Mixed Race Studies

Rachel Dolezal is now an artisanal lollipop saleswoman

The New York Post
2017-11-15

Rachel Dolezal has a line of homemade lollipops. Polaris

Rachel Dolezal wants to sweeten her image.

The disgraced NAACP activist — who claimed to be of African-American descent, though she’s a white woman — is now hawking homemade lollipops for extra cash…

Read the entire article here.

First Martyr of Liberty: Crispus Attucks in American Memory

Oxford University Press
2017-07-19
328 pages
22 hts
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780199731619

Mitch Kachun, Professor of History
Western Michigan University

• Most thorough study of what is known about the life of Crispus Attucks.
• First extended analysis of the role of Attucks in American history and memory.
• Figure has been referenced constantly in popular culture throughout the centuries, inc. current series “Luke Cage.”

First Martyr of Liberty explores how Crispus Attucks’s death in the 1770 Boston Massacre led to his achieving mythic significance in African Americans’ struggle to incorporate their experiences and heroes into the mainstream of the American historical narrative. While the other victims of the Massacre have been largely ignored, Attucks is widely celebrated as the first to die in the cause of freedom during the era of the American Revolution. He became a symbolic embodiment of black patriotism and citizenship.

This book traces Attucks’s career through both history and myth to understand how his public memory has been constructed through commemorations and monuments; institutions and organizations bearing his name; juvenile biographies; works of poetry, drama, and visual arts; popular and academic histories; and school textbooks. There will likely never be a definitive biography of Crispus Attucks since so little evidence exists about the man’s actual life. While what can and cannot be known about Attucks is addressed here, the focus is on how he has been remembered–variously as either a hero or a villain–and why at times he has been forgotten by different groups and individuals from the eighteenth century to the present day.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Who Was This Man?
• Chapter 2: The Dustbin of History: Crispus Attucks and American Amnesia, 1770s-1840s
• Chapter 3: First Martyr of Liberty: Crispus Attucks and the Struggle for Citizenship in the Civil War Era
• Chapter 4: Crispus Attucks Meets Jim Crow: The Segregation of American Memory, 1870s-1910s
• Chapter 5: Crispus Attucks Meets the New Negro: Black History and Black Heroes between the World Wars
• Chapter 6: Crispus Attucks Meets Dorie Miller: Black Patriotism and Activism in the World War II Era
• Chapter 7: Crispus Attucks and the Black Freedom Struggle, 1950s-1970s
• Chapter 8: Crispus Attucks from the Bicentennial to the Culture Wars, 1970s-1990s
• Chapter 9: Crispus Attucks in Twenty-First Century America
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index

Do people feel privileged when they are white passing?

Cut
Seattle, Washington
2017-11-15

Do people feel privileged when they are white passing? Check out the post interview to People Guess Who is White In a Group of People.

How my mother’s fanatical views tore us apart

The Daily Mail
2008-05-23

Rebecca Walker

Maternal rift: Rebecca Walker, whose mother was the feminist author of The Color Purple – who thought motherhood a form of servitude, is now proud to be a mother herself

She’s revered as a trail-blazing feminist and author Alice Walker touched the lives of a generation of women. A champion of women’s rights, she has always argued that motherhood is a form of servitude. But one woman didn’t buy in to Alice’s beliefs – her daughter, Rebecca, 38.

Here the writer describes what it was like to grow up as the daughter of a cultural icon, and why she feels so blessed to be the sort of woman 64-year-old Alice despises – a mother.

Read the entire article here.

Measuring the health patterns of the ‘mixed/multiple’ ethnic group in Britain: data quality problems, reporting issues, and implications for policy

International Journal of Social Research Methodology
Published online: 2017-11-25
pages 1-13
DOI: 10.1080/13645579.2017.1399623

Peter J. Aspinall, Emeritus Reader in Population Health
Centre for Health Services Studies
University of Kent, Canterbury, United Kingdom

The ‘mixed’ group, officially recognised in the 2001 Census, is one of the most rapidly growing ethnic groups in Britain. Although ‘mixed’ categorisation was added to ethnic coding in NHS datasets, our knowledge of health patterns for this population is meagre. Data quality problems remain a key obstacle, including poor reproducibility of the data and constraints on reporting due to sparse data bias. The consequent minimal and indicative evidence base has focused mainly on risky health behaviours, mental health and generic measures of self-rated health, as it has in the U.S.A. and Canada. There is negligible information on the main underlying causes of death, such as neoplasms, heart disease and stroke. Consideration should be given to pooling data across multiple years of health and general purpose surveys to enable reporting for the four ‘mixed’ categories and adjustment for mediating factors and relevant confounders, such as measures of socio-economic status.

Read or purchase the article here.