Mixed Race Studies

Left of Black S3:E10 | Who is Black in Multiracial America?

Left of Black
John Hope Franklin Center
Duke University
2012-11-19

Mark Anthony Neal, Host and Professor of African & African American Studies
Duke University

Habiba Ibrahim, Associate Professor of English
University of Washington

Yaba Blay, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies
Drexel University

Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.

American racial history was long framed by the notion of the “one drop” rule, which within a political economy of race and difference, was a blatant attempt to embolden Whiteness and the privilege that derived from it.  Scholar Yaba Blay offers a different view of the “one drop” rule with her multi-media project (1)ne Drop which “seeks to challenge narrow, yet popular perceptions of what Blackness is and what Blackness looks like.”

Blay, a Visiting Professor of Africana Studies at Drexel University and contributing producer to CNN’s Black in America 5, which was inspired by the (1)ne Drop project, joins Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal on the November 19th episode of Left of Black to talk about the complexities of Black identity.  Neal is also joined by University of Washington Professor Habiba Ibrahim for part two of an interview about her new book Troubling the Family: The Promise of Personhood and the Rise of Multiracialism (University of Minnesota Press).

Left of Black S3:E9 | Racial Passing and the Rise of Multiracialism

Left of Black
John Hope Franklin Center
Duke University
2012-11-12

Mark Anthony Neal, Host and Professor of African & African American Studies
Duke University

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Clinical Assistant Professor of Communications
University of Southern California, Annenberg

Habiba Ibrahim, Associate Professor of English
University of Washington

Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.

For many African Americans, the practice of ‘Passing’—where light-skinned Blacks could pass for White—remains a thing connected to a difficult racial past. In her new book, Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity (Baylor University Press), Marcia Dawkins, a professor in the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California provides a fresh take on the practice arguing that passing in the contemporary moment transcends racial performance.

Dawkins talks about her new book with Left of Black host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal, via Skype.  Neal is also joined by University of Washington Professor Habiba Ibrahim for part one of a two-part interview about her new book Troubling the Family: The Promise of Personhood and the Rise of Multiracialism (University of Minnesota Press) in which she links the rise of Multiracialism in the 1990s to the maintenance of traditional gender norms.