Mixed Race Studies

Meeting the Needs of Ethnic Minority Children – Including Refugee, Black and Mixed Parentage Children: A Handbook for Professionals

Jessica Kingsley Publishers
2000
336 pages
234mm x 156mm / 9.25in x 6in
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-85302-959-2

Edited by:

Kedar N. Dwivedi, MBBS, MD, DPM, FRCPsych, Consultant Psychiatrist
Northampton Child and Family Consultation Service

Experts from a variety of disciplines contribute to this substantially revised edition of this popular handbook – new chapters are included on identity work, refugee children, and the work of the Asian Project. The book also examines the central importance for professionals of the Lawrence Enquiry; the move to include more public services in the Race Relations Act; increased awareness of institutional racism; and the specific inclusion of ethnic minority children in health improvement programmes. Offering practical guidance based on sound research and practice, the book provides a focus on some of the most difficult and topical aspects of this field of work.

Contents

• Preface, Kedar Nath Dwivedi
• Foreword, Professor Richard Williams, University of Glamorgan
• 1. Introduction, Kedar Nath Dwivedi
• 2. Culture and Personality, Kedar Nath Dwivedi
• 3. Mental Health Needs of Ethnic Minority Children, Rajeev Banhatti, Northampton Child and Family Services, and Surya Bhate, The Tees and North East Yorkshire Trust
• 4. Family Therapy and Ethnic Minorities, Annie Lau, North East London Mental Health Trust
• 5. Children, Families and Therapists: Clinical considerations and ethnic minority cultures, Begum Maitra, Child and Family Consultation Centre, Hammersmith, and Ann Miller, Marlborough Family Service
• 6. Can talking about culture be therapeutic? Tasneen Fateh, Nurum Islam, Farra Khan, Cecilia Ko, Marigold Lee, Rubia Malik, Marlborough Family Service, and Inga-Britt Krause, Tavistock and Portman Mental Health Trust
• 7. What is a Positive Black Identity? Nick Banks, University of Nottingham
• 8. The Emergence of Ethnicity: A tale of three cultures, John Burnham, Birmingham Children’s Hospital (NHS) Trust, and Queenie Harris, Charles Burn Clinic, Birmingham
• 9. Anti-racist Strategies for Educational Performance: Facilitating successful learning for all children, Gerry German, Communities Empowerment Network
• 10. Mixed Race Children and Families, Nick Banks, University of Nottingham
• 11. Adoption of Children from Minority Groups, Professor Harry Zeitlin, North Essex Child and Family Consultation Service
• 12. Residential Care for Ethnic Minority Children, Harish Mehra, Birmingham Social Services
• 13. Practical Approaches to Work with Refugee Children, Jeremy Woodcock, University of Bristol
• 14. Community and Youth work with Asian Women and Girls, Radha Dwivedi, Northampton Child and Family Services
• 15. A Conceptual Framework of Identity Formation in a Society of Multiple Cultures: Applying theory to practice, James Rodriquez, Family Research Consortium, Ana Marie Cauce, Department of Psychology, Seattle, and Linda Wilson, Casey Family Programs, Seattle
• Bibliographic References
• Index

Defining Mixed Race Feminism

Musings of a Mixed Race Feminist: Random diatribes from a mixed race feminist scholar.
2014-05-16

Donna J. Nicol, Associate Professor Women & Gender Studies
California State University, Fullerton

…Question of the Day: What is mixed race feminism? Good question given mixed race and gender issues aren’t often brought in conversation together even with the academic use of intersectionality theory.

Let’s start with some basic terminology. I define feminism as a critique on male power with efforts to change it. In essence, for me, feminism is both a theory and a form of activism. This means that feminism is for everyday folks; not just folks with degrees or lots of titles…

…I view one’s claim of being mixed race as a personal choice at self-definition; not simply a matter of DNA. I object to “one-droppist” logic in which a person with any non-white ancestry can not claim to be of Caucasian/European descent. I find it totally illogical that people of color (anyone who is non-white) often play the role of “one-drop” police when the policy and practice of “one-dropping” originated while African Americans were still enslaved and continued through the period of Jim Crow segregation. Why would oppressed people use the oppressors terminology to limit our self-definition is beyond me. I also object to the relative silence from the mixed race community (most prominently found via online forums) in calling out white racism which often forbids mixed race persons from claiming their white ancestry. It is like whiteness is reserved for only “pure bloods” or “mono-racial” white people. Many mixed race people I have encountered say nothing about their experiences with racism from their “white side” but can give you time, date, place and even weather reports when they experience discrimination from non-whites…

Read the entire article here.

Allyson Hobbs: Racial Passing and African American Family Life in Jim Crow America

The Ethics@noon Series
The McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society
Stanford University
2011-02-04

Allyson Hobbs, Assistant Professor of History
Stanford University

On February 4th, 2011 Allyson Hobbs discussed the Jim Crow era as a watershed in the history of racial passing. The talk examines passing’s disruptions and dislocations to black families in Jim Crow America. Allyson Hobbs is an assistant professor of American history. Her research interests include racial mixture, migration and urbanization, and the intersections of race, class and gender.

The Ethics@noon series consists of informal noon-time talks and discussions, focused on different ethical issues. Each week, Stanford faculty tackle important questions of ethics that arise in private and public life.

The McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society is committed to bringing ethical reflection to bear on important social problems through research, teaching, and engagement.

One Drop of Love – Lounge Theater 1, Los Angeles

Plays 411
May 2014

Saturday, 2014-05-31 20:30 PDT (Local Time)
Lounge Theatre 1
6201 Santa Monica Boulevard
Los Angeles, California 90038

How does our belief in ‘race’ affect our most intimate relationships?

One Drop of Love is a multimedia solo performance exploring family, race, love, pain – and a path towards reconciliation. The show is produced by Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and the show’s writer/performer Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni.

For more information, click here.

More Hispanics Declaring Themselves White

The New York Times
2014-05-21

Nate Cohn

Hispanics are often described as driving up the nonwhite share of the population. But a new study of census forms finds that more Hispanics are identifying as white.

An estimated net 1.2 million Americans of the 35 million Americans identified in 2000 as of “Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin,” as the census form puts it, changed their race from “some other race” to “white” between the 2000 and 2010 censuses, according to research presented at an annual meeting of the Population Association of America and reported by Pew Research.

The researchers, who have not yet published their findings, compared individual census forms from the 2000 and 2010 censuses. They found that millions of Americans answered the census questions about race and ethnicity differently in 2000 and 2010. The largest shifts were among Americans of Hispanic origin, who are the nation’s fastest growing ethnic group by total numbers…

…The data provide new evidence consistent with the theory that Hispanics may assimilate as white Americans, like the Italians or Irish, who were not universally considered to be white. It is particularly significant that the shift toward white identification withstood a decade of debate over immigration and the country’s exploding Hispanic population, which might have been expected to inculcate or reinforce a sense of Hispanic identity, or draw attention to divisions that remain between Hispanics and non-Hispanic white Americans. Research suggests that Hispanics who have experienced discrimination are less likely to identify as white…

Read the entire article here.

Almost Free: A Story about Family and Race in Antebellum Virginia by Eva Sheppard Wolf (review) [Padraig Riley]

Civil War History
Volume 60, Number 2, June 2014
pages 199-201
DOI: 10.1353/cwh.2014.0041

Padraig Riley, Assistant Professor of History
Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

Wolf, Eva Sheppard, Almost Free: A Story about Family and Race in Antebellum Virginia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012)

Almost Free is the story of Samuel Johnson of Warrenton, Virginia, a mixed-race slave who worked successfully to free himself and then purchased his wife and children in the early nineteenth century. Less successfully, he then struggled for many years to free his extended family, and to establish a legacy of black freedom in the heart of the slaveholding republic. Relying on a remarkable series of petitions Johnson sent to the Virginia state legislature from 1811 to 1837, Wolf reconstructs the man’s life and identity. This entails considerable speculation, but Wolf’s imaginings are balanced by a rich archival source base covering much of Johnson’s life. This accessible book is ideal for undergraduate instruction, and it is an important addition to scholarship on race and slavery. For Wolf, Samuel Johnson demonstrates that free blacks were not simply “slaves without masters” and that race in the antebellum South was a fluid concept, rather than a simple black-and-white proposition.

Wolf contends that race was not dictated by statute but rather was “something people themselves created and re-created in their multiple interactions with one another” (3). Samuel Johnson became free in 1812, well after an 1806 statute that compelled all freed slaves to leave the state within a year, under threat of being sold back into slavery. Because he wanted to remain in Virginia, he had to petition the state legislature. While most such petitions failed, Johnson’s succeeded because he was backed by both local whites and a few influential political figures. Thus, at the local level, whites did not simply act out the 1806 statute or Thomas Jefferson’s fears about the dangers of slave emancipation. They instead accepted Samuel Johnson as their neighbor, quite literally in the case of John and Maria Smith, who lived next door to him.

As a free man, Johnson saved money to purchase his wife and children, becoming, like many free black slaveholders, the master of his own family. He also owned land and sued white men in court. But, ultimately, the law left him and his family vulnerable. Despite numerous petitions to the state legislature, his family members were never allowed to remain in Virginia as free inhabitants. Had Johnson freed his family, they would have been legally bound to leave the state within a year; had he unexpectedly died, his family would have remained enslaved, subject to sale. In addition, Johnson suffered numerous other legal restraints as a free man of color, from restrictions on owning firearms to being unable to testify against a white man in court. He could be a white man’s neighbor, but he was very far from being his equal.

Why, then, did Johnson stay? Wolf poses this question quite poignantly by contrasting Johnson with Spencer Malvin, a free African American man who married Johnson’s daughter Lucy in 1826. Malvin, born free, knew the evils of slavery firsthand: as a teenager, he had been apprenticed to one Fielding Sinclair, who killed his adolescent slave. Sinclair was charged with murder, but the case was dismissed for lack of evidence, perhaps because Malvin could not testify against a white man. After Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831, Malvin openly attacked slavery, circulating antislavery papers in Warrenton. He left Virginia and his family in 1832, along with a fugitive named Sandy, eventually settling in Pennsylvania.

But Johnson and his daughter Lucy remained, even after white hostility to free blacks increased in the wake of Turner’s rebellion. Many of the local whites who had supported Johnson’s petitions in the past now requested that the state legislature support the colonization of all free blacks outside of Virginia. For Wolf, Johnson’s decision to remain under such circumstances suggests an act of resistance: “In staying, they rejected racial exclusion. . . . They challenged the notion that Virginia belonged to white people” (107).

On the one hand, this contention is clearly true. But in other respects, Samuel Johnson’s life was marked by deference, rather than challenge, and white support for his limited freedom was a sign of condescension rather than recognition. Thus Philip Pendleton Barbour, as Wolf shows us, one of the foremost defenders of slavery during…

Beyond the One-Drop Rule: Views of Obama’s Race and Voting Intention in 2008

Sociological Science
Volume 1, March 2014 (2014-04-17)
pages 70-80
DOI: 10.15195/v1.a6

Simon Cheng, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Connecticut

David Weakliem, Professor of Sociology
University of Connecticut

We use data from a national survey of likely voters conducted before the 2008 election to study the association between Obama’s perceived racial identity and voters’ choices. Voters who saw Obama as biracial were substantially more likely to vote for him, suggesting that many Americans regard a biracial identity more favorably than a black identity. The relationship was stronger among Democrats than among Republicans. The potential implications of our findings for the future of race in American politics are discussed.

Read the entire article here.

Learning from the Collusions, Collisions, and Contentions with White Privilege Experienced in the United States by White Mothers of Sons and Daughters whose Race is not White

Cardinal Stritch University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
2014
405 pages
ATI Number: 3614469

Jennifer Lee Slye Chandler

The purpose of this study was to collect and examine stories from women who identify as White in the United States who are mothers whose sons and daughters they do not identify as White. The stories collected are about their interactions as White women (who are mothers of daughters and sons who are not White) with family, friends, strangers, doctors, daycare providers, teachers, and principals. Their stories are also about their thoughts, feelings, decisions, and actions regarding themselves as White and as mothers. The research question was: How is White privilege manifested in the lives of White women who are mothers of daughters and sons who they do not identify as White?

Based on interviews with thirty White mothers whose sons and daughters they do not identify as White living in twenty-four locations across the United States interviewed over an eight month period, three manifestations of White privilege were identified and analyzed: collusions, collisions, and contentions. These three social processes were incorporated into Harro’s (2013) cycle of socialization. The findings from the current study were correlated with findings from prior studies of White privilege with White mothers of daughters and sons who they do not identify as White and also with the findings from studies with White teachers. The conclusions from this study support recommendations in three areas of theory: (1) updating theories on White privilege; (2) updating one of the tenets of Critical Race Theory; and (3) updating theories on motherhood. The conclusions from this study support also recommendations in three areas of research: (1) research on White privilege; (2) research on teacher preparation; and (3) research on motherhood.

Purchase the dissertation here.

Almost Free: A Story about Family and Race in Antebellum Virginia

University of Georgia Press
June 2012
192 pages
6 b&w photos, 1 map
Trim size: 5.5 x 8.5
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8203-3229-1
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8203-3230-7
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-8203-4364-8

Eva Sheppard Wolf, Associate Professor of History
San Francisco State University

In Almost Free, Eva Sheppard Wolf uses the story of Samuel Johnson, a free black man from Virginia attempting to free his family, to add detail and depth to our understanding of the lives of free blacks in the South.

There were several paths to freedom for slaves, each of them difficult. After ten years of elaborate dealings and negotiations, Johnson earned manumission in August 1812. An illiterate “mulatto” who had worked at the tavern in Warrenton as a slave, Johnson as a freeman was an anomaly, since free blacks made up only 3 percent of Virginia’s population. Johnson stayed in Fauquier County and managed to buy his enslaved family, but the law of the time required that they leave Virginia if Johnson freed them. Johnson opted to stay. Because slaves’ marriages had no legal standing, Johnson was not legally married to his enslaved wife, and in the event of his death his family would be sold to new owners. Johnson’s story dramatically illustrates the many harsh realities and cruel ironies faced by blacks in a society hostile to their freedom.

Wolf argues that despite the many obstacles Johnson and others faced, race relations were more flexible during the early American republic than is commonly believed. It could actually be easier for a free black man to earn the favor of elite whites than it would be for blacks in general in the post-Reconstruction South. Wolf demonstrates the ways in which race was constructed by individuals in their day-to-day interactions, arguing that racial status was not simply a legal fact but a fluid and changeable condition. Almost Free looks beyond the majority experience, focusing on those at society’s edges to gain a deeper understanding of the meaning of freedom in the slaveholding South.

Exploring the Political Exploitation of Blood Quantum in the U.S.

Indian Country Today Media Network
2013-05-17

Vincent Schilling, Executive Vice President
Schilling Media, Inc.

Arica L. Coleman is an assistant professor of Black American Studies at the University of Delaware. She is African American and Native American (Rappahannock), which may help explain why she has conducted research for the past 12 years on what she calls the “intersections between Native American, African American and European peoples in the southeastern United States with a focus on the etymology of race, the ideology of racial purity and its historical and contemporary effects on racial and identity formation.” In non-academic terms, that means she has done a lot of thinking about the relations and interactions of blacks, Indians and whites on the East Coast, primarily in Virginia.

Coleman has turned her Ph.D. dissertation into an upcoming book, That the Blood Stay Pure: African Americans, Native Americans and the Predicament of Race and Identity in Virginia, and agreed to talk with ICTMN about her experiences as an African American woman who gets a lot of grief for also being an American Indian.

Wouldn’t you say that back in the day, American Indians and African Americans all went to the same parties?

Yes, we went to the same parties and we also worked the slave plantations together. This is what a lot of people do not understand when you talk about slavery. My African American brothers and sisters will have a problem with this because they like to look at slavery only in terms of black and white. The truth is—and specifically in Virginia—there was Indian slavery. The first slaves in the Americas were Native American and this business that the Native Americans died off as a result of disease and war [is inaccurate]—those were not the only reasons for their demise, there was the Indian slave trade, which is something we do not discuss a lot.

When you had people of African descent being brought across the Atlantic to the Americas, you also had Native American people throughout the Americas being dispersed throughout the world, including portions of South Africa and Angola. When you look at the records of the South—and specifically in Virginia—they talk about Indian, Negro and mulatto slaves…. From the 16th century through the 19th century, you had Native American peoples identified as Negro and as mulatto.

When you look in those records and see these terms you cannot automatically assume that these folks were African, because they could have been a mix of Native American or European as well. Racial labels have never been constant or used with consistency…

Read the entire interview here.