Mixed Race Studies

All Day, Talking

dancing girl press
2014

Sarah A. Chavez

Sarah A. Chavez is a mestiza born and raised in the California Central Valley where she worked every job from farm laborer, to janitor and maintenance, to barista, to waitress, house-sitter, web editor, tutor, and finally administrative assistant for a Native American drug and alcohol recovery home before going back to school to pursue writing and teaching. She earned a PhD in English with a focus in Creative Writing (poetry) and an interdisciplinary specialization in Ethnic Studies, with a focus on Chican@/Latin@ & Native American literature and culture, from the University of Nebraska – Lincoln.

During her academic career her work has been the recipient of the Fredrick A. and Minnie J.M. Stuff Memorial Placement Fellowship (2014), the Quercus Press Review, Fall Poetry Book Award, Honorable Mention (2013), Stuff Dissertation Fellowship (2013), the Susan Atefat Peckham Fellowship, Literary Contest (2013), the Arts & Letters/ Rumi Prize for Poetry, finalist (2012), the Ford Foundation Predoctoral Competition, Honorable Mention (2012), the Vreeland Award (2011), Chancellor’s Doctoral Fellowship (2009 – 2011), and the Excellence in Education, 2007 – 2008 teaching award from Ball State University’s Correctional Education Program.

How the Irish Became White

Routledge
2009 (Originally published in 1995)
276 pages
6 B/W Illustrations
Paperback ISBN: 9780415963091
Hardback ISBN: 9781138127777
eBook ISBN: 9780203473009

Noel Ignatiev

The Irish came to America in the eighteenth century, fleeing a homeland under foreign occupation and a caste system that regarded them as the lowest form of humanity. In the new country – a land of opportunity – they found a very different form of social hierarchy, one that was based on the color of a person’s skin. Noel Ignatiev’s 1995 book – the first published work of one of America’s leading and most controversial historians – tells the story of how the oppressed became the oppressors; how the new Irish immigrants achieved acceptance among an initially hostile population only by proving that they could be more brutal in their oppression of African Americans than the nativists. This is the story of How the Irish Became White.

Table of Contents

• Introduction to the Routledge Classics Edition
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1: Something in the Air
• Part 2: White Negroes and Smoked Irish
• Part 3: The Transubstantiation of an Irish Revolutionary
• Part 4: They Swung their Picks
• Part 5: The Tumultuous Republic
• Part 6: From Protestant Ascendancy to White Republic

The Color of Whiteness

The Color of Whiteness
2017-03-16

Christopher Petrella, Lecturer in the Humanities and the Associate Director of Equity and Diversity
Bates College, Lewiston, Maine

Josh Begley, Data artist & App developer

Josh Begley

Who is white? Who is not? How has that changed throughout U.S. history? Legally speaking, how have some people gone from white to non-white and back again?…

Read the entire photo-essay here.

After Trump

Boston Review: A Political and Literary Forum
2016-11-22

Christopher Petrella, Lecturer in the Humanities and the Associate Director of Equity and Diversity
Bates College, Lewiston, Maine

In November 2015 Donald Trump was asked on the campaign trail if he would require Muslim U.S. citizens to register with the Department of Homeland Security. “Absolutely,” Trump said, “they have to be.” Trump and his team had been mum on the issue until last week when a number of prominent surrogates and advisers—including incoming White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and Trump’s immigration adviser Kris Kobach—mused, seemingly as a test balloon, that the administration is “not going to rule out anything” and that a registry of Muslims entering the country would pass constitutional muster. One member of Trump’s team went as far as citing the 1942–45 internment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II as a “precedent.” (Both statements were hedged with qualifications that made them no less worrisome.)

Since then, many commentators have roundly condemned the idea of a Muslim registry—not to mention citing the internment of Japanese-Americans as a precedent for anything except that which we must avoid repeating. Few have offered deeper historical examinations , though, that would suggest that the registration of Japanese-Americans and their subsequent movement to concentration camps were not really aberrations in American history. On the contrary, racial and ethnic registries and immigration quota systems have long been integral to America’s approach to regulating the freedom, movement, and rights of non-whites. Two pieces of legislation passed in the same year nearly a century ago—one federal, one in the state of Virginia—reflect the recurrent appeal in the United States of laws aimed at protecting the racial purity of whatever is indexed in a given moment as best representing American nationalism…

…In the same year as the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, the Commonwealth of Virginia passed its Racial Integrity Act, originally drafted as “A Bill for the Preservation of the White Race.” The Racial Integrity Act of 1924 explicitly forbade miscegenation—that is, “race mixing through marriage and fornication”—on the basis that such practices would “pollute [the nation] with mixed-blood offspring.”…

Read the entire article here.

Mind the Gap: Mixed-race mindset

The Tufts Daily
Medford, Massachusetts
2017-03-14

MJ Greigo

Most strangers who pass me on the street think I’m white. I don’t blame them for this, as I’m pale as hell. I got some sort of mid-point of my parents’ genes: my obviously brown father and my paper-white mom, his black hair and her light brown, her 5-foot-7-inches and his 6-foot-4-inches. Growing up, I got so tan in the summers, and I brought in Nana Griego’s homemade tortillas for show and tell. My friends joked about how I loved burritos and that I was like a maid. The confusion of childhood takes a lifetime to unpack, and I find myself looking back with terror on things that I couldn’t have understood at the time. Yet without fully knowing about their repercussions, these tiny moments come together to form a huge part of the way everyone sees the world…

Read the entire article here.

11 People in Interracial Relationships on the Intense Experience of Watching Get Out

New York Magazine
2017-03-14

Ana Silman, Culture Writer

Allison Williams and Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out. Photo: Justin Lubin/Universal Studios

Get Out — Jordan Peele’s acclaimed horror-comedy about a black man who finds himself in a nightmare while visiting his white girlfriend’s suburban family — is the kind of film that gets under your skin, using horror-film tropes to illuminate the daily terror of being black in a white world. We talked to seven interracial couples of various backgrounds about how watching the film made them reflect on their own relationships, the enduring stress of “meeting the parents,” and whether they’ll be RSVPing for the next family reunion — “TBD,” as one of our interviewees put it…

Read the entire article here.

Obama on Our Minds: The Impact of Obama on the Psyche of America

Oxford University Press
2016-09-01
312 Pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780199390618

Edited by:

Lori A. Barker, Professor
Department Psychology and Sociology Department
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona

• Examines the true psychological impact of Obama’s presidency on the nation’s collective psyche
• Connects well-known psychological theories with contemporary issues, such as racism, ethnic identity, and stereotyping, and applies them to the historic election of President Obama
• Offers expert critical approaches to widely disseminated rhetoric from political pundits, i.e.

On the evening of November 4, 2008, as news of Barack Obama’s presidential victory spread, television footage depicted the emotional reactions of people across the country and the globe. As Obama gave his acceptance speech in Grant Park that night, the camera focused on those in the audience who were overjoyed, tears streaming down their faces. People cheered. Spontaneous and joyful celebrations broke out in the streets. Change had finally come.

Analysts describe Barack Obama’s success as “unheard of”–a meteoric rise–leaving many in the elite political circles astonished at what he had accomplished in his campaign. With his success, many questions arose: How was a junior senator from Chicago able to do this? Why does he evoke such strong reactions? What cultural shifts took place in American society for this to happen? Do we now live in a post-racial society, and what will this mean for the next generation?

In Obama on Our Minds, Lori A. Barker leads a team of expert multicultural theorists and researchers studying racism, ethnic identity, sexual orientation, and immigration to answer these questions and analyze the enormous impact of this groundbreaking event in our nation’s history.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Section I: Obama and Key Concepts in Multicultural Psychology
  • Chapter 1: Presidents, Prototypes, and Stereotypes, Oh My! Understanding the Psychological Impact of Obama / Lori A. Barker
  • Chapter 2: The Struggle for Identity Congruence in an Obama White House / Thomas A. Parham
  • Chapter 3: Academic Success of Black Americans: Stereotype Threat in the Era of Obama / Brian E. Armenta and Carey S. Ryan
  • Chapter 4: Teaching for Change: Post-racial or a Different Kind of Racism? / Jeffrey Scott Mio
  • Chapter 5: Changing the Course of Race Relations in America: From Prevention of Discrimination to Promotion of Racial Equality / John F. Dovidio
  • Chapter 6: The Obama Effect on Racial Attitudes: A Review of the Research / Curtis A. Thompson and Lori A. Barker
• Section II: Obama’s Impact on Diverse Populations
  • Chapter 7: (Mixed) Race to the White House / Christine C. Iijima Hall
  • Chapter 8: Race, Masculinity, and Gendered Racism: President Obama’s Influence on Black Men / Christopher T.H. Liang, Carin Molenaar, and Shalena Heard
  • Chapter 9: Barack Obama and the LGBT Community: A Rocky Path to Real Progress and Ongoing Hopes for the Future / Laurie A. Roades
  • Chapter 10: New Hope for Immigrants in the Obama Era / Patricia Arredondo
  • Chapter 11: Has Change Come to America? College Student Attitudes Toward Obama’s Presidency / Andrea Aoun, Blake D. Daryaie, and Lori A. Barker
  • Chapter 12: The Obama Marriage: A Model for Moving Forward the ‘Stalled Revolution’ / Donna L. Franklin

Get the Fuck Outta Here: A Dialogue on Jordan Peele’s GET OUT

Medium
2017-02-27

Son of Baldwin (Robert Jones, Jr)

Writer and educator Law Ware had the wonderful idea of he and I having a dialogue on the recently released horror film, Get Out. The film, written and directed by comedian Jordan Peele, stars Daniel Kaluuya as Chris Washington, a photographer dating a white woman named Rose (Allison Williams). Rose takes Chris home to meet her “liberal/progressive” parents in their New England home and that’s when shit, literally and figuratively, goes left.

The film is multilayered and speaks quite deftly to the terror of being black in the United States. Law and I were anxious to get the conversation started. We spoke on Sunday, the same day as the Oscars, where the specter of race hung over everything like a noose on a poplar tree. There was so much to talk about and as much as we unpacked, there was still so much left to cover (like the end scene, for example). We might need a part two.

PLEASE NOTE: This discussion will contain SPOILERS. Proceed at your own risk.]

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Robert Jones, Jr: So about Get Out. Shall we begin? I’m a horror film buff. I like to watch them to better understand the psychology of other human beings. And I’m very critical of them because a lot of them are dishonest garbage. But this one here? Chile, this is one of the greatest, maybe the greatest, horror film I’ve ever seen.

The opening scene. Did you peep how Jordan Peele flips the script on who the actual menace is? How he reverses course on how the black body is always seen as the threat on the streets and in elevators and such. But here, we have an ordinary black person walking in a neighborhood in which he “doesn’t belong” and the menace is the white people seeking to police his presence in very literal and nefarious terms. This was a brilliant metaphor for stop-and-frisk and the so-called “Concerned Neighbor” phenomena, both of which often end with the death of us. Sundown Towns and shit.

Law Ware: Absolutely. And what I found to be utterly brilliant about that scene, and the movie holistically, is that he uses established horror film tropes to critique Whiteness and white fears. He could have put this in the mouth of our protagonist, but he uses the language of film. That’s why I think many don’t see what he is up to. We are accustomed to preachifying in “important films.” Peele is too nuanced for that…

…RJJ: Precisely. And it’s those nuances, those metaphors, that subtext that speaks to some of us on a subconscious level, that made Get Out such a terrifying experience. My partner was as deeply moved by this film as I was, perhaps deeper. But as you imply, it also explains the misreadings of the film that I have seen or encountered. One person insisted that it was a film designed to let white people off the hook. I was flabbergasted by two things: 1. That the person actually watched the film — with that reveal and that ending — and got that from it, and 2. That the person actually thought this film was for white people in any way, shape, or form. To me, this was a film for black people. And it spoke to us in our own language and felt no need to explain anything to us. It assumed we already knew certain things and proceeded from that knowing. If anything perplexed me, it was knowing that Peele is biracial and has a white mother, and is also married to a white woman. I assumed that the movie would be certain unfavorable things based on that. I assumed he’d be more understanding and apologetic to Whiteness. But the exact opposite was true. So I’m implicated in making certain false judgments about black people based on their backgrounds. And I wonder if this film operates, in some ways, as Peele’s cry for help…

Read the entire interview here.

What You Need To Know About Colorism, As Told By A Light Skinned Black Woman

Elite Daily
2017-03-07

Jenna Graham, Staff Writer

Boris Jovanovic

“What are you mixed with?” is something I’m asked regularly. It’s the most common question I receive from a stranger, and it still manages to get deep under my skin.I raise my eyebrow and respond with a blunt, “I’m black,” only to be challenged with “black and what?”

Sometimes I respond “just black,” and when I can’t resist being slick I’ll answer, “black and proud.”

Being black, despite all the ugly we’ve endured, is the most remarkable experience I’ll ever know…

Read the entire article here.

I Am a Proud Black Teen Who Happens to be Half White

Affinity
2017-02-25

Jazkia Phillips
Portland, Oregon

I grew up in a community where black was the thing to be. My friends and family members had an ample amount of pride and confidence when it came to their racial identities and weren’t afraid to let people know. I too had this visceral sense of pride in my identity as a child. When we learned about the Civil Rights Movement and the pioneers of that era, in my mind I would think, “Yeah, those are my people on the frontlines.” When I was asked that dreaded question “What are you?” I never knew how to answer because I felt black in every way. But, my mother had white skin and I chose to acknowledge that. So I settled on the term “mixed” and the rest just fell together nicely. Throughout my elementary school years, I moved along with this pride and the notion that I was, in fact, a black girl. I just had lighter skin, that’s all…

Read the entire article here.