Mixed Race Studies

79-173 Freshman Seminar: Barack Obama and the History of Race in America

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Department of History
2013-2014

Well before he was elected the forty-fourth President of the United States, Barack Obama challenged Americans to think anew about the history of race in this country. In this course, we will examine President Obama’s life, writings, and speeches as the foundation for a larger investigation into the history of race and, in particular, the struggle to achieve racial equality within the United States. We will read President Obama’s first biography and several of his key speeches as well as a recent history of the Civil Rights Movement. Our goal will be not only to probe the life and ideas of President Obama but to examine the larger history of race in America. Topics will include the geographic and temporal diversity of the Civil Rights Movement, the shifting meanings of “mixed-race,” race and American foreign policy, the history of racial inequality in housing, education, and employment, affirmative action, and race and immigration.

Trayvon, Postblackness, and the Postrace Dilemma

boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture
Volume 40, Number 3 (Fall 2013)
pages 139-161
DOI: 10.1215/01903659-2367072

Richard Purcell, Assistant Professor of English
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

If President Barack Obama crystallizes the intersection of postrace and postblack idealism, nothing has exposed the fraught relationship between the two than the shooting death of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin on February 26, 2012. What Trayvon Martin’s death has brought to the fore is what contemporary intellectuals are attempting to think when they think postblackness and, for that matter, postrace. What way of understanding race knowledge in our present does postblackness offer us, especially in a postrace era? The answer: both blindness and insight. Through a meditation on the relationship between Trayvon Martin, postrace, and postblackness, this essay aims to demonstrate this blindness and insight. On the one hand, postblackness has the potential to provide a bulwark against the persistent biologisms in contemporary race thinking. Yet, it is also used in our postrace era as a term to indulge in a weaker mode of criticism: debunking—a critical posture that has allowed critics to ignore and even circulate more insidious forms of race thinking.

Read or purchase the article here.

Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America (Fourth Edition)

Rowman & Littlefield
July 2013
384 pages
6 1/4 x 9 1/2
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-4422-2054-6
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4422-2055-3
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4422-2056-0

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Professor of Sociology
Duke University

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s acclaimed Racism without Racists documents how beneath our contemporary conversation about race lies a full-blown arsenal of arguments, phrases, and stories that whites use to account for—and ultimately justify—racial inequalities. This provocative book explodes the belief that America is now a color-blind society.

The fourth edition adds a chapter on what Bonilla-Silva calls “the new racism,” which provides the essential foundation to explore issues of race and ethnicity in more depth. This edition also updates Bonilla-Silva’s assessment of race in America after President Barack Obama’s re-election. Obama’s presidency, Bonilla-Silva argues, does not represent a sea change in race relations, but rather embodies disturbing racial trends of the past.

In this fourth edition, Racism without Racists will continue to challenge readers and stimulate discussion about the state of race in America today.

Features

• An engaging read that provokes classroom discussion
• Challenges the truth behind the assumption “I don’t see race”
• A new chapter on what Bonilla-Silva calls “new racism” in America introduces students to key themes in studying race and ethnicity
• Assesses the impact of Obama’s presidency and reelection on race relations in America

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Preface to the Fourth Edition
• 1. The Strange Enigma of Race in Contemporary America
• 2. The New Racism: The U.S. Racial Structure Since the 1960s
• 3. The Central Frames of Color-Blind Racism
• 4. The Style of Color Blindness: How to Talk Nasty about Minorities without Sounding Racist
• 5. “I Didn’t Get That Job Because of a Black Man”: Color-Blind Racism’s Racial Stories
• 6. Peeking Inside the (White) House of Color Blindness: The Significance of Whites’ Segregation
• 7. Are All Whites Refined Archie Bunkers? An Examination of White Racial Progressives
• 8. Are Blacks Color Blind, Too?
• 9. E Pluribus Unum, or the Same Old Perfume in a New Bottle? On the Future of Racial Stratification in the United States
• 10. Race Matters in Obamerica: The Sweet (but Deadly) Enchantment of Color Blindness in Black Face
• 11. “The (Color-Blind) Emperor Has No Clothes”: Exposing the Whiteness of Color Blindness
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author

Playwright Sarah Rutherford: ‘Middle-class, mixed-race families are invisible on our stages’

What’s on Stage
London
2013-10-10

Editorial Staff

As her new play Adult Supervision premieres at the Park Theatre, playwright Sarah Rutherford discusses multiculturalism in modern Britain

What’s Adult Supervision about?

It’s set in 2008 and it’s about a white ex-lawyer, Natasha, who’s adopted two children from Ethiopia. As a parent who likes to do things by the book, she’s decided that it’s important for the kids to get to know the handful of other ‘children of colour’ at their very smart private school. Natasha seizes on the opportunity of the US election to invite the mothers of these children to a drinks party, but things start to go awry as the Obamatinis flow and inhibitions are shed.

Why did you set it on the night of Obama’s election?

I have such vivid memories of that night, and although it was historic for everyone, I think many communities—‘parents of children of colour’ being one—took it as a kind of personal victory. It was an incredibly heady moment—suddenly anything seemed possible—and it’s an interesting time to look back on from the perspective of today, when the US seems to be going into meltdown and November 2008 looks like an almost innocent time.

Would you describe it as a comedy?

Yes—a comedy drama. But the laughs in it come mostly from character, from truth (truths you may not have heard spoken out loud before) and from discomfort, rather than from gags.

How has your personal experience influenced and shaped the play?

Hugely. I’m married to a man of Jamaican origin and am the mother of two amazing mixed-race children, although they go to a much more diverse school than the one in the play. Some of the more jaw-dropping dialogue in the play is actually pretty much verbatim stuff that has been said to me over the years; other material has come from things that I’ve thought or sensed but that have gone unsaid…

Read the entire interview here.

Paint the White House Black: Barack Obama and the Meaning of Race in America [Review]

Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews
Volume 42, Number 5 (September 2013)
page 763
DOI: 10.1177/0094306113499714e

Paint the White House Black: Barack Obama and the Meaning of Race in America, by Michael P. Jeffries. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013. 210pp. paper. ISBN: 9780804780964.

The ascendancy of Barack Obama from an orphan raised by his grandparents to the most powerful man on the planet is extraordinary not only due to its rapid progression, but also because of its impact on racism in America. Surely the election of a black President will heal America’s wounds of modern racism and erase the scars of slavery. However, in his poignant book Paint the White House Black, Michael P. Jeffries points out that President Obama’s election has placed the United States no closer to the idealized post-racial society that many Americans seem to strive for. Indeed, if anything, the election of America’s first black President raises interesting questions about the nature and pervasiveness of race.

In his book, Jeffries skillfully outlines his thesis, beginning with a description of the politics of inheritance, the racialized natureof patriotism, and the intersectionality of black identity and nationalism. He proceeds with a discussion of multiracial identity and its impact on black politics by incorporating theoretical arguments made by others, as well as his own analysis of self-collected interview data. Next, Jeffries discusses the intersection of gender and blackness by focusing on the First Lady, Michelle Obama, before concluding with a concise chapter that summarizes his arguments quite nicely. The writing is both accessible and direct. Though the scholarly nature of this work requires the inclusion of specialized jargon, the detailed notes section leaves the reader with all the information needed to fully understand this topic…

Read the entire review here.

The Essential Barack Obama

Random House
2008-03-10
Abridged Compact Disc
ISBN: 978-0-7393-7594-5

Barack Obama, President of the United States

A CD collection featuring the best-selling audiobooks, The Audacity of Hope and Dreams from My Father from Grammy^® award-winning author, Barack Obama.

The Audacity of Hope

In July 2004, Barack Obama electrified the Democratic National Convention with an address that spoke to Americans across the political spectrum. One phrase in particular anchored itself in listeners’ minds, a reminder that for all the discord and struggle to be found in our history as a nation, we have always been guided by a dogged optimism in the future, or what Senator Obama called “the audacity of hope.”

Now, in The Audacity of Hope, Senator Obama calls for a different brand of politics–a politics for those weary of bitter partisanship and alienated by the “endless clash of armies” we see in congress and on the campaign trail; a politics rooted in the faith, inclusiveness, and nobility of spirit at the heart of “our improbable experiment in democracy.” He explores those forces–from the fear of losing to the perpetual need to raise money to the power of the media–that can stifle even the best-intentioned politician. He also writes, with surprising intimacy and self-deprecating humor, about settling in as a senator, seeking to balance the demands of public service and family life, and his own deepening religious commitment.

At the heart of this book is Senator Obama’s vision of how we can move beyond our divisions to tackle concrete problems. He examines the growing economic insecurity of American families, the racial and religious tensions within the body politic, and the transnational threats–from terrorism to pandemic–that gather beyond our shores. And he grapples with the role that faith plays in a democracy–where it is vital and where it must never intrude. Underlying his stories about family, friends, members of the Senate, even the president, is a vigorous search for connection: the foundation for a radically hopeful political consensus.

A senator and a lawyer, a professor and a father, a Christian and a skeptic, and above all a student of history and human nature, Senator Obama has written a book of transforming power. Only by returning to the principles that gave birth to our Constitution, he says, can Americans repair a political process that is broken, and restore to working order a government that has fallen dangerously out of touch with millions of ordinary Americans. Those Americans are out there, he writes–“waiting for Republicans and Democrats to catch up with them.”

Dreams from My Father

In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father—a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man—has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey—first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance.

The president’s words, perhaps consigned to a long-ago news cycle now, remain powerful: they validate experiences that blacks have undergone in their everyday lives. Obama’s voice resonates with those philosophical voices (Frantz Fanon, for example) that have long attempted to describe the lived interiority of racial experiences. He has also deployed the power of narrative autobiography, which is a significant conceptual tool used insightfully by critical race theorists to discern the clarity and existential and social gravity of what it means to experience white racism. As a black president, he has given voice to the epistemic violence that blacks often face as they are stereotyped and profiled within the context of quotidian social spaces.

George Yancy, “Walking While Black in the ‘White Gaze’,” The New York Times, (September 1, 2013). http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/01/walking-while-black-in-the-white-gaze.

Walking While Black in the ‘White Gaze’

The New York Times
2013-09-01

George Yancy, Professor of Philosophy
Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

“Man, I almost blew you away!”

Those were the terrifying words of a white police officer — one of those who policed black bodies in low income areas in North Philadelphia in the late 1970s — who caught sight of me carrying the new telescope my mother had just purchased for me.

“I thought you had a weapon,” he said.

The words made me tremble and pause; I felt the sort of bodily stress and deep existential anguish that no teenager should have to endure.

This officer had already inherited those poisonous assumptions and bodily perceptual practices that make up what I call the “white gaze.” He had already come to “see” the black male body as different, deviant, ersatz. He failed to conceive, or perhaps could not conceive, that a black teenage boy living in the Richard Allen Project Homes for very low income families would own a telescope and enjoyed looking at the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn.

A black boy carrying a telescope wasn’t conceivable — unless he had stolen it — given the white racist horizons within which my black body was policed as dangerous. To the officer, I was something (not someone) patently foolish, perhaps monstrous or even fictional. My telescope, for him, was a weapon.

In retrospect, I can see the headlines: “Black Boy Shot and Killed While Searching the Cosmos.”

That was more than 30 years ago. Only last week, our actual headlines were full of reflections on the 1963 March on Washington, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and President Obama’s own speech at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to commemorate it 50 years on. As the many accounts from that long ago day will tell you, much has changed for the better. But some things — those perhaps more deeply embedded in the American psyche — haven’t. In fact, we should recall a speech given by Malcolm X in 1964 in which he said, “For the 20 million of us in America who are of African descent, it is not an American dream; it’s an American nightmare.”…

…The president’s words, perhaps consigned to a long-ago news cycle now, remain powerful: they validate experiences that blacks have undergone in their everyday lives. Obama’s voice resonates with those philosophical voices (Frantz Fanon, for example) that have long attempted to describe the lived interiority of racial experiences. He has also deployed the power of narrative autobiography, which is a significant conceptual tool used insightfully by critical race theorists to discern the clarity and existential and social gravity of what it means to experience white racism. As a black president, he has given voice to the epistemic violence that blacks often face as they are stereotyped and profiled within the context of quotidian social spaces…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Ms. [Heather] Curry thinks Mr. Obama identifying as African-American could be confusing to mixed-race children, making them feel they have to choose or making them think, “If Obama says he’s black, does this mean I’m black?” She thinks biracial people shouldn’t choose one race over the other because they are both.

“I’m biracial,” she says. “I will fight somebody who calls me black.”

L. A. Johnson, “Obama election stokes debate over what is biracial,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, February 3, 2009. http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/sectionfront/life/obama-election-stokes-debate-over-what-is-biracial-328436/

Saluting a Dream, and Adapting It for a New Era

The New York Times
2013-08-28

Peter Baker and Sheryl Gay Stolberg

WASHINGTON — President Obama stepped into the space on Wednesday where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once stood, summoning his iconic dream of a colorblind society in a celebration of a half-century of progress and a call to arms for the next generation.

On a day of overcast skies and misty rain, tens of thousands of Americans — black, white and every shade in between — returned to the site of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech to listen to the nation’s first black president pay tribute to the pioneers who paved the way for his own ascension to the heights of American government.

“Because they kept marching, America changed,” the president said as Dr. King’s family watched. “Because they marched, a civil rights law was passed. Because they marched, a voting rights law was signed. Because they marched, doors of opportunity and education swung open so their daughters and sons could finally imagine a life for themselves beyond washing somebody else’s laundry or shining somebody else’s shoes.

“Because they marched,” he added, “city councils changed and state legislatures changed and Congress changed and, yes, eventually, the White House changed.”

The symbolic journey from Dr. King to Mr. Obama on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial animated the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom more than any oratory. While Mr. Obama’s line about the White House changing was his only reference to his unique place in history, the power of his presence was lost on no one.

But it also underscored the challenge to a movement to reframe its mission for a new era. With an African-American in the Oval Office, it is harder to argue about political empowerment than it was in 1963, and much of the day’s message centered on tackling persistent economic disparity, as well as newer frontiers of civil rights like equality for gay men and lesbians…

Read the entire article here. Read President Obama’s full remarks here.