Mixed Race Studies

Chowan Discovery Group, Marvin T. Jones

Backintyme.biz
Blog Talk Radio
2014-12-20

Stacey Webb, Host

Marvin T. Jones, Executive Director
Chowan Discovery Group

Author & Historian Marvin T. Jones, Executive Director & owner of Marvin T. Jones and Associates, specializing in corporate communications photography and photographic design. His love of the community of his birth led him to create the now defunct Rowan-Chowan.com website, a personal website of stories and photo essays. jones is a native of Cofield, North Carolina. He attended the Winton Triangle’s C.S. Brown School and graduated from Ahoskie High School.

Marvin also wrote a chapter in Carolina Genesis, Beyond The Color Line and presents the first history of the Winton Triangle. Marvin’s essay “The Leading Edge of Edges-The Tri-Racial People of the Winton Triangle”, tells the story of a people who emerge from the meeting of the New and Old Worlds and how they created success from century to century in northeastern North Carolina. Highlights of the essay include: Origins of the Winton Triangle and the Triangle’s contribution to the Civil War in expanding freedom in the United States, Founding of Pleasant Plains Baptist Church & the C.S. Brown & Robert L. Vann Schools, and the achievements of their members & graduates. Leadership in worship, education, business & government.

Associates; Laverne Jones, Director & Dr. Harold Mitchell, Director.

Mission of the Chowan Discovery Group is to Collect, Preserve & present materials that describe & illustrate the Winton Triangle history. Dating back to the 1740’s, North Carolina’s Winton Triangle is one of the oldest communities if land-owning people of color in America. The Triangle originally encompassing the towns of Winton, Cofield & Union. In the late 19th century the Triangle expanded toward the newly incorporated town of Ahoskie.

“A Lot Like You” ~ Where Will Your Cultural Journey Take You?

Mixed Race Radio
Blog Talk Radio
2014-01-15, 20:00Z (15:00 EDT)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

Eliaichi Kimaro, Filmmaker

On today’s episode of Mixed Race Radio, we will meet Activist-turned-filmmaker Eliaichi Kimaro. As the director of 9elephants productions, Eli produces videos for non-profits about social and economic justice issues in an effort to use  video to bring stories of struggle, resistance and survival to a broader audience.

Eliaichi brings a lifetime of personal and professional experience exploring issues of culture, identity, race, class, gender and trauma to her Award-winning directorial debut, A Lot Like You.  Drawing upon her 9-year film journey, she is currently on the campus and conference lecture circuit engaging communities across the country in discussion about mixed race/multicultural issues, cultural identity, gender violence, and the power of personal storytelling.

Please join us Today as we discuss how we can “use our own personal stories (our own documentaries if you will) like ‘A Lot Like You’, as a spring board for exploring issues of race, identity, and belonging.”

WON’T YOU JOIN US? We’d love to hear your story!

Listen to the interview here.

The Chinese in Mexico: No Longer a Forgotten History

Mixed Race Radio
Blog Talk Radio
2013-10-09, 21:00Z (17:00 EDT)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

Robert Chao Romero, Associate Professor of Chicana/o Studies and Asian American Studies
University of California, Los Angeles

On Today’s episode of Mixed Race Radio we will meet Professor Robert Chao Romero. With a Mexican father from Chihuahua and a Chinese immigrant mother from Hubei in central China, Romero’s dual cultural heritage serves as the basis for his academic studies. He considers himself fortunate to be able to study himself for a living and his research examines Asian immigration to Latin America, as well as the large population of “Asian-Latinos” in the United States. He is also interested in the role played by religion in social activism.

His first book, The Chinese in Mexico, 1882-1940 (2010), tells the forgotten history of the Chinese community in Mexico.  The Chinese in Mexico received a Latino Studies Section Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association. Romero received his J. D. from UC Berkeley and his Ph.D. in Latin American history from UCLA.  

When he is not a professor, he is a pastor and director of Christian Students of Conscience, an organization which trains and mobilizes students in issues of race and social justice from a faith-based perspective.  He is also the author of Jesus for Revolutionaries: An Introduction to Race, Social Justice, and Christianity (October 2013).

“The United States of the United Races” w/ Dr. Greg Carter

Mixed Race Radio
Blog Talk Radio
2013-09-25, 16:00Z (12:00 EDT)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

Greg Carter, Associate Professor of History
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

On Today’s episode of Mixed Race Radio we will meet Professor Greg Carter, author of The United States of the United Races: A Utopian History of Racial Mixing. Professor Carter currently serves as the Associate Professor, Department of History at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. He studied at the University of Texas at Austin where he received his Ph.D. in 2007.

Besides receiving several prestigious awards including, the Graduate School Research Council Award (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee 2009) and the Campus Reading Seminar Award (University of Wisconsin System Institute for Race and Ethnicity 2008), Professor Carter is teaching some of the coolest courses in a college setting. He continues to present some very intriguing discussions that explore the mixed race experience in media and he does this while remaining involved in the History Caucus, Minority Scholars Committee and several other committees which he actually chairs.

“Each of the seven chapters in The United States of the United Races explores how tensions in our history have revised themselves in every period since the early republic. This book presents the career of an idea through time more so than the biographies of particular writers, orators, or activists. This unified approach shows that in every period, an optimistic stance has been as central to the American conversation on race as the pessimist. Because antipathy towards mixture is so established, and because they have no formal connection to predecessors, each critic of the dominant position must re-create the position in new ways.”

Today, we will discuss Professor’s Carter’s book,  The United States of the United Races: A Utopian History of Racial Mixing and engage our listeners in a discussion centered on the history of positive ideas about racial mixing in the U.S. as well as Critical Mixed Race Studies as a field.

Mixed People: “Natural Bridges” to Racial Healing & Utopia?

Mixed Race Radio
Blog Talk Radio
2013-09-04, 16:00Z (12:00 EDT)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

Rainier Spencer, Senior Advisor to the President; Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies; Founder and Director of the Afro-American Studies Program
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

On today’s episode of Mixed Race Radio we will meet Rainier Spencer, Professor of Afro-American Studies in the Interdisciplinary Degrees Program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). He has authored three books: 1) Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix, Lynne Rienner, 2011; 2) Challenging Multiracial Identity, Lynne Rienner, 2006 and; 3) Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States, Westview, 1999.  All this and he currently serves as Senior Advisor to the UNLV President.

Dr. Spencer is the founder and director of the Afro-American Studies Program at UNLV and is considered one of the founders of the field of critical mixed-race theory. While his research interest is in multiracial identity from the perspective of racial skepticism, including the ways that multiracial identity is implicated in the reification of biological race his interdisciplinary teaching interests include Afro-American history and popular culture as well as American slavery. In addition to writing numerous anthology chapters in this field of study, Rainier Spencer has been interviewed by and has provided commentary for the New York Times, has appeared on both American & Canadian television to discuss mixed-race identity, and is a featured speaker in the documentary film Multiracial Identity (Abacus Productions, 2010).

Using his book, Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix as the foundation for today’s episode, we will discuss the long held view that mixed race people are somehow supposed to serve as a bridge to unite all people,

“But what of the notion that black/white persons are in themselves natural bridges for the facilitation of racial healing and reconciliation? It should come as no surprise that this is a biological argument dressed up in sociological attire.” —Rainier Spencer

For more information, click here.

Heidi Durrow~The Girl Who Fell From the Sky Into Our Hearts

Mixed Race Radio
Blog Talk Radio
2013-08-28, 16:00Z (12:00 EDT)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

Heidi W. Durrow, Author

On Today’s episode of Mixed Race Radio, we will meet author, speaker, and visionary, Heidi Durrow. Heidi is the New York Times best-selling author of The Girl Who Fell From the Sky (Algonquin Books), which received writer Barbara Kingsolver’s 2008 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Literature of Social Change, and is already a book club favorite.

Ebony Magazine named Heidi as one of its Power 100 Leaders of 2010 along with writers Edwidge Danticat and Malcolm Gladwell. Heidi was nominated for a 2011 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Debut.

Originally from the Pacific Northwest, Heidi is a graduate of Stanford, Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism and Yale Law School.  She has worked as a corporate attorney at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, and as a Life Skills trainer to professional athletes of the National Football League and National Basketball Association. Most recently she has served as the co-host of the award-winning weekly podcast Mixed Chicks Chat; and as a co-founder and co-producer of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival which was featured in the New York Times, Ebony Magazine and National Public Radio…

For more information, click here.

“The One and Only Cheerios”~ The “NEW” American Family?

Mixed Race Radio
Blog Talk Radio
2013-07-10, 16:00Z (12:00 EDT)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

Join us on Wednesday July 10th, 2013 as we explore the newest General Mills Cheerios commercial that recently debuted. We will discuss the backlash and speak with an all-star guest line-up while exploring what many of us have known for years: The “NEW” American family is mixed, blended, and splendid!

Listen to the episode here.

CREE w/ Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, PhD

Counter-Racist Evolving Engineer (CREE)
Blog Talk Radio
2013-06-16

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Professor of Sociology
Duke University

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, PhD,  is a professor of sociology and a council member of Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Duke University.  He is the author of several books including the acclaimed Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America.  He is also the author and co-author of numerous other books and papers. Most interestingly for this program, Dr. Bonilla-Silva co-authored a chapter in Changing Terrain of Race and Ethnicity: Theory, Methods and Public Policy entitled “‘We are all Americans!’: The Latin Americanization of Race Relations in the USA”.

The center question of this discussion will be the functionality of the term “non-black people” in eliminating the global system of racism (white/light domination).

Listen to the episode here. Download the episode here.

Dr. J .T. Mills: Helping Students Explore Concepts of Race

Mixed Race Radio
Blog Talk Radio
2013-06-19, 16:00Z (12:00 EDT)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

John T. Mills, Assistant Director of Multicultural Affairs
Rowan University, Glassboro, New Jersery

Legitimate knowledge regarding the construction of race in America is absent in today’s youth and college aged students. It is imperative to have an understanding of the fluidity of race in America and its context to the systems that perpetuate the ongoing racial divisions in communities and disparities in health care, economic prosperity, and everyday interactions, for example.

Such clarity for these issues is overshadowed by the notion of post racialism in this society that teaches us to avoid or suppress such discussions in the axiom of “political correctness.”  One only needs to look to the President of the United States who is described as the first African American/Black man to hold that office when he is in reality bi-racial. Moreover, the complexity of race in the United States can further be interrogated in his self identification because he is aware of the social, political, and global lenses that identify him as a man of color over his White ancestry.

It is in this context that Dr. Mills works to create environments and opportunities for students to explore the nuances of race and race relations in America in the hopes of creating an awareness that would bring about greater understanding among and between all people.

These discussions then must begin with analyzing why and how race came about in this country during the 17th and 18th centuries during the economic development of the United States when there was much more cross racial cooperation and even harmony at one point than our history books tell us. Blacks, Whites, and Native American Indians intermingled to create a nation and have had more historical commonalities that is being taught and that needs to be addressed to expose the modern forms of raced based oppression that exists today.

For more information, click here.