Mixed Race Studies

Luck and a Shrewd Strategy Fueled de Blasio’s Ascension

The New York Times
2013-09-11

Michael Barbaro, Political Writer

The commercial that changed the course of the mayor’s race almost never happened.

Bill de Blasio’s campaign team had mused about building an ad around his wife, Chirlane McCray, a telegenic African-American poet, then abandoned the concept.

They then turned to his 15-year-old son, but nothing seemed to go right. The de Blasio family kitchen in Brooklyn was not big enough for the camera crew, so they borrowed a bigger one from a neighbor.

The neighbor’s kitchen turned out to be too fancy, sending the wrong message for a populist candidate. So a long lens was used to blur out the expensive fixtures.

But when the commercial was finally shown to the candidate and his wife, they seemed overcome, instantly recognizing the power of its message: that the aggressive policing of the Bloomberg era was not an abstraction to Mr. de Blasio, it was an urgent personal worry within his biracial household.

“This,” predicted the campaign’s pollster, Anna Greenberg, “will be huge.”…

Read the entire article here.

One of the Family: Métis Culture in Nineteenth-Century Northwestern Saskatchewan by Brenda Macdougall (review)

Canadian Ethnic Studies
Volume 44, Number 3, 2012
pages 147-148
DOI: 10.1353/ces.2013.0012

Frits Pannekoek, President and Professor of History
Athabasca University, Athabasca, Alberta, Canada

Brenda Macdougall, One of the Family: Metis Culture in Nineteenth-Century Northwestern Saskatchewan (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010)

For the last several decades, scholarship in Métis genealogy has matured to the point that it can proudly claim a leading position in the field of prosopography, a field first identified in medieval studies. It has become an instrument to divine an understanding of Métis society, its construction, its past and its continuity. Macdougall has built carefully on the scholarship of amongst others: Jennifer Brown, Sylvia Van Kirk, John Foster, Gerhard Ens, Doug Sprague, Heather Devine, and Nicole St. Onge. Her book deals with Métis culture in 19th century Northwestern Saskatchewan largely around Ile a La Crosse, a real and symbolic centre to the people of the Northwest. It is organized into seven chapters with introduction and conclusion, for a total of nine chapters.

The book argues that the Métis families of the Northwest are “wahkootowin.” This, according to Macdougall, is a Cree “worldview linking land, family, and identity in one interconnected web of being.” The first chapter deals with the social landscapes of the Northwest, the second with the social construction of the Métis family, the third with residency and patronymic connections across the Northwest, the fourth with family acculturation and Roman Catholicism, and the fifth with family labor and the Hudson’s Bay Company. Two later chapters deal with free trade and the culture it contributed.

Macdougall’s contributions are significant and considerable. As noted, she used “wahkootowin” to explain the complex set of interrelationships amongst a people. She explains how marriage patterns, work lives, and religion were all mutually reinforcing and how these complex relationships or “wahkootowin” defined life. Family mattered a great deal and a study of the family structures evidences a pattern that persisted and deepened over four generations. The volume is rich in detail and anyone with roots in Northern Saskatchewan will leave with a deeper understanding of themselves. It is, to a degree, an insider’s study, but for the scholar of Métis genesis, it is now the best explanation of how a people and an identity emerged in the Saskatchewan interior.

The book is, however, not without its problems, although some will consider these its greatest strengths. First, it will be very difficult for people outside the region or new to Métis studies to read the book with any real enjoyment. The genealogical data is dense and will be in the eyes of some a major obstacle to understanding “wahkootowin.” Others, however, will find the nuanced tapestry of family information a highly compelling background to the family networks that Macdougall argues are so foundational to an understanding of the Métis. Most Métis scholars will ponder these connections and will use the questions Macdougall asks to further their own family reconstructions regardless of region or Aboriginal cultural roots.

The real question that will be posed by many is whether the findings are replicable. Are the complex interconnections of Northwestern Saskatchewan to be found in Northern Manitoba at Rossville for example? Macdougall rightfully makes much of the Catholicism of the Ile a La Crosse community, and points out how Protestant mixed bloods were probably purposefully excluded. Would the Methodist community at, for example, Rossville, the community at White Fish Lake, or that at Stanley mission have been equally exclusionary to Catholics? Would English-speaking, Protestant mixed-blood communities have differing structures? Would “wahkootowin” take on a different texture in these communities? Would the Hudson’s Bay Company have a different relationship given the dominance of Protestants in its hierarchy? Would there be Protestant Catholic intermarriages? Macdougall, I would suggest, would likely say not, but were Irene Spry still alive she would suggest that intermarriages would and did occur. A more careful reading of Anglican and Methodist archives might pose new questions. What is important is that Macdougall has moved the discussion on Métis culture from one of class, or one focusing on ethnicity to one that requires an understanding of complex Aboriginal cultural norms rather than one requiring a complex understanding of European or Euro American ones. Macdougall demands much of her readers, and those who accept the challenge will be well rewarded…

Penny Marshall Directing A Dennis Rodman Documentary + Effa Manley Project In Development

Shadow and Act: On Cinema of the African Diaspora
2012-09-25

Courtney Singer

Lately, she has been working on a documentary about the basketball player Dennis Rodman, some of which she has been shooting via Skype. That came up because a) Ms. Marshall is a big sports fan. (“You can yell and scream at a game and no one’s taking you away in a white coat.”) And b) “I have a little radar to the insane,” she said. “They seek me out. Dennis and his agent asked if I would do a documentary.”

That was from a recent Wall Street Journal profile of actress/producer/director Penny Marshall, on account of the publication of her book My Mother Was Nuts.

I must admit that Penny Marshall’s name probably won’t be the first one I’d think of if I were to come up with a short list of directors for a Dennis Rodman documentary. But as the director of memorable films like Big, Awakenings, A League Of Their Own, The Preacher’s Wife (and several others) says of herself, she’s drawn to the *insane;* or rather, the *insane* are drawn to her – the supposition there being that Dennis Rodman is *insane.*…

But what I did find there was a project she has in development to direct titled Effa. I almost ignored it when I looked closer, and read the project’s synopsis which reads:

Effa Manley is a white woman “passing” as black during segregation. Outspoken, dynamic and beautiful, she crashes through barriers in the male-dominated world of sports as the first woman to own and manage a professional sports team.

The name didn’t immediately ring the bell, so I looked up Effa Manley to learn that she was also the first woman inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame; She co-owned the Newark Eagles baseball franchise in the Negro leagues with her husband Abe Manley from 1935 to 1946, and was sole owner through 1948 after his death.

She was also active during the America civil rights movement and was a social activist. She died in 1981 at 84 years old.

It’s said that Manley’s racial background is not fully known. Her biological parents may have been white, but she was reportedly raised by her black stepfather and white mother, which lead to assumptions that her stepfather was her biological father and therefore many thought she was black—or at least, bi-racial.

This calls for further research…

Read the entire article here.

Comorbid substance use disorders with other Axis I and II mental disorders among treatment-seeking Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders, and mixed-race people

Journal of Psychiatric Research
Available online 2013-09-09
DOI: 10.1016/j.jpsychires.2013.08.022

Li-Tzy Wu, ScD, RN, MA, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, School of Medicine
Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina

Dan G. Blazer, MD, PhD, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences; Professor of Community and Family Medicine
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, School of Medicine
Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina

Kenneth R. Gersing, MD, Clinical Associate
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, School of Medicine
Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina

Bruce Burchett, PhD, Assistant Professor in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, School of Medicine
Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina

Marvin S. Swartz, MD, Professor in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, School of Medicine
Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina

Paolo Mannelli, MD, Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, School of Medicine
Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina

Little is known about behavioral healthcare needs of Asian Americans (AAs), Native Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders (NHs/PIs), and mixed-race people (MRs)—the fastest growing segments of the U.S. population. We examined substance use disorder (SUD) prevalences and comorbidities among AAs, NHs/PIs, and MRs (N=4572) in a behavioral health electronic health record database. DSM-IV diagnoses among patients aged 1–90 years who accessed behavioral healthcare from 11 sites were systematically captured: SUD, anxiety, mood, personality, adjustment, childhood-onset, cognitive/dementia, dissociative, eating, factitious, impulse-control, psychotic/schizophrenic, sleep, and somatoform diagnoses. Of all patients, 15.0% had a SUD. Mood (60%), anxiety (31.2%), adjustment (30.9%), and disruptive (attention deficit-hyperactivity, conduct, oppositional defiant, disruptive behavior diagnosis, 22.7%) diagnoses were more common than others (psychotic 14.2%, personality 13.3%, other childhood-onset 11.4%, impulse-control 6.6%, cognitive 2.8%, eating 2.2%, somatoform 2.1%). Less than 1% of children aged <12 years had SUD. Cannabis diagnosis was the primary SUD affecting adolescents aged 12–17. MRs aged 35–49 years had the highest prevalence of cocaine diagnosis. Controlling for age at first visit, sex, treatment setting, length of treatment, and number of comorbid diagnoses, NHs/PIs and MRs were about two times more likely than AAs to have ≥2 SUDs. Regardless of race/ethnicity, personality diagnosis was comorbid with SUD. NHs/PIs with a mood diagnosis had elevated odds of having SUD. Findings present the most comprehensive patterns of mental diagnoses available for treatment-seeking AAs, NHs/PIs, and MRs in the real-world medical setting. In-depth research is needed to elucidate intraracial and interracial differences in treatment needs.

Read or purchase the article here.

De Blasio First in Mayoral Primary; Unclear if He Avoids a Runoff

The New York Times
2013-09-10

David M. Halbfinger, Reporter

David W. Chen, City Hall Bureau Chief

Bill de Blasio, whose campaign for mayor of New York tapped into a city’s deepening unease with income inequality and aggressive police practices, captured far more votes than any of his rivals in the Democratic primary on Tuesday.

But as Mr. de Blasio, an activist-turned-operative and now the city’s public advocate, celebrated a remarkable come-from-behind surge, it was not clear if he had won the 40 percent needed to avoid a runoff election on Oct. 1 with William C. Thompson Jr., who finished second. At night’s end, he had won just over 40 percent of the ballots counted; thousands of paper ballots had yet to be tallied, which could take days.

…Mr. de Blasio, a white Brooklynite who frequently showcased his biracial family, built a broad coalition of support among nearly every category of Democratic primary voters on Tuesday, according to the exit poll by Edison Research. His critique of a city divided between rich and poor — tried in the past by other candidates in New York and nationally with little success — resonated…

“I love his message about the tale of two cities, the big inequality gap,” said Jelani Wheeler, 19, a politics student at St. John’s University in Queens…

Read the entire article here.

Norma Storch Is Dead at 81; Subject of TV Documentary

The New York Times
2003-09-21

Douglas Martin

Norma Storch, a white woman whose decision to have her 4-year-old mixed-race daughter raised by a black couple became the subject of an Emmy Award-winning documentary made by the daughter in adulthood, died on Aug. 28 at her home in Manhattan. She was 81.

The cause was cancer, said the daughter, June Cross, the producer of the documentary, “Secret Daughter,” which PBS broadcast in 1996.

The film was heralded as a searing look at race relations in the 1950’s and 60’s, and drew praise for its emotional rawness and the bravery of both mother and daughter. Other reviews suggested that the documentary’s power came from a mother’s willingness to reject her daughter and then rationalize it.

Ms. Cross said in an interview last week that this impression properly reflected the documentary but not their real relationship. She said that tensions were exaggerated for dramatic effect.

But for almost 35 years, Mrs. Storch and her husband—the actor and comedian Larry Storch, who starred as Cpl. Randolph Agarn in the 1960’s comedy series “F Troop,”—indisputably lived a lie. They told friends and acquaintances that the black girl who visited them at their Hollywood home was their adopted daughter, who lived with a black family for most of the year…

Read the entire obituary here.

Interracial Family Memoirs: Reconstructing Genealogies across the Color Line

Yale University
230 Prospect Street
Room 101
New Haven, Connecticut 06511
2013-09-16, 12:00-13:15 EDT (Local Time)

Cedric Essi, Ph.D. Candidate in American Studies
University of Erlangen-Nürnberg

During the last two decades numerous autobiographical works have emerged which explore family histories in black and white, such as Barack Obama’s “Dreams from My Father,” June Cross’s “Secret Daughter” or Edward Ball’s “Slaves in the Family.” Essi subsumes these works under the umbrella term ‘interracial family memoir’ and draws up a typology of ‘genealogies’ in order to categorize and interrogate the ways in which these texts thematize kinship across the color line. This talk will provide a critical overview of the genre and discusses how the US-specific ideology of the one-drop rule affects interracial family experiences, to what extent transnational affiliations conflict with racial self-identification, on what terms white motherhood is rendered visible and how the interracial family is often imagined as an allegory of the American nation. This talk is part of the GLC Brown Bag Lunch Series. Bring your lunch; drinks & dessert will be provided.

For more information, click here.

Finding the Silver Lining: Hair, (Mixed) Race, and Identity Politics in Toni and Slade Morrison’s Little Cloud and Lady Wind

The Lion and the Unicorn
Volume 37, Number 2, April 2013
pages 173-187
DOI: 10.1353/uni.2013.0016

Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins, Associate Professor of English
Florida Atlantic University

rainclouds
we are
nature
nature
nature
natural!!!
black people, we rainclouds
closer to the sun and full of life.

—Marvin Wyche Jr., “We Rainclouds” (1974)

As a little girl I dreamed freely, often on the top step of the back porch—morning, noon, sunset, deep twilight. I loved clouds, I loved red streaks in the sky. I loved the gold worlds I saw in the sky. Gods and little girls, angels and heroes and future lovers labored there, in misty glory or sharp grandeur.

—Gwendolyn Brooks, Report from Part One (1972)

In Happy to Be Nappy (1999), bell hooks describes black girls’ unprocessed hair as “soft like cotton, flower petal billowy soft, full of frizz and fuzz.” In addition to being described as puffy, spongy, kinky, crinkly, wooly or cotton-like, “natural” unprocessed hair is often associated with clouds. “Flower petal billowy soft” immediately evokes the image of lightness but also brings to mind billow clouds, layers of water vapor that create fluffy wave-like patterns in the sky. The trope of black-hair-as-clouds is especially noticeable in descriptions of black hair in twentieth-century African American literature. In Jessie Redmon Fauset’s “Double Trouble” (1923), Angelique shakes her “short, black, rather wiry hair til it misted like a cloud” (32); Fran Ross’s mixed race protagonist in Oreo (1974) is told: “Kinky hair—like that beautiful fuzzy cloud you have—is not really kinky” (49); in Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow (1983), Avey Johnson’s daughter’s hair “had stood massed like a raincloud about to make good its threat” (13); in Dorothy West’s The Wedding (1995), Clark Cole thinks of his mistress: “There is no beauty like that of a brown skinned woman when she is beautiful: the velvet skin, the dark hair like a cloud” (97); and in John Edgar Wideman’s Hiding Place (1998), Tommy’s hair is described as, “[c]ombed so high it’s a cloud over his head, a bushy cloud making him taller than his brothers” (77). Toni and Slade Morrison’s children’s book Little Cloud and Lady Wind (2010), illustrated by Sean Qualls, focuses on a young female cloud whose image appears as a black or biracial girl; she sports a giant blue Afro (cloud), striking feature and a continuation of the hair/cloud analogy. In fact, some of Morrison’s novels also equate African American hair with clouds. In Tar Baby after Jadine complains about the effect of the island’s foggy weather on her hair, “[s]he pressed her hair down with both palms, but as soon as she removed them her hair sprang back into a rain cloud” (Morrison, Tar Baby 64) and in Love, the narrator, L, describes the transition black hair goes through when wet as she recounts the actions of a woman on the beach: “Her hair, flat when she went in [the water] rose up slowly and took on the shape of the clouds dragging the moon” (Morrison, Love 106). Little Cloud’s hair and her lavender tan skin act as racial signifiers in this children’s book about independence, belonging, and community.

In the beginning of the story, Little Cloud separates from the other clouds, “not wanting to blend into a group and lose her freedom, [but] not wanting to frighten the earth” (Toni and Slade Morrison). A visit from Lady Wind shows Little Cloud that her cloud duties of providing mist and dew are important, teaching her to respect both her individuality and restoring her place in the sky community. The story is reminiscent of Eric Carle’s Little Cloud (1996), which also features a “Little Cloud” that chooses independence: “The clouds pushed upward and away. Little Cloud pushed downward and touched the tops of horses and trees” (Carle). Toni and Slade Morrison’s book seems to signify on this Little Cloud predecessor who does not take a human form (and thus remains a white cloud). On one level, Little Cloud and Lady Wind encourages children to express their individuality while honoring “the whole is far mightier than any single part” (Little Cloud, inside flap). On another level, the story is a subtle treatise on mixed…

Book Review: Land of the Cosmic Race: Race Mixture, Racism and Blackness in Mexico

LSE Review of Books
London School of Economics
2013-08-30

Zalfa Feghali, Editorial Assistant
Journal of American Studies

Land of the Cosmic Race is a richly-detailed ethnographic account of the powerful role that race and colour play in organizing the lives and thoughts of ordinary Mexicans. It presents a previously untold story of how individuals in contemporary urban Mexico construct their identities, attitudes, and practices in the context of a dominant national belief system. Carefully presented and self-consciously written, this is an excellent book for anyone with an interest in how Mexican racial politics can be seen to operate on the ground, finds Zalfa Feghali.

Land of the Cosmic Race: Race Mixture, Racism, and Blackness in Mexico. Christina A. Sue. Oxford University Press. March 2013.

One prevailing fact of studying race in the Americas is that the discussion almost always turns to the US as a reference point. Studies of racial dynamics in the Americas are—obviously—rich, necessary, and often sidelined in favour of these more popular ways of thinking about race. Christina A. Sue’s Land of the Cosmic Race: Race Mixture, Racism and Blackness in Mexico attempts to redress this imbalance by complicating and problematising the dynamics of racial mixture in Mexico. Primarily an ethnographic study, this book offers new ways of thinking about race studies in the Mexican context.

The book’s title, which Sue discusses but doesn’t fully unpack, is taken from a provocative work by Jose Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race, published in 1925. Vasconcelos’ views on mestizaje­—racial mixture—are key to understanding the dominant ideological logic behind Mexico’s national(ist) relationship with race. In The Cosmic Race, Vasconcelos sees the vast potential of (specifically) Mexicans as mestizos, and lauds them for their mestizo/a (mixed race, specifically Spanish and Indigenous) character. Significantly, he also casts the mestizos as the first stage in the creation of a new, cosmic race that will eventually take on characteristics and subsume the genetic streams of “all the races.” According to his logic, this cosmic race would take on the best or most desirable traits from each respective race and eventually lines between the “original” races will blur to the point that any one individual’s “racial heritage” would be completely indistinguishable from another’s, thus becoming the ultimate mestizo/a (something akin what some might now call a post-ethnic or post-racial world)…

Read the entire review here.

By the 1930s and 40s, medical science and genetics, too, were providing empirical evidence that the notion of a biological basis for racial classifications was on increasingly shaky ground. They were finding that the distribution of genetic traits appeared to straddle previously defined racial groups, leading to suspicion that racial categories were problematic.

Robert H. Gargett, “Are There Human Races? The Evolutionary Biology—Or Not—Of Race,” The Subversive Archaeologist, (May 19, 2013). http://www.thesubversivearchaeologist.com/2013/05/are-there-human-races-evolutionary.html.