Mixed Race Studies

Professor: Racial categorization remains necessary in Census

Medill Washington
Medill News Service
Medill School, Northwestern University
2011-08-08

Angie Chung

WASHINGTON—Does where we come from tell us whom we are? Why do we come in different colors? Does skin color equal race?
 
Talking about racial issues can be a never-ending discussion. It’s complicated.

The Census Bureau adopted a question that allowed for checking more than one box to describe ancestry in 2000. Ever since, questions have surfaced about the effectiveness of asking people to affirm their identity.
 
The notion of race is not a scientific construct, said Phil Tajitsu Nash, an Asian American studies professor at the University of Maryland. But the U.S. needs to have those categories in the Census to create a better understanding of its multiracial population.
 
During the discussion with visitors at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History’s ‘Race: Are We So Different?’ exhibition on Wednesday,  Nash pointed out that people often don’t want to confront the notion of racism, saying they’re opposed to racial society.
 
“I personally would love to see a post-racial society, but we’re not living in a one now.”…

Read the entire article here.

Emerging Voices in Academia: Critical Mixed Race Theory

Little Theater, Building 1200
Nappa Vally College
Napa, California
2011-09-22, 16:00 PDT (Local Time)

Andrew Jolivétte, Associate Professor of American Indian Studies (Also see biographies at Speak Out! and Native Wiki.)
Center for Health Disparities Research and Training
San Fransisco State University

Dr. Andrew Jolivétte is an accomplished educator, writer, speaker, and social/cultural critic. His work spans many different social and political arenas – from education reform and LGBT/Queer community of color identity issues to mixed-race identity, critical whiteness studies, gay marriage, and AIDS disparities among people of color. Jolivétte is currently an assistant professor in the American Indian Studies Department and also teaches in the Ethnic Studies Program at San Francisco State University. He recently completed a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship through the National Academy of Sciences. Professor Jolivétte is a mixed-race studies specialist with a particular interest in Comparative Race Relations, Creole studies, Black-Indians, critical mixed-race movement building, and mixed-race health disparities. He is the author of, Obama and the Biracial Factor: The Battle for a New American Majority (Policy Press, February 2012), Cultural Representation in Native America (AltaMira Press, July 2006) which is a part of the Contemporary Native American Communities Series and Louisiana Creoles: Cultural Recovery and Mixed Race Native American Identity (Lexington Books, January 2007).

For more information, click here.

Mixed Race Britain – How The World Got Mixed Up

BBC Press Office: Press Packs
2011-09-05

Ruth Williams, Seretse Khama and family

This one-off documentary explores the historical and contemporary social, sexual and political attitudes to race mixing.

Throughout modern history, interracial sex has been one of society’s great taboos, and across many parts of the world, mixed race relationships have been subjected to a range of deterrents. Mixed couples have endured shame, stigma and persecution and many have risked the threat of ostracism from their friends and families.

In several parts of the world, including South Africa during the apartheid era, governments introduced legislation to prohibit race mixing. Laws against race mixing were still in force in 16 American states until they were declared unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court’s verdict in the Loving v Virginia case of 1967.

Yet despite the social and legal constraints–and the even more violent extra-judicial attempts to discourage race mixing organised by extreme nationalist groups like the Ku Klux Klan–interracial relationships have been an ever-present feature of societies throughout modern times.

Through the stories of interracial relationships which created scandals in their own time–including the liaisons between the East India Company’s James Achilles Kirkpatrick and the Muslim princess Khair un-Nissa at the beginning of the 19th Century, and the romance of the Botswanan royal Seretse Khama and the middle-class British girl Ruth Williams in the years after the Second World War–the film examines the complex history of interracial relationships and chronicles the shifts in attitudes that for centuries have created controversy and anxiety all around the world.

Contributors to this film include the former Labour Cabinet minister Tony Benn; who founded the Seretse Khama Defence Council; and the esteemed moral philosopher Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah, whose mother Peggy Cripps–the daughter of the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Stafford Cripps married his father, the Ghanaian political activist Joe Appiah in 1953.

Mixed Race Britain – Mixed Britannia

BBC Press Office: Press Packs
2011-09-05

In this three-part series George Alagiah explores the remarkable and untold story of Britain’s mixed-race community and examines through the decades how mixed race has become one of the country’s fastest growing ethnic groups. Most of all, the films tell a tale of love, of couples coming together to fight prejudice and create a new society.

The first film (1910-1939) [Air Date: 2011-10-06, 20:00Z] discovers the love between merchant seamen and liberated female workers and witnesses the riots in British port cities as returning white soldiers find local girls in relationships with other men. George hears about the eugenics research examining mixed-race children and learns how Britain avoided the race laws and race hatred of fascism that scarred other countries in Europe.

The second film (1940-1965) sees the Second World War creating a miniature baby boom of “brown babies” born to local British women and African American GIs, and tells the tragic story of the British-Chinese children in Liverpool who lost their Chinese seamen fathers. With the post-war mass immigration, mixed couples, once rare and exotic, were becoming more common and society finally witnessed the first interracial kiss on British television.

In the Seventies a new wave of immigration was settling in Britain, the National Front was on the march and mixed-race families faced violence on the street (film three, 1965-2011). George learns about the debates surrounding mixed race adoption and hears about a 21st story love-story as the couple struggle to overcome the cultural prejudice from the community.

Notes from Steven F. Riley.

For some early 20th century background material on the topics covered in Mixed Britannia, see:

• Jacqueline Nassy Brown. Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail: Geographies of Race in Black Liverpool. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005, 312 pp., ISBN: 978-1-4008-2641-4).
• Mark Christian. “The Fletcher Report 1930: A Historical Case Study of Contested Black Mixed Heritage Britishness,” Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 21, Issue 2-3 (2008): 213-241.
• Lucy Bland. “White Women and Men of Colour: Miscegenation Fears in Britain after the Great War,” Gender & History, Volume 17, Issue 1 (2005): 29-61.
• Rachel M. Fleming.“Human hybrids in various parts of the world,” Eugenics Review, Volume 21, Number 4 (1930): 257-263.
• Carina E. Ray. “‘The White Wife Problem’: Sex, Race and the Contested Politics of Repatriation to Interwar British West Africa,” Gender & History, Volume 21, Number 3 (2009): 628-646.
• Daniel R. McNeil. Sex and Race in the Black Atlantic: Mulatto Devils and Multiracial Messiahs. (London: Routledge, 2009, 204 pp., ISBN: 978-0-415-87226-3).
• Alison Blunt. “Geographies of diaspora and mixed descent: Anglo-Indians in India and Britain,” International Journal of Population Geography (Special Issue: Geographies of Diaspora) Volume 9, Issue 4 (2003): 281-294.
• Sydney F. Collins. “The Social Position of White and “Half-Caste” Women in Colored Groupings in Britain,” American Sociological Review, Volume 16, Number 6 (1951): 796-802.

Mixed Race Britain – Introduction

BBC Press Office: Press Packs
2011-09-05

Mixed Race Britain is put under the spotlight this September on BBC Two in a collection of revealing and compelling new programmes.

Britain in 2011 has proportionately the largest mixed population in the Western world, but a hundred years ago people of mixed race lived on the edges of British society. With an exciting mix of drama and documentaries, this season explores the mixed race experience in Britain–and around the world–from the distant past to the present-day, using the testimonies of a range of people, both ordinary and extraordinary, to illuminate this seldom-told story.

Janice Hadlow, Controller of BBC Two, says: “It is 10 years since the full ‘mixed race’ category was added to the 2001 census and a timely moment to explore this subject matter. But this is not just a season for mixed race people, or those in a mixed race relationship. It’s BBC Two’s role to reflect contemporary society and the story of mixed-race Britain is a valuable exploration into the way we live now. I hope our audience will find it fresh and inspiring.”…

Read the entire press release here.

A Snug Little Flock: The Social Origins of the Riel Resistance, 1869-70

Watson & Dwyer Publishing, Winnipeg, Manitoba
1991
290 pages
ISBN: 0-920486-48-7

Frits Pannekoek, President
Athabasca University, Athabasca, Alberta, Canada

Questions about the identities of the mixed-blood Indian-European peoples of Canada and the United States have puzzled historians and anthropologists in both countries. Who are the mixedbloods of North America? Why do they have a strong collective identity in Canada, and virtually none in the United States? Why is the collective identity in Canada largely French-Cree and Catholic? What happened to the English-speaking Protestant Halfbreeds? Why do the Protestant, English-speaking mixed-bloods no longer exist as a unique group either in Canada or in the United States, but identify themselves as White, Indian or Métis in Canada and Indian or White in the United States? While it has become commonplace to view mixed-blood peoples as products of the culture and economy of the fur trade, it is much more difficult to trace the roots of the process that created an identifiable Metis ‘nation’. It is even more difficult to determine why no strong mixed-blood identity emerged in the United States.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The Red River Setting
• 2 A Question of Leadership
• 3 The First Years
• 4 A Little Britain in the Wilderness
• 5 Free Trade and Social Fragmentation
• 6 A Strife of Blood
• 7 The Rev. G. O. Corbett and an Uprising of the People
• 8 The Halfbreeds and the Riel Protest
• 9 The Métis and the Riel Protest
• 10 Conclusion
• Historiographical Note
• Selected Bibliography
• End Notes
• Index

Read the entire book here.