Mixed Race Studies

Four Simple Reasons Smart People Shouldn’t Believe in Races

Psychology Today
About Thinking: Questioning everything with a hopeful skeptic
2013-12-23

Guy P. Harrison

Today is a good day to wake up and join the human species.

Guess what I do almost every time race and racism are discussed in popular culture. I groan and turn away in discomfort. The curse of an anthropology education makes me painfully aware of how clueless politicians, writers, broadcasters, and virtually everyone else are on this topic. Whenever some celebrity utters the dreaded N-word or a person of one race does something horrible to a person of another race, the voices of authority take center stage and call for understanding, love and cooperation between races.

Blah, blah, blah.

Such reactions to race problems may feel nice and do some good but they are too shallow to be effective long-term. The problem is that they completely miss the core problem, which is race belief itself. Races are not naturally occurring subspecies of human beings. They are the artificial creations of our cultures. Therefore, attempting to solve the problem of racism by asking for tolerance between races is like turning up the air conditioner in a burning house because you don’t like the temperature. Overt racism and all other destructive but less obvious race problems are unlikely to ever go away no matter how much love and tolerance we pour on the fire. What is needed is a game-changer, an awakening to the reality of who we are as revealed by science.

The critical problem with biological races is the claim that we are all inherently limited or empowered based on our birth into a unique genetic group that contains millions of other similar people. Many good people who champion racial equality and would not be considered racists carry this destructive belief in their heads. But it can’t be true because the groups themselves are unnatural, inconsistent and illogical. The biological race group called “black people”, for example, makes no sense because of the deep genetic diversity within it. Two randomly selected “black” people from Africa, the Caribbean or elsewhere are likely to be more distantly related to one another than any one of them is to a typical “white” European…

…1. The police lineup in your head. By far, the most common objection I hear to the rejection of biological races comes from what I call the “mental police lineup”. It’s easy to imagine a dark-skinned African, a light-skinned European, and a typical Japanese or Chinese person all standing side-by-side. The visible contrast is so great, I’m often told, that races must be real. There is an easy answer to this popular defense of the race concept, however…

Read the entire article here.

Notes On A Theory Of Multi-Racial White Supremacist Patriarchy, aka MRWaSP

it’s her factory: pop culture and philosophy from a critical-race feminist perspective.
2013-11-29

Robin James, Associate Professor of Philosophy & Women’s & Gender Studies
University of North Carolina, Charlotte

Multi-Racial White Supremacist Patriarchy, or MRWaSP, is my term for early 21st-century globalized Western race/gender/sexuality/capitalist hegemony. I put a lower-case “a” in the acronym to both make the acronym something pronounceable to English speakers, and to echo the older acronym WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant). You say it like “Mr. Wasp”–emphasis on the “mister” shows that this is not just about white supremacy, it’s also about patriarchy.

MRWaSP is an upgrade on WASP. As critical theorists of race have been arguing, white supremacy has retooled itself to work more efficiently in and for globalized, neoliberal hegemonies. Not only are exclusion and border-patrolling resource-intensive, they’re also not the most efficient ways of promoting nationalist, capitalist, patriarchal interests. As Jared Sexton argues, contemporary multiculturalism/multiracialism is a “protest less against the genocidal objectives of Anglo white supremacy than the inefficiency of unrestrained violence as the means of its accomplishment” (Amalgamation Schemes [: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism], 200). You can extend this argument to patriarchy and other institutionalized forms of identity-based oppression. It is more cost-effective to include some formerly excluded/abjected groups in racial/gender/sexual supremacy, because this inclusion further reinforces both the supremacy of the hyperelites and the precarity of the most unruly groups (those who pose the greatest threat to MRWaSP hegemony)…

Read the entire article here.

NYC Mayor-Elect’s Family Reflects Rise of Intermarriage

Voice of America
2013-12-17

Carolyn Weaver

In 1959, only four percent of Americans approved of interracial marriage. Today, 87 percent do, according to a Gallup poll. President Barack Obama was born to such a marriage, and census figures show that the fastest growing demographic under 18 is children of mixed race.

When New York City’s new mayor-elect, Bill de Blasio, a white man married to an African American woman, takes office January 1 with his wife and their two children at his side, his family will mirror this new American landscape.

It hardly could be more different from 1958, when people who married across racial lines were subject to arrest in 22 U.S. states. Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving wed that year in Washington, D.C. Mildred was African American and Richard was white. Six weeks after, when they returned to their home state of Virginia, police broke down the door of their house in the middle of the night…

Read the entire article here.

Professor Mark Christian on Mixed Chicks Chat

Mixed Chicks Chat (The only live weekly show about being racially and culturally mixed. Also, founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival) Hosted by Fanshen Cox, Heidi W. Durrow and Jennifer Frappier
Episode: #233 – Professor Mark Christian
Wednesday, 2011-11-16, 22:00Z (17:00 EST, 14:00 PST)

Mark Christian, Professor & Chair of African & African American Studies
Lehman College, City University of New York

Note from Steven F. Riley: In my opinion, this was the most engaging episode of Mixed Chicks Chat.

Dr. Christian received his B.A. in Sociology and American Studies from Liverpool Hope University, his M.A. in Black Studies from The Ohio State University, and his Ph.D. in Sociology from The University of Sheffield in 1997. He is the author of Multiracial Identity: An International Perspective (Palgrave, 2000) and two other edited volumes, and has been the guest editor of three special issue journals. Currently, he is the book review editor for the Journal of African American Studies.

Selected Bibliography:

• “Mixing Up the Game: Social and Historical Contours of Black Mixed Heritage Players in British Football in Race,” in Ethnicity and Football: Persisting Debates and Emergent Issues, Daniel Burdsey, ed. (London: Routledge, 2011). 131-144.
• Multiracial Identity: An International Perspective, New York: Palgrave, 2000. 186 pp. Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-312-23219-1.
• “The Fletcher Report 1930: A Historical Case Study of Contested Black Mixed Heritage Britishness,” Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 32, Number 2 (November 2001): 213-241.

Listen to the episode here. Download the episode here.

New York Times and The American Riddle

Only-NeverInSweden
2013-09-03

Larry Lundgren
Linköping, Sweden

The [New York] Times accepted two comments on OpEd article by Charles Blow: “The Most Dangerous Negro.”

Here are the two books that I presently cite in comments on this and related articles

Prewitt, Kenneth, 2013, What is Your Race-The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans: Princeton University Press, Princeton

Roberts, Dorothy, 2011, Fatal Invention-How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century: The New Press, London

These are the two most important books on this subject that I have read. They should be read by every American professor who daily employs the nomenclature of the US Census Bureau classification of Americans…

Read the entire article here.

Colloquium: Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind

University of Pennsylvania
103 McNeil Building
3718 Locust Walk
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-6299
Wednesday, 2014-01-29, 12:00-13:00 EST (Local Time)

Osagie K. Obasogie, Professor of Law
University of California, Hastings College of the Law

Professor Obasogie’s research attempts to bridge the conceptual and methodological gaps between empirical and doctrinal scholarship on race. This effort can be seen in his recent work that asks: how do blind people understand race? By engaging in qualitative research with individuals who have been totally blind since birth, this project provides an empirical basis from which to rethink core assumptions embedded in social and legal understandings of race. His first article from this project won the Law & Society Association’s John Hope Franklin Prize in addition to being named runner-up for the Distinguished Article Award by the Sociology of Law Section of the American Sociological Association.  This research provides the basis for Professor Obasogie’s first book, Blinded By Sight, which is forthcoming with Stanford University Press.

His scholarship also looks at the past and present roles of science in both constructing racial meanings and explaining racial disparities. This is tied to his interest in bioethics, particularly the social, ethical, and legal implications of reproductive and genetic technologies. Obasogie’s second book, Beyond Bioethics: Towards a New Biopolitics (with Marcy Darnovsky) is currently under contract with the University of California Press…

For more information, click here.

Race Medicine: Treating Health Inequities from Slavery to the Genomic Age with Prof. Dorothy Roberts

Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice
Brown University
Steven Robert ’62  Campus Center, Petteruti Lounge
75 Waterman Street
Providence, Rhode Island 02912
Tuesday, 2013-12-10, 17:30 EST (Local Time)

Dorothy E. Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology; Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania

Dorothy Roberts is the fourteenth Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, George A. Weiss University Professor, and the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at University of Pennsylvania, where she holds appointments in the Law School and Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology. An internationally recognized scholar, public intellectual, and social justice advocate, she has written and lectured extensively on the interplay of gender, race, and class in legal issues and has been a leader in transforming public thinking and policy on reproductive health, child welfare, and bioethics. Professor Roberts is the author of the award-winning books Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Random House/Pantheon, 1997) and Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books/Civitas, 2002), as well as co-editor of six books on constitutional law and gender. She has also published more than eighty articles and essays in books and scholarly journals, including Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, and Stanford Law Review. Her latest book, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century, was published by the New Press in July 2011.

Professor Roberts has been a professor at Rutgers and Northwestern University, a visiting professor at Stanford and Fordham, and a fellow at Harvard University’s Program in Ethics and the Professions, Stanford’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and the Fulbright Program. She serves as chair of the board of directors of the Black Women’s Health Imperative, on the board of directors of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, and on the advisory boards of the Center for Genetics and Society and the Family Defense Center. She also serves on the Standards Working Group of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (stem cell research). She recently received awards from the National Science Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the 2010 Dorothy Ann and Clarence L. Ver Steeg Distinguished Research Fellowship.

Sponsored by the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice with support from the Associate Provost for Diversity, the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, the Office of Medical Education, and the Science and Technology Studies Program.

For more information, click here.

Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind

Stanford University Press
November 2013
288 pages
Cloth ISBN: 9780804772785
Paper ISBN: 9780804772792

Osagie K. Obasogie, Professor of Law
University of California, Hastings College of the Law
Also University of California, San Francisco, Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences

Colorblindness has become an integral part of the national conversation on race in America. Given the assumptions behind this influential metaphor—that being blind to race will lead to racial equality—it’s curious that, until now, we have not considered if or how the blind “see” race. Most sighted people assume that the answer is obvious: they don’t, and are therefore incapable of racial bias—an example that the sighted community should presumably follow. In Blinded by Sight, Osagie K. Obasogie shares a startling observation made during discussions with people from all walks of life who have been blind since birth: even the blind aren’t colorblind—blind people understand race visually, just like everyone else. Ask a blind person what race is, and they will more than likely refer to visual cues such as skin color. Obasogie finds that, because blind people think about race visually, they orient their lives around these understandings in terms of who they are friends with, who they date, and much more.

In Blinded by Sight, Obasogie argues that rather than being visually obvious, both blind and sighted people are socialized to see race in particular ways, even to a point where blind people “see” race. So what does this mean for how we live and the laws that govern our society? Obasogie delves into these questions and uncovers how color blindness in law, public policy, and culture will not lead us to any imagined racial utopia.

Passing for white and straight: How my looks hide my identity

Salon
2013-12-08

Koa Beck
Brooklyn, New York

I’m neither straight nor white, but I’m frequently mistaken for both — and it’s taught me a lot about privilege

I first became aware of my passing as a young child confronted with standardized testing. My second grade teacher had walked us through where to write our names in capital letters and what bubbles to fill in for our sex, our birth date and ethnicity. But in the days before “biracial” or “multiracial” or “choose two or more of the following,” I was confronted with rigid boxes of “white” or “black” – a space that my white father and black-Italian mother had navigated for some time.

But even at 8 years old, I knew I could mark “white” on the form without a teacher’s assistant telling me to do the form over with my No. 2 pencil. I could sometimes be “exotic” on the playground to the grown-ups who watched us for skinned knees and bad words. But with hair that had yet to curl and a white-sounding last name, I was at first glance – and many after – a dark-haired white girl with a white father who collected her after school…

…Because with my invisibility has come her privilege, an experience that has undeniably marked most of my life.  Due to my passing, I have the W.E.B. Du Bois-patented “double consciousness” for the opportunities that have been placed before me, scholastic and professional, from generally white and hetero establishments that look at me and always see their own. Is it the presumed commonality that garnered me those interviews? Those smiles? Those callbacks? Those firm handshakes?

When I read statistics about how employers are more likely to hire white people than people of color, I know that I can count myself in the former, despite the fact that I identify as the latter. I’m hyper-aware that when a bank, a company or any public office hears the sound of my voice and reads my legal first name (under which this article does not appear), they assume that they’re talking to a white woman, and therefore give me better service…

…My privilege in passing reflects a racism and heterosexism that continues to flourish, despite romantic notions that racial mixing and gay marriage will create a utopian future free of prejudices…

Read the entire article here.

There is nothing more bizarre to me than when people who identify as biracial/mixed race etc, demand that those of us who also have parents of differing races, identify ourselves just like they do. Barack Obama self-identifies as a black man. Period. Finished. Let him be. It is those people (and not black/white people) who actually hurt the multiracial “cause” (if such exists), by forcing one experience on us. To me, they are exactly like those who invented the tragic mulatto. We all have different experiences and should be free to identify as we wish. My mother is black (African) and my father a white man. I never got to meet or know him or his family, but my mother made sure that I was proud of who I am from all angles. I have always chosen to identify myself as a black woman. Not because I hate my “white side”, but because my experiences closely mirror those of black people, especially the black people who raised me. While I do share some experiences with biracial people, I have not come close to identifying myself as such. However, I think it’s great when anyone can chose who they are or identify with. I’m not ashamed of either of my parents, just ashamed of the society we live in, where people try and force you to be who they want you to be. It comes from all sides, but it’s uglier when it comes from those who have front-row experience on the pain of being society outcasts because people are unable to box us immediately. I don’t think this topic will ever go away, in fact it will get worse, no matter how much we try and wish it away. Race was born out of capitalist ambitions, invented by human beings so one group can control and benefit from the subjugation of another. That’s a human problem that will never go away. If you call yourself biracial…good for you. But I call myself black, and so does Barack. Leave us alone.

Rosalie (from NY), Reader’s Comments (#45) for article “Pushing Boundaries, Mixed-Race Artists Gain Notice,” The New York Times, July 5, 2011. http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2011/07/06/arts/mixed-race-writers-and-artists-raise-their-profiles.html?permid=45#comment45