Mixed Race Studies

Tanya K. Hernández, “Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination”

Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America
Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island
2018-12-06 (Recorded on 2018-10-25)

Tanya K. Hernández, Archibald R. Murray Professor of Law
Fordham University School of Law, New York New York

In her new book “Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination,” Professor Tanya Katerí Hernández explores the question of how to pursue racial equality in a growing multiracial world. The growth of a mixed-race population has led some commentators to proclaim that multiracial discrimination is distinct in nature from the racial discrimination that non-multiracial persons experience, and that as a consequence a whole new approach to civil rights law is required. Hernández describes her own experience as an Afro-Latina mixed-race person and then shares how she tracked down the court case narratives of multiracial discrimination and the story of racial privilege they revealed. The stories she uncovered are especially timely. Coming at a time when explicit racism is resurfacing, Hernández’s look at multiracial discrimination cases is essential for fortifying the focus of civil rights law on racial privilege and the lingering legacy of bias against non-whites, and has much to teach us about how to move towards a more egalitarian society.

Princess Nokia In Conversation at Brown University

Brown University
2017-04-27 (Published on 2017-05-16)

Facilitated by Sofia Robledo Rower ’18

Destiny Nicole Frasqueri, also known as Princess Nokia, is an Afro-Latina Boricua artist and musician based in New York City. Her music tackles the intersection of gender, race, class, urbanism, and age in captivating sonic and linguistic medleys. This public conversation will focus on spirituality, feminism, and race in her artistic process and performances.

Presented by Women’s History Series 2017

Watch the discussion here.

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “Why Can’t We Just Get Along?: Race Matters in the Colorblind Racial Movement”

Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America (CSREA)
Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice
Brown University
2015-02-27 (Published on 2015-07-02)

Presents…

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Professor of Sociology
Duke University

“Race Today: A Symposium on Race in America” brought a group of the nation’s most respected intellectuals on race, racial theory and racial inequality together to consider the troubling state of black life in America today. What are the broader structural factors that shape race today? How do these factors work on the ground and institutionally and what are the consequences? What are the ideas about race, and racial identities that enable the normalcy of stark racial differences today? In particular, what role do key ideas such as “colorblindness” and “post race” play in shaping perception and outcomes? What can be done to challenge ideological and structural impediments to a racially egalitarian society?

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva is a Professor of Sociology at Duke University. Bonilla-Silva speaks widely on race and ethnic matters nation wide. He has published four books: White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era (co-winner of the 2002 Oliver Cox Award given by the American Sociological Association), Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States (2004 Choice Award; this book is now in a second [fourth] expanded and revised edition that was published in 2006), White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism (with Ashley Doane), and (with Tukufu Zuberi) White Logic, White Methods: Racism and Social Science.

Brown campus newspaper issues apology after racist columns

The Associated Press
2015-10-07

Amy Anthony

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — The Brown University campus newspaper apologized Wednesday after publishing what it says were two “deeply hurtful” and racist columns.

The Brown Daily Herald’s editorial board published an editor’s note saying it regretted the hurt caused by the two opinion columns, both written by student M. Dzhali Maier.

One titled “The white privilege of cows,” which was published Monday, “invoked the notion of biological differences between races,” while “Columbian Exchange Day,” published Tuesday, argued that Native Americans should be thankful for colonialism, according to the editor’s note.

“The white privilege of cows” column was left on The Herald’s website “in an effort to be transparent,” according to an editor’s note later added to it. The “Columbian Exchange Day” column was removed and replaced by an editor’s note. That column was “unintentionally published due to an internal error,” according to the note. It was online for about an hour before it was taken down.

“We understand that these columns contained racist content that has no place in our paper or community,” the editor’s note said…

Read the entire article here.

A Statement from a Collective of Multiracial and Biracial Students

bluestockings magazine
Monday, 2015-10-12

Multiracial and Biracial Students at Brown

For further context, please see the bluestockings editors statement.

Introduction

We, a collective of multiracial and biracial students, write this statement to address the publication of a series of articles by the Brown Daily Herald, as well the publication of “An open letter to students on power, learning and responsibility” written by President Christina Paxson, Richard Locke, a provost, and Russell Carey, executive vice president for planning and policy. We write out of deep concern for the decisions made by the Brown Daily Herald to publish the racist opinion articles “The White Privilege of Cows,” and “Columbian Exchange Day” [by M. Dzhali Maler ’17] on October 5th, and October 6th, 2015, respectively, and the administration’s choice to address the publishing of these articles with an open letter that minimizes the pain of Native and Indigenous students.

The Herald’s staff privileges writers who continue in the legacy of white supremacy, further marginalizing students already systemically oppressed by the University. In an effort to recenter and stand in solidarity with Native and Indigenous students, we call attention to The Herald’s errors and their history of racism…

…We also call multiracial and biracial community members to interrogate the ways in which we are complicit in the erasure of Native and Indigenous people. Moreover, multiracial, biracial and Indigenous identities are not separate—there are multi- and biracial people who hold Indigenous identity. We, as a community that experiences multiple histories of racism and colonization while often being heralded as a signal of the end of racism, must evaluate, address, and decolonize our own actions…

Read the entire article here.

Book Release of Prof. Lundy Braun’s Breathing Race into the Machine

Brown University
Providence, Rhode Island
Program in Science and Technology Studies
2014-03-26

This February, Royce Family Professor in Teaching Excellence, professor of medical science and Africana studies, and a member of the Science and Technology Studies Program, Lundy Braun released her new book Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics.

In her book, Lundy Braun traces the little-known history of the spirometer to reveal the ways medical instruments have worked to naturalize racial and ethnic differences, from Victorian Britain to today. An unsettling account of the pernicious effects of racial thinking that divides people along genetic lines, this book helps us understand how race enters into science and shapes medical research and practice.

In the antebellum South, plantation physicians used a new medical device—the spirometer—to show that lung volume and therefore vital capacity were supposedly less in black slaves than in white citizens. At the end of the Civil War, a large study of racial difference employing the spirometer appeared to confirm the finding, which was then applied to argue that slaves were unfit for freedom. What is astonishing is that this example of racial thinking is anything but a historical relic…

Read the entire article here.

Race Medicine: Treating Health Inequities from Slavery to the Genomic Age with Prof. Dorothy Roberts

Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice
Brown University
Steven Robert ’62  Campus Center, Petteruti Lounge
75 Waterman Street
Providence, Rhode Island 02912
Tuesday, 2013-12-10, 17:30 EST (Local Time)

Dorothy E. Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology; Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania

Dorothy Roberts is the fourteenth Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, George A. Weiss University Professor, and the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at University of Pennsylvania, where she holds appointments in the Law School and Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology. An internationally recognized scholar, public intellectual, and social justice advocate, she has written and lectured extensively on the interplay of gender, race, and class in legal issues and has been a leader in transforming public thinking and policy on reproductive health, child welfare, and bioethics. Professor Roberts is the author of the award-winning books Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Random House/Pantheon, 1997) and Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books/Civitas, 2002), as well as co-editor of six books on constitutional law and gender. She has also published more than eighty articles and essays in books and scholarly journals, including Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, and Stanford Law Review. Her latest book, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century, was published by the New Press in July 2011.

Professor Roberts has been a professor at Rutgers and Northwestern University, a visiting professor at Stanford and Fordham, and a fellow at Harvard University’s Program in Ethics and the Professions, Stanford’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and the Fulbright Program. She serves as chair of the board of directors of the Black Women’s Health Imperative, on the board of directors of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, and on the advisory boards of the Center for Genetics and Society and the Family Defense Center. She also serves on the Standards Working Group of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (stem cell research). She recently received awards from the National Science Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the 2010 Dorothy Ann and Clarence L. Ver Steeg Distinguished Research Fellowship.

Sponsored by the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice with support from the Associate Provost for Diversity, the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, the Office of Medical Education, and the Science and Technology Studies Program.

For more information, click here.

Critical Mixed Race Studies in the Twenty-First Century (ETHN 0090B S01)

Brown University
Fall 2013

Alexandrina R. Agloro, Visiting Instructor in American Studies

This course will guide students through an understanding of the historical, contemporary, and ideological rationale behind the constructions of mixed race, and how mixed race theory plays out in history, art, and contemporary media. This course aims to expand the conversations of mixed race beyond the stereotypes of tragic mulattos and happy hapas, instead interrogating what mixed race looks like in the twenty-first century and what historical precedents can explain current phenomena.

For more information, click here. View the syllabus (in Microsoft Word format) here.

The week of October 20th, my co-authored article with Glenn C. Robinson titled, “The Impact of Internet Publishing and Online Communications on Mixed-Race Discourses” from the Asian American Literary Review Special Issue on Mixed Race, will be part of the required reading. Please read the syllabus for information on some other additional excellent resources.

Lecture: Unbearable Blackness

Terror and the Inhuman (2012-10-25 through 2012-10-27)
Brown University
Sidney Frank Hall, Room 220
185 Meeting St.
2012-10-25, 18:30 EDT (Local Time)

Jared Sexton, Associate Professor, African American Studies; Associate Professor, Film & Media Studies
University of California, Irvine

The Department of Modern Culture and Media presents a lecture by Jared Sexton titled “Unbearable Blackness,” as part of a conference called “Terror and the Inhuman.” In this lecture, Sexton will address the psychic life struggles of black freedom within the political culture and cultural politics. Sexton, associate professor of African American studies and film and media studies at the University of California, is the author of Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (2008) and is the editor of Racial Theories in Context (2013).

For more information, click here.

Sequencing the Trellis: The Production of Race in the New Human Genomics

Brown University
December 2003
185 pages

Brady Dunklee, Executive Director
ATRAVES US

In partial completion of the requirements for honors.

Note on the Title: “Trellis” refers to an analogy that NHGRI director Francis Collins uses to describe race and human evolution, emphasizing mixture between “races,” in opposition to evolutionary trees which emphasize divergence. “Sequencing” refers to the main activity of recent genomic research, and is meant to suggest both this activity and the differentiation of groups of people, which is the subject of this thesis.

Human genomic science has emerged in the past decade as a powerful new biological field, combining molecular and population genetics with advanced information technologies, allowing DNA sequencing and analysis in a rapid, high throughput fashion. In addition to producing a vast quantity of scientific data, the Human Genome Project and other efforts in human genomics have produced claims about the social implications of their work. The result has been a complex expert discourse on the nature of the human.

A particularly rich subset of this discourse has addressed the meanings, use and reality of race and ethnicity in light of new genomic knowledge. A great variety of positions on racial and ethnic difference have been put forth, best known of which is the contention that race is biologically meaningless.

This thesis shows that this claim is not the whole story. Genomic discourse has, since its beginnings, deployed and produced race in a constant, if variegated manner. A “technology of difference” has been produced, a set of terms, meanings, and ways in which knowledge is structured and authorized, whose collective action is to differentiate people racially and ethnically.

This thesis examines this technology of difference, showing that genomics is in fact making race, and demonstrating some of the ways in which it does so. My approach is an analysis of discourse, which addresses terminology, formal configurations and epistemology in the literatures produced by genomic scientists. The dominant characteristic in this discourse is instability. Meanings, forms, and claims shift and change on a variety of levels.

This thesis shows that surprising patterns can be seen in this instability, and that instability is itself a constitutive factor giving strength and cohesion to the genomic production of human racial and ethnic difference.

I suggest, further, that now is a crucial time for interventions to be made in the genomics of human difference. Those who want an end to race, or who want positive, livable transformations of race, can find both opportunity and danger in these new differentiations.

Table of Contents

• Title Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• Table of Figures
• Inscriptions
• Thesis Statement…………………………………………………………………
• Introduction……………………………………………………………………………
  • I. Unifications
  • II. Divisions
  • III. Contexts
  • IV. Materials and Methods
• Chapter 1: Categories and Keywords in the Genomics of Race
  • I. Transferals
  • II. “Race” and “Ethnicity”
  • III. Populations, Groups and Communities
  • IV. “Minorities” and “Inclusion”
  • VI. Chapter Summary
• Chapter 2: Formal Configurations: Nested Proxies & Perspectival Phasing
  • I. Theoretical Framework
  • II. Making Difference Within Race
  • III. Making Difference Around Race
• Chapter 3: Instability and Discourse
  • I. Reading and Writing
  • II. Articulate Instability
• Chapter 4: Epistemology……………………………………………………………
  • I. Definitions and Methods
  • II. One Drop
  • III. White Normativity
  • IV. Racial Essentialism
  • V. Three Spaces
• Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………
• Bibliography

Table of Figures

• Figure I-1— Craig Venter of Celera Genomics, left, shakes hands with Francis Collins of NHGRI, right, at a ceremony at the White House, June 2000.
• Figure I-2 — Cover of Nature, February 15, 2001. The mosaic includes the faces of Mendel, Watson and the Beatles.
• Figure I-3 — Stills from “Exploring Our Molecular Selves,” a film produced by NHGRI as part of a free educational toolkit for high school students.
• Figure 1-1 — “Populations” and Race: “Not everyone’s smiling. A plan to study haplotypes in these populations is prompting angry words.”
• Figure 2-1 — Diagram of racial schema in Risch, et al. (2002).
• Figure 2-2 — Perspectival Differentiation in Collins (2003).
• Figure 4-1 — One Drop Rule and Founding Populations in genomics.

…At first glance, the appearance of these types of anti-race critiques appears to frustrate an attempt to theorize a mainstream of genomic ideas about race and ethnicity—they simply appear contradictory. It is my contention that they are contradictory on significant levels, but that they share a terminology, a set of discursive patterns, and a certain epistemology that allow them to resolve such contradictions, and unite them in making race.

Even when the term race is used as a “misconception,” race is configured in new ways with respect to genomic knowledge. Race is produced, as an entity that is purely mythical and controverted by this expert discourse. Race is made by genomicists into something new which is not genomic…

Read the entire thesis here.