Mixed Race Studies

Obama bares his ‘blackness’ in Trayvon speech

The Buffalo News
2013-07-20

Sonya Ross
The Associated Press

In a move unparalleled among presidents, Barack Obama reflects on being black in America.

WASHINGTON – Something in President Obama’s voice caught Gregory C. Ellison’s ear. It was fleeting, subtle, and easy to miss — unless you’re a black man, too.

“In between his personal reflections on what it feels like to be an African-American man, and the history of pain and his strategic plan, there was what I call a very pregnant pause,” says Ellison, a theology professor in Atlanta.

“If I ever have an opportunity to talk to President Obama, I would ask him what was he searching in his soul during that pregnant pause?”

Obama was wrapped in presidential authority Friday as he talked to a nation rubbed emotionally raw in the week since the man who shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was acquitted in a Florida courtroom.

Then, in a move hardly anyone saw coming, Obama unwrapped himself, and put his own young, black face on Trayvon’s dead, young, black body.

This first black president, the guy accused by some of running from his blackness, of trying to address black folks’ needs on the down low, suddenly lifted the veil off his black male identity and showed it to the world. It was something no American president before him could have done.

He had to do it, Obama said, because “Trayvon Martin could have been me, 35 years ago.”…

…Greg Carr, chairman of the Afro-American Studies department at Howard University in Washington, said the president “has an authenticity, because he does signal to the black community that he too has experienced what we experienced.”…

Read the entire article here.

Discussing Trayvon Martin, Obama Embraces his Blackness

The American Prospect
2013-07-19

Jamelle Bouie, Staff Writer

On Obama’s remarks this afternoon.

When President Obama issued a pro forma statement following last week’s verdict in the Zimmerman trial, there was some disappointment—“Why didn’t he say more?” It only takes a small step back to see the answer; not only would it have been inappropriate for the president to question the decision of the jury, but given wide outrage at the ruling, it could have inflamed passions on both sides.

But it isn’t out of bounds for Obama to speak on the meaning of Trayvon Martin, which he did this afternoon, during a White House press briefing. And unlike his earlier statement, this was a frank and heartfelt take on the racial issues surrounding the shooting and the trial.

Which, to be honest, came as a surprise. Barack Obama’s entire political career has been about de-racializing his personal identity. Yes, he was a black senator from Illinois, but for white audiences at least, he wasn’t a black one. It’s why the Jeremiah Wright controversy was so dangerous for his candidacy—it emphasized his blackness at a time when he was trying most to build a universal appeal…

…Obama gains nothing by identifying with his blackness, but in talking about Martin, he did exactly that. “You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son,” said the president, “Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.” He continued, “There are very few African-American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me.”…

Read the entire article here.

Fracture Risk Assessment without Race/Ethnicity Information

The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism
Volume 97, Number 10 (2012-10-01)
pages 3593-3602
DOI: 10.1210/jc.2012-1997

Shinya Ishii
Department of Geriatric Medicine (S.I.)
Graduate School of Medicine
University of Tokyo

Gail A. Greendale
David Geffen School of Medicine
University of California, Los Angeles

Jane A. Caule
Graduate School of Public Health
University of Pittsburgh

Carolyn J. Crandall
David Geffen School of Medicine
University of California, Los Angeles

Mei-Hua Huang
David Geffen School of Medicine
University of California, Los Angeles

Michelle E. Danielson
Graduate School of Public Health
University of Pittsburgh

Arun S. Karlamangla
David Geffen School of Medicine
University of California, Los Angeles

Context: Dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry-derived bone mineral density (BMD) does not explain interracial differences in fracture risk; thus, BMD-based fracture risk assessment requires patient race/ethnicity information and ethnicity-specific BMD reference databases.

Objective: The objective of the study was to investigate whether composite femoral neck strength indices, which integrate dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry-derived femoral neck size, femoral neck BMD, and body size, will allow fracture risk assessment without requiring race/ethnicity information.

Design: This was a prospective cohort study.

Setting and Participants: A total of 1940 community-dwelling women aged 42–53 yr from four race/ethnicity groups (968 Caucasian, 512 African-American, 239 Japanese, and 221 Chinese) were followed up for 9 yr.

Outcome Measurements: Self-reported, nondigital, noncraniofacial fractures were measured.

Results: Two hundred and two women (10.4%) sustained fractures and 82 (4.3%) had minimum-trauma fractures. Each sd increment in any of the strength indices was associated with a 34–41% reduction in fracture hazard over 9 yr (each P < 0.001). Race/ethnicity predicted fracture hazard independent of BMD (P = 0.02) but did not predict fracture hazard independent of any of the composite indices (P = 0.11–0.22). Addition of race/ethnicity did not improve risk discrimination ability of the strength indices, but did significantly improve the discrimination ability of BMD. The discrimination ability of BMD with race/ethnicity was not statistically different from that of any of the strength indices without race/ethnicity.

Conclusions: Composite strength indices of the femoral neck can predict fracture risk without race/ethnicity information as accurately as bone mineral density does in combination with race/ethnicity information and therefore would allow risk prediction in people of mixed race/ethnicity and in groups without a BMD reference database.

Read or purchase the article here.

Crossed Lines in the Racialization Process: Race as a Border Concept

Research in Phenomenology
Volume 42, Issue 2 (2012)
pages 206-228
DOI: 10.1163/156916412X651201

Robert Bernasconi, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies
Pennsylvania State University

The phenomenological approach to racialization needs to be supplemented by a hermeneutics that examines the history of the various categories in terms of which people see and have seen race. An investigation of this kind suggests that instead of the rigid essentialism that is normally associated with the history of racism, race predominantly operates as a border concept, that is to say, a dynamic fluid concept whose core lies not at the center but at its edges. I illustrate this by an examination of the history of the distinctions between the races as it is revealed in legal, scientific, and philosophical sources. I focus especially on racial distinctions in the United States and on the way that the impact of miscegenation was negotiated leading to the so-called one-drop rule.

Read or purchase the article here.

Voice of the voiceless? Multiethnic student voices in critical approaches to race, pedagogy, literacy and agency

Linguistics and Education
Volume 24, Issue 3, September 2013
pages 348–360
DOI: 10.1016/j.linged.2013.03.005

Benji Chang, Adjunct Assistant Professor and Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Curriculum & Teaching
Teachers College, Columbia University, New York

In this article, the author utilizes critical and sociocultural approaches to race, language and culture to examine the intersectional experiences of a multiethnic and ‘mixed race’ cohort of students in an inner-city, working-class neighborhood between their elementary and high school years. This article examines the students’ experiences in a nine-year educational process focused on critical pedagogy, sociocultural learning, and community engagement in and out of classrooms. More specifically, the article looks at interview, participant observation, and narrative data with a Latina/o and Asian American male student, and an Asian American female student, and how they made sense of their experiences over time with regards to issues of race, pedagogy, literacy, and agency.

Highlights

• Critical race, ethnic studies, and sociocultural theory are used to examine K-12 student voices.
• Classroom teaching, parent engagement and community organizing are discussed.
• Asian American, multiethnic and ‘mixed race’ contexts help challenge race, culture and achievement paradigms.
• Student cultural, linguistic and literacy practices are built upon toward transformative outcomes.
• 9 years of data are used to inform more dynamic and sustainable approaches toward educational equity.

Read or purchase the article here.

Trayvon Martin, Race and Anthropology

Anthropology News
American Anthropological Association
2013-07-19

Leith Mullings, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology
City University of New York
(and President of the American Anthropological Association)

On February 26, 2012, 28-year-old George Zimmerman shot and killed an unarmed 17-year-old African American teenager who, after buying Skittles and iced tea at the local 7-Eleven, was on his way home. Zimmerman claimed he was acting in self-defense, and the Sanford, Florida police force, after a brief investigation, refused to press charges. Following several months of demonstrations, Florida Governor Rick Scott (no fan of anthropology, as you may recall) assigned the case to State Attorney Angela Corey, who charged Zimmerman with 2nd degree murder. A year and a half after the killing, on July 13, 2013, a virtually all-white (and all-female) jury found George Zimmerman not guilty of murdering Trayvon Martin (see journalist Charles Blow for an excellent discussion of the systemic racism that brought us to this moment). Though prosecutors, many journalists and large segments of the public saw the case as a quintessential example of race profiling—there is ample evidence, many believed, that Zimmerman profiled the teenager because he was a young Black man—during and after the trial both teams of lawyers and the jurors tripped over themselves proclaiming that neither the murder nor the subsequent not guilty verdict had anything to do with race. How do we explain these startlingly different responses as to the role of race?…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Mixed Race Studies with Steven Riley [on Research at the National Archives & Beyond]

Research at the National Archives & Beyond
Blog Talk Radio
Thursday, 2013-07-25, 21:00 EDT, (18:00 PDT), (2013-07-26, 01:00Z, 02:00 BST)

Natonne Kemp, Host

Steven Riley is the creator of MixedRaceStudies.org which is a non-commercial website that provides a gateway to contemporary interdisciplinary English language scholarship about the relevant issues surrounding the topic of multiracialism. At present, the site contains +6,000 posts which consists of links to +3,300 articles; +1,000 books; nearly 600 dissertation, papers and reports; nearly 300 multimedia items; +300 excerpts and quotes, +100 course offerings; etc.

Currently, MixedRaceStudies.org receives over 1,800 visitors/day, over 37,000 unique visitors/month, and nearly ½ million page views/month. The site has been called the “most comprehensive and objective clearinghouse for scholarly publications related to critical mixed-race theory” by a leading scholar in the field.

Steve has been an Information Technology professional for 25 years in the D.C. area and is currently Director of Database Development and Design at a trade association in Washington D.C. His areas of expertise are application programming, database and website development.

When he is not developing software applications, he spends his time at home in Silver Spring, Maryland with his artist wife Julia, working on his photography and reading books on history and sociology.

For more information, click here.

Trayvon Martin and Making Whiteness Visible

TIME Magazine
2013-07-17

Eric Liu

If there’s one good thing to come out of the George Zimmerman verdict, it’s the acknowledgement of white privilege

If there is one hopeful note amid all the anguish and recrimination from the acquittal of George Zimmerman, it’s that growing numbers of white people have come to appreciate whiteness for what it is: an unearned set of privileges. And as a result of that dawning awareness, it’s become possible to imagine a day when that structure of privilege is dismantled — by white people.

Recall that immediately after the killing of Trayvon Martin, people of every race took to the Internet to declare “I am Trayvon Martin.” They wore hoodies. They proclaimed solidarity. That was a well-meaning and earnest attempt to express empathy, but it also obscured the core issue, which is that Martin died not because he was wearing a hoodie but because he was wearing a hoodie while black. Blackness was the fatal variable.

And so now, post verdict, a more realistic meme has taken root. On Tumblr and Facebook and elsewhere there is a new viral phenomenon: “We are not Trayvon Martin” (emphasis mine). Huge numbers of white Americans are posting testimonials and images to declare that it is precisely because they are not black that they have never had to confront the awful choices Martin faced when Zimmerman began to pursue him…

…Much has been made about the fact that Zimmerman is white and of Hispanic ethnicity, as if he therefore couldn’t possibly embody white privilege. This is a deep misreading of the dynamics of race and the media in America. As an Asian American, I am endlessly frustrated by how binary and black-and-white — literally and figuratively — the portrayal of race is in our country. Much of the time Asian Americans are an afterthought, or simply presumed foreign. But I assume that had I been the neighborhood watchman that day in Florida, I would have been understood in the media as the nonblack actor. Which is to say, for the limited purposes of this trial, I would have been granted “honorary white” status — whether or not I wanted it…

Read the entire article here.

Obama on Trayvon Martin: The first black president speaks out first as a black American

The Washington Post
2013-07-20

David Maraniss

Trayvon Martin, the president said, could have been him 35 years ago. That would have been Barack Obama at age 17, then known as Barry and living in Honolulu. He had a bushy Afro. Hoodies were not in style then, or often needed in balmy Hawaii. His customary hangout outfit was flip-flops, called “slippers” on the island, shell bracelet, OP shorts and a tee.

Imagine if Barry Obama had been shot and killed, unarmed, during a confrontation with a self-deputized neighborhood watch enforcer, perhaps in some exclusive development on the far side of Diamond Head after leaving home to get shave ice. The news reports would have painted a complicated picture of the young victim, a variation on how Martin was portrayed decades later in Florida:

Lives with his grandparents; father not around, mother somewhere overseas. Pretty good student, sometimes distracted. Likes to play pickup hoops and smoke pot. Hangs out with buddies who call themselves the Choom Gang. Depending on who is providing the physical description, he could seem unprepossessing or intimidating, easygoing or brooding. And black.

On the inside, the young Obama had already begun a long search for identity — and by extension a study of the meaning and context of race. His mother and maternal grandparents were white. He was not. He lived in one culture, and the skin color passed along to him by his absent father placed him inalterably in another, in the eyes of others. How and why did race define him, limit him, grace him, frustrate him, alienate him, propel him and connect him to the world?

His effort to reconcile those questions and figure himself out was his quest. It took him off the island to Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, where he finally found a sense of belonging and comfort in the black community. It took him into writing, and then politics. He wrote a book about it. “Dreams From My Father” is not so much an autobiography as a coming-of-age memoir filtered through the lens of race. As a state senator in Illinois, where he worked on legislation to overcome racial profiling, some African American colleagues dismissed him as not being black enough. As a candidate for president, when he was linked to a fiery black preacher, some white detractors said he hated white people. He eventually reached the presidency on a theme meant to answer both extremes. His idealistic message was that people yearned to transcend the differences that kept them apart, race prime among them…

Read the entire article here.

Weeding Out the Riffraff

The New York Times
Home & Garden
2013-07-17

Penelope Green, Editor

At Home With Sheila Bridges

Sheila Bridges played the cancer card only once, when a state trooper stopped her for speeding on the Taconic Parkway.

At the time, Ms. Bridges, the interior designer Time magazine once celebrated as one of America’s best talents, was already notable for her race (as a black woman in a very white field, she stood out), her distinctive design style (a sensual and witty classicism) and her clients (music moguls like Andre Harrell, best-sellers like Tom Clancy and, famously, Bill Clinton). But she was not used to getting so much attention for her hair, or lack thereof.

In 2004, Ms. Bridges, now 49, was at a career apogee, juggling a television show, product lines, type-A suitors and high-maintenance clients, when her hair began to fall out. The diagnosis was alopecia, an autoimmune disorder. And as she recounts in “The Bald Mermaid,” her sharply told memoir, out this month from Pointed Leaf Press, rather than struggle with wigs or weaves, she decided to shave her head…

…Which takes us back to the speeding ticket Ms. Bridges dodged on the Taconic a few years ago. There she was, as she put it, “driving while black” in a Range Rover, when she was pulled over. While she steeled herself for the inevitable “Whose car is this?” challenge from the trooper, she noted his confusion at her baldness. When he asked where she was going in such hurry, she answered honestly that she had an appointment at Columbia University Medical Center (it was a dentist’s appointment, but she didn’t mention that). And in a response that had become frustratingly familiar since she shaved her head, the officer clocked her as a cancer patient and waved her on.

It is a rare day, Ms. Bridges said wryly, that she is not mistaken for some sort of patient. Last month, in line at the post office, a man tapped her on the shoulder. “I thought, ‘Here it comes,’ ” she recalled. “Then he asks me when I’m having kidney dialysis. To constantly have to engage in conversations about my appearance is exhausting. A natural boundary is erased when you don’t have hair. I was in a restaurant and a guy reached out and put both his hands on my head. I realize I’m a trigger for other people’s fears, of mortality, losing a loved one. But it creates all these other issues. I think I look great, and a man asks me if I’m having dialysis. Is that how men see me? No wonder I’m single.”

Ms. Bridges is a lively memoirist, habituated since childhood to navigating a familiar sea of misconceptions and prejudices with a tart wit and the “double consciousness,” to quote W. E. B. Du Bois, worn by so many African-Americans.

Although she grew up in Philadelphia, the child of a dentist and a teacher (a k a “the black girl” in her small Quaker school), she was nonetheless required to arrive at Brown University her freshman year a week early to attend its Third World Transition Program. There was a plus: because she moved in before her roommate, she was able to snag the bigger closet. “All the better,” she writes with characteristic humor, “to hang my Masai headdress and lion’s tooth necklace right next to my collection of polo shirts from Saks.”

That same week, she was also asked to join a biracial support group. (In those days, she was feathering her light brown hair in homage to Farrah Fawcett). “Biracial? I’d never even heard the word before,” she writes. “Around Philly, we adhered to the one drop rule when it came to determining race. Or as my mother used to say, jokingly, ‘It doesn’t matter how much milk you put into your coffee. Coffee with milk is still coffee.’ ”…

Read the entire article here.