Mixed Race Studies

‘Complicating my place:’ multiracial women faculty navigating monocentricity in higher education––a polyethnography

Race Ethnicity and Education
Published online: 2020-04-23
DOI: 10.1080/13613324.2020.1753679

Kelly F. Jackson, Associate Professor of Social Work
Arizona State University

Dana J. Stone, Associate Professor of Educational Psychology and Counseling
California State University, Northridge

E. Namisi Chilungu, Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychology
Georgia State University

Jillian Carter Ford, Associate Professor of Social Studies Education
Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, Georgia

This polyethnography is an interdisciplinary collaboration between four multiracial women faculty employed at different universities across the US to examine their experiences navigating monocentricity in higher education. This insightful study amplifies the voices of a particular subset of women of color faculty who identify multiracially – a group overlooked in existing literature examining diverse faculty experiences in higher education. Utilizing Multiracial Critical Race Theory (MultiCrit), we reflex on the similarities and nuances that exist within and between our written stories of experience. Conjointly, our critical reflections reveal the prevalence of monoracism within institutions of higher education, which places both internal and external pressures on multiracial women faculty to demarcate themselves monoracially, while simultaneously maintaining a clandestine borderland identity within their departments. Implications for this study reveal the importance of multiracial counterspaces for multiracial faculty as a form of resistance against monocentricity in US institutions of higher education.

Read or purchase the article here.

How Should I Think About Race When Considering a Sperm Donor?

The Ethicist
The New York Times Magazine
2020-06-16

Kwame Anthony Appiah, Professor of Philosophy, Law
New York University

Illustration by Tomi Um

I am an American woman, of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry, and I strive to live my life as an active agent against racism and white supremacy. I am beginning to consider having children and am open to bearing a child as a single mother. It is possible to sort through sperm donors by race, eye color, education level and so on. If I choose a donor of color, am I condemning my child to be born into a system designed not to serve them? Or can I use my white privilege to help them fight that system? Would my future child of color feel separated from their heritage with me as their mother? If I choose a white donor, am I succumbing to racist ideas of what traits are “desirable,” or taking the “easy road” in knowing my child will look more like me? What do you think? Name Withheld

Women have been making choices about their children’s possible appearance and identity from the beginning of human history. Long before genetics, people knew that parental characteristics show up in their offspring. With modern technologies, the prospects for trying to fix your child’s heritable characteristics are expanding, raising plenty of ethical issues. Race, however, is not a biological fact but a social fact — a social fact that, for example, Americans who are known to have African ancestry are regarded as African-American. What’s more, having an African-American donor doesn’t tell you what your child’s skin or hair will look like. You can be socially black without looking black, like Walter White, the longtime head of the N.A.A.C.P.

I’m spelling all this out because your question about having a child with a sperm donor of color presupposes that it will produce a child who won’t look “white,” and that’s not necessarily the case. Suppose you have a white-looking son with an African-American sperm donor. Then you and your child will have a choice to make about whether he or she should identify as African-American. Some people think that failing to do so — “passing for white” — is somehow dishonest. Yet to hold that you must identify as black in those circumstances would be to accede to a longstanding American notion (“the one-drop rule”) that one black ancestor makes you black. You could reasonably reject that notion, which is rooted in the history of slavery and the nonsensical racial theories that grew up with it…

Read the entire article here.

The Accident of Color: A Story of Race in Reconstruction

W. W. Norton
2020-06-18
336 pages
6.4 x 9.6 in
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-393-24744-2
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-393-53172-5

Daniel Brook

A technicolor history of the first civil rights movement and its collapse into black and white.

In The Accident of Color, Daniel Brook journeys to nineteenth-century New Orleans and Charleston and introduces us to cosmopolitan residents who elude the racial categories the rest of America takes for granted. Before the Civil War, these free, openly mixed-race urbanites enjoyed some rights of citizenship and the privileges of wealth and social status. But after Emancipation, as former slaves move to assert their rights, the black-white binary that rules the rest of the nation begins to intrude. During Reconstruction, a movement arises as mixed-race elites make common cause with the formerly enslaved and allies at the fringes of whiteness in a bid to achieve political and social equality for all.

In some areas, this coalition proved remarkably successful. Activists peacefully integrated the streetcars of Charleston and New Orleans for decades and, for a time, even the New Orleans public schools and the University of South Carolina were educating students of all backgrounds side by side. Tragically, the achievements of this movement were ultimately swept away by a violent political backlash and expunged from the history books, culminating in the Jim Crow laws that would legalize segregation for a half century and usher in the binary racial regime that rules us to this day.

The Accident of Color revisits a crucial inflection point in American history. By returning to the birth of our nation’s singularly narrow racial system, which was forged in the crucible of opposition to civil rights, Brook illuminates the origins of the racial lies we live by.

My Wife Is Black. My Son Is Biracial. But White Supremacy Lives Inside Me

Cognoscenti
WBUR
Boston, Massachusetts
2020-06-22

Calvin Hennick

The author and his son (Courtesy)

My son is 9 years old. He’s big and beautiful and biracial, and although my wife and I have always known we would need to prepare him to face racism, we’ve never talked to him or his little sister about police violence against Black people. Not until now.

He wept when we told him about George Floyd. His voice shaking, he asked whether the same thing would one day happen to him.

My wife and I told him to draw about his feelings, and what he brought back to us broke both our hearts. In pen, he’d drawn a white police officer standing in front of a cruiser, holding up a smoking gun and looking down at an unseen corpse. My son had written the words “Killed Me,” with an arrow pointing down at his own body, lying lifeless just outside the frame of the page.

There’s nothing my son can do to prevent this nightmare from becoming a reality. There’s nothing he can do to change the way the world will see him when he grows into a tall, broad-shouldered Black man.

To protect my son, and every other Black boy and girl in America, white people must change the way our own eyes see the world. We must do the work of stamping out white supremacy where it lives: in our systems, and in ourselves…

Read the entire article here.

As a White Mom to Black Children, I Question Other Parents’ Intentions 24/7

Working Mother
2020-06-12

Audrey Goodson Kingo, Deputy Editor

I must protect my 4-year-old son and 9-month-old daughter.

To be a good mom to my kids, I must be their fiercest advocate at all times, because the world won’t be.

I remember my biggest parenting mistake with perfect clarity. The shame still turns my stomach when I recall the moment I sided with white parents, who look like me, instead of my Black son…

Read the entire article here.

Comfortable in My Own Skin

Sojourners
January 2020

Maika Llaneza
New Orleans, Louisiana

My theology says brown skin is beautiful, but my Pinterest page said otherwise.

MY EXPERIENCE BEING color-shamed began when I was 5 years old and still living in the Philippines. My mom and aunts often told me that I could be mistaken for “the maid’s daughter,” due to my darker brown skin. Even at a young age, I understood it was intended as an insult.

As I grew up, billboards, films, television shows, and magazines bombarded me with images of white Americans and Filipinas with white facial features. Mestiza Filipina models and actresses—celebrities admired by young girls like me—advertised skin-whitening products.

Color-shaming by other Filipinas continued after I moved to the United States at age 7. My mom, titas (aunts or older women), and lolas (grandmothers or elderly women) told me to “stay away from the sun” and “try not to get so dark.” They told me I would look even prettier if I had lighter skin…

Read the entire article here.

The Confederate Flag Didn’t Bother Bubba Wallace. Until It Did.

The New York Times
2020-06-19

Juliet Macur

Barry Cantrell

The only black driver in NASCAR’s top tier, he has emerged as an impassioned activist who got the flag banned at races in the largely white sport after years of putting up with it.

Darrell “Bubba” Wallace Jr., the only black driver in NASCAR’s top racing series, has drawn widespread attention and acclaim for his principled stand that got the Confederate flag banned from races in a largely white sport.

Yet, after years of often quiet acceptance of the sport’s “racist label,” as he put it, nobody was more surprised than his mother that he had become a central figure in the sports world’s upheaval regarding race.

“I was shocked,” his mother, Desiree Wallace, said in a telephone interview. “I said, ‘Wait a minute, is this my son? The one who doesn’t really care about anything but getting in the car and driving?’ I’m tripping that he’s gone from being a racecar driver to becoming a daggone activist. Who does that? Not Bubba.”

Yet a series of events, particularly the killing of a black man, Ahmaud Arbery, while he was jogging in a predominantly white neighborhood in Georgia, flipped a switch in Wallace, he and those who know him said…

Read the entire article here.

Rediscovering Frank Yerby: Critical Essays

University Press of Mississippi
2020-05-15
208 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9781496827821
Paperback ISBN: 9781496827838

Edited by:

Matthew Teutsch, Director, Lillian E. Smith Center
Piedmont College, Demorest, Georgia

The first book-length sounding of the major contributions of the first black American novelist to sell more than a million copies

Contributions by Catherine L. Adams, Stephanie Brown, Gene Andrew Jarrett, John Wharton Lowe, Guirdex Massé, Anderson Rouse, Matthew Teutsch, Donna-lyn Washington, and Veronica T. Watson

Rediscovering Frank Yerby: Critical Essays is the first book-length study of Yerby’s life and work. The collection explores a myriad of topics, including his connections to the Harlem and Chicago Renaissances; readership and reception; representations of masculinity and patriotism; film adaptations; and engagement with race, identity, and religion. The contributors to this collection work to rectify the misunderstandings of Yerby’s work that have relegated him to the sidelines and, ultimately, begin a reexamination of the importance of “the prince of pulpsters” in American literature.

It was Robert Bone, in The Negro Novel in America, who infamously dismissed Frank Yerby (1916–1991) as “the prince of pulpsters. ” Like Bone, many literary critics at the time criticized Yerby’s lack of focus on race and the stereotypical treatment of African American characters in his books. This negative labeling continued to stick to Yerby even as he gained critical success, first with The Foxes of Harrow, the first novel by an African American to sell more than a million copies, and later as he began to publish more political works like Speak Now and The Dahomean.

However, the literary community cannot continue to ignore Frank Yerby and his impact on American literature. More than a fiction writer, Yerby should be put in conversation with such contemporaneous writers as Richard Wright, Dorothy West, James Baldwin, William Faulkner, Margaret Mitchell, and more.

Revisiting The Pioneering Composer Florence Price

All Things Considered
National Public Radio
2019-01-21

Tom Huizenga, Music Producer

Florence Price was the first African-American woman to have her music performed by a major symphony orchestra. Special Collections, University of Arkansas Libraries

In 1933, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra gave the world premiere of Symphony No. 1 by a then little-known composer named Florence Price. The performance marked the first time a major orchestra played music by an African-American woman.

Price’s First Symphony, along with her Fourth, has just been released on an album featuring the Fort Smith Symphony, conducted by John Jeter.

Fans of Price, especially in the African-American community, may argue that her music has never really been forgotten. But some of it has been lost. Not long ago, a couple bought a fixer-upper, south of Chicago, and discovered nearly 30 boxes of manuscripts and papers. Among the discoveries in what turned out to be Price’s abandoned summer home was her Fourth Symphony, composed in 1945. This world-premiere recording is another new piece of the puzzle to understanding the life and music of Price, and a particular time in America’s cultural history.

Read the story here. Listen to the story (00:04:00) here.

Are you raising a Biracial child? If so – we want to learn more about their experiences in your family!

McKenzie N. Stokes, B.S., Doctoral Candidate
Applied Social and Community Psychology
North Carolina State University

2020-06-15

We are currently conducting a research study on if and how multiracial families communicate about race and culture. We are reaching out to ask if your child could participate in our study which will include completing 2 brief surveys and partaking in a 1-hour group discussion with other Biracial youth on Zoom.

Participation is completely voluntary, and their answers will be confidential. They will receive a $10 (USD) Amazon gift card for participating. Information from this project will help researchers and family psychologists understand how to best serve Biracial youth and multiracial families like yours.

In order to participate, your child must be:

• Between the ages of 12 and 17
• Biracial Black-White (e.g. the biological child of 1 White parent and 1 Black parent)
• Live with 1 at least of their biological parents in the United States

If you are interested, please click on this link for our brief eligibility questionnaire https://tinyurl.com/ProjectBASES. Once we confirm eligibility, we will send you an email with more information about the study and the activities your child will participate in. If your child is not eligible to participate, the data will be destroyed.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me by phone (919) 438-3176 or email: mnstokes@ncsu.edu.

Thank you!