Mixed Race Studies

Maybe you don’t say you’re black if you’re biracial. But it’s how you’re seen

The Guardian
2015-11-22

Zach Stafford, Contributing Writer
Chicago, Illinois

No matter how I identify or how I feel, it’s my skin color that determines how I’ll be treated

Like every young black man I know, I remember the moment when my parents sat me down for “the talk” about the very real danger that comes from being young, black and male in the US. My mother and step-father sat me down one day when I was about 15 years old and told me that that now that I was getting older, I needed to be careful…

Read the entire article here.

Medicalizing Racism

Contexts
Fall 2014, Volume 13, Number 4
pages 24-29
DOI: 10.1177/1536504214558213

James M. Thomas, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
University of Mississippi

Cassandra Conlin

Sociologist James M. Thomas (JT) examines how public and scientific accounts of racism draw upon medical and psychological models, and how this contributes to our understandings of racism as a medical, rather than social, problem.

In June of 2013, Riley Cooper, a wide receiver for the NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles, was caught on video at a Kenny Chesney concert shouting, “I will jump that fence and fight every nigger in here, bro!” After a massive public uproar about the scene, Cooper, who is white, released a statement announcing that he would speak with “a variety of professionals” in order to ”help me better understand how I could have done something that was so offensive, and how I can start the healing process for everyone.” His team excused Cooper from activities so that he could get expert help to “understand how his words hurt so many.”

It was hardly the first time a high-profile figure sought professional counseling after being associated with an act of public racism. In 2006, while performing at a West Hollywood comedy club, Michael Richards, best known as Kramer from the hit television series Seinfeld, lashed out at hecklers, referring to them as “niggers.” Afterward, Richards’ publicist quickly issued a statement announcing that his client would seek psychiatric help. Paula Deen, Mel Gibson, and John Rocker also pledged publicly to seek treatment for their racism—reflecting a growing tendency to frame racist acts as a mental health issue.

Cassandra Conlin

How did racism come to be seen as psychopathological, and how might that understanding influence efforts to combat racism? With that question in mind, I examined mainstream print media, and conference proceedings, presidential addresses, and debates within the American Psychiatric Association from the period immediately following World War II through the present. I also analyzed public speeches by civil rights activists from the late 1950s through the early 1970s

Over time, this research shows, experts expressed growing concern about the psychopathological consequences of racism on victims, and the effects of being racist—a mental health discourse that is transforming our understanding of the nature and causes of racism. In this medicalized model, new protocols focus on treating those who suffer from the condition of racism. It is an understanding that reflects the “new racism” of the post-civil rights era…

Read (for free for a limited time) the article here.

Correcting the conversation about race

OUPblog: Oxford University Press’s Academic Insights for the Thinking World
2015-11-20

Carlos Hoyt

On 6 November 2015, the New York Times featured a poignant five-minute documentary called “A Conversation About Growing Up Black,” produced by Joe Brewster and Perri Peltz. Brewster and Peltz present Rakesh, Miles, Malek, Marvin, Shaquille, Bisa, Jumoke, Maddox, and Myles. The youngest are 10 and the eldest is 25 years old. These nine individuals are very different from one another (hair, height, weight, skin color, voice, manner of speech, body language… all those things that combine to make each of us unique). As with all human beings, each of them is his own universe of individuality and each occupies several universes of other individuals known as family, friends, teammates, school mates, colleagues, and the like.

But we never learn much about the individuality of these individuals: where they live; where they go to school or work; what their worldviews might be on faith, politics, or the environment; what are their talents, their challenges; what they love, and what they dislike. Instead we are introduced to them as racialized human beings, adversely racialized nominally black males to be specific, who by dint of this social relegation are subject to suspicion, discrimination, degradation, and brutality.

We encounter them as living, breathing targets of racism.

We are graced with their eloquent and compelling meditations on racism, their narratives of being misrepresented, misunderstood and mistreated, and their heroic resolve to successfully navigate the mine-infested landscape of the racist country in which they live – for themselves and for their loving, protective, and worried parents.

It is a heartbreaking five-minutes of film.

And it will change nothing…

Read the entire article here.

When You’re Biracial, There’s No ‘Choice’ in the Matter of Your Blackness

The Root
2015-11-19

Charles D. Ellison, Contributing Editor

It’s safe to wager that when well-meaning black actor Taye Diggs took a recent dip into controversy over his biracial son’s identity, there was no less than white former Mrs. Taye Diggs putting on the pressure in the background: “Hey, I’m here. White mom. Don’t forget about me.” And who knows? Taut playpen discussions might have taken an interesting turn. Somewhat understandably, but too publicly and too clumsily, Diggs obliged, and met the ire of many African Americans head on. While Diggs gets some nod for courage, he did rip back a rather mean layer of onion in the process.

But the mistake Diggs made here is not so much the demand that his son stand firm on his biracialness. It’s that he trivializes that kind of existence as a simple mark-the-box choice. Contrary to the warped and misguided conjecture that biracial sons and daughters somehow have more control over their racial selfness than black people do, it’s really a lot more complex than that.

Don’t get me wrong: Diggs loves his son. And he should demand respect and love for the mother from the start. No surprise, even, if it was also Diggs’ conclusion that his boy’s complete embrace of the biracial construct could somehow shield him from the beastly assaults of routine racism.

It won’t…

Read the entire article here.

Taye Diggs, Embrace Blackness In Mixed Families: They’re Not Mutually Exclusive

Global Grind
2015-10-18

Jada Gomez, Managing Editor

Taye Diggs is set to release a second children’s book, Mixed Me, to teach young biracial children how to embrace their multicultural, multi-hued identities. But before it hits shelves, it needs a few edits… from a multiracial person.

In an interview with The Grio, the actor shared that he wants his son, Walker Nathaniel Diggs, to be identified as mixed and not Black. The most troubling part of the admission is that he “fears” people will see his son as Black. With the best of intentions I’m sure, his remarks were more fixated on Walker’s outer shell, and what other people will think about his son, than instilling a sense of identity at Walker’s core.

As a millennial of mixed heritage, I learned quite early that my skin color and “otherness” would raise questions about who I am, and what I should “identify” with, throughout my life. The first major hit came in preschool, when my Latino father showed up to parent-teacher night with my African-American mother. Usually, my mom would handle picking me up from school, so my classmates – and most importantly, their parents – had never met Juan Gomez before. The night was as normal as any four-year-old’s night, as we watched Sesame Street while our parents met with teachers. All in all, pretty harmless…

Read the entire article here.

“Evoking the Mulatto” Screening + Panel Discussion

The National Black Programming Consortium
2015-11-19

Tune in Thursday, November 19, 2015 from 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM ET for a back-to-back screening of all four episodes from “Evoking the Mulatto,” a transmedia project about 21st-century mixed black identity. A discussion will follow with Judy Pryor-Ramirez, director of Civic Engagement & Social Justice at the New School; Lise Funderburg, author of “Black, White, Other” and the 2013 National Geographic article “The Changing Face of America“; plus “Evoking the Mulatto” interviewee Giovanna Fischer and the project’s creator, Lindsay Harris.

View the entire presentation (01:35:55) here.

The Mixed-Race in-betweeners

The Columbia Spectator
New York, New York
2015-11-12

Keenan Smith

I am Mixed-Race. I am both Black and white. I am also American and have therefore been raised in a culture that seems to be constantly divided along racial boundaries, whether they are in campus diversity and inclusion programs or identity-based organizations, with little regard for those of us who fall among the shades of gray.

Regardless of how those of us on the grayscale identify, we are often forced by society to pick a side, whether it be on college applications or social circles. We are encouraged to choose only one lineage, to look at our racial background and choose which identity we will bear.

Because I am biracial, choosing a background has meant recognizing the fact that one of my racial identities is responsible for the oppression of the other. This internal struggle has been illustrated by current events like the #BlackLivesMatter movement, the church shooting in Charleston that killed nine Black brothers and sisters, the countless murders of Black women, men (both cis and trans), and gender-nonconforming individuals at the hands of our police force, and the protests organized by brave students at Mizzou and Yale. This tension has also impacted my personal life. For example, I’ve had to explain to my mother why racial “color-blindness” is harmful and that she shouldn’t take it personally when I complain about white people…

Read the entire article here.

Academia and the Identity of Mixed-Race Women

Ain’t I A Woman Collective
2015-11-10

Nicola Codner
Leeds, Yorkshire, United Kingdom

Image: Vox Efx

I am a 35-year old mixed race woman (Black Jamaican, Nigerian and White British), born and living in Leeds, Yorkshire the UK and I recently completed a counselling diploma. As part of the work I had to do to achieve my diploma I had to do a great deal of work around examining my racial and cultural identity. It was also part of the course requirements that I had to do 20 hours of personal counselling.

I didn’t know it when I started the diploma but I had a massive amount of work that I needed to do around exploring my identity as a mixed race woman. This emerged when I started my personal counselling. I began to realise I had a lot of unresolved feelings around past experiences of racism and the lack of understanding and acknowledgement I had met as a mixed race female. I also needed to look at issues to do with race within my family as well as ancestral baggage…

Read the entire article here.

“I’m A Biracial Person Who…” | A Snapchat Story

Chescaleigh
2015-10-26

Franchesca Ramsey

Colored Perceptions: Racially Distinctive Names and Assessments of Skin Color

American Behavioral Scientist
Published online before print 2015-10-28
DOI: 10.1177/0002764215613395

Denia Garcia
Department of Sociology
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

Maria Abascal
Department of Sociology
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

Scholars are increasingly employing skin color measures to investigate racial stratification beyond the dimensions of self- or other-classification. Current understandings of the relationship between phenotypic traits, like skin color, and racial classification are incomplete. Scholars agree that perceptions of phenotypic traits shape how people classify others; it remains to be seen, however, whether racial classification in turn shapes people’s perceptions of phenotypic traits. The present study is based on an original survey experiment that tests whether assessments of others’ skin color are affected by a subtle racial cue, a name. Results indicate that skin color ratings are affected by the presence of a racially distinctive name: A significant share of people will rate the same face darker when that face is assigned a distinctively Hispanic name as opposed to a non-Hispanic name. In addition, ratings of male faces are more sensitive to racially distinctive names. The findings bear important lessons for our understanding of the social construction of race and its role in producing inequalities.

Read or purchase the article here.