Mixed Race Studies

Morning Joe finally admits GOP ‘radicalization’ is ongoing racist backlash to Barack Obama

Raw Story
2021-12-07

Travis Gettys

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough has finally come around to admitting that Republicans’ radicalization was a racist backlash against the election of Barack Obama.

The “Morning Joe” host, a former Republican himself, said he had long been skeptical of that notion, but he said the evidence had become too obvious to deny.”I have been a skeptic for quite some time that the election of Barack Obama was such a shock to so many white Americans that they just never got over it,” Scarborough said.

“I was always a skeptic of that. I saw his election, even though they didn’t agree with him ideologically on a lot of things. I saw that as a moment that all Americans — Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals — could stop and go, ‘Wow, okay, the United States of America is the first majority white country that elected a Black man as their leader,’ something to celebrate.”…

Read the entire article here.

CNN pundit goes off on racist whites who think they ‘allowed’ Obama to be president

Raw Story
2016-07-10

David Edwards

Former Congressional Black Caucus Executive Director Angela Rye took issue on Sunday with white Americans who think they “allowed” Barack Obama to become president.

During a panel discussion about race in America, CNN host Fareed Zakaria noted that some pundits had speculated that “the fact that you have allowed in a member of an excluded minority in a strange way gives you license to continue the old pattern of discrimination.”

“Does that make any sense to you?” Zakaria asked. “That the fact that you have elected an African-American actually could mean a certain reversion to patterns of discrimination?”

Rye immediately objected to the premise of the question.

“I think it’s interesting even that you used the term ‘allowed,’ that he was allowed to be there,” she said. “That’s terminology that we would never use to describe the 43 presidents that preceded him.”…

Read the entire article here.

We now know that the way we talk about race has no scientific validity. There is no genetic basis that corresponds with any particular group of people, no essentialist DNA for black people or white people or anyone. This is not a hippy ideal, it’s a fact. There are genetic characteristics that associate with certain populations, but none of these is exclusive, nor correspond uniquely with any one group that might fit a racial epithet. Regional adaptations are real, but these tend to express difference within so-called races, not between them. Sickle-cell anaemia affects people of all skin colours because it has evolved where malaria is common. Tibetans are genetically adapted to high altitude, rendering Chinese residents of Beijing more similar to Europeans than their superficially similar neighbours. Tay-Sachs disease, once thought to be a “Jewish disease”, is as common in French Canadians and Cajuns. And so it goes on.

Adam Rutherford, “Why racism is not backed by science,” Raw Story, June 29, 2015. http://www.rawstory.com/2015/06/why-racism-is-not-backed-by-science/.

Why racism is not backed by science

Raw Story
2015-06-29

Adam Rutherford
The Guardian

As we harvest ever more human genomes one fact remains unshakeable: race does not exist

Barely a week goes by without some dispiriting tale of racism seeping into the public consciousness: the endless stream of Ukip supporters expressing some ill-conceived and unimaginative hate; football hooligans pushing a black man from a train. I am partly of Indian descent, a bit swarthy, and my first experience of racism was more baffling than upsetting. In 1982, my dad, sister and I were at the Co-op in a small village in Suffolk where we lived, when some boys shouted “Coco and Leroy ” at us. Fame was the big hit on telly at the time, and they were the lead characters. My sister and I thought this was excellent: both amazing dancers and supremely attractive: we did bad splits all the way home.

As someone who writes about evolution and genetics – both of which involve the study of inheritance, and both of which rely on making quantitative comparisons between living things – I often receive letters from people associating Darwin with racism, usually citing the use of the words “favoured races” in the lengthy subtitle to his masterpiece, On the Origin of Species. Of course, Darwin doesn’t discuss humans in that great book, and “races” was used to describe groups within non-human species. Contemporary use of language must be taken into account…

…We now know that the way we talk about race has no scientific validity. There is no genetic basis that corresponds with any particular group of people, no essentialist DNA for black people or white people or anyone. This is not a hippy ideal, it’s a fact. There are genetic characteristics that associate with certain populations, but none of these is exclusive, nor correspond uniquely with any one group that might fit a racial epithet. Regional adaptations are real, but these tend to express difference within so-called races, not between them. Sickle-cell anaemia affects people of all skin colours because it has evolved where malaria is common. Tibetans are genetically adapted to high altitude, rendering Chinese residents of Beijing more similar to Europeans than their superficially similar neighbours. Tay-Sachs disease, once thought to be a “Jewish disease”, is as common in French Canadians and Cajuns. And so it goes on…

Read the entire article here.

Nevada GOP lawmaker to ‘colored’ colleague: Racism is over because the president is black

Raw Story
2015-03-18

David Ferguson

The Nevada state Assemblywoman who believes that cancer is a “fungus” that can be flushed from the body with saline solution has now said that she believes that racism in her state is a thing of the past.

According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, State Assemblywoman Michelle Fiore (R) said that racism is over, now, so people of color should stop “using the race card” about voter ID laws and other Republican policies that unfairly impact people of color and the poor.

She also congratulated an African-American colleague for being the first “colored” person to graduate from his college.

Fiore is one of the cosponsors of a proposed voter ID law in Nevada which — like all such laws — has been predicted to have an adverse effect on voter turnout by blacks, the elderly and students, all traditionally Democratic voting blocs.

Addressing “peers that are concerned with color,” Fiore went on to congratulate Democratic Assemblyman Harvey J. Munford — an opponent of the voter ID law — for being “the first colored man to graduate from his college.”

“We’re in 2015 and we have a black president, in case anyone didn’t notice,” she added. “So the color and the race issue, I think it’s time that we put that to rest.”…

Read the entire article here.

‘I’m actually black’: Awkwardness ensues when journalist calls radio host Jay Smooth white

Raw Story
2015-03-18

David Ferguson

In one of the most cringe-worthy moments of television you will ever see, on Tuesday night’s All In with Chris Hayes, activist Nancy Giles of CBS Sunday Morning accused hip hop critic and cultural commentator Jay Smooth of being a white man who is trying to “code switch,” i.e., talk “black” to reach the rap audience.

Smooth — who was born John Randolph to a black father and a white mother — gently explained to Giles that he is, in fact, black.

The discussion began innocently enough, with Hayes and his two guests discussing Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz’s decree that all U.S. baristas should write the words “Race together” in Sharpie on their paper cups in order to foster a dialogue about race with their customers.

But after watching Smooth’s clip “How to Tell Someone They Sound Racist,” Giles took it upon herself to comment on Smooth’s “co-opting blackness.”…

Read the entire article here. Watch the interview here.