Mixed Race Studies

‘Bleach bath’, clothes pins on the nose and ‘black monkey’: Study exposes racism in interracial families debunking one of Brazil’s greatest myths

Black Women of Brazil
2017-06-27

Courtesy of Jornal Floripa

What happens when there is racism in the home? In what way does it manifest? How can interracial marriages generate children who are segregated in their own home environment because of their color? Why do many white people deny the black race of their spouses – chosen by them – and even their children? Some answers to these questions appear in a study by the doctor in social psychology Lia Schucman, who researches racial relations in Brazil.

For her postdoctoral work at USP (University of São Paulo), entitled Famílias Inter-Raciais: Tensões entre Cor e Amor (Inter-Racial Families: Tensions Between Color and Love), she interviewed 13 families who were willing to talk about the subject – often in conversations punctuated by tension and disagreement in relation to the races. In the end, the psychologist used reports from five families with different manifestations of what Lia called “racism of intimacy”…

Read the entire article here.

Ngozi Onwurah: the forgotten pioneer of black British film

gal-dem
2017-06-20

Varaidzo

‘The Body Beautiful‘ by Ngozi Onwurah. Image via BFI

Ngozi Onwurah, despite being the director of the first independent black British feature film to be released, is not a household name. For a long time, her film Welcome II The Terrordome (1995), was the only film by a black woman to have a UK release. Like many black British women pioneers, her contributions to her craft have been pushed to the peripheries of British film history, yet revisiting her films reveals them to be prescient explorations of race that are just as relevant today.

Onwurah was born to a white mother and a black father in 1960s Nigeria. She was raised in England by her mother, alongside her two other siblings (one of whom, Simon Onwurah, produced Welcome II The Terrordome). Her first work, Coffee Coloured Children (1988), uses Onwurah’s own personal narrative to look at the experiences of being a black mixed-race child in England. It begins gleefully with folk of all races gathered together, dancing, laughing, rejoicing, to the ever optimistic soundtrack of Blue Mink’s song ‘Melting Pot’. The tone of the film darkens almost instantly, its extended background monologue beginning with the question “our childhood memories are blurred, murky, why did the big boys throw dog shit on our front door?”. This is coupled with the visual of this particular act being reproduced for the viewer…

Read the entire article here.

Princess Nokia Is Ready to Reign

The Village Voice
2017-03-29

Ivie Ani

ioulex

I meet up with Destiny Frasqueri — the 24-year-old Nuyorican alternative hip-hop artist known variously as Princess Nokia, Wavy Spice, or simply Destiny — in the East Village. I’m running late; she’s even later, so I get to the Astor Place cube first. Fifteen minutes later she walks up, dressed, as she’d indicated in a text apologizing for being behind schedule, in a beige duster coat and sweats to match, carrying a cherry-print Louis V bag. She’s wearing oversize shades, no makeup, just a touch of mascara. Her dark hair blows in the breeze, caressing a diamond-studded choker.

Frasqueri has appeared in Vogue, modeled for Calvin Klein, and had her song “Tomboy” used for an Alexander Wang runway show. But what makes her a figure of fascination for music aficionados in their teens and early twenties is the way she celebrates the beauty of imperfection, building a hero’s identity out of being a self-described “fucked-up kid.” She’s stunning yet still rough around the edges, rhyming about wearing dirty sneakers, smoking blunts in the stairwell, and proclaiming the power in her heritage. For her followers, her attractiveness lies in her contrasts. “Eczema so bad I’m bleeding,” she raps on “Bart Simpson,” the first track on 1992, the album she put up on SoundCloud last September. Sure enough, I look down and her irritated hands are bleeding slightly.

“I’m just ghetto as hell,” she says once we’ve settled in at San Loco for some chicken nachos. “That’s the only way that I know how to just be myself.”…

…Frasqueri’s mom passed by the time she was nine, and she grew up living in various homes across the Bronx, Harlem, and the Lower East Side. She experienced abusive foster care, life in the projects, and brief escapes to camp with wealthy kids from the Upper West Side. She’d skip class but bury herself in books, digging deep into the Black literary canon. (“I am Black Harlem Renaissance,” she says. “I am Walter Dean Myers and Langston Hughes, baby.”) She taught herself, studying Kemetic philosophy, practicing brujería and Santería, claiming her inheritance of Yoruba and Taíno cultures, and falling in love with New York City. Pissy project elevators and breezy summer barbecues in the street suffuse Frasqueri’s memories. She represents a specific kind of New York, what she describes as her own “urban realism.” “What makes life beautiful?” she muses at one point. “The ghetto makes life beautiful. Black people make life beautiful.”…

…“I’m a Brown Afro-indigenous woman. That makes people uncomfortable as it is. The folks that have a problem with me and say, ‘You still live with privilege. You not fully Black.’ I can’t win and I can’t lose, so I’ma just keep going.” She smiles. “Yes, I’m mixed-race. There’s girls who look like me and glorify being exotic. I have a responsibility to my Blackness.”…

Read the entire article here.

I Only Protested the Affordable Care Act Because the President Was Black. Please Don’t Take Away My Health Insurance

McSweeney’s Internet Tendency
2017-06-27

David Bradley Isenberg
New York, New York

Back in 2009, when the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was being debated in Congress, I was fuming with anger. How could I, a fiscal conservative, support a program that would drive down my insurance costs and cover my child’s preexisting condition? It clearly was a flawed bill that would ruin small businesses.

I nearly boiled over for eight years, and rightly so. But now that President Obama has finally left office, and the Republicans want to take away my health insurance options and increase my premiums, I just want to be up front about something.

It was never about the taxes. It was always about the president’s Blackness. It was super related to his race. Arguably, completely and wholly tied to race, alright? And now that the president is normal again, I’d be very grateful to be able to enjoy this health insurance and all these patient protections that have saved my small business and my child’s life. So please, don’t repeal the Affordable Care Act..

Read (and enjoy) the entire article here.

The Afro-Latino Festival NYC Celebrates A Culture That’s Ready To Be Heard

The Village Voice
2017-06-27

Siddhartha Mitter

Two revelers dance at last year’s festival Source: New Visual Collective

At 26, Amara La Negra, the Dominican-American singer, has a string of energetic tropical-funk hits in Spanish, fierce dance moves, a fashion line, hundreds of thousands of social media followers, and rising star power in her hometown of Miami and back in the Dominican Republic. But Amara is also Afro-Latina — a visibly, unapologetically Black woman making her career in worlds where colorism still runs rampant, among them the D.R. with its social hierarchy and the international Latin entertainment industry. With her dark skin, exuberant Afro, and in-your-face “La Negra” stage name, Amara is making a point.

“Change would be more Afro-Latinos in Hollywood, more on magazine covers,” Amara says. “It would be main roles in novelas, which we don’t yet have. They’ll cast you to be either a slave, a gangster, or a prostitute. They stereotype us.” Last year, a light-skinned beauty queen put on blackface and butt pads to parody Amara on Dominican TV. “We’re still a long way [from] seeing big change,” Amara says. “But we’re being more vocal.”…

…In New York City, the flagship venue for the new cultural reassertion is the Afro-Latino Festival, which holds its fifth edition on July 7 and 8. A grassroots project led by Mai-Elka Prado Gil and Amilcar Priestley, a Panamanian couple in Brooklyn, it has ballooned since 2013 from an outdoor afternoon party to a two-day international summit gathering musicians, filmmakers, activists, scholars, and partygoers….

Read the entire article here.

The Mexipino Experience: Growing Up Mexican and Filipino in San Diego

Remezcla
2017-06-27

Rudy P. Guevarra Jr., Associate Professor of Asian Pacific American Studies
Arizona State University

Author Rudy P. Guevarra Jr. Photo by Jimaya Gomez, Art by Alan López for Remezcla.

Rudy P. Guevarra Jr. is the author of Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego

Growing up in San Diego, I remember watching my abuelito tend the guava tree he grew for my mother, while singing along to the Mexican rancheras that blared from his tiny radio in the backyard. When my mother called him in for lunch, he’d start whistling, as Linda Ronstadt’s Canciones de mi Padre echoed from the house. We both knew that we’d be eating caldo de res con arroz Mexicano. Once a month, my Filipino grandfather, or tata, would also pay us visits from San Francisco. I’d help him and my mother cook Filipino delicacies, like chicken adobo, pansit, and lumpia. He’d have us in tears, laughing at his jokes, while the smell of soy sauce and vinegar permeated the entire house.

Many of our family functions centered on moments like these – eating Filipino food while listening to Mexican music, bathing ourselves in the experiences that were for me, the essence of being a Mexipino…

Read the entire article here.

One metric shows that race in America is about to experience a dramatic shift

Quartz
2017-06-27

Dan Kopf, Reporter
San Francisco, California

Feel the demographic change. (Reuters/Lucy Nicholson)

The demographics of the United States are changing quickly, and there is no simpler way to understand that than to look at the most common age of each race and ethnic group.

The US Census Bureau recently released its estimates of the US population as of July 2016. Besides an estimate of the total population (325 million), the census also includes estimates of the number of people of every age within each race and ethnicity. For example, the census estimates that, as of July 2016, there were 976,288 Hispanic 15-year-olds in the country.

Jed Kolko, chief economist of jobs site Indeed, combed through this data and came away with a fascinating insight. He discovered huge variation in the most common age—more technically, the mode—between each major racial group in the US…

Read the entire article here.

Navigating my way through mixed race identity

news.com.au
Surry Hills, New South Wales, Australia
2017-06-27

Carolyn Cage

Carolyn Cage pictured as a newborn with her dad Ray and her mum Doreen. Picture: Carolyn Cage

IF THERE were an algorithm that could formulate a person’s most asked question, mine would be “what are you?” Society has a habit of labelling people like soup cans in a kitchen and for as long as I can remember, one of the first questions people ask during initial conversation is usually in relation to my racial ambiguity.

Replying with “I am Australian” only ever leads to “but what are you really?” Learning how to tolerate ignorance and pass it off as curiosity, I take a deep breath and pull out the pie chart. I was born in Australia, but my mother originates from Malaysia and is of Chinese heritage. My father is of Anglo background, mixed with German and Belgium descent but was born in Sydney.

The responses tend to be generic ranging from how exotic that is, how adorable mixed babies are or how I am the spitting image of their other mixed raced friend. Accepting that it is intended as a compliment, at the same time it is dehumanising and reduces my identity to some sort of novelty. Most of the time it leaves me unscathed, but the more I am asked “what am I”, the more of a hindrance it becomes…

Read the entire article here.

Tiger Woods says he’s ‘Cablinasian,’ but the police only saw black

The Undefeated
2017-05-30

Michael A. Fletcher

The golfer’s DUI arrest highlights the country’s ‘one-drop’ rule and his complex relationship with black America

Tiger Woods, once the fresh-faced future of golf, stared into the police camera with a forlorn look and hooded eyes. A 41-year-old man who has famously insisted on his mixed racial heritage was identified in the arrest report with one word: black.

The former No. 1 golfer in the world was sleeping at the wheel of his Mercedes-Benz early Monday when Jupiter, Florida, police said they spotted his car stopped in the road, its blinker flashing and engine running. He was charged with driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol and is scheduled for a court appearance on July 5. Woods, who is recovering from back surgery, apologized for the incident, saying in a statement that it resulted from “an unexpected reaction to prescribed medications.”…

Read the entire article here.

French Fathers and Their “Indigenous Children”: Interracial Families in Colonial Senegal, 1900–1915

Journal of Family History
Volume 42, Issue 3, July 2017
pages 308–325
DOI: 10.1177/0363199017711212

Kelly Duke Bryant, Associate Professor of History
Rowan University, Glassboro, New Jersey

This article focuses on interracial families in early twentieth-century Senegal, exploring how relationships between French fathers and their racially mixed children simultaneously challenged and reflected colonial racism. Relying on applications for scholarships and related correspondence, it offers detailed case studies of two such families and a discussion of wider trends. The article argues that despite the duty and love that they felt toward their mixed-race children, French fathers continued to see themselves as colonists and to accept some of the ideas about race and power that this entailed.

Read or purchase the article here.