Mixed Race Studies

“I’m mixed race. I identify as a black woman from Ireland, who is quite pale,” she laughs. “The only heritage I ever had was Irish heritage.” [Lorraine] Maher is aware of her other ancestry, “but it is not important at the moment for me”, she says…

Anthea McTeirnan, “‘Growing up in Ireland I was the only black person’,” The Irish Times, September 30, 2016. http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/growing-up-in-ireland-i-was-the-only-black-person-1.2807492.

Jane Doe v. State of Louisiana (1985)

Justice Ward delivered the opinion of the Court.

This appeal is brought by several members of the Guillory family, children and grandchildren of Simea Fretty and Dominique Guillory, both deceased. Six of the appellants, Marie Bernice Guillory Rougeau, Armet Guillory Fontenot, Lucy Elizabeth Guillory Parker, Suzy Elizabeth Rita Guillory Phipps, Regina Rougeau, and Tex Adam Rougeau, contend that their birth certificates, issued between the years 1919 and 1941, erroneously designate their parents as “colored”, when in fact they were white. These appellants seek a mandamus that would compel the Louisiana Department of Health and Human Resources to correct the alleged error. Two of the appellants, Theresa Guillory Rougeau and Mildred Rougeau, were never issued birth certificates. They seek a mandamus compelling the state to issue delayed birth certificates designating their parents as white. The Trial Court found that the evidence presented by appellants was insufficient to justify a mandamus.

As an alternative to their suit for mandamus, appellants challenged the constitutionality of former La. R.S. 42:267 which provided that a person having one-thirty second or less of Negro blood shall not be described or designated as “colored” by any state official. The Trial Court rejected the constitutional challenge solely on the grounds that 42:267 was held constitutional in State ex rel. Plaia v. Louisiana State Board of Health (1974).

We affirm the Trial Court judgment…

…As to the six appellants who presently have birth certificates, we find that they failed to prove by a preponderance of the evidence that their parents’ racial designations are incorrect. Expert testimony indicated that the very concept of the racial classification of individuals, as opposed to that of a group, is scientifically insupportable. Individual racial designations are purely social and cultural perceptions, and the evidence conclusively proves those subjective perceptions were correctly recorded at the time appellants’ birth certificates were issued. There is no proof in the record that Simea or Dominique Guillory preferred to be designated as white. They might well have been proud to be described as colored. Indeed, we have no evidence that during their lifetimes they objected to the racial designations in dispute in this case. Accordingly, we hold that the defendant state officers have no legal duty to alter the birth certificates…

Read the entire opinion here.

The “Birther” Movement: Whites Defining Black

Racism Review
2016-09-18

Dr. Terence Fitzgerald, Clinical Associate Professor
University of Southern California

Hallelujah I say, Hallelujah! Did you hear the news? Did ya? After sending a team of investigators to Hawaii, drawing the attention of the national and international media, and leading an almost six year charge of infesting the mind of those already under the influence of the white racial frame into a catnip type psychological and emotional frenzy; the “benevolent one,” Donald J. Trump, has publically and emphatically acknowledged that our President of the United States of America is—get this, “an American!” Yes it is true. Republican presidential nominee and town jester, Trump on Friday, September 16, 2016 recognized in a public forum for the first time in eight years that President Obama was indeed born in the U.S. After not only leading, but becoming synonymous with what many have described as the “birther movement,” Trump has conceded and given up on furthering the conspiracy theory that our President is not an American citizen.

…One cannot forget the history behind the 1662 Virginia law that in particular focused on the behavior directed toward mixed-race people. The notion of the ‘one drop rule’ was consequently constructed. This legal means for identifying who was Black was judicially upheld as recent as 1985 “when a Louisiana court ruled that a woman with a black great-great-great-great-grandmother could not identify herself as ‘white’ on her passport.” …

Read the entire article here.

Same Family, Different Colors: Confronting Colorism in America’s Diverse Families

Beacon Press
2016-10-04
216 pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-080707678-1

Lori L. Tharps, Assistant Professor of Journalism
Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Weaving together personal stories, history, and analysis, Same Family, Different Colors explores the myriad ways skin-color politics affect family dynamics in the United States.

Colorism and color bias—the preference for or presumed superiority of people based on the lighter color of their skin—is a pervasive but rarely openly discussed phenomenon, one that is centuries old and continues today. In Same Family, Different Colors, journalist Lori Tharps, the mother of three mixed-race children with three distinct skin colors, uses her own family as a starting point to explore how skin-color difference is dealt with in African American, Latino, Asian American, and mixed-race families and communities. Along with intimate and revealing stories and anecdotes from dozens of diverse people from across the United States, Tharps adds a historical overview and a contemporary cultural critique. Same Family, Different Colors is a solution-seeking journey to the heart of identity politics, so this more subtle “cousin to racism,” in the author’s words, will be acknowledged, understood, and debated.

GONS-FA16.03 | Transcending Race

GONS – Gonson Society Lecture Series
The Cambridge Center for Adult Education
42 Brattle Street
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138
2016-10-12, 11:00 EDT (Local Time)

Carlos Hoyt

Based on Carlos Hoyt’s recently published book, The Arc of a Bad Idea: Understanding and Transcending Race, will provide a penetrating, provocative, and promising analysis and alternative to the hegemonic racial world-view. How race came about, how it evolved into a natural-seeming aspect of human identity, and how racialization, as a habit of the mind, can be broken is presented through the unique and corrective framing of race as a time-bound (versus eternal) concept, the lifespan of which is traceable and the demise of which is predictable.

For more information, click here.

Inequality and African-American Health: How Racial Disparities Create Sickness

Policy Press
2016-10-05
224 pages
6¾ x 9½
Cloth ISBN-13: 978-1-4473-2281-8
Paper ISBN-13: 978-1-4473-2282-5

Shirley A. Hill, Professor of Sociology
Univeristy of Kansas

This book shows how living in a highly racialized society affects health through multiple social contexts, including neighborhoods, personal and family relationships, and the medical system.

Black-white disparities in health, illness, and mortality have been widely documented, but most research has focused on single factors that produce and perpetuate those disparities, such as individual health behaviors and access to medical care.

This is the first book to offer a comprehensive perspective on health and sickness among African Americans, starting with an examination of how race has been historically constructed in the US and in the medical system and the resilience of racial ideologies and practices. Racial disparities in health reflect racial inequalities in living conditions, incarceration rates, family systems, and opportunities. These racial disparities often cut across social class boundaries and have gender-specific consequences.

Bringing together data from existing quantitative and qualitative research with new archival and interview data, this book advances research in the fields of families, race-ethnicity, and medical sociology.

Contents

• Introduction
• Part One: Theorizing Social Inequalities in Health
  • Race, Racism, and Sickness
  • Slavery and Freedom
• Part Two: Health and Medicine
  • Health Behaviors in Social Context
  • Medical Care and Health Policy
• Part Three: Health and Families
  • Economic Decline and Incarceration
  • Love, Sexuality and (Non)Marriage
  • Children’s Health

Who Are We, Really?

View from Rue Saint-Georges
The American Scholar
2016-09-21

Thomas Chatterton Williams

Detail from The Redemption of Ham by Modesto Brocos y Gómez (1895)

Lately, as I’ve been working on my second book, a meditation on the absurdity of sorting human beings into metaphorical color categories, I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of passing. In his 1948 autobiography, A Man Called White, the pale-skinned, blond-haired, blue-eyed former NAACP leader, Walter White, observed, “Many Negroes are judged as whites. Every year approximately twelve-thousand white-skinned Negroes disappear—people whose absence cannot be explained by death or emigration.” Or as Henry Louis Gates Jr. has tabulated more recently, “How many ostensibly ‘white’ Americans walking around today would be classified as ‘black’ under the one-drop rule? Judging by the last U.S. Census, 7,872,702. To put that in context, that number is equal to roughly 20 percent, or a fifth, of the total number of people identified as African American in the same census count!”…

Read the entire article here.

Both black and white Brazilians have long considered “whiteness” something that can be striven towards. In 1912 João Baptista de Lacerda, a medic and advocate of “whitening” Brazil by encouraging European immigration, predicted that by 2012 the country would be 80% white, 3% mixed and 17% Amerindian; there would be no blacks. As Luciana Alves, who has researched race at the University of São Paulo, explains, an individual could “whiten his soul” by working hard or getting rich. Tomás Santa Rosa, a successful mid-20th-century painter, consoled a dark-skinned peer griping about discrimination, saying that he too “used to be black”.

“Slavery’s legacies,” The Economist, September 10, 2016. http://www.economist.com/news/international/21706510-american-thinking-about-race-starting-influence-brazil-country-whose-population.

Racial awareness lacks “One Drop of Love”

The Current
St. Petersburg, Florida
2016-10-06

Mereysa Taylor, Co-Opinion Editor

Cox DiGiovanni artfully narrates her own education about being mixed race in America in efforts to start a larger national dialogue. photo by Jeff Lorch

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni graced Eckerd with her one-woman performance about how race was constructed in the U.S. and the ways in which it affects our most intimate relationships on Sept. 15.

“People lived with the rule, that one drop of black blood, deemed you black in a national census,” she said, remarking on the history of our national census and the notorious “one drop rule.”

Her performance, called “One Drop of Love,” barely filled Miller Auditorium; more senior citizens of the surrounding St. Petersburg area attended than Eckerd students did. Shame on us.

Cox DiGiovanni tours around the country, performing her wildly entertaining, educational and autobiographical piece on race, justice, truth and love. A mixed race woman herself, she found her passion in acting and storytelling, and what began as a thesis project for her Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in 2013 bore an influential piece of performance art. She has since then used her platform and creative license to educate and empathize with the plight of racial minorities in this country, including those of mix race.

At this school, this is a particular conversation that nobody really wants to have — it’s too awkward, too uncomfortable to face the fact that there may be something wrong with the way race is handled at Eckerd– whether that be in the classroom, on tours or with Eckerd brochures that like to depict a rainbow of color in our predominantly white student body…

Read the entire article here.

Jackie Kay announces makar’s tour of all the Scottish islands

The Guardian
2016-10-07

Libby Brooks, Scotland Correspondent

The poet has revealed plans for ‘an odyssey’ that will take in overlooked parts of Scotland and form the basis of a long poem about the country

As the UK lurches towards xenophobia, it is a writer’s responsibility to “tell the time”, says Scotland’s national poet Jackie Kay.

Kay, whose complex relationship with her Scottish identity provides inspiration for much of her work, warned that poets should not shy away from addressing current and acute political divisions…

Read the entire article here.