Nina Jablonski looks at the evolution of human pigmentation. It was noted by Darwin and others that humans who lived closer to the equator had darker skins. Is this a functional adaptation to sun exposure, or is there something more at play here? Series: “Darwin Evolving” [10/2009] [Science] [Show ID: 16926]
Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.youtube.com
HT @TheAngryindian
“… I cringe when I hear her chant, “You mix that Negro with that Creole make a Texas bamma” about her Alabama-born dad and her mom from Louisiana. This is the same reason I cringed at the L’Oreal ad that identified Beyonce as African-American, Native American and French.”
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Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.colorlines.com
There is a fine line between affirming mixed race people and bashing mono-race people.
I agree with Dr. Blay’s sentiment.
Bragging about being mixed race is akin to bragging about being mono-raced. Race is not a thing to be proud about. It is no accomplishment to be born. A person may prefer a certain skin color, but as Brenda says: Your preference is not preferable.
TRANSCRIPT:
FANSHEN: Recently I asked my friends when was the first time that they heard about the one-drop rule. And their answers were really incredible, so we’re sharing them here and we’d like to hear yours. So send us an email (onedropoflove(at)gmail, tweet us, anything, and let us know: when was the first time that YOU learned about the one-drop rule?
MARK: I self-identify as mixed, but I am politically Black. In our family we never talked about race or the one-drop rule – anything. And so basically I just intuited that there was a one-drop rule because I was defined as Black growing up as far as my experiences.
My dearest friend, growing up, would call me “contraband” because he learned about the phrase – he read something about slavery and that a slave that was seeking freedom, if they were caught they were considered ‘contraband’ and he thought that was funny. I had no knowledge, so he was calling me contraband and it hurt like hell and I had no ability to defend myself or to articulate a different argument.
So it really wasn’t until I graduated from high school, I was in the Marine Corps, I came across an interesting story in the New York Times about a woman who was suing the State of Louisiana because her birth certificate said that she was ‘Colored.’ She was raised White, she self-identified as White. And she fought her case all the way up to the Supreme Court and lost because according to state law, in 1970 if you were just any – any trace of Black, you were Colored to 1/32 Black, you were Colored. And she had 3/32s – they even went so far as to hire a genealogist. And so that fascinated me – it really resonated with me. I couldn’t articulate why, but I just found it a fascinating story.
Ten years later I was attending school at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland and I learned about the one-drop rule. And that’s where I learned about slavery, I learned about Manifest Destiny, etc. etc. etc. And I learned about the one-drop rule and I learned how pernicious and ridiculous it is and how hard we work to create a caste system and what really saddened me was defining Black as a negative – that if you had any part Black in you, that was not a good thing. And that’s…that’s heartbreaking. Nobody should ever have that experience and it will end because of people like Fanshen, who are creating this space for us to talk about elements of racism such as the one-drop rule and I’m very appreciative and have much gratitude for allowing me to share my story of how I learned about the one-drop rule.
SPOKESPERSON: Don’t forget to subscribe to the channel to keep up with the latestOne Drop news and other videos. Do you have ideas for more video content? Tell us what you’d like to see. We’ll see you next time to share more drops of love. Be sure to tell us by commenting here and on Twitter and Facebook, how YOU are spreading drops of love.
From
http://www.onedropoflove.org/how-i-learned-about-the-one-drop-rule-mark/
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David Edwards | RAW STORY 15 Oct 2015
Two Iowa parents are calling for an educator at Bailey Park Elementary School in Grinnell to be fired for allegedly making racist comments to mixed-race children.
Geoff Burd choked up as he explained to KCCI that his daughter,
Nikki, came home from school and recalled that the para-educator had said black people and white people should not be a family or go to the same school.
“It’s an unbelievable situation,” Burd said, sounding defeated. “I work very hard to protect her. I have worked her entire life to protect her.”
Sourced through Scoop.it from: mixemag.wordpress.com
by Abagond
Issa Rae Diop (1985- ), better known as Issa Rae, is a Black American television producer, writer and director. She is best known for “Awkward Black Girl” (2011), which went viral on YouTube a few years back. She is now working on the television show “Insecure” for HBO, still in development. The main character is loosely based on her.
…
At White private schools she stood out because she was Black. At Black and Latino public schools she was mocked for acting too “White”.
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Sourced through Scoop.it from: abagond.wordpress.com
By Jennifer Harvey
Excerpts by Glenn Robinson
In the mid-1990s Mary Bucholtz spent hours in conversation with students at a racially diverse high school in northern California. During her interviews, she asked each student a seemingly straightforward question. She asked them “for the record” to identify themselves according to their age, sex/gender, grade and race/ethnicity.
One of her persistent experiences blew my mind.
Almost every white student could not or would not answer Bucholtz’s question in a straightforward way. On everything else they did fine. But when it came to race/ethnicity, their responses ranged from the ironic (exemplified by a student who said, “I’m the whiteness of the white boys” in a fake British accent; responses Buchold characterizes as mock-celebrations of “affiliation with whiteness”), to those “feigning ignorance” (respondents qualifying “I’m white” with phrases like “I guess,” or “I don’t know” or odd elaborations like “From, uh, outward signs”).
…
how problematic “white” is in a racially supremacist society
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if one names one’s white identity without demonstrating a reluctance about that identity one risks being perceived as somehow endorsing racism
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white racial identity and white supremacy are so bound up with each other in the U.S. that these young people get silly, snarky or tongue-tied because–forced to own “white”–they are trying desperately to create a gap between these two things.
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Sourced through Scoop.it from: livingformations.com
Article by Guilaine Kinouani
Excerpts selected by Glenn Robinson
The privilege of being lighter skinned
I am a lighter skinned Black woman. I am light enough to benefit from shadism but dark enough to still be accepted as Black. A uniquely privileged position. Throughout my upbringing I have received messages in my environment that this made me more desirable, more worthy, and/or more significant than my darker skinned counterparts. These messages were both covert and overt and articulated in the home and outside the home, at school, in the media etc… Pretty much everywhere. There is no doubt that I was, at times, spoken to in kinder voices or treated with more patience than my darker skinned peers or sisters by both people of colour and by White people, all things being equal. In time, I have learnt that my femininity and womanhood would be more easily accepted.
Parenting and internalised racism
…in our efforts to compensate for racism, we socialise children into injustice, compliance and complicity and instil a sense of inferiority in them. In doing so we may limit children’s scope to be themselves. We may reduce our capacity to respond to them with compassion and kindness. We may attend to stereotypes of what our children could be or could be seen as, rather than attending to them as unique persons. In a nutshell, we may contribute to racism’s self-fulfilling prophecies, perpetuate racial inequalities and more worryingly, may increase their risk of psychological distress.
The perpetuation of oppression is everyone’s business
Sourced through Scoop.it from: racereflections.co.uk
Many pearls of wisdom in this article!
Note: Parents of all colors can have internalized racism and bias.
Earlier this week I, along with 21 other adoptee’s, adoption professionals and activists joined together to write An Open Letter: Why Co-opting “Transracial” in the Case of Rachel Dolezal is Problematic. The result was a media blitz, helping to define the word transracial. I was interviewed by the New York Times, Washington Post and International Business Times, as well as other outlets who supported adoptees in our desire to reclaim the integrity of this word.
View my conversation with Anderson Cooper here.
Sourced through Scoop.it from: theadoptedlife.com
Click through for more
“Every time we go after Rachel, we are doing exactly what her abusive parents want.”
Sourced through Scoop.it from: homeschoolersanonymous.wordpress.com
We were joined in this edition of iMiXWHATiLiKE! by a roundtable of panelists for a discussion of the politics of multiracialism and identity. We talked about the film Dear White People and more generally about the history of multiracial identities and the politics of popular culture representation of those identities, and bunch more!
Several of our music selections came from THIS LIST by J-Zone.
Get all the other shows you’ve missed and much more at imixwhatilike.org!
Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.mixcloud.com
HT Steven Riley @mixed_race
Mixed American Life 
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