Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

Puerto Rico, a colony of the United States since 1898―and a colony of Spain for 400 years before ―was very much subjected, by the empires and local criollo elites, to eugenicist ideas. “Race” science, in the first-half of the twentieth century, allowed criollo elites to create new racializing parameters while inserting “progressive” measures of social hygiene, public health, and eugenics to promote ideas of modernization, progress, and civilization. These seemingly progressive ideas were cemented on the figure of “el jibaro” (a white Puerto Rican farmworker) as the mythical symbol of the Puerto Rican nation which is constructed as a product of the mixture of Black, indigenous, and Spanish. Discursively constructing Puerto Ricanness as the mixture of three “races” allows for an erasure of racialization processes and the systematic racist structure of Puerto Rican nationalism as an all-inclusive ideology of exclusion. The conflation of these three “races” to create a white/light-skinned farmworker signify an erasure of the “factors”/bodies that were assumed to compose the idea behind Puerto Rican nationalism. Additionally, by seeing these three “races” as a mere factor for the creation of the “jibaro” it invisibilized those bodies which—in the criollo elite’s views—did not belong unless they were to “better the ‘race”(an intrinsic eugenic idea rooted in popular belief around certain kinds of racial mixture “pa’ mejorar la raza”). Hence, Blackness and Indigeneity in Puerto Rico are discursively mounted to create a seemingly mixed—dare I say, post-racial—society as long as Black and indigenous bodies mix and assimilate to the “jibaro nation.” This is to say, everything that falls outside of the national symbol of the “jibaro”—which strives for a lighter skin—becomes systematically pathologized. Hence, even if mixed-race identity is assumed to be the organizing principle, it is anti-Blackness and the systemic striving to achieve whiteness that operates as the driving force of Puerto Rican society.

R. Sánchez-Rivera, “Shilling for U.S. Empire: The Legacies of Scientific Racism in Puerto Rico,” The Abusable Past, June 22, 2020. https://www.radicalhistoryreview.org/abusablepast/shilling-for-u-s-empire-the-legacies-of-scientific-racism-in-puerto-rico/.

Engaging Culture, Race and Spirituality: New Visions

Posted in Anthologies, Books, Media Archive, Teaching Resources on 2013-09-13 04:52Z by Steven

Engaging Culture, Race and Spirituality: New Visions

Peter Lang Publishing
2013
232 pages
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-4331-2327-6
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4331-2328-3

Cynthia B. Dillard, Mary Frances Early Endowed Professor in Teacher Education
University of Georgia

Chinwe L. Okpalaoka, Director of Undergraduate Recruitment and Diversity Services in the College of Arts and Sciences
Ohio State University

Engaging Culture, Race and Spirituality addresses a critical question rarely addressed in our conversations and the literature about race, culture and diversity: How might spirituality and our inner lives matter in teaching and teacher education that explicitly engages and addresses race and culture? In ways explicit and embodied, this book focuses on how engaging spirituality and the inner life can serve as radical intervention in our dialogues about race and culture in education. Gathered together are the voices of emerging young scholars whose thinking and research explicitly marshal theories of spirituality as critical interventions in their dialogues and discourses about culture and race in teaching and teacher education. Each chapter is followed by a scholar visionary who points to ways for educators and educational researchers to see the usefulness of such spirituality in engaging research, pedagogy and practices. Their collective visions all deeply political, sometimes humorous, always insightful, and thoughtfully provocative call us to a new way of thinking about the «evidence of things unseen», about spirituality in education as a site of profound possibilities for change, equity, and social justice.

Contents

Cynthia B. Dillard/Chinwe L. Ezueh Okpalaoka: Introduction: Culture, Race, and Dialogue: Toward a Spiritual Praxis in Education
Tami A. Augustine/Deborah Justice Zurmehly: Conversations about Race: How Embracing Spirituality Opens Space for Dialogues in Teacher Education
Barbara Dray: Visionary Response: With Mindfulness as a Guide: Engaging Conversations in Teacher Education
Eyatta Fischer: Writing and Telling: Healing the Pain of Disconnection
Robin M. Boylorn: Visionary Response: On Teaching and Telling: Two Sides of a Teaching (Cassette) Tape
Brooke Harris Garad: Spiritually Centered Caring: An Approach for Teaching and Reaching Black Students in Suburbia
Samara D. Madrid: Visionary Response: Care as a Racialized, Critical, and Spiritual Emotion
Gilbert Kaburu/Chris Landauer: Less Religion, More Spirituality: Spiritually Relevant Pedagogy in the Global Era
Khosi Kubeka: Visionary Response: Infusing Identity Enactment as a Component of Spiritually Relevant Pedagogy
Angela Cartwright Lynskey: Occupy Classrooms: Teaching from a Spiritual Paradigm
Carmen Liliana Medina: Visionary Response: Spiritual Occupations: Reflections on Pedagogies and Everyday Stories of Globalization
Ashley N. Patterson: Can One Ever Be Wholly Whole? Fostering Biracial Identity Founded in Spirit
Bettina L. Love: Visionary Response: Biracial Identity, Spiritual Wholeness, and Black Girlhood
Erica Womack: Lessons in Love, Literacy, and Listening: Reflections on Learning with and from Black Female Youth
Marcelle M. Haddix: Visionary Response: Listening Face-to-Face and Eye-to-Eye: Seeing and Believing Black Girls and Women in Educational Practice and Research

Tags: Angela Cartwright Lynskey, Ashley N. Patterson, Barbara Dray, Bettina L. Love, Brooke Harris Garad, Chinwe L. Okpalaoka, Chinwe Okpalaoka, Chris Landauer, Cynthia B. Dillard, Cynthia Dillard, Deborah Justice Zurmehly, Erica Womack, Gilbert Kaburu, Khosi Kubeka, Marcelle M. Haddix, Peter Lang Publishing, Robin M. Boylorn, Samara D. Madrid, Tami A. Augustine

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