Mixed Race Studies

Our Zip Code May Be More Important Than Our Genetic Code: Social Determinants of Health, Law and Policy

Social Determinants of Health
Rhode Island Medical Journal
Volume 96, Number 7 (July 2013)

Dannie Ritchie, MD, MPH, Clinical Assistant Professor of Family Medicine
Lead, Transcultural Community Health Initiative
Brown University Center for Primary Care and Prevention

Public health is defined as “what we, as a society, do collectively to assure the condition for people to be healthy.” (Institute of Medicine (IOM), 1988, 2003). This evokes the social determinants of health – where we live, learn, work and play has a greater impact on individual and population health than does access to health care. However, when we discuss health and health disparities, clinical care problems are often framed as the problems with the health-care system. Recently, the Institute of Medicine has moved to make the distinction that in public health, the clinical care system is but one part of the overall health system, which should help to avoid the conflation of health as only a product of medical care (IOM 2010)…

…This special issue contains a series of papers expanding key themes addressed in the seminars. Making real improvements in the health of our communities, especially the economically, socially and environmentally impoverished communities, requires much more than “fixing” our wasteful, fragmented and misdirected medical-care systems. If we are to achieve health equity, it is time for us to evaluate how to truly shift the dialogue, and not inadvertently replicate the same disparities we are trying to eliminate. We must examine how disparities impact us all across demographics and not only the most vulnerable, though they bear the greater burden. It is our intent with this edition to provide tools to better equip us to evaluate the social determinants of health and ways to take action through law and policy…

Read the entire article here.

“A Very Different Looking Class of People”: Racial Passing, Tragedy, and the Mulatto Citizen in American Literature

University of Southern Mississippi
2013-02-18
81 pages

Stephanie S. Rambo

Honors Prospectus Submitted to the Honors College of The University of Southern Mississippi In Fulfillment Bachelors of Arts In the Department of English

This project explores the mulatto citizen as one who prevails against tragedy, uses passing as an escape route to freedom and equality, and establishes a fixed racial identity in a color struck world. In nineteenth-century American literature, the mulatto penetrates a seemingly solid world of color to reveal racial anxieties of the time. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lonely (1852), William Wells Brown’s Clotel, or the President’s Daughter (1853), Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1857) and Frances E.W. Harper’s Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted depict these mulatto characters as agents of social change. Each of these texts present the figure of the mulatto in a historical context, as a slave in the South and free/freedman in the antebellum North. Considering these various genres (esp. the blending of fiction and nonfiction at times), this study examines how different authors take a political stance by using the mulatto figure to define U.S. citizenship.

Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a foundational text due to the political response during Abraham Lincoln’s administration and from abolitionists worldwide. Stowe represents those minorities excluded from the democratic process, namely African Americans and women who were both disenfranchised. I examine political fiction by Brown, Webb, and Harper due to their depictions of the laws of slavery and African Americans’ civil rights struggles throughout the nineteenth century. Most of these American writers were excluded themselves from the political process. Therefore, I consider these writers most capable to present the voice of the marginal, mulatto citizen.

Read the entire thesis here.

And so it’s always powerful for me to visit countries outside of the United States generally, but obviously for an African American, and an African American President to be able to visit this site I think gives me even greater motivation in terms of the defense of human rights around the world.

Barack Obama, “Remarks by President Obama After Tour of Maison Des Esclaves,” (Gorée Island, Senegal) The White House: Office of the Press Secretary, (Washington, D. C., June 27, 2013). http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/06/27/remarks-president-obama-after-tour-maison-des-esclaves.

Japanese-Canadian hapa woman makes opera fun

Global Asian Women: Stories for and about Asian women around the world
2013-07-31

Elizabeth Noh

Her name means a solo piece in an opera, and it just so happens that Aria Umezawa is a trained opera singer.

The mixed Japanese-Canadian is also the co-founder and artistic director of Opera 5, a small production company in Toronto, Canada.

Fate or coincidence? Her parents had no idea when they named her 25 years ago.

“My parents joke that if they knew I would follow my namesake, they would have named me lawyer or doctor,” says Aria.

Her calling came at the age of 6, when she saw her first opera, Turandot by Puccini. “The music touched me.”

The experience lead her to study at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto and later at McGill University in Montreal. She trained as an opera singer, but she found that she wasn’t cut out to be a performer and was more suited to be a director…

…Aria is bi-racial. Her mother is Caucasian from the province of Alberta in western Canada. Her father is Japanese who came to Canada as a teenager. Aria was born and raised in Toronto. She has two younger brothers.

Some people say Eurasian, but “hapa” is commonly used in North America. The term originates from Hawaii and means a person of mixed blood. We talk about her mixed background.

“Growing up, it never occurred to me that my family was different on any sort of substantial level. We ate foods that my friends didn’t eat, and I was enrolled in karate instead of ballet, but I figured every family had its quirks,” she says…

Read the entire article here.

New book details racism faced by black soldiers who helped build Alaska Highway

Edmonton Journal
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
2013-08-02

Chris Zdeb

EDMONTON – Author John Virtue admits he knew “absolutely nothing” about The Black Soldiers Who Built the Alaska Highway, which is also the title of his latest book, before he started researching the topic six years ago.

He was inspired to write the story at the suggestion of Monte Irvin, a former New York Giant and a member of the baseball Hall of Fame, who Virtue met while writing a book about the role of the Mexican League in desegregating American baseball.

Virtue had never heard about the black soldiers who worked on the highway, even though he was raised in Edmonton, the staging area for the project.

You’d think it would be hard to miss 5,000 black troops, almost half of the 11,000 American soldiers who spent 18 months working on two of the biggest construction projects of the Second World War…

…The black soldiers should have been especially newsworthy, since they were the first African-American troops to be deployed outside of the U.S. mainland during the Second World War.

“The main reason why the contributions of the black soldiers was ignored during the war,” the former journalist says from his Miami Beach home, “is because of the power of congressmen from the southern states, who thought that anything that glorified the contributions of the blacks would cause problems back home. They might agitate for improvement of their conditions once the war was over and they were back home.”…

…There was immediate opposition from Brig.-Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr., commander in charge of the defence of Alaska, to black soldiers being sent to the far north. On receiving a letter from Brig.-Gen. Clarence L. Sturdevant, assistant of the Corps of Engineers, informing him that two black regiments would be sent to the Yukon and Alaska to help with the highway, Buckner minced no words in his reply.

“I have no objections whatever to your employing them on the roads if they are kept far enough away from the settlements and kept busy and sent home as soon as possible,” wrote Buckner, a southern aristocrat raised in rural Kentucky.

“The very high wages offered to unskilled labour here would attract a large number of them and cause them to remain and settle after the war, with the natural result that they could interbreed with the Indian and Eskimos and produce an astonishingly objectionable race of mongrels which could be a problem from now on.”…

Read the entire article here.

Obama Warms To Speaking Personally About Race

Weekend Edition Saturday
National Public Radio
2013-08-13

Linda Wertheimer, Senior National Correspondent and Host

Ari Schapiro, White House Correspondent

On race, Barack Obama often says he is not president of black America, but of the United States of America. Though he has not avoided the subject during his time in office, he tends not to seek out opportunities to discuss racial issues.

“He wanted to address them in a time and a way that accomplished specific objectives,” says Joshua Dubois, who ran the White House’s faith-based initiatives during Obama’s first term.

Obama addressed race most comprehensively in a Philadelphia speech during his first presidential campaign, after incendiary sermons by the pastor Jeremiah Wright came to light. “Race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now,” he said.

A handful of other events followed in the next four years, including a White House “beer summit” between a black Harvard professor and a white police officer; and the occasional commencement address at a historically black college.

Sherrilyn Ifill, who leads the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, believes Obama’s posture is typical for African-Americans who lead racially diverse groups. “It’s not as though many of us relish wading into issues of race,” she says. “We often feel we must, or we feel compelled to, but very few of us are eager to do it, and certainly I think the president was not eager to do it.”…

…During his recent travels through Africa, Obama talked repeatedly and explicitly about the significance of his skin color. “As an African-American president, to be able to visit this site I think gives me even greater motivation in terms of defense of human rights around the world,” he said at a slave port in Senegal…

Listen to the story here.  Download the audio here. Read the entire transcript here.

Actor Guilt

2nd Story
Chicago, Illinois
2012-06-07

Khanisha Foster

Coming up on two years ago I moved to L.A., and since that time I have been writing. Writing creative non-fiction for 2nd Story, an organization that has stolen my heart, and writing my memoir—I’m the kid of a former Black Panther career criminal and heroin-addicted parents, one black and one white (so there’s lots to write about there), and with the help of UCLA’s professional program I’m in screenplay Heaven. All of this is work, commitment, and time well spent FO SHO, but here I am feeling like I’m cheating on acting.

Acting was the first and only thing I ever wanted to do. It taught me about my brain, my heart, my sexuality. I felt alive on stage before I ever felt it in real life. I was ready for the business you hear about when you grow up wanting to be an actor. I was going to be rejected. No problem. I was going to be poor. Since I had never been anything else, that was fine by me. I was going to have to work my butt off. This, to me, seemed to be the easiest part. My childhood was more than challenging, and my father always taught me I’d have to work twice as hard to get half as far, so hard work seemed habitual. What I wasn’t ready for was the complete challenge of identity I was about to undergo.

I’m mixed; the list, which changes in specifics based on my audience and how they wish to receive it (everybody thinks they know more about being mixed than you do), goes like this: black and white, which then breaks down into Creole, which then breaks down into African, French, Spanish (Spain), plus Native American (I prefer this to American Indian), Scottish, Irish, and German. Are you trying to picture what I look like? If you don’t know me or haven’t seen a picture, my skin is honey-colored (or so every base makeup I ever bought tells me), while my hair is almost black like both of my parents’; its waves fall into curls and it is shiny soft, and even though it looks full, quite thin. Everyone thinks I’m Latina…

Read the entire article here.

2nd Story’s “Cruel Summer” Ends Up Sweet

Gapers Block
Chicago, Illinois
2013-08-01

Ines Bellina

The night’s theme may have been “Cruel Summer: Stories of Learning the Hard Way,” but 2nd Story‘s first-ever appearance at City Winery last Monday gave audience members the giddy feeling of a summer fling. Combining storytelling and live music against the backdrop of the gorgeous City Winery stage, the event was perhaps one of the most carefully crafted storytelling soirees of the season. Director and curator Jess Kadish turned a mundane Monday evening into one hell of a summer bash…

…Take the second storyteller, Khanisha Foster. Her heartbreaking (and often laugh-out-loud funny) account of trying to make it as an actor despite her ethnically ambiguous looks showcased her chameleon-like ability to imitate everyone from a shady theater director to Gilda Radner. Foster’s performance was easily the most bittersweet of the night. Her vulnerability was palpable as she described the struggles of wanting to be seen as a talented thespian while being obscured by her “Latina” looks. (Foster’s mother is white and her father is black.) Her versatility as an actor allowed her to easily transition from one character to another, making the piece even more poignant…

Read the entire article here.

Colleges Help Ithaca Thrive In a Region Of Struggles

The New York Times
2013-08-04

Jesse McKinley

ITHACA, N.Y. — In many ways, this city is not so special. It has a nice lake, some attractive houses with lawns, and a couple of colleges. But many places in upstate New York have lakes and lawns and places of high learning.

What most sets this city of 30,000 apart from many of its neighbors these days is what is absent: fear for its future.

Led by a young mayor with an inspiring back story and an idealist’s approach — he talks about sidewalks in philosophical terms — Ithaca is the upstate exception: a successful liberal enclave in a largely conservative region troubled by unemployment woes, declining or stagnant population, and post-Detroit talk of bankruptcy.

“It’s like a little San Francisco,” Nicole Roulstin, 32, an Ithaca resident, said recently, “or the Berkeley of the East.”

Much of that optimism comes from a reciprocal relationship with two institutions — Cornell University and, to a lesser degree, Ithaca College — which have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the economy and created thousands of jobs for everyone from professors to landscapers, and also fostered new companies. Ithaca and its home county, Tompkins, regularly post the lowest unemployment rate in the state. In June, Ithaca’s was 5.7 percent, tied with another college city, Saratoga Springs, where a racetrack drives an annual summer boom.

Ithaca’s model of education as an economic engine is one that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has made a priority this year as a strategy for all of upstate, where there are dozens of universities. In June, he signed into law a bill that would allow State University of New York branches and some private schools to offer tax-free zones for new businesses that open on or adjacent to campuses.

Ithaca’s mayor, Svante L. Myrick, who was invited to speak alongside the governor when he promoted the plan in May, playfully challenged other leaders of Ivy League cities in the Northeast to come to his. “And I’ll show you how we built in Ithaca the lowest unemployment rate in the state,” he said, adding that the city had been successful “because our universities have partnered with our private industries,” and did not just rely on businesses selling “sandwiches and beds” to visitors and students…

…Soft-spoken and slyly funny, Mr. Myrick is a striking success story. Living in the tiny town of Earlville, N.Y., he overcame a childhood that included stints living in shelters and sometimes sleeping in a family car. His father struggled with drug abuse, and his mother raised him and his three siblings on minimum-wage jobs, with help from his grandparents.

Mr. Myrick, whose mother is white and whose father is African-American, said he vividly remembers reading about Barack Obama as a teenager. “I thought, ‘Holy moly,’” Mr. Myrick said. “Here’s this guy, he’s mixed race, he’s got a funny name, he’s just like me. And it made me think I could go to a good school. I could do something.”…

Read the entire article here.