Mixed Race Studies

Trend 6: Who Am I? The Rise of Multiple Identities

Profiles in Diversity Journal
2013-02-08

Mary-Frances Winters, CEO
The Winters Group, Inc.

“I am Latina, Muslim, millennial, mother and I want you to understand all of me.” The check the one box identity answer is a thing of the past. Diversity and inclusion practitioners will have to understand the multi-dimensional intersections of identities that employees want acknowledged, valued and respected.

Andres Tapia, President of Diversity Best Practices, and I co-authored a paper in 2011 entitled Who Am I? Who Are We- Really? which explores the multiple identities of individuals, organizations, and nations. We posited that a one dimensional view of diversity was a fundamental flaw in the current models of diversity work.

We all have multiple identities. No one is uni-dimensional. I identify as an African American woman, a baby boomer, a widow, a mother, a liberal with parents of Canadian heritage.

President Barack Obama exemplifies the conundrum of intersection of multiple identities well. His father is from Kenya and his mother was white American, officially making him bi-racial. He lived in Indonesia and Hawaii during his formative years, making him what anthropologists call a “Third Culture kid. However he is most often identified in a uni-dimensional way as “African American”.

Consider these statistics:…

Read the entire article here.

ITYC Interview: Multicultural Psychologist and Author Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu

Is That Your Child? Thought in Full Color
2013-02-11

Michelle Clark-McCrary, Host

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu
Stanford University

ITYC had the great pleasure of talking with multicultural psychologist and author Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu about his latest book When Half is Whole: Multiethnic Asian Identities. Through deeply personal, raw storytelling, When Half Is Whole explores the complex journey of identity formation in a world where social and economic realities of race affect every facet of human life both here in the United States and abroad in countries like Japan…

Listen to the interview here.

The Presumption of Passing Among Multiracial Persons: Perceived Benefits and Associated Resentments

University of California, Santa Barbara
Race Matters Series
MultiCultural Center Lounge
2013-02-11, 18:30 PST (Local Time)

Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly, Professor of History

In her forthcoming book, By the Least Bit of Blood: The Allure of Blackness among Mixed-Race Americans of African Descent, 1862-1935, Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly has uncovered the uplift potential, in terms of social and political mobility, a mono-racial black identity afforded mixed-race people of African descent in nineteenth and early-twentieth century America. Dr. Dineen-Wimberly will lead a discussion regarding the implications of a similar phenomenon derived from a contemporary racial system, which both limits and benefits persons of color. The perception of benefits gained from claiming minority status on college applications, fellowships, scholarships, etc. has reinforced resentments from non-minority students, while it devalues the continued racism students of color face. All voices are welcome.

For more information, click here.

African Americans and the Presidency: The Road to the White House

Routledge
2009-11-25
256 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-80392-2
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-80391-5
eBook ISBN: 978-0-203-86433-3

Edited by:

Bruce A. Glasrud, Professor Emeritus of History
California State University, East Bay

Cary D. Wintz, Distinguished Professor of History and Geography
Texas Southern University

African Americans and the Presidency explores the long history of African American candidates for President and Vice President, examining the impact of each candidate on the American public, as well as the contribution they all made toward advancing racial equality in America. Each chapter takes the story one step further in time, through original essays written by top experts, giving depth to these inspiring candidates, some of whom are familiar to everyone, and some whose stories may be new.

Presented with illustrations and a detailed timeline, African Americans and the Presidency provides anyone interested in African American history and politics with a unique perspective on the path carved by the predecessors of Barack Obama, and the meaning their efforts had for the United States.

Contents

• Introduction: The African American Quest for the Presidency / Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz
• 1. Beginning the Trek—Douglass, Bruce, Black Conventions, Independent Political Parties / Bruce A. Glasrud
• 2. The Communist Party of the United States and African American Political Candidates / David Cullen and Kyle G. Wilkison
• 3. Charlotta A. Bass—Win Or Lose, We Win / Carolyn Wedin
• 4. Shirley Chisholm—A Catalyst for Change / Maxine D. Jones
• 5. The Socialist Workers Party and African Americans / Dwonna Naomi Goldstone
• 6. Civil Rights Activists and the Reach for Political Power / Jean Van Delinder
• 7. Jesse Jackson—Run, Jesse, Run! / James M. Smallwood
• 8. Lenora Branch Fulani—Challenging the Rules of the Game / Omar H. Ali
• 9. Race Activists and Fringe Parties with a Message / Charles Orson Cook
• 10. Black Politicians—Paving the Way / Hanes Walton, Jr., Josephine A. V. Allen, Sherman C. Puckett, and Donald R. Deskins, Jr.
• 11. Colin Powell—The Candidate Who wasn’t / Cary D. Wintz
• 12. Barack Hussein Obama—An Inspiration of Hope, an Agent for Change / Paul Finkelman
• Blacks and the Presidency: A Selected Bibliography

Introduction: The African American Quest for the Presidency

Forty years ago (1968), the African American political scene began to change dramatically, the culmination of Supreme Court decisions such as Smith vs. Allwright, Baker vs. Carr, and Terry vs. Adams; amendments to the United States Constitution including the fourteenth, fifteenth, nineteenth, and twenty-fourth; federal legislation, especially the Civil Rights Act (1964) and Voting Rights Act (1965); and determined black leaders and voters. African Americans as never before voted and contended for national office. Some white liberals abetted and encouraged the metamorphoses. All was not well, however. Civil rights leader and black activist Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated while leading a reform effort in Memphis, Tennessee. Two months later, while completing a primary election victory in California, Democratic senator Robert F. Kennedy, a white proponent of black rights, was assassinated. Perhaps propelled by these losses on the national scene, African American men and women participated in the national political process as delegates and voters, both vital steps, and also as nominees and candidates.

A few years before, while serving as Attorney General of the United States for his brother, John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy asserted that the United States could have a black president within forty years. As Kennedy phrased it, “in the next forty years a Negro can achieve the same position that my brother has.” From the perspective of 2008 Kennedy’s prescience is remarkable. Forty years after the assassinations of King and Kennedy, an African American, Senator Barack Obama, was the Democratic Party’s nominee for the presidency. By mid-September most polls suggested that he was the front-runner to be elected president of the United States, and in November Obama was elected the forty-fourth president of the United States. President Obama was not the first African American to seriously pursue the presidency. In fact, more than forty black men and women candidates paved the way for a black president; Obama stands on the shoulders of those other black leaders and politicians…

Read the entire Introduction here.

White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2001 [Wintz Review]

White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2001, Michael Phillips, (The University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX, 78713-7819) 2006. Contents. Illus. Notes. Biblio. Index. P. 267.

East Texas Historical Journal
Volume XLV (45), Number 2, Fall 2007

Cary D. Wintz, Distinguished Professor of History and Geography
Texas Southern University

As the writing of Texas history has grown increasingly sophisticated in recent years, relatively little of this new scholarship has been directed at the history of Texas cities. Michael Phillips addresses this shortcoming in White Metropolis, his study of Dallas from its founding to 2001. Phillips’ focus is race, but not as it is usually conceptualized. This is not a history of African Americans in Dallas, or for that matter a study of Dallas race relations. Instead Phillips organizes his study around the concept of race in all of complexity. Influenced in part by Neil Foley’s tri-racial study of black, Mexican American and poor white workers in Texas agriculture, Phillips broadens our usually narrow concept of race to include blacks, along with Mexican Americans, immigrants (especially those from southern and eastern Europe), the white working class, Jews, Catholics, and even women. These otherwise disparate groups share the fate of having been marginalized and oppressed—sometimes violently—by the white power elite that dominated Dallas’ political and economic development and controlled its history and its image of itself.

Central to Phillip’s analysis of Dallas history is the theory of “whiteness,” which the author defines as much as an attitude as a complexion. “Whiteness rested on a steadfast belief in racial differences, support of capitalism, faith in rule by the wealthy, certitude that competition and inequity arose from nature, and rejection of an activist government that redistributed political or economic power.” (12)…

Read the entire article here.

As this chapter will argue, soon after Anglo Texas’ separation from Mexico in the 1835-1836 revolution, white elites created a society rooted in the absolute legal separation of the white and black worlds. In order to prevent the development of a mulatto population that might inherit the political and economic wealth of the racial ruling class, white leaders promulgated harsh legal penalties in the 1840s and 1850s attached to blackness. Blacks faced slavery, the death penalty for many crimes punished less severely for whites, and laws defining the offspring of mixed-race parents as enslaved bastards ineligible for inheritance. Whiteness was defined simply as the absence of blackness, Indian blood, or other racial “pollution,” although many who were socially accepted as white had been polluted in this manner. Elites hoped that the social superiority all whites ostensibly enjoyed over blacks ameliorated disparities of power and wealth within the white community.

To the dismay of elites, however, frequently severe weather and a cash-strapped economy made life insecure for the non-slaveholding majority. In Dallas, divisions developed along economic and regional lines, leading to outbursts of violence that disturbed elite confidence and security. When a fire destroyed downtown Dallas in 1860, elite suspicions settled on white abolitionists born outside the South. The violence of 1860 created the terrain on which postwar racial ideology developed. Elites labeled those opposed to their notions of race and class hierarchy as uncivilized and therefore not fully white. After Reconstruction, the city leadership embraced a more fluid concept of race in which white status could be gained or lost based on acceptance of elite social norms. This more flexible definition of whiteness, which held dissent in check, shaped Dallas politics for more than 130 years afterward.

Michael Phillips, White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2001, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 1. The Music of Cracking Necks: Dallas Civilization and Its Discontents.

National Association of Mixed Student Organizations (NAMSO) – Newsletter 1.3

National Association of Mixed Student Organizations
2013-02-10

Happy spring semester!

Dear Mixed Student Organizations and friends,
 
Hope the new term and new year are off to a great start. Here at NAMSO, we have been busier than ever following the holiday season.

In this issue of our newsletter, a few follow-ups from the fall:

• The full collection of our photos from November 2012’s Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference in Chicago, where we led a workshop about the history of mixed heritage student organizing. Find the photos in our Facebook album here, and tag yourself and friends!
• If you’re interested in seeing what you missed in our CMRS Conference workshop, we’ve uploaded the slides from our presentation. Access them here. Questions? Email us.
• Critical Mixed Race Studies has a Facebook page, and a forthcoming website. Like their Facebook page to receive updates about the 2014 conference!

And, a message from us at the Leadership Council:…

Read the entire issue here.

Critical Mixed Race Studies: Research and Teaching on the Margins in the Mainstream

University of California, Los Angeles
Haines Hall 279
Friday, 2013-02-15, 12:00-13:30 PST (Local Time)

G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

In the early 1980s, there emerged several important unpublished doctoral dissertations on multiraciality and the mixed race experience in the United States. Numerous scholarly works were published in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They composed part of the emerging field of Mixed Race Studies although that scholarship did not yet encompass a formally defined area of inquiry. What has changed is that there is now recognition that there is an entire field specifically devoted to the study of multiracial identity and the mixed race experience. Rather than being an abrupt shift or change in the field, that field, Mixed Race Studies, is now being formally defined at a time that beckons scholars to be more critical. That is, this moment calls upon scholars to look back and assess the merit of arguments over the last twenty years and their relevance for future research. This talk seeks to map out this critical turn in Mixed Race Studies and discusses to what extent Critical Mixed Race Studies diverges from previous explorations of the topic, thereby leading to the discovery of new terrain in the field.

Dr. Daniel is Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Barbara. He teaches courses exploring comparative race and ethnic relations and he has numerous publications that explore this topic. Some of his publications include the books entitled More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order (2002) and Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths? (2006), and Machado de Assis: Multiracial Identity and the Brazilian Novelist (2012).

View the flyer here.

Betwixt & Between~Multiracial Identity=A Denial of Blackness

Mixed Race Radio
2013-02-06, 17:00Z (12:00 EST)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology, teaches courses exploring comparative race and ethnic relations. Since 1989, he has taught “Betwixt and Between,” which is one of the first and longest-standing university courses to deal specifically with the question of multiracial identity comparing the U.S. with various parts of the world.

He has numerous publications that explore this topic including several books entitled More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order (2002) and Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths? (2006), Machado de Assis: Multiracial Identity and the Brazilian Novelist (2012), as well as the article “Race, Multiraciality, and Barack Obama: Toward a More Perfect Union?”, which appeared in the journal Black Scholar (2009), and a book chapter with a similar title “Race, Multiraciality, and the Election of Barack Obama: Toward a More Perfect Union?,” which was published in Andrew Jolivette’s edited volume Obama and the Biracial Factor: The Battle for a New American Majority (2012).

On June 16, 2012, Daniel received the Loving Prize at the 5th Annual Mixed Roots Film and Literary Festival in Los Angeles. Established in 2008, the prize is a commemoration of the June 12, 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision that removed the last laws prohibiting racial intermarriage. It is awarded annually to outstanding artists, storytellers, and community leaders for inspirational dedication to celebrating and illuminating the mixed racial and cultural experience. More recently, Daniel was interviewed on National Public Radio’s “Talk of the Nation” where he discussed his teaching on multiraciality and the significance of the Loving Prize.

Black History Month Events at Two Colleges

The San Diego Union-Tribune
2013-02-09

Karen Pearlman

El Cajon — Both East County community colleges are getting into the commemoration of Black History Month with free events this month.

A library exhibit featuring John Robert Clifford, a seminal figure in African-American history (and a forefather of a Cuyamaca College administrator) and a stepping demonstration by members of a historically black fraternity are part of the commemoration at Cuyamaca College.

At Grossmont College, the celebration will take on a culinary and artistic flair, with events ranging from a soul food lunch with live jazz, a visit by a pair of blues and jazz masters, and the showing of a student documentary…

…Grossmont College film student Sicarra Devers, 22, cites her mixed-race heritage as inspiration for her documentary, “Who Are We Really: An Exploration of Multiculturalism Self-identity,” which will be shown at 4 p.m. Feb. 19 in Room 220 of Building 26. The film explores self-identity through the lens of a multicultural society and includes interviews of students, faculty and community members to highlight issues related to race relations.

Read the entire article here.