PRico sees increase in blacks, American Indians

Posted in Articles, Census/Demographics, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, United States on 2011-04-05 21:14Z by Steven

PRico sees increase in blacks, American Indians

The Seattle Times
2011-03-31

Danica Coto
Associated Press

The number of Puerto Ricans identifying themselves solely as black or American Indian jumped about 50 percent in the last decade, according to new census figures that have surprised experts and islanders alike.

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico—The number of Puerto Ricans identifying themselves solely as black or American Indian jumped about 50 percent in the last decade, according to new census figures that have surprised experts and islanders alike.
 
The increase suggests a sense of racial identity may be growing among the various ethnic groups that have long been viewed as a blurred racial mosaic on the U.S. territory, although experts say it is too soon to say what caused the shift.
 
“It truly breaks with a historic pattern,” said Jorge Duany, an anthropology professor at the University of Puerto Rico…

Experts said several factors could have influenced the rise in the number of people who identify themselves as black.

Duany said the election of Barack Obama as U.S. president might have influenced some to call themselves black as the high-profile leader dispelled negative stereotypes about their race.

The jump in numbers of blacks also coincided with a push to highlight Puerto Rico’s black population, with the Department of Education offering for the first time a high school book that deals solely with their history…

…In addition, there was a grassroots effort to target dark-skinned Puerto Ricans through social media websites including Facebook that urged them to identify themselves as “Afro-Puerto Rican” in the 2010 census.
 
It was an option that appealed to Barbara Abadia-Rexach, a 30-year-old sociology and anthropology professor at the University of Puerto Rico…

…The island’s population is a fusion of races where phrases such as “coffee with milk” abound to identify various varieties of skin color.
 
“There is no authentic or pure race,” Abadia-Rexach said. “We are all mixed.”
 
Puerto Ricans are known as “boricuas,” a name derived from the Taino Indian word for the island’s indigenous people who were colonized by the Spaniards.
 
One possible reason for the increase in Puerto Ricans who identify themselves as American Indian is that the U.S. Census Bureau allowed responders to write down their tribe…

Read the entire article here.

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Base Wretches and Black Wenches: A Story of Sex and Race, Violence and Compassion, During Slavery

Posted in Articles, History, Law, Media Archive, Slavery, Texas, United States on 2011-04-04 03:51Z by Steven

Base Wretches and Black Wenches: A Story of Sex and Race, Violence and Compassion, During Slavery

Alabama Law Review
Volume 59 (2008)
pages 1501-1555

Jason A. Gillmer, Associate Professor of Law
Texas Wesleyan School of Law

This Article examines in detail the local and trial records of a nineteenth-century Texas case to tell the story of a white slave master who had a thirty-year relationship with a female slave. This is a story of complexities and contradictions, and it is a story designed to add depth and detail to our current assumptions about the content of sex between the races during slavery times. Indeed, through these local records—a source traditionally underused by legal historians—the Article provides us with a pathway into the consciousness of ordinary people, and suggests a world with much more flexibility and fluidity along the lines of race and slavery than traditional accounts allow. The amount of sexual exploitation that took place under slavery will surprise no one; but, to hear the former slaves who lived on this plantation talk about it, this couple, at least, lived together as man and wife. It is this story—the story of the everyday life of slavery—that this Article seeks to tell, illuminating in the process a social order that was predicated on racial domination yet where men and women, white and black, often defied those ideologies. Ultimately, this Article concludes that the master narrative of rape so familiar to students of the subject is inadequate to account for a case like this, and urges us instead to focus on the fissures and blind spots created in the logic of slavery to further our understanding of the South and the relations between the races.

Introduction

In 1861, with the country in the midst of the Civil War, John C. Clark died at his home in Wharton County, Texas. He left a large estate, consisting of lands, slaves, and personal assets, valued at almost a half a million dollars. Ten years later, his three adult children filed suit to maintain what, they claimed, rightfully belonged to them. Their only problem: they were—under the law—black, and John Clark had been white.

What ensued was a lengthy trial, consisting of dozens of witnesses testifying about John Clark, his life, his holdings, and his relationship with a “dark mulatto” woman named Sobrina, Clark’s long-time slave and the mother of the three plaintiffs. For Clark died without a will, and since no heirs came forward in the immediate aftermath of his death, the local court ordered his property sold, and then had the proceeds deposited in the public trust. But with that much money at stake, it did not take long for forgotten relatives from as far away as Virginia to descend on the small community, many claiming that they were entitled to the vast estate despite never having met the man whom they now so eagerly embraced. But for the jury listening to testimony in the case of Clark v. Honey these other filings were of little importance. For them, the question of whether the three persons before them were entitled to take under the laws of intestacy was deceptively simple: were they John Clark’s legitimate children, or, stated differently, were John and Sobrina husband and wife?

The ensuing trial and its aftermath, however, proved to be far more complicated than anyone on that mild December day likely could have anticipated. Indeed, the question of whether Clark’s children were entitled to inherit his property took years to resolve—the case and its offshoots occupied the courts for the next several decades—and the issues it raised remain problematic for scholars interested in questions of race and slavery even today. No one doubted then and no one doubts now that white men were involved sexually with their female slaves. But the question of whether terms like “caring,” “devotion,” and “love” can be used to describe these relations remains controversial. Twenty years ago, in her landmark study, Deborah Gray White turned contemporary analysis of the sexual aspects of slavery on its head when she looked at the subject from the perspective of black women, not white men. Since that time, there has been an impressive outpouring of scholarship, reminding us that there was nothing romantic about planters taking advantage of their slave women. Sex in these circumstances was about power: it was brutal, it was ugly, and it was rape.

But to hear John Clark’s former slaves talk about the couple that occupied the small rustic cabin on the banks of the Colorado River, their relationship, at least, was anything but violent. “Clark and Sobrina lived together as man and wife until their deaths,” said one witness.10 Another agreed: “Sobrina had no other husband and Clark no other wife.” Such testimony throws the master narrative of rape into flux, suggesting the need to reexamine the broad generalizations about the nature of these relationships and the people involved. It is unlikely, in this case or in most others, that the relationship ever evolved into an entirely consensual one—Sobrina, after all, remained Clark’s slave until his death, inevitably tilting the relationship toward power and dominance. But if we listen to Clark’s former slaves—witnesses who arguably knew best—the relationship consisted of something more. How much more is the question, and it is the same question that a jury of twelve men were asked to answer in December of 1871, two years after Sobrina, now free, had passed away.

This Article, through the close examination of John Clark’s relationship with Sobrina, seeks to broaden our understanding of sex between the races by focusing on a case that seems both unusual yet strangely emblematic of the South in the years before the Civil War. This is a story of complexities and contradictions, and it is a story which illustrates the importance of taking into account not just the circumstances of brutal exploitation so familiar to students of the subject, but also the rare case of genuine affection. Indeed, the central argument here is that sex between the races was far more complicated than traditional accounts suggest, as blacks and whites, men and women, intermingled with each other in ways that defied both the legal rules and the social conventions of the time. Reducing these cases to simple descriptions of power and powerlessness misses out on the rich details they have to offer, and risks minimizing the impact they had on both the people around them and on the larger community in which the participants lived.

To that end, this Article seeks to take advantage of a recent trend in slavery scholarship, one that draws on local records—and particularly trial records—to make its essential points. These records, as others have stressed, have been a surprisingly underused source among legal historians, a group who has traditionally spent time mining published appellate decisions and statutory provisions for hints of Southern ideologies. Yet trial records open up doors that these traditional sources can never do, by providing us with a window into the consciousness of ordinary people. Through their lawsuits and their testimony, litigants and witnesses argued about nothing of national significance yet about everything that mattered most to them. They fought over property rights and slave sales, over contested wills and slave hires—and in doing so they reveal a world that involved far less adherence to the bright line rules of race and slavery than previous studies would have allowed. Indeed, when it came to such topics as interracial sex and its consequences, guardians of the Southern social order spoke with a uniform voice. “Hybridism is heinous,” Henry Hughes roared in 1854. “Impurity of races is against the law of nature. Mulattoes are monsters.” But at the local level, these seemingly rigid racial lines broke down with considerable frequency. Men left their entire estates to their former slaves; white women divorced their husbands after losing their affections to their black counterparts; and local prosecutors indicted interracial couples for living together as husband and wife. And the communities’ response—through testimony, through verdicts, through the filings of the cases themselves—tells us much about the substance of life of the ground, and about the complex interplay of slavery, race, sexuality, and power, in shaping people’s views of the world in which they lived.

In the end, then, this Article is about more than just John Clark and Sobrina; it is about a society struggling with its own identity. Far from the official ideologies of the South, men and women, blacks and whites, regularly met in the towns and on the streets—sometimes explosively and sometimes on more considerate terms. Yet, in either case, local communities had to reckon with a social order that never was how it was supposed to be. John Clark’s relationship with Sobrina, in other words, like so many others, forced a confrontation over the ideals white Southerners projected about themselves and the stuff of everyday life…

Read the entire article here.

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Suing for Freedom: Interracial Sex, Slave Law, and Racial Identity in the Post-Revolutionary and Antebellum South

Posted in Articles, History, Law, Media Archive, Slavery, United States on 2011-04-04 03:20Z by Steven

Suing for Freedom: Interracial Sex, Slave Law, and Racial Identity in the Post-Revolutionary and Antebellum South

North Carolina Law Review
Volume 82, Issue 2 (January 2004)
pages 535-

Jason A. Gillmer, Associate Professor of Law
Texas Wesleyan School of Law

Introduction

A. Two Stories
 
In 1823 in Sumner County, Tennessee, Phebe, a “colored woman” transplanted from Virginia, brought suit against Abraham Vaughan for her freedom. Phebe alleged that she was being wrongly held in slavery because she descended in the maternal line from an American Indian woman named Murene, her great-grandmother.  Murene, Phebe alleged, was free, and since the rule in Tennessee, as in every Southern state, was that a person’s status as free or slave was determined by the status of the mother, Phebe claimed that she also was free. Phebe thus offered little in the way of her appearance (classed as she was as a woman of color), choosing instead to base her claim on evidence of her descent. Both the trial court and the Tennessee Supreme Court of Errors and Appeals proved solicitous of her efforts, allowing her to rely on hearsay testimony to trace herself back to Murene and, also, to establish that Murene was both an Indian and free.  The Tennessee Supreme Court of Errors and Appeals also upheld the decision to permit Phebe to rely on the record from a case involving her maternal aunt, Tab, against her owner. In that case, Tab successfully sued for her freedom based on the same claim at issue here: that she was free because she descended from Murene.  In the end, the jury awarded Phebe her freedom, with the bulk of the evidentiary rulings upheld on appeal…

Read or purchase the article here.

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The Making of Racial Sentiment: Slavery and the Birth of The Frontier Romance

Posted in Books, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Monographs, Slavery, United States on 2011-04-04 02:04Z by Steven

The Making of Racial Sentiment: Slavery and the Birth of The Frontier Romance

Cambridge University Press
August 2006
256 pages
Dimensions: 228 x 152 mm
Weight: 0.55 kg
Hardback ISBN: 9780521865395
Paperback ISBN: 9780521073042
Adobe eBook Reader ISBN: 9780511239465
Mobipocket eBook ISBN: 9780511247484

Ezra Tawil, Associate Professor of English
University of Rochester, Rochester, New York

The frontier romance, an enormously popular genre of American fiction born in the 1820s, helped redefine ‘race’ for an emerging national culture. Ezra Tawil argues that the novel of white-Indian conflict provided authors and readers with an apt analogy for the problem of slavery. By uncovering the sentimental aspects of the frontier romance, Tawil redraws the lines of influence between the ‘Indian novel’ of the 1820s and the sentimental novel of slavery, demonstrating how Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin ought to be reconsidered in this light. This study reveals how American literature of the 1820s helped form modern ideas about racial differences.

Contents

  • Introduction: toward a literary history of racial sentiment
  • 1. The politics of slavery and the discourse of race, 1787–1840
  • 2. Remaking natural rights: race and slavery in James Fenimore Cooper’s early writings
  • 3. Domestic frontier romance, or, how the sentimental heroine became white
  • 4. ‘Homely legends’: the uses of sentiment in Cooper’s Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish
  • 5. Stowe’s vanishing Americans: ‘Negro’ inferiority, captivity, and homecoming in Uncle Tom’s Cabin
  • 6. Captain Babo’s cabin: racial sentiment and the politics of misreading in Benito Cereno
  • Index.
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Memories of Interracial Contacts and Mixed Race in Dutch Cinema

Posted in Articles, Europe, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive on 2011-04-04 00:57Z by Steven

Memories of Interracial Contacts and Mixed Race in Dutch Cinema

Journal of Intercultural Studies
Volume 28, Issue 1 (2007)
Pages 69 – 82
DOI: 10.1080/07256860601082947

Pamela Pattynama, Professor of Media and Culture
University of Amsterdam

This essay explores the (post)colonial relationship between the present-day Netherlands and its former colony the Dutch East Indies—a continuing relationship that has generated a wide range of memories. Exploring two Dutch films on the colonial past and comparing them with two autobiographical writings of Dutch writers of mixed race, it argues that the recurrent theme of interracial contacts emerges as the privileged metaphor for the relation between Holland and its ex-colony. A recurring feature of Dutch representations of interracial contacts, it is specifically the figure of the Indonesian concubine, the so-called nyai, which continues to obsess the male gaze. The essay concludes that through their focus on loss, separation and failure in representing interraciality, the films speak primarily to the incapacity of the Dutch nation to engage effectively with its colonial past.

Read or purchase the article here.

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The construction of ethnoracial identity within situational contexts: A study of triracial family histories

Posted in Biography, Dissertations, History, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Slavery, Tri-Racial Isolates, United States on 2011-04-04 00:48Z by Steven

The construction of ethnoracial identity within situational contexts: A study of triracial family histories

University of Pennsylvania
2007
263 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3270863
ISBN: 9780549087526

Samuel M. Lemon, Director of Master of Science in Strategic Leadership Program
Division of Continuing Adult and Professional Studies
Neumann University, Aston, Pennsylvania

Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Education

Based largely on data collected from oral history interviews, this study examines the construction of triracial ethnoracial identities (African American-Caucasian-American Indian). Here in-depth narratives and analyses of two triracial family histories surface the complex, dynamic, and interactional social contingencies that act on individual and family psychologies to share ethnic identity; these processes are illustrative of the anthropological construct of situationality. In the role of a participant observer, the author reports the history of his own family, the Ridleys of Media, Pennsylvania, which he compiled from the family’s oral tradition, genealogies and archival documents, and the U.S. Census. His narrative revolves around three prominent family members on his mother’s side: Cornelius, a venerated, light-complexioned ancestor who escaped from slavery on an antebellum plantation in southeastern Virginia, and “passing” as white fled north to Pennsylvania on the Underground Railroad in the 1860s; Josefa, a mysterious, legendarily clairvoyant woman from the Danish West Indies, who married into the Ridley family in the 1880s; and Maud, the author’s remarkable maternal grandmother, whose story begins in Media, Pennsylvania, in the 1890s. The author’s narrative history of the Harveys, another triracial family of Delaware County, Pennsylvania, well known to the author, offers illuminating points of comparison and contrast with the Ridleys. Concepts and arguments drawn from the fields of cultural theory, social history, and Southern literature provide the theoretical framework for the study.*

*This dissertation is a compound document (contains both a paper copy and a CD as part of the dissertation). The CD requires the following system requirements: Adobe Photoshop; Roxio; CD Now.

Table of Contents

  • 1 Introduction
    • 1.1 Background of the researcher
    • 1.2 Mulatto identity versus Native American identity
    • 1.3 The Original Impetus to Construct a Family History:
    • A Grandmother’s Inspiration
    • 1.4 Purpose, Significance, and Conceptualization of the Study
    • 1.5 Research questions
    • 1.6 Families selected for the study
    • 1.7 The Harvey Family
    • 1.8 The Ridley Family
    • 1.9 Supporting Families Tangentially Included in this Study
    • 1.10 Notes for Chapter One
  • 2 The Nexus of Ethnoracial Identity and Culture
    • 2.1 Etymological Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity
    • 2.2 Difficulties in Discerning Ethnic and Cultural Differences
    • 2.3 Methods Used in the Study
    • 2.4 Interview Script
    • 2.5 Notes for Chapter Two
  • 3 Culture, Ethnicity, and Assimilation: A Literature Review
    • 3.1 Historical and contemporary examples of the construction of culture
    • 3.2 The Great Melding Pot: Perspectives on Immigration and Globalization
    • 3.3 New country, new culture, new people
    • 3.4 Notes for Chapter Three
  • 4 New People: Triracial Families and Their Traditions
    • 4.1 The Harvey Family: background
      • 4.1a Mrs. Lee Ethel Gregory Harvey
      • 4.1b Life in the North for the Harvey Family
      • 4.1c The Children of Dr. Reginald and Mrs. Lee Harvey
      • 4.1d LeRoy Harvey
      • 4.1e Reginald Olive Harvey, II
      • 4.1f Robert Bruce Harvey
      • 4.1g Bonnie Lee Harvey Elliot
    • 4.2 The Ridley Family
    • 4.3 Situational Variables in the Construction of Ethnoracial Identity
    • 4.4 A Gift and a Curse
    • 4.5 Ridley Family Belief System
    • 4.6 Experientially Based Beliefs
      • 4.6a Helena Ortiga Miller
      • 4.6b Tomas Ridley Ortiga, Sr.
      • 4.6c Josepha Ortiga Allen
    • 4.7 Samuel M. Lemon
    • 4.8 Notes for Chapter Four
  • 5 The Self-Determination of Ethnoracial Identity: Findings
    • 5.1 Importance of Oral Tradition
    • 5.2 Ethnoracial identities are constructed within situational contexts
    • 5.3 Conflicts in Cultural Perspectives
    • 5.4 Self-determination of ethnoracial identity
    • 5.5 Crossing Ethnic Boundaries
    • 5.6 Conclusion
    • 5.7 Notes for Chapter Five
  • Index to Photographic Appendices
  • Bibliography
  • Appendices (on compact disc)
    • Ridley Family Photographs and Documents
    • Harvey Family Photographs
    • Oye Family Information
    • Genograms: Ridley and Harvey Families

Introduction

In late July 2006, my next-door neighbor, Gilbert, a quiet and dignified black man with graying hair and a large and spirited extended family, invited me to his backyard barbecue to celebrate his sixty-first birthday. Although I had made a prior commitment for that same evening to attend another barbecue (an asada, in Portuguese) at the home of my Brazilian neighbors across the street, I felt that it would be rude of me not to stop at least briefly at Gilbert’s house for a spare rib or bottle of beer. Although we are acquaintances rather than friends, I have known Gilbert’s family since they moved to my hometown of Media, PA, from the nearby city of Chester, about forty years ago. They are one branch of a larger family that includes cousins who live in Media who were among my childhood friends and classmates. And because my family has lived on the same block where I currently reside for over eighty years and on the same street for over one hundred and thirty years, we have strong communal ties and have always felt a social obligation to attend community events whenever we are invited. However, this invitation gave me some vague sense of trepidation, the reasons for which I could not pinpoint. My neighbor, Gilbert, although a man of very few words, has always been polite to me. But he readily admits that some of the members of his extended family who still reside in Chester are often ill-mannered, and he refers to them disdainfully as “Chester niggers”

As I walked around the side of Gilbert’s house and approached the gathering, I heard the quiet rumblings of imaginary thunder in the distant regions of my mind. I chided myself for having qualms, and reassured myself that this was just a party I was visiting briefly. But I sensed that something unpleasant was about to happen. Upon entering Gilbert’s back yard, I spoke to several individuals sitting under a canopy that shaded them from the still hot, late afternoon summer sun. I recognized a few of his guests as members of his family, and another as a neighbor who lives two doors down from me. By virtue of their cool stares and lack of an audible greeting, the rest of the group seemed to view me as an uninvited guest. I also noticed that there were no white people present. As a person of color, I immediately notice the racial or ethnic composition of any large group, as it gives me clues about the nature of the event and the social and cultural dynamics at work—all of which are helpful in assessing and navigating an unfamiliar social situation.

Normally, there would be one or two white people—often, one male and one female, though not necessarily related—conspicuously present at Gilbert’s parties. But on this occasion, they were conspicuous by their absence. I didn’t see Gilbert in the crowd, so I asked his daughter if he was around. When she called for him, he came out of the house and we exchanged pleasantries. He then invited me to sample some of his array of could still hear that quiet, distant, imaginary thunder.

Gilbert’s daughter, a tall, slightly muscular, dark brown woman in her late thirties with a charming smile, led the way. As I stepped into the house, she introduced me to a group of mostly middle-aged black women who were enjoying the air conditioner on this steamy ninety-five degree day. I recognized one woman as Gilbert’s girlfriend—a stocky, serious, street-tough woman in her late fifties, from Chester. His girlfriend and I exchanged casual hellos. Next, Gilbert’s daughter introduced me to another woman who looked resembled the girlfriend enough for me to assume that they were sisters, explaining to the woman that my brothers and I had grown up in this neighborhood. She exclaimed in a very loud voice tinged with derision, “Oh you mean, them ‘yallow’ [sic] brothers who used to live up the street?”

I was taken aback by her verbal slap and had a visceral reaction to it. I punctured the sudden pregnant pause in the room with an assertive, visibly annoyed and equally voluminous, “Yeah, that’s right.” I shot a glance at Gilbert’s brown-skinned daughter across the room, who was smiling an uncomfortable smile of embarrassment. I replied to her smile with a classic rolling of my eyes, which she appeared to enjoy and gestured to me that it was the appropriate response to the offensive remark. Though it was difficult, out of respect for my host, I succeeded in controlling my anger. But I was seething as I exited the room with the racial insult still stuck in my craw. Passing by the food table, I picked up a massive beef rib and moments later found myself absent-mindedly gnawing on it—sitting at a table under the canopy, chatting with my host, who was unaware that anything awkward had just occurred. After making customary small talk, I excused myself, wished Gilbert a happy birthday, and headed for the cultural comfort of my Brazilian friends, in whose multiracial culture of origin, or so they tell me, this incident would probably never have occurred—because most people in Brazil consider themselves mixed-race. As I crossed the street, still seeing only the ignorant woman’s face in my crosshairs, I muttered quietly to myself: “It never ends. It just never f— ends!”

This incident was just the most recent in a lifetime of similar disquieting experiences—actually, many lifetimes of such experiences—in the history of my family, always posing the same question: “Why? Why do they say these things to us?” This deeply personal and perennial question has in large part prompted my interest in the construction of ethnoracial identity within situational contexts. Why have so many of our African American neighbors routinely treated us with such disdain? This vexing question once inspired me to write the following poem entitled, Who Am I? during my early teenage years—circa 1963.

Who am I?
My skin is light,
Why not black
Why not white?

Where are my roots?
And were they born,
To hold African spear
Or English horn?

Perhaps I am,
The bubbling foam,
Some inward ocean
Washes home.

The quandary and frustration regarding the challenges of racial hybridity are palpable in this poem. The last three lines of verse may at first blush seem simplistic. However, the metaphor refers to the desire to be genetically restored to one original racial identity prior to miscegenation—i.e. either black or white—rather than to be forever condemned to the racial limbo inhabited by mixed-race people in America. Regarding the personal construction of ethnoracial identity, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. addressed this very query when he stated “Every man must ultimately confront the question of ‘Who am I?’ and seek to answer it honestly. One of the first principles of personal adjustment is the principle of self-acceptance. The Negro’s greatest dilemma is that in order to be healthy he must accept his ambivalence. The Negro is the child of two cultures—Africa and America. The problem is that in the search for wholeness all too many Negroes seek to embrace only one side of their natures… The old Hegelian synthesis still offers the best answer to many of life’s dilemmas. The American Negro is neither totally African nor totally Western. He is Afro-American, a true hybrid, a combination of two cultures.”…

Purchase the dissertation here.

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Multiracial Identity [Film]

Posted in Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Social Science, United States, Videos on 2011-04-03 23:30Z by Steven

Multiracial Identity

Bullfrog Films
2010
77 minutes/56 minutes
DVD ISBN: 1-59458-913-5
Directed by Brian Chinhema
Produced by Abacus Production
Narrated by Dieter Weber
Director of Photography: Jay Cornelius
Editor: Jay Cornelius
Music: Ed Beceril, Elizabeth Nicholson

Explores the social, political and religious impact of the multiracial movement.

Note: There are two versions of this program on the same DVD: 77-minutes and 56-minutes.

Multiracial people are the fastest growing demographic in America, yet there is no official political recognition for mixed-race people. MULTIRACIAL IDENTITY explores the social, political, and religious impact of the multiracial movement and the lived experience of being multiracial.

Different racial and cultural groups see multiracialism differently. For some Whites multiracialism represents the pollution of the White race. For some Blacks it represents an attempt to escape Blackness. And for some Asians, Latinos, and Arabs, multiracialism can be seen as ill equipped to perpetuate cultural traditions and therefore represents the dilution of the culture.

Also features commentary from noted scholars, Rainier Spencer, Naomi Zack, Aliya Saperstein, Aaron Gullickson, Susan J. Hayflick and Pastor Randall Sanford.

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Existential hazards of the multicultural individual: Defining and understanding “cultural homelessness.”

Posted in Articles, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive on 2011-04-03 23:21Z by Steven

Existential hazards of the multicultural individual: Defining and understanding “cultural homelessness.”

Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology
Volume 5, Number 1 (February 1999)
pages 6-26.
DOI: 10.1037/1099-9809.5.1.6

Veronica Navarrete-Vivero
University of North Texas

Sharon Rae Jenkins, Professor of Psychology
University of North Texas

Discusses cultural homelessness (CH), the unique experiences and feelings reported by some multicultural individuals. Ethnically related concepts found in the cross-cultural and multiethnic literature (eg., marginality, intercultural effectiveness, ethnic enclaves, and reference group) are used to explain how CH may arise from cross-cultural tensions within the ethnically mixed family and between the family and its culturally different environment, especially due to geographic moves. CH is conceptualized as a situationally imposed developmental challenge, forcing the child to accommodate to contradictory and changing norms, values, verbal and nonverbal communication styles, and attachment processes. Culturally homeless individuals may enjoy a broader, stronger cognitive and social repertoire because of their multiple cultural frames of reference. However, code-switching complexities may lead to emotional and social confusion, which, if internalized, may result in self-blame and shame. Culturally encoded emotion labeling may be disrupted, leading to alexithymia.

Read or purchase the article here.

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Identity and Marginality: Issues in the Treatment of Biracial Adolescents

Posted in Articles, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive on 2011-04-03 22:47Z by Steven

Identity and Marginality: Issues in the Treatment of Biracial Adolescents

American Journal of Orthopsychiatry
Volume 57, Issue 2
(April 1987)
pages 265–278
DOI: 10.1111/j.1939-0025.1987.tb03537.x

Jewelle Taylor Gibbs, Emeritus Professor
School of Social Welfare
University of California, Berkeley

Teenagers of mixed black and white parentage face peculiar difficulties in the developmental tasks of adolescence. The major conflicts and coping mechanisms of this group are examined, as are the clinical and sociocultural issues in its assessment and diagnosis. Specific treatment techniques are delineated.

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Study of HLA antigens of the Martinican population

Posted in Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive on 2011-04-03 04:39Z by Steven

Study of HLA antigens of the Martinican population

Tissue Antigens
Volume 26, Issue 1 (July 1985)
pages 1–11
DOI: 10.1111/j.1399-0039.1985.tb00928.x

Nicole Monplaisir
Blood Transfusion Center of Martinique

Ignez Valette
Blood Transfusion Center of Martinique

Virginia Lepage
Groupe de Recherches d’Immunogenetique de la Transplatation Humaine, INSERM – U 93, Paris, France

Veronique Dijon
Blood Transfusion Center of Martinique

Elizabeth Lavocat
Blood Transfusion Center of Martinique

Colette Ribal
Blood Transfusion Center of Martinique

Colette Raffoux
Groupe de Recherches d’Immunogenetique de la Transplatation Humaine, INSERM – U 93, Paris, France

This is the first time a study has been undertaken on the HLA profile of the Martinican population, a population which is essentially the product of intermixture between African-Negroes and French Caucasians. Two hundred and thirty-eight non-related subjects were typed for the A and B loci, 158 subjects for C locus and 128 for DR locus.

After analysis of our parameters (antigen and gene frequencies, linkage disequili-bria, etc.) and their comparison to those found in the Black and Caucasian control populations, we came to the conclusion that our racially-mixed population is closer to the African-Negro population than to the French Caucasian. A study of the average gene flow enabled us to evaluate the Caucasian contribution as being about 30%. This figure is subject to change inasmuch as racial intermixture continues. Socio-cultural variables are assumed to play a minimal role, given the high rate of illegitimacy.

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