Mixed Race Studies

Making it Last: A Couple Who See Race Clearly

The New York Times
2013-08-23

Erika Allen

Booming’s “Making It Last” column profiles baby boomer couples who have been together 25 years or more.

Christopher and Laura Castoro met when she asked him to tutor her in German. They didn’t realize they were of different race till their first date, and when they decided to marry, “We knew it was going to be us against the world,” she said.

Christopher and Laura Castoro celebrated their 45th wedding anniversary on June 8. In 2000, he retired as the director of transportation for a chemical and technology company. She is an author (also writing under her maiden name, Laura Parker) who writes, among other things, romance novels, including “Love on the Line,” “Rose of the Mists,” “A Rose in Splendor” and “The Secret Rose.” The couple lives in Fort Worth. They have three adult children and nine grandchildren. A condensed and edited version of our conversation follows.

You met in college?

Christopher: Yes, I went to Howard University to study chemistry. As a high-schooler in Brooklyn I’d taken a test that secured me a scholarship — a full ride to Howard. I was studying German during my junior year and this girl with very fair skin and curly blond hair shyly asked me to tutor her.

Laura: I was on scholarship, too. I had to make Bs in all of my classes. But six weeks into the year I was getting a C+ in German. Money and pride were at stake so I asked a boy from the front row to tutor me.

First impressions?

Laura: He was cute and professional, but he was older and I thought he had a girlfriend.

Christopher: Even though we were at Howard I assumed that Laura was a white girl. As it turned out, she’d assumed that I was African-American and we both had it wrong.

How did you sort things out?

Laura: The tutoring went on for a while before we decided to go out and the first place we went was a German restaurant. Halfway through the meal he mentioned being Italian and I said, “Oh, you have Italian in your family?” and he said that yes, his whole family was Italian.

Your reaction?

Laura: I was stunned. I am from the segregated South. At the time one in six people at Howard was not African-American, but I assumed he was black. I was out with a white person and I had not done this intentionally. And he was out with a black woman and didn’t know it. The schools in my town in Arkansas were just being integrated, but I graduated from an all-black high school. I just did not know white people. And even though I am very fair, everyone knew my family and they knew I was black. This was the first time I realized that it wasn’t obvious that I was black.

Christopher: I was surprised, but I had been at Howard for two years and she wasn’t the first black woman I dated…

Read the entire interview here.

Not All Blacks Are African American: The Importance of Viewing Advisees as Individuals in a Culturally Mosaic Context

The Mentor: An Academic Advising Journal
Pennsylvania State University
2013-08-15

Mary M. Livingston, Professor of Psychology
Louisiana Tech University

Latoya Pierce, Assistant professor of Psychology
Louisiana Tech University

Lou’uan Gollop-Brown, Assistant Professor of Psychology
Louisiana Tech University

When an advisee walks through the door, it is important for an adviser to consciously refrain from making possibly fallacious assumptions about the advisee’s racial heritage on the basis of skin color. Of course, this is also a mistake that may also be made by the advisee. One author of this paper, who is from the Caribbean, was selected as a preferred adviser by many undergraduate African American advisees, because they felt, as one of them, she would know and understand their experiences. Initial impressions influence the adviser-advisee interaction. This is not to say that the adviser should eschew accurate cultural recognition, which may be an important part of an advisee’s identity and a key to understanding and communication. Instead, we should attempt to verify our assumptions since our suppositions may not be correct…

…An additional issue is the racial identity of individuals who consider themselves to be biracial or multiracial. Biracial is defined as “of, relating to, or involving members of two races” (Biracial, 2013). Multiracial is defined as “composed of, involving, or representing various races” (Multiracial, 2013). When individuals are biracial or multiracial, our human tendency to fit them into one category no longer works. Numerous times, biracial or multiracial advisees have told stories about meeting a person, and during the conversation, racial identity came up. The multiracial student was almost always asked to readily identify himself or herself as a member of an established racial group. The acronym VREG coincides with this experience. VREG stands for visibly recognizable ethic groups, and the concept speaks to our need to classify and recognize people as such (Helms & Cook, 1999)…

Read the entire article here.

Race on the Menu: Cheerios, Paula Deen, with Some Supreme Court for Dessert

brianbantum: theology, culture, teaching and life in-between
2012-06-26

Brian Bantum, Assistant Professor of Theology
Seattle Pacific University

It’s been a bad month. For some reason incidents and issues of race seems to appear like death, in groups of three. They clump together, overwhelming those whom they hurt and they come too quickly for others to process…

…But I am becoming less convinced that we will be able to have rational conversations about the facts of the cases, about how race functions in our society, what the consequences for our ignorance are for people of color. We cannot have these conversations because I am not sure we have really grappled with the reality of our condition as American citizens. We do not see ourselves as we really are. While some imagine themselves as the white wife and others as the black husband, what we fail to understand is that we are all the mixed race child. Regardless of our race we are children of this interracial union called America. We are the progeny of a tragic, dark, difficult history that we bear in our skin, even while we exhibit many wonderful possibilities.

But we will never move forward until we can admit who we are…

Read the entire article here.

Is There a “New Black Theology?” Yes and No.

brianbantum: theology, culture, teaching and life in-between
2012-11-28

Brian Bantum, Assistant Professor of Theology
Seattle Pacific University

Last week I had the distinct privilege of sitting on a panel with Willie James Jennings, J. Kameron Carter, and Edward Philip Antonio with Joanne Terrell responding. The panel was convened by the Black Theology Group at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meetings in Chicago, IL [Illinois] from November 16-20.

The title of the panel was “Towards a New Black Theology?: Going Back in Order to Move Forward!” and centered upon the work of Jennings (The Christian Imagination), Carter (Race: A Theological Account), and myself (Redeeming Mulatto) and how we intersect with and diverge from Black Theology. As a panel we did not directly address the nomenclature “New Black Theology” which is not a terribly apt term for the work that we do, but it would also be a mistake to suggest that we are not indebted to Black Theological reflection either. The question of the name is less important than our hope that people might begin to enter into the problems and possibilities that animate our theological work. In the presentations we each, in our own way, sought to highlight both our connections to traditions and sensibilities of Black Christian thought as well as highlight how we are imagining a way forward…

…What follows is the text of my presentation, “Theology From and To: What is Mulatto Theology?”…

…What “mulatto” in a mulattic theological framework suggests is not the valorization of the mixed race body, nor the marginalization of the mixed race body. Rather, “mulatto” gestures towards the situatedness of bodies in a racial world where a person and a people occupy multiple spaces at once. The life of discipleship is navigating these various realities, discovering patterns of unfaithfulness as well as the continual possibilities that stand before us. “Mulatto” theology suggests that we stand in a space that is both transgressive and transgressed, that we cannot separate ourselves from the realities of our tragic beginnings, but that these realities do not exonerate us or protect us from perpetuating old terrors in new ways. We are children of mothers and fathers with complicated and tragic stories, but we cannot excise ourselves from them. A mulattic theology seeks to exist between these realities and discern patterns of faithfulness in their midst. Out of this reality a mulatto theology does not work to establish a cultural space or retrieve a tradition…

Read the entire article here.