Mixed Race Studies

Mixed Experiences: Growing up mixed race – mental health and well-being

Jessica Kingsley Publishers
February 2014
96 pages
210mm x 148mm / 8.5in x 5.5in
Paperback ISBN: 9781909391154

Dinah Morley and Cathy Street

Mixed race is the fastest growing population group of children and young people in England and Wales. The diversity of the mixed race group’s does not allow for a one-size-fits-all assessment of needs, and this is the challenge for practitioners.

This guide offers practitioners an insight into the experiences of racism, discrimination and identity confusion that mixed race children and young people encounter. With a focus on mental health, it discusses the policy context and considers the learning from projects and local services that have targeted mixed race children, young people and families.

It will be of value to all practitioners working with children and young people, especially those in the mental health field, and also in health more generally, early years services, social care, education, youth justice and the voluntary sector.

MiC Drop: Let’s talk about race

The Michigan Daily
The Campus Newspaper of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor
2014-01-20

Rima Fadlallah, Michigan in Color Editor
Jerusaliem Gebreziabher, Michigan in Color Editor
Kayla Upadhyaya, Michigan in Color Editor

MiC check 1, 2. 1, 2. Can you hear us? Because we’re here.

We are Michigan in Color, the Daily’s first opinion section designated as a space for and by students of color at the University of Michigan. Welcome! MiC is a place for people of color to voice their opinions and share experiences that are overshadowed by dominant narratives — or the history, stories and perspectives that privilege conformity and make it into the mainstream, marginalizing all other narratives in the process. We hope MiC will elevate conversations on race, identity, liberation and social justice while engaging specifically with communities of color on campus.

Race is a topic that can elicit several different emotions; from shame, pride, anger, confusion, love, discomfort, or all of the above, this space is here to explore it all. We want to unearth “taboos.” We want the topics that feel a bit too coarse to talk about in a crowded coffee shop to roll right off your tongue in this safe space. We want to challenge the historical whiteness of The Michigan Daily by creating this long-needed space that will hopefully lead to a more inclusive newsroom and a better informed campus.

To kick off this exciting new project, we will start at the roots of MiC: What exactly does “person of color” mean?…

…As the founding editors of Michigan in Color, this project means a lot to us. We’re excited; we’re ready.

I’m Jerusaliem Gebreziabher, and I’m here because as a victim of internalized racism (sometimes self-inflicted) I needed this space four years ago. As a first generation American with parents hailing from Ethiopia and heavy strains of Italian blood in my veins, I struggled to identify with anyone and was afraid of being stigmatized if I did.

Although I know myself to be more than my race (ironically I’m often mistaken for being everything but Black), I found it hard to find my place on this campus for fear of being lumped into another category. Throughout my life, I’ve felt waves of shame and pride for who I am, where I’ve come from, or the undeniable evidence my physical features reveal about my identity. MiC is a space where I hope to reconcile some of this conflict and connect to those with shared experiences.

I’m Kayla Upadhyaya, and I’m here because I can still recall the overwhelming sense of affirmation and safety I felt the first time I found myself in a room of only other people of color here at the University. With a father who immigrated from India and a white mother, racial identity is oftentimes a source of confusion for me. But over time, my mixed racial background has become as important to who I am and my writing as is my identity as a feminist, and MiC is a space where I can not only explore those parts of my identity but also connect with other PoCs and write about the issues that truly matter to me…

Read the entire article here.

Hawai’i’s Interracial History, Culture, and Tradition: Construction and Deconstruction (Sawyer Seminar VIII)

University of Southern California, University Park Campus
Doheny Memorial Library
East Asian Seminar Room (110C)
Friday, 2014-02-28, 09:00-13:00 PST (Local Time)

How are islands connectors of flows of peoples and culture? What types of constructions and deconstructions of race and identity have influenced Hawai’i’s interracial history? How might the past impact the future of racial/ethnic relations on the Hawaiian islands?

PRESENTERS

“Hybrid” and “Hapa”: Challenging the Construction of Hawai‘i as America’s Racial Laboratory

Maile Arvin, University of Santa Cruz, California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow; Ph.D. UC San Diego
Author of Pacifically Possessed: Scientific Production and Native Hawaiian Critique of the “Almost White” Polynesian Race (2013).

“Chinese-Hawaiian Hybrids,” “Hapa Haoles,” and Other Categories: Mixed Race and Racial Consciousness Across the Native-Settler Divide in Territorial Hawai‘i

Christine Manganaro, Assistant Professor
Maryland Institute College of Art
Author of Assimilating Hawai‘i: Racial Science in a Colonial Laboratory, 1919-1959 (forthcoming)

Respondent:

Duncan Williams, Associate Professor of Religion
University of Southern California

For more information, click here.

“Alien Citizen: An Earth Odyssey” Performance by Elizabeth Liang

Arts at MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Eastman Laboratories (Building 6)
2014-02-21, 18:00-20:30 EST (Local Time)

Written and Performed by Elizabeth Liang

Who are you when you’re from everywhere and nowhere? Alien Citizen: An Earth Odyssey is a funny and poignant one-woman show about growing up as a dual citizen of mixed heritage in Central America, North Africa, the Middle East, and New England.

Elizabeth Liang, like President Obama, is a Third Culture Kid or a TCK. Third Culture Kids are the children of international business people, global educators, diplomats, missionaries, and the military-anyone whose family has relocated overseas because of a job placement. Liang weaves humorous stories about growing up as an Alien Citizen abroad with American commercial jingles providing her soundtrack through language confusion, first love, culture shock, Clark Gable, and sandstorms…Our protagonist deals with the decisions every global nomad has to make repeatedly: to adapt or to simply cope; to build a bridge or to just tolerate. From being a Guatemalan-American teen in North Africa to attending a women’s college in the USA, Alien Citizen reflects her experience that neither one was necessarily easier than the other. She realizes that girls across the world are growing into womanhood in environments that can be hostile to females (including the USA). How does a young girl cope as a border/culture/language/religion straddler in country after country that feels “other” to her when she is the “other” Where is the line between respecting others and betraying yourself?

For more information, click here.

“The Red and The White: A Family Saga of the American West” presentation

New Mexico State University
Nason House
1070 University Ave
Friday, 2014-02-21, 13:00-14:30 MST (Local Time)

CLABS-Book Talk to be held Feb. 21

A Center for Latin American Border Studies-Book Talk titled “The Red and The White: A Family Saga of the American West” [on the book by the same name] by Andrew Graybill, William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX will be held at 1 p.m. Friday, Feb. 21, at the Nason House. The event is free and open to the public. The Nason House is located on 1070 University Ave., across from FedEx Kinko’s.

At dawn on Jan. 23, 1870, 400 men of the Second U.S. Cavalry attacked and butchered a Piegan winter camp on the Marias River in Montana in one of the worst slaughters of Indians by American military forces in U.S. history. Come to avenge the murder of their father – a former fur trader named Malcolm Clarke, killed four months earlier by his Piegan wife’s cousin – Clarke’s own two sons rode with the cavalry that day and thus murdered their own blood relatives. Andrew R. Graybill places the Marias Massacre within a larger three-generation saga of the Clarke family, illuminating the complex history of native-white intermarriage in the American West.

The event is free and open to the public. For more information click here.

Identity Politics of the Captivity Narrative after 1848

University of Nebraska Press
2006
160 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8032-4400-9
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8032-2067-6

Andrea Tinnemeyer, English Teacher
The College Prepartory School, Oakland, California

Andrea Tinnemeyer’s book examines the nineteenth-century captivity narrative as a dynamic, complex genre that provided an ample medium for cultural critique, a revision of race relations, and a means of elucidating the U.S.–Mexican War’s complex and often contradictory significance in the national imagination.

The captivity narrative, as Tinnemeyer shows, addressed questions arising from the incorporation of residents in the newly annexed territory. This genre transformed its heroine from the quintessential white virgin into the Mexican maiden in order to quell anxieties over miscegenation, condone acts furthering Manifest Destiny, or otherwise romanticize the land-grabbing nature of the war and of the opportunists who traveled to the Southwest after 1848. Some of these narratives condone and even welcome interracial marriages between Mexican women and Anglo-American men.

By understanding marriage for love as an expression of free will or as a declaration of independence, texts containing interracial marriages or romanticizing the U.S.–Mexican War could politicize the nuptials and present the Anglo-American husband as a hero and rescuer. This romanticizing of annexation and cross-border marriages tended to feminize Mexico, making the country appear captive and in need of American rescue and influencing the understanding of “foreign” and “domestic” by relocating geographic and racial boundaries.

In addition to examining more conventional notions of captivity, Tinnemeyer’s book uses war song lyrics and legal cases to argue that “captivity” is a multivalenced term encompassing desire, identity formation, and variable definitions of citizenship.

Kaa-tipeyimishoyaahk – ‘We are those who own ourselves’: A Political History of Métis Self-Determination in the North-West, 1830-1870

University of Victoria, British Columbia
2014
394 pages

Adam James Patrick Gaudry

Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in the Department of Indigenous Governance

This dissertation offers an analysis of the history of Métis political thought in the nineteenth century and its role in the anti-colonial resistances to Canada’s and Hudson’s Bay Company governance. Utilizing the Michif concepts of kaa-tipeyimishoyaahk and wahkohtowin to shed light on Métis political practices, this work argues that the Métis people had established themselves as an independent Indigenous people in the nineteenth century North West. By use of a common language of prairie diplomacy, Métis had situated themselves as a close “relation” of the Hudson’s Bay Company, but still politically independent of it. Nineteenth century Métis had repeatedly demonstrated their independence from British institutions of justice and politics, and were equally insistent that Canadian institutions had no authority over them. When they did choose to form a diplomatic relationship with Canada, it was decidedly on Métis terms. In 1869-1870, after repelling a Canadian official who was intended to establish Canadian authority over the North-West, the Métis formed a provisional government with their Halfbreed cousins to enter into negotiations with Canada to establish a confederal treaty relationship. The Provisional Government of Assiniboia then sent delegates to Ottawa to negotiate “the Manitoba Treaty,” a bilateral constitutional document that created a new province of Manitoba, that would contain a Métis/Halfbreed majority, as well as very specific territorial, political, social, cultural, and economic protections that would safeguard the Métis and Halfbreed controlled future of Manitoba. This agreement was embodied only partially in the oft-cited Manitoba Act, as several key elements of the agreement were oral negotiations that were later to be institutionalized by the Canadian cabinet, although were only ever partially implemented. These protections included restrictions on the sale of the 1.4 million acre Métis/Halfbreed land reserve, a commitment to establish a Métis/Halfbreed controlled upper-house in the new Manitoba legislature, a temporary limitation of the franchise to current residents of the North West, and restrictions on Canadian immigration to the new province until Métis lands were properly distributed. While these key components of the Manitoba Treaty were not included in the Manitoba Act, they remain a binding part of the agreement, and thus, an unfulfilled obligation borne by the contemporary government of Canada. Without adhering to Canada’s treaty with the Métis people, its presence on Métis lands, and jurisdiction over Métis people is highly suspect. Only by returning to the original agreement embodied by the Manitoba Act can Canada claim any legitimacy on Métis territories or any functional political relationship with the Métis people.

Read the entire dissertation here.

On Race and Medicine

The Scientist: Exploring Lie, Inspiring Innovation
Volume 28, Issue 2 (Febuary 2014)

Keith Norris, M.D., Ph.D., Professor, College of Medicine and Science
David Geffen School of Medicine
University of California, Los Angeles

Until health care becomes truly personalized, race and ethnicity will continue to be important clues guiding medical treatments.

Clinical trials were traditionally conducted using predominately white male subjects. However, the 1993 National Institutes of Health (NIH) Revitalization Act required that all NIH-funded research involving human subjects, including clinical trials, have as diverse a participant cohort as possible, unless there were strongly justifiable reasons to do otherwise (e.g., limiting the study of uterine cancer to female subjects). One of the most significant advantages to the inclusion of diversity in clinical studies is that it enables the early detection of differences in the safety and efficacy of interventions among heterogeneous patient subgroups.

Most clinical trials, as well as large observational studies, now perform an elaborate set of statistical adjustments to account for the impact of key cohort characteristics such as age, gender, and race/ethnicity on study outcomes. Despite these sophisticated analyses, it is still uncertain whether these characteristics can accurately predict treatment response in an individual patient. While age and gender are strongly associated with biological differences that may have a significant impact on disease susceptibility and treatment response—and are thus carefully controlled for, sometimes by excluding certain groups such as children and/or elderly from trials—the role of race/ethnicity is far less clear. Indeed, unlike the case with age or gender, race has no consensus criteria for definition…

…At the same time, we must be mindful that generalizations filtered through the lens of race/ethnicity and other sociodemographic factors should not be used indiscriminately. In the setting of increasing admixture within and across racial/ethnic groups in a diversifying United States, there is a lack of concordance between today’s patients and traditional racial stereotypes. Fortunately, genomic data are already beginning to predict disease risk and treatment response, and advances will no doubt continue to improve their accuracy. The ultimate goal is to arrive at a point where medicine becomes so personalized that it is driven from a “fingerprint” of one’s biologic makeup, not from racial typecasting…

Read the entire article here.

Advancing Health Through A Racial Lens: The New Biopolitics of Race, Health, and Justice

University of Maryland, College Park
Stamp Student Union
Banneker Room 2212
Thursday, 2014-02-20, 12:30-15:00 EST (Local Time)

Moderated by:

Dorothy Roberts J.D., Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology, and the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania

Dorothy Roberts 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 author of Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (1997); Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (2002); and Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (2011). Among her many public interest activities, Roberts serves as chair of the board of directors of the Black Women’s Health Imperative.

Distinguished University of Maryland Panelists:

“Racial Coping in African American Mothers & Adolescents”
Mia A. Smith Bynum, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Family Science

“Treating Difference: Race, Risk, and the Politics of HIV/AIDs Prevention”
Thurka Sangaramoorthy, Ph.D., MPH, Assistant Professor of Anthropology

“Addressing Racial Disparities in Cardiovascular Disease: Directions for the Patient Protection and Affordability Care Act”
Gneisha Y. Dinwiddie, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of African American Studies

For more information, click here or here.

Mixed Roots Stories~ What’s Yours?

Mixed Race Radio
Blog Talk Radio
2014-02-19, 17:00Z (12:00 EDT)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

Join us today as we meet the visionaries behind Mixed Roots Stories: Chandra Crudup, Mark Edwards and our very own, Fanshen Cox. Mixed Roots Stories (MXRS) is a new resource for teaching and learning about the Mixed Experience and is a creative and dynamic online and physical California Not-For-Profit dedicated to promoting artists and stories of all kinds that address Mixed experiences. “We are an interactive community, so input and collaboration with others is essential to our mission of Celebrating and Strengthening Diverse Mixed Communities through the Power of Sharing Stories.”

AND THIS IS WHERE YOU COME IN:

There are a number of collaborative opportunities:

• YOU CAN Promote story ideas on the Mixed Roots Stories website
• YOU CAN Partner to plan and implement an event (for example MXRS is partnering with the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference in bringing arts and cultural programming to the 2014 conference)
• YOU CAN Share the MXRS podcast
• YOU CAN Participate in the selection of the Mixed Roots Stories logo

PLEASE CALL IN TO SHARE YOUR MIXED ROOTS STORY.

Mixed Roots Stories’ very own: Chandra, Mark and Fanshen will join us to take your calls and tell us all about this amazing new resource.

WON’T YOU JOIN US?