Mixed Race Studies

Mixed Heritage Week 2015: AIDE Presents: “What Are You?” Exploring Biracial and Multiracial Identity (DICE)

The Ohio State University
Student Life Multicultural Center, Alonso Family Room
3034 Ohio Union, 1739 N. High Street
Columbus, Ohio
Thursday, 2015-03-26, 20:00-21:00 EDT (Local Time)

This presentation will provide an overview of the changing racial demographics in the United States in relation to multiracial people. This will include identifying issues multiracial college students face, U.S. Census data, examples of multiracial microaggressions, and examples of the use of multiracial identity in modern pop culture…

For more information click here.

San Francisco Lithographer: African American Artist Grafton Tyler Brown

Arts Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA)
July 2014

Amy De Simone, Research Consultant
Kansas State University

by Robert J. Chandler. University of Oklahoma Press, February 2014. 264 p. ill. ISBN 9780806144108 (cl.), $36.95.

More than just a book about one man, San Francisco Lithographer: African American Artist Grafton Tyler Brown is about the emerging lithography scene in nineteenth-century San Francisco and Brown’s role in it as a mixed race artist and businessman. Author Robert J. Chandler, previously the senior research historian for Wells Fargo Bank, has done extensive research on the life and times of Brown. Though other scholars have written about Brown, Chandler’s work is the first comprehensive biography, which seamlessly references appropriate field literature to piece together Brown’s life from his birth in Pennsylvania to his death in Minnesota…

Read the entire review here.

Finding Grafton Tyler Brown, African American Artist

Keith Skinner: Writer: Renegade Image: Fiction, memoir, travel & essays
2014-05-25

Keith Skinner

I had never heard of Grafton Tyler Brown before. I was just trying to develop a character for my historical novel-in-progress, The Relentless Harvest.

The Search for a Character

It all started with a desire to raise the level of conversation in the lumber camp scenes set in 19th century Albion, California. Much of the dialogue I had written for those scenes featured hardened men with little or no education, men who generally were aware of little else than life in camp. I considered tossing a writer into their midst but quickly discounted the idea. I needed someone who would interact with and leave an impression on the men, someone who would ignite their imaginations. A writer would only isolate himself and would be unable to share his work with the largely illiterate loggers. Then I remembered all the vintage lithographs and drawings I had examined for my San Francisco scenes. What if an artist came to the woods to chronicle the emerging lumber industry?…

Read the entire article here.

Hate Takes the Bus

The New York Times
2015-03-11

Charles M. Blow

A University of Oklahoma Fraternity’s Chant and the Rigidity of Racism

This week, when video was posted showing members of the University of Oklahoma’s chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon gleefully engaged in a racist chant on a bus, some people were shocked. Others, like me, were not.

This was just video confirmation of a racism that envelops us like a fog, often just as evanescent and immeasurable.

Some people seemed surprised because these were millennials, and college students to boot. Both because of generational easing and educational enlightenment, weren’t these sorts of things supposed to be vestiges of the past?

After all, as the Pew Research Center put it last year, “Millennials are the most racially diverse generation in American history,” with “some 43 percent of millennial adults” being nonwhite.

A 2010 Pew report found that “almost all millennials accept interracial dating and marriage.” An MTV poll of millennials found that “84 percent say their family taught them that everyone should be treated the same, no matter what their race,” and that 89 percent “do believe that everyone should be treated the same no matter their race.”

But these numbers can be deceiving. They don’t herald an age of egalitarianism as we might think…

Read the entire article here.

Was Elliot Rodger Asian American?

Reappropriate.co
2015-03-10

Jenn Reappropriate

For weeks following the Isla Vista shooting, killer Elliot Rodger was described in mainstream media as a young White man. This was a convenient narrative: Rodger was seen as yet another example of the maligned young vengeance-seeking White male outcast (like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold and Adam Lanza): so twisted by violent first-person shooters and sexual-social frustration that he resorted to unthinkable violence.

Yet, for Elliot Rodger, this narrative is complicated by Rodger’s own tangled and confusing relationship with his racial identity: one that defies simple categorization as Rodger being straightforwardly White, or otherwise.

Biologically speaking, Elliot Rodger was biracially White and Asian American. Both Rodger’s biological mother and his step-mother were Asian American, and in his lengthy manifesto, Rodger self-identified as a “beautiful Eurasian”. Upon his death, Rodger was initially identified by law enforcement as an unknown “Asian male”.

Elliot Rodger also viewed his mixed race heritage as elevating him above those he termed as “lowly” “full-blooded Asian” men. In a lengthy 68-page report released last month by the Santa Barbara sheriff’s department, it is revealed that Elliot Rodger frequently conducted Google searches on Adolf Hitler and Naziism. These search terms are consistent with Rodger’s frequent racist web postings that espouse a clear belief in a racial hierarchy which positioned men of colour as sexually and socially inferior to Whites, and which further positioned White women as the most-coveted.

In May of last year, Chauncey DeVega wrote a highly-shared piece for Alternet (“Yes, Elliot Rodger is ‘White’: What the Santa Barbara Shooter Can Teach Us About Race and Masculinity”), where DeVega argues that racial identity is predominantly a performance, and that Whiteness is the specific performance of superiority over other people of colour. Both DeVega and Philip of You Offend Me You Offend My Family reason that Rodger’s rejection of his Asianness coupled with internalization of White supremacy was evidence of his Whiteness…

Read the entire article here.

What was it like raising three biracial children?

WBEZ 91.5
Chicago, Illinois
2015-03-06

Bill Healy

Rosa Ramirez was in basic training in the Army, when she came across a girl in her barracks with red hair and blue eyes. “What kind of blood do you have?” Ramirez asked her. “Do you see the world blue?”

Ramirez had gone to high school in Texas and spent time picking fruit in the fields of California. But when it came to race, she was clueless.

Ramirez tells her daughter, Judy, in this week’s StoryCorps, “In my hometown, it was Mexicans and whites. We didn’t have any idea about blacks or Germans or Italians.”

Rosa Ramirez served four years in the military before moving to Virginia, where she met her future husband. Her daughter asked what it was like when Rosa told her parents she wanted to marry a black man?…

Read the entire article here.

Diversity Week Keynote Speaker 2015: “One Drop of Love” perfomed by Fanshen DiGiovanni Cox

Miami University
Oxford-Armstrong Student Center
Harry T. Wilks Theater
550 E. Spring Street
Oxford, Ohio
Thursday, 2015-03-12, 19:00-21:00 EDT (Local Time)

One Drop of Love produced by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, performed by Fanshen Cox Digiovanni is a multimedia solo show that tells the story of how the notion of ‘race’ came to be in the United States. In addition, Fanshen whom is of mixed race shares personal accounts of how it affected the relationship with her father.

Every spring, specifically in the month of March, the Diversity Affairs Council (DAC) plans and coordinates a week-long program known as “Diversity Week.” This week serves as a campaign that seeks to raise awareness of social differences, promote an appreciation for such differences, and encourage open dialogue about topics involving diversity.

The Diversity Keynote Address provides an opportunity for open dialogue about various diversity topics with students and the speaker.

For more information, click here.

IRRPP Annual Bowman Lecture: Fatal Invention: Why The Politics of Race and Science Still Matters

Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy
University of Illinois, Chicago
Student Center East
750 S. Halsted St, Room 302
Chicago, Illinois
2015-03-12, 16:00 CDT (Local Time)

Dorothy Roberts, Professor of Law and Sociology
University of Pennsylvania

Co-sponsors: Medical Education, Institute for the Humanities Health and Society Working Group, Gender & Women’s Studies, Sociology, Biocultures, Racialized Body Cluster, African American Studies

An acclaimed scholar of race, gender, and the law, Professor Dorothy Roberts is the fourteenth Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, George A. Weiss University Professor, and the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at University of Pennsylvania. She holds appointments in the Law School and Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology. Professor Roberts received her Doctor of Jurisprudence from Harvard Law School.

This lecture was established to honor Phillip J. Bowman’s contributions to UIC during his tenure as Director of IRRPP and Professor of African American Studies. It features national scholars of race, ethnicity, and public policy who provide timely analysis of issues of critical importance to the field and to communities of color.

For more information, click here.

Don’t Starve the Census

The New York Times
2015-03-10

The Editorial Board

Some Republicans in Congress are calling for cuts to the Census Bureau’s budget that would impair the agency’s already strained ability to gather basic data.

An accurate census is essential to determining the correct number of representatives from each state, the effectiveness of voting laws and the allotment of federal aid to states. In fact, information from the census and other surveys by the bureau is crucial to anyone — policy makers and businesspeople, researchers and citizens — who wants to understand the United States, assess where it is headed and influence its course on the basis of hard data.

The White House has requested a slim $1.5 billion for the bureau for fiscal year 2016. Much of that would be for the 2020 census, the planning of which is already behind schedule because of previous budget cuts. Next year is critical for the testing of data-gathering technology; Congress’s failure to provide timely financing to try out hand-held computers before the 2010 census forced a last-minute reversion to paper forms, which proved costlier than an orderly roll out of the computers would have been…

Read the entire article here.

Bodies Under Re/view? Mediating Racial Blackness

InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture
2013-08-20

Tiffany E. Barber, Adjunct Instructor African and African American Studies
University of Oklahoma

“In our allegedly postracial moment, where simply talking about racism openly is considered an impolitic, if not racist, thing to do, we constantly learn and re-learn racial codes. [. . .] In short, it was Trayvon Martin, not George Zimmerman, who was put on trial. He was tried for the crimes he may have committed and the ones he would have committed had he lived past 17.” – Robin D.G. Kelley, “The U.S. v. Trayvon Martin: How the System Worked”

In a 1995 keynote address titled “On Identity Politics,” critical race theorist Mari J. Matsuda cautions against assumptions “that racial identity is the cause of racial division rather than a product of it.” For Matsuda, critical race theory emerges “[o]ut of the struggle to understand the ways in which mainstream legal consciousness is white, male, Christian, able-bodied, economically privileged, and heterosexual.” That is, how legal consciousness itself signifies a type of whiteness that excludes and marginalizes difference, difference that is seen in opposition to this constructed whiteness – i.e. black and other non-white subjects, queer subjects, women subjects, and so on. Matsuda’s assertions bring into relation a politics of law, race, and gender that persist today, and demand a consideration of what these mediated relationships tell us about histories of identity formation particular to race, gender and sexuality in the U.S….

…To address these questions, I turn to two cases of precedence that establish relations between the U.S. justice system, racial blackness, and visuality. In 1921, Leonard ‘Kip’ Rhinelander, an affluent white male from a wealthy New York family met and courted Alice Beatrice Jones, a working-class woman of mixed-race ancestry. Jones’s fair skin color permitted her to pass for white and it is unclear whether or not she self-identified as white. Over the next few years, Rhinelander and Jones grew closer and shared a number of intimate encounters, at least two of which were known to be sexual. The couple eloped in October 1924 and enjoyed secluded bliss – Rhinelander’s parents did not approve of Jones – until scandal ripped through the relationship. Soon after, Rhinelander filed for an annulment. The charge? Racial fraud; Rhinelander claimed Jones had misrepresented her blackness…

Read the entire article here.