Mixed roots, common bonds

Posted in Articles, Family/Parenting, Media Archive, United States on 2014-07-30 22:00Z by Steven

Mixed roots, common bonds

The Kansas City Star
Kansas City, Missouri
2014-07-21

Jeneé Osterheldt

Her first year at KU [University of Kansas], Jasmin Moore noticed the black students sat together. The Hispanic students sat together. And everyone else did the same. This was over a decade ago.

“For the first time, I was trying to figure out where I belonged,” she says. Her mom is white and her dad is black, and students pulled her in different directions, wanting her to declare herself. She found herself gravitating toward the Hispanic students. She looked like them. At the time, it was easier.

As she and her husband pursued graduate programs, they moved to Little Rock, Ark., where things are still very segregated and being mixed is an anomaly.

“People didn’t know what to make of me,” she says. “I got stares. I realized that for people in other places, being biracial is still a unique experience, and it’s important to support others.”

And that’s why, now that she’s back in town, she is helping rebuild the Multiracial Family Circle, now called Kansas City Mixed Roots…

Read the entire article here.

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Fatal Invention with Dorothy Roberts

Posted in Audio, Health/Medicine/Genetics, History, Interviews, Live Events, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2014-07-30 20:49Z by Steven

Fatal Invention with Dorothy Roberts

Research at the National Archives and Beyond
BlogTalk Radio
Thursday, 2014-07-24, 21:00 EDT, (Friday, 2014-07-25, 01:00Z)

Bernice Bennett, Host

Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology; Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania

Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century

Dorothy Roberts, an acclaimed scholar of race, gender and the law, joined the University of Pennsylvania as its 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Sociology and the Law School where she also holds the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mosell Alexander chair. Her pathbreaking work in law and public policy focuses on urgent contemporary issues in health, social justice, and bioethics, especially as they impact the lives of women, children and African-Americans. Her major books include Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century (New Press, 2011); Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books, 2002), and Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Pantheon, 1997). She is the author of more than 80 scholarly articles and book chapters, as well as a co-editor of six books on such topics as constitutional law and women and the law.

Popular History Internet Radio with BerniceBennett on BlogTalkRadio

Download the episode here.

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The Invisible Line: A Secret History of Race in America – Daniel J. Sharfstein

Posted in Audio, History, Interviews, Live Events, Media Archive, Passing, United States on 2014-07-30 20:15Z by Steven

The Invisible Line: A Secret History of Race in America – Daniel J. Sharfstein

Research at the National Archives and Beyond
BlogTalk Radio
Thursday, 2014-06-26, 21:00 EDT, (Friday, 2014-06-27, 01:00Z)

Bernice Bennett, Host

Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee

Join author, Daniel J. Sharfstein for a discussion of his book and research – The Invisible Line – Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White.

Defining their identities first as people of color and later as whites, these families provide a lens for understanding how people thought about and experienced race and how these ideas and experiences evolved—how the very meaning of black and white changed—over time. Cutting through centuries of myth, amnesia, and poisonous racial politics, The Invisible Line will change the way we talk about race, racism, and civil rights.

Daniel J. Sharfstein is a professor of law at Vanderbilt University. A graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, he has been awarded fellowships for his research on the legal history of race in the United States from Harvard, New York University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. His book is available in paperback as The Invisible Line: A Secret History of Race in America, and it has won three prizes: the J. Anthony Lukas Prize for narrative non-fiction, the Cromwell Book Prize from the American Society for Legal History, and the Hurst Prize from the Law and Society Association. Daniel has also spent the past year as a Guggenheim Fellow, working on a new book.

Defining their identities first as people of color and later as whites, these families provide a lens for understanding how people thought about and experienced race and how these ideas and experiences evolved—how the very meaning of black and white changed—over time. Cutting through centuries of myth, amnesia, and poisonous racial politics, The Invisible Line will change the way we talk about race, racism, and civil rights.

Check Out History Podcasts at Blog Talk Radio with BerniceBennett on BlogTalkRadio

Download the episode here.

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Mexican WhiteBoy

Posted in Books, Media Archive, Novels on 2014-07-30 18:19Z by Steven

Mexican WhiteBoy

Random House Kids
2008-08-12
256 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-385-73310-6
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-440-23938-3

Matt de la Peña

  

  • WINNER – LatinoStories.com Top Ten New Latino Authors to Watch (and Read) (2009)
  • WINNER – Bulletin Blue Ribbon Book (2008)
  • WINNER – ALA Best Books for Young Adults
  • NOMINEE – Arizona Young Readers Award
  • NOMINEE – New Jersey Garden State Teen Book Award

Danny’s tall and skinny. Even though he’s not built, his arms are long enough to give his pitch a power so fierce any college scout would sign him on the spot. Ninety-five mile an hour fastball, but the boy’s not even on a team. Every time he gets up on the mound he loses it.

But at his private school, they don’t expect much else from him. Danny’ s brown. Half-Mexican brown. And growing up in San Diego that close to the border means everyone else knows exactly who he is before he even opens his mouth. Before they find out he can’t speak Spanish, and before they realize his mom has blond hair and blue eyes, they’ve got him pegged. But it works the other way too. And Danny’s convinced it’s his whiteness that sent his father back to Mexico.

That’s why he’s spending the summer with his dad’s family. Only, to find himself, he may just have to face the demons he refuses to see–the demons that are right in front of his face. And open up to a friendship he never saw coming.

Set in the alleys and on the ball fields of San Diego County, Mexican Whiteboy is a story of friendship, acceptance, and the struggle to find your identity in a world of definitions.

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Census Data Confusion, Manipulation, and Latinos of Mixed Ancestry or “Should Latino be a Race?”

Posted in Census/Demographics, Latino Studies, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States, Videos on 2014-07-30 14:23Z by Steven

Census Data Confusion, Manipulation, and Latinos of Mixed Ancestry or “Should Latino be a Race?”

Presented at The Second Annual Mixed Heritage Conference
University of California, Los Angeles
2014-04-16

Thomas Lopez, President
Multiracial Americans of Southern California (MASC)

Multiracial Americans President Thomas Lopez delivers a talk on changing the Census categories to allow Latino to become a race. In this episode, the talk is introduced with a brief history of the Census. Special emphasis is made on how Hispanic became a Census category and mixed race people succeeded in checking one or more racial categories.

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Race in a Baby’s Face

Posted in Articles, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Social Science on 2014-07-29 16:39Z by Steven

Race in a Baby’s Face

Psychology Today
2014-07-28

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, Ed.D, Psychologist and Co-founder
Stanford University LifeWorks program for Integrative Learning

Crawling the color line

Race is supposedly something objective, even biological, that we’re ascribed at birth and marks us through our whole lives, assigning us to a group that separates us from others. But for many people race is ambiguous, complex, and uncertain. I’ve never understood my race or that of my children. And for the newest babies in my extended family, it’s not clear at all what their race is supposed to be.

When my niece had a baby, a beautiful boy, everyone oohed and aahed when they saw the cute little guy. One of his cousins glowed, “Oh he’s so cute!”  But suddenly a puzzled expression came over him and he looked at the baby’s father, then at the mother, and back at the baby and blurted out: “Wait…..they had a white baby?”…

Read the entire article here.

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Loving v. Virginia in Historical Context

Posted in Articles, History, Law, United States on 2014-07-29 00:34Z by Steven

Loving v. Virginia in Historical Context

Crossing Borders, Bridging Generatons
Brooklyn Historical Society
June 2014

Renee Romano, Associate Professor of History
Oberlin College

Renee Romano teaches history at Oberlin College and she is the author of Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America (Harvard University Press, 2003), and co-editor of The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory (University of Georgia Press, 2006). Her new book, Racial Reckoning: Prosecuting America’s Civil Rights Murders (forthcoming from Harvard University Press in fall 2014) explores the contemporary prosecutions of civil rights era crimes.

On June 12, 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a groundbreaking decision in the aptly named case, Loving v. Virginia. Responding to a challenge to a Virginia law that barred interracial marriages, the Supreme Court ruled that state laws that made it illegal for whites and nonwhites to marry were unconstitutional.

There can be no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the Equal Protection clause,” Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the unanimous decision.

With the stroke of a pen, the Supreme Court overturned centuries of common practice and its own legal precedent.

The colony of Virginia had enacted the first law punishing interracial marriage in 1691 in an attempt to prevent what it called the “abominable mixture and spurious issue” produced by unions between whites and nonwhites. Miscegenation laws proved vital for establishing racial boundaries and for constructing a racial hierarchy that placed whites above people of color. All but nine of the fifty states outlawed interracial marriage at some time in their history. These laws were not limited to the South—they existed at different historical moments in states ranging from Massachusetts to California, and they variously outlawed marriages between whites and those defined as black, Asian and American Indian. What they had in common was a shared intent in protecting the status of whites and communicating the subordinate position of nonwhite groups…

Read the entire article here.

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No ‘rainbow families’: Ethnic donor stipulation at fertility centre ‘floors’ local woman

Posted in Articles, Canada, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive on 2014-07-28 22:23Z by Steven

No ‘rainbow families’: Ethnic donor stipulation at fertility centre ‘floors’ local woman

Calgary Herald
Calgary, Alberta, Canada
2014-07-25

Jessica Barrett

A Calgary woman says she was shocked to learn of a policy at the city’s only fertility treatment centre that restricts patients from using sperm, eggs or embryos from donors who do not match their ethnic background.

Catherine, who asked to use only her first name, said she sought invitro fertilization at the Regional Fertility Program last March as a single woman. During routine consultations with her doctor she was told she could only use sperm from donors who were white, like her.

“That’s when everything went downhill,” she told the Herald. “I was absolutely floored.”

Dr. Calvin Greene, the clinic’s administrative director, confirmed the private facility will not treat couples or singles who insist on using donors of a different ethnicity. The policy has been in place since the clinic opened in the 1980s.

“I’m not sure that we should be creating rainbow families just because some single woman decides that that’s what she wants,” he said. “That’s her prerogative, but that’s not her prerogative in our clinic.”

A statement on the clinic’s website reads: “it is the practice of the Regional Fertility Program not to permit the use of a sperm donor that would result in a future child appearing racially different than the recipient or the recipient’s partner.”

Greene said doctors at the clinic feel “a child of an ethnic background should have the ability to be able to identify with their ethnic roots.” He added patients should have a “cultural connection” to their donors.

The Alberta Human Rights Commission upheld the policy after a white couple brought a complaint against the clinic about five years ago, Greene said…

Read the entire article here.

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I’m Not White, But Nobody Can Ever Tell What Race I Am

Posted in Articles, Autobiography, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, United States on 2014-07-28 21:48Z by Steven

I’m Not White, But Nobody Can Ever Tell What Race I Am

xoJane.com
2014-07-25

Casey Walker
Emerson College, Boston, Massachusetts

I have to go through a “coming out” moment in every new relationship to explain my ethnicity.

My skin is pale olive in the winter and a soft brown in the summer, and my hair is a thick, dark mess of curls. I have eyes that are deep brown and almond-shaped. My maternal grandparents are immigrants who left their small village and came to America with the hope of creating a better life for future generations. They lived in California and worked in agriculture, and my mother was the first person in her family to attend college.

Chances are, the thought of my ethnicity has crossed your mind by this point—race is one of the most basic descriptors, so it’s normal to try and come to a conclusion in order to construct a basic identity for me. However, in my case, people are usually wrong—I have lived my entire life experiencing instances of racial misidentification. I am not Mexican, Italian, Puerto Rican, or black (some of the most common assumptions). People have projected various stereotypes onto me, spoken to me in languages they assumed I understood, and thrown around various racial comments in reference to their assumptions.

So… what am I?…

Read the entire article here.

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Race & Its Categories in Historical Perspective

Posted in Articles, History, Media Archive, Social Science on 2014-07-27 09:36Z by Steven

Race & Its Categories in Historical Perspective

Crossing Borders, Bridging Generatons
Brooklyn Historical Society
June 2014

Ann Morning, Associate Professor of Sociology
New York University

A native New Yorker, Ann Morning is an associate professor of sociology at New York University and the author of The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach about Human Difference (University of California Press, 2011). In this essay she explores race and its categories in historical perspective.

What Is “Race”? Academics Disagree

“Race” is a familiar, everyday word for Americans, one that we routinely come across when we open a newspaper or fill out a form. Yet there is no scientific consensus about what exactly the term denotes. As I report in The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach about Human Difference, even academics within the same discipline, like biology or anthropology, disagree on how best to define the concept of race.

The scholarly debate hinges on whether races are groupings that we human beings invent, influenced by our subjective cultural prejudices and hierarchies, or whether they are groups of people who objectively share certain physical characteristics, whether visible or invisible (e.g. genetic). Members of the former camp are often referred to as “constructivists” because of their insistence that racial categories are built or put together by human hands, while proponents of the latter perspective are often labelled “essentialists” due to their conviction that racial groupings reflect traits naturally embedded within individuals’ bodies (i.e. “essences”). To illustrate this scientific conflict with a concrete example, take the standard U.S. racial category “black.” To a constructivist, this classification has all the makings of a social construct: Over the nation’s history, there have been changing beliefs about who falls into this category (e.g. anybody with a black mother during colonial times, or anybody with any known African ancestry after the Civil War) and conflicting beliefs by region (e.g. Louisiana versus Virginia). Moreover, if we compare the United States to other countries, it is quickly apparent that someone who is considered “black” here might not be classified the same way in Latin America, Western Europe, the Middle East, or Africa. In other words, racial categorization depends a lot on the society that is doing the categorizing—which is exactly the point that constructivists wish to make. To an essentialist however, the biological sciences demonstrate that there are distinct subgroups—races—within the human species. In the past, biologists thought the telltale markers of racial type lay in such disparate physical features as skull size and shape, blood type, skin color, hair texture, eye shape, and so on. Today however the academic debate about race and biology takes place almost entirely on the terrain of genetics, where scholars argue whether DNA patterns do or do not map onto racial groupings…

Read the entire article here.

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