Clarion University forced to cancel play over actors’ race

Posted in Articles, Arts, Asian Diaspora, Campus Life, Media Archive, United States on 2015-11-12 21:42Z by Steven

Clarion University forced to cancel play over actors’ race

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
2015-11-12

Bill Schackner, Higher Education Writer

Student actors and the stage crew at Clarion University arrived Tuesday evening for one of the final rehearsals before next week’s campus opening of “Jesus in India” only to learn the off-Broadway production they had spent months on had been canceled.

The reason they were given was race: theirs.

Three of the five characters in the production are Indian, but on the mostly white state university campus, two of those characters were to be played by white student actors and a third was being portrayed by a mixed-race student.

Lloyd Suh, the playwright, told the university through his literary agent Monday that he was uncomfortable with any notion that he supported Caucasians portraying Indian characters in his play, said Bob Levy, chairman of the visual and performing arts department at Clarion.

“He felt they should be of Asian descent,” Mr. Levy said Wednesday.

The Korean-American playwright wanted the parts recast, Mr. Levy said, and ultimately pulled the university’s right to stage the production after being told that finding Asian replacements was not practical given the play was to open next Wednesday on a campus in rural northwestern Pennsylvania where Asian or Pacific Islander students account for 0.7 of 1 percent of the university’s 5,368 students.

The mixed-race actor was not of Asian descent, Mr. Levy said. He said the Indian characters portrayed by the non-Indians are Gopal, Sushil and Mahari…

Read the entire article here.

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Whasian

Posted in Asian Diaspora, Books, Media Archive, Novels on 2015-11-12 20:25Z by Steven

Whasian

Harken Media
2015-11-02
340 pages
6 in x 9 in
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-9887757-6-3
Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-9887757-5-6
E-Book ISBN: 978-0-9887757-4-9

Joy Huang Stoffers

Young adult literary fiction for teens struggling with racial and cultural identity and racism.

The thing about secrets is they force you to choose—especially the ones that hurt so much you keep them from your best friend. Ava Ling Magee hopes college will free her from the past: high school, parents, everything. Freedom from her Asian mother’s control, her Caucasian father’s neglect, and the world’s confusion, however, requires more than a dorm room. Sure, she makes new friends, separates herself from the parental units, and parties. Yet, Ava’s secrets linger, binding her to the past and cleaving her in two. She must choose between the darkness she knows and unknown perils. Sometimes, when life hurts the most, we discover our freedom lay within all along.

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Intermarriage and Integration Revisited: International Experiences and Cross-Disciplinary Approaches

Posted in Articles, Canada, Europe, Family/Parenting, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United Kingdom, United States on 2015-11-12 16:40Z by Steven

Intermarriage and Integration Revisited: International Experiences and Cross-Disciplinary Approaches

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Volume 662, November 2015

Guest Edited by:

Dan Rodríguez-García, Associate Professor
Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Autonomous University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

Intermarriage has been a subject of study in the social sciences for more than a century.  Conventional wisdom (and some scattered research) holds that intermarriage is important to the  social integration of immigrants and minority peoples in majority cultures and economies, but we still have a great deal to learn about dynamics of intermarriage and integration. Which groups are  more likely to intermarry? Does crossing racial, ethno-cultural, national, religious or class  boundaries at the intimate level lead to greater integration of individuals and groups that have not  been considered part of the societal mainstream?

This special issue of The ANNALS investigates the intermarriage/integration nexus. The  research within shows the extent to which intermarriage is related to pluralism, cultural diversity,  and social inclusion/exclusion in the twenty-first century; we also evaluate the impact that mixed  marriages, families, and individuals have on shaping and transforming modern societies. We  identify patterns and outcomes of intermarriage in both North America and Europe, detecting  boundaries between native majorities and ethnic minorities.

Obviously, intermarriage and mixedness are often deeply entwined with immigration, so we also  scrutinize the relationship between intermarriage and various aspects of immigrant integration,  whether legal, political, economic, social, or cultural. Does intermarriage, in fact, contribute to  immigrant incorporation? How and to what degree? Findings – whether quantitative, qualitative,  or both – are presented in this volume for a wide variety of national contexts: Canada, the United States, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, and Sweden.

Specific findings include:

  • Race and religion remain significant barriers to societal integration, and deep social cleavages exist even in countries with higher rates of intermarriage. Race is a significant barrier in the United States, and religion – Islam in particular – is a prominent barrier in Western Europe, where even “looking Muslim” is automatically a low-status attribute, making some basic social integration, from housing to employment, automatically more difficult.
  • Diversity has never been greater in the United States, but social integration is context-bound and conditional:
    • White immigrants have an easier time with various forms of integration (e.g. educational attainment, housing, and labor), but the opposite is true for black immigrants, who are less likely to marry black natives or out-marry with other groups.
    • Asian Americans have become the most “marriageable” ethnoracial minority in America. Boundaries to integration in the U.S. for Asians have not disappeared, but the rising multiracial Asian population faces fewer social hurdles. This is particularly true for Asian women, who are seen as more desirable than Asian men, likely because of persistent ethnic stereotypes.
    • The earnings gap between immigrants who marry natives and those who marry other immigrants has increased over time in the U.S.
  • In the U.S. and France, immigrants with high levels of education are more likely to marry natural born citizens.
  • British multiracial people with part white ancestry and their children do not necessarily integrate into the white mainstream.
  • EU citizens generally have a strong identification with Europe – they tend to feel “European” and take pride in being so; this is particularly true of those with a partner from a different EU27 country.
  • The key to integration can lie in children who are products of mixed unions and the role that these families have in shaping societies where plural identities are normalized. In Quebec, for example, parents in mixed unions tend to make decisions that transmit identity, values, and culture to their children in ways that contribute to the “unique social pluralism” of the Quebecois.
  • Immigrants in Canada with Canadian-born partners have similar levels of political engagement as the third-plus generation with Canadian-born partners; however, immigrants with foreign-born partners have lower political participation.
  • The regulation of mixed marriages in the Netherlands has historically been gendered, to the detriment of Dutch women.
  • The link between intermarriage and immigrant integration in Spain is complex and varied: outcomes for some aspects of integration may show a direct connection, while other results indicate either no relationship or a bidirectional association; further, the outcomes may be moderated by factors such as country of origin, gender, or length of residence.
  • The social, cultural, and achievement outcomes for children of mixed marriages in England, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden are always in between the outcomes for immigrant children and native children, suggesting that mechanisms of both integration and  stigmatization, among other possibilities, play a role.

Together, these studies suggest a more complex picture of the nexus between intermarriage and integration than has traditionally been theorized, composing a portrait of what some scholars are calling “mixedness” – an encompassing concept that refers to intermarriage and mixed families, and the sociocultural processes attendant to them, in the modern world. We find that mixedness can be socially transformative, but also that it illuminates the disheartening persistence of ethnic and cultural divides that hinder inclusion and social cohesion.

Read or purchase this special issue here.

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Revisiting Palmares: Maroon Communities in Brazil (Celeste Henery)

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, Media Archive on 2015-11-12 16:37Z by Steven

Revisiting Palmares: Maroon Communities in Brazil (Celeste Henery)

African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS)
2015-11-09

Celeste Henery, Postdoctoral Fellow
University of Texas, Austin

This is a guest post by Celeste Henery, a Research Associate at the University of Texas at Austin (UT) in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies. She completed a PhD in Anthropology at UT in 2010. Her research and writing focuses on issues of gendered blackness, mental wellness, and diaspora. She has conducted anthropological research in Brazil and in the United States. In addition to working on her book manuscript, she is applying her anthropological and race scholarship as a social historian for post-conviction habeas corpus proceedings. Dr. Henery is currently continuing her research on gender and race with a geographic focus on Texas and the U.S. South.

AAIHS Blogger Greg Childs’ recent post, “Visible Fugitives,” initiates a welcomed conversation about black geographies. As Childs suggests, quilombos, or maroon communities in Brazil, have played integral roles in the social constructions of such notions as the urban and rural, as well as conceptions of black subjectivity and resistance in Brazil. In the years following the fall of Palmares, quilombos persisted. In 1988, when Brazil’s current Constitution was drafted, quilombos attained state recognition and guarantees to their land. The 1988 Constitution and subsequent legislation created a bureaucratic process for quilombos to acquire land titles. According to statistics from the Fundação Cultural Palmares and the INCRA (the National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform), the two state agencies responsible for the recognition and land titling of quilombos, there are over 2,500 recognized communities—1,528 in the titling process and 196 possess titles.

However, much like their ancestors, many quilombolas, or quilombo descendants continue to struggle to stay connected to their lands and sustain themselves in spite of titles. Issues of geography and land are intricately woven into their livelihood and they raise pertinent questions about quilombos and the interplay of black geography and black racial politics in Brazil. For those interested in diaspora, quilombos also provide another critical subject of discussion about the familiar notions of home, dispersal, and sustainability–all factors that are pertinent to disparate black realities.

This post draws on my fieldwork in several quilombola communities in the state of Goiás, Brazil. These communities had registered, if not already had received their title by the time I began conducting research in 2005. These were all rural communities. One was more remote than the others–at a distance from infrastructure such as stores, hospitals, and social services. As a result, their geography presented distinct and ongoing challenges…

Read the entire article here.

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Lib at Large: Documentary tells odd story of Korla Pandit, ‘godfather of exotica’

Posted in Articles, Arts, Biography, Media Archive, Passing, United States on 2015-11-12 16:07Z by Steven

Lib at Large: Documentary tells odd story of Korla Pandit, ‘godfather of exotica’

Marin Independent Journal
San Rafael, California
2015-10-29

Paul Liberatore

Marin has been home to some fascinating characters over the decades, but probably no one has been as mysterious and exotic as Korla Pandit, an organ-playing, turban-wearing sex symbol of 1950s daytime TV.

In a 1975 article in the Independent Journal, reporter Ernest Murphy described Pandit as “a puzzle inside an enigma wrapped in a turban.”

While housewives swooned over his doe-eyed gaze on the music show he starred in for KGO-TV in San Francisco, he lived with his wife and two children in the erstwhile Hall McAllister mansion in Kentfield.

He said the 70-year-old house reminded him of his privileged childhood in New Delhi as the son of a Brahmin priest father and a French opera singer mother. The grand old house enhanced his mystique as “the godfather of exotica,” but it was a kind of false front, a facade. He was only renting it temporarily before its owner had it torn down.

Two years after Pandit’s 1998 death in a Petaluma hospital at age 77, journalist R.J. Smith exposed his true identity in a 2001 article in Los Angeles Magazine, “The Many Faces of Korla Pandit.” His fans were shocked to learn that their swami dream boat wasn’t born in New Delhi, far from it. He wasn’t even Indian. He was a light-skinned African American, born in Columbia, Missouri, in a family of seven children. His father was pastor of the largest black church in town and his mother was of Creole heritage. His real name was John Roland Redd. He attended a segregated school in Missouri and showed talent as a pianist and later as an organist…

Read the entire article here.

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Interracial relationships and the ‘brown baby’ problem: black GIs, white women and their mixed race offspring in World War II Britain

Posted in History, Live Events, Media Archive, United Kingdom on 2015-11-12 04:28Z by Steven

Interracial relationships and the ‘brown baby’ problem: black GIs, white women and their mixed race offspring in World War II Britain

University of Cambridge
Department of History and Philosophy of Science
Seminar Room 1
Tuesday, 2015-11-17, 17:00-18:30Z

Lucy Bland, Reader in History
Anglia Ruskin University

For more information, click here.

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Academia and the Identity of Mixed-Race Women

Posted in Articles, Autobiography, Campus Life, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, United Kingdom, Women on 2015-11-12 04:21Z by Steven

Academia and the Identity of Mixed-Race Women

Ain’t I A Woman Collective
2015-11-10

Nicola Codner
Leeds, Yorkshire, United Kingdom


Image: Vox Efx

I am a 35-year old mixed race woman (Black Jamaican, Nigerian and White British), born and living in Leeds, Yorkshire the UK and I recently completed a counselling diploma. As part of the work I had to do to achieve my diploma I had to do a great deal of work around examining my racial and cultural identity. It was also part of the course requirements that I had to do 20 hours of personal counselling.

I didn’t know it when I started the diploma but I had a massive amount of work that I needed to do around exploring my identity as a mixed race woman. This emerged when I started my personal counselling. I began to realise I had a lot of unresolved feelings around past experiences of racism and the lack of understanding and acknowledgement I had met as a mixed race female. I also needed to look at issues to do with race within my family as well as ancestral baggage…

Read the entire article here.

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The Color of Love Lecture & Book Signing

Posted in Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, Family/Parenting, Live Events, Media Archive, United States on 2015-11-12 04:01Z by Steven

The Color of Love Lecture & Book Signing

University of South Florida
Tampa Library Grace Allen Room, 4th Floor
4202 E. Fowler Ave. LIB122
Tampa, Florida
Monday, 2015-11-16, 11:00-13:00 EST (Local Time)

Dr. Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman, Assistant Professor in Sociology and ISLAC

Examining race and gender, Hordge-Freeman illustrates [in her new book, The Color of Love: Racial Features, Stigma, and Socialization in Black Brazilian Families] the privileges of whiteness, by revealing how those with “blacker” features often experience material and emotional hardships, and how it is connected to the distribution of affection within families. Racial hierarchies may orchestrate family relationships in ways that reflect and reproduce racial inequality at large, but black Brazilian families actively negotiate these hierarchies to assert their citizenship and humanity.

Open to all public. Light refreshments will be served.

For more information, click here.

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The Sweet (and Sour) Enchantment of Racism in Post-Racial America

Posted in Caribbean/Latin America, Live Events, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2015-11-12 03:41Z by Steven

The Sweet (and Sour) Enchantment of Racism in Post-Racial America

University of South Florida
Patel Center for Global Solutions Auditorium
4202 E Fowler Ave, CGS101
Tampa, Florida 33620
Friday, 2015-11-13, 12:30-13:30 EST (Local Time)

Dr. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva will be on campus on November 13, 2015, for the purpose of discussing his recent works relating to racism, the “Latin Americanization” of racism in the United States, and the connections between these discourses and the topics of citizenship, democracy and human rights. Dr. Bonilla-Silva is an internationally acclaimed scholar and speaker with a history of motivating intellectual thought of young scholars.

USF World is please to co-sponsor this event with the College of Arts and Sciences, the Humanities Institute, the Institute for Latin America and the Caribbean (ISLAC), and the Department of Government and International Affairs (GIA).

Event is free and open to the public.

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The Color of Love: Racial Features, Stigma, and Socialization in Black Brazilian Families

Posted in Books, Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, Family/Parenting, Media Archive, Monographs, Social Science on 2015-11-12 03:22Z by Steven

The Color of Love: Racial Features, Stigma, and Socialization in Black Brazilian Families

University of Texas Press
November 2015
328 pages
6 x 9
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4773-0238-5
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4773-0788-5

Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman, Assistant Professor of Sociology with a joint appointment in the Institute for the Study of Latin America & the Caribbean
University of South Florida

Drawing on more than one hundred interviews and observations within ten core families, this study of intimate relationships as sites of racial socialization reveals a new facet of race-based differential treatment and its origins—and the mechanisms that perpetuate these strata across generations.

The Color Of Love reveals the power of racial hierarchies to infiltrate our most intimate relationships. Delving far deeper than previous sociologists have into the black Brazilian experience, Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman examines the relationship between racialization and the emotional life of a family. Based on interviews and a sixteen-month ethnography of ten working-class Brazilian families, this provocative work sheds light on how families simultaneously resist and reproduce racial hierarchies. Examining race and gender, Hordge-Freeman illustrates the privileges of whiteness by revealing how those with “blacker” features often experience material and emotional hardships. From parental ties, to sibling interactions, to extended family and romantic relationships, the chapters chart new territory by revealing the connection between proximity to whiteness and the distribution of affection within families.

Hordge-Freeman also explores how black Brazilian families, particularly mothers, rely on diverse strategies that reproduce, negotiate, and resist racism. She frames efforts to modify racial features as sometimes reflecting internalized racism, and at other times as responding to material and emotional considerations. Contextualizing their strategies within broader narratives of the African diaspora, she examines how Salvador’s inhabitants perceive the history of the slave trade itself in a city that is referred to as the “blackest” in Brazil. She argues that racial hierarchies may orchestrate family relationships in ways that reflect and reproduce racial inequality, but black Brazilian families actively negotiate these hierarchies to assert their citizenship and humanity.

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