My self-designation: Black with Access to Residual White Privilege (BWATRWP).

Posted in Excerpts/Quotes on 2013-02-25 00:50Z by Steven

…I don’t believe multi-racial makes sense by my understanding of race.  Race is socially constructed and “multi-racial” seems to assume that race is biological: if parents are of different then the kid is “mixed”.   But that is not how race works. Race is constructed through law, history, culture, practice, custom, etc.

“Black” does not designate having two parents who are both “un-mixed” descendants of Africa and African diaspora. “Black” [is] derived from society.  There is no “mixed race” history, institutions, cultural practices.  There are mixed race [people] who are part of all these, but no group history.  I believe all people can self-identify themselves in ways that feel comfortable and honest, but the social/political part is bigger. I have a white mother and black father, but this doesn’t make me mixed race.  Race is not biology. In USA this combo makes me black.

My self-designation: Black with Access to Residual White Privilege (BWATRWP)…

Melissa Harris-Lacewell

Eddings, Jeff, “Princeton Professor tweets about her views on mixed-race identity,” Mixed Child: The Pulse of the Mixed Community, (July 27, 2009). http://www.mixedchild.com/NEWS/August2009/Princeton_Professor.htm or http://coleridgehead.blogspot.com/2009/07/melissa-harris-lacewell-on-race.html.

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The Obamas and a (Post) Racial America?

Posted in Anthologies, Barack Obama, Books, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United States on 2012-10-03 18:49Z by Steven

The Obamas and a (Post) Racial America?

Oxford University Press
January 2011
336 pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4
Hardback ISBN13: 9780199735204; ISBN10: 0199735204

Edited by

Gregory Parks, Assistant Professor of Law
Wake Forest University, Winston Salem, North Carolina

Matthew Hughey, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Connecticut

The United States has taken a long and winding road to racial equality, especially as it pertains to relations between blacks and whites. On November 4, 2008, when Barack Hussein Obama was elected as the forty-fourth President of the United States and first black person to occupy the highest office in the land, many wondered whether that road had finally come to an end. Do we now live in a post-racial nation?

According to this book’s contributors, a more nuanced and contemporary analysis and measurement of racial attitudes undercuts this assumption. They contend that despite the election of the first black President and rise of his family as possibly the most recognized family in the world, race remains a salient issue-particularly in the United States. Looking beyond public behaviors and how people describe their own attitudes, the contributors draw from the latest research to show how, despite the Obama family’s rapid rise to national prominence, many Americans continue to harbor unconscious, anti-black biases. But there are whispers of change. The Obama family’s position may yet undermine, at the unconscious level, anti-black attitudes in the United States and abroad. The prominence of the Obamas on the world stage and the image they project may hasten the day when America is indeed post-racial, even at the implicit level.

Features

  • Draws on a growing body of scholarly literature on implicit racial bias.
  • Discusses the implications of the entire First Family’s rise to prominence, not simply the President’s.

Contents

  • Contributors
  • Introduction
  • Chapter 1: Measuring Racial Progress in America: The Tangled Path of Race – by Matthew W. Hughey (Commentary: Constraint and Freedom in the “Age of Obama” – by Kenneth Mack)
  • Chapter 2: Implicit Bias: A Better Metric for Racial Progress? – Leslie Ashburn-Nardo, Robert Livingston and Joshua Waytz (Commentary: The Erasure of the Affirmative Action Debate in the Age of Obama – by Ian Ayres)
  • Chapter 3: Black Man in the White House: Ideology and Implicit Racial Bias in the Age of Obama – by Kristin Lane and John Jost (Commentary: Black Man in the White House: A Commentary – Marc H. Morial)
  • Chapter 4: Obama-nation?: Implicit Beliefs about American Nationality and the Possibility of Redefining Who Counts as “Truly” American – by Nilanjana Dasgupta and Kumar Yogeeswaran (Commentary: As American as Barack Obama – by Lawrence Bobo)
  • Chapter 5: Does Black and Male Still = Threat in the Age of Obama? – by Jennifer A. Richeson and Meghan G. Bean (Commentary: Threat, Fantasy, and President Obama – by Eddie Glaude, Jr.)
  • Chapter 6: Michelle Obama: Redefining Images of Black Women – by Shanette C. Porter and Gregory S. Parks (Commentary: First Lady Michelle Obama: Getting Past the Stereotypes – Julianne Malveaux)
  • Chapter 7: Barack, Michelle and the Complexities of a Black “Love Supreme” – Clarenda M. Phillips, Tamara L. Brown and Gregory S. Parks (Commentary: The Obamas: Beyond Troubled Love – by Jenée Desmond-Harris)
  • Chapter 8: Malia and Sasha: Re-envisioning Black Youth – by Valerie Purdie-Vaughns and Rachel Sumner (Commentary: Re-envisioning Black Youth: A Commentary by Marc Lamont Hill)
  • Chapter 9: Obama and Global Change in Attitudes about Group Status – by George Ciccariello-Maher and Matthew Hughey (Commentary: Commentary on Obama and Group Change in Attitudes about Group Status – Michael Dawson)
  • Chapter 10: The Role of Race in American Politics: Lessons Learned from the 2008 Presidential Election – by Thierry Devos (Commentary: The State of the Post-racial Union – by Farai Chideya)
  • Chapter 11: Obama’s Potential to Transform the Racial Attitudes of White Americans – by Jack Dovidio, Samuel L. Gaertner, Tamar Saguy and Eric Hehman (Commentary: Black Behavior and Moral Dissonance: Missing Mechanisms in Theorizing the Obama Effect – by Richard O. Lempert)
  • Chapter 12: New Bottle, Same Old Wine: The GOP and Race in the Age of Obama – by Russell J. Webster, Donald A. Saucier and Gregory S. Parks (Commentary: New Bottle, Same Old Wine: A Response – by Melissa Harris-Lacewell)
  • About the Editors, Contributors, and Commentators
  • Index
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Bill Moyers interview with Patricial Willilams and Melissa Harris-Lacewell

Posted in Barack Obama, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United States, Videos, Women on 2011-05-31 01:25Z by Steven

Bill Moyers interview with Patricial Willilams and Melissa Harris-Lacewell

Bill Moyers Journal
2009-01-23

Bill Moyers, Host

Patricia Williams, James L. Dohr Professor of Law
Columbia University

Melissa Harris-Lacewell (Harris-Perry), Associate Professor of Politics and African American Studies
Princeton University

Bill Moyers sits down with Columbia law professor and Nation columnist Patricia Williams and Princeton politics and African American studies professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell about the significance of this milestone and what it means for the future.

BILL MOYERS: A year and a half ago Melissa Harris-Lacewell sat right here and told me she thought Barack Obama could not be elected president in 2008. This week she attended his inauguration. I’m eager to hear her reaction.

Melissa Harris-Lacewell is Associate Professor of Politics and African American Studies at Princeton University. She’s the author of “Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought”.

Patricia Williams is back, too. She teaches law at Columbia University, writes “Diary of a Mad Law Professor” column in “The Nation” magazine, and is the author of “The Alchemy of Race and Rights”. It’s good to see you both back.

PATRICIA WILLIAMS: Thanks.

MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: Thanks, great to be here.

BILL MOYERS: You did say, sitting right there — Obama can’t win.

MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: I did. And probably the worst part was I suggested I thought he’d be a great vice president. And in my mind I was thinking John Edwards would be at the top of the ticket. So this is maybe more than anything why political scientists don’t run actual political campaigns. I mean, it has been quite an electoral season.

BILL MOYERS: So what were you thinking on Tuesday?

MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: I suppose the greatest thought I was having as I was watching the inauguration of Barack Obama was my sense that I didn’t even know I wanted a black president. I wasn’t particularly attached to the idea of an African American in the White House. It seemed just sort of symbolic. And yet I was moved at a very profound level about how this made me feel connected to my country in a way that I’d never fully felt connected before. It was an astonishing feeling.

PATRICIA WILLIAMS: But I think this was a very particular, remarkable moment because it came on the tail end of a very freighted, complicated, and I think unhappy eight years. And so I think a lot of people who did not necessarily even support the Democratic Party voted for Obama or celebrated his inauguration because the joy in it was infectious. And the sense of improvement, the sense of an opportunity for global recognition, not just domestic recognition, was something that, just spread like wildfire…

…PATRICIA WILLIAMS: I do think that we need to quell some of the expectations that, now that he is president, you know, bluebirds have suddenly come into, you know, that butterflies are hatching all over the country. It is, we still have difficulty with, for example, the vocabulary of race that I think is still very much confining how we see Barack Obama. Now, again, that may change-

BILL MOYERS: What do you mean?

PATRICIA WILLIAMS: Well, I think that he is, on the one hand, our first African American president. And some people call him our first bi-racial president.

BILL MOYERS: Right.

PATRICIA WILLIAMS: Some people say that he is, or really consider him still much more acceptable because he has a white parent. I think that part of that internecine warfare within the black community based on skin color.

I think one of the freighted problems within the black community with hearing words like “bi-racial” is that, you know, African Americans have always been multi-racial. We are, I mean, you know, since slavery, at least bi-racial. And so that some of that vocabulary within the black community I think evokes images of half-breed, quadroon, mulatto, the kind of color coded, tragic mulatto conversation that induces a kind of hierarchy. And I think that that’s going to be part of a new American vocabulary in dealing with that unconscious level of distinction.

BILL MOYERS: What do you think about that?

MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: Well, so for me I suppose the notion of Barack Obama as our first bi-racial president is troubling. And it’s troubling in part because, as you point out, African Americans have always been a multi-racial people, or at least for all of contemporary American history they have been a multi-racial people. But the other thing is that race is not simply about biology.

Race is, of course, socially and legally constructed. And at every point in American history Barack Obama would have been in the category of black. He would have been enslaveable under the slave codes. He would have been Jim Crowed in the context of the Jim Crow South.

Homer Plessy, who is the litigate in the Plessy v. Ferguson, which establishes separate but equal, the legal code that we think of the civil rights movement as finally breaking open, was so visibly or physiologically white that he had to go to the conductor on the train and tell him, “I’m passing the color line here. I’m breaking the color line. You need to arrest me.”

So all of the moments of American racial political history hinge right around a space where multi-racial, sometimes much more sort of in appearance white-black people, have been a part of the story. So it’s very hard for me to imagine that now, at the culmination of one part of the black political story, we would start to break that off and assign it to a group that simply does not exist as a matter of law, the bi-racial group.

I suppose what I find exciting about the upfrontness about Barack Obama’s patchwork, racial identity is that it allows him to be empowering to many different kinds of people. But at the same time, to take away that this is a particular moment of ordinary black folks on the ground who came to D.C. in numbers like nothing I’ve ever seen, who stood there in the cold.

That is the accomplishment and the achievement of ordinary black folks on the ground as voters, as those who survived the Jim Crow South. So I just can’t take Barack away from us. We need him…

Watch the video clip here. Read the transcript here.

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Fall 2010 Honors Colloquium: RACE

Posted in Asian Diaspora, Health/Medicine/Genetics, History, Identity Development/Psychology, Live Events, New Media, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United States, Videos on 2010-09-27 20:45Z by Steven

Fall 2010 Honors Colloquium: RACE

University of Rhode Island
Tuesday evenings, 19:00 ET (Local Time); (23:00Z through November; 00:00Z on Wednesday after November 9).
2010-09-14 through 2010-12-07
Edwards Auditorium, URI Kingston Campus

A series of public programs at the University of Rhode Island presented by the URI Honors Program

Join us! The public is invited to attend this series of free events.

Perceptions about race shape everyday experiences, public policies, opportunities for individual achievement, and relations across racial and ethnic lines. In this colloquium we will explore key issues of race, showing how race still matters.

You will be able to watch the Colloquium live by clicking here or watching below. This link will only work in real time, while the presentation is going on.

Note: the live feed is only active during live events.

Includes noted scholars (Times and dates below are in UTC.  Please read carefully!):

2010-10-05, 23:00Z
Race, Identity, and Medical Genomics in the Obama Age
Duana Fullwiley, Assistant Professor of African and African American studies and of Medical Anthropology
Harvard University

2010-10-12, 23:00Z
The Invisible Weight of Whiteness: The Racial Grammar of Everyday Life in Contemporary America
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Professor of Sociology
Duke University

2010-11-31, 00:00Z
How Black Women’s Stories Complicate Race and Gender Politics
Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Associate Professor of Politics and African American Studies
Princeton University

For more information, click here.

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Not-Black by Default

Posted in Articles, Barack Obama, Census/Demographics, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United States on 2010-05-25 02:16Z by Steven

Not-Black by Default

The Nation
Diary of a Mad Law Professor
2010-04-21

Patricia J. Williams, James L. Dohr Professor of Law
Columbia University

Most people who appear phenotypically “black” don’t play around when the government asks them to report their race.

Last week, Melissa Harris-Lacewell wrote an insightful column, “Black by Choice,” about President Obama’s having checked the box marked “Black, African American or Negro” on his Census form. As she notes, despite the way his complex heritage both disrupts “standard definitions of blackness” and creates “a definitional crisis for whiteness,” in American culture “having a white parent has never meant becoming white” if one also has an African-descended parent…

Read the entire article here.

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Black by Choice

Posted in Articles, Barack Obama, Census/Demographics, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United States on 2010-04-21 02:24Z by Steven

Black by Choice

The Nation
2010-04-15

Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Associate Professor of Politics and African American Studies
Princeton University

The first black president has created a definitional crisis for whiteness.

President Obama created a bit of a stir in early April when he completed his Census form. In response to the question about racial identity the president indicated he was “Black, African American or Negro.” Despite having been born of a white mother and raised in part by white grandparents, Obama chose to identify himself solely as black even though the Census allows people to check multiple answers for racial identity.

This choice disappointed some who have fought to ensure that multiracial people have the right to indicate their complex racial heritage. It confused some who were surprised by his choice not to officially recognize his white heritage. It led to an odd flurry of obvious political stories confirming that Obama was, indeed, the first African-American president…

Read the entire article here.

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Faculty Spotlight: Melissa Harris-Lacewell

Posted in Articles, Interviews, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United States, Women on 2010-01-26 22:26Z by Steven

Faculty Spotlight: Melissa Harris-Lacewell

CAAS News
Center for African American Studies
Princeton University
Spring 2008 Newsletter
Pages 6-7

Dara-Lyn Shrager

Melissa Harris-Lacewell smiles broadly when asked about Senator Barack Obama’s run for the democratic nomination for President. She is clearly a fan of both the man and his campaign.  As a former Chicagoan, who lived in the state while Obama was first a State Senator and then a US Senator, Harris-Lacewell considers herself an Obama supporter.  After just a few minutes spent chatting with Harris-Lacewell in her cozy Corwin Hall office, I realize how lucky Obama – or anyone for that matter – would be to find Harris-Lacewell on his side. She is a veritable storm of intelligent exuberance, possessing equal parts charm and determination. I left our meeting as a fan and supporter of Melissa Harris-Lacewell.

Q. What do you make of the criticism that Obama is not really black?

R. It’s wrong. Americans are really stupid about race, partly because we live so far apart from each other. Black people have always been a mixed race but whites cannot say this about themselves.  Doubting his authenticity as a black candidate means that white people cannot feel good about supporting him because he’s not really black. That’s ridiculous.  It also discredits his ability to make claims on the black resistance movements and other important issues.  Obama has actively promoted himself as someone onto whom we can cast our own understandings. His race is something of a blank slate onto which we can project our own hopes, dreams and desires…

Read the entire interview here.

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Princeton Professor tweets about her views on mixed-race identity (Interview with Melissa Harris-Lacewell)

Posted in Articles, Identity Development/Psychology, Interviews, New Media, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United States, Women on 2010-01-26 21:56Z by Steven

Princeton Professor tweets about  her views on mixed-race identity (Interview with Melissa Harris-Lacewell)

Mixed Child: The Pulse of the Mixed Community
2009-07-29

Jeff Eddings

MSNBC contributor, Princeton University’s Associate Professor of Politics & African American Studies and author of Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought Melissa Harris-Lacewell had a frank  discussion with a follower on Twitter about the concept of mixed-race identity.

The conversation with Jeff Eddings of Silicon Valley, CA went as follows (published Monday, July 27th [2009]):

Eddings: Wrong pres[idential]. predictions aside, the biggest missed opp. w/BO [Barack Obama] as pres. & you in the mix is lack of discussion re: multiracial.

Harris-Lacewell: I’m not sure its a missed opportunity. From my perspective I am not “multi-racial” the term has no meaning for me.

Eddings: We keep talking about race as if it were one thing. e.g. You & pres. are both multiracial, but only self-identify as black.

Harris-Lacewell: because race is a social construct it is clear to me that I am constructed as black and self-identify as such.

Eddings: Being multiracial & having grown up in both cultures, I can tell you that I’m not constructed as simply one or the other 🙂

Harris-Lacewell: Though I respect that ppl [people] have right to think of themselves as anything they like, I think “multi-racial” is a weird idea…

…Harris-Lacewell: I don’t believe multi-racial makes sense by my understanding of race.  Race is socially constructed and “multi-racial” seems to assume that race is biological: if parents are of different then the kid is “mixed”.  But that is not how race works. Race is constructed through law, history, culture, practice, custom, etc… I have a white mother and black father, but this doesn’t make me mixed race. Race is not biology. In USA this combo makes me black…

Read the entire interview here.

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