Mixed Race Studies

Luck and a Shrewd Strategy Fueled de Blasio’s Ascension

The New York Times
2013-09-11

Michael Barbaro, Political Writer

The commercial that changed the course of the mayor’s race almost never happened.

Bill de Blasio’s campaign team had mused about building an ad around his wife, Chirlane McCray, a telegenic African-American poet, then abandoned the concept.

They then turned to his 15-year-old son, but nothing seemed to go right. The de Blasio family kitchen in Brooklyn was not big enough for the camera crew, so they borrowed a bigger one from a neighbor.

The neighbor’s kitchen turned out to be too fancy, sending the wrong message for a populist candidate. So a long lens was used to blur out the expensive fixtures.

But when the commercial was finally shown to the candidate and his wife, they seemed overcome, instantly recognizing the power of its message: that the aggressive policing of the Bloomberg era was not an abstraction to Mr. de Blasio, it was an urgent personal worry within his biracial household.

“This,” predicted the campaign’s pollster, Anna Greenberg, “will be huge.”…

Read the entire article here.

Comorbid substance use disorders with other Axis I and II mental disorders among treatment-seeking Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders, and mixed-race people

Journal of Psychiatric Research
Available online 2013-09-09
DOI: 10.1016/j.jpsychires.2013.08.022

Li-Tzy Wu, ScD, RN, MA, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, School of Medicine
Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina

Dan G. Blazer, MD, PhD, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences; Professor of Community and Family Medicine
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, School of Medicine
Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina

Kenneth R. Gersing, MD, Clinical Associate
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, School of Medicine
Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina

Bruce Burchett, PhD, Assistant Professor in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, School of Medicine
Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina

Marvin S. Swartz, MD, Professor in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, School of Medicine
Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina

Paolo Mannelli, MD, Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, School of Medicine
Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina

Little is known about behavioral healthcare needs of Asian Americans (AAs), Native Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders (NHs/PIs), and mixed-race people (MRs)—the fastest growing segments of the U.S. population. We examined substance use disorder (SUD) prevalences and comorbidities among AAs, NHs/PIs, and MRs (N=4572) in a behavioral health electronic health record database. DSM-IV diagnoses among patients aged 1–90 years who accessed behavioral healthcare from 11 sites were systematically captured: SUD, anxiety, mood, personality, adjustment, childhood-onset, cognitive/dementia, dissociative, eating, factitious, impulse-control, psychotic/schizophrenic, sleep, and somatoform diagnoses. Of all patients, 15.0% had a SUD. Mood (60%), anxiety (31.2%), adjustment (30.9%), and disruptive (attention deficit-hyperactivity, conduct, oppositional defiant, disruptive behavior diagnosis, 22.7%) diagnoses were more common than others (psychotic 14.2%, personality 13.3%, other childhood-onset 11.4%, impulse-control 6.6%, cognitive 2.8%, eating 2.2%, somatoform 2.1%). Less than 1% of children aged <12 years had SUD. Cannabis diagnosis was the primary SUD affecting adolescents aged 12–17. MRs aged 35–49 years had the highest prevalence of cocaine diagnosis. Controlling for age at first visit, sex, treatment setting, length of treatment, and number of comorbid diagnoses, NHs/PIs and MRs were about two times more likely than AAs to have ≥2 SUDs. Regardless of race/ethnicity, personality diagnosis was comorbid with SUD. NHs/PIs with a mood diagnosis had elevated odds of having SUD. Findings present the most comprehensive patterns of mental diagnoses available for treatment-seeking AAs, NHs/PIs, and MRs in the real-world medical setting. In-depth research is needed to elucidate intraracial and interracial differences in treatment needs.

Read or purchase the article here.

De Blasio First in Mayoral Primary; Unclear if He Avoids a Runoff

The New York Times
2013-09-10

David M. Halbfinger, Reporter

David W. Chen, City Hall Bureau Chief

Bill de Blasio, whose campaign for mayor of New York tapped into a city’s deepening unease with income inequality and aggressive police practices, captured far more votes than any of his rivals in the Democratic primary on Tuesday.

But as Mr. de Blasio, an activist-turned-operative and now the city’s public advocate, celebrated a remarkable come-from-behind surge, it was not clear if he had won the 40 percent needed to avoid a runoff election on Oct. 1 with William C. Thompson Jr., who finished second. At night’s end, he had won just over 40 percent of the ballots counted; thousands of paper ballots had yet to be tallied, which could take days.

…Mr. de Blasio, a white Brooklynite who frequently showcased his biracial family, built a broad coalition of support among nearly every category of Democratic primary voters on Tuesday, according to the exit poll by Edison Research. His critique of a city divided between rich and poor — tried in the past by other candidates in New York and nationally with little success — resonated…

“I love his message about the tale of two cities, the big inequality gap,” said Jelani Wheeler, 19, a politics student at St. John’s University in Queens…

Read the entire article here.

Norma Storch Is Dead at 81; Subject of TV Documentary

The New York Times
2003-09-21

Douglas Martin

Norma Storch, a white woman whose decision to have her 4-year-old mixed-race daughter raised by a black couple became the subject of an Emmy Award-winning documentary made by the daughter in adulthood, died on Aug. 28 at her home in Manhattan. She was 81.

The cause was cancer, said the daughter, June Cross, the producer of the documentary, “Secret Daughter,” which PBS broadcast in 1996.

The film was heralded as a searing look at race relations in the 1950’s and 60’s, and drew praise for its emotional rawness and the bravery of both mother and daughter. Other reviews suggested that the documentary’s power came from a mother’s willingness to reject her daughter and then rationalize it.

Ms. Cross said in an interview last week that this impression properly reflected the documentary but not their real relationship. She said that tensions were exaggerated for dramatic effect.

But for almost 35 years, Mrs. Storch and her husband—the actor and comedian Larry Storch, who starred as Cpl. Randolph Agarn in the 1960’s comedy series “F Troop,”—indisputably lived a lie. They told friends and acquaintances that the black girl who visited them at their Hollywood home was their adopted daughter, who lived with a black family for most of the year…

Read the entire obituary here.

Interracial Family Memoirs: Reconstructing Genealogies across the Color Line

Yale University
230 Prospect Street
Room 101
New Haven, Connecticut 06511
2013-09-16, 12:00-13:15 EDT (Local Time)

Cedric Essi, Ph.D. Candidate in American Studies
University of Erlangen-Nürnberg

During the last two decades numerous autobiographical works have emerged which explore family histories in black and white, such as Barack Obama’s “Dreams from My Father,” June Cross’s “Secret Daughter” or Edward Ball’s “Slaves in the Family.” Essi subsumes these works under the umbrella term ‘interracial family memoir’ and draws up a typology of ‘genealogies’ in order to categorize and interrogate the ways in which these texts thematize kinship across the color line. This talk will provide a critical overview of the genre and discusses how the US-specific ideology of the one-drop rule affects interracial family experiences, to what extent transnational affiliations conflict with racial self-identification, on what terms white motherhood is rendered visible and how the interracial family is often imagined as an allegory of the American nation. This talk is part of the GLC Brown Bag Lunch Series. Bring your lunch; drinks & dessert will be provided.

For more information, click here.

Pulitzer-Winning Poet Dove Gives Rall Cultural Lecture

nih record
Volume LVX, Number 8 (2013-04-12)

Carla Garnett

Any ‘Discovery…a Little Bit of Poetry’

A mixed-race violin prodigy, a self-proclaimed “African prince” and Beethoven (yes, the Beethoven). That unlikely trio provides much of the fascinating storyline in poet Rita Dove’s latest book, Sonata Mulattica. The Pulitzer-winning former U.S. poet laureate offered NIH’ers tantalizing tidbits from her work on Mar. 13 at the 2013 J. Edward Rall Cultural Lecture.

“We need—all of us—to be pushed out of our comfort zones every once in a while,” said Dove, beginning her talk after having lunch with postdocs and touring the Children’s Inn and a pediatric unit of the Clinical Center. “That’s why I send my poetry students to science and math—kicking and screaming—and they come back enriched. I think we’re all perpetual students. It’s when our minds are open to something new—and sometimes a little frightening—that the old-and-familiar gets refreshed and energized.”

‘If was at the beginning…’

Dove’s Sonata Mulattica, which tells the “story of someone who has been forgotten,” is not easily pigeonholed in the literary world. Reviewers, she said, have alternately called the work a poetic sequence (although it has a play in the middle), a verse novel (although all the people and facts in it are true) or a long poem (although the book contains 84 separate poems).

The main character, George Augustus Bridgetower, was born in 1780 to a white Polish mom and a black African dad, a lothario who claimed to have royal blood. In early childhood, young Bridgetower’s extraordinary talent as a violinist was discovered (by Austrian composer Joseph Haydn, no less), leading his father to take him on the road for performances.

“‘If was at the beginning,’” said Dove, reading from The Bridgetower, the book’s first poem. In that one word, “if,” she seemed to impart all the possibilities of the young phenom’s improbable life. In that one poem she offered all the facts of his life while still leaving the audience hungry for more. Masur Auditorium was silent, spellbound…

Read the entire article here.

The Ethnic Project: Transforming Racial Fiction into Ethnic Factions

Stanford University Press
2013
240 pages
7 illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 9780804757713
Paper ISBN: 9780804757720
E-bok ISBN: 9780804787284

Vilna Bashi Treitler, Professor of Sociology and Black and Hispanic Studies
Baruch College, City University of New York

Race is a known fiction—there is no genetic marker that indicates someone’s race—yet the social stigma of race endures. In the United States, ethnicity is often positioned as a counterweight to race, and we celebrate our various hyphenated-American identities. But Vilna Bashi Treitler argues that we do so at a high cost: ethnic thinking simply perpetuates an underlying racism.

In The Ethnic Project, Bashi Treitler considers the ethnic history of the United States from the arrival of the English in North America through to the present day. Tracing the histories of immigrant and indigenous groups—Irish, Chinese, Italians, Jews, Native Americans, Mexicans, Afro-Caribbeans, and African Americans—she shows how each negotiates America’s racial hierarchy, aiming to distance themselves from the bottom and align with the groups already at the top. But in pursuing these “ethnic projects” these groups implicitly accept and perpetuate a racial hierarchy, shoring up rather than dismantling race and racism. Ultimately, The Ethnic Project shows how dangerous ethnic thinking can be in a society that has not let go of racial thinking.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• 1. Racism and Ethnic Myths
• 2. How Ethnic and Racial Structures Operate
• 3. Ethnic Winners and Losers
• 4. The Irish, Chinese, Italians, and Jews: Successful Ethnic Projects
• 5. The Native Americans, Mexicans, and Afro-Caribbeans: Struggling Ethnic Projects
• 6. African Americans and the Failed Ethnic Project
• 7. The Future of U.S. Ethnoracism
• Notes
• Index

Quadroons for Beginners: Discussing the Suppressed and Sexualized History of Free Women of Color with Author Emily Clark

The Huffington Post
2013-09-04

Stacy Parker Le Melle

“As a historian, I knew that mixed race women and interracial families were everywhere in America from its earliest days. And I knew that most of the free women of color in antebellum New Orleans bore no resemblance to the quadroons of myth.” —Dr. Emily Clark

As an American, I follow my roots like trails across the globe. My mother is from Kansas and is of German descent, and my deceased father was black with roots in North Carolina, and before then, Africa. Arguably you can trace all of us back to Africa. But my parents’ union created me: a black American woman, a woman of color, a mixed kid, a mulatta, maybe an Oreo, definitely a myriad of identities and categories to embrace or resist.

Living in Harlem, I see so many mixed marriages, mixed kids everyday all the time. Traveling the South, I see so many kids with the telltale curly locks. Growing up in Metro Detroit in the 80s, I knew there were other black & white mixes like me. I just didn’t know them. Only at college in Washington, DC, did I meet mixed girls and have them as friends. And not until my English, women’s studies, and African-American history courses did I learn any American history about women like me.

Before college, maybe I’d encounter a definition of “miscegenation” – that very special crime of racemixing in segregated America. And maybe an explanation of the “one drop rule” that went on to create the classifications of “mulatto” and “quadroon” and “octaroon“—your label dependent upon which fraction of African was in your genealogy. But that was it. In my high school American History texts, I don’t remember any acknowledgement of centuries of rape and consensual relationships between whites and blacks. None of my suburban history teachers lingered on the taboo. Maybe I didn’t either. When I think of the mania around racemixing, and of the cultural trope of the “tragic mulatta“—the woman doomed because she is too white for the blacks, too black for the whites—it was easy to assume that the history of mixed-race women in America was simple in its sadness and injustice.

Yet there is nothing simple about the American Quadroon. Once she was the picture of irresistible beauty, the symbol of a city thought of as irredeemably “other”, an earthbound goddess who conjured so much desire that white men made her concubines, and slavetraders scoured the states for enslaved girls that fit her description to fulfill buyer demand. That was the myth, the dominant story. But as Tulane historian Emily Clark writes in her richly-researched and compelling The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World (UNC Press), she was also a family-woman, marrying men of color, living the propriety dream in her New Orleans society. If her myth was simple in its power, her reality was rich and complicated—by no means a single story…

…How do you define an “American Quadroon”?

Dr. Clark: There are really two versions. One is the virtually unknown historical reality, the married free women of color of New Orleans who were paragons of piety and respectability. The other is the more familiar mythic figure who took shape in the antebellum American imagination. If you asked a white nineteenth-century American what a quadroon was, they would answer that she was a light-skinned free woman of color who preferred being the mistress of a white man to marriage with a man who shared her racial ancestry. In order to ensnare white lovers who would provide for them, quadroons were supposedly schooled from girlhood by their mothers to be virtuosos in the erotic arts. When they came of age, their mothers put them on display at quadroon balls and negotiated a contract with a white lover to set the young woman up in a house and provide enough money to support her and any children born of the liaison. The arrangement usually ended in heartbreak for the quadroon when the lover left her to marry a white woman. If this sounds like a white male rape fantasy, that is exactly what it was. There is one other key characteristic of the mythic American Quadroon: she was to be found only in New Orleans…

Read the entire interview here.

N.Y. mayor’s race front-runner cast as a ‘socialist redistributionist’

The Christian Science Monitor
2013-09-04

Harry Bruinius, Staff writer

Democrat Bill de Blasio, the most liberal major candidate in the New York City mayor’s race, is leading polls ahead of the Sept. 10 primary. Republicans sense an opportunity.

The surprising ascendancy of New York City Public Advocate Bill de Blasio may have energized the liberal wing of city Democrats, but the commanding mayoral front-runner has some Republicans cheering as well.

Despite the fact that the Republican line has won the mayor’s office five consecutive times in New York, conventional wisdom has long had the Democratic nominee easily winning the Nov. 5 general election this year.

It is still a city in which registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 6 to 1, after all, and which gave Obama 81 percent of its votes in 2012. Even the Democrat-turned-Republican-turned-Independent Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who won three terms on the Republican line, has deftly played down standard partisan divisions during his 12-year tenure.

But Mr. de Blasio has stunned the more moderate Democratic candidates the past few weeks with his relentless critique of the Bloomberg administration, as well as his dogged liberal message of income inequality in the shadow of Wall Street wealth. He also was very effective showcasing his interracial family – including his teenage son, Dante, whose Afro-style hair and descriptions of his father in campaign commercials have become some of the most memorable of the race…

…But even de Blasio’s multicultural and nontraditional family could cause some problems in the general election – even in a city like New York. His wife, Chirlane McCray, was a high-profile lesbian activist who wrote a groundbreaking article for Essence magazine in 1979, describing her coming out as a gay black woman.

According to GOP consultant Johnson, who says he is familiar with some of the internal polling of the Lhota campaign, there are a number of groups, including many Jewish voters, who remain uncomfortable with de Blasio.

“Despite all the popularity, despite everything we’ve heard about his son stealing the show, they’re also seeing, too, that there is still some backlash about the mixed marriage,” he says…

Read the entire article here.

Black Coral: A Daughter’s Apology To Her Asian Island Mother

Research at the National Archives and Beyond
BlogTalk Radio
Thursday, 2013-09-05, 21:00 EDT, (Friday, 2013-09-06, 01:00Z)

Bernice Bennett, Host

C. D. Holmes-Miller, Clergywoman, Theologian, Designer, Author

Mother with Clergywoman, Theologian, Communications Designer and author, The Rt. Reverend Dr. Cheryl D. Holmes-Miller aka Bishop Miller, M.S., MDiv.

She tells of her tumultuous, emotional teen agony of trying to accept her multiracial, multiethnic family as they struggle to fit in a “one box, one drop” racial category of being Negroes. Her coming of age story during the Civil Rights Movement leads to her back to the future 21st century revelations of her true heritage. Once taboo, her story is vogue and trending…her memoir is  a genuine catalyst for talking about race and culture, and those discussions start within the context of our families. She is the Senior Minister of The North Stamford Congregational Church in Stamford, Connecticut.

For more information, click here.