Mixed Race Studies

Our real police/race problem: Diverse forces, white resentment, and America’s persistent divides

Salon
2015-01-02

Jim Sleeper

Why diverse police forces can’t seem to trump the economics of racism, or the twisted politics of white resentment

Nearly two decades before last month’s murders of New York police officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu by a black man, the murder of a black NYPD officer, Charles Davis, anticipated claims we’re hearing that police-community problems aren’t really “black and white” and the only color that really counts is blue.

Yet the problems do remain “black and white” for reasons of economic exploitation and isolation that run deeper than race itself and that are gathering force, despite rising numbers of white/Asian and white/Hispanic marriages and of multiracial children, even in the families of police officers themselves. Unless we can face the reasons why more “diversity” in police ranks is a far-from-sufficient condition of justice, American society will remain more racist than many others, and thereby hangs my tale…

Read the entire article here.

Of Many Colors: Portraits of Multiracial Families

University of Massachusetts Press
1997-11-21
160 pages
0.5 x 8 x 10.5 inches
ISBN (paper): 978-1-55849-101-4
ISBN (cloth): 978-1-55849-100-7 (out of print)

Gigi Kaeser, Co-director
Family Diversity Projects, Inc., Amherst, Massachusetts

Peggy Gillespie, Co-director
Family Diversity Projects, Inc., Amherst, Massachusetts

Photographs by Gigi Kaeser. Interviews by Peggy Gillespie.

Based on an award-winning photo exhibit, this book documents the feelings and experiences of Americans who live in multiracial families. Of Many Colors tells the stories of thirty-nine families who have bridged the racial divide through interracial marriage or adoption. In these pages, parents and children speak candidly about their lives, their relationships, and the ways in which they have dealt with issues of race.

Although the number of mixed-race families in America is steadily rising, this trend remains controversial. For centuries, America has depended on distinct racial categories for its social, political, and economic organization. The current debate over the inclusion of a “multiracial” category on census forms illustrates the extent to which the deeply embedded construct of race continues to divide our society.

Transracial adoption has also generated fierce controversy and debate. As in the case of racial categories, the discussion of transracial adoption reflects ever-changing social standards. As recently as 1987, thirty-five states had laws prohibiting the adoption of black children by white families. In 1996, however, President Clinton signed a bill making it illegal to prohibit adoptions based on race.

The interviews in this book provide the reader with a clear understanding of how mixed-race families contradict stereotypes, challenge racism, and demonstrate that people of different races can indeed live together in harmony. Family members also have much to say about the most intimate form of integration, familial love, and this love is made visible in the superb photographs by Gigi Kaeser.

Revealing Racial Purity Ideology: Fear of Black–White Intimacy as a Framework for Understanding School Discipline in Post-Brown Schools

Educational Administration Quarterly
Volume 50, Number 5 (December 2014)
pages 783-795
DOI: 10.1177/0013161X14549958

Decoteau J. Irby, Assistant Professor
School of Education
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Purpose: In this article, I explore White racial purity desire as an underexamined ideology that might help us understand the compulsion of disciplinary violence against Black boys in U.S. public schools. By pointing to the dearth of research on sexual desire as a site of racial conflict and through revisiting Civil Rights–era fears about interracial intimacy between Black men and White women, I encourage readers to consider if and to what extent fears about sexual desires remain in the fabric of our school and social lives.

Proposed Conceptual Argument: I argue that in schools, White-supremacist patriarchy reproduces normative Whiteness through the continual surveillance, punishment, distancing, and removal of primarily heteronormative Black male bodies, locating its justification in protecting the bodily safety and academic achievement of heteronormative White girls. I suggest that in predominantly White desegregated schools, disciplining heteronormative Black boys represents a new policy-based campaign of institutionalized violence and intimidation that reflects a subtle, but nonetheless pernicious, White male segregationist agenda.

Implications: Considering fear/desire of interracial intimacy as a lens, alongside economic and political explanations of resistance to desegregation, provides a more complete analytical framework to comprehend racial conflict and segregationism in contemporary school settings. Our collective failure to acknowledge and interrogate the ways schools produce Whiteness by seeking to protect White girls from Black boys ensures Black boys’ bodies and minds will continue to be unfairly subjected to the violence of harsh and disproportionate disciplinary measures.

Read or purchase the article here.

Professor Jared Ball on Ferguson and the Media

Truthout
2014-12-29

Dan Falcone

At the recent “Shrouded Narrative teach-in” at American University, Dan Falcone met Jared A. Ball, a professor of communication studies at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland, who discussed, “Propaganda and Media.” In this interview, father and husband, author of I MiX What I Like: A MiXtape Manifesto and coeditor of A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable’s Malcolm X, Ball talks about the construction of Black identity, colonialism and what is needed to stop the police killings of a Black person every 28 hours.

Dan Falcone for Truthout.org: Professor Ball, could you tell the readers about your teaching, academic interests, and how they relate to activism and democratic participation?

Jared Ball: Thank you. My academic interests and teaching are very much tied to my personal political passions – all of which revolve around Black or Africana studies, political struggles, cultural production and how that all intersects or interacts with the political and “libidinal” (thanks to the work of Frank Wilderson and Jared Sexton) economies of media, communication and journalism.

This primarily works out to be a focus on the political function of mass media within the context of ongoing power (national, racial, class) struggles. I generally look to extend or tailor deep traditions of radical political, economic and cultural analyses and media criticism to our time and hope that I can make them relevant to students today. To better connect traditions of political activism to the immediate work of my classes, I’ve increasingly infused the work of political prisoners into our own course work, which allows me to tap an almost endless reservoir of knowledge and experience – while exposing students to a more realistic political context for our own studies.

Additionally, this approach infuses into our classes, ideas of political struggle and activism while challenging the limitations of conventional approaches to such study, including notions of “American democracy.”…

Read the entire interview here.

Section of Creative Media lecturer to speak at Global Mixed Race conference in Chicago

Dundalk Institute of Technology
Dundalk, County Louth, Ireland
2014-11-10

Kathryn Moley
Communications Office

Dundalk Institute of Technology is incredibly proud to announce that Joint Programme Director of Video and Film in the Institute, Zélie Asava, is travelling to Chicago, to participate in a ‘Global Mixed Race’ conference.

The conference will be held at DePaul University’s Lincoln Park Campus and will focus on critical mixed race studies with discussions by scholars, filmmakers and performers at this international conference across November 13th-15th. The DkIT lecturer will join nearly two hundred presenters from the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, Japan and Australia who will participate in 45 panels during this third biennial conference, which was founded in 2010…

Read the entire article here. Watch the keynote address here.

Racial Fluidity and Inequality in the United States

American Journal of Sociology
Volume 118, Number 3, November 2012
pages 676–727
DOI: 10.1086/667722

Aliya Saperstein, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Stanford University

Andrew M. Penner, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

The authors link the literature on racial fluidity and inequality in the United States and offer new evidence of the reciprocal relationship between the two processes. Using two decades of longitudinal data from a national survey, they demonstrate that not only does an individual’s race change over time, it changes in response to myriad changes in social position, and the patterns are similar for both self-identification and classification by others. These findings suggest that, in the contemporary United States, microlevel racial fluidity serves to reinforce existing disparities by redefining successful or high-status people as white (or not black) and unsuccessful or low-status people as black (or not white). Thus, racial differences are both an input and an output in stratification processes; this relationship has implications for theorizing and measuring race in research, as well as for crafting policies that attempt to address racialized inequality.

Read the entire article here or here.

Losing My Cool: Love, Literature, and a Black Man’s Escape from the Crowd

Penguin Books
April 2010
240 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780143119623
ePub ISBN: 9781101404348

Thomas Chatterton Williams

Growing up, Thomas Chatterton Williams knew he loved three things in life: his parents, literature, and the intoxicating hip-hop culture that surrounded him. For years, he managed to juggle two disparate lifestyles, “keeping it real” in his friends’ eyes and studying for the SATs under his father’s strict tutelage-until it all threatened to spin out of control. Written with remarkable candor and emotional depth, Losing My Cool portrays the allure and danger of hip-hop culture with the authority of a true fan who’s lived through it all, while demonstrating the saving grace of literature and the power of the bond between father and son.

The Birth of A Nation: How a Legendary Filmmaker and a Crusading Editor Reignited America’s Civil War

PublicAffairs
2014-11-04
368 pages
6.300 x 9.500
Hardcover ISBN: 9781586489878
eBook ISBN: 9781586489885

Dick Lehr, Professor of Journalism
Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts

In 1915, two men—one a journalist agitator, the other a technically brilliant filmmaker—incited a public confrontation that roiled America, pitting black against white, Hollywood against Boston, and free speech against civil rights.

Monroe Trotter and D. W. Griffith were fighting over a film that dramatized the Civil War and Reconstruction in a post-Confederate South. Almost fifty years earlier, Monroe’s father, James, was a sergeant in an all-black Union regiment that marched into Charleston, South Carolina, just as the Kentucky cavalry—including Roaring Jack Griffith, D. W.’s father—fled for their lives. Griffith’s film, The Birth of a Nation, included actors in blackface, heroic portraits of Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and a depiction of Lincoln’s assassination. Freed slaves were portrayed as villainous, vengeful, slovenly, and dangerous to the sanctity of American values. It was tremendously successful, eventually seen by 25 million Americans. But violent protests against the film flared up across the country.

Monroe Trotter’s titanic crusade to have the film censored became a blueprint for dissent during the 1950s and 1960s. This is the fiery story of a revolutionary moment for mass media and the nascent civil rights movement, and the men clashing over the cultural and political soul of a still-young America standing at the cusp of its greatest days.

Racism And Redemption At The Tournament Of Roses Parade

Forbes
2014-12-31

Andrew Bender, Business Travel Blogger

Joan Williams holds the portrait from 1957, when she was Miss Crown City. On January 1, 2015, after 57 years, she will finally get to ride in the Tournament of Roses Parade. (Photo credit: Savannah Wood)

The theme of 2015′s Tournament of Roses Parade is “Inspiring Stories,” and the person leading it has a doozy: a tale of racism and redemption from a 57-year-old injustice involving the parade itself.

Riding on the first float in the 126th edition of this New Year’s Day tradition, before some 700,000 spectators in Pasadena, Calif. and an estimated 70 million television viewers, will be 82-year-old Joan Williams. She was first slated to ride in the parade in 1958 as Miss Crown City, but later denied the honor because she was African-American.

In 1957, Williams, her husband and two daughters had just moved to Pasadena (about 10 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles), where she worked for the city’s Department of Water and Power. She didn’t even know there was a Miss Crown City – a Pasadena city employee who appeared at civic ceremonies and rode on the city’s Rose Parade float – until her colleagues had nominated her for the position…

Read the entire article here.

Wickham: Silence of NYC’s good cops widens divide

USA Today
2014-12-30

DeWayne Wickham, Distinguished Professor of Journalism and Dean
School of Journalism
Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland

When Mayor Bill de Blasio stepped to the podium Saturday to eulogize Rafael Ramos, one of two New York City cops killed by a black gunman, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, five days before Christmas, hundreds of police outside the church staged a silent protest that sullied the solemn occasion.

The officers turned their backs to the large televisions set up for the overflow crowd to see Ramos’ funeral. Their pivot away from the screens was meant as a protest against the mayor, whom Patrick Lynch, the head of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, accused of having blood on his hands for not being more supportive of the city’s police officers.

That charge and the lemming-like act of back-turning were cheap shots that came as the city grieved the death of Ramos and Wenjian Liu, who were shot to death as they sat in their patrol car. The officers’ deaths came in the wake of a series of street demonstrations following a grand jury’s decision not to indict Daniel Pantaleo, a white New York City police officer who was videotaped using a chokehold to subdue Eric Garner, an unarmed black man, whose death was labeled a homicide. Pantaleo and several other cops were attempting to arrest Garner for illegally selling untaxed cigarettes.

In his first public comments after the grand jury’s decision, de Blasio said he could relate to the pain Garner’s father was feeling and admitted that he and his wife, who is black, have warned their son about how “to take special care in any encounters he has with the police officers, who are there to protect him.”

That’s a warning many black parents routinely give their boys — and one that de Blasio, understandably, would offer his mixed-race son. They could also have reminded him that New York has long been a petri dish for police abuse of blacks. Remember Abner Louima. Amadou Diallo. Patrick Dorismond. Sean Bell…

Read the entire article here.