Mixed Race Studies

Mixing It Up: Supporting Multiracial Students in Racial Affinity Groups

American College Personnel Association
ACPA 2012 Annual Convention
Louisville, Kentucky
2012-03-24 through 2012-03-28

Session Information:
Wednesday, 2012-03-28
08:30-09:30 EDT (Local Time)
Kentucky International Convention Center, 212 & 213

Heather C. Lou, FYE Coordinator
University of Vermont

Adam J. Ortiz, House Director
Hampshire College

Rachel Luna
University of the Pacific

Racial affinity groups in higher education have significant potential to advance positive identity development for people of all races. The dynamic between dominant and non-dominant social identities calls for individuals to be divided into binary racial affinity groups of White and People of Color (POC). Frustration, anxiety, and feelings of marginality can arise when multiracial people are asked to choose between groups. In this presentation, will discuss tactics to best support multiracial students through affinity group facilitation.

For more information, click here.

Spoilt for choice?

New Law Journal: Leading on debate, litigation & dispute resolution
Vol 162, Issue 7498
2012-01-26

Adrian Jack, Barrister & Rechtsanwalt
Enterprise Chambers

Encouraging greater judicial diversity is no easy task, says Adrian Jack

The government is consulting on creating greater diversity in the judiciary. Where candidates for judicial appointment are of similar merit, membership of a “protected category” should be a trump card, allowing the candidate with that status to be appointed over the rival.

The idea is a simple one. If a white and a black candidate are of roughly similar merit, the black candidate should be appointed. Likewise, if there were a male and a female candidate, the female should go through.

Immediately though a problem arises. What if a black man is up against a white woman? Does the black man’s ethnicity trump the other candidate’s sex? Or vice versa?

One solution in such a case would be to disregard the protected characteristic of both candidates. However, this would not necessarily increase diversity. Take a woman applying for a tribunal post. In tribunals 38% of judges are women (against 51% in the population at large), whereas the percentage of black, Asian and minority ethnic judges is 10.5%—more than the nine per cent in the population (Report of the Advisory Panel on Judicial Diversity, para 18). A woman should surely be able to argue that the black male candidate’s ethnicity should be ignored (because the tribunal judiciary is already sufficiently ethnically diverse), so giving her the tie-break.

Indeed the problems do not stop there. The consultation implies that it will be readily apparent which candidates have protected characteristics. Yet this is not so. Who is “black”? Someone of mixed race must qualify. But what of someone who is one eighth of black heritage? Or one sixteenth?

In a case of race discrimination in the employment tribunal it is normally sufficient for claimants to self-describe their ethnicity. If a claimant has such a small proportion of black ancestry that they show no physical or cultural signs of that ethnicity, then the claimant is unlikely to show that he was treated less favourably on the ground of his race…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Obituaries: Fredi Washington, 90, Actress; Broke Ground for Black Artists

The New York Times
1994-06-30

Sheila Rule

Fredi Washington, one of the first black actresses to gain recognition for her work on stage and in film, died on Tuesday at St. Joseph Medical Center in Stamford, Conn., where she lived. She was 90.

The cause was pneumonia, which developed after a stroke, said her sister, Isabel Powell.

Miss Washington’s best-known performance was as the young mulatto who passes for white in the 1934 film “Imitation of Life.” Her performance was so convincing that she was accused of denying her heritage in her private life.

“She did pass for white when she was traveling in the South with Duke Ellington and his band,” said Jean-Claude Baker, a restaurateur and author and a friend of Ms. Washington’s. “They could not go into ice-cream parlors, so she would go in and buy the ice cream, then go outside and give it to Ellington and the band. Whites screamed at her, ‘Nigger lover!’ “…

Read the entire obituary here.

Looking White, Acting Black: Cast(e)ing Fredi Washington

Theatre Survey
Volume 45, Issue 1 (2004)
pages 19-40
DOI: 10.1017/S0040557404000031

Cheryl Black, Associate Professor of Acting, Theatre History/Theory/Criticism
University of Missouri, Columbia

In October 1926 a leading African-American newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier, featured adjacent photographs of two young women with a provocative caption: “White Actresses Who Open with Robeson and Bledsoe on Broadway during Week.” The actresses featured were Lottice Howell, starring with Jules Bledsoe in the musical play Deep River, and Edith Warren, starring with Paul Robeson in the drama Black Boy. In reporting this latest bit of integrated casting, however, the Courier was wrong on two counts. First, they misidentified the photographs, identifying Howell as Warren and Warren as Howell; and second, they misidentified Warren, whose real name was Fredi Washington, as “white.” Washington (who dropped the stage name during previews) was, by self-identification, Negro, or, in the language of the Savannah official who recorded her birth in 1903, “colored.”

Purchase the article here.