Mixed Race Studies

UCSB Ph.D. Alum Overcomes Odds and Pays Back With History Grad Parent Award

UCSB GradPost
University of California, Santa Barbara
2012-07-20

Patricia Marroquin, Guest Editor-in-Chief

Dr. Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly believes strongly in paying back and paying forward. When she was a History Ph.D. student at UCSB just a few years ago, “graduate school was quite difficult for me. Not in terms of the intellectual rigors required but rather insofar as managing my life circumstances beyond school.” Pursuing a graduate degree is bound to be difficult when you are a disabled Navy veteran taking oral chemotherapy for a rare bone-marrow disease developed during Persian Gulf War duty; a single woman carrying a child in a high-risk pregnancy; and surviving an abusive past.

Financial awards she received from the History Department and History Associates, including a 2005 Donald Van Gelderen Memorial Fellowship, which recognizes nontraditional students who return to graduate study after pursuing career and family interests, allowed Ingrid to support her then-infant daughter, Grace.

“It was incredibly difficult to make ends meet while meeting my degree requirements,” she said. “However, earning my Ph.D. in History had become more than a mere personal goal. I realized that I was an example for other nontraditional students of color,” continued Ingrid, who is of African-American and Irish descent. “In fact, today African Americans still constitute only 1% of all graduate school students at UCSB.”…

…Ingrid, who is finishing the final edits on her forthcoming book, “By the Least Bit of Blood: The Allure of Blackness Among Mixed-Race Americans of African Descent, 1862-1935,” discusses her experiences as a teacher, student, parent, philanthropist, and role model…

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Capturing complexity in the United States: which aspects of race matter and when?

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 35, Issue 8, 2012
Special Issue:Accounting for ethnic and racial diversity: the challenge of enumeration
pages 1484-1502
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2011.607504

Aliya Saperstein, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Stanford University

The experience of race in the United States is shaped by both self-identification and ascription. One aspect reflects personal history, ancestry, and socialization while the other draws largely on appearance. Yet, most data collection efforts treat the two aspects of race as interchangeable, assuming that the relationship between each and an individual’s life chances will be the same. This study demonstrates that incorporating racial self-identification and other-classification in analyses of inequality reveals more complex patterns of advantage and disadvantage than can be seen using standard methods. These findings have implications for how racial data should be collected and suggest new directions for studying racial inequality in the United States and around the world.

It is templing to assume there are clear distinctions that identify a person as being a particular race or ethnicity. Though the characteristics that define racial or ethnic difference vary across societies, it is nevertheless common for people to maintain thai their country’s ‘others’ are easily singled out e.g., by face, accent, name, or dress. Indeed, in recent years, governments around the world have begun to mandate the collection of data to monitor racial/ethnic discrimination as if the information needed were obvious. In the United States, official racial data has been collected since at leasl 1790, and how it
should be gathered was rarely questioned because, according to commonsense belief, racial differences were ‘unmistakable’. Today, the assumption of measurement agreement can take on a different tone as racial data is put to different purposes: why quibble over…

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