Mixed Race Studies

Diverse Neighborhood Has Mixed Enthusiasm About New York City Mayor’s Race

The New York Times
2013-11-03

Cara Buckley

The last presidential candidate Steve Waldman voted for was Hubert H. Humphrey. The last mayor he cast a ballot for was Edward I. Koch. And he’ll be darned if he is going to break his nonvoting streak by partaking in the mayoral election on Tuesday.

The Republican candidate, Joseph J. Lhota, reminds him too much of Rudolph W. Giuliani, of whom he takes a dim view. The Democratic candidate, Bill de Blasio, strikes him as likely to help people who abuse welfare. Mr. Waldman, a 65-year-old computer supplier, sees the city is on a reverse Robin Hood course — with parking fines, bridge tolls and assorted high taxes — and extracting more dollars from people like him…

…With New York City on the verge of electing a new mayor for the first time in 12 years, the people of Sheepshead Bay, with its mosaic of Russians, Irish, Italians and Jews, have views on the city’s prospects that are as diverse as their neighborhood. The community can at times seem ethnically segmented, but the four-decade-old El Greco serves as an enduring melting pot, and draws hordes of local residents by the boothful each weekend…

…Ms. McField, who works as an accountant for the Administration for Children’s Services, said she yearned for an end to the Police Department’s controversial stop-and-frisk tactics that Mr. de Blasio has vowed to change. Ms. McField said that many of her family members had been harassed by the police, including her husband, John McField, 36, a former corrections officer who recently returned from serving as an Army specialist in Afghanistan.

“Being black in New York, we see a lot of things that other people don’t see,” Ms. McField said as her family tucked into brunch. “It’s emotional for me,” she added, her eyes welling, “It’s targeting.”…

…Yet Luchia Larrazabal, a caregiver who was eating with her daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren, said she pinned her hopes on Mr. de Blasio to help bridge one of the city’s enduring issues — racial schisms. After all, he is white, his wife is black and their two children are biracial.

“Because of the mixed race,” Ms. Larrazabal said, “I look forward to him uniting everyone.”

Read the entire article here.

Booker Sworn In as U.S. Senator

The New York Times
2013-10-31

Jennifer Steinhauer, Congressional Reporter

WASHINGTON — Cory A. Booker, who gained celebrity as a danger-dodging, super-tweeting mayor of Newark, was sworn in as New Jersey’s junior United States senator on Thursday, the first African-American to be elected to the chamber since Barack Obama in 2004…

Read the entire article here.

TEDxHampshireCollege–Jay Smooth: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Discussing Race

TEDx
Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts
2011-11-15

Jay Smooth is host of New York’s longest running hip-hop radio show, the Underground Railroad on WBAI 99.5 FM in NY, and is an acclaimed commentator on politics and culture.

In this talk, he discusses the sometimes thorny territory of how we discuss issues of race and racism, offering insightful and humorous suggestions for expanding our perception of the subject.

Jesus for Revolutionaries: An Introduction to Race, Social Justice, and Christianity

Robert Chao Romero
2013-10-07
262 pages
5.83 wide x 8.26 tall
Paperback ISBN: 9781304513984
eBook ISBN: 9781304531063

Robert Chao Romero, Associate Professor of Chicana/o Studies and Asian American Studies
University of California, Los Angeles

Are you a “revolutionary”? Are you curious about exploring issues of race and social justice from a Christian perspective? This book by UCLA Professor and Pastor, Robert Chao Romero, is for you!

Topics covered include: a biblical framework for understanding poverty, race, and gender; undocumented immigration; politics; affirmative action; mixed race issues; Christian social justice pioneers; and, an introduction to the Christian world of social justice and community development.

Contents

• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction: Student Stories from the Revolution
• 1. God’s “Equal Protection Clause”: The Biblical Basis for Social justice
• 2. Jesus Was An Immigrant
• 3. “A Day Without A Mexican”: The Essential Economic Contributions of Undocumented Immigrants
• 4. “Secure Communities” Destroys Immigrant Families
• 5. God Loves “Dreamers”: Undocumented Youth and Comprehensive Immigration Reform
• 6. Jesus Invented Affirmative Action
• 7. The Case for Affirmative Action Today
• 8. Jesus and the Tea Party: Politics and Christianity
• 9. “Chino-Chicano“: A Biblical Framework for Diversity
• 10. Colorblindness, Structural Inequality, and Trayvon Martin
• 11. Gender
• 12. Class
• 13. Summing Up the Image of God: Neither Jew nor Gentile, Male nor Female, Slave nor Free
• 14. Manifest Destiny? The Historical Misrepresentation of Christianity
• 15. God Never Leaves Himself Without A Witness: MLK, Cesar Chavez, and other Social Justice Pioneers
• 16. Modern-Day Revolutionaries
• 17. Join the Revolution!
• Appendix I: A Faith and Justice Manifesto
• Appendix II: More Resources for the Budding Revolutionary—Books, Films, and Immigration
• Appendix III: PraXis Groups and The 4-Part Study

Growing Up Black in American Apartheid – Ford Pt1

Reality Asserts Itself
The Real News Network
2013-10-23

Paul Jay, Host

Glen Ford, Executive Editor
Black Agenda Report

On Reality Asserts Itself with Paul Jay: Glen Ford, Executive Editor of Black Agenda Report, tells his story as a red-diaper baby, growing up facing racism in the North living with his white activist mother, and living in the Deep South with his black deejay father.

crossings: undone presents, pyrrhic futures

The State
Dubai, U.A.E.
Voicing
2013-03-30

Tiana Reid
Columbia University

“Cyaan live split. Not in this world.”

The first time I read Michelle Cliff’s 1987 book No Telephone to Heaven, I immediately forgot which character had said this line. Was it Harry/Harriet, the queer Jamaican character? Or was it Clare Savage, the cosmopolitan “bi-racial” protagonist? It could have been either/both really. And that was partially the point.

What I did remember, however—what I felt—was the resonances of feeling the impulse of having to choose identity. The backdrop, for Clare, and to some extent for Cliff too, is about negotiating an existence in between races, cultures, nationalities and an endless act of et cetera. In the book, Clare undergoes a process of becoming(s) through a series of transatlantic yearnings, which culminate in her realization that she must choose her identity. And then, well, dies for that choice. In an essay called “Clare Savage as a Crossroads Character,” Cliff writes that “in [Clare’s] death she has complete identification with her homeland; soon enough she will be indistinguishable from the ground. Her bones will turn to potash, as did her ancestors’ bones.”

All the same, Clare is never accepted and never accepts herself. I’m still not sure what’s worse. No Telephone to Heaven complicates the idea of wholeness and that in order to “be true to yourself” if you have one parent, say, of European ancestry and the other of African ancestry, you should, as a citizen of the West (or perhaps the global West, i.e., the world) acknowledge the ambiguity of your both/and state of being, as if everyone doesn’t exist in a similar mode of being. A multimodal existence— a similar vacillating position of entering, understanding and being in the world. Don’t we all exist between things—parents, cultures, lovers, yesses and nos, life and death?

What I remembered, then, was what I didn’t think I had to be aware of. What I remembered was that until then, until that very moment when I read No Telephone to Heaven, I had identified as “mixed,” which would refer to my White mom and my Black Jamaican dad, who got married and had sex and had miscarriages and then had me. But I mean, isn’t a child always a mixture? Aren’t we (and is the “we” here decidedly North American?) all products of mixings and jumbles and breaking of the law pre-Loving v. Virginia and also victims and perpetrators of rape before abolition, and, and, and…?

I won’t get into how I learned how not to identify as “mixed,” how I began to understand that “mixed-race” in my generation was predicated on racial essentialism, false notions of purity, historical inaccuracies and worst of all, a sense of superiority over those who were only Black. Soon, I understood “mixed” as an intermediary between Black and White, a cushion almost, between racism and progress…

Read the entire article here.

Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America (Fourth Edition)

Rowman & Littlefield
July 2013
384 pages
6 1/4 x 9 1/2
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-4422-2054-6
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4422-2055-3
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4422-2056-0

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Professor of Sociology
Duke University

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s acclaimed Racism without Racists documents how beneath our contemporary conversation about race lies a full-blown arsenal of arguments, phrases, and stories that whites use to account for—and ultimately justify—racial inequalities. This provocative book explodes the belief that America is now a color-blind society.

The fourth edition adds a chapter on what Bonilla-Silva calls “the new racism,” which provides the essential foundation to explore issues of race and ethnicity in more depth. This edition also updates Bonilla-Silva’s assessment of race in America after President Barack Obama’s re-election. Obama’s presidency, Bonilla-Silva argues, does not represent a sea change in race relations, but rather embodies disturbing racial trends of the past.

In this fourth edition, Racism without Racists will continue to challenge readers and stimulate discussion about the state of race in America today.

Features

• An engaging read that provokes classroom discussion
• Challenges the truth behind the assumption “I don’t see race”
• A new chapter on what Bonilla-Silva calls “new racism” in America introduces students to key themes in studying race and ethnicity
• Assesses the impact of Obama’s presidency and reelection on race relations in America

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Preface to the Fourth Edition
• 1. The Strange Enigma of Race in Contemporary America
• 2. The New Racism: The U.S. Racial Structure Since the 1960s
• 3. The Central Frames of Color-Blind Racism
• 4. The Style of Color Blindness: How to Talk Nasty about Minorities without Sounding Racist
• 5. “I Didn’t Get That Job Because of a Black Man”: Color-Blind Racism’s Racial Stories
• 6. Peeking Inside the (White) House of Color Blindness: The Significance of Whites’ Segregation
• 7. Are All Whites Refined Archie Bunkers? An Examination of White Racial Progressives
• 8. Are Blacks Color Blind, Too?
• 9. E Pluribus Unum, or the Same Old Perfume in a New Bottle? On the Future of Racial Stratification in the United States
• 10. Race Matters in Obamerica: The Sweet (but Deadly) Enchantment of Color Blindness in Black Face
• 11. “The (Color-Blind) Emperor Has No Clothes”: Exposing the Whiteness of Color Blindness
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author

The Uniqueness of Dante de Blasio

Gotham Gazette: The Place or New York Policy and Politics
New York, New York
2013-09-24

Andy Beveridge, Professor of Sociology
Queens College, City University of New York

As New York took in the extent of the win by Bill de Blasio in the Democratic primary for mayor, the impact of a powerful television ad starring his son Dante seemed plain.

The ad hit on de Blasio’s main campaign points of taxing the wealthy, ending a “stop-and-frisk era that unfairly targets people of color” and universal pre-K. But it was the messenger that made it a show-stopper: A mixed-race kid with an exuberant Afro speaking to the camera about how his dad was “the only Democrat with the guts to really break with the Bloomberg years.”

De Blasio’s wife is a black woman, and both Dante and Chiara (his daughter) are mixed race. With his family and the ad featuring his son playing key roles in his campaign, de Blasio split the black vote almost evenly with former comptroller Bill Thompson, the only black candidate for mayor.

Remember, in the primary between Hillary Clinton and Obama, who is mixed race, in 2008 Hillary Clinton did better among white and Hispanic voters than she did overall, and Barack Obama won the black vote by a very wide margin in an overall close race. In terms of who voted for whom, race mattered.

As Joe Lenski, the man behind the exit polls, said in the Daily News, “I don’t know if I could ever remember a race where a black guy is (close to) losing the black vote, the woman is losing the woman vote, the Jewish guy is losing the Jewish vote. It’s quite impressive …. De Blasio did a good job of saying, ‘I’m one of you even though I’m not personally one of you.’ He was able to say, ‘my wife is African-American, my kids are multiracial.”

How unique is Dante de Blasio, the 16-year-old superstar of the 2013 elections, who communicated this important message? Just how many New Yorkers are non-Hispanic males who would identify themselves as black and white? An analysis of 2010 Census data shows that very few young New Yorkers are black and white, and even fewer are non-Hispanic black and white. Furthermore, there are much lower proportions of such individuals in New York City in the country at large. These data are presented in the accompanying table, and some are summarized in the two charts below…

Read the entire article here.

De Blasio Responds to Lhota’s Doomsday Ad With a Cheery One

Politicker
2013-10-17

Colin Campbell

Tale of Two Ads

A day after Joe Lhota released an ad warning of apocalyptic results if rival Bill de Blasio is elected mayor–complete with photos of race riots and corpses–Mr. de Blasio is out with a new spot of his own.

But Mr. de Blasio’s ad, narrated by his daughter Chiara, is almost saturated in sweetness.

“From the start of this campaign, Bill de Blasio has offered a vision for New York that leaves no one behind. Now that my dad’s on the move. His opponents are on the attack,” says the older of the de Blasio kids, wearing her signature rose-adorned headband, as cheery music plays…

Read the entire article here.

Booker, Winning Rocky Senate Bid, Gets a Job to Fit His Profile

The New York Times
2013-0-16

Kate Zernike

Mayor Cory A. Booker of Newark easily won New Jersey’s special Senate election on Wednesday, finally rising to an office that measures up to his national profile.

He will arrive in Washington already one of the country’s most prominent Democrats, and its best-known black politician other than President Obama, who backed him aggressively. Mr. Booker’s fund-raising prowess puts him on course to lead his party’s campaign efforts in the Senate, and he has been mentioned as a possible vice-presidential pick for 2016.

With 99 percent of the precincts reporting, Mr. Booker had 55 percent of the vote to 44 percent for Steve Lonegan, a Republican former mayor of Bogota, N.J., and state director of the conservative group Americans for Prosperity, according to The Associated Press. Still, the campaign gave a wider audience to certain facets of Mr. Booker that long ago began to prompt eye-rolling among his constituents…

Read the entire article here.