He will also talk about his storied career in the reggae music industry, which began when his parents Vincent and Patricia Chin founded VP Records in Jamaica in 1979. The currents of the Black Atlantic and the overseas Chinese converge in Caribbean music but also in Young and Lowe’s novels and poetry that tackle themes such as intimacies out of wedlock, masculinities, abandonment, and criminality set in Kingston, Jamaica’s Chinatown and gambling dens in London’s East End. In these cultural texts, Jamaican patois and southern Chinese dialects are sometimes woven together to construct new narrative forms of the Afro-Asian experience in the Americas.

Together with historian John Kuo Wei Tchen and literary scholar Tao Leigh Goffe, panelists will discuss the tensions and intimacies between the minority Chinese community in the Caribbean and the majority Afro-Caribbean community. Other themes to be explored include representations of blackness and Chineseness in Caribbean diasporic literature and music.

This event is part of the Campus Conversations on Identities and is co-sponsored by the Department of African American Studies, the Program in American Studies, the Lewis Center for the Arts, the Department of Comparative Literature, the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, the Asian American Students’ Association, and the Princeton Caribbean Connection (PCC).

What Woodrow Wilson Cost My Grandfather

The New York Times
2015-11-25

Gordon J. Davis, Partner
Venable, LLP,  New York, New York

John Abraham Davis, center, and his family at their farm in the early 1900s. Credit Courtesy of the Davis Family

OVER the last week, a growing number of students at Princeton have demanded that the university confront the racist legacy of Woodrow Wilson, who served as its president before becoming New Jersey’s governor and the 28th president of the United States. Among other things, the students are demanding that Wilson’s name be removed from university facilities.

Wilson, a Virginia-born Democrat, is mostly remembered as a progressive, internationalist statesman, a benign and wise leader, a father of modern American political science and one of our nation’s great presidents.

But he was also an avowed racist. And unlike many of his predecessors and successors in the White House, he put that racism into action through public policy. Most notably, his administration oversaw the segregation of the federal government, destroying the careers of thousands of talented and accomplished black civil servants — including John Abraham Davis, my paternal grandfather.

An African-American born in 1862 to a prominent white Washington lawyer and his black “housekeeper,” my grandfather was a smart, ambitious and handsome young black man. He emulated his idol, Theodore Roosevelt, in style and dress. He walked away from whatever assistance his father might have offered to his unacknowledged black offspring and graduated at the top of his class from Washington’s M Street High School (later the renowned all-black Dunbar High School)…

Read the entire article here.

Loving v. Virginia as a Civil Rights Decision

Cosponsored by the Center for African American Studies and the Program in Law and Public Affairs
102 Jones Hall
Princeton University
Princeton, New Jersey
Monday, 2013-12-09, 12:00-13:20 EST (Local Time)

Dorothy E. Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology; Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania

The Workshop in American Studies brings together students and faculty from the wide range of departments that contribute to the Program in American Studies. By encouraging a diversity of topics from researchers from a variety of departments, we hope the Workshop highlights the advantages of the “in-between” disciplinary space that American Studies inhabits at Princeton. Our goal is to provide a forum where presenters can receive feedback from a wide variety of disciplinary perspectives and participants can be exposed to new methodologies and new topics for research. Moreover, we hope to foster a community of advanced undergraduates, graduate students and faculty who share in the common project of researching the American experience.

The format of the workshop is that the speaker introduces the paper for ten minutes and then we open up the floor to questions. Copies of the papers are made available outside the American Studies office, 42 McCosh Hall…

For more information and reservations, click here.

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.

Shades of Passing (AAS 340 / ENG 391 / AMS 340)

Princeton University
Fall 2012-2013

Anne A. Cheng, Professor of English and African American Studies

This course studies the trope of passing in 20th century American literary and cinematic narratives in an effort to re-examine the crisis of identity that both produces and confounds acts of passing. We will examine how American novelists and filmmakers have portrayed and responded to this social phenomenon, not as merely a social performance but as a profound intersubjective process embedded within history, law, and culture. We will focus on narratives of passing across axes of difference, invoking questions such as: To what extent does the act of passing reinforce or unhinge seemingly natural categories of race, gender, and sexuality?

Sample reading list:
William Faulkner, Light in August
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
Nella Larsen, Passing
Chang-rae Lee, A Gesture Life
Douglas Sirk (director), Imitation of Life (film, 1959)
Woody Allen (director), Zelig (film, 1983)

Hypodescent: A history of the crystallization of the one-drop rule in the United States, 1880-1940

Princeton University
September 2011
383 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3480237
ISBN: 9781124939179

Scott Leon Washington

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE FACULTY OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY RECOMMENDED FOR ACCEPTANCE BY THE DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY

This dissertation examines the crystallization of the one-drop rule in the United States between 1880 and 1940. The “one-drop rule” is a colloquial expression, a phrase which reflects the belief that a person bearing a trace of African ancestry (literally, a single drop of black or Negro “blood”) is black. Historians and social scientists have tended to assume that, as a principle of classification, the one-drop rule can be traced back to the institution of slavery. This study provides a different account. Using a variety of methods, it attempts to explain how the one-drop rule developed, when it became institutionalized, and why. It also adopts a new approach to the study of race, ethnicity, and nationalism, an approach based largely although by no means exclusively on the work of Pierre Bourdieu. The study in its present form has been limited to five chapters. Chapter One explores the origins and development of the one-drop rule, while Chapter Two provides a detailed reading of the case of Plessy v. Ferguson. Chapter Three provides a quantitative account of the country’s history of anti-miscegenation legislation, while Chapter Four examines the role lynching played in the South as a means of social demarcation. The study ends in Chapter Five with a brief synopsis, an inquiry into the relationship between slavery and democracy, and a nonpartisan look at the legacy of the one-drop rule.

Contents

• Abstract
• Maps and Figures
• Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• I. Introduction: A Prehistory of the Present
  • 1.1. An American Anomaly
  • 1.2. The Origins and Development of the One-Drop Rule
  • 1.3. An Outline of the Argument
  • 1.4. Words about Words
  • 1.5. References
• II. The Blood of Homer Plessy
  • 2.1. Introduction
  • 2.2. Digression: The Virtues of Virtual History
  • 2.3. The Wider Context
  • 2.4. Plessy v. Ferguson: Background Information
  • 2.5. The Tourgée Brief
  • 2.6. The Majority Opinion
  • 2.7. Counterfactual Scenario
  • 2.8. Plausibility Defense
  • 2.9. Conclusion
  • 2.10. References
• III. Crossing the Line
  • 3.1. Introduction
  • 3.2. A Brief History of Laws Prohibiting Interracial Sex and Marriage
  • 3.3. Trends in Anti-Miscegenation Activity
  • 3.4. Data and Methods
  • 3.5. Results
  • 3.6. Discussion
  • 3.7. Conclusion
  • 3.8. References
  • 3.9. Appendix
• IV. The Killing Fields Revisited: Lynching and Anti-Miscegenation Legislation in the Jim Crow South, 1882-1930
  • 4.1. Introduction
  • 4.2. Lynching: Background Information
  • 4.3. Anti-Miscegenation Legislation: Background Information
  • 4.4. The Strange Career of Judge Lynch: A Review of the Literature
  • 4.5. Data and Methods
  • 4.6. Results
  • 4.7. Discussion
  • 4.8. Conclusion
  • 4.9. References
• V. Conclusion: The Legacy of the One-Drop Rule
  • 5.1. Permanence and Change
  • 5.2. Synopsis
  • 5.3. Slavery and Democracy
  • 5.4. A Final Note
  • 5.5. References

Maps and Figures

• 3.1A. Colonies Prohibiting Interracial Sex or Marriage, 1776
• 3.1B. States and Territories, Prohibiting Interracial Sex or Marriage, 1861
• 3.1C. States and Territories, Prohibiting Interracial Sex or Marriage, 1877
• 3.1D. States Prohibiting Interracial Sex or Marriage, 1938
• 3.1E. States Prohibiting Interracial Sex or Marriage, 1967
• 3.2A. Anti-Miscegenation Activity, 1619-2000
• 3.2B. Anti-Miscegenation Activity, Excluding Significant Cases, 1619-2000
• 3.3A. Anti-Miscegenation Bills Defeated, 1913
• 3.3B. Anti-Miscegenation Bills Defeated, 1927
• 3.4A. Statutory Definitions, 1861
• 3.4B. Statutory Definitions, 1877
• 3.4C. Statutory Definitions, 1938
• 3.5A. Statutory Penalties, 1861
• 3.5B. Statutory Penalties, 1877
• 3.5C. Statutory Penalties, 1938
• 3.6. Punishments Against Secondary Parties, 1938
• 3.7. Racial Coverage of Laws Prohibiting Miscegenation, 1938
• 3.8. Appellate Litigation Concerning Definitions of Race, 1776-2000
• 3.9A-G. Severity of Definitions, 1880-1940
• 3.10A-G. Severity of Penalties, 1880-1940
• 4.1. Lynching and Anti-Miscegenation Legislation in the Jim Crow South, 1882-1930
• 4.2. Lynching and Anti-Miscegenation Legislation in the Jim Crow South, Integrated Trends, 1882-1930
• 4.3. The Moving Effects of Anti-Miscegenation Activity and the Constant Dollar Price for Cotton, 1882-1930
• 5.1. Percent of Americans Marrying Out of Race, 1970-2000
• 5.2A. Percent of Whites Marrying Out of Race, 1880-2000
• 5.2B. Percent of Blacks Marrying Out of Race, 1880-2000
• 5.3A. Percent of Whites Marrying Out of Race, Adjusting for Relative Numbers in the Population, 1880-2000
• 5.3B. Percent of Blacks Marrying Out of Race, Adjusting for Relative Numbers in the Population, 1880-2000
• 5.4. Percent within Categories Reporting Two or More Races, 2000

TABLES

• 1.1. The Longue Durée of the One-Drop Rule, 1619-2000
• 3.1. Percent of Colonies, Territories, and States Prohibiting Interracial Sex or Marriage, 1776-1967
• 3.2A. Anti-Miscegenation Activity, 1619-2000
• 3.2B. Anti-Miscegenation Activity, Excluding Significant Cases, 1619-2000
• 3.3A. Average Severity of Definitions, 1861, 1877, 1938
• 3.3B. Average Severity of Definitions, Excluding States without Definitions, 1861, 1877, 1938
• 3.4A. Average Severity of Penalties, 1861, 1877, 1938
• 3.4B. Average Severity of Penalties, Excluding States without Penalties, 1861, 1877, 1938
• 3.5. Expected Relationships
• 3.6. ARMA (1,1) Regression of Anti-Miscegenation Activity on Selected Variables
• 3.7. ARMA (1,1) Regression of Severity of Definitions on Selected Variables
• 3.8. ARMA (1,1) Regression of Severity of Penalties on Selected Variables
• 3.9. Racial Categories Used by the United States Census Bureau, 1880-1940
• 3.10. Growth of the Decennial Census, 1880-1940
• 3.11A. Significant Cases, 1810-1894
• 3.11B. Significant Cases, 1895-1972
• 4.1. ARMA (1,1,1) Regression of Black Lynchings on Selected Variables
• 4.2. ARMA (1,1) Regression of Black Lynchings on Selected Variables
• 4.3. The Impact of Anti-Miscegenation Activity and the Market for Southern Cotton Before and After 1900
• 5.1. Percent of Americans Marrying Out of Race, 1970-2000
• 5.2. Black-White Intermarriage Rates, 1970-2000
• 5.3. Total Population by Number of Races Reported, 2000
• 5.4. Percent within Categories Reporting Two or More Races, 2000
• 5.5. Multiple-Race Population, 2000

Purchase the dissertation here.