Mixed Signals: Examining Ethnic Affirmation as a Factor in the Discrimination-Depression Relationship with Multiracial and Monoracial Minority Adolescent Girls

Posted in Dissertations, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, United States, Women on 2017-07-11 02:04Z by Steven

Mixed Signals: Examining Ethnic Affirmation as a Factor in the Discrimination-Depression Relationship with Multiracial and Monoracial Minority Adolescent Girls

University of Connecticut
2017-02-15
62 pages

Linda A. Oshin

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Science

Multiracial adolescents are a growing segment of our population, but not much is known about their ethnic-racial identity development. The current study examined ethnic affirmation, a dimension of ethnic-racial identity, and race socialization and their influence in the relationship between perceived group discrimination and depressive symptoms among multiracial (n = 42) and monoracial minority Black (n = 29) and Latina (n = 95) adolescents (M=15.4 years). Results showed that there were no mean differences between multiracial and monoracial adolescents in ethnic affirmation, maternal race/ethnic socialization, or depressive symptoms. Multiracial adolescents reported significantly less perceived discrimination. There was also evidence that the indirect effect of perceived discrimination on depressive symptoms via ethnic affirmation differed between multiracial and monoracial adolescents. Implications of these results for treatment and research are discussed.

Read the entire thesis here.

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HERstory: Denomination to elect first Black, female leader

Posted in Articles, Media Archive, Religion, United States on 2017-07-11 01:53Z by Steven

HERstory: Denomination to elect first Black, female leader

Indianapolis Recorder
2017-07-06

Ebony Marie Chappel


Rev. Teresa Hord Owens

Editor’s Note: On July 9, the Disciples of Christ elected Rev. Teresa Hord Owens to lead the denomination. While Rev. Owens is the first Black woman to lead a mainline Protestant organization in a solo capacity, we failed to mention Rev. Denise Anderson. Anderson, a Black woman, was elected co-moderator of the Pentecostal Church (U.S.A.) last year alongside Jan Edmiston. This marked the first time that the P.C. (USA) elected women as moderators and elected two co-moderators of either sex. The P.C.(USA) traditionally elects a moderator and vice-moderator. 

In a matter of days, Rev. Teresa Hord Owens will become the general minister and president of the Disciples of Christ. The appointment, pending an election on July 9 during the Disciples of Christ General Assembly in Indianapolis, will make Owens the first Black woman to lead a mainline Protestant denomination in North America.

“Her nomination represents an opportunity for us to continue the important transformation of the church,” said Chris Dorsey, Disciples of Christ president of higher education and leadership ministries. “We seek to be a church that is more inclusive and more holistic, and she is the right person to help us do that.”

Owens, a native Hoosier, was raised in Terre Haute and is a direct descendant of the free people of color who founded the Lost Creek settlement in Vigo County. She has been an active member of the Disciples denomination since she was a young adult, when she and her mother moved to Indianapolis and attended Second Christian, now known as Light of the World Christian Church…

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Mixed-race authors write fantasies with Asian and Middle Eastern heroes

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Media Archive on 2017-07-11 01:36Z by Steven

Mixed-race authors write fantasies with Asian and Middle Eastern heroes

The Straits Times
Singapore
2017-07-10

Olivia Ho


Roshani Chokshi was shortlisted in February for a Nebula award for The Star-Touched Queen (2016), which is steeped in Hindu mythology and folklore. PHOTO: AMAN SHARMA

Authors Roshani Chokshi and Renee Ahdieh struggled to identify with the white protagonists of books they read growing up and have written stories that draw on their heritage

Young adult authors from mixed- race backgrounds are making their mark with fantasy worlds that draw not on European fairy tales or Greek myth, but on Sanskrit epic or samurai lore, and where the heroines are not blonde or blue-eyed but Asian or Middle Eastern.

Among these is best-selling Scottish-Korean-American author Renee Ahdieh, who drew on the Arabian Nights and her husband’s Persian roots for the Scheherazade-inspired novel The Wrath And The Dawn (2015) and its sequel The Rose And The Dagger (2016). She is exploring feudal Japan in her new novel Flame In The Mist.

Writer Roshani Chokshi, an American of Indian-Filipino descent, was shortlisted in February for a Nebula award for The Star-Touched Queen (2016), which is steeped in Hindu mythology and folklore…

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No Exit: Mixed-Race Characters and the Racial Binary in Charles Chesnutt and Ernest J. Gaines

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Passing, United States on 2017-07-11 01:14Z by Steven

No Exit: Mixed-Race Characters and the Racial Binary in Charles Chesnutt and Ernest J. Gaines

Studies in the Literary Imagination
Volume 49, Number 1, Summer 2016
pages 33-48
DOI: 10.1353/sli.2016.0003

Keith Byerman, Professor
Department of English
Indiana State University

While Ernest J. Gaines has generally emphasized the importance of white writers rather than black ones in his career, he shares with Charles Chesnutt an interest in the role of mixed-race characters in narrative. Repeatedly in his brief fiction-writing career, Chesnutt engaged with both the passing tradition and the status of those who were marked as black though they clearly had white ancestry. Similarly, Gaines, in both novels and short stories, depicted the social and racial pressures on light-skinned characters.1 The focus of this essay will be on narratives of those who have been clearly labeled black regardless of ancestry. While Gaines shows little interest in stories of passing, he shares with Chesnutt a concern for Black Creoles and for those who choose or are compelled to identify as black. The texts I will be examining are Chesnutt’s Paul Marchand, F. M. C. and “The Wife of His Youth” and Gaines’s Catherine Carmier and “Bloodline.” The two novels treat Creole characters and their status within multiracial and multiethnic societies, while the two stories focus on light-skinned men and their relationships to other blacks as well as whites.

Each of these works in one way or another signifies on the tradition of the tragic mulatto/a. For example, there is no deceit or confusion on the part of the central characters about their racial category, as there is in Chesnutt’s House Behind the Cedars. Nor is there the angst of white and mulatto romance such as we see between Robert and Mary Agnes in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. Instead, we find a free man of color who turns out to be white, a “black” man who has the arrogance and racial superiority of his white father, a family of Black Creoles who are the only members of the community who define themselves as different from blacks, and a light-skinned man who at the end of the story may or may not identify with his black past.

Both authors, in effect, depict complex performances of race along the socially constructed boundary that constitutes the color line. Thus, each of them rejects straightforward ideas of essentialism, but does so in the context of his particular historical moment. For Chesnutt, this moment of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is the time of retrenchment in civil rights, white racial terrorism, and the development of a racial “science” that sought to give a biological, social, and anthropological basis for essentialist thinking and policies. Gaines’s moment came at the high point of the civil right movement, with the emergence of black nationalism and a reversed claim of essentialism that asserted black moral superiority. Thus, it can be argued that each writer uses mixed-race characters to subvert fixed notions of race while acknowledging the power of such notions in shaping the lives of their characters.

It is also worth noting that all four works involve some moral violation that extends beyond white supremacy (which both writers see as a fixed aspect of the societies they depict) and the violations of black women’s bodies that produced the mixed-race characters that are their subjects. Thus, the texts create an implicit link between such figures and the moral failure that is the nation’s racial ideology.

In “The Wife of His Youth,” Chesnutt can be seen as critiquing if not satirizing the pretensions of northern, middle-class, light-skinned blacks. It is worth noting that this is Chesnutt’s own social category, so the story may be read as self-criticism. The central character, Mr. Ryder, has become the leader of the Blue Vein Society, so called because its members are assumed to be light enough to have visibly blue veins. While the group denies such an exclusionary requirement, Ryder himself, though slightly darker than others, establishes a standard:

“I have no race prejudice,” he would say, “but we people of mixed blood are ground between the upper and the nether millstone. Our fate lies between absorption by the white race…

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The Discourse of Konketsuji: Racialized Representations of Biracial Japanese Children in the 1950s

Posted in Asian Diaspora, Communications/Media Studies, Dissertations, History, Media Archive on 2017-07-11 00:23Z by Steven

The Discourse of Konketsuji: Racialized Representations of Biracial Japanese Children in the 1950s

University of Toronto
March 2017
79 pages

Zachery Anthony Nelson

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, Department of East Asian Studies University of Toronto

This study examines textual representations of biracial Japanese children as featured in the print media of 1950s Japan. Attention is paid to the complex discursive process of racialization that produced knowledge of biracial Japanese under the label konketsuji or “mixed-blood child.” This “discourse of konketsuji” is deconstructed and analyzed towards the aim of illustrating how it functioned to disassociate the figure of the konketsuji from the category of “Japanese.” This study situates konketsuji and Japanese racial identity discourse into their proper historical contexts before transitioning to an analysis of primary source material. The discourse of konketsuji is revealed as having racialized konketsuji in a plural and complex manner. Racializing statements about konketsuji referenced difference in phenotype, social origin, political potential, birth circumstances, mentality, intellect, and cultural proclivities so as to position biracial children as a group outside a normative construction of Japanese raciality.

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