Mixed Race Studies

Old Dixie Highway renamed President Barack Obama Highway in Florida city

The Washington Post
2015-12-19

Elahe Izadi, Reporter

Workers install a new sign in Riviera Beach, Fla., on Thursday. (City of Riviera Beach)

Old Dixie Highway is no more in Riviera Beach, Fla. Instead, motorists are driving on President Barack Obama Highway.

Riviera Beach officials renamed the portion of the highway in their city limits, and the new sign carrying the name of the nation’s first black president went up Thursday. Old Dixie, officials said, paid homage to an era that glorified slavery.

The name was “symbolic of racism, symbolic of the Klan, symbolic of cross burnings, and today we are stepping up to a new day, a new era,” Riviera Beach Mayor Thomas Masters told WPTV on Thursday.

The street itself carried a painful history for some. Dora Johnson, 77, told the television station that she once witnessed a cross-burning on Old Dixie Highway. Johnson will be given the old sign that has been removed, Masters told the Palm Beach Post.

The city council’s August vote to rename Old Dixie came at a time when many communities in the South were reconsidering Confederate flags and monuments. A national debate over such symbols began anew following the June shooting of nine parishioners by a white gunman inside a historic black church in South Carolina…

Read the entire article here.

Reflections on Multiracial Identity on Another Thanksgiving Passed

Black Agenda Report: News, information and analysis from the black left.
2015-12-01

Danny Haiphong

The U.S. imperial domain floats on raw force and fairy tales. One myth “paints the U.S. as a safe haven for people of different backgrounds instead of the genocidal settler state that it is.” Another tale holds that multi-racial identity “carries with it new experiences with racism not yet easily understood or dealt with.” The truth is, the U.S.is racist to the core, and “proponents of multiracial identity possess little interest in solidarity.”

Over the last few years, much discussion has occurred in the US corporate media around the demographic shift in the US. Reports have verified that white Americans will be minorities in the general population after 2042. This impending change has struck fear in the eyes of the racist, rightwing sector of society and romanticism in the minds of the racist, white liberal sector of society. The right has responded with racist terror while self-identified white liberals have found new ways to boast of the so-called “progress” of US capitalist society. Multiracial identity has been a key concept recently devised to sanitize the racial political order of the US.

The politics of multiracial identity are a product of the same liberal mythology so embedded in the Thanksgiving holiday. This ideology, promoted by the liberal sector of the ruling class, celebrates Thanksgiving as proof that the US is a “nation of immigrants.” Thanksgiving positions the US as a cooperative society. The fairy tale paints the US as a safe haven for people of different backgrounds instead of the genocidal settler state that it is.

Similarly, multiracial identity has been featured in corporate media such as the New York Times as a product of an increasingly tolerant, diverse US Empire. The US corporate media is quick to cite how more self-identified “Americans” are marrying between racial groups and how migrations of peoples from Africa, Asia, and Latin America have increased as well. These developments are indeed fact. However, the past and present exploitation that underlies their meaning is left out of the discussion in the same manner that the continued plight and resistance of indigenous peoples is left out of the Thanksgiving narrative…

Read the entire article here.

Chasing Daybreak: A Film About Mixed Race in America

University of Michigan
Shapiro Undergraduate Library
919 South University Avenue
Screening Room 2160
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1185
2016-01-19, 12:00-14:00 CST (Local Time)

Karen E Downing, Host Contact

This is one of a year-long series of events that explore what it means to be multiracial in a monoracially conceived world.

In 2005, the MAVIN Foundation, the nation’s largest mixed race organization, sponsored the Generation MIX National Awareness Tour to raise awareness of America’s multiracial baby boom. Chasing Daybreak (2006, 71 min.) follows the five Generation MIX crew members as they travel 10,000 miles across the country in a 26-foot R.V. and spark discussions on race, mixed race and diversity. As the crew meets with hundreds of people from U.S. Senator Barack Obama to Bubba the tow truck driver, they share their hopes, fears and aspirations for the future of race in America.

The screening will be followed by a discussion. For more information, click here.

Are multiracial millennials leading the way towards an inclusive society?

MPR News with Kerri Miller
Minnesota Public Radio
Tuesday, 2015-08-25, 14:00Z (09:00 CDT, 10:00 EDT)

Kerri Miller, Host

Jose Santos, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Metropolitan State University, St. Paul, Minnesota

Rainier Spencer, Vice Provost for Academic Affairs; Associate Vice President for Diversity Initiatives; Chief Diversity Officer
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

“Demographically, multiracial Americans are younger—and strikingly so—than the country as a whole. According to Pew Research Center analysis of the 2013 American Community Survey, the median age of all multiracial Americans is 19, compared with 38 for single-race Americans,” —Pew Research Center.

While the nation’s multiracial population is growing – does that make our culture more understanding of issues of diversity?

MPR News host Kerri Miller hosts an engaging discussion on this question with her guests, callers and online commenters.

Listen to the interview (00:41:36) here. Download the interview here.

White Debt: Reckoning with what is owed — and what can never be repaid — for racial privilege.

The New York Times
2015-12-02

Eula Biss. Professor of Instruction
Department of English
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois

Illustration by Geoff McFetridge

The word for debt in German also means guilt. A friend who used to live in Munich mentioned this to me recently. I took note because I’m newly in debt, quite a lot of it, from buying a house. So far, my debt is surprisingly comfortable, and that’s one quality of debt that I’ve been pondering lately — how easy it can be.

I had very little furniture for the first few months in my new house and no money left to buy any. But then I took out a loan against my down payment, and now I have a dining-room table, six chairs and a piano. While I was in the bank signing the paperwork that would allow me to spend money I hadn’t yet earned, I thought of Eddie Murphy’s skit in which he goes undercover as a white person and discovers that white people at banks give away money to other white people free. It’s true, I thought to myself in awe when I saw the ease with which I was granted another loan, though I understood — and, when my mortgage was sold to another lender, was further reminded — that the money was not being given to me free. I was, and am, paying for it. But that detail, like my debt, is easily forgotten.

“Only something that continues to hurt stays in the memory,” Nietzsche observes in “On the Genealogy of Morality.” My student-loan debt doesn’t hurt, though it hasn’t seemed to have gotten any smaller over the past decade, and I’ve managed to forget it so thoroughly that I recently told someone that I’d never been in debt until I bought a house. Creditors of antiquity, Nietzsche writes, tried to encourage a debtor’s memory by taking as collateral his freedom, wife, life or even, as in Egypt, his afterlife. Legal documents outlined exactly how much of the body of the debtor that the creditor could cut off for unpaid debts. Consider the odd logic, Nietzsche suggests, of a system in which a creditor is repaid not with money or goods but with the pleasure of seeing the debtor’s body punished. “The pleasure,” he writes, “of having the right to exercise power over the powerless.”…

…Whiteness is not a kinship or a culture. White people are no more closely related to one another, genetically, than we are to black people. American definitions of race allow for a white woman to give birth to black children, which should serve as a reminder that white people are not a family. What binds us is that we share a system of social advantages that can be traced back to the advent of slavery in the colonies that became the United States. “There is, in fact, no white community,” as Baldwin writes. Whiteness is not who you are. Which is why it is entirely possible to despise whiteness without disliking yourself…

Read the entire article here.

Black Enough/White Enough: The Obama Dilema

Third World Press
February 2009
199 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0883783092

Rickey Hendon

Foreword by: Hermene D. Hartman

Barack is caught between two worlds and struggles for acceptance by either side-Black enough? White enough? It’s a fine line that he must walk, writes Illinois state Senator Rickey Hendon, in Black Enough/White Enough: The Obama Dilemma, a personal memoir of the historic 2008 presidential election. Hendon, an African American senator from Chicago’s blighted West Side, was a veteran politico firmly aligned with other Black leaders when the man who would go on to become the golden presidential hopeful was an upstart balancing atop America’s cultural fence in one the most notoriously segregated cities in the nation. This newcomer was of a different stock than Chicago’s old guard, which boasted icons such as Rev. Jesse Jackson, late Mayor Harold Washington and Minister Louis Farrakhan, and was initially eyed with some suspicion-even by Hendon himself as the two served side by side in the Illinois state Senate. And as Hendon explains in this book, the phenomenon that became Barack Obama, the audacious presidential hopeful, was created not just by wooing America’s whites, but also by winning acceptance by America’s Blacks.

Hendon begins Black Enough/White Enough: The Obama Dilemma with Obama’s announcement of his presidential bid on February 10, 2007, and follows his entire campaign in a journal-like fashion, all the way to the November 4, 2008 election. This running account is peppered with Hendon’s own observations, insights, inside information, and personal anecdotes of his long history with Barack Obama. Hendon pulls no punches and offers a warts-and-all look at how Obama’s campaign tiptoed across a tightrope to gain the confidence of white Americans without angering African Americans-the latter not always being successful. Since the book was compiled from a journal that Hendon kept of events as they were unfolding during the marathon campaign, we find ourselves transported back to Super Tuesday to race endlessly against a tenacious Senator Hillary Clinton, dodge scandals involving militant pastors and terrorist friends, to play running mate roulette with Republican opponent Senator John McCain. Some of the discussion deals with issues and incidents that have long since been resolved, and perhaps even forgotten, however, the memory of the uncertainty, the tough choices, the curve balls, the dirty tricks, the surprise game changers, and most of all, the nail biting stress, is preserved just as we should all want to remember it-when we were there!

Intersection Episode 10: Being Melissa Harris-Perry Is a Full-Time Job

The New Republic
Intersection with Jamil Smith
2015-12-01

Jamil Smith, Senior Editor and Host

Professor, feminist, TV host, activist, mom, rabid hip-hop fan. Melissa Harris-Perry works seven days a week balancing all her identities, and she isn’t stopping anytime soon.

Besides hosting her eponymous MSNBC news show and teaching political science and running an institute at Wake Forest University, she is also on the front lines of an intersectional fight for racial justice and women’s rights.

This November, the Anna Julia Cooper Center, a research center directed by Dr. Harris-Perry, partnered with the White House Council on Women and Girls to co-host a major conference on expanding opportunities for women and girls of color. Her center is also part of new collaborative to advance equity for women and girls of color through research…

Listen to the interview here.

Michael Eric Dyson Discusses His Cover Story on Hillary Clinton

The New Republic
Minutes
2015-11-27

Mikaela Lefrak, Associate Editor

“Obama will probably go down in history as one of the greatest presidents we’ve had. I just don’t think that the issue of race will earn him those kudos.” That’s professor Michael Eric Dyson’s opinion on the first black president of the United States. Dyson, a New Republic contributing editor, wrote “Yes She Can,” the cover story of our January/February issue. It’s an in-depth profile of Hillary Clinton and how she’s addressing race in America.

We sat down with Dyson to discuss some of the big issues discussed in the article. He talked with us about how Clinton can address race and gender, what President Obama has (and has not) done for black Americans, and which Republican presidential candidate would be the least bad option for the United States.

President Obama & Marilynne Robinson: A Conversation in Iowa

The New York Review of Books
2015-11-05

President Barack Obama

Marilynne Robinson

President Obama and Marilynne Robinson at the Iowa State Library, Des Moines, September 2015 (Pete Souza/White House)

The following conversation between President Obama and Marilynne Robinson was conducted in Des Moines, Iowa, on September 14. An audio recording of it can be heard at itunes.com/nybooks. —The Editors

The President: Marilynne, it’s wonderful to see you. And as I said as we were driving over here, this is an experiment, because typically when I come to a place like Des Moines, I immediately am rushed over to some political event and I make a speech, or I have a town hall, or I go see some factory and have wonderful conversations with people. But it’s very planned out and scripted. And typically, we’re trying to drive a very particular message that day about education or about manufacturing.

But one of the things that I don’t get a chance to do as often as I’d like is just to have a conversation with somebody who I enjoy and I’m interested in; to hear from them and have a conversation with them about some of the broader cultural forces that shape our democracy and shape our ideas, and shape how we feel about citizenship and the direction that the country should be going in.

And so we had this idea that why don’t I just have a conversation with somebody I really like and see how it turns out. And you were first in the queue, because—

Marilynne Robinson: Thank you very much.

The President: Well, as you know—I’ve told you this—I love your books. Some listeners may not have read your work before, which is good, because hopefully they’ll go out and buy your books after this conversation.

I first picked up Gilead, one of your most wonderful books, here in Iowa. Because I was campaigning at the time, and there’s a lot of downtime when you’re driving between towns and when you get home late from campaigning. And you and I, therefore, have an Iowa connection, because Gilead is actually set here in Iowa…

…Robinson: And also, one of the things that doesn’t take into account is that local governments can be great systems of oppression. And it’s a wonderful thing to have a national government that can intervene in the name of national values.

Our systems for maintaining the peace and our criminal justice systems generally work, except for this huge swath of the population that is incarcerated at rates that are unprecedented in world history.

And when you are thinking about American democracy or, for that matter, Christianity in your writings, how much does that issue of “the other” come up and how do you think about that? I know at least in Gilead that factors into one major character, trying to figure out how he can love somebody in the Fifties that doesn’t look like him.

Robinson: Iowa never had laws against interracial marriage. Only Iowa and Maine never had [them]—

The President: Those were the only two.

Robinson: Yes. And [Ulysses S.] Grant really did call [Iowa] the shining star of radicalism, and so on. We never had segregated schools; they were illegal from before, while it was still a territory, and so on. And these laws never changed and they became the basis for the marriage equality ruling that the Supreme Court here [in Iowa] did.

So that whole stream of the culture never changed. And at the same time, the felt experience of the culture was not aligned with the liberal tradition [of the] culture. And so in that book, Jack has every right to think he can come to Iowa, and yet what he finds makes him frightened even to raise the question…

Read the entire conversation here. Read part 2 of the conversation here.

A Change Has Come: Race, Politics, and the Path to the Obama Presidency

Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race
Volume 6, Issue 01, Spring 2009
pages 1-14
DOI: 10.1017/S1742058X09090018

Lawrence D. Bobo, W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences
Harvard University

Michael C. Dawson, John D. MacArthur Professor of Political Science
University of Chicago

Has Barack Obama’s success transformed the racial divide? Did he somehow transcend or help bring to an end centuries of racial division in the United States? Did he deliberately run a strategically race-neutral, race-evading campaign? Did his race and ingrained American racism constrain the reach of his success? Have we arrived at that postracial moment that has long been the stuff of dreams and high oratory? Or was the outcome of the 2008 presidential election driven entirely by nonracial factors, such as a weak Republican ticket, an incumbent party saddled with defending an unpopular war, and a worsening economic crisis? It is at once too simple and yet entirely appropriate to say that the answers to these questions are, in a phrase, complicated matters. These complexities can, however, be brought into sharper focus.

Read the entire article here.