Mixed Race Studies

De Blasio Sworn In as New York Mayor

The New York Times
2014-01-01

Michael M. Grynbaum

Bill de Blasio was sworn in as the 109th mayor of New York City early Wednesday, at two minutes past the stroke of midnight.

The oath of office was administered by Eric T. Schneiderman, the attorney general of New York, in a brief ceremony inside the front yard of the mayor’s rowhouse in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where Mr. de Blasio stood with his family behind a chain-link fence and beside a bare-limbed tree.

“I want to say to all of you how grateful we are,” Mr. de Blasio, who wore a black topcoat and cobalt blue tie, told a crowd of journalists and well-wishers, including the actor Steve Buscemi and Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont.

“From the beginning,” the mayor continued, “this has been our family together, reaching out to the people of this city to make a change that we all needed.” He added: “This is a beginning of a road we will travel together.”

The ceremony, which precedes a formal inauguration to take place at noon on the City Hall steps, was the culmination of a campaign in which Mr. de Blasio carefully calibrated his image as a fiery populist, intent on easing the disparities of a gilded city, and a proud husband and father, whose biracial family seemed a paragon of multi-cultural New York…

Read the entire article here.

Jolene Ivey on The Rock Newman Show

The Rock Newman Show
Busboys and Poets
Washington, D.C.
2013-10-19

Rock Newman, Host

Jolene Ivey, Representative, 47th District, Maryland House of Delegates
Also candidate for Maryland Lieutenant Governor

Maryland’s House of Delegates member and 2014 Maryland gubernatorial Running Mate, Jolene Ivey visits The Rock Newman Show. Delegate Jolene Ivey talks about growing up in Maryland, her family, issues in the state of Maryland and her political career. Including the campaign that could make her the first female African American lieutenant governor in Maryland’s history.

Partial transcription by Steven F. Riley

00:09:48 Rock Newman:  In the spirit of my audience, understanding who you are. Let’s go back. Let’s go all the way back. I’d like to know where you where born, where you grew up, where you went to elementary school. Let’s start with those three things. Let’s go all the way back.

Jolene Ivey: Oh boy. My dad was in the military, actually he was a Buffalo Soldier.

RN: Okay.

JI: So he was in World War II and the Korean War, so 20 years. Then he became a public school teacher in Prince George’s County public schools for the next 20 years.

RN: Oh wow. Where did he teach?

JI: He taught at Douglas in south county and then he taught at High Point, which was my alma mater in Beltsville.

RN: Okay.

JI: So he taught at Douglas when we had segregation, of course all the black kids, all the black teachers were there.

RN: Sure.

JI: And then when they desegregated, they sent a few black teachers to other schools. That’s when he got moved to High Point.

RN: Okay.

JI: Yeah. But in any event, he and my mom were married in the fifties. Now, my mom is white..

RN: Uh uh.

JI: …and my dad’s black.

RN: Right.

JI: And it was illegal at that time for them to be married in Maryland… or Virginia. So in this area, they had to live in D.C. [Be]cause D.C. was the one place they could be legally wed. So we lived in Northeast D.C., lived on…

RN: Let me just stop you there. [Be]cause you know, I try to take those moments for my audience. You know, that stuff doesn’t just float by. It’s like, wow, wait a minute. There’re certain posts we can latch on to. Did you hear what she said? In the fifties, as early back as the fifties!

JI: In fact it was the sixties and it was still illegal.

RN: Still illegal..

JI: I think it was… [19]66 before the law changed.

RN: Maryland and Virginia, so they actually,… for them to be married and to reside in Maryland and Virginia your mom and dad. Dad who’s black and the mother’s who’s white, they had to live in the District of Columbia.

JI: They didn’t have any choice. Because you know, the Lovings, the couple that changed the law the whole country, they were in Virginia…

RN: Right.

JI: …when they got married. And they got in a whole heap of trouble.

RN: Right.

JI: And it ended up being a Supreme Court case.

RN: Yes.

JI: Fortunately we won the case. The right side won.

RN: Right.

JI: But, my parents and us, lived in Northeast D.C. in Riggs Park.

RN: Okay.

JI: My mom left when I was three. And my dad raised us. He told her you can do whatever you want, but the kids stay with me. So dad was just an outstanding father. And he raised me and my brother. Um, my stepmother joined us when I was about seven. And you know.

RN: Where did you go to elementary school?

JI: I went to LaSalle Elementary right there in Riggs Park and it was kind of tough on me then boy… middle school, Bertie Backus Middle School. I loved the school, but I had some bad memories from part of it.

RN: And what are the bad memories?

JI: Well, you know what it’s like Rock. You grow up in an all-black neighborhood and especially back then as light I am. I was getting my butt whipped! I mean, and I was real skinny too.

RN: A little tiny thing.

JI: A little tiny thing! Getting picked on. But anyway, it made me tough. And by the time I went to high school, I ended going to high school the same school my dad taught at. So year—which is High Point High School—the first year we still lived in D.C., so we had to pay for me to go the first year, [be]cause it was out of the region. But after that we moved to Prince George’s county and I was able to just continue to go to High Point…

…00:21:36

Rock Newman: Jolene, before we went to break, we got a little biographical information about you. And we left off where obviously there was the incredible strong influence of your father, your grandmother you said was an influence also and you said she brought some joy in your life.

What I was wondering, did you have a particular idol outside of your father and grandmother, a teacher, a public figure, whatever, that might have been… who had an impact on your life early on?

Jolene Ivey: You know, it’s gonna sound corny, okay, but it was Martin Luther King. And…

RN: That doesn’t sound corny at all… [Be]cause we all have a dream.

JI: Right, Right. And you know, he was such a point of discussion in my family. And when he was killed, there was a television, a local television [that] came to our school to interview kids about how they felt..

RN: This was now maybe when you were in Junior High?

JI: No, No.

RN: Elementary.

JI: At the time it happened, I was just a little kid and I remember this local television came out to interview kids about what was his impact on our lives. And I know that when they saw me sitting in that class, they were like, “what the heck is this little ‘white-looking’ girl doing in this class,” but they interviewed me and I came home and I told my parents, told my family, “I’m going to be on television tonight.” And they were like, “Yeah, you don’t know what you’re talking about!” And so, when it was time for it to come on, I went and turned on the TV and they were like “What’s she watching?” And they came, and sure enough, there I was. And they asked me what his impact had been on me and I said, “he got us a seat on the bus.”

RN: Go on now!…

Fathers, Farmers, Fighters Leaders: The Robbins Family at War (Civil War Roundtable of the Rock Creek Nature Center)

U.S. Park Service
Rock Creek Nature Center
5200 Glover Road, NW
Washington, D.C.
2014-01-04, 09:30 EST (Local Time)

Marvin Jones, Executive Director
Chowan Discovery Group

The Robbinses lived across racial lines and along the borders of slavery. What did six members of this free mixed-race family do when the Civil War came their way? And what was their fate? I get to present their remarkable story, bolstered by research from the National Archives.

Racial identity development of mixed race college students

Clemson University
2012
216 pages

Helen Diamond Steele

The purpose of this study was to identify the factors that influence mixed race college students’ choice of racial identity. This study also explored whether or not there are any differences among each of the racial identity groups’ perceptions of institutional support for mixed race college students. The theoretical framework of this study was formed by Chickering’s Theory of Psychosocial Identity Development, Wijeyesinghe’s Factor Model of Multiracial Identity, and Renn’s Patterns of Multiracial Identity. The eight research questions that guided this study addressed hypothesized factors that may have a relationship with a mixed race student’s racial identity and students’ perceptions of institutional support for mixed race students. The sample included traditional age college students (18-24 at the time of the survey) who are mixed race (which is defined as having biological parents belonging to different racial groups) and enrolled as full-time students (registered for twelve or more credits) at an institution that was a member of the University System of Georgia. This study employed a survey instrument that included 63 multiple-choice and Likert scale questions and was divided into six sections: (a) racial ancestry, (b) racial identity, (c) physical appearance, (d) cultural attachment, (e) other social identities, and (f) institutional characteristics. The following quantitative methods were employed to analyze the collected data: (a) descriptive statistics, (b) Cochran-Mantel-Haenszel test, (c) analysis of variance, (d) multinomial logistic regression, and (e) factor analysis. Implications for future research, policy, and practice are included. Keywords: mixed race, racial identity development.

Order the dissertation here.

Marylander of the Year: Benjamin Todd Jealous [Editorial]

The Baltimore Sun
2013-12-28

Our view: Jealous leaves the NAACP a revitalized and relevant institution that is at the forefront of the social justice struggles of our time

In the spring of 2008, as the prospect that America would elect its first black president became more and more likely, the organization that did as much as any to make that watershed possible had fallen on hard times. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, America’s oldest and best known civil rights group, was in disarray. It’s last president and CEO had abruptly quit, and it had laid off half of its staff to balance the books. Its membership and relevance in what many were heralding as a post-racial America seemed destined to wane, and one of the defining institutions of the 20th century had no sure place in the 21st.

The answer to that challenge was an unlikely one: Benjamin Todd Jealous, a 35-year-old, bi-racial foundation president from California who was born a decade after the civil rights movement’s greatest triumphs. To call his selection controversial would be an understatement. Some saw it not just as risky but as a repudiation of a century of sacrifice by the NAACP’s members.

Five years later, he is leaving the NAACP a changed institution. Its finances are stabilized, its membership is up, its social media presence is robust and its role in American public life is clear and forceful. Mr. Jealous brought energy, vision and focus to an organization in need of all three and showed a new generation that the pursuit of social justice remains a vital cause in these and any times. And if we may be parochial for a moment, he kept its headquarters in Baltimore. We are proud to name him The Baltimore Sun’s 2013 Marylander of the Year…

Read the entire editorial here.

Struck by Lightning? Interracial Intimacy and Racial Justice

Human Rights Quarterly
Volume 25, Number 2, May 2003
pages 528-562
DOI: 10.1353/hrq.2003.0017

Kevin R. Johnson, Dean and Mabie-Apallas Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o Studies
University of California, Davis

Kristina L. Burrows

Rachel F. Moran, Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 2001), pp. xii, 271. Cloth, $30.

If true love is like lightning, what can romantic choice have to do with racial justice[?].

I. Introduction

Over the last decade, growing attention has been paid to the mixed race population in the United States. Much of the literature on the subject offers compelling stories of the life experiences of persons with African American and white parents. In addition, the controversy over the proper classification of mixed race people for Census 2000 attracted national attention.

Only recently has legal history scholarship begun to analyze the rich history of the legal regulation of racial mixture in the United States and its modern day repercussions. Breaking important new ground in this emerging field, Rachel Moran’s book Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance represents the first comprehensive review of the intricacies of the law and policy of racial mixture, ambitiously surveying wide-ranging legal terrain from the anti-miscegenation laws to transracial adoption. By tackling a much-neglected topic that is central to a full appreciation of civil rights in the modern United States, Interracial Intimacy deserves attention and will likely serve as an influential guide to future research in the field.

As Interracial Intimacy unravels the law’s efforts to regulate and respond to intermarriage, it offers powerful evidence that race is a social and legal construct, a product of our collective mind rather than an immutable biological fact. But Moran goes well beyond that. She demonstrates how intermarriage is inextricably linked to the quest for racial justice. A central theme of Interracial Intimacy is that the prevailing racial segregation in the United States makes intermarriage far less likely than would be the case in an integrated society. The low rate of interracial relationships is a function of pervasive housing, school, and employment segregation, as well as the lack of racial diversity in higher education. Socioeconomic class disparities reflected in residential and employment patterns factor in as well, implicating the connection between race, class, and marriage.

Put simply, people are less likely to select mates of another race if they rarely meet them. Because Americans of different races continue to live separate daily lives, we should expect that people will continue to marry others of their own race. Moran’s reference to love striking “like lightning” makes love seem all the more romantic. However, as we all know, one’s location can affect whether he or she is hit by lightning. So too, location and geography matter for love and romance. The effect of location on love and romance is one of Interracial Intimacy’s powerful insights. Somewhat ironically, Moran proves that, at one level, the segregationists of the old South were entirely correct: segregation and “race mixing” indeed are—and always have been—deeply interrelated. As Gunnar Myrdal observed in his classic study of race relations in the United States, “[e]very single measure [of segregation] is defended as necessary to block ‘social equality’ which in its turn is held necessary to prevent ‘intermarriage.'”

One can only speculate why serious legal scholarship has failed for so long to analyze the connection between love, intimacy, and racial justice. In part, the failure may stem from the view that intensely private and personal decisions are immune from legal purview. By implicating issues of passion and eroticism, intimacy may appear to be beyond rational analysis. Moran’s book breaks the long silence in legal scholarship on this critically important topic.

Interracial Intimacy also identifies deeply perplexing questions worthy of further exploration. Notably, African Americans marry whites much less frequently than Asian Americans, Latina/os, and Native Americans do. Are these other minorities effectively “white,” or at least “whiter,” than African Americans? One can only wonder about the future of interracial marriage between African Americans and whites and what it portends for racial progress.

Ultimately, Interracial Intimacy leaves open whether optimism or pessimism is justified about black/white intermarriage in the next millennium and its impact on civil rights in the United States. In that way, the book proves…

The 10 Best Black Books of 2013 (Non-Fiction)

The AFRO
2013-12-24

Kam Williams, Special to the AFRO

The 10 Best Black Books of 2013 (Non-Fiction)

1. (1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race Edited by Yaba Blay, Ph.D. with photography by Noelle Theard
2. Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities by Craig Steven Wilder
3. David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants by Malcolm Gladwell
4. The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross by Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Dr. Donald Yacovone…

Read the entire list here.

Biracial Girls Will Be Fine If Their Dolls Don’t Look Like Them

The Root
2013-12-27

Jenée Desmond-Harris

Race Manners: A rainbow of toys is great, but how kids live is much more important than how they play.

“Hello. I’m wondering if you can offer some broad guidance before I head out to the malls for Christmas shopping. I have two beautiful nieces in a very diverse, melting pot family. My sisters and I are white, and one has a daughter who is half-Japanese, and my younger sister’s husband is half-African American. The two little ones are 4 and 6. Both are very much in the girly-girl phase, pink, purple, dolls, etc. and also great friends.

“I’m well aware that there are now, thankfully, dolls in many different ethnicities and even with different hair textures. But what’s the right choice for these two? The 4-year-old is Japanese and Caucasian but has light brown hair and essentially looks more like brunette white dolls. The 6-year-old who is half African American has fair skin and long dark hair and probably looks more like white dolls than African-American dolls. If I purchase dolls for them, should they receive the ones that reflect their nonwhite ethnicity or the way they look, or does it matter if they are at this point unaware of any color-related differences?” —Shopping Sensitively

Well, Christmas is over, but I decided to answer this anyway. After all, the relationship between little girls of color and dolls is by no means limited to the holiday season.

It’s why people were so ecstatic (seriously, what took so long?) when Natural Girls United’s line of dolls with realistic black hair came out and why it was so moving when the mom behind Chocolate Hair/Vanilla Care styled this doll’s hair so its braids (as well as its complexion and outfit) would match her daughter’s exactly.

Generally speaking, it sucks if little girls can’t access dolls that look like what they see in the mirror (that extends beyond race to body shape and size, etc). And when they can, everyone is happy. I think we can all agree on that.

Of course, when it comes to color, hair and background matching, your situation is extra complicated because you’re dealing with kids whose identity is up in the air (it’s anyone’s guess how they’ll see themselves 10 years from now when America’s demographics have changed even more), and who might not look anything like what a factory-made plastic representation of their particular racial mixtures would, even if those existed.

I just read—and can’t stop thinking about—Yaba Blay’s (1)ne Drop, which explores the way historical definitions of race help shape contemporary identities through a collection of individual stories and accompanying photos. Let’s just say there’s a lot of variation and very little predictability when it comes to people’s actual skin and hair color and how they identify. A doll manufacturer could spend the rest of the year producing all of the variations of complexion and features and textures chronicled in the project, and there would still be people who couldn’t find reflections of themselves…

Read the entire article here.

Off-White Like Me

LA Weekly
Culver City, California
2008-03-26

David Ehrenstein

Biracial? Tell it to the hosts of Fox and Friends. Obama is black.

On a cross-country trip in the summer of 1957, my family stopped in Oklahoma City. There, my father asked a policeman for directions to the state capitol. The officer began to offer them, when I leaned forward from the back seat. Suddenly the policeman’s demeanor changed. A scowl crossed his face as he asked my parents what they were doing in town and how long they planned to stay. Not immediately sensing his hostility, they volunteered that they were tourists and were stopping overnight. He then brusquely ordered them to “move on!” without directing them to the capitol. My parents were flabbergasted. They had no idea what had inspired his shift in attitude. But I did. All 10 years of me had just discovered what it was like to have pure racism staring you in the face.

My father was white. My mother, half-black. She wore makeup to cover her light, rather blotchy complexion, so her race wasn’t always apparent. I was darker-hued, and, therefore, as I leaned up into the light of the car that day, unmistakable.

Race was rarely discussed in my family. Growing up in the New York suburb of Flushing, Queens, I had the luck to live in an integrated neighborhood. People of different religions and ethnicities co-existed all around me. My favorite movie was The Thief of Bagdad,whose star, Sabu, looked, I thought, quite a bit like me. And wasn’t that terrific? He rode a magic carpet. All the neighborhood kids liked him, and practically all of them liked me too. Should the N word be uttered by some pintsize lout, it was treated as evidence of “bad parents.” The cop in Oklahoma was a different story. His face, a threat and a promise of “more where that came from,” were attitudes held outside my becalmed suburban bubble. America does judge a book by its cover. “Biracial”? Tell it to that cop. I’m black…

…Anatole Broyard, book critic for The New York Times and one of the most-talked-about intellectuals of the post–World War II period, was born in 1920 and died in 1990. Upon his death, the long-whispered rumor that he was a black man passing for white burst forth as fact. The light-skinned issue of light-skinned parents, Broyard hid his lineage and became what black scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. called“a virtuoso of ambiguity and equivocation.”

In a piece he wrote for Commentary in 1950 titled “Portrait of the Inauthentic Negro,” Broyard said his subject “is not only estranged from whites, he is also estranged from his own group and from himself. Since his companions are a mirror in which he sees himself as ugly, he must reject them; and since his own self is mainly a tension between an accusation and a denial, he can hardly find it, much less live in it. . . He is adrift without a role in a world predicated on roles.”…

Read the entire article here.

Looking for Co-presenters for 2014 Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference (Chicago, November)

2013-12-26

Kim Potowski, Associate Professor of Linguistics
University of Illinois, Chicago

I would like to submit a panel for the 2014 Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference about language and the ways in which language (dialects, code-switching, etc.) reflects and enacts the identities of mixed “race” and mixed “ethnicity” individuals and groups.

By “mixed ethnicity” I mean to include, for example, intra-Latino individuals (e.g. “MexiRicans”), intra-Asian individuals (e.g. “Chinese-Korean”), and other such combinations. Again, the focus of the panel is the ways in which such individuals use and are marked by their linguistic repertoires. Many MexiRicans, for example, speak a variety of Spanish that shows traits from both Mexican and Puerto Rican dialects.

Ideally all presentations will incorporate some mixed race theory, but we can discuss this.

If you know anyone who might like to be considered for this panel, please contact me, Kim Potowski at kimpotow@uic.edu. I would need to receive abstract proposals and author information (name, institution, areas of scholarly interest) by January 2, 2014.

Thanks!