“Tense and Tender Ties”: a review of Janny Scott’s A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother (2011)

Posted in Articles, Barack Obama, Book/Video Reviews, Media Archive on 2012-10-31 00:01Z by Steven

“Tense and Tender Ties”: a review of Janny Scott’s A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother (2011)

Transition
Number 108 (2012)
pages 129-140

Kimberly DaCosta, Associate Professor of Sociology; Associate Dean of Students
New York University, Gallatin

Psychologically conflicted, confused, traitorous, tragic, and deracinated: the public vocabulary used to describe multiracial people has hardly changed since the days when state laws banned marriage between black and white. Zeroing in on interracial kinship, Kimberly DaCosta close reads Janny Scott’s biography of Barack Obama’s mother.

My father’s white, I tell them, and rural.
You don’t hate the South? they ask. You don’t hate it?
Natasha Trethewey, “Pastoral”

“I think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men,” said Cornel West in an interview published on the political blog, TruthDig in May 2011. “It’s understandable,” he continues, “As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He is just as human as I am, but that is his cultural formation. When he meets an independent black brother, it is frightening … Obama, coming out of Kansas influence, white, loving grandparents, coming out of Hawaii and Indonesia, when he meets these independent black folk who have a history of slavery, Jim Crow, Jane Crow and so on, he is very apprehensive. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination. It is understandable.”

West claims to understand quite a lot about Obama, intuited from the most general facts of his upbringing in an interracial and international family context. According to West, this upbringing has directly shaped (or perhaps “distorted” is the better description from West’s point of view) his political formation, alienating him from his people (“deracination”) and thus making him ideally suited to become what West calls “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats.”

“It is a tried and true ritual of American politics to interpret interracial intimacy and mixed race subjectivity as a sign of suspect political loyalty.”

When he made these statements, West was participating in a tried and true ritual of American politics—the one in which interracial intimacy and mixed-race subjectivity are interpreted as sign of, or explanation for, suspect or insufficient political loyalty. George W. Bush performed the ritual in 2000, successfully smearing John McCain in the South Carolina Republican primary with a whisper campaign that he had fathered a black child out of wedlock. Most recently, in a widely read and discussed New York Times opinion piece published just a few months after the West interview, Drew Westen, psychologist and self-described “scientist and strategic consultant,” explained Obama’s perceived political betrayal as a consequence of his insufficiently integrated identity. In Obama, Westen writes, we have “a president who either does not know what he believes or is willing to take whatever position he thinks will lead to his reelection. Perhaps those of us who were so enthralled with the magnificent story he told in Dreams from My Father appended a chapter at the end that wasn’t there—the chapter in which he resolves his identity and comes to know who he is and what he believes in” (emphasis added).

These statements rely on familiar stereotypes of mixed race people—psychologically conflicted, confused, race traitors—for their impact, and evidence no more than a cursory knowledge of the details of Obama’s family life. Not that more detail about those relationships matters much to those making these kinds of political speculations. Ideologies, as Barbara Fields reminds us in the New Left Review, “are real, but it does not follow that they [need to be] scientifically accurate” in order to do their work. They work because they reflect the daily rituals that people engage in to make them seem plausible—rituals like the ones West and Westen are performing—that assert, while claiming to merely describe, the political impact of mixed-race subjectivity.

Janny Scott’s biography emerges in this moment in which the political utility of interracialism reveals itself yet again. If statements about the significance of Obama’s upbringing in his political decision-making proceed largely on the basis of supposition and innuendo,A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother, published by Riverhead Press, provides some much needed context. Scott did not get to comment on this most recent controversy since the volume went to press before it occurred. Yet, her book can be read as a long (nearly 400-page) retort to those who would so blithely use interracial kinship and mixed-race subjectivity in this way…

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2012 Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference

Posted in Barack Obama, Forthcoming Media, Live Events, United States on 2012-10-30 21:30Z by Steven

2012 Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference

DePaul University
Student Center
2250 North Shefield Avenue
Chicago, Illinois
2012-11-01 through 2012-11-04

“What is Critical Mixed Race Studies?,” the biennial Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference, will be held at DePaul University in Chicago on November 1-4, 2012.

The CMRS conference brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines nationwide. Recognizing that the diverse disciplines that have nurtured Mixed Race Studies have fostered different approaches to the field, the 2012 CMRS conference is devoted to the general theme “What is Critical Mixed Race Studies?”
 
Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) is the transracial, transdisciplinary, and transnational critical analysis of the institutionalization of social, cultural, and political orders based on dominant conceptions of race. CMRS emphasizes the mutability of race and the porosity of racial boundaries in order to critique processes of racialization and social stratification based on race. CMRS addresses local and global systemic injustices rooted in systems of racialization.

For more information, click here. View the final schedule here.

I will deliver my paper, “Barack, Blackness, Borders and Beyond: Exploring Obama’s Racial Identity Today as a Means of Transcending Race Tomorrow,” during the Session Three panel titled, “Assessing Mixed—Race Iconography: Barack Obama and Tiger Woods” from 14:15-15:45 CDT (Local Time) in Room 313.  The abstract of my paper is below:

The racial identity of President Barack Obama has been the topic of considerable discussion and debate. Despite the fact that Obama has always identified unambiguously as black—most significantly in March, 2010 after filling out his census form—commentary continues to the point of unilaterally referring to him as “biracial” within some camps.
 
Using three separate frameworks, I explain why Obama is indeed black.  Firstly, I show that Obama is black within the framework of self-identification as crafted by the multiracial identity movement. Secondly, I show via an ethnological framework that Obama’s heterogeneous ancestry reinforces rather than weakens his cultural connection with black Americans.  Lastly, and most importantly, I show within a sociological framework, that Obama is black because we perceive him as such.

Furthermore, I show how the multiracial movement reifies rather than blurs racialized boundaries; and that Obama’s blackness creates one of the greatest challenges to this movement.  Rather than concluding with a seemingly triumphalist Afro-centric focus, I will instead explain how Obama’s “blackness” from “white/black” parentage can be used to exemplify the social construction of race and can provide us a means to create meaningful discourses that may lead us beyond the illogical nature of racialization.

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What Can We Learn about White Privilege and Racism from the Experiences of White Mothers Parenting Biracial Children?

Posted in Canada, Dissertations, Family/Parenting, Identity Development/Psychology, Social Science, Social Work, Women on 2012-10-30 03:32Z by Steven

What Can We Learn about White Privilege and Racism from the Experiences of White Mothers Parenting Biracial Children?

Wilfrid Laurier University
2008
175 pages

Shannon Cushing

A THESIS Submitted to the Department of Psychology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for Master of Arts Degree in Community Psychology

Despite progress in the movement toward anti-racism, racism remains a problem in Canada. While the presence of racism and the problem of racism are recognized by Canadian society, there is still a long way to go before racism and white privilege are eliminated. In the present study, I apply Community Psychology values to the examination of an as-yet relatively unexamined minority population: white mothers of biracial children. Guided by epistemological views that place my research within the critical and social constructivist research paradigms, I explore my research question, “How can the experiences of white mothers parenting biracial children inform us about white privilege and racism?”, using a grounded theory analysis of self-reported experiences of six white mothers living in Greater Waterloo Region, in Ontario, Canada. My informants participated in semi-structured individual and small group interviews and completed a photographic journaling project. While all the mothers were united by their common experience of being white women parenting biracial children, they represented a diverse range of socioeconomic classes and family compositions, and were parenting children whose fathers came from several ethnic backgrounds. Through my analysis of my informants’ stories, I identified a new perspective of the “experience of racism” in society. In addition, my findings led to the development of a theoretical framework that merges white privilege and racism into inseparable entities and fosters critical understanding of how racism is perpetuated in Canadian society. Recommendations for additional contributions to the anti-racism movement are suggested.

Read the entire dissertation here.

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Learning to be different: A white mother of biracial children experiences racism

Posted in Dissertations, Family/Parenting, Media Archive, Social Work, United States, Women on 2012-10-30 03:24Z by Steven

Learning to be different: A white mother of biracial children experiences racism

University of St. Thomas (Minnesota)
December 2004
194 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3154007
ISBN: 9780496146376

Jennifer Ann Greer Johnson

A Dissertation Submitted to the Education Faculty of the University of St. Thomas in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of the Degree Doctor of Education

This qualitative autoethnographic study examines the experiences of an inner-city assistant principal in a multiracial high school who is also a Caucasian mother of biracial children of African American and Caucasian descent. The narratives throughout this study illustrate encounters with prejudice, discrimination, and racism in public and private places. The stories are analyzed through the lens of racial formation theory and Critical Race Theory. Results indicate that the identity of a mother of biracial children is complex as she straddles two cultures, that of the black and white community. An Ethnic Identity Development Model illustrates the struggles of rearing biracial children while working in an urban high school. This autoethnographic study illustrates the mother’s identity shift as she learns to be different in both worlds.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

  • ABSTRACT
  • LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES.
  • PREFACE
  • CHAPTER 1: JUMPING THE BROOM
    • A journey into difference
    • Evolution of the study
    • Autoethnography
    • Data collection and analysis
    • Validity and ethics
    • Organization of the Dissertation
  • CHAPTER 2: REVIEW OF LITERATURE
    • Interracial Relationships
    • Biracial Identity
    • Class Issues
    • Racial Formation Theory
    • Critical Race Theory
  • CHAPTER 3: AWAKENINGS
    • Is she adopted?
    • Their father is Black.
    • Children are not supposed to be out in the sun
    • Intraracial Discrimination
    • We can only choose one
    • Would you buy a warranty on a Cadillac?
    • Another Awakening
    • Is that your child?
    • I will never be with another white woman again!
    • His mouth fell open, and he stared at my children and then at me
  • CHAPTER 4: HAIR: POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF RACE
    • What is this, the next Shirley Temple?
    • Do you use this on your hair?
    • I decided that you need to do something with Jacqueline’s hair
    • Everyone stopped and stared at me
    • Shampoo and conditioner for one colored girl
    • I have to get their hair “right” in the eyes of the Black community
  • CHAPTER 5: WILL MY CHILDREN HAVE A PLACE AT THE TABLE?
    • I was raised in a strict Catholic household
    • The Archbishop’s Letter
    • Racism is a sin
    • For my children’s sake, great changes need to be made
  • CHAPTER 6: WILL MY CHILDREN BE LEFT BEHIND?
    • Appointment as Assistant Principal
    • “Are those your children?”
    • I circled ‘White’ even though my son does not look White
    • “She does not like you”
    • “So you’re kickin it with a black man”
    • You’re just picking on me because I am Black
    • Does anyone speak another language?
    • Mama, will you still like us even though your skin is white and mine is brown?
    • Let’s not just give people the boots, let’s give them the straps
    • Most of the International Baccalaureate students are white
  • CHAPTER 7: A MOTHER’S STRUGGLE
    • “Second-Hand Racism”
    • Racism at school and the workplace
    • Rearing my children
    • Ethnic Identity Development Model
  • REFERENCES
  • BIBLIOGRAPHY

LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES

  • TABLE 1 Changing Racial Combinations of Interracial Marriages in Minnesota.
  • TABLE 2 My Journey in a Racialized Society
  • FIGURE 1 2000 Census Self-Identification Questionnaire
  • FIGURE 2 Ethnic Identity Development Model (Fluid)

Purchase the dissertation here.

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Mixed Race Issues to be Examined at DePaul University Forum

Posted in Articles, Forthcoming Media, Live Events, United States on 2012-10-30 03:07Z by Steven

Mixed Race Issues to be Examined at DePaul University Forum

DePaul University
News Release
2012-10-29

As Americans of mixed racial ancestry continue to grow in number and diversity, the demographic, social, political and cultural implications for the country become more complex. These issues will be examined from a variety of perspectives at a groundbreaking conference that will bring scholars and artists from around the United States and the world to DePaul University Nov. 1 through 4.
 
The conference will include 50 programs featuring research presentations, panel discussions and performances that explore various aspects of the emerging field of Critical Mixed Race Studies. More than 150 presenters from the U.S. and other countries, including the Philippines and the United Kingdom, are expected to attend.

Individual programs will examine issues such as discrimination against mixed race persons, mixed race student organizations and mixed race gender and sexuality issues. Individual panel topics include: “Assessing Mixed Race Iconography: Barack Obama and Tiger Woods;” “Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Mixed Race Identities;” and “Media, Celebrity and Beauty: The Visuals of Mixed Race.”
 
All programs are free and open to the public. A full schedule of events, times and locations is online here.

For more information, click here.

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Race in a Bottle

Posted in Articles, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2012-10-29 17:35Z by Steven

Race in a Bottle

Scientific American
Volume 297 (January 1, 2007)
pages 40-45

Jonathan D. Kahn, Professor of Law
Hamline University, Saint Paul, Minnesota

Drugmakers are eager to develop medicines targeted at ethnic groups, but so far they have made poor choices based on unsound science. This article focuses on the drug, BiDil – a drug that combats congestive heart failure by dilating the arteries and veins of African American patients. The author expounds that there is no solid evidence that the drug should targeted towards only one ethnic group. The author includes the history of BiDil including its inception and then its reappearance with a race-based focus.

Read the entire article here.

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Is Elizabeth Warren an Indian?

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, History, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, Politics/Public Policy, United States, Virginia on 2012-10-29 17:23Z by Steven

Is Elizabeth Warren an Indian?

The Aporetic
2012-09-27

Mike O’Malley

The ques­tion posed above is extremely hard to answer. She doesn’t “look like an indian.” But what do Indians look like?

Just to recap: Elizabeth Warren is run­ning for the Sen­ate in Massachusetts. She’s been widely mocked for claiming herself as “native Ameri­can” at var­i­ous points in her career. Warren grew up in what’s now Oklahoma, a vast region which the US government had originally reserved for Indian tribes relocated from the East…

…The racial past of Americans is far more complicated and ambiguous than Americans generally realize. My favorite example is very personal. According to Virginia, the state in which I now reside, I am a black man. Had my family stayed in VA, my father could not have attended white schools and my parents would not have been allowed to marry. It’s absurd, and ridiculous: I’m as white as any white man you’d ever imagine, and no one in my family even knew of this history till about a decade ago. But there it is, a mat­ter of record.

The man responsible, Walter Ashby Plecker, was convinced there were no “real” indians in VA. Instead, he argued, there lived a mongrel race of intermmarried people, the “WIN” tribe (White, Indian, Negro). If you listed yourself as “Indian” on official documents, Plecker would rewrite them, and change “indian” to “colored,” because there were no “real” indians. Had Warren grown up in VA, she would have been unable to prove any connec­tion to Indian ancestors, because Plecker destroyed the records. And yet, the descendants of Indians still live in Virginia today…

Read the entire article here.

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Obama struggles to balance African Americans’ hopes with country’s as a whole

Posted in Articles, Barack Obama, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2012-10-29 04:39Z by Steven

Obama struggles to balance African Americans’ hopes with country’s as a whole

The Washington Post
2012-10-28

Peter Wallsten

Barack Obama stood at the lectern, trying to figure out what to say — or at least how to say it. He started speaking, then stopped, then started again, each time searching for the right tone, the right cadence, the right words.

The audience was a small group of advisers, including two African American scholars who were counseling him on how to get his message across most effectively with black voters. Obama, whose memoir years earlier had explored his mixed-race background and search for racial identity, wanted to connect with African Americans but remain true to his own style and voice.

“I can’t sound like Martin,” Obama said at one point, according to the scholars. “I can’t sound like Jesse.”

Obama was still more than a year away from becoming America’s first black president, but already he was parsing that identity in his mind…

Obama rarely discusses his innermost feelings about being the first African American to occupy the Oval Office, according to friends and associates, preferring to keep his thoughts closely held, shared with only a select few. He has shown himself to be drawn to the symbolic, or even aspirational, aspect of his presidency.

One of the iconic images of his tenure is a 2009 photograph of Obama leaning down to let a 5-year-old black boy, Jacob Philadelphia, touch his hair. The boy wanted to see if his hair felt like the president’s. The image, captured by White House photographer Pete Souza, has been on display ever since, just outside the Oval Office in a hallway that Obama passes through regularly…

…If the election of four years ago put to rest the notion that the United States was not ready to elect a black president, this year poses a new question: Can an African American president, after four years as a fixture in Americans’ lives, win reelection?…

Read the entire article here.

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“Incestuous Sheets” and “Adulterate Beasts”: Incest and Miscegenation in Early Modern Drama

Posted in Dissertations, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States on 2012-10-29 03:31Z by Steven

“Incestuous Sheets” and “Adulterate Beasts”: Incest and Miscegenation in Early Modern Drama

University of Michigan
2011
199 pages

Kentston D. Bauman

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature)

This dissertation explores the centrality of incest and miscegenation in the early modern cultural imaginary. Incest, which occurs with surprising frequency in the drama of the period but with equally surprising scarcity in everyday social life, is frequently invoked in conjunction with miscegenation in all of its various forms (social, religious, ethnic/cultural/racial). As boundary phenomena – the two extreme ends of the spectrum of sexual alliance – incest and miscegenation served as powerful and surprisingly flexible dramatic tropes, providing a useful means of interrogating the social processes that create, instill, and redefine acceptable choices in sexual and social partners. I divide the project into two sections. In the first, I investigate the interplay among incest, social miscegenation, and social mobility. Looking at Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, I explore how these issues become filtered through the figure of the incestuous widow, whose treatment serves as both a critique of aristocratic hierarchies and a means of promoting sexual and social mobility. The second, which examines the relations between incest and ethnic miscegenation, centers on Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Noting that Shakespeare takes the incestuous rape in Ovid’s tale of Philomel and replaces it with the miscegenistic rape of Lavinia, I investigate how this transposition interrogates the family’s relationship to itself and to the state. I situate my readings of these plays in a socio-political context that takes into account two different, yet intricately connected, cultural issues: the painful transition of a society still highly stratified along feudal lines to one suddenly faced with the possibilities for radical economic and political advancement; and the anxieties of a culture just as suddenly exposed, through exploration and trade, to other geographic and cultural realms. The attempt to navigate the new terrain opened up by changes in the social, political, and geographic climate, I argue, disrupts long-established institutions – the family, marriage, hierarchical stratification. Significantly, the tensions between incest and miscegenation so apparent in the period’s drama express, in part, cultural anxieties fostered by a new social openness combined with a newly heightened sense of an enticing yet threatening Other.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

  • DEDICATION
  • ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
  • CHAPTER
    • Introduction. Incest and Miscegenation on the Early Modern Stage
    • One. The Incestuous Widow and Social Mobility in Early Modern Drama
    • Two. Aristocratic Endogamy and Social Miscegenation in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi
    • Three. “Unkind and Careless of Your Own”: Incest, Miscegenation, and Family in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus
    • Epilogue. Looking Forward: A Pattern for Reading
  • BIBLIOGRAPHY

Read the entire dissertation here.

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Research Matters June 27, 2012

Posted in Articles, Campus Life, Media Archive on 2012-10-29 03:00Z by Steven

Research Matters June 27, 2012

USC Dornsife Research Office Weekly Updates
University of Southern California
2012-06-27

Stephan Haas, Vice Dean of Research

Awards

This information is based upon official award data from the Contracts and Grants office. It is provided to make you aware of the interesting research that is being conducted by our colleagues and that is supported through extramural sources…

Read the entire update here.

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