Mixed Race Studies

‘I’m mixed-race, is Cambridge University right for me?’

BBC News
2019-01-22

Anoushka Mutanda Dougherty has been offered a place at Cambridge University, but she’s mixed-race and from a state school – and only 3% of students who started at Cambridge in 2017 were black, or mixed-race with black heritage. So is it the best place for her? At this point, she’s not sure.

Cambridge is the second-oldest university in the English-speaking world. Cambridge is the fourth-oldest surviving university in the world. Cambridge has produced, so far, 90 Nobel prize winners – and Cambridge, this educational powerhouse, just might not be where I want to go. At least, that’s how I feel right now, a week after finding out that I got a place…

Read the entire article here.

White Women’s Role in School Segregation

JSTOR Daily
2019-01-04

Livia Gershon
Nashua, New Hampshire

via Flickr

White American women have long played significant roles in maintaining racist practices. One sociologist calls the phenomenon “social mothering.”

In recent years, many public conversations about American racism have focused on white women—their votes for Trump, their opposition to school desegregation, their calls to the police about black people doing innocuous things. As sociologist Joseph O. Jewell points out, however, this is nothing new. White women have long played a role in maintaining institutional racism in this country.

Jewell focuses on two nineteenth-century incidents involving school segregation. The post-Civil War era was a time of changing racial and gender ideologies. White Anglo-Protestant families in U.S. cities viewed the growing visibility of upwardly mobile racial outsiders as a threat. Meanwhile, public schools and other institutions serving children were growing, creating new roles for middle-class white women—what Jewell calls “social mothering.”

In 1868, a white New Orleans engineer and Confederate army veteran learned there were nonwhite students attending his daughter’s school. When questioned, the school’s principal, the ironically-named Stephanie Bigot, provided a list of twenty-eight students “known, or generally reputed to be colored”—presumably girls whose appearances were passably “white.” Bigot claimed that she had no knowledge of their racial backgrounds but that there were rumors among the student body that they were not white.

Jewell writes that the enrollment of racially ambiguous girls posed a particular threat to white New Orleans families. “Allegations of racial passing compromised the entire student body’s ability to secure either marriage into a ‘good’ family or ‘respectable’ employment,” he writes…

Read the entire article here.

Other(ing) People’s Children: Social Mothering, Schooling, and Race in Late Nineteenth Century New Orleans and San Francisco

Race, Gender & Class
Volume 21, No. 3/4, RGC Intersectionalilty, Race, Gender, Class, Health, Justice Issues (2014)
pages 138-155

Joseph O. Jewell, Associate Professor of Sociology
Texas A&M University

Social mothering—women’s carework in the public sphere—played an important role in whites’ responses to racial minorities’ claims to middle-class mobility and identity in the late nineteenth century. In New Orleans and San Francisco, two cities where racial minorities used public education to achieve and reproduce middle-class position, white women principals were central figures in struggles over schooling that contributed to the de jure segregation of black and Asian children. I analyze two historical cases to show how racialized constructions of social mothering helped to maintain links between race and class. In both incidents, public opinion held white professional women responsible for ensuring the racial purity of white children’s public spaces and social identities. I argue that analyses of the race-class intersection should more carefully consider how the economic domination of racial minorities is maintained through various gendered forms of reproductive labor.

Read the entire article here.

Court declares one must “look like an African descendant in the eyes of the average man” to qualify for affirmative action, rejecting another case of a white student “passing” for black

Black Women of Brazil
2018-11-12

Marques Travae, Creator and Editor

One of numerous examples of fraud, Vinícius Loures defined himself as black to attain access to a Medicine course at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais.

Court declares one must “look like an African descendant in the eyes of the average man” to qualify for affirmative action, rejecting another case of a white student “passing” for black

In a recent decision that will have huge repercussions on persons who attempt to obtain access to certain jobs and vacancies in universities, a panel upheld a policy that defined that for anyone wishing to qualify through affirmative action, it is not enough that said person be of African descent, but rather must look like an African descendant in the eyes of the average man. This was an argument I made several months ago. A little background here.

Due to the lack of diversity on Brazil’s college and university campuses, the nation began to experiment with affirmative action policies nearly 20 years ago. The discussion on the policies generated debates on race in the public sphere that had never happened to such a degree in Brazil. Sure, the topic of race in Brazil had been studied in academia for decades, but never had the general public had such public debates on the topic. Since the first half of the 20th century, the belief system in Brazil had been that Brazil was a “racial democracy” in which any person, regardless of their racial appearance had an equal opportunity to attain a middle class lifestyle. In fact, because of widespread miscegenation, it was even difficult to determine what race the average Brazilian was anyway…

Read the entire article here

Color Struck: How Race and Complexion Matter in the “Color-Blind” Era

Sense Publishers
2017
218 pages
ISBN Paperback: 9789463511087
ISBN Hardcover: 9789463511094
ISBN E-Book: 9789463511100

Edited by:

Lori Latrice Martin, Associate Professor of Sociology
Louisiana State University

Hayward Derrick Horton, Professor of Sociology
State University of New York, Albany

Cedric Herring, Professor and Director of the Language, Literacy, and Culture (LLC)
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Verna M. Keith, Professor of Sociology
Texas A&M University

Melvin Thomas, Associate Professor of Sociology
North Carolina State University

Skin color and skin tone has historically played a significant role in determining the life chances of African Americans and other people of color. It has also been important to our understanding of race and the processes of racialization. But what does the relationship between skin tone and stratification outcomes mean? Is skin tone correlated with stratification outcomes because people with darker complexions experience more discrimination than those of the same race with lighter complexions? Is skin tone differentiation a process that operates external to communities of color and is then imposed on people of color? Or, is skin tone discrimination an internally driven process that is actively aided and abetted by members of communities of color themselves? Color Struck provides answers to these questions. In addition, it addresses issues such as the relationship between skin tone and wealth inequality, anti-black sentiment and whiteness, Twitter culture, marriage outcomes and attitudes, gender, racial identity, civic engagement and politics at predominately White Institutions. Color Struck can be used as required reading for courses on race, ethnicity, religious studies, history, political science, education, mass communications, African and African American Studies, social work, and sociology.

Table of Contents

• Introduction / Lori Latrice Martin
• 1. Race, Skin Tone, and Wealth Inequality in America / Cedric Herring and Anthony Hynes
• 2. Mentions and Melanin: Exploring the Colorism Discourse and Twitter Culture / Sarah L. Webb and Petra A. Robinson
• 3. Beyond Black and White but Still in Color: Preliminary Findings of Skin Tone and Marriage Attitudes and Outcomes among African American Young Adults / Antoinette M. Landor
• 4. Connections or Color? Predicting Colorblindness among Blacks / Vanessa Gonlin
• 5. Black Body Politics in College: Deconstructing Colorism and Hairism toward Black Women’s Healing / Latasha N. Eley
• 6. Biracial Butterflies: 21st Century Racial Identity in Popular Culture / Paul Easterling
• 7. Confronting Colorism: An Examination into the Social and Psychological Aspects of Colorism / Jahaan Chandler
• 8. How Skin Tone Shapes Civic Engagement among Black Americans / Robert L. Reece and Aisha A. Upton
• 9. The Complexity of Color and the Religion of Whiteness / Stephen C. Finley and Lori Latrice Martin
• About the Contributors

Harvard Undergrads Form First Campus Group for Mixed-Race Students

The Harvard Crimson
Cambridge, Massachusetts
2018-11-20

Ruth A. Hailu and Olivia C. Scott, Crimson Staff Writers

Harvard Yard Photo: Amy Y. Li

The Harvard Undergraduate Union of Mixed Students received official recognition from the Undergraduate Council earlier this month to become the first group on campus for all mixed race students.

Since they began recruiting members last week, the group has attracted plenty of immediate interest, and its membership list now includes more than 100 students. Founders Iris R. Feldman ’20, Antonia Scott ’20, and Isaiah Johnson ’20 said they want the organization to serve as an inclusive space for all identities shaped by the needs and ideas of its members.

Scott said she was partially inspired to create the group after seeing mixed race organizations at other colleges, and she wanted to replicate the same experience at Harvard, which did not have a mixed race group on campus…

Read the entire article here.

What it is like for a black student to go to Cambridge

The Financial Times
2018-05-30

Rianna Croxford

Rianna Croxford

Trailblazer discovers confidence sought by top universities can be learned

I am the first in my family to go to university and faced a lot of the obstacles students of colour encounter when aiming for Oxford and Cambridge.

Educated at state school, I graduated from Cambridge last year as one of only seven women of mixed white and black heritage in my year of 3,371 undergraduates.

As one of the first black students to read English at Trinity Hall college, I had to deal with different degrees of racism day to day, as well as cultural challenges that my background had not prepared me for.

I want to help make it easier for other students like myself to enter elite institutions that can offer a fast track to a successful career…

Read the entire article here.

What It’s Like Being an “Other”

College Magazine
2018-06-19

Mailinh McNicholas

Mailinh McNicholas

I’ve remained on the fringes of two different and separate Anchorage, Alaska communities. I have a Caucasian father and Vietnamese mother. My high school friends often talked about my ethnicity and attempted to place me into a defined racial category. Some of my peers pegged me as an Asian immigrant, some have asked if I am Native Alaskan, and others simply asked ‘What are you?’

Unfortunately, my hopes did not match my reality. A few months into my freshman year at GW [George Washington University] I found that my college peers also cast me as “the other.” Although I’m equal parts Asian and White, to my white friends I’m Asian and to my Asian friends, I’m white. My bi-cultural heritage once again left me excluded from being included in ether community…

Read the entire article here.

Mayor de Blasio’s son Dante says the SHSAT, the elite high school admissions test, fostered racism at Brooklyn Tech

New York Daily News
2018-06-14

Dante de Blasio (son of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and Chirlane McCray, is a rising senior at Yale University.)

Dante de Blasio attends the Brooklyn Technical High School graduation ceremony on June 19, 2015. (Stephanie Keith for New York Daily News)

A year after I graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School in 2015, the hashtag #BlackinBrooklynTech started appearing on my social media. Black students and recent alumni were using it to share stories of overt acts of racism at the school.

The stories included a teacher laughing at a black student when that student shared her dream of becoming a doctor, white and Asian students using racial slurs to bully black students, and faculty members ignoring a black student’s complaints after he was called the N-word and “monkey” by his peers.

Older black alumni soon got involved, and they shared many of their own stories at a public meeting with the principal. The current and former students who drove the campaign were sick of having to defend their right to earn an elite education in the face of adversity from the students and faculty meant to support their success.

I understood exactly where my fellow black alumni were coming from. I’d had many of my own experiences. Some of them might seem innocuous. For example, I remember being the only black kid in many of my classes (something that seemed normal to many of my classmates). However, many experiences displayed the racism which was all too common in the school…

Read the entire article here.

Carina Ray fuses scholarship and teaching with personal experience

Brandeis Now
Waltham, Massachusetts
2017-12-17

Jarret Bencks
Office of Communications

Carina Ray in the classroom

Almost 25 years ago, historian Carina Ray spent her junior year abroad as an undergraduate studying in Ghana. She planned to explore her Puerto Rican family’s African roots.

Most Ghanaians she met insisted she was white, despite her longwinded explanations about her multiracial background. Eventually, she realized it would be smarter to talk less and listen more.

“I was enthralled by what Ghanaians had to say about their own perceptions of blackness and how race works there,” says Ray, associate professor of African and Afro-American studies (AAAS). The seeds of Ray’s career were planted.

By the time she returned to the University of California, Santa Cruz, to finish her bachelor’s degree, Ray knew she wanted to study what it means to be black in West Africa — from an African perspective. The history of race in Africa was rarely written about from an African perspective, and it became the focus of her PhD in African history at Cornell University…

Read the entire article here.