Mixed Race Studies

Locating black mixed-raced males in the black supplementary school movement

Race Ethnicity and Education
Published online 2016-11-08
pages 1-14
DOI: 10.1080/13613324.2016.1248838

Remi Joseph-Salisbury
School of Ethnicity and Racism Studies, School of Sociology and Social Policy
University of Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom

Kehinde Andrews, Associate Professor of Sociology
Birmingham City University, Birmingham, United Kingdom

This article draws upon data from semi-structured interviews conducted with black mixed-race males in the UK and the US, to argue that a revival of the black supplementary school movement could play an important role in the education of black mixed-race males. The article contends that a strong identification with blackness, and a concomitant rejection of the values of mainstream schooling, make black supplementary education a viable intervention for raising the attainment and improving the experiences of black mixed-race males. Whilst blackness was important to participants’ understandings of their lived experiences, this did not engender a disregard for their mixedness. Supplementary schools must therefore find ways of recognising black mixedness within their practice.

Read or purchase the article here.

The New Biopolitics of Race, Health, and Justice

Center For Health and Wellbeing
Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs
001 Robertson Hall
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey
Friday, 2016-11-11, 12:00-13:30 EST (Local Time)

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

Dorothy Roberts, an acclaimed scholar of race, gender and the law, joined the University of Pennsylvania as its 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Sociology and the Law School where she also holds the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mosell Alexander chair.

Her pathbreaking work in law and public policy focuses on urgent contemporary issues in health, social justice, and bioethics, especially as they impact the lives of women, children and African-Americans. Her major books include Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century (New Press, 2011); Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books, 2002), and Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Pantheon, 1997). She is the author of more than 80 scholarly articles and book chapters, as well as a co-editor of six books on such topics as constitutional law and women and the law.

For more information, click here.

Artist, surfer Kip Fulbeck to exhibit work at MSU

Times Record News
Wichita Falls, Texas
2016-11-03

Richard Carter, Special to the Times Record News

Kip Fulbeck

Kip Fulbeck grew up in Hawaii as the child of a Chinese mother and a white American father.

In elementary school, children would come up to him and ask, “Who are you? What are you?” It was an experience that stuck with him, said Midwestern State University art professor Gary Goldberg, and as Fulbeck developed as an artist, he reflected on those experiences.

An exhibit of Fulbeck’s artwork, “Hapa,” opened earlier this week at the Juanita and Ralph Harvey Art Gallery in the MSU Fain Fine Arts Center. The exhibit of photographic works runs through Dec. 2.

Fulbeck will be at a reception at the gallery from 3-5 p.m. Nov. 11 and will then lecture at 7 p.m. that evening as part of the MSU Artist Lecture Series in Akin Auditorium…

Read the entire article here.

When will Rachel Dolezal stop trying to get in formation?

gal-dem
2016-06-23

Paula Akpan and Ella Wilks-Harper

When the story of Rachel Dolezal first broke – the NAACP president who has been misrepresenting herself as black – I snorted derisively.

When she was interviewed by VICE’s Broadly and mused over how “it’s so hard to explain this to people: I don’t feel white,” I rolled my eyes.

However, upon discovering that Dolezal had joined the Twittersphere, I had a cursory stalk and came across the following tweet…

Read the entire article here.

In An Election Defined By Race, How Do We Define Race?

FiveThirtyEight
2016-11-06

Farai Chideya, Senior Writer

When I was younger, I had an idea for a satire in which a group of rogue genealogists would get blood samples from racially incendiary white politicians. They’d run DNA tests on them to see if they were part black, then publish the information on those who were.

This was way back before you could order DNA tests online and watch television shows about celebrities seeing their results. I don’t write satire, and wisely abandoned the idea. But the broader concept of bloodlines and our construction of political identity popped into my head during a recent discussion about the election.

Donald Trump’s supporters, 90 percent of whom are white, have measurably less positive feelings about African-Americans and several other groups than other Republicans or the public at large. But how many of his voters are “black,” not by our current categorization but under the “one-drop rule” saying that no matter how white they looked, anyone with a drop of black blood was categorized as such? Variations of the one-drop rule persisted in law until 1983 in Louisiana, after a mixed-race woman unsuccessfully sued to become legally white, and legislators overturned the law in response to the fractious case. Some argue that the one-drop rule had already been eroded by the 1967 Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court case on interracial marriage, now the subject of a new movie…

Read the entire article here.

‘You don’t see many of them round here’: being black in the white, rural West Country

gal-dem
2016-09-05

Louisa Adjoa Parker

My parents met when my dad came to the UK from Ghana in the 1960s to train as a nurse. He married my mum, and I was born in Doncaster in 1972. I don’t think he had a clue before he came how racist Britain was then, and both my parents were naïve in their own ways. Their turbulent marriage was unsuccessful, not, as my grandparents had feared, as a result of two different cultures colliding, but because of two very different personalities colliding (and my dad’s fists colliding with parts of my mum’s body).

Many people of mixed heritage talk of the difficulties of belonging to two cultures. I didn’t have that problem – my dad rarely offered anything in the way of Ghanaian culture. We didn’t eat Ghanaian food, listen to Ghanaian music, or have contact with any of our Ghanaian relatives. In fact, Ghana has always seemed to me, a far-off, mystical, hot and dusty land, peopled by unknown relatives. My dad wanted to become English; he looked up to them, liked their ways. I’ve not yet visited, although I hope to soon, and am grateful to my brother for flying out there and finding our long-lost family…

Read the entire article here.

‘Barry’ Is An Introspection On President Obama’s Collegiate Years

Black Girl Nerds
2016-11-06

Jamie Broadnax

An Uneventful Origin Story Of Our First Black President

The most profound experiences of our lives happen during those tumultuous years before we have achieved our own level of success.  The moment before we meet the love of our life, start a family, or become an entrepreneur.  In the film Barry, directed by Vikram Ghandhi, we dive into the origin story of our first Black President Barack Obama.  The story examines the college years of Barry and his experiences during his years as an academic at Columbia University.

Earlier this year, the film Southside With You gave us some background about the budding romance between Barack and Michelle Obama.  It was a dramatic depiction about one of our favorite relationships in pop culture.  The film Barry, which is more serious in tone; and focused more on Barack Obama’s self-analyzing and contemplation of his experiences, doesn’t quite have the impact that one would expect from a strong biopic…

Read the entire review here.

EXCLUSIVE: Ruth Negga on How Feeling Alien Inspired Her Oscar-Worthy Performance and the Power of ‘Loving’

Entertainment Tonight
2016-11-06

John Boone

Photo: Getty Images

Ruth Negga may go from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. to the Academy Awards, which is no easy feat even for a Marvel superhero. The 34-year-old actress may be most recognizable for her comic book fare — she also appeared in Warcraft: The Beginning and currently stars on AMC’s Preacher — but that very well may change because of Loving, a small, quiet film centered on the landmark court case that legalized interracial marriage. The film isn’t actually about the case, though, it’s about the Lovings behind Loving v. Virginia. What does it mean to her to get Oscar buzz for this movie?

“That people will know who Mildred and Richard Loving were,” she explained. “It surprised me that more people don’t know about them, because I think they’re a couple that America should be extraordinarily proud of. The world should be proud of.”…

Read the entire article here.

Mark Loving on the film ‘Loving’ and a Supreme Court case that changed the nation

Eastern Mennonite University
Harrisonburg, Virginia
2016-11-03

Lauren Jefferson, Editor-in-Chief

Mark Loving, a sophomore at Eastern Mennonite University, shows a photo of his great-grandparents, Mildred and Richard Loving. In 1967, the couple won a Supreme Court case that eventually led to freedom for mixed-race couples to marry and live together in Virginia. Their story is featured in “Loving,” a film opening Nov. 4. (Photos by Londen Wheeler Photography; inset photo, Bettman/Getty)

In his native Caroline County, Virginia, Mark Loving II’s family name is well known. Beyond generations of rootedness, there is both a plaque at the courthouse and a historical marker about his family history. One reason why Mark came to Eastern Mennonite University: some anonymity in a rural landscape not dissimilar to home.

But being one of a crowd is shortly coming to an end for this sophomore kinesiology major who plays basketball and has plans to become a physical therapist. On Friday, Nov. 4, a movie will be released, the title of which is one word: his surname.

“I don’t think too many people know,” he said, “but that’s starting to change. The word has got out there.”…

Read the entire article here.

In my family, racial passing and the deception it involved was the ultimate taboo and betrayal. It was what the writer Nella Larsen called a hazardous business, “this breaking away from all that was familiar and friendly to take one’s chance in another environment, not entirely strange, perhaps, but certainly not entirely friendly.” The first time someone perceived me as white, it made me wonder if they thought I was passing or trying to pass. But unlike the character Clare in Larsen’s novel Passing, I did not become untethered or unhinged from my identity; I did not feel a desire to cross into whiteness. Instead I grabbed hold of my identity even tighter, as if somehow my blackness could slip away.

W. Ralph Eubanks, “Passing Strange,” The Common, November 4, 2016. http://www.thecommononline.org/features/passing-strange.