Mixed Race Studies

CU group promoting multiracial experience wins ’02 Perkins Prize

The Cornell Chronicle
Cornell University
2002-04-02

A Cornell campus organization that promotes and celebrates the multiracial experience at the university and in the Ithaca community will be the recipient of the 2002 James A. Perkins Prize for Interracial Understanding and Harmony.

The group BLEND (Bi-/Multiracial Lineages, Ethnicities and Nationalities Discussion) and its founder and president, Cornell senior Tamika Lewis, will be presented with the eighth annual Perkins Prize, including an award of $5,000, by Cornell President Hunter Rawlings during a ceremony Tuesday, April 9, at 4:15 p.m. in the Memorial Room of Willard Straight Hall on campus.

Also awarded will be two finalists for the prize: Salah Hassan, associate professor of Africana studies and chair of the Department of History of Art, for his organization of the 2001 Blackness in Color Art Exhibition at Cornell’s Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art; and the seminar series “Leadership, Management and Diversity in Corporate America” and the course “Diversity and Inclusion in Organizations,” developed by Quinetta Roberson, assistant professor in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations. The two finalists each will be awarded cash prizes of $1,000.

BLEND, which was founded by Lewis in the fall semester of 2001, focuses on issues involved with being of mixed-racial background. The organization has hosted a film series at Robert Purcell Community Center, showing films about interracial relationships; co-sponsored with the Cornell Filipino Association a lecture by Melissa Howard of MTV’s The Real World, titled “The ‘Real’ Story on Ethnic Identity”; and also participated in the Anti-Racism Teach-In on campus Nov. 11, presenting a workshop on the mixed-race experience. BLEND also coordinated a program with the Greater Ithaca Activities Center and Beverly J. Martin Elementary School in Ithaca titled MIRAR (Multicultural Initiative for Racial Awareness through Reading). The program’s goals are to foster racial awareness in children and, in the process, hone their reading skills by using books that incorporate multiracial, interracial and multicultural themes. In the spring semester, BLEND brought an award-winning photo-text exhibit to Cornell titled “Of Many Colors: Portraits of Multiracial Families.”…

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