Mixed Race Studies

Karin Tanabe: THE GILDED YEARS

Busboys and Poets
Langston Room
2021 14th Street, NW (14 & V Street, NW)
Washington, D.C. 20009
Tuesday, 2016-06-14, 18:30-20:30 EDT (Local Time)

Politics & Prose at Busboys and Poets 14th & V welcomes Karin Tanabe to present the new book “The Gilded Years.”

A Politico journalist turned novelist, Tanabe has reported on politics and society for Entertainment Tonight, CNN, and Inside Edition, experience she drew on for the Washington insider fiction of The List and The Price of Inheritance. Her third novel looks at class, race, and ambition in the Gilded Age, following smart and talented Anita Hemmings—daughter of a janitor—as she realizes her dream of attending Vassar. But Anita is also the descendent of slaves, and though her pale skin allows her to “pass” for white, as she moves among the wealthy elite of 1897 high society, she walks an increasingly tense line concerning her identity.

Tanabe will be in conversation with LaFleur Paysour, communications director for the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

For more information, click here.

“What are you?”: Mixed race responses to the racial gaze

Ethnicities
Published online before print 2015-12-16
DOI: 10.1177/1468796815621938

Jillian Paragg
Department of Sociology
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada

Mixed race scholarship considers the deployment of the term “mixed race” as an identification and theorizes that the operation of the external racial gaze is signaled through the “what are you?” question that mixed race people face in their everyday lives. In interviews conducted with mixed race, young adults in a Western Canadian urban context, it was evident that the “what are you?” question is the verbal form of the external racial gaze’s production of ambivalence on mixed race bodies. However, this study also found that mixed race people have “ready” identity narratives in response to the “what are you?” question. This paper shows the importance of these narratives (the very existence of the “ready” narratives, as well as the content of the “ready” narrative) for fleshing out the operation of the external racial gaze in the Canadian context. Respondents draw on two closely related modes of narrating origin when responding to the “what are you?” question: they respond through a kinship narrative that is heteronormative and they narrate that they inherit “national origin” “through blood.” I argue that these responses point to how the gaze produces the multiracialized body through the desire to imagine and “know” its originary point of racial mixing. Yet, the “ready” narratives are also agential: while at times they narrate to the expectations of the gaze, they also “play on” the gaze.

Read or purchase the article here.

Whiteness is provisional and cannibalistic. The imposition of whiteness is based on falsehoods and conflation. White supremacy is a conglomerate forged through fear, colonialism, imperialism and anti-Blackness, not through the purity of blood. The time has come not to seek access to farcical social constructs used to oppress, but instead to seek liberation through rejection of such. Racial superiority doesn’t actually exist, and to accept the concept of whiteness inherently represents a denial of Black humanity. The expression of who we are as individuals is what makes cultures and people the world across beautiful. Embracing who we are without dehumanizing anyone else or distancing oneself from Blackness poses a direct threat to the ideation of whiteness. In order to invest in humanity, we must divest from whiteness and our contributions to it.

William C. Anderson, “The Changing Face of Whiteness,” Truthout, June 5, 2016. http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/36292-the-changing-face-of-whiteness.

Yara Shahidi, the Iranian-American Star of ‘Black-ish,’ Is Breaking Stereotypes On & Off Screen

Muftah
2016-06-03

Alex Shams

Over the last two years, the hit ABC sitcom “Black-ish” has deftly explored issues of race, class, and gender in the United States through the eyes of an upper-middle class, African-American family. The show has received rave reviews for portraying the unique struggles of the Johnson family, offering an incisive critique of racism in modern America without being too preachy.

What few people know, however, is that the role of Zoey, the Johnson’s eldest daughter, is played by a sixteen-year-old, Iranian-American actress. Born to an Iranian father, Afshin Shahidi, and a mother of mixed African-American and Native Choctaw heritage, Keri Salter, Yara Shahidi lived in Minneapolis before moving to California at a young age…

Read the entire article here.

The Racism-Race Reification Process: A Mesolevel Political Economic Framework for Understanding Racial Health Disparities

Sociology of Race and Ethnicity
Published online before print 2016-02-08
DOI: 10.1177/2332649215626936

Abigail A. Sewell, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

The author makes the argument that many racial disparities in health are rooted in political economic processes that undergird racial residential segregation at the mesolevel—specifically, the neighborhood. The dual mortgage market is considered a key political economic context whereby racially marginalized people are isolated into degenerative ecological environments. A multilevel root-cause conceptual framework, the racism-race reification process (R³p), is proposed and preliminarily tested to delineate how institutional conditions shape the health of racially marginalized individuals through the reification of race. After reviewing and critiquing the conceptual and theoretical roots of R³p, the key components of the synergistic framework are detailed and applied to clarify extant understandings of the upstream (i.e., macrolevel) factors informing racial health disparities. Using aggregated data from the 1994 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act and Neighborhood Change Database merged at the mesolevel (i.e., the neighborhood cluster) with microlevel data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, exploratory analysis is presented that links dual mortgage market political economies to ethnoracial residential segregation at the mesolevel and to childhood health inequalities at the microlevel. The author concludes by considering how racial inequality is an artifact of the political economic reality of race and racism manifested from the neighborhood-level down.

Read or purchase the article here.

Essential Measures: Ancestry, Race, and Social Difference

American Behavioral Scientist
April 2016, Volume 60, Number 4
pages 498-518
DOI: 10.1177/0002764215613398

Aaron Gullickson, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Oregon

Race and ancestry are both popularly viewed in the United States as different but intertwined reflections on a person’s essentialized identity that answer the question of “who is what?” Despite this loose but well-understood connection between the two concepts and the availability of ancestry data on the U.S. census, researchers have rarely used the two sources of data in combination. In this article, drawing on theories of boundary formation, I compare these two forms of identification to explore the salience and social closure of racial boundaries. Specifically, I analyze race-reporting inconsistency and predict college completion at multiple levels of racial ancestry aggregation using Census data. The results suggest that, while much of the variation in these measures corresponds to popular “big race” conceptions of difference, considerable variation remains among individual ancestries.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Rev. J. W. Loguen, as a Slave and as a Freeman: A Narrative of Real Life Including Previously Uncollected Letters

Syracuse University Press
2016
360 pages
2 black-and-white illustrations, appendix, notes, index
7 x 10
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8156-3446-1
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8156-1068-7
ebook ISBN: 978-0-8156-5369-1

J. W. Loguen (1813-1872)

Edited and with a Critical Introduction by:

Jennifer A. Williamson, Director of Gender Mainstreaming and Women’s Empowerment
ACDI/VOCA

The Rev. Jermain Wesley Loguen was a pioneering figure in early nineteenth-century abolitionism and African American literature. A highly respected leader in the AME Zion Church, Rev. Loguen was popularly known as the “Underground Railroad King” in Syracuse, where he helped over 1,500 fugitives escape from slavery. With a charismatic and often controversial style, Loguen lectured alongside Frederick Douglass and worked closely with well-known abolitionists such as Harriet Tubman, William Wells Brown, and William Lloyd Garrison, among others.

Originally published in 1859, The Rev. J. W. Loguen chronicles the remarkable life of a tireless young man and a passionate activist. The narrative recounts Loguen’s early life in slavery, his escape to the North, and his successful career as a minister and abolitionist in New York and Canada. Given the text’s third-person narration and novelistic style, scholars have long debated its authorship. In this edition, Williamson uncovers new research to support Loguen as the author, providing essential biographical information and buttressing the significance of his life and writing. The Rev. J. W. Loguen represents a fascinating literary hybrid, an experiment in voice and style that enlarges our understanding of the slave narrative.

Inside The Five-Day Stretch When Obama Found His Voice On Race

FiveThirtyEight
2016-05-26

The number of Americans “greatly worried” about race relations hit an all-time low, 13 percent, the year after President Obama took office. Last month, Gallup recorded the opposite, an all-time high of 35 percent.

As Obama prepares to leave office, the conversation about his legacy will no doubt include his role in how Americans see race. In the latest in FiveThirtyEight’s podcast documentary series on key election moments, we go back to the first time in Obama’s presidential career that he addressed the country’s debate over race in a big way…

…Who you’ll hear from in the podcast

• Obama’s Team
  • David Axelrod, Obama’s chief campaign strategist at the time
  • Jon Favreau, Obama’s speechwriter at the time
  • Valerie Jarrett, longtime adviser to the president
  • Marty Nesbitt, one of Obama’s closest friends
• Media Members
  • Brian Ross of ABC News, whose reporting set off the firestorm
  • Conservative commentator Tucker Carlson
  • Clips of Joe Scarborough, Diane Sawyer, Chris Cuomo, Chris Matthews, Katie Couric, Sean Hannity and Karl Rove
• Analysts
  • FiveThirtyEight’s Harry Enten
  • The Nation’s Kai Wright

Listen to the podcast here. Download the podcast here.

You Can’t Go from Zero to ‘The Daily Show’: The Playboy Interview with Trevor Noah

Playboy
2016-05-19

David Hochman, Contributing Editor

Has there ever been a more auspicious moment to chase after clown cars on the road to the White House? Since bravely taking over for Jon Stewart as host of The Daily Show last September, South African comedian Trevor Noah has watched American politics burble into a molten mess of a reality series that even Comedy Central would find too ludicrous to green-light. Then again, Noah did not campaign for the role of satirist in chief; it found him. In March of last year, he was in a taxi heading to an event in Dubai when his manager called to ask if he wanted the planet’s most coveted fake news-anchoring job. This, after appearing a mere three times as a Daily Show correspondent. As Noah said around the time to his friend and early champion Jerry Seinfeld, “I get out of the car, and my legs—I didn’t have legs.”

Thick skin is what he really needed. The instant the gig was announced, social media cried out with a collective “Who the fuck?” followed by a judge-y indictment over a handful of old Twitter barbs that painted the little-known comic as a menace to Jews, Ebola victims and “fat chicks.” It didn’t help that TV critics held Noah to crazy-high standards: not to Jon Stewart’s early days but to Stewart at the glorious end of a 16-year run. But the sharp-suited newcomer, now 32, settled in with polish and intelligence (and without issuing any apologies) and continues to build a following with a young, plugged-in crowd that no longer treats him like Job.

Trevor Noah was born in Johannesburg on February 20, 1984 and survived a lot worse than web controversy. He grew up in the final decade of apartheid with a white Swiss German father and a black Xhosa mother who never married because mixed-race marriage was illegal in that era. Noah spent his early years in a “whites only” neighborhood where his mom had to pretend she was the maid. (His dad would walk across the street from them “like a creepy pedophile,” Noah joked in one of his routines.) After the relationship dissolved, Noah and his mother moved in with family members in the black municipality of Soweto. Experiencing such contrasting worlds made him fluent in a range of cultures and languages, including six South African dialects, English and German…

…Eight years with a black man in the White House does not appear to have eased tensions around race.

This is hard to explain to white people, but the thing about race is that you can’t turn it off. If you’re black, you are constantly black and that blackness is always affecting you in some way or another. That’s a tough conversation to have, because it can be subtle. It’s often very small things, but they pile up. Cabdrivers don’t pick you up. It happens to me. Or you go into a corner store and get followed, or people say things about you. It’s often not blatant, but it’s entrenched in the system. Over time, it might change, but if you’re black in the United States, even after two terms of President Obama, you still feel black.

I think the benefit of a movement like Black Lives Matter is that people have seen the influence they can have by actively getting out and doing something about ending the silencing of a voice. It has been a fantastic proponent for new conversations about race, which is amazing…

Read the entire interview here.

Large Abroad | London poet laureate Raymond Antrobus staying true to Jamaican roots

The Gleaner
Kingston, Jamaica
2016-06-13

Andre Poyser

Raymond Antrobus

Raymond Antrobus continues to be in strong contention to be named Young Poet Laureate for London – a position awarded annually to a poet age 21-30 living in the United Kingdom capital.

Antrobus, a second-generation Jamaican born and bred in East London, has been redefining what it means to be a poet in the 21st century through monologues, which Calabash co-founder Kwame Dawes describes as stunning studies of voice and substance.

While he only visits Jamaica occasionally, the young poet says he owes his graceful and finely crafted lyric poems, another characterisation penned by Dawes, to his Jamaican heritage…

Read the entire article here.