Mixed Race Studies

Is George Zimmerman white, Latino or mixed race? Depends on who you ask.

The Seattle Globalist: Where Seattle Meets the World
2013-08-01

Leilani Nishime, Assistant Professor of Communications
University of Washington, Seattle

It’s been nearly two weeks since the George Zimmerman verdict was handed down, and the conversations in my Facebook feed have shifted from outrage and sorrow to more nuanced discussions of the state of race in the U.S.

Many of these conversations have focused on Zimmerman’s racial identity and, more recently, the identity of the lone “non-black” juror.

Zimmerman’s mixed ethnicity has stirred up conversation about how much his race “counts”: To what extent does he identify as Latino, and does it make a difference in how he saw himself and how he saw Trayvon Martin?…

Read the entire article here.

Status and Stress

The New York Times
2013-07-27

Moises Velasquez-Manoff

Although professionals may bemoan their long work hours and high-pressure careers, really, there’s stress, and then there’s Stress with a capital “S.” The former can be considered a manageable if unpleasant part of life; in the right amount, it may even strengthen one’s mettle. The latter kills.

What’s the difference? Scientists have settled on an oddly subjective explanation: the more helpless one feels when facing a given stressor, they argue, the more toxic that stressor’s effects.

That sense of control tends to decline as one descends the socioeconomic ladder, with potentially grave consequences. Those on the bottom are more than three times as likely to die prematurely as those at the top. They’re also more likely to suffer from depression, heart disease and diabetes. Perhaps most devastating, the stress of poverty early in life can have consequences that last into adulthood.

Even those who later ascend economically may show persistent effects of early-life hardship. Scientists find them more prone to illness than those who were never poor. Becoming more affluent may lower the risk of disease by lessening the sense of helplessness and allowing greater access to healthful resources like exercise, more nutritious foods and greater social support; people are not absolutely condemned by their upbringing. But the effects of early-life stress also seem to linger, unfavorably molding our nervous systems and possibly even accelerating the rate at which we age…

…“Early-life stress and the scar tissue that it leaves, with every passing bit of aging, gets harder and harder to reverse,” says Robert Sapolsky, a neurobiologist at Stanford. “You’re never out of luck in terms of interventions, but the longer you wait, the more work you’ve got on your hands.”

This research has cast new light on racial differences in longevity. In the United States, whites live longer on average by about five years than African-Americans. But a 2012 study by a Princeton researcher calculated that socioeconomic and demographic factors, not genetics, accounted for 70 to 80 percent of that difference. The single greatest contributor was income, which explained more than half the disparity. Other studies, meanwhile, suggest that the subjective experience of racism by African-Americans — a major stressor — appears to have effects on health. Reports of discrimination correlate with visceral fat accumulation in women, which increases the risk of metabolic syndrome (and thus the risk of heart disease and diabetes). In men, they correlate with high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease.

Race aside, Bruce McEwen, a neuroscientist at Rockefeller University in New York, describes these relationships as one way that “poverty gets under the skin.” He and others talk about the “biological embedding” of social status. Your parents’ social standing and your stress level during early life change how your brain and body work, affecting your vulnerability to degenerative disease decades later. They may even alter your vulnerability to infection. In one study, scientists at Carnegie Mellon exposed volunteers to a common cold virus. Those who’d grown up poorer (measured by parental homeownership) not only resisted the virus less effectively, but also suffered more severe cold symptoms…

Read the entire article here.

Narratives from a Nottingham council estate: a story of white working-class mothers with mixed-race children

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 36, Issue 8 (August 2013)
Special Issue: Mothering Across Racialised Boundaries
pages 1342-1358
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2013.776698

Lisa McKenzie, Research Fellow, Faculty of Social Sciences
University of Nottingham

This paper introduces a group of white working-class women living on a council estate in the UK drawing on an ethnographic study conducted between 2005 and 2009, examining the impact of class inequality and a stigmatized living space in an ethnically diverse urban neighbourhood. All of the women are mothers and have mixed-race children; they reside on the St Ann’s estate in Nottingham, an inner-city neighbourhood that has been subject to poor housing, poverty and unemployment for many generations. The women who live on this estate say that they suffer from negative stereotypes and stigmatization because of the notoriety of the estate, because they are working class and because they have had sexual relationships with black men. However, there is a sense of connectedness to the estate and there are strong cultural meanings that are heavily influenced by the West Indian community. This paper then highlights the importance of place when focusing upon families, class inequality and intercultural relationships.

Read or purchase the article here.

Trayvon Martin Could Have Been Me: A Watershed Moment for the U.S.

Racism Review
2013-07-21

Joe Feagin, Ella C. McFadden Professor of Sociology
Texas A & M University

President Obama’s poignant comments on the white-racist discrimination that Black men regularly face were pathbreaking for this country. First, in the history of the U.S. never has such a high government official so forthrightly called out key elements of white racism and condemned persisting patterns of racial harassment and profiling of Black boys and men.

Secondly, Obama’s commentary, together with his speech during the 2008 election, mark the first time that whites and many other nonblack Americans have heard important elements of the Black counter-frame to the centuries-old white racial framing of this society—at least not from such a “bully pulpit,” as Teddy Roosevelt put it.

One cannot imagine any white president saying, or being able to say, what Obama has said in his two explicit commentaries on U.S. racism. He certainly did not say enough about this racism, but his commentaries so far have been pathbreaking, especially for a white population much of which is in terminal denial of that racism.

Obama assessed the killing of Trayvon Martin from a Black perspective, one rarely taken seriously by most white Americans. Now, for a time, it has to be taken seriously and provides the basis to expand on his analysis later on…

Read the entire article here.

Medical Experimentation and Race in the Eighteenth-century Atlantic World

Social History of Medicine
Volume 26, Issue 3 (August 2013)
pages 364-382
DOI: 10.1093/shm/hkt011

Londa Schiebinger, The John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science
Stanford University

This article examines medical experimentation with humans in the Atlantic world. Physicians in this period tended to use bodies interchangeably in medical trials; subjects were scarce and, for the most part, used with extreme care. Experimentalists in this period, however, faced a paradox. In the second half of the eighteenth century naturalists across Europe began focusing attention on what they perceived to be racial differences. At the same time medical experimentalists required that human bodies be fully interchangeable if results were to hold universally. The dilemma, then, was this: on the one hand, physicians tended to emphasize racial difference with respect to the science of race; on the other hand, they assumed uniformity across humans with respect to developing drug therapies. It was in this context that important questions arose about whether experiments done among Caribbean slave populations were valid for Europeans.

Read or purchase the article here.

White-Race Problems: White Hispanic, White Black, Geraldo Rivera

Living Anthropologically: Anthropology – Understanding – Possibility
2013-07-25

Jason Antrosio, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Hartwick College, Oneonta, New York

A strange meme circulates, apparently fueled by Geraldo Rivera’s White Hispanic, Yellow Journalism. It goes like this: George Zimmerman is not really white, he’s Hispanic, and so the [liberal, race-baiting] Main Stream Media [MSM] invented “White Hispanic.” And if Zimmerman’s White Hispanic, does that make President Obama a White Black? Hahaha. #LiberalLogic Gotcha!

Rivera’s account is not completely inaccurate, it’s just a bit twisted and incorrect. First, the claim that “White Hispanic” is a completely made-up term for the Zimmerman trial should be news to the more than 26 million people who in 2010 marked in as White Hispanic on the US Census form–the categories for Hispanic yes/no and race are both separate and both mandatory, as they have been since at least the 1980 Census. Second, as of 2000, people like Obama could indeed check in as White Black on the US Census–however, understanding this issue means knowing about the traditional US framework of hypodescent. Finally, Rivera’s claim that the Hispanic immigrant experience is different from the Irish and Italian one–that Latinos will transform the US racial landscape–is intriguing but unsupported. If anything, the move seems to be toward a Hispanic White/Black bifurcation…

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial Child Resource Book: Living Complex Realities

MAVIN Foundation
2003
288 pages
8 x 7.9 x 0.7 inches
Paperback ISBN: 978-0972963909

Edited by:

Maria P. P. Root

Matt Kelley

As America experiences a multiracial baby boom, parents, teachers and child welfare professionals must be equipped with resources to help raise happy and healthy mixed heritage youth. Published in 2003, this groundbreaking, 288-page volume edited by Maria P. P. Root, Ph.D. and Matt Kelley, offers 35 chapters to assist the people who work with children to serve multiracial youth with compassion and competence. Providing both a developmental and mixed heritage-specific approach, the Multiracial Child Resource Book provides a layered portrait of the mixed race experience from birth to adulthood, each chapter written by the nation’s experts and accompanied by first-person testimonials from mixed heritage young adults themselves.

SOCI 395-005: Plessy to Martin: Race and Politics

George Mason University
Fairfax, Virginia
Fall 2013

Rutledge M. Dennis, Professor of Sociology

This course examines the issues, individuals, and groups central to the intersectionality of race, culture, and politics in American life. We will begin with the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson case which solidified and legitimized the nation’s “separate and equal” racial policy until Brown v. Board of Education. A critique of this case allows us to understand the intricate relations between the nation’s racial theories and policies and its public politics and culture. These racial, political, and cultural issues will provide the background from which we analyze the individuals and groups whose actions and positions presented challenges and counter-challenges to America’s image of itself as a free and democratic society. As a consequence, we will examine how racial and cultural politics were driving forces in the public debates and controversies surrounding such cases as the Scottsboro Boys in Alabama, Robert Williams in North Carolina, Emmett Till in Mississippi, Medgar Evers in Mississippi, Martin Luther King in Georgia, Angela Davis in California, O. J. Simpson in California, Rodney King in California, and currently, Trayvon Martin in Florida. The central questions in the cases presented above focus on why, and in what ways, did racial feelings, fears, and animosities surface as they did, how were intragroup and intergroup relations affected by such attitudes and behavior, and what were the short and long-term societal consequences of these attitudes and behavior.

For more information, click here.

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.

Burton Mixed Heritage Oral Hers/His story project

East Staffordshire Rights & Equality Council (ESREC)
July 2012
39 pages

The mixed heritage community is the fastest growing ethnic minority group in the UK and is predicted to be the largest minority ethnic group by 2020.The ethnicity category Mixed was first introduced in the 2001 UK Census, where 677,177 people classified themselves as of mixed race, making up 1.2% of the UK’s population.

The origin of mixed heritage people in this country started en masse in the early 1940s when the USA entered World War II. Some of the American soldiers who were stationed in the UK were black and whilst here formed relationships with local people resulting in the birth of children. When they returned to the USA many left their families behind.

In 1948 the UK government was heavily involved on its national rebuilding programme following the war. People were invited to the UK from the Commonwealth. It is well documented that many came on the SS Windrush from the Caribbean, with others coming from India, Pakistan and other Commonwealth countries.

The Burton Mixed Heritage Project recognises the importance of capturing and preserving the experiences of the 1st, 2nd, and the current generation of mixed heritage people in East Staffordshire and surrounding areas.

We recorded the interviews and divided them into 3 categories to show their experiences for the benefit of future generations.

1. The G.I. Generation (1941-1964)

This generation is descended from foreign mainly Black soldiers who were stationed in Burton and surrounding areas, who had children with the local residents. It also includes the Windrush generation.

2. The Beat Generation (1965-1984)

These are the children born from the union of different cultures i.e. people from the Caribbean or the Asian sub-continent joining with people from the UK

3. The Y Generation (1985 -present)

Young people who were born in the late 80s/early 90s and are of mixed heritage.

Our aim is to empower, educate and inform people of mixed heritage communities, and society at large about their experiences and journey. This DVD aims to show you that “On every corner there is a story”

Read the entire report here.