Mixed Race Studies

Are multiracial millennials leading the way towards an inclusive society?

MPR News with Kerri Miller
Minnesota Public Radio
Tuesday, 2015-08-25, 14:00Z (09:00 CDT, 10:00 EDT)

Kerri Miller, Host

Jose Santos, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Metropolitan State University, St. Paul, Minnesota

Rainier Spencer, Vice Provost for Academic Affairs; Associate Vice President for Diversity Initiatives; Chief Diversity Officer
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

“Demographically, multiracial Americans are younger—and strikingly so—than the country as a whole. According to Pew Research Center analysis of the 2013 American Community Survey, the median age of all multiracial Americans is 19, compared with 38 for single-race Americans,” —Pew Research Center.

While the nation’s multiracial population is growing – does that make our culture more understanding of issues of diversity?

MPR News host Kerri Miller hosts an engaging discussion on this question with her guests, callers and online commenters.

Listen to the interview (00:41:36) here. Download the interview here.

Revealed: How Britons welcomed black soldiers during WWII, and fought alongside them against racist GIs

The Telegraph
2015-12-06

Patrick Sawer, Senior Reporter

This was no ordinary Saturday night punch-up outside a pub.

At the height of World War Two, with the country gripped in a life or death fight for freedom against fascism and dictatorship, dozens of local drinkers fought alongside black soldiers against white Military Police officers harassing them outside a Lancashire pub.

It was just one extraordinary example of the active support shown by ordinary Britons for the thousands of black American troops stationed amongst them during the war – in stark contrast to the vicious racist abuse they received from their fellow countrymen.

The Lancashire riot was just one of hundreds of cases of simple humanity displayed by ordinary Britons towards black soldiers.

Details of the riot are revealed in a new book exploring the experience of black GIs stationed in Britain during the war.

While white GIs sought to have them banned from pubs, clubs and cinemas and frequently subjected them to physical and verbal assault, many ordinary Britons welcomed the black troops into their homes – and on several occasions physically stood up to their tormentors.

The book, Forgotten: The Untold Story of D-Day’s Black Heroes, at Home and at War, also reveals how in June 1943 there was a public outcry when four black servicemen were refused service in a bar in Bath, for no reason other than the colour of their skin…

…While most people have heard of the GI babies the US troops left behind, few have considered that many of these children were of mixed-race, the offspring of affairs between local white women and the black soldiers they encountered.

Many of those “brown babies” only came to know their fathers in later years, with some of their descendants now embarking on a search for their American grandfathers.

Miss Hervieux said: “Given the racial tensions that exist in Britain today, as in other countries, it is hard to believe that the UK was once a relative racial paradise for African Americans. Britons were willing to open their hearts and minds to fellow human beings who were there to help them…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Like Us: How to Support Biracial Children and Their Shifting Identities

Literatigurl
2015-12-01

Kimberly Cooper

The year was 2002. I’d just landed in Tucson, AZ to present my graduate school research on the “Social Perceptions of Multiracial Children” at the first-ever National Conference on the Multiracial Child in the United States. Hundreds of teachers, mental health professionals, social workers, student organizations, academics, authors and families from all over the U.S. and abroad met for two days of workshops specifically celebrating multiracial children and their histories. Organized by the two largest multiracial advocacy organizations in the U.S. – AMEA (The Association of MultiEthnic Americans) and The Mavin Foundation, we convened to share resources, strengthen collaboratives and then return to our respective fields to expand discussions on diversity and multiculturalism to include those of us strongly identifying with two or more distinct racial backgrounds.

Growing up biracial, I’d learned that negative social perceptions of biracial, multiracial and transracially adopted children were largely impacting the growth, well-being, and resources available to members of our own community at home and in schools. Asserting that biracial children were more “mixed-up” than mixed-race only served to further perpetuate negative stereotypes about us.

But what if mixed-race and biracial children were supported for an identity which embraced both parents?…

Read the entire article here.

White Debt: Reckoning with what is owed — and what can never be repaid — for racial privilege.

The New York Times
2015-12-02

Eula Biss. Professor of Instruction
Department of English
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois

Illustration by Geoff McFetridge

The word for debt in German also means guilt. A friend who used to live in Munich mentioned this to me recently. I took note because I’m newly in debt, quite a lot of it, from buying a house. So far, my debt is surprisingly comfortable, and that’s one quality of debt that I’ve been pondering lately — how easy it can be.

I had very little furniture for the first few months in my new house and no money left to buy any. But then I took out a loan against my down payment, and now I have a dining-room table, six chairs and a piano. While I was in the bank signing the paperwork that would allow me to spend money I hadn’t yet earned, I thought of Eddie Murphy’s skit in which he goes undercover as a white person and discovers that white people at banks give away money to other white people free. It’s true, I thought to myself in awe when I saw the ease with which I was granted another loan, though I understood — and, when my mortgage was sold to another lender, was further reminded — that the money was not being given to me free. I was, and am, paying for it. But that detail, like my debt, is easily forgotten.

“Only something that continues to hurt stays in the memory,” Nietzsche observes in “On the Genealogy of Morality.” My student-loan debt doesn’t hurt, though it hasn’t seemed to have gotten any smaller over the past decade, and I’ve managed to forget it so thoroughly that I recently told someone that I’d never been in debt until I bought a house. Creditors of antiquity, Nietzsche writes, tried to encourage a debtor’s memory by taking as collateral his freedom, wife, life or even, as in Egypt, his afterlife. Legal documents outlined exactly how much of the body of the debtor that the creditor could cut off for unpaid debts. Consider the odd logic, Nietzsche suggests, of a system in which a creditor is repaid not with money or goods but with the pleasure of seeing the debtor’s body punished. “The pleasure,” he writes, “of having the right to exercise power over the powerless.”…

…Whiteness is not a kinship or a culture. White people are no more closely related to one another, genetically, than we are to black people. American definitions of race allow for a white woman to give birth to black children, which should serve as a reminder that white people are not a family. What binds us is that we share a system of social advantages that can be traced back to the advent of slavery in the colonies that became the United States. “There is, in fact, no white community,” as Baldwin writes. Whiteness is not who you are. Which is why it is entirely possible to despise whiteness without disliking yourself…

Read the entire article here.

The Invention of the White Race, Volume 2: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America

Verso Books
November 2012 (Originally published in August, 1997)
422 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9781844677702
Ebook ISBN: 9781844678440

Theodore W. Allen (1919-2005)
Introduction and notes by Jeffrey B. Perry

Groundbreaking analysis of the birth of racism in America.

On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, Martin Luther King outlined a dream of an America where people would not be judged by the color of their skin. That dream has yet to be realized, but some three centuries ago it was a reality. Back then, neither social practice nor law recognized any special privileges in connection with being white. But by the early decades of the eighteenth century, that had all changed. Racial oppression became the norm in the plantation colonies, and African Americans suffered under its yoke for more than two hundred years.

In Volume II of The Invention of the White Race, Theodore W. Allen explores the transformation that turned African bond-laborers into slaves and segregated them from their fellow proletarians of European origin. In response to labor unrest, where solidarities were not determined by skin color, the plantation bourgeoisie sought to construct a buffer of poor whites, whose new racial identity would protect them from the enslavement visited upon African Americans. This was the invention of the white race, an act of cruel ingenuity that haunts America to this day.

Allen’s acclaimed study has become indispensable in debates on the origins of racial oppression in America. In this updated edition, scholar Jeffrey B. Perry provides a new introduction, a select bibliography and a study guide.

44 on 44: Forty-Four African American Writers on the Election of Barack Obama, 44th President of the United States

Third World Press
2011-03-29
319 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0883783177

Edited by: Lita Hooper, Sonia Sanchez, and Michael Simanga

To give voice to the historic election of President Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States, this anthology of essays, poetry, and creative non-fiction documents the conversation on President Obama’s campaign within the African American community, and the dialogue after his election and since he has taken the Oath of Office. Included are perspectives on the historical moments during President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, the finale of the 2008 general election, and Obama’s new plans and policies since he took office in January 20, 2009. Editors Lita Hooper, Michael Simanga, and Sonia Sanchez have assembled an impressive list of forty-four contributors to capture the energy and excitement, the expectation and hope. Featured are works from Lita Hooper, Michael Sigmanga, Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, Haki Madhubuti, Askia Toure, Quincy Troupe, Chuck D, Pearl Cleage, Natasha Trethewey, Tony Medina, Jessica Care Moore, Nathan McCall, Jasmine Guy, Farai Chideya, Keith Gilyard, Opal Moore, Sharan Strange, and Tina McElroy Ansa.

Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb: An American Slave

Lushena Books
2014-02-20 (Originally published in 1849)
104 pages
0.2 x 4.9 x 7.9 inches
Paperback ISBN-10: 1631820060
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1631820069

Henry Bibb (1815-1854)

Read the entire narrative, courtesy of Documenting the American South (DocSouth) here.

Black Enough/White Enough: The Obama Dilema

Third World Press
February 2009
199 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0883783092

Rickey Hendon

Foreword by: Hermene D. Hartman

Barack is caught between two worlds and struggles for acceptance by either side-Black enough? White enough? It’s a fine line that he must walk, writes Illinois state Senator Rickey Hendon, in Black Enough/White Enough: The Obama Dilemma, a personal memoir of the historic 2008 presidential election. Hendon, an African American senator from Chicago’s blighted West Side, was a veteran politico firmly aligned with other Black leaders when the man who would go on to become the golden presidential hopeful was an upstart balancing atop America’s cultural fence in one the most notoriously segregated cities in the nation. This newcomer was of a different stock than Chicago’s old guard, which boasted icons such as Rev. Jesse Jackson, late Mayor Harold Washington and Minister Louis Farrakhan, and was initially eyed with some suspicion-even by Hendon himself as the two served side by side in the Illinois state Senate. And as Hendon explains in this book, the phenomenon that became Barack Obama, the audacious presidential hopeful, was created not just by wooing America’s whites, but also by winning acceptance by America’s Blacks.

Hendon begins Black Enough/White Enough: The Obama Dilemma with Obama’s announcement of his presidential bid on February 10, 2007, and follows his entire campaign in a journal-like fashion, all the way to the November 4, 2008 election. This running account is peppered with Hendon’s own observations, insights, inside information, and personal anecdotes of his long history with Barack Obama. Hendon pulls no punches and offers a warts-and-all look at how Obama’s campaign tiptoed across a tightrope to gain the confidence of white Americans without angering African Americans-the latter not always being successful. Since the book was compiled from a journal that Hendon kept of events as they were unfolding during the marathon campaign, we find ourselves transported back to Super Tuesday to race endlessly against a tenacious Senator Hillary Clinton, dodge scandals involving militant pastors and terrorist friends, to play running mate roulette with Republican opponent Senator John McCain. Some of the discussion deals with issues and incidents that have long since been resolved, and perhaps even forgotten, however, the memory of the uncertainty, the tough choices, the curve balls, the dirty tricks, the surprise game changers, and most of all, the nail biting stress, is preserved just as we should all want to remember it-when we were there!

The Invention of the White Race, Volume 1: Racial Oppression and Social Control

Verso Books
November 2012 (Originally published in August, 1997)
372 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9781844677696
Ebook ISBN: 9781844678433

Theodore W. Allen (1919-2005)
Introduction and notes by Jeffrey B. Perry

Groundbreaking analysis of the birth of racism in America.

When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no “white” people there. Nor, according to colonial records, would there be for another sixty years. In this seminal two-volume work, The Invention of the White Race, Theodore W. Allen tells the story of how America’s ruling classes created the category of the “white race” as a means of social control. Since that early invention, white privileges have enforced the myth of racial superiority, and that fact has been central to maintaining ruling-class domination over ordinary working people of all colors throughout American history.

Volume I draws lessons from Irish history, comparing British rule in Ireland with the “white” oppression of Native Americans and African Americans. Allen details how Irish immigrants fleeing persecution learned to spread racial oppression in their adoptive country as part of white America.

Since publication in the mid-nineties, The Invention of the White Race has become indispensable in debates on the origins of racial oppression in America. In this updated edition, scholar Jeffrey B. Perry provides a new introduction, a short biography of the author and a study guide.

Kansas City Artist Shane Evans, Co-Author Taye Diggs Demystify Mixed-Race Families In New Book

KCUR 89.3
Kansas City, Missouri
2015-12-04

Laura Ziegler, Special Correspondent

Shane Evans at KCUR studios to talk about illustrating new children’s book (Laura Ziegler KCUR)

Kansas City artist Shane Evans was raised by a mother and father whose racial and cultural backgrounds were different from one another. But to Evans they were just mom and dad. He’s also raising a mixed-race daughter.

That’s why Evans was eager to collaborate with his friend, actor Taye Diggs, on a children’s book that takes on the complex issues of growing up in a mixed-race household. Diggs has a six-year-old son with actress and singer Idina Menzel, who is white.

The book, Mixed Me, came out in October. Evans is the illustrator…

Listen to the interview (00:30:46) here.