Why isn’t College for Learning About Mixed-Race Identities?

Posted in Articles, Campus Life, Media Archive, United States on 2014-03-10 18:51Z by Steven

Why isn’t College for Learning About Mixed-Race Identities?

Racism Review: scholarship and activism toward racial justice
2014-03-08

Sharon Chang

There are some incredible opportunities out there right now to get certificates, higher ed and even advanced degrees specializing in the experience of Americans of color. Want a degree in Asian American Studies? Sure. How about African American, Native or American Indian, Latin American, Mexican American or Chicano studies? Absolutely. Google [Search] all of these and you’ll find brilliant choices to be credentialed in these heritage experiences at very fine colleges and universities.

But what if you ID as mixed-race multicultural across any of these racial lines? Is there a degree for that?

Not that I’m aware of,” writes Steven F. Riley of MixedRaceStudies.org (46), “The vast majority of courses on mixed-race studies are within the disciplines of Sociology, Psychology, History and Literature, etc.” Despite the fact that the crop of students moving through college today is the largest group of self-identified mixed-race people ever to come of age in the U.S., “In traditional Ethnic Studies,” writes University of California, Berkeley: Center for Race and Gender, “Mixed race scholarship has often been marginalized, misappropriated, tokenized or simply left out.”

Indeed it has only been in recent history that an arena for multi-race discourse has even forcibly begun construction mostly due to multiracials themselves. In the US this is because we have (a) not only a history of denying mixed race which persists but (b) a habit of continuing to operate under the assumption that race can be easily identified and filed away. Anyone who can’t be instantly categorized by visual scanning either gets shoved into something that kinda sorta fits, shows up as a mere blip on the cognitive-radar screen or flies under it completely. Case in point, whether by choice or lack of choice, some of the more visible mixed-race Asian scholars/authors right now are embedded in other departments at their campuses: Laura Kina (Art, Media, & Design, DePaul University), Leilani Nishime (Dept of Communication, University of Washington), Stephen Shigematsu-Murphy (Asian American Studies, Stanford University), Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain (Sociology, University of Ireland)…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: , , , , ,

Rutherford’s Bill Galloway reflects on genealogy, racial history

Posted in Articles, History, Media Archive, Passing, United States on 2014-03-10 05:49Z by Steven

Rutherford’s Bill Galloway reflects on genealogy, racial history

NorthJersey.com
Woodland Park, New Jersey
Thursday, 2014-02-20

Kelly Nicholaides

Bill Galloway, a resident with roots that go back to the 1920s in Rutherford, is proud of both his black roots and the “miscegenation” of his family. The longtime-Rutherford resident’s ancestors built a solid foundation with a focus on education and work ethic in a fully integrated school system since the 1920s. The family built relationships with individuals of all backgrounds, and made lasting connections that cemented their success as community leaders.

A pharmacist who still works full-time, Galloway, 85, reflected on his genealogy as well as the evolution of the concept of race, and notes that his family has a long history of bi-racial roots on both maternal and paternal sides. Regardless, Galloway notes that even if one doesn’t appear black, any black individuals in one’s ancestry technically makes someone black. Part-African-American, part-Scottish and British, with a bit of Native American, Pacific Islander on his paternal side, Galloway, eschews the term African-American. Additionally, he does not differentiate between ethnicity, which relies on DNA, and race, which applies to physical attributes.

“First it was colored, then Negro, then black, and now African American. Yet all of us came from mixed race families, when you think about it. I’m the darkest in my family,” Galloway reflects. “The black race is everything from jet black to pure white. If you have even just a little black in you, even if you don’t appear black, you’re still black. Race has nothing to do with color of your skin. Race is what’s in your DNA.”…

…”Back in those days, and since the miscegenation of the 1860s, black woman had babies by slave owners, and there were thousands during the Civil War. Around 1900, white women were fined if they had a bi-racial baby,” Galloway says. “Back then, people who got tired of discrimination got rid of their birth certificates, came up north here and 100 miles around, and passed as white people. They took Bibles and put in their birth dates and new names. The Bible was accepted as ID,” Galloway explains…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: , , ,