The Franklin Institute Speaker Series: Does Race Exist? (9/12/18)

Posted in Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, Videos on 2019-02-25 02:46Z by Steven

The Franklin Institute Speaker Series: Does Race Exist? (9/12/18)

The Franklin Institute
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
2018-09-13

On September 12, 2018, as part of The Franklin Institute Speaker Series, University of Pennsylvania professors Sarah Tishkoff and Dorothy Roberts joined The Franklin Institute’s chief bioscientist Jayatri Das for a program titled “Does Race Exist? Exploring the Future of Genetics, Ancestry, and Medicine.”

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Overflow Crowd Attends Slover Lecture On Jefferson’s Black Daughter

Posted in Articles, Biography, History, Media Archive, Slavery, United States, Virginia, Women on 2019-02-25 02:39Z by Steven

Overflow Crowd Attends Slover Lecture On Jefferson’s Black Daughter

The New Journal & Guide
Norfolk, Virginia
2019-02-03

Overflow Crowd Attends Slover Lecture On Jefferson’s Black Daughter

An overflow crowd was on hand Sunday, Jan. 27 at the Slover Library in downtown Norfolk to hear Dr. Catherine Kerrison discuss her latest book, “Jefferson’s Daughters: Three Sisters, White and Black, in A Young America.” Kerrison is an associate professor of history at Villanova University, where she teaches courses in colonial and revolutionary America and women’s and gender history.

The event was the second of three lectures in the Catherine Lee Brinkley Memorial Lecture Series being offered by the Slover Library to “keep the spirit of community discourse about current events alive and to celebrate recently published books of national note.” It is being sponsored by Jane Batten, who was in attendance, as was former Mayor Paul Fraim, who heads the Slover Library Foundation.

Kerrison’s expert re-search and writing on Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson, the primary writer of the Declaration of Independence, and the third president of the United States, may have added to the crowd’s interest. Certainly, the sexual liaison between Jefferson and his enslaved companion Sally Hemings has been a topic of discussion and controversy since the relationship was disclosed several years ago…

Read the entire article here.

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The Problems With Raced Based Medicine

Posted in Articles, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, Videos on 2019-02-25 01:39Z by Steven

The Problems With Raced Based Medicine

LabRoots
2019-02-18

Abbie Arce

Race is often used in medicine to evaluate symptoms, make diagnoses, and decide on a course of care. These systems of evaluation are often inaccurate representations of reality, based on stereotypes.

For example, minorities are much less likely to be prescribed pain medication based on these kinds of preconceived notions about race. This type of race-based medicine has a way of blinding doctors to other more important factors such as an individual’s family or social history, symptoms, or related illnesses…

Read the entire article here.

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NASA Renames Facility After Katherine Johnson of ‘Hidden Figures’ Fame

Posted in Articles, Media Archive, United States, Women on 2019-02-25 01:25Z by Steven

NASA Renames Facility After Katherine Johnson of ‘Hidden Figures’ Fame

The New York Times
2019-02-23

Elisha Brown


Katherine Johnson, left, and Christine Darden, two of the first African-American women to work as mathematicians at NASA. The agency named a facility in Ms. Johnson’s honor on Friday. Chet Strange for The New York Times

NASA on Friday officially renamed a facility in West Virginia after Katherine Johnson, an African-American mathematician and centenarian whose barrier-breaking career was depicted in the film “Hidden Figures.”

The 2016 film, based on a book released earlier that year, depicted the struggle of Ms. Johnson and other black women for equality at NASA during the height of the space age and segregation. The mathematician tracked the trajectories of crucial missions in the 1960s.

“I am thrilled we are honoring Katherine Johnson in this way as she is a true American icon who overcame incredible obstacles and inspired so many,” Jim Bridenstine, the administrator of NASA, said Friday in a statement. A dedication ceremony is to be held at a later time.

The newly renamed facility, which is in Fairmont, W.Va., will now be known as the Katherine Johnson Independent Verification and Validation Facility. The program housed at the facility monitors the software used to track high-profile NASA missions, according to the agency’s website…

Read the entire article here.

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Artists on Artists: Genevieve Gaignard on Real Worlds: Brassaï, Arbus, Goldin

Posted in Arts, Media Archive, United States, Videos on 2019-02-25 01:01Z by Steven

Artists on Artists: Genevieve Gaignard on Real Worlds: Brassaï, Arbus, Goldin

MOCA
Museum of Contemporary Art
Los Angeles, California
2019-01-24

Genevieve Gaignard’s work mixes elements of self-portraiture, collage, and sculpture to present nuanced issues surrounding race, beauty, and cultural identity. Gaignard’s staged photographs create a platform for what she calls “persona-play-performances” within these spaces. The performances enacted within her photographic works are a combination of autobiography and allegory. Responding to the photographs on view in Real Worlds: Brassaï, Arbus, Goldin, Gaignard will expand on how these three legendary practitioners have influenced her own photographic work.

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Amreekiya: A Novel

Posted in Books, Media Archive, Novels, United States, Women on 2019-02-23 21:52Z by Steven

Amreekiya: A Novel

University Press of Kentucky
2018-11-09
194 pages
6 x 9 in.
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8131-7637-6

Lena Mahmoud

Isra Shadi, a twenty-one-year-old woman of mixed Palestinian and white descent, lives in California with her paternal amu (uncle), amtu (aunt), and cousins after the death of her mother and abandonment by her father at a young age. Ever the outcast in her amu and amtu’s household, they eagerly encourage Isra to marry and leave. After rejecting a string of undesirable suitors, she marries Yusef, an old love from her past.

In Amreekiya, author Lena Mahmoud deftly juggles two storylines, alternating between Isra’s youth and her current life as a married twentysomething who is torn between cultures and trying to define herself. The chapters chronicle various moments in Isra’s narrative, including the volatile relationship of her parents and the trials and joys of forging a partnership with Yusef. Mahmoud also examines Isra’s first visit to Palestine, the effects of sexism, how language affects identity, and what it means to have a love that overcomes unbearable pain.

An exploration of womanhood from an underrepresented voice in American literature, Amreekiya is simultaneously unique and relatable. Featuring an authentic array of characters, Mahmoud’s first novel is a much-needed story in a divided world.

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Kamala Harris’s record and character matter — not the race of her father and husband

Posted in Articles, History, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2019-02-23 21:38Z by Steven

Kamala Harris’s record and character matter — not the race of her father and husband

The Washington Post
2019-02-22

Colbert I. King


Sen. Kamala D. Harris arrives at a Harlem restaurant in New York for lunch with the Rev. Al Sharpton on Thursday. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

California Democratic Sen. Kamala D. Harris hardly had time to finish basking in the glow of her presidential bid’s five-star rollout before 20,000 adoring Oakland hometown fans, when two black-media-inspired questions hit her in the face: Why did she marry a white man? And: Is she black enough?

Harris has answers to both questions. They will appear in this column. But let’s take a look at why these questions turn up in a presidential contest.

Questions about race, sex and interracial coupling aren’t new. Warring over them is older than the Republic…

Read the entire article here.

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The “Miscegenation” Troll

Posted in Articles, History, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2019-02-23 21:23Z by Steven

The “Miscegenation” Troll

JSTOR Daily
2019-02-20

Mark Sussman

The Miscegenation Troll
via Wikimedia Commons

The term “miscegenation” was coined in an 1864 pamphlet by an anonymous author.

In 1864, a pamphlet entitled “Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro” began to circulate on the streets of New York. The title certainly would have given New Yorkers pause. No one had ever seen the word “miscegenation” before. In fact, the pamphlet’s anonymous author invented it, giving the reason that “amalgamation”—then the most common term used to describe “race mixing”—was a “poor word, since it properly refers to the union of metals with quicksilver.” The term “miscegenation”—from the Latin miscere (to mix) and genus (race)—had only one definition.

Besides introducing a new word into the English language, the pamphleteer was also responsible for what appeared to be one of the most fearless documents in the archive of nineteenth century abolitionist writing. Among many other claims and political recommendations, the pamphlet notes that, “the miscegenetic or mixed races are much superior, mentally, physically, and morally, to those pure or unmixed;” that “a continuance of progress can only be obtained through a judicious crossing of diverse elements;” that “the Caucasian, or white race… has never yet developed a religious faith on its own;” that “the true ideal man can only be reached by blending the type man and woman of all the races of the earth;” that “the most beautiful girl in form, feature, and every attribute of feminine loveliness [the pamphleteer] ever saw, was a mulatto.” Most provocatively, the writer claimed that “the Southern beauty… proclaims by every massive ornament in her shining hair, and by every yellow shade in the wavy folds of her dress, ‘I love the black man.’”

At the time, Miscegenation was radical. Even among the most radical abolitionists of the day, interracial marriage was tolerated, but rarely explicitly encouraged. (Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner and prominent abolitionist Wendell Phillips were exceptions.) Eurocentric racial hierarchies were often deeply ingrained in their thinking…

Read the entire article here.

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The Arresting Eye: Race and the Anxiety of Detection

Posted in Asian Diaspora, Books, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Monographs, Passing on 2019-02-23 02:57Z by Steven

The Arresting Eye: Race and the Anxiety of Detection

University of Virginia Press
May 2015
224 pages
6×9 inches
Cloth ISBN: 9780813937014
Paper ISBN: 9780813937021
Ebook ISBN: 9780813937038

Jinny Huh, Associate Professor of English
University of Vermont

In her reading of detective fiction and passing narratives from the end of the nineteenth century forward, Jinny Huh investigates anxieties about race and detection. Adopting an interdisciplinary and comparative approach, she examines the racial formations of African Americans and Asian Americans not only in detective fiction (from Sherlock Holmes and Charlie Chan to the works of Pauline Hopkins) but also in narratives centered on detection itself (such as Winnifred Eaton’s rhetoric of undetection in her Japanese romances). In explicating the literary depictions of race-detection anxiety, Huh demonstrates how cultural, legal, and scientific discourses across diverse racial groups were also struggling with demands for racial decipherability. Anxieties of detection and undetection, she concludes, are not mutually exclusive but mutually dependent on each other’s construction and formation in American history and culture.

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Henriette Delille is two steps away from becoming a Saint

Posted in Articles, Biography, History, Louisiana, Media Archive, Religion, United States, Women on 2019-02-22 23:54Z by Steven

Henriette Delille is two steps away from becoming a Saint

The Louisiana Weekly
2019-01-02

HENRIETTE DELILLE
Henriette Delille

As the Who Dat Nation roots for the New Orleans Saints as they strive to win the NFL Super Bowl in Atlanta, another group of dedicated and faithful folks is eagerly awaiting the day that their Beloved Founder becomes a bonafide Saint in her own right.

Henriette Delille, founder of the Sisters of the Holy Family, is but two steps from being recognized by the Vatican as a Roman Catholic Saint.

Henriette Delille was born in New Orleans, La., on Thursday, March 11, 1813. Her mother, Marie-Josèphe “Pouponne” Díaz, was a free woman of color of New Orleans. Her father Jean-Baptiste Lille Sarpy (var. de Lille) was born about 1758 in Fumel, Lotet-Garonne, France. Their union was a common-law marriage typical of the contemporary plaçage system. She had a brother Jean Delille and other siblings. Their maternal grandparents were Juan José (var. Jean-Joseph) Díaz, a Spanish merchant, and Henriette (Dubreuil) Laveau, a Créole of color. Their paternal grandparents were Charles Sarpy and Susanne Trenty, both natives of Fumel, France. Her maternal great-grandmother is said to be Cécile Marthe Basile Dubreuil, a woman of color considered to be a daughter of Villars Dubreuil, born in 1716, who immigrated to Louisiana from France. Henriette and her family lived in the French Quarter, not far from St. Louis Cathedral

Read the entire article here.

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