Mixed Race Studies

Maj. Gen. Nadja West confirmed as 44th Army Surgeon General

www.army.mil: The Official Homepage of the United States Army
2015-12-11

Maria Tolleson, Media Relations Officer

Maj. Gen. Nadja West is sworn in as 44th Surgeon General of the Army by Acting Secretary of the Army Eric Fanning. West is also Commander of the US Army Medical Command.

OFFICE OF THE SURGEON GENERAL Falls Church, Va. (Dec. 11, 2015) — The Senate confirmed Thursday Maj. Gen. Nadja West to serve as the new Army Surgeon General and Commanding General, U.S. Army Medical Command (MEDCOM).

With the appointment as the 44th Surgeon General, West picks up a third star to become the Army’s first black female to hold the rank of lieutenant general.

She most recently served as the Joint Staff Surgeon at the Pentagon. West’s appointment as Army Surgeon General is effective immediately…

…With this appointment she becomes the first black Army Surgeon General and the highest ranking female to have graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point…

Read the entire article here.

South Bend high school student behind race-based signs speaks out

WNDU TV 16
South Bend, Indiana
2016-02-12

A local high school student says he’s in trouble after he and two other students posted some controversial signs at Riley High School.

The signs stated “COLORED ONLY” and “WHITES ONLY,” and they were placed above water fountains throughout the school.

Shane Williams, who says he’s black, white, and Hispanic, told NewsCenter 16, “I put the signs up to help students to view legal segregation in a different form, for them to experience it themselves…

Read the entire story here.

Passing up the race: Students share stories of racial “passing”

Polaris Press
The Ann Richards School For Young Women Leaders
Austin, Texas
2016-02-04

It was one of the first weeks of sixth grade when Lanna Ahlberg found herself at school talking on the phone in Traditional Mandarin with her Taiwanese grandmother.

Hanging up the phone, Ahlberg found a number of girls staring at her.

“In sixth grade, a lot of people thought I was Hispanic or white because I have chocolate hair, like it’s not black hair. My eyes aren’t as prominent,” Ahlberg, now in eighth grade, said. “My mom is Taiwanese and my dad is half Swedish.”

If you’re a person of color who has ever been mistaken for white, you’ve experienced the phenomenon known as “white passing.”

Simply defined, White passing is when a person of color is perceived as white at any point in their life…

Read the entire article here.

“The Day Beyoncé Turned Black” – SNL

Saturday Night Live (NBC)
2016-02-13

Puerto Rican schoolchildren are taught that regardless of physical appearance they all individually derive from the same aforementioned roots. Regardless of whether this is true or not hasn’t eradicated in Puerto Rico structural or personal racism. Belief in mestizaje silences conversations about white supremacy and doesn’t force those with privilege to take responsibility for it. This allows white Puerto Ricans to appropriate, steal, and taint Afro-Puerto Rican traditions and exploit afro-descendant communities with no repercussions or consequences because “we are all Puerto Rican so all parts of Puerto Rican culture belong to all of us.” Not acknowledging the fact that a racial construct exists in Puerto Rico allows white privilege, white saviourism, and finally racism to flourish.

Dorothy Bell Ferrer, “How “Mestizaje” in Puerto Rico Makes Room for Racism to Flourish,” La Respuesta: A magazine to (Re)Imagine the Boricua Diaspora, February 8, 2016. http://larespuestamedia.com/mestizaje-racism/.

Dorothy Roberts: The problem with race-based medicine

TEDMED 2015
November 2015

Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology and the Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania

Social justice advocate and law scholar Dorothy Roberts has a precise and powerful message: Race-based medicine is bad medicine. Even today, many doctors still use race as a medical shortcut; they make important decisions about things like pain tolerance based on a patient’s skin color instead of medical observation and measurement. In this searing talk, Roberts lays out the lingering traces of race-based medicine — and invites us to be a part of ending it. “It is more urgent than ever to finally abandon this backward legacy,” she says, “and to affirm our common humanity by ending the social inequalities that truly divide us.”

Watch the video presentation (00:14:41) here. Download the video presentation here.

TEDx USF with Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman

TEDx USF
University of South Florida
Tampa, Florida
2016-02-08

From November 2015, Assistant Professor of Sociology Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman discusses her new book, The Color of Love: Racial Features, Stigma, and Socialization in Black Brazilian Families.

Is Obama a black man?

The Independent: You Buy the Truth, We Pay the Price
Kololo, Kampala, Uganda
2016-02-08

Andrew M. Mwenda, Founder and Owner

How he has accepted the categorisation imposed upon him by a racial system that subjugated black people

US President Barak Obama calls himself a black man. Indeed, America and the rest of the world refer to him as a black man. Yet we all know he is actually a person of mixed ancestry. His father was a black man from Kenya, his mother a white woman from Kansas. If Obama had been born in Uganda, he would be called a “mucotera”, in apartheid South Africa, a “colored”, in Brazil, a “mulatto” and in mainstream English, a “half caste”. This teaches us that racial categories are not biological but social constructions.

Some would think Obama sees himself as a black person because of our patrilineal cultures where a child takes after their father’s identity. That is not the case in America. Even if Obama’s mother had been black and his father white, he would have been seen and treated by American society as a black man. This would also lead him to see himself as a black man. The categorisation of anyone with black blood, whatever the percentage, as a black person is a very American thing rooted in that nation’s slave history and the politics around it.

Slavery in America was based on race. To justify keeping a certain group of people in perpetual bondage, white supremacists developed ideologies that dehumanised black people. Blacks were referred to as sub human, or as animals in the category of monkeys and chimpanzees. This justified white people owning black people as private property – just the way one owns a horse, a cow or goat. Interracial sexual liaisons threatened to upset this social order because they showed that black people were as human as white people and therefore capable of loving and siring children with whites…

Read the entire article here.

Identifying as Mixed Race vs Identifying as Black: I Choose Both

Mixed Race Feminist Blog
2016-02-10

Nicola Codner
Leeds, Yorkshire, United Kingdom

I recently watched an interview with the UK rapper, writer and academic Akala. I usually really enjoy hearing him speak and generally find him to be quite faultless in his views on racial issues. For those who don’t know of Akala he is of mixed race and identifies as both mixed and black. In the interview I am referencing he covers many topics including veganism, internalized racism and Obama’s presidency. He also briefly mentions his thoughts on people with some black heritage who identify solely as mixed race. I’d long been wondering about where he stood in terms of his thoughts on mixed race issues. Please note that for the purposes of this article when I mention ‘mixed race’ I am referring to people with both black and white heritage…

…I have to admit I was actually quite upset about Akala’s comments in the interview on those who choose to identify as mixed race. He gave the usual spiel that is frequently heard in the US, about how many of those who describe themselves as mixed are problematic and are disassociating themselves from blackness. It’s quite common, particularly in the US, for people to view identifying as mixed race when you have black heritage, as anti-black and evidence of self-loathing/ internalized racism. I was shocked in some ways to hear Akala endorsing such simplistic views given that he obviously has such a good intellect…

Read the entire article here.

A call for end of the “Globeleza Mulata”: A Manifesto

Black Women of Brazil: The site dedicated to Brazilian women of African descent
2016-02-08

Stephanie Ribeiro and Djamila Ribeiro

Originally, “A Mulata Globeleza: Um Manifesto” from Agora é que são elas (2016-01-29).

The Globeleza Mulata is not a natural cultural event, but a performance that invades the imaginary and the Brazilian televisions during Carnival. A spectacular created by art director Hans Donner to be the symbol of the popular party, which exhibited for 13 years his companion Valéria Valenssa in the super-expositional function of “mulata”. We’re talking about a character that appeared in the nineties and still strictly follows the same script: it is always a black woman that dances the samba as a passista (Carnaval dancer), naked with her body painted with glitter, to the sound of the vignette displayed throughout the daily programming of Rede Globo (TV).

To start the debate on this character, we need to identify the problem contained in the term “mulata”. Besides being a word naturalized by Brazilian society, it is a captive presence in the vocabulary of the hosts, journalists and reporters from the Globo broadcasting. The word of is of Spanish origin comes from “mula” or “mulo” (the masculine and feminine of ‘mule’): that that is a hybrid originating from a cross between species. Mules are animals born crossing donkeys with mares or horses with donkeys. In another sense, they are the result of the mating of the animal considered noble (equus caballus) with the animal deemed second class (donkey). Therefore, it is a derogatory word indicating mestiçagem (racial mixture or crossbreeding), impurity; an improper mixing that should not exist.

Employed since the colonial period, the term was used to designate lighter skinned blacks, fruits of the rape of slaves by masters. Such a nomenclature has sexist and racist nature and was transferred to the Globeleza character, naturalized. The adjective “mulata” is a sad memory of the 354 years (1534-1888) of escravidão negra (black slavery) in Brazil…

Read the entire article here.