Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

One of the key phenomena to understanding skin color stratification among African Americans is the history of sexual violence against African women by white men during slavery. “The social order established by powerful white men was founded on two inseparable ingredients: the dehumanization of Africans on the basis of race, and the control of women’s sexuality and reproduction.”¹ As one of the violent mechanisms of social control that whites exercised against African Americans, sexual violence, including rape, was part of the beginning of the skin color stratification process itself. This violent method of social control produced two important effects. The first and most obvious result was the creation of racially mixed children by white fathers and black mothers. The second more long-term effect was the creation of a color hierarchy through systematic privileging of light-skinned African Americans over darker-skinned African Americans. Though many mixed-race offspring were the result of violent unions between white men and black women, there were also a notable number of consensual relationships between the races. Many men and women involved in interracial relationships lived together and were married in churches despite an enormous amount of resistance on the part of most whites and some blacks.

Margaret L. Hunter, Race, Gender, and the Politics of Skin Tone, (New York, London: Routledge, 2005). 18-19.

When people challenge her blackness, I always say, ‘If she went to Howard, it means she’s one of us.’

Posted in Excerpts/Quotes on 2019-09-19 22:41Z by Steven

“When people challenge her [Kamala Harris’] blackness, I always say, ‘If she went to Howard [University], it means she’s one of us,’ ” says Howard grad and Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Jenice Armstrong. “She comes from there. No one should challenge her blackness.”

Robin Givhan, “Kamala Harris grew up in a mostly white world. Then she went to a black university in a black city.” The Washington Post, September 16, 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/09/16/kamala-harris-grew-up-mostly-white-world-then-she-went-black-university-black-city/.

Tags: Howard University, Jenice Armstrong, Kamala D. Harris, Kamala Devi Harris, Kamala Harris, Robin Givhan, The Washington Post, Washington Post

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Kamala Harris grew up in a mostly white world. Then she went to a black university in a black city.

Posted in Articles, Biography, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2019-09-17 17:04Z by Steven

Kamala Harris grew up in a mostly white world. Then she went to a black university in a black city.

The Washington Post
2019-09-16

Robin Givhan, Fashion critic

From left: Karen Gibbs, Kamala Harris and Valerie Pippen at Homecoming in 1986-1987. (Courtesy of Karen Gibbs)

When anyone challenges her racial identity, the presidential candidate points to her four years at Howard University.

Kamala Harris wanted to go to a black school. That’s what black folks called Howard University in the early 1980s when Harris was a teenager considering her future.

Harris, she would say later, was seeking an experience wholly different from what she had long known. She’d attended majority-white schools her entire life — from elementary school in Berkeley, Calif., to high school in Montreal. Her parents’ professional lives and their personal story were bound up in majority-white institutions. Her father, an economist from Jamaica, was teaching at Stanford University. Her mother, a cancer researcher from India, had done her graduate work at the University of California at Berkeley, where the couple had met and fallen in love. And Harris’s younger sister would eventually enroll at Stanford.

Harris wanted to be surrounded by black students, black culture and black traditions at the crown jewel of historically black colleges and universities…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: Kamala D. Harris, Kamala Devi Harris, Kamala Harris, Robin Givhan, The Washington Post, Washington DC, Washington Post

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Mixed Race Studies

When people challenge her blackness, I always say, ‘If she went to Howard, it means she’s one of us.’

Kamala Harris grew up in a mostly white world. Then she went to a black university in a black city.

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