Mixed Race Studies

Controversial Hire Won’t Serve as Dartmouth’s Native American Program Director

Valley News
White River Junction, Vermont
2015-10-02

Rob Wolfe, Valley News Staff Writer

Susan Taffe Reed stepped down as director of Dartmouth’s Native American Program. (Dartmouth College – Eli Burakian)

Hanover — Dartmouth College officials said Thursday that the school’s new Native American Program director has left that position in response to controversy over her representation of her ancestry and tribal affiliation.

“Susan Taffe Reed will no longer serve as the director of the Native American Program,” college spokeswoman Diana Lawrence said in an email Thursday. “Unfortunately, the distraction around her appointment prevents her from effectively serving in this role. It does not prevent her from contributing to Dartmouth in other ways, and we are currently exploring opportunities with her.”

She remains an employee of the college, according to Lawrence.

Taffe Reed, who says she is of Native American descent, is president of the Eastern Delaware Nations, a nonprofit group not recognized by federal or state authorities that says it represents Delawares who remained in their ancestral lands of Northeastern Pennsylvania — a claim that the federally recognized Delaware Tribe contests…

Read the entire article here.

Indian Enough for Dartmouth?

Inside Higher Ed
2015-09-17

Scott Jaschik, Editor

Dartmouth College this month appointed Susan Taffe Reed as director of its Native American Program. In a news release, the college noted Taffe Reed’s academic background (a Cornell University Ph.D. and postdocs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Bowdoin College), her research interest (ethnomusicology) and something else: Taffe Reed, Dartmouth noted, is president of Eastern Delaware Nations Inc.

If Dartmouth expected applause for hiring someone with a strong academic background and a personal background that would appeal to its Native American students, whom the program serves, it was mistaken…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed: Multiracial College Students Tell Their Life Stories

Cornell University Press
2013-12-17
208 pages
6 x 9 in.
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8014-5251-2
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8014-7914-4

Edited by:

Andrew Garrod, Professor Emeritus of Education
Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire

Christina Gómez, Professor of Sociology and Latino & Latin American Studies
Northeastern Illinois University

Robert Kilkenny, Executive Director; Clinical Associate
Alliance for Inclusion and Prevention
School of Social Work
Simmons College, Boston, Massachusetts

Mixed presents engaging and incisive first-person experiences of what it is like to be multiracial in what is supposedly a postracial world. Bringing together twelve essays by college students who identify themselves as multiracial, this book considers what this identity means in a reality that occasionally resembles the post-racial dream of some and at other times recalls a familiar world of racial and ethnic prejudice.

Exploring a wide range of concerns and anxieties, aspirations and ambitions, these young writers, who all attended Dartmouth College, come from a variety of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Unlike individuals who define themselves as having one racial identity, these students have lived the complexity of their identity from a very young age. In Mixed, a book that will benefit educators, students, and their families, they eloquently and often passionately reveal how they experience their multiracial identity, how their parents’ race or ethnicity shaped their childhoods, and how perceptions of their race have affected their relationships.

Contents

• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I. Who Am I?
  • 1. Good Hair / Ana Sofia De Brito
  • 2. So, What Are You? / Chris Collado
  • 3. In My World 1+1 = 3 / Yuki Kondo-Shah
  • 4. A Sort of Hybrid / Allison Bates
• Part II. In-Betweenness
  • 5. Seeking to Be Whole / Shannon Joyce Prince
  • 6. The Development of a Happa / Thomas Lane
  • 7. A Little Plot of No-Man’s-Land / Ki Mae Ponniah Heussner
  • 8. Finding Blackness / Samiir Bolsten
• Part III. A Different Perspective
  • 9. Chow Mein Kampf / Taica Hsu
  • 10. A Work in Progress / Anise Vance
  • 11. We Aren’t That Different / Dean O’Brien
  • 12. Finding Zion / Lola Shannon
• About the Editors

Professor discusses covert racism

The Dartmouth
Dartmouth College
Hanover, New Hampshire
2013-09-27

Bryn Morgan

Though racism is more covert today, blacks are subject to the same prejudice as they were in the 1960s, Duke University sociology professor Eduardo Bonilla-Silva argued in a lecture on Thursday. Bonilla-Silva said a new form of racism has emerged, replacing Jim Crow racism.

“We are not post-racial,” he said. “This ideology is suave but deadly.”

Focusing on relations between whites and blacks, Bonilla-Silva said the latter’s current economic status has remained the same in recent decades, even as the forms of subordination and racism have since evolved.

After describing various ways in which this ideology is prevalent in today’s society, Bonilla-Silva presented three main points about color-blind racism: the forms of interpreting racism, rhetorical strategies for articulating racism and stories contextualizing racism.

Bonilla-Silva said whites believe that they are not racist and often use the election of President Barack Obama to support the claim that America has moved beyond its racially tense past…

Read the entire article here.

The Color of Color-Blindness: Whites’ Race Talk in ‘Post-Racial’ America

Reitman/DeGrange Memorial Lecture Series
Dartmouth College
Hanover, New Hampshire
Haldeman 41 (Kreindler Conference Hall)
Thursday, 2013-09-26, 16:00-17:30 EDT (Local Time)

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Professor of Sociology
Duke University

Professor Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Sociology Deptartment Chair at Duke University, will deconstruct whites’ post-racial or color-blind talk & suggest this is the new, dominant prejudice in the U.S.

Post-racial arguments did not emerge in 2008 with the election of President Obama. White America has believed a version of post-racialism since the early 1980s. In this talk, Professor Bonilla-Silva will address three things related to this subject. First, to be able to clearly discuss racial matters, he will begin by defining what racism is all about. Second, he will be devote some time to characterizing the nature of and describing the practices associated with the racial regime of Post-Civil  Rights America. Third, the bulk of the talk will revolve around the examination of “color-blind racism” or whites’ race talk in the contemporary period. He will conclude his talk with suggestions of what is to be done to prevent color-blindness from sealing the (white racial) deal in America.

Co-Sponsored by the African and African-American Studies Program, and the Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies Program.  

For more information, click here.

SOCY 57: Identity and Social Interaction of Multiracial Americans

Dartmouth College
Department of Sociology
Upper Division

Currently being taught as of Spring 2011

Melissa R. Herman, Assistant Professor of Sociology

The 2000 Census revealed that nearly 4% of youth and 2% of adult Americans belong to more than one racial category. What are the social, historical, and biological meanings of the term multi-racial? What are the challenges and benefits associated with belonging to more than one race group? How do multi-racial youth negotiate the path to developing a healthy identity differently than mono-racial youth? How has the social context of race changed the way multiracial people identify? We will consider how schools, families, peer groups, and neighborhoods influence the development of biracial Americans. (Course syllabus)

Students manage social lives amidst diversity

The Dartmouth
Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire
2010-11-11

Marina Villeneuve, The Dartmouth Staff

Editor’s Note: This is the second installment in a three-part series investigating race at the College. The experiences and opinions expressed are the views of individual students, and should not be considered representative of wider communities.

When Marian Gutierrez ’13 stepped onto Dartmouth’s campus as a freshman, she said found she herself a member of a student population strikingly different than the one that existed in her hometown of Los Angeles.

“It wasn’t as diverse as I thought it would be,” she said. “It was a bit of a culture shock.”

The College’s efforts to widen the diversity of the student body have resulted in an undergraduate population increasingly reflective of national demographics — as of this fall, the undergraduate population is 8 percent African-American, 14 percent Asian-American, 7 percent Latino, 4 percent Native American, 7 percent international and 53 percent white, according to the Office of Institutional Research…

…Students of mixed race said their backgrounds allowed them to mediate between different groups on campus.

“Being half black and half Mexican has made my life more interesting here — I feel two ways at same time,” Chris Norman ’13 said. “There’s more than one group I can go to and relate with. For me, it’s easier to branch out to the mainstream community being mixed race.”…

Read the entire article here.