Seeking participants for a study on multiracial identification

Posted in Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, United States, Wanted/Research Requests/Call for Papers on 2019-02-28 02:27Z by Steven

Seeking participants for a study on multiracial identification

Laurie T. Resnick, M.S.Ed., Principal Investigator
Pace University, New York, New York

2019-02-27

Pace University

We are conducting a study on self-identification and identity development in multiracial individuals. The purpose of this study is to understand how the experiences of these individuals relate to their racial identity.

If you live in the United States, are 18 years or older, and belong to two or more racial/ethnic groups, or your parents belong to different racial/ethnic groups, we invite you to participate in a quick survey about your experiences and your racial identity.

To begin the study, click here.

Thank you for your time and consideration!

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Neither of my parents (or their families) required me to be one thing or another, and they let me decide how I would identify.

Posted in Excerpts/Quotes on 2019-02-26 21:08Z by Steven

In my adolescence, I referred to myself (and my brother) as blaxican to honor both parents, even though I did not experience the world through a black self and a Mexican self. Many of the biracial kids I grew up around tried desperately to be in two worlds but struggled with the duality. They never seemed comfortable or satisfied with trying to belong in whatever space they occupied. I could not relate. Neither of my parents (or their families) required me to be one thing or another, and they let me decide how I would identify.

Marguerite Matthews, “A Tale of Two Faces,” The Root, January 31, 2019. https://verysmartbrothas.theroot.com/a-tale-of-two-faces-1832206862.

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France Winddance Twine | Digging Up the Past: Race & Class in Brazil

Posted in Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Media Archive, Social Science, Videos on 2019-02-26 19:59Z by Steven

France Winddance Twine | Digging Up the Past: Race & Class in Brazil

Duke Franklin Humanities Institute
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
2019-02-11

The From Slavery to Freedom Lab welcomed France Winddance Twine on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the publication of her book, “Racism in a Racial Democracy: The Maintenance of White Supremacy in Brazil.” Dr. Twine reflected on intersectionality and racial, gender, and class politics in Brazil and the future of Brazilian Studies.

France Winddance Twine is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is an ethnographer, a feminist race theorist, and a documentary filmmaker, whose research focuses on multiple dimensions of inequality. Twine’s research provides case studies for a nuanced analysis of the intersections of race, class, sexuality and gender inequality. Twine has conducted extensive field research on both sides of the Atlantic including: Brazil, Britain, and the United States. She is the author and editor of ten books including: Racism in a Racial Democracy: The Maintenance of White Supremacy in Brazil; A White Side of Black Britain: Interracial Intimacy and Racial Literacy; Geographies of Privilege; Outsourcing the Womb: Race, Class, and Gestational Surrogacy in the Global Market; and Girls with Guns: Firearms, Feminism and Militarism.

Drawing inspiration from John Hope Franklin’s path-breaking 1947 study, the “From Slavery to Freedom” Franklin Humanities Lab seeks to examine the life and afterlives of slavery and emancipation, linking Duke University to the Global South.

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Rhiannon Giddens Is Reclaiming the Black Heritage of American Folk Music

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States, Women on 2019-02-26 02:34Z by Steven

Rhiannon Giddens Is Reclaiming the Black Heritage of American Folk Music

TIME
2019-02-21

John Lingan


Shahar Azran—WireImage/Getty Images

In early 2018, folk-music torchbearer Rhiannon Giddens decamped to Breaux Bridge, La., with minstrelsy on her mind. In her early work with the Grammy-winning bluegrass band the Carolina Chocolate Drops and across two solo albums and a role in the TV series Nashville, Giddens has been as much a historian as a singer and banjoist. She’s won acclaim, including a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, for her attention to America’s folk traditions, but she felt that minstrelsy, with its troubled history, remained relatively unexplored…

..For the Louisiana trip, she enlisted three of her favorite contemporary musicians: Leyla McCalla, Allison Russell and Amythyst Kiah, all, like Giddens, black women with a focus on the banjo and early American string-music traditions. All four brought original songs to the sessions, and their collaboration quickly expanded beyond its initial historical focus. The resulting album, Songs of Our Native Daughters, which comes out on Feb. 22, has one foot in acoustic minstrel sounds but is also a tribute to the strength and resilience of black women in the antebellum era

Read the entire article here.

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New Perspectives on James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man ed. by Noelle Morrissette (review)

Posted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, Media Archive, Passing, United States on 2019-02-26 02:18Z by Steven

New Perspectives on James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man ed. by Noelle Morrissette (review)

African American Review
Volume 51, Number 4, Winter 2018
pages 344-346
DOI: 10.1353/afa.2018.0049

Masami Sugimori, Associate Professor of American Literature
Florida Gulf Coast University, Fort Myers, Florida

Ed. Noelle Morrissette. New Perspectives on James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2017. 272 pp. $59.95.

More than a century after its initial publication in 1912, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson continues to generate commentary. The narrator’s racial passing, along with the novel’s twist of genre through “passing” for an autobiography, has led much scholarship to address the issues of race and narrative. At the same time, with the advent and development of new critical and theoretical approaches, more and more topics (pertaining to the literary climate around Johnson’s composition, the novel’s intertextuality with other works both within and outside of the era, and the sociocultural contexts of the early twentieth-century U. S., to name just a few) have arisen and enriched our inquiry. Meanwhile, the novel itself has gone through numerous editions—including, but not limited to, those published by Alfred A. Knopf (1927), New American Library (1948), Vintage (1989), Penguin Books (1990), Library of America (2004), and recently, by W. W. Norton as a Critical Edition (2015)—which attest to its increasingly canonical status in American literature. New Perspectives on James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man—the first critical anthology devoted entirely to the novel—is a timely addition to this evolution of Johnson scholarship and readership, featuring both established and innovative strategies for analysis and interpretation.

Editor Noelle Morrissette’s Introduction defines New Perspectives as a product of the ongoing critical history of The Autobiography, on the one hand, and as an embodiment of the “futurity” that explicitly or implicitly informs the novel, on the other. While offering “new perspectives” in their respective ways, the essays in this collection attend productively to the accumulated scholarship that Morrissette surveys in terms of topical trends: Johnson’s authorial achievements and the novel’s documentary values (1960s and ’70s); its intertextuality with African American narratives (late 1970s and early ’80s); modernity, modernism, and racial identity (1990s); and transnationalism, performativity, music, and sound (since 2000). These essays also share an emphasis on the visions of the future Johnson embedded in the novel—not only as an extension of his careful assessment of the contemporary U. S., but also in his resistance to the nation’s racial regime, which denied blacks a legitimate history or a sense of teleological progression in time. Thus, Morrissette designs her anthology to conduct “a reassessment of the author’s writing and legacy and the racial futurity he called for, to which we continue to respond” (15).

These guiding principles also account for the section organization of New Perspectives, with its ten chapters and an Afterword assigned to four parts according to topical focuses. The three essays in part one, “Cultures of Reading, Cultures of Writing: Canons and Authenticity,” examine Johnson’s complex relationship with “cultural” parameters surrounding his composition: white mentor Brander Matthews’s theory of modern American fiction (Lawrence J. Oliver); the early twentieth-century African American literary scene (Michael Nowlin); and the novel’s “reliably unreliable” white readers (Jeff Karem 67). Each of these relationships consists of transactional negotiation rather than one-way influence. Through careful analysis of Johnson’s œuvre and correspondence, for example, Nowlin reveals that the author’s acute sense of African American literary destitution underlies the way he framed The Autobiography—both in its anonymous publication in 1912 and in the 1927 republication marketed as “a classic in Negro literature” (49)—which went in tandem with his strenuous promotion of other black writers to establish a legitimate and well-recognized African American literary tradition.

Part two, “Relational Tropes: Transnationalism, Futurity, and the Ex-Colored Man,” features three essays on the transnational and transhistorical potential of, and exploration in, The Autobiography. Diana Paulin compares the novel with Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood, and Daphne Lamothe does so with Teju Cole’s Open City, to reveal the “futurity” that Johnson’s work posits in the form, respectively, of…

Read or purchase the review here.

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People of Mixed Ancestry in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake: Freedom, Bondage, and the Rise of Hypodescent Ideology

Posted in Articles, History, Law, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, Slavery, United States, Virginia on 2019-02-26 01:58Z by Steven

People of Mixed Ancestry in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake: Freedom, Bondage, and the Rise of Hypodescent Ideology

Journal of Social History
Volume 52, Number 3, Spring 2019
pages 593-618
DOI: 10.1093/jsh/shx113

A. B. Wilkinson, Assistant Professor of History
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

This article examines the origins of mixed-race ideologies and people of mixed African, European, and Native American ancestry—commonly identified as mulattoes—in the seventeenth-century English colonial Chesapeake and wider Atlantic world. Arguably, for the better part of the century, English colonial societies in the Chesapeake resembled Latin America and other Atlantic island colonies in allowing a relatively flexible social hierarchy, in which certain mixed-heritage people benefitted from their European lineage. Chesapeake authorities began to slowly set their provinces apart from their English colonial counterparts in the 1660s, when they enacted laws to deter intimate intermixture between Europeans and other ethnoracial groups and set policies that punished mixed-heritage children. Colonial officials attempted to use the legal system to restrict people of mixed ancestry, Africans, and Native Americans in bondage. These efforts supported the ideology of hypodescent, where children of mixed lineage are relegated more closely to the position of their socially inferior parentage. However, from the 1660s through the 1680s, these laws were unevenly enforced, and mixture increased with the growth of African slaves imported into the region. While many mulattoes were enslaved during this period, others were able to rely on their European heritage or racial whiteness. This allowed them to gain or maintain freedom for themselves and their families, before Virginia and Maryland institutionalized greater restrictions in the 1690s.

Read or purchase the article here.

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Together and apart: relational experiences of place, identity and belonging in the lives of mixed-ethnicity families

Posted in Articles, Family/Parenting, Media Archive, Social Science on 2019-02-26 01:52Z by Steven

Together and apart: relational experiences of place, identity and belonging in the lives of mixed-ethnicity families

Social & Cultural Geography
Published online: 2019-01-17
DOI: 10.1080/14649365.2018.1563710

Natascha Klocker, Senior Lecturer, Social & Cultural Geography
School of Geography & Sustainable Communities, Australian Centre for Culture, Environment, Society and Space (ACCESS)
University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia

Alexander Tindale, Ph.D. Candidate
School of Geography & Sustainable Communities, Australian Centre for Culture, Environment, Society and Space (ACCESS)
University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia

Intersectionality, as an ‘analytical sensibility’, demands attentiveness to the multiple aspects of identity that interlock to shape privilege and marginality in specific spatial contexts and moments. Notwithstanding their fluidity, intersectional analyses have retained a core focus on the individualized self. This paper articulates an intercorporeal approach to intersectionality, based on interviews with adult members of mixed-ethnicity (mixed-race) families. In public space, family members are exposed to stares, questions, judgements and racisms that metamorphose depending on who they are with. Alone, with a visibly different partner, with mixed-ethnicity children, or as a family unit, the strands of each family member’s multiple identities intersect with those of their loved ones. Each is interpellated – or feels interpellated – differently, in physical proximity to the other. Our empirical analysis sheds new light on the everyday lives of mixed-ethnicity families. Our theoretical pairing of intercorporeality and intersectionality presents an innovative extension to dominant interpretations of the latter. It highlights the analytical utility of adding an extra-individual lens to the intersectionality toolkit. While visibly different mixed-ethnicity families afford a potent example, our approach has broader resonance. An intercorporeal approach to intersectionality offers nuanced perspectives on place, identity and belonging. It is necessary because privilege and marginality are always lived, relationally.

Read or purchase the article here.

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A Tale of Two Faces

Posted in Articles, Family/Parenting, Latino Studies, Media Archive, United States on 2019-02-26 01:38Z by Steven

A Tale of Two Faces

America In Black
The Root
2019-01-31

Marguerite Matthews


The writer’s paternal grandparents, left, and her parents.
Photo: Marguerite Matthews

America. In Black. is a weekly essay series that examines the myriad experiences of blackness in the United States.

My mother tells me I look like my grandmother, a brown belle whose features I know only through faded photographs and choppy 8mm film strips. I try to imagine the experience of a woman with whom I seem to share a face, with her growing up under Jim Crow in the 1910s and 1920s as a black girl in Elizabeth City, N.C., and maturing into womanhood in Atlantic City, N.J. I don’t know much about her, but I know she was a badass because she wore pants, traveled the world without her husband, and bore her first child (my father) in her 30s. My grandmother dared to defy the norms of her time, and in that way, I think I look like her, too.

My friends, on the other hand, tell me I look like my mother, a bronze beauty whose eyes I have been swallowed by for more than three decades. As a child, I looked into the sepia-colored face of my mother’s childhood and declared she was me. She was born and raised in California to Spanish-speaking parents from Texas who were desperate to escape their Mexican-ness and assimilate into white American culture. Without any desire to be or pass as white, my mother bathed her skin in the sun even after warnings of getting too dark and risked being disowned for marrying a black man. A true chingona, my mother has lived life on her own terms. And I hope I look like her in that way, too…

Read the entire article here.

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Mixed race of Asian and Western: Asia’s new standard of beauty

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Communications/Media Studies, Media Archive, Social Science on 2019-02-25 20:36Z by Steven

Mixed race of Asian and Western: Asia’s new standard of beauty

The Independent Singapore
2019-02-06


Asian celebrities with mixed race. (Photo: Screengrab from YouTube)

It seems the old adage, “Beauty is relative” is not true anymore, as what is beautiful for the Asians nowadays are those who have a mixed race—Asian and Western.

Certainly, the new standard of beauty has changed over the years. Large, double-lidded eyes, small sharp nose, narrow face, tall figure, and white skin—these Western qualities make Asians sigh and admire.

In today’s generation, those with Western features have come to represent the beauty ideal in many parts of Asia. There is a long list of mixed race celebrities, actors, models, and beauty titlists in many parts of Asia…

…The notion of “mixed races” in Asia was invented during the era of European imperialism from the early 1800s. The mix of Eastern and Western is referred to as Eurasian or Pan-Asian. As a matter of fact, these terms are relatively new, with no agreed-upon definition of either.

According to Emma Teng, the T.T. and Wei Fong Chao Professor of Asian civilizations at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, intermarriage and intermixing among ethnic groups date back to antiquity.

“After the Portuguese and other European traders arrived in China, mixed families emerged across different sites where Europeans and Chinese commonly interacted,” she said…

…Regarding mixed race as the more beautiful can result in an issue of racism. As this heightened to changing one’s perspective about beauty, there is a need to examine the notions of racialised beauty standards…

Read the entire article here.

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Yes, Kamala Harris is ‘black enough’

Posted in Articles, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2019-02-25 19:11Z by Steven

Yes, Kamala Harris is ‘black enough’

The Boston Globe
2019-02-19

Renée Graham, Globe Columnist

MANCHESTER, NH - February 19, 2019: - Presidential Candidate, United States Senator Kamala Harris powers a question during "Politics & Eggs" at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics St. at Anselm College in Manchester, NH on February 19, 2019. (Craig F. Walker/Globe Staff) section: Metro reporter:
Craig F. Walker/Globe Staff
United States Senator Kamala Harris answers a question during “Politics & Eggs” at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics St. at Anselm College in Manchester, Feb. 19.

The presidential hopeful knew the comment was coming.

“There are African-Americans who don’t think you’re black enough, who don’t think you’ve had the required experience,” said the white journalist, trailing off before he could define “the required experience.” In a voiceover, he’d already mentioned that the politician was “not a descendant of slaves,” as if that fact automatically impugns black authenticity.

The candidate gave a slight, weary smile and responded, “I am rooted in the African-American community, but I’m not defined by it. I am comfortable in my racial identity, but that’s not all I am.”

That exchange is from a 2007 “60 Minutes” segment with Barack Obama, the son of a Kenyan father and a white American mother. Now Senator Kamala Harris, daughter of a Jamaican father and Tamil Indian mother, is being subjected to the same inane racial purity questions…

Read the entire article here.

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