Jordan Clarke: “Something In-between” @ Hang Man Gallery

Posted in Arts, Canada, Live Events, Media Archive, Women on 2011-08-09 17:04Z by Steven

Jordan Clarke: “Something In-between” @ Hang Man Gallery

Hang Man Gallery
756 Queen Street East
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Open Tuesday-Sunday, 12:00-17:00 ET (Local Time)

Exhibit Duration: 2011-09-06 through 2011-09-25
Opening Reception: 2011-09-08, 19:00-21:00 EDT (Local Time)

Jordan Clarke

Artist Jordan Clarke explores her mixed-race identity through paintings of self-portraiture. This series looks at being “in-between” as both a physical and psychological state for bi-racial women of the 21st century, where there is constant pressure to assume predetermined racial and gender roles created by society.
 
Clarke most recently received a grant from the Ontario Arts Council.  In 2008, she studied at the Academy of Realist Art in Toronto, completing the Drawing curriculum in 2009.  In 2007, she graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design, where she received a BFA majoring in Drawing and Painting.  While attending OCAD, she received the opportunity to participate in the off-campus studies program in Florence, Italy from 2005-2006.

For more information, click here.

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Texas bucks U.S. trend on standardized scoring

Posted in Articles, Campus Life, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Texas, United States on 2011-08-09 04:10Z by Steven

Texas bucks U.S. trend on standardized scoring

Houston Chronicle
2011-07-25

Jennifer Radcliffe
 
It will tally multiracial students but not report their scores separately

Multiracial students are being tallied for the first time in Texas history, but their standardized test scores won’t appear as a separate group when accountability ratings are released Friday.

As it grapples with increasing diversity, Texas has opted not to measure the scores of the state’s 78,419 multiracial, non-Hispanic students as an ethnic subgroup whose performance matters in determining whether a school made “adequate yearly progress.”
 
Instead, they’ll join the ranks of the 180,000 Asian students lumped in with their schools’ entire student body for accountability purposes…

…Some scores moved
 
As Texas transitions to the new categories this year, state officials have opted to return some multiracial students’ scores to their previous category, if records indicate that the student was originally listed as white or African American. Their scores will only count in that previous category if they improve the school’s rating…

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Racial attitudes and the Anglo‐Indians perceptions of a community before and after independence

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, History, Media Archive on 2011-08-09 03:41Z by Steven

Racial attitudes and the Anglo‐Indians perceptions of a community before and after independence

South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies
Volume 6, Issue 2 (1983)
pages 34-45
DOI: 10.1080/00856408308723045

Coralie Younger
University of Sydney

The question of racial attitudes between the rulers and the ruled, and whites and non-whites has evoked attention from numerous authors. E. Said maintains that ‘the White man was always on the alert to keep the coloured at bay’ while Northrop Frye notes a “garrison mentality” whereby,

‘there is a need for the projection of an unbroken surface, an apparently flawless morale, to be presented not merely to the outside world where the subject races crowd but also to one’s companions’

As Ballhatchet has argued in Race, Sex and Classunder the Rajt ‘the preservation of social distance seemed essential to the maintenance of structures of power and authority.’ Given such attitudes, what was the place of those who were neither black nor white? What, in other words, were attitudes towards Anglo-Indians? British ideas of racial supremacy evolved during the nineteenth century and reached their apotheosis during the imperial heyday of the Victorian age with a belief in white superiority over the inferior coloured races. The British rigidly maintained a distance between themselves and those over whom they ruled. They frowned upon anyone who attempted to bridge the gap.

Anglo-Indians are a minority community in India of mixed European and Indian blood, claiming European descent through the male line. They are legally defined in the Indian Constitution and have concomitant educational and political rights. Economically they are a depressed community, placing little emphasis upon education. Their traditional neglect of education was a result of the paternalistic practice of the British, who gave them preference in upper-subordinate positions in government service regardless of educational attainments. However the reforms that followed the Montagu-Chelmsford Report of 1919 saw the end of reserved positions for Anglo-Indians and led to the Indianisation of all government departments.

Did the British maintain their distance from Anglo-Indians in quite the same way as they did in regard to Indians? In general it would seem that the British response was complex. Racial attitudes had sexual and class overtones. They were contemptuous of Anglo-Indians because of their “native’* blood. The British felt ashamed of Anglo-Indians because they were the products of sexual relations between themselves and Indian women…

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From Invisible Man to “New People”: The Recent Discovery of American Mulattoes

Posted in Articles, History, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States on 2011-08-09 02:38Z by Steven

From Invisible Man to “New People”: The Recent Discovery of American Mulattoes

Phylon (1960-)
Volume 46, Number 2 (2nd Quarter, 1985)
pages 106-122

Patricia Morton

It might well seem obvious what the following persons have in common: Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, Walter White, Horace Mann Bond, Julian Bond, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, James Weldon Johnson, Charles Chesnutt, and Langston Hughes.

Although such a list could be expanded indefinitely, the point is that most of these are familiar enough names that they will readily be identified as Afro-Americans who have acted in some capacity as spokespeople for black Americans. Therefore, the obvious answer to the question suggested above is that these persons share their racial identity, as black American people. It might also be recognized, however, that this answer is based upon a distinctive North American perspective. In Latin American societies, for example, they would be identified instead as “mulattoes,” and in several cases, on the basis of physical appearance and status, as “white.”

It is essentially only during the last decade that this kind of distinction has been explicitly recognized in the publication of a number of studies which explore the historical experience of Americans of mixed black and white ancestry. It was observed recently that “As a field of enquiry with its own conceptual and methodological concerns, Afro-American history came of age during the past two decades.” In one sense these mulatto studies might be seen as part of that coming of age; however, in another sense they hearken back to what Black History has attempted to do for black Americans until recently, namely, to write the mulatto into American history. What does seem clear is that such studies represent a new direction in American historiography, and that the scholars engaged in this field are far from arriving at any consensus regarding their conceptual and methodological concerns. Indeed, they have remained largely unaware of one another’s work, and have arrived largely independently at conclusions which are sometimes complementary and sometimes contradictory. It may be useful at this point, therefore, to compare and contrast their accounts, to offer some tentative suggestions as to their strengths and weaknesses, and where possible, to integrate their conclusions. In addition, this recent upsurge of scholarly interest in Americans of mixed black and white ancestry is a striking phenomenon in itself, which deserves some comment in the context of modern North American attitudes to race and race relations…

…Both miscegenation and mulatto are emotion-charged and value-laden terms, and both have been employed by North American whites in a variety of ways in accordance with their views on race. However, the mulatto figure has also been employed by Afro-Americans as a defense against white racism. Certainly Berzon demonstrates that during the Jim Crow era, Afro-American writers revived the “superior mulatto” for this purpose, consistently and repeatedly portraying the respectable and virtuous character of the person of mixed ancestry to counter the image of Negro degradation. These novels depict exemplary “Victorian” mulatto women, and equally bourgeois mulatto men who are also educated, refined, patriarchal, self-reliant, and devoted to acquiring all the marks of middle-class status. They are race leaders and role models who are both distinct from and an inspiration to the black masses, and particularly during the turn-of-the-century years, Afro-Americans themselves emphasized mulatto distinctiveness, John Mencke’s thesis notwithstanding….

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