Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

To really grasp race, we must accept a double paradox. The first one is a truism of antiracist educators: we can see race, but it’s not real. The second is stranger: race has real consequences, but we can’t see it with the naked eye. Race is a power relationship; racial categories are not about interesting cultural or physical differences, but about putting other people into groups in order to dominate, exploit and attack them. Fundamentally, race makes power visible by assigning it to physical bodies. The evidence of race right before our eyes is not a visual trace of a physical reality, but a by-product of social perceptions, in which we are trained to see certain features as salient or significant. Race does not exist as a matter of biological fact, but only as a consequence of a process of racialisation.

Gregory Smithsimon, “How to see race,” Aeon, March 26, 2018. https://aeon.co/essays/race-is-not-real-what-you-see-is-a-power-relationship-made-flesh.

Katherine Johnson, Va. woman at center of ‘Hidden Figures,’ calls calculation ‘piece of cake’

Posted in Articles, Biography, Media Archive, United States, Virginia, Women on 2017-01-16 02:20Z by Steven

Katherine Johnson, Va. woman at center of ‘Hidden Figures,’ calls calculation ‘piece of cake’

CBS 6, WTVR-TV
Richmond Virginia
2017-01-13

HAMPTON, Va. — It is the untold story that has been hidden in Hampton for decades.

The box office hit “Hidden Figures” highlights the black female mathematicians at NASA who’s brain power helped launch the first Americans into space.

“It feels good,” said 98-year-old former NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson.

Johnson, portrayed in the film by Taraji P. Henson, calculated the trajectory for Alan Shepard, the first American in space. Johnson also confirmed, by hand, the launch calculations for John Glenn, the first American to circle the globe in 1962…

Read the entire article and watch the story here.

Tags: Alan Shepard, John Glenn, Katherine Johnson, NASA, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, WTVR-TV

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Taraji P. Henson Is a Math Genius in ‘Hidden Figures’ First Trailer

Posted in Articles, Arts, Media Archive, United States, Women on 2016-08-16 01:43Z by Steven

Taraji P. Henson Is a Math Genius in ‘Hidden Figures’ First Trailer

Variety
2016-08-15

Dave McNary, Film Reporter

Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monae break the glass ceiling — among other barriers — in the first trailer for the NASA drama “Hidden Figures,” which debuted Sunday night during the Rio Olympics.

The teaser opens with Henson’s Katherine Johnson character as a young girl, filling up a classroom blackboard with mathematical formulas, prompting her teacher to tell her parents, “I’ve never seen a mind like your daughter has.”…

In addition to Henson, Spencer portrays Dorothy Vaughan and Monae plays Mary Jackson as a trio of brilliant African-American women working at NASA, who served as the brains behind the 1962 launch of astronaut John Glenn into orbit — a stunning achievement that turned around the Space Race…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: Dorothy Vaughan, Janelle Monáe, John Glenn, Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, NASA, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Octavia Spencer, Taraji P. Henson, Variety

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Mixed Race Studies

Katherine Johnson, Va. woman at center of ‘Hidden Figures,’ calls calculation ‘piece of cake’

Taraji P. Henson Is a Math Genius in ‘Hidden Figures’ First Trailer

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