Four-country newspaper framing of Barack Obama’s multiracial identity in the 2008 US presidential election

Posted in Africa, Articles, Asian Diaspora, Barack Obama, Caribbean/Latin America, Media Archive, United Kingdom, United States on 2015-09-02 22:02Z by Steven

Four-country newspaper framing of Barack Obama’s multiracial identity in the 2008 US presidential election

Ecquid Novi: African Journalism Studies
Volume 35, Issue 3, 2014
pages 23-38
DOI: 10.1080/02560054.2014.955867

Kioko Ireri, Assistant Professor of Journalism & Mass Communication
United States International University-Africa, Nairobi, Kenya

Though Barack Obama was the first African American presidential nominee for a major party in the history of the US presidential election, his multiracial identity put him under intense scrutiny during the 2008 election – more than any other previous black aspirants for the White House. Using quantitative content analysis of election stories in the newspapers of four countries (New York Times – US; Times – Britain; China Daily – China and Daily Nation – Kenya), this comparative study examines the prevalence of four racial frames associated with Obama’s multilayered racial identity: ‘African American’, ‘black’, ‘Kenyan roots’ and ‘white roots’. In addition, the study investigates the four newspapers’ valence coverage of the four racial frames in relation to Obama’s candidacy. The findings indicate that ‘Kenyan roots’ was the racial frame which occurred most frequently, followed by the ‘black’ frame. Overall, Obama received more positive coverage than negative across the racial frames depicted in the four newspapers.

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Redefining Racial Categories: The Dynamics of Identity Among Brazilian-Americans

Posted in Articles, Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2015-09-02 21:49Z by Steven

Redefining Racial Categories: The Dynamics of Identity Among Brazilian-Americans

Immigrants & Minorities: Historical Studies in Ethnicity, Migration and Diaspora
Volume 33, Issue 1, 2015
pages 45-65
DOI: 10.1080/02619288.2014.909732

Catarina Fritz
Department of Sociology and Corrections
Minnesota State University, Mankato

Research based on a sample of Brazilian youth living in Massachusetts reveals a variety of responses to racialisation of their phenotypes. Caught between the fluid patterns of colour categories found in Brazilian society and the more rigid racial stratification that characterises the USA, Brazilian-Americans have followed a variety of strategies to adapt to this situation. By exploring the reactions of these young adults of different appearance along the colour continuum to the constraints of the dominant society, questions concerning the future dynamics of race relations in the USA are raised against a background of the continuing post-racialism debate.

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Adolescent Racial Identity: Self-Identification of Multiple and “Other” Race/Ethnicities

Posted in Articles, Campus Life, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Teaching Resources, United States on 2015-09-02 21:30Z by Steven

Adolescent Racial Identity: Self-Identification of Multiple and “Other” Race/Ethnicities

Urban Education
Published online before print: 2015-03-18
DOI: 10.1177/0042085915574527

Bryn Harris, Assistant Professor of Psychology
University of Colorado, Denver

Russell D. Ravert, Associate Professor
Department of Human Development & Family Studies
University of Missouri, Columbia

Amanda L. Sullivan, Associate Professor of Psychology
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

This mixed methods study focused on adolescents who rejected conventional singular racial/ethnic categorization by selecting multiple race/ethnicities or writing descriptions of “Other” racial/ethnic identities in response to a survey item asking them to identify their race/ethnicity. Written responses reflected eight distinct categories ranging from elaborative descriptions of conventional race categories to responses refusing the construct of race/ethnicity. Students’ endorsement of multiple or “Other” ethnicities, and the resultant categories, differed by gender, grade, school type, and school compositions. Findings support scholars’ concern that common conceptualizations of race may not capture the complexity of self-identified racial categories among youth.

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Locating queer-mixed experiences: Narratives of geography and migration

Posted in Articles, Gay & Lesbian, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Social Work, United States on 2015-09-02 20:29Z by Steven

Locating queer-mixed experiences: Narratives of geography and migration

Qualitative Social Work
Volume 14, Number 5 (September 2015)
pages 651-669
DOI: 10.1177/1473325014561250

Kimberly D. Hudson
School of Social Work
University of Washington

Gita R. Mehrotra, Assistant Professor of Social Work
Portland State University, Portland, Oregon

Social work scholarship concerned with mixed-race and queer identities is growing and ever-changing, yet often treats race and sexuality as separate experiences independent from context and environment. In addition, in studies of mixed-race people, the legacy of the Black-White/US-based multiracial paradigm and the history of such research using race as the only or primary analytic has left a dearth of studies that seek to understand mixed-race experiences within geographical, transnational and intersectional contexts. In this paper, we extend previous work focused on situational and contextual multiracial identities through an interview-based study of a sample of 12 queer and mixed-race individuals. We employ a narrative analysis to explore how emergent themes of geography and migration are salient to self-making processes of participants. Findings include: (1) diverse geographic and migration histories among participants; (2) interviewees’ use of discursive strategies that draw upon experiences of geography and migration within the narrative structure; and (3) the critical role of geography and migration in expanding and changing participants’ identity discourses and in shaping individuals’ identity and sense of community. Ultimately, this work serves as a call for on-going attention to how geography and migration, as well as intersectional and transnational perspectives, add depth and texture to studies of queer-mixed people while also offering specificity to social work’s broader commitment to context and environment.

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More than that, The Sneetches taps into one of the fears that segregationists held, and which was represented as an ever-present danger in the Northern as well as the Southern states: the fear of “passing.”

Posted in Excerpts/Quotes on 2015-09-02 01:24Z by Steven

More than that, The Sneetches taps into one of the fears that segregationists held, and which was represented as an ever-present danger in the Northern as well as the Southern states: the fear of “passing.” In a country where “one drop of African blood” made a person black and not white, worries about being able to place people in the racial hierarchy if they could “pass” for white emerged through various forms of cultural production. Mark Twain, Charles Chestnutt, and Nella Larsen all wrote novels about African-Americans passing for white. The 1930s musical “Showboat,” twice made into a film (in the 1930s and the 1950s), has a tragic plot involving passing. Another film, based on a Fannie Hurst novel, was made twice by Hollywood (again in the 1930s and the 1950s). “Imitation of Life,” in its second incarnation became the fourth-most successful movie of 1959—just two years before The Sneetches was published.

Karen Sands-O’Connor, “Dr. Seuss and Racial Passing,” theracetoread: Children’s Literature and Issues of Race, February 11, 2015. https://theracetoread.wordpress.com/2015/02/11/dr-seuss-and-racial-passing.

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Does ‘Half Chinese, Half Jewish’ Condemn Me To Being Neither?

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Autobiography, Judaism, Media Archive, Religion, United States on 2015-09-02 01:08Z by Steven

Does ‘Half Chinese, Half Jewish’ Condemn Me To Being Neither?

Forward
2015-08-21

Rachel E. Gross

When I was four years old, my father introduced me to his colleague, Jing. “Are you Chinese?” I asked, eyeing her shrewdly. “Yes,” she replied. “So am I,” I said. “And shoe-ish, too!”

My father likes to tell this story, I think, because it illustrates my self-assurance: Even at that young age, I knew exactly who I was.

What I didn’t anticipate was that others might have opinions, too. That hit home recently when I wrote a NPR column on being “half-Chinese, half-Jewish.” Suddenly, people on the Internet were dictating my identity to me. “The author is not half Jewish,” one wrote in the comments, citing Orthodox halacha that deems you Jewish only if your mother is. “She is not Jewish at all.” How did he know which of my parents was Jewish? “I Googled her,” he wrote…

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Politics, Opinion and Reality in Black and White: Conceptualizing Postracialism at the Beginning of the 21st Century

Posted in Articles, Barack Obama, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2015-09-01 20:17Z by Steven

Politics, Opinion and Reality in Black and White: Conceptualizing Postracialism at the Beginning of the 21st Century

Revue de Recherche en Civilisation Américaine
Number 3 (March 2012): Post-racial America?

Lisa Veroni-Paccher, MCF, Civilisation américaine
Université Bordeaux Montaigne

With the election of the first black president, commentators and pundits said that Americans could now believe that African Americans had achieved racial equality, or at least that they would achieve it in their lifetimes. As Barack Obama used a universalist message and adopted a racially transcendent strategy which might seem at odds with his self-definition as an African American, he came to be defined as a postracial candidate, in a postracial America. The promise of an electoral victory indeed called for a strategy that would avoid race-specific issues, while at the same time reassured voters that their interests would be best served. This article argues that postracialism can thus be understood and used as an effective electoral strategy aiming at downplaying the individual and collective roles race and racism play in structuring group hierarchy and interaction, so that black or other nonwhite candidates can appeal to white voters. Using recent public opinion data, this paper will then attempt to understand how the contemporary political environment transforms the use of race as a political and/or social construction and whether it matches the evolution of black public opinion as it relates to understandings of race and racism.

Contents

  • I. Postracial Politics: Deracialized Electoral Strategies as Necessity
  • II. Race, Racism, Racial Equality and Public Opinion: Postracial America as Desire
  • III. Postracialism Real or Dreamed? Beyond the black/white dichotomy
  • Conclusion

Read the entire article here.

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Mixed Messages: The Role of the Multiracial Character in Children’s Literature

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United Kingdom, United States on 2015-09-01 19:47Z by Steven

Mixed Messages: The Role of the Multiracial Character in Children’s Literature

theracetoread: Children’s Literature and Issues of Race
2015-08-20

Karen Sands-O’Connor, Professor
English Department
Buffalo State, The State University of New York, Buffalo, New York

In 19th and early 20th century children’s literature, the multiracial character generally evoked one of two responses: fear, or pity. Tom Sawyer’s Injun Joe, for example, was much feared by Tom and his gang, Tom even having nightmares about the character coming to get him. In Caddie Woodlawn, the children of an Indian mother and white father are “half savage” and the recipient of Caddie’s attempts to “civilize” them by paying for new clothes. Other examples can be found in British Empire literature—the “ugly mulatto” being a stock character of fear in books by G.A. Henty, H. Rider Haggard, and others; and the pitiable female “half-breed” or “mulatto” who cannot ultimately be saved by the white hero also figures in the works of these authors.

After World War II, as civil rights in the US and changing immigration patterns in Britain meant increasing, often hostile, interaction between racial groups, the multiracial character in children’s literature nearly disappeared for a time. But a generation later, many things had changed. More and more children were born who had parents of different races, but it was unclear where they would fit in to a post-civil rights society. Both American and British authors produced books dealing with this issue, but for this blog, I’m just going to look at two from Britain: Anthony Masters’ Streetwise (London: Methuen, 1987), and Jacqueline Roy’s Soul Daddy (London: Collins, 1990)…

Read the entire article here.

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“Beyond the Binary: Obama’s Hybridity and Post-Racialization.”

Posted in Articles, Barack Obama, Communications/Media Studies, Media Archive, Social Science on 2015-09-01 17:57Z by Steven

“Beyond the Binary: Obama’s Hybridity and Post-Racialization.”

Revue de Recherche en Civilisation Américaine
Number 3 (March 2012): Post-racial America?

Kirin Wachter-Grene, Acting Instructor of Literature
New York University

According to many in the American and international press, the 2008 presidential election of Barack Obama has heralded a possible era of “postracialism” in the United States. The election, and Obama himself, has given this term social capital worthy of deep consideration. If we understand “postracialism” to be congealing into a “color-blind” ideology that ruptures the historic hegemony of the bichromatic (black-white) American binary (as some journalists posit) we have to look at media discourses that position Obama as “postracialism’s subjective signifier” to understand postracialism’s failure to function as it’s imagined to do so.

Far from accomplishing a simplistic and idealistic end to discourses of race and practices of racialization in America, postracialism has served to reify public racial obsession, and Obama has been made the locus of attention on which these discourses circulate. Obama is consistently conscripted in racialized projects from those individuals and groups attempting to use him to advance their political cause. Obama is also actively engaging in a discourse of universalized nationalism that uses color-blindness to articulate itself.

This article will seek to complicate mass media articulations of the postracial, to help broaden it from what appears to be its limited lines of inquiry. Perhaps the salient question to ask is whose “postracialism” are we referring to, and what might this term signify if we imagine it to mean more than what it clearly is not? Might we read postracialism as an articulation of “post-black,” if we consider “black,” in an American context to be historically understood and legitimized as African American? In other words, might “postracial” have salience as a means to invite a larger cultural conversation of different articulations of blackness in America, one in which immigrant blacks are considered and given voice? This is a particularly relevant question in relation to Obama due to his second-generation immigrant identity, and due to the fact that his “blackness” comes not from African American ancestors, but from his African father.

This article aims toward a meditation of the potential for immigrant blackness to offer a more inclusive, and more accurate representation of a progressively variegated, “post-racialized” American culture in need of social legitimacy for its potential to disrupt bichromatic racialization and coterminous universalized nationalism.

Contents

  • Barack Obama: Postracialism’s “Subjective Signifier”
  • Universalized Nationalism/Neoliberal Colorblindness
  • Obama and Internal Racialization
  • Obama’s External Hyper-Racialization
  • Beyond the Binary
  • Toward a Discourse of Post-Bichromatic Racialization

Read the entire article here.

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The Politics of Race and Class in the Age of Obama

Posted in Articles, Barack Obama, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2015-09-01 14:35Z by Steven

The Politics of Race and Class in the Age of Obama

Revue de Recherche en Civilisation Américaine
Number 3 (March 2012): Post-racial America?

Myra Mendible, Professor of English and Department Chair for Language and Literature
Florida Gulf Coast University, Fort Myers, Florida

This essay explores the revival and misappropriation of identity politics in the age of Obama. I argue that Obama’s presidency has exposed the fault lines of American society, evoking deep-seated apprehensions about race, immigration, and America’s role in a post-9/11 world. As a result, it has generated a range of discursive strategies intended to both disguise and deploy racialist ideology. In particular, my analysis focuses attention on three developments in the wake of Obama’s election: the emergence of “whiteness” as an endangered identity; the prevalence of “class” as a code word for “race”; and the reconfiguration of “passing” and miscegenation tropes in political discourse. I consider the ways that these rhetorical sleights-of-hand exploit post-racial discourse in order to dismantle decades of progressive civil rights legislation in the United States.

Contents

  • Post-Racial America: New Myth for a New Age?
  • “Passing” for “Black”?
  • Is White the New Black?
  • Exploiting the “Obama Effect”

Read the entire article here.

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