{"id":2415,"date":"2009-10-23T19:16:26","date_gmt":"2009-10-23T19:16:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=2415"},"modified":"2011-10-27T19:37:17","modified_gmt":"2011-10-27T19:37:17","slug":"race-mixing-jones-research-has-ties-to-political-sports-figures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=2415","title":{"rendered":"Race mixing: Jones’ research has ties to political, sports figures"},"content":{"rendered":"

Race mixing: Jones’ research has ties to political, sports figures<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Richmond Now<\/a>
\nThe Faculty, Staff and Student Newspaper
\nUniversity of Richmond<\/em><\/p>\n

By Joan Tupponce<\/strong>
\nApril 2007<\/p>\n

No one is more intrigued with news about presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama<\/a> or professional golfer Tiger Woods<\/a> than Dr. Suzanne W. Jones<\/a>, professor of English and women, gender and sexuality studies. But it\u2019s not Obama\u2019s bid for the presidency or Woods\u2019 latest handicap that has Jones\u2019 attention\u2014it\u2019s their racial identity, or more specifically, how they and others view their mixed ancestry.<\/strong><\/p>\n

For more than 20 years, Jones has been writing about and teaching classes about literature that explores U.S. race relations, especially black-white relationships. The idea for her latest book project stems from one of the chapters in her 2004 book Race Mixing: Southern Fiction since the Sixties<\/a><\/em>. In her new work, Jones will be looking at the reappearance of the racially mixed character in the contemporary American imagination through the study of fiction, memoirs and family histories.<\/p>\n

Jones first became personally interested in the topic about 15 years ago. \u201cI taught a student in my African-American literature class whose mother was white and whose father was black,\u201d she recalls.<\/p>\n

Jones was unaware of the student\u2019s heritage until she read a paper the student had written about her racial identity. Jones, like others, had assumed the student was white…<\/p>\n

…The mulatto character figured prominently in American literature in the 19th century. \u201cThe so-called \u2018tragic mulatto\u2019 was used to point out the tragedy of defining race the way we did in the United States,\u201d she explains. According to Jones\u2019 research, the character disappeared by the 1960s\u2014the time of the Black Power movement\u2014only to resurface in the 1990s.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis reappearance of the mixed character is happening in part because the children of 1960s mixed marriages have grown up and are writing both fiction and nonfiction,\u201d Jones says. \u201cAlso an intense debate about racial classification began in the early 1990s, spurred both by racially mixed people and some parents of mixed children, particularly white parents, who didn\u2019t want their children to be defined by the old \u2018one-drop\u2019 rule. This debate eventually led to a change on the 2000 U.S. census form, which allowed people to check more than one racial or ethnic category.\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Race mixing: Jones’ research has ties to political, sports figures Richmond Now The Faculty, Staff and Student Newspaper University of Richmond By Joan Tupponce April 2007 No one is more intrigued with news about presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama or professional golfer Tiger Woods than Dr. Suzanne W. Jones, professor of English and women, gender […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,63,33,8,394,20],"tags":[709,105,79],"class_list":["post-2415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-barack-obama","category-census","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-suzanne-w-jones","tag-tiger-woods","tag-tragic-mulatto"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2415","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2415"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2415\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}