Mixed Race Studies

Seeking Participants: Experiences of Multiracial Students in Higher Education

2020-08-27

Lauren Wagner
Graduate College of Education
San Francisco State University

Hello – I am a graduate student in the Master of Arts in Education: Equity and Social Justice in Education at San Francisco State University. I am currently seeking research participants for phone interviews during the month of September.

My qualitative study focuses on perceptions, representation, and identity development of multiracial students in higher education – specifically the significance of continuous access and visibility of ethnic studies curriculum throughout a student’s academic journey.

Please consider participating if you meet all of the below:

1. Identify as multiracial (i.e., individuals who have mixed ancestry of two or more races).
2. Have taken at least one ethnic studies course at a California Community College, California State University, or University of California.

Participants will be asked to share their experiences in a 45-60 minute interview. All information provided will be kept confidential.

If you or someone you know is interested in participating in this research, please contact me at lwagner@sfsu.edu.

Thank you!

Global ‘Mixed Race’ Studies: Global Perspectives on ‘Mixed Race’, Citizenship and Immigration (CULANTH 220FS – 01)

Duke University
Asian American & Diaspora Studies
Fall 2020

Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, Senior Research Scholar
Duke Center on Genomics, Race, Identity, Difference (GRID), Durham, North Carolina

By exploring pioneering and controversial writings from both the social and the biological sciences as well as the humanities, this course will situate debates on ‘race’, ‘mixed race’ and social hierarchies within broader global, comparative, and historical contexts. These comparative examples shed light on the the different social, social, and historical meanings attached to ‘race’ and ‘mixed race’ and address social and cultural variations in the symbolic rules which determine the social status of ‘mixed race’ communities.

For more information, click here.

An RNC Speaker Said Cops Would Be ‘Smart’ to Racially Profile Her Own Son

VICE
2020-08-25

Carter Sherman

“Statistically, my brown son is more likely to commit a violent offense over my white sons,” anti-abortion activist Abby Johnson said in a YouTube video earlier this year.

One of the Republican National Convention’s top speakers said in a recent video that it would be “smart” for a police officer to racially profile her biracial son, because “statistically, my brown son is more likely to commit a violent offense over my white sons.”

“I recognize that I’m gonna have to have a different conversation with Jude than I do with my brown-haired little Irish, very, very pale-skinned, white sons, as they grow up,” Abby Johnson, a prominent anti-abortion activist, said in a 15-plus-minutes video posted to YouTube in late June, after weeks of nationwide protests against the police killing of George Floyd.

“Right now, Jude is an adorable, perpetually tan-looking little brown boy,” said Johnson, whose husband blogged, in 2015, about adopting their biracial son at his birth. Johnson is white. “But one day, he’s going to grow up and he’s going to be a tall, probably sort of large, intimidating-looking-maybe brown man. And my other boys are probably gonna look like nerdy white guys.”

Read the entire article here.

Other Tongues: Call for Submissions VOLUME 2

I Wonder As I Wonder
2019-09-16

Adebe DeRango-Adem

Mixed-Race Women Speak Out (Again!)

Co-editors Adebe DeRango-Adem and Andrea Thompson are seeking submissions of writing and/or artwork for a follow-up anthology of work by and about mixed-race women, intended for publication by Inanna Publications in 2020-21.

Deadline for Submissions: SEPTEMBER 1, 2020

The purpose of this anthology is to explore the question of how mixed-race women in North America identify in the 21st Century. The anthology will also serve as a place to learn about the social experiences, attitudes, and feelings of others, while investigating more general questions around what racial identity has come to mean today. We are inviting previously unpublished submissions that engage, document, and/or explore the experiences of being mixed-race…

…WHAT IS OTHER TONGUES?

The first edition of Other Tongues: Mixed Race Women Speak Out was born from a desire to see a new and refreshing literature that could be at the forefront of mixed-race discourse and women’s studies, while providing a space for the creative expression of mixed-race women. Through an inspirational and provocative mix of visual art, literature, orature, creative non-fiction and academic analysis, Other Tongues chronicled the changes in social attitudes towards race, mixed-race, gender and identity, and the each of the contributors’ particular reactions to those attitudes.

The diversity of each woman’s story demonstrated the breadth and depth of the lived reality of the mixed experience for women in North America at that particular moment in time. In this way, the book became a snapshot of the North American racial terrain in the afterglow of the inauguration of the first mixed-race/Black American President—a pivotal point in history that many mistakenly labeled the dawning of a “post-racial” age….

For more information, click here.

Harris’ dual identities challenge America’s race labels

Associated Press
2020-08-21

Sally Ho

Benjamin Beltran, 26, on Aug. 18, 2020, in Washington. For most of his childhood, Beltran identified with his dad’s roots as a Filipino growing up. At times, that made his white mother worry he was forgetting her ancestry, which traces to Scotland and Ireland. Jacquelyn Martin / AP

Kamala Harris’ historic nomination for vice president on the Democratic ticket is challenging multicultural, race-obsessed America’s emphasis on labels.

It was just 20 years ago that the U.S. census began to allow Americans to identify as more than one race. And now, the country is on the threshold of seeing the name of Kamala Harris — proud daughter of a Jamaican father and Indian mother — on the national ballot.

Harris’ historic nomination for vice president on the Democratic ticket is challenging America’s emphasis on identity and labels.

While her dual heritage represents several slices of the multicultural and multiracial experience, many have puzzled over how to define her — an issue people of diverse backgrounds have long had to navigate.

Harris has long incorporated both sides of her parentage in her public persona, but also has been steadfast in claiming her Black identity, saying her mother — the biggest influence on her life — raised her and her sister as Black because that’s the way the world would view them.

“My mother instilled in my sister, Maya, and me the values that would chart the course of our lives,” Harris said in a Wednesday night speech at the Democratic National Convention to accept her party’s nomination. “She raised us to be proud, strong Black women. And she raised us to know and be proud of our Indian heritage.”…

Read the entire article here.

Author Event: Dedria Humphries Barker on AADL.TV

Ann Arbor District Library
343 South Fifth Avenue
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104
2020-08-20, 00-01:30Z [2020-08-19, 20:00 to 21:30 EDT]

Join Dedria Humphries Barker as she discusses her book, Mother of Orphans: The True and Curious Story of Irish Alice, a Colored Man’s Widow.

Before Her Time: The Heroic Schooling of a Mulatto Girl

White women who for love crossed the 19th century Jim Crow color line for a new life in a Black family were highly unusual and often ostracized. But one such woman was Alice Donlan. Her interracial family braved further complication when her husband died in 1912, and Alice put their three children in an orphanage. Why was the one-hundred year old mystery unraveled by a two decades of research by Alice’s great granddaughter, Dedria Humphries Barker. Mother of Orphans is the resulting family biography. In this presentation, Humphries Barker argues that Alice’s act was heroic and helped propel future generations, including the author, to lives of opportunity.

Richly illustrated with historical and contemporary photographs, Mother of Orphans tells the story of Humphries Barker’s great grandmother, Alice Donlan, an Irish American woman from Indiana, who found love in Cincinnati, Ohio, at the end of the Gilded Age when the Ohio River city was known as the London and Paris of America. It was also the age of Jim Crow and lynching. This family biography explains how navigating interracial family life and different cultural values led to Alice’s unspeakable act. An intricate social history, Mother of Orphans links the stories of four generations of related White and Black women directly affected by Alice’s unspeakable act. And, in the final analysis, the author was amazed at how the social condition of 21st century women remains very similar to the daunting challenges Alice faced, especially when it comes to child care.

Dedria Humphries Barker is a African American woman writer who lives in Lansing, Michigan where she is a working mother of three adult children. Her work has included being a journalist at The Michigan Chronicle, Detroit’s African American newspaper, a staff writer for two Gannett, Co., Inc. daily newspapers, The Commercial News in Danville, Illinois, and The Lansing State Journal in Michigan’s capitol city; an editor at Michigan State University, and a freelance writer whose work on parenting has appeared on Salon.com, Your Teen, and Literary Mama, and in the Redbook and Good Housekeeping magazines, and The Detroit News, among other periodicals. Her work has been published by the historical societies of Ohio and Michigan. She is a former professor of English at Lansing Community College in Michigan.

To watch the event, click here.

Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir

Ecco (an imprint of HarperCollins)
2020-07-28
224 pages
6x8in
Hardcover ISBN: 9780062248572
Large Print ISBN: 9780063076709
E-book ISBN: 9780062248596
Digital Audio, MP3 ISBN: 9780063005860

Natasha Trethewey, Board of Trustees Professor of English
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois

An Instant New York Times Bestseller

A chillingly personal and exquisitely wrought memoir of a daughter reckoning with the brutal murder of her mother at the hands of her former stepfather, and the moving, intimate story of a poet coming into her own in the wake of a tragedy

At age nineteen, Natasha Trethewey had her world turned upside down when her former stepfather shot and killed her mother. Grieving and still new to adulthood, she confronted the twin pulls of life and death in the aftermath of unimaginable trauma and now explores the way this experience lastingly shaped the artist she became.

With penetrating insight and a searing voice that moves from the wrenching to the elegiac, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Natasha Trethewey explores this profound experience of pain, loss, and grief as an entry point into understanding the tragic course of her mother’s life and the way her own life has been shaped by a legacy of fierce love and resilience. Moving through her mother’s history in the deeply segregated South and through her own girlhood as a “child of miscegenation” in Mississippi, Trethewey plumbs her sense of dislocation and displacement in the lead-up to the harrowing crime that took place on Memorial Drive in Atlanta in 1985.

Memorial Drive is a compelling and searching look at a shared human experience of sudden loss and absence but also a piercing glimpse at the enduring ripple effects of white racism and domestic abuse. Animated by unforgettable prose and inflected by a poet’s attention to language, this is a luminous, urgent, and visceral memoir from one of our most important contemporary writers and thinkers.

The Truths We Hold: An American Journey

Penguin Press
2019-01-08
336 Pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4
Hardcover ISBN: 9780525560715
Paperback ISBN: 9780525560739
eBook ISBN: 9780525560722

Kamala D. Harris

A New York Times bestseller

From one of America’s most inspiring political leaders, a book about the core truths that unite us, and the long struggle to discern what those truths are and how best to act upon them, in her own life and across the life of our country.

Senator Kamala Harris’s commitment to speaking truth is informed by her upbringing. The daughter of immigrants, she was raised in an Oakland, California community that cared deeply about social justice; her parents–an esteemed economist from Jamaica and an admired cancer researcher from India–met as activists in the civil rights movement when they were graduate students at Berkeley. Growing up, Harris herself never hid her passion for justice, and when she became a prosecutor out of law school, a deputy district attorney, she quickly established herself as one of the most innovative change agents in American law enforcement. She progressed rapidly to become the elected District Attorney for San Francisco, and then the chief law enforcement officer of the state of California as a whole. Known for bringing a voice to the voiceless, she took on the big banks during the foreclosure crisis, winning a historic settlement for California’s working families. Her hallmarks were applying a holistic, data-driven approach to many of California’s thorniest issues, always eschewing stale “tough on crime” rhetoric as presenting a series of false choices. Neither “tough” nor “soft” but smart on crime became her mantra. Being smart means learning the truths that can make us better as a community, and supporting those truths with all our might. That has been the pole star that guided Harris to a transformational career as the top law enforcement official in California, and it is guiding her now as a transformational United States Senator, grappling with an array of complex issues that affect her state, our country, and the world, from health care and the new economy to immigration, national security, the opioid crisis, and accelerating inequality.

By reckoning with the big challenges we face together, drawing on the hard-won wisdom and insight from her own career and the work of those who have most inspired her, Kamala Harris offers in The Truths We Hold a master class in problem solving, in crisis management, and leadership in challenging times. Through the arc of her own life, on into the great work of our day, she communicates a vision of shared struggle, shared purpose, and shared values. In a book rich in many home truths, not least is that a relatively small number of people work very hard to convince a great many of us that we have less in common than we actually do, but it falls to us to look past them and get on with the good work of living our common truth. When we do, our shared effort will continue to sustain us and this great nation, now and in the years to come.

Biden’s VP pick: Why Kamala Harris embraces her biracial roots

BBC News
2020-08-11

Soutik Biswas, India correspondent

Getty Images

US Senator Kamala Harris – chosen by Joe Biden as his Democratic vice-presidential candidate – is known as a prominent black politician. But she has also embraced her Indian roots.

“My name is pronounced “Comma-la”, like the punctuation mark,” Kamala Harris writes in her 2018 autobiography, The Truths We Hold.

The California senator, daughter of an Indian-born mother and Jamaican-born father, then explains the meaning of her Indian name.

“It means ‘lotus flower’, which is a symbol of significance in Indian culture. A lotus grows underwater, its flowers rising above the surface while the roots are planted firmly in the river bottom.”

Early in life, young Kamala and her sister Maya grew up in a house filled with music by black American artists. Her mother would sing along to Aretha Franklin’s early gospel, and her jazz-loving father, who taught economics at Stanford University, would play Thelonius Monk and John Coltrane on the turntable.

Shyamala Gopalan and Donald Harris separated when Ms Harris was five. Raised primarily by her Hindu single mother, a cancer researcher and a civil rights activist, Kamala, Maya and Shyamala were known as “Shyamala and the girls”.

Her mother made sure her two daughters were aware of their background.

“My mother understood very well she was raising two black daughters. She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident black women,” she wrote…

Read the entire article here.

Joe Biden picks Sen. Kamala Harris to be his vice presidential running mate, making her the first black woman on a major ticket

CNBC
2020-08-11

Christina Wilkie, White House Reporter

• Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden has chosen California Sen. Kamala Harris to be his running mate.
• Widely considered at moderate Democrat, Harris will be the first Black woman to join a major party ticket.
• The announcement caps off a monthslong process that saw nearly a dozen prospective running mates vetted by the Biden campaign.

WASHINGTON – Former Vice President Joe Biden has chosen Sen. Kamala Harris of California to join him on the Democratic ticket, fulfilling his pledge to select a female running mate and making Harris the first Black person ever tapped as the vice presidential nominee of a major party.

His campaign announced the pick Tuesday afternoon through his webpage.

Biden’s selection of Harris, 55, lends racial diversity, gender parity and generational breadth to his campaign. It also represents a strategic decision by the 77-year-old former vice president to keep his ticket firmly within the more moderate wing of the Democratic Party.

“Back when Kamala was Attorney General, she worked closely with Beau,” tweeted Biden, referring to his late son, Beau Biden. “I watched as they took on the big banks, lifted up working people, and protected women and kids from abuse. I was proud then, and I’m proud now to have her as my partner in this campaign.”…

Read the entire article here.