Mixed Race Studies

Stateless in the Dominican Republic

Columbia Law School
2015-12-15

Media Contact: Public Affairs, 212-854-2650 or publicaffairs@law.columbia.edu

Human Rights Lawyers Champion the Rights of Disenfranchised Dominicans of Haitian Descent, in a Talk at Columbia Law School

New York, December 15, 2015—The plight of more than 200,000 people in the Dominican Republic who were stripped of their citizenship two years ago by that nation’s highest court was discussed by two human rights attorneys at Columbia Law School. The newly stateless people were Dominican-born to undocumented Haitian immigrant parents or grandparents, and they now face the threat of forced deportation, leading the lawyers to draw parallels to the current debate in the United States over birthright citizenship.

The Nov. 19 event—“Immigration and Black Lives: Haitian Deportations in the Dominican Republic”—was sponsored by Columbia Law School’s Latino/a Law Students Association and Black Law Students Association, and cosponsored by Social Justice Initiatives, the Columbia Journal of Race and Law, and the Human Rights Institute. It was organized by Daily Guerrero ’17, who came to the United States from the Dominican Republic when she was six years old.

Cassandre Théano, an associate legal officer for the Open Society Justice Initiative, explained that in 2013, the Dominican Republic’s highest court denied the daughter of Haitian migrants her “cédula”—or identity papers—confiscated her birth certificate, and applied the decision to anyone born after 1929, revoking the citizenship of Haitian descendants who had been living in the Dominican Republic for generations. “Pretty much every international organization was shocked, and there was a lot of uproar,” Théano said…

“This is really a racial justice issue,” said Natasha Lycia Ora Bannan, president of the National Lawyers Guild and an associate counsel at LatinoJustice PRLDEF, which works with low-wage Latina immigrant workers in the United States. Nearly three-quarters of the Dominican Republic’s population is made up of people of mixed-race heritage, while 95 percent of the Haitian population is black. A language difference also exists, as most Dominicans speak Spanish and Haitians Haitian Creole. “These policies are targeting black and brown people,” Bannan said…

Read the entire article here.

Mexico ‘discovers’ 1.4 million black Mexicans—they just had to ask

Fusion
2015-12-15

Rafa Fernandez De Castro

For the first time in its history, Mexico’s census bureau has recognized the country’s black population in a national survey that found there are approximately 1.4 million citizens (1.2% of the population) who self-identify as “Afro-Mexican” or “Afro-descendant.”

The survey found that more women identify as black than men, by about 705,000 to 677,000. It also found that most Afro-Mexicans live in the states of Guerrero, Oaxaca and Veracruz, which is not entirely unsurprising given Mexico’s history.

Miguel Cervera, director general of sociodemographic statistics for the country’s census bureau (known as INEGI), told Fusion the 2015 survey is a preliminary effort to register demographic changes in preparation for the 2020 national census. He says Afro-Mexicans have always been included in past surveys, but were never given the option to identify themselves as such…

Read the entire article here.

New book ‘A Chosen Exile’

WREG-TV
Memphis, Tennessee
2015-12-17

For nearly 200 years, countless African-Americans chose to leave their families, friends and communities to live in exile.

Allyson Hobbs reveals this piece of history and how it affected race relations in her new book “A Chosen Exile.”

Watch the interview here.

The Rise and Rise of Misty Copeland

The Year in Style 2015
The New York Times
2015-12-18

Ruth La Ferla

This year, Misty Copeland’s fame rose from her performances in ballet, on Broadway and in commercials. Credit Bon Duke for The New York Times, taken at Steps on Broadway in New York City.

Captivating a general audience, the prima ballerina is a crossover star: from ballet to Broadway to commercial fame.

Cherry Peace stood, feet firmly planted, at the stage door of the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in October. She was waiting for Misty Copeland, who had just wrapped up a matinee performance of Paul Taylor’s “Company B” at the American Ballet Theater, to kick off her toe shoes and exit.

There was no sign of Ms. Copeland, but Ms. Peace, 52, a writer who had traveled from Reno, Nev., expressly to see her, stayed rooted to the spot, hoping, if not for an autograph, at least for a glimpse of her idol.

“When you get older,” she said, “there are certain things you want to do. Seeing Misty Copeland was on my bucket list.”

Ms. Peace was among legions of fans — schoolgirls and seniors, New Yorkers and visitors, balletomanes and oddly assorted thrill seekers — who had thronged to Lincoln Center to see Ms. Copeland perform, in the Taylor ballet, and as Odile/Odette in “Swan Lake,” a crowning role for many dancers, and the first in the company for a black ballerina…

Red the entire article here.

Putting racism, white supremacy, and white privilege in context

Chimes: The official student newspaper of Calvin College
Grand Rapids, Michigan
2015-12-11

Joseph Kuilema, Professor of Social Work

A group of students went to write positive messages on snow on cars following the racist comments that were written. Photo Credit Katelyn Bosch

On Sunday, Nov. 22, two members of our community wrote “white power” and drew a swastika in the snow on a car. Many members of our community condemned these actions as hateful and totally incompatible with our mission. In some ways, that’s the easy part. What has been more difficult is to acknowledge that what occurred was not an isolated incident, a freak occurrence in an otherwise loving and inclusive community. While few members of this community openly espouse white supremacy, many members of our community continue to deny white privilege. It must be clearly stated that those who deny white privilege functionally believe in white supremacy, whether they have the courage to write it on a car or not.

In his remarks on the incident, President Le Roy rightly identified the statement “white power” and the swastika with white supremacy and the ideology that shaped Nazi Germany, apartheid South Africa, chattel slavery in the U.S. and the Jim Crow South. He focused on two scriptures, the story of Jesus and the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53-8:11), and Jesus warning that before we remove the splinter in the eye of the other we ought to attend to the plank in our own (Matthew 7:1-5, Luke 6:37-42). He did this largely in the context of not demonizing those who committed these acts, and that is an appropriate concern. Christians should never reduce anyone to the worst thing they have done. None of us stands innocent before the Lord.

However, we should never mention Nazi Germany, apartheid South Africa or the Jim Crow South without identifying the connections to us here at Calvin College and the brutality right here in Grand Rapids…

…At the same time, I have to respectfully disagree with President Le Roy’s assertion that we are all racists. I, Joseph Kuilema, am certainly a racist. As a white male, I benefit tremendously from institutions and systems that have been built by and for people like me. This is how the social sciences define racism, not as merely the product of prejudice, explicit or implicit bias, but a system of power based on the invention of the “white race” by people in power. By this definition, we are not all racists…

Read the entire article here.

Play means to help people of mixed race find sense of belonging

MPR News
Minnesota Public Radio
2015-12-15

Marianne Combs, Arts and Culture Reporter

“Purple Cloud,” written by Jessica Huang and directed by Randy Reyes, looks at three generations of hapa, or mixed race, Chinese immigrants as they search to find a place where they belong. Courtesy Keri Pickett | Mu Performing Arts

“What are you?” It’s a question that people of mixed race get all the time.

“Purple Cloud,” a new play produced by Mu Performing Arts, explores what it means to be of mixed race. It’s inspired by playwright Jessica Huang’s own experiences growing up mixed race, and it tells the story of one family’s journey of self-discovery.

“For most of my life I had been struggling with feeling outside, because I’m not white and I’m not Chinese, and I didn’t really know where I belonged,” she explained. “But there was a theater director in town … and she saw me across the room and she pointed at me and said, ‘You — you’re hapa.’

“And I had no idea what that word meant.”…

Read or listen to the story here.

Rethinking Multiracial Formation in the United States: Toward an Intersectional Approach

Sociology of Race and Ethnicity
Volume 2, Number 1 (January 2016)
pages 27-41
DOI: 10.1177/2332649215591864

Celeste Vaughan Curington
Department of Sociology
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

This article forwards an integrative multiracial formation perspective that analyzes race, class, and gender as complex social systems, predicated on racism, patriarchy, and economic exploitation. I apply this new framework to three distinct racial projects—slavery, miscegenation law, and the multiracial movement of the 1990s. An analysis of the linkages between the several racial projects that have produced multiraciality over time shows the larger context in which those in power were able to shape the meaning of multiraciality in a way that was created by and constitutive of privilege and power at the intersections of class, gender, and racial hierarchies in the United States.

Read or purchase the article here.

Putting History in Its Place: An Interview with Bernardine Evaristo

Contemporary Women’s Writing
Volume 9 Issue 3 November 2015
pages 433-448
DOI: 10.1093/cww/vpv003

Jennifer Gustar, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies
University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus, Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada

Bernardine Evaristo was born in Woolwich, London, to an English mother of Irish descent and a Nigerian father, who had immigrated to the UK. She has been actively publishing since the release of her first book of poetry, Island of Abraham (1994). She has published six other works since: the semiautobiographical Lara (1997); The Emperor’s Babe (2001), a novel in verse, based in Roman Londinium; Soul Tourists (2005), a hybrid of poetry and prose that explores the spectral black history of Europe; Blonde Roots (2008), a satirical novel that inverts the historical realities of the transatlantic slave trade; Hello Mum (2010), an epistolary novella that explores a fourteen-year-old boy’s sense of disenfranchisement and the consequent lure of gang culture; and, most recently, Mr. Loverman (2013), the story of a closeted homosexual Trinidadian-British Londoner, who must confront the damage perpetuated by his own silences. Evaristo has served as coeditor of two literary anthologies: NW15 (Granta/British Council, 2007) and Ten New Poets (Bloodaxe, 2010). As editor, she has been instrumental in both mentoring and promoting the visibility of black British writers. In 2010, she guest-edited an issue of Wasafiri, entitled Black Britain: Beyond Definition, that celebrates contemporary black writing in the UK. Her 2012 guest-edited volume of the UK’s leading poetry journal Poetry Review, entitled Offending Frequencies, features more poets of color than any previous single issue. In September of 2014, she investigated the publishing industry’s attitude toward women of color as guest editor of Mslexia. She currently works as a Reader in Creative Writing at Brunel University, where, in 2011, she instituted the Brunel University African Poetry Prize. Two of her works have been adapted for radio: The Emperor’s Babe for BBC 1 (2012) and Hello Mum for BBC 4 (2012). She was elected Fellow of the…

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Rachel Dolezal: ‘I wasn’t identifying as black to upset people. I was being me’

The Guardian
2015-12-13

Chris McGreal, Senior Writer
Guardian US

Rachel Dolezal at her home in Spokane. Photograph: Annie Kuster for the Guardian

She became a global hate figure this year when she was outed as a ‘race faker’. Here, she talks about her puritanical Christian upbringing, the backlash that left her surviving on food stamps – and why she would still do the same again

Anyone looking for clues to the real Rachel Dolezal would do well to begin with her birth certificate. In the bottom right-hand corner, under the names of the parents who brought her world crashing down by outing her as a white woman masquerading as black, is a box for the identity of the medic who delivered her as a baby. In it is written “Jesus Christ”…

Read the entire interview here.

Choose Your Own Identity

The New York Times Magazine
2015-12-14

Bonnie Tsui

A series of portraits from “The Hapa Project” by the artist Kip Fulbeck. Kip Fulbeck/The Hapa Project

I never realized how little I understood race until I tried to explain it to my 5-year-old son. Our family story doesn’t seem too complicated: I’m Chinese-American and my husband is white, an American of English-Dutch-Irish descent; we have two children. My 5-year-old knows my parents were born in China, and that I speak Cantonese sometimes. He has been to Hong Kong and Guangzhou to visit his gung-gung, my father. But when I asked him the other day if he was Chinese, he said no.

“You’re Chinese, but I’m not,” he told me, with certainty. “But I eat Chinese food.” This gave me pause. How could I tell him that I wasn’t talking about food or cultural heritage or where we were born? (Me, I’m from Queens.) I had no basis to describe race to him other than the one I’d taken pains to avoid: how we look and how other people treat us as a result.

My son probably doesn’t need me to tell him we look different. He’s a whir-in-a-blender mix of my husband and me; he has been called Croatian and Italian. More than once in his life, he will be asked, “What are you?” But in that moment when he confidently asserted himself as “not Chinese,” I felt a selfish urge for him to claim a way of describing himself that included my side of his genetic code. And yet I knew that I had no business telling him what his racial identity was. Today, he might feel white; tomorrow he might feel more Chinese. The next day, more, well, both. Who’s to say but him?

Racial identity can be fluid. More and more, it will have to be: Multiracial Americans are on the rise, growing at a rate three times as fast as the country’s population as a whole, according to a new Pew Research Center study released in June. Nearly half of mixed-race Americans today are younger than 18, and about 7 percent of the U.S. adult population could be considered multiracial, though they might not call themselves that. The need to categorize people into specific race groups will never feel entirely relevant to this population, whose perceptions of who they are can change by the day, depending on the people they’re with…

Read the entire article here.