Mixed Race Studies

Two Chowan Discovery Panels in Chicago

Chowan Discovery Group
Press Release
2014-10-27

Marvin T. Jones, Executive Director

Thursday, 2014-11-13, 09:00 CST (Local Time) and Friday, 2014-11-14, 16:00 CST (Local Time)

For the second consecutive conference, Chowan Discovery Group is hosting two panels at the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference at DePaul University in Chicago. Address is DePaul University Center, 2250 N. Sheffield at the Fullerton CTA station.

• Thursday, November 13 from 2:15 to 3:45pm, Room 325: “Mobility and Definition in Mixed-Race History.” The moderator is Mayola Cotterman, retired professor, Northwestern University. The panelists are:
  • Dr. Arwin D. Smallwood (North Carolina A&T University): “Documenting and Exploring the Early History of Mixed Race Peoples: Over Five Hundred Years of the Merging of Native American, African, and European Peoples in North America from the 1500s to Present”
  • Ainsworth Tracy (New York College – CUNY): “Documenting the Intersections and History of African-Americans and Native Americans in Colonial America: American Marronage: An Examination of Eastern North Carolina.”
  • Marvin T. Jones (Chowan Discovery Group): “Measurements of a Mixed-Race Community – the Winton Triangle.” Jones’ presentation will give the audience the size and scope of the Winton Triangle by showing numbers of large houses, stores, churches, acreages, professionals and educators.
• Friday, November 14 from 1:45 to 3:15pm, Room 314A: “Beginnings and Transitions of Mixed Race People in North Carolina.” The Moderator is Steven F. Riley of www.mixedracestudies.org. Panelists are:
  • Lars Adams (Independent Writer): “The Algonquians of North Carolina: Ethnic Transformation and Identity Retention in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries”
  • Dr. Arwin D. Smallwood (North Carolina A&T University): “One of America’s First Mixed Race Peoples: A Study of the Tuscarora and the Indian Woods, Reservation Established in Bertie County, North Carolina in 1717.”
  • Marvin T. Jones (Chowan Discovery Group): “A Mixed Race Family at War – The Robbins Family.” We are still in the time of the 150th anniversary observances of the Civil War. This story is about one Mixed Race Family and its role in the War and beyond.

For last minute information call 202.236.2030.

ONExSAMENESS: Dr Anita Heiss at TEDxBrisbane

TEDx Talks
2013-10-25

Anita Heiss

“It’s and I-dentity, not a YOU-dentity, stop telling me who I am!”

Anita is a contemporary Australian author. She is a Wiradjuri woman. She is an Indigenous Literacy Day Ambassador and an Adjunct Professor with Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning, UTS amongst many other things.

‘Everything I Never Told You’ is Amazon’s book of the year

Reuters
2014-11-08

Patricia Reaney
New York

Nov 8 (Reuters) – “Everything I Never Told You,” the debut novel by author Celeste Ng about a teenage girl growing up in a mixed race family in the American Midwest in the 1970s, was named Amazon’s best book of 2014 on Saturday.

It topped the list of 100 good reads, which included fiction and non-fiction works, selected by editors at the online retailer.

“It is a beautiful book about a family,” Sara Nelson, editorial director of books and Kindle at Amazon.com, said about the novel. “The characterizations are moving. The people are very interesting.”…

Read the entire article here.

Growing Up “Too Black” In Trinidad

The New Local: Think Global, Read Local
2014-11-10

Malaika Crichlow
Miami, Florida

I grew up in Trinidad in the 80s and 90s as a black girl child. To be black in a country that idealizes the curly hair and mixed ethnicity aesthetic is rough to say the least. Although I shared the same parental genes as my sister, who is considered mixed or “red,” what I embodied physically was dark skin and “kinky” hair. It didn’t matter that my heritage included French, Scottish, East Indian and African; I was black to everyone who saw me, which wouldn’t bother me if I wasn’t treated as less than because of it.

I was the daughter of a dark-skinned man who, as a man, couldn’t comprehend my female self-esteem struggles. He didn’t know that his unabashed preference of my light-skinned sister could truly fuck me up. As my primary example of the male gender and my only other dark skinned counterpart in our immediate family, he didn’t understand that not loving me as much as my red sister could damage my mind and sense of self for years.  I was also the daughter of a light-skinned mother who, similarly, couldn’t fully understand my dark-skinned complex because like my sister, she had gotten the red woman’s preferential treatment her whole life…

Read the entire article here.

The Skin I’m In – At the Korean Sauna

Ms. Food Queen: Cooking Across Difference
November 2014

Christine Gregory

I am lying naked on a padded linoleum table while a heavyset Korean ajumma (middle aged woman) scrubs every inch of my body.  I catch a glimpse of the tiny rolls of dead skin left behind on her pink washrag. I see more bits on the table and all over the floor. Mortified, I shut my eyes.  My mind is racing.  I’m at a Korean sauna in Palisades, New Jersey with my mother and her dear friend.  We have all paid for a body scrub and a massage.  I am supposed to be relaxing, but instead I am silently freaking out. Bits of my brown skin are everywhere and I am worried about being judged.

I’m the only black woman in here.  The bath area is filled with Korean women of all ages and shapes.  It is a beautiful, communal space.  Not so much because of the décor, more because of how lovely it is to bare everything without judgment or shame. And yet I cannot seem to enjoy the moment…

Read the entire article here.

Review: Leilani Nishime’s Undercover Asian: Multiracial Asian Americans in Visual Culture

Slant
2014-02-03

Clayton Dillard, Staff Critic

In 2003, The New York Times published an article entitled “Generation E.A.” which discussed the emergent role of multiracial people in advertising campaigns and concluded by suggesting that they’re an emerging racial category and a stepping-stone key to a race-free future. According to Leilani Nishime, such a notion has become dominant among popular media outlets, which awaits an “inevitable end to race.” For Nishime, these inclinations aren’t only misguided, but a constituent for racial oppression, since “color blindness is not the opposite of racial hierarchies; it is its enabling fiction.” These concerns form the bulk of Nishime’s focus in Undercover Asian: Multiracial Asian Americans in Visual Culture, an exciting new addition to the canon of critical race studies, which marks the first book-length examination of media images of multiracial Asian Americans.

Nishime’s scope extends across cinema, reality TV, episodic TV drama, advertising campaigns, sports figures, and art installations to offer a comprehensive sense of the representational landscape. Thus, she devotes two chapters to Keanu Reeves, both as a celebrity persona in the 1990s and for his role as Neo in The Matrix trilogy. Within media discussions of both Reeves’s ethnicity and sexuality, Nishime finds that “writers often revert to the queer rhetoric of closeting instead of summoning the racially inflected language of passing to describe Reeves racially.”…

Read the entire review here.

Only history maligns Malaga Island

The Portland Press Herald
Portland, Maine
2014-10-26

Dierdre Fleming, Outdoor Reporter

The Casco Bay island’s future needn’t be lost in a painful past marked by intolerance.

MALAGA ISLAND — The tragic story of Malaga Island has been told many times since the tiny isle off Phippsburg was sold in 2001 to the Maine Coast Heritage Trust and archaeologists began to unearth the remains of its disenfranchised community.

But there’s still much pain for the descendants of Malaga Island, despite the fact this wild, pristine island in the Gulf of Maine is now visited by boaters and coastal hikers.

“I hope as time goes on it becomes easier for people to talk about, because the island as a physical place does carry a lot of significance to the descendants,” said Kate McMahon, a doctoral student at Howard University, who gives historic tours on the island for the Heritage Trust.

“It’s really important to them. It’s important to them that the kiosk on the island … presents the history of the island in a respectful way, because it’s a living memorial to them. It’s the only thing they have left of the people that lived here.”

During the mid-1860s a small, racially diverse community inhabited the north end of the island to fish and eke out a living as many coastal communities did back then. The community grew to 40 islanders by the early 20th century.

In 1912 the state, in the interest of growing tourism along the coast, evicted the residents, who included black, white and interracial families. In addition, relatives buried on the island were exhumed and re-interred at the Maine School for the Feeble-Minded, now the site of Pineland Farms. Another eight residents were institutionalized there against their will.

A century later, in 2010, a ceremony was held on the island at which Gov. John Baldacci publicly apologized for his predecessors’ decision in 1912…

Read the entire article here.

When whites are guilty of colorism

The Washington Post
2014-11-08

Lance Hannon, Professor
Department of Sociology and Criminology
Villanova University, Villanova, Pennsylvania

Robert DeFina, Professor
Department of Sociology and Criminology
Villanova University, Villanova, Pennsylvania

The 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits employment discrimination based on “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” However, in our public discourse, the second of those categories — “color” — is rarely mentioned as a source of discrimination distinct from “race.” And when “colorism” — discrimination based on skin shade — does get discussed, it is framed almost exclusively as something that occurs only within a racial group — “black-on-black discrimination,” as a 2005 segment of ABC’s “20/20” program put it.

But is that correct? There are two common reasons colorism by whites gets overlooked. First, social science seems to bolster anecdotal evidence that white people see variation in skin tone in a narrower range than African Americans do. Second, given that one’s racial category has always been of such great importance in the United States — think of the infamous “one-drop rule” — any impact of skin-tone differences within racial categories is assumed to be minuscule in comparison. While both of these rationales may seem to make sense on the surface, on close inspection neither provides justification for ignoring clear, real-life consequences of white colorism.

Regarding the first point: Our recent analysis of data from the National Opinion Research Center’s long-running General Social Survey confirms that African Americans and whites judge skin tone quite differently. In particular, white observers perceive the skin tones of black individuals as much darker than black observers do. This is consistent with other data showing that, to use one example, roughly 42 percent of whites describe Tiger Woods as having “dark” or “very dark” skin, while only about 14 percent of African Americans say the same. But such results do not mean that white people are “tone-blind.” In fact, there is solid evidence that white people do indeed see significant variation in African American skin tones. It is just that this variation is concentrated at the darker end of the scale…

Read the entire article here.

There Is No Such Thing as Race

Newsweek
2014-11-08

Robert Wald Sussman, Professor of Physical Anthropology
Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri

In 1950, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) issued a statement asserting that all humans belong to the same species and that “race” is not a biological reality but a myth. This was a summary of the findings of an international panel of anthropologists, geneticists, sociologists, and psychologists.

A great deal of evidence had accumulated by that time to support this conclusion, and the scientists involved were those who were conducting research and were most knowledgeable about the topic of human variation. Since that time similar statements have been published by the American Anthropological Association and the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, and an enormous amount of modern scientific data has been gathered to justify this conclusion…

…In my book, The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea, I have not dwelt upon all of the scientific information that has been gathered by anthropologists, biologists, geneticists, and other scientists concerning the fact that there are no such things as human biological races. This has been done by many people over the past fifty or so years.

What I do is describe the history of our myth of race and racism. As I describe this history, I think that you will be able to understand why many of our leaders and their followers have deluded us into believing these racist fallacies and how they have been perpetuated from the late Middle Ages to the present.

Many of our basic policies of race and racism have been developed as a way to keep these leaders and their followers in control of the way we live our modern lives. These leaders often see themselves as the best and the brightest. Much of this history helped establish and maintain the Spanish Inquisition, colonial policies, slavery, Nazism, racial separatism and discrimination, and anti-immigration policies.

Although policies related to racism seem to be improving over time, I hope to help clarify why this myth still exists and remains widespread in the United States and throughout Western Europe by describing the history of racism and by exploring how the anthropological concepts of culture and worldview have challenged and disproven the validity of racist views…

Read the entire article here.

Honduran held in Mexican jail returns home

BBC News
2014-11-08

A Honduran migrant who was jailed for more than five years by Mexican police is expected to arrive in his home country on Sunday.

Angel Amilcar Colon Quevedo belongs to the Garifuna community, descended from African slaves and indigenous groups.

He was picked up in 2009 by police in Tijuana in Mexico as he tried to across the border into the United States.

Human rights organisations say Mr Colon was tortured and detained on the basis of his ethnicity.

Mr Colon was released in mid-October but stayed on in Mexico to publicise the treatment he had received.

International human rights organisations worked alongside local rights campaigners to release him.

“I am an example of thousands of people who are in jail today and who do not have anyone defending them.” said Mr Colon…

…The Garifuna

The black communities living on the Caribbean coast of Central America are commonly called Garifuna or Black Carib, or as they refer to themselves, Garinagu.

Over the last three centuries, in spite of many migrations, re-settlements and interactions with Indians, British, French and Spanish, they have preserved much of the culture from their two main branches of ancestry.

The Garinagu are the descendants of Caribs Indians and Black African slaves. The Caribs were originally indigenous peoples from South America…

Read the entire article here.