Mixed Race Studies

The Myth of a Post-Racial America

Literary Hub
2016-11-07

Pamela Newkirk, Professor of Journalism
New York University

Pamela Newkirk Wonders How Much Further Back We Can Go…

For the past eight years, many African-Americans instinctively presumed that the venom spewed at President Obama was on account of his race. More recently, we endured a steady stream of chilling videotaped killings of unarmed blacks by police, and the harsh realization that despite all our protests and all our tears, for much of white America, Black Lives Don’t Much Matter. In case after case, the police went unpunished and most whites, when polled, supported impunity.

By the time Donald Trump won the Republican presidential nomination, he vowed to ban Muslims, build a wall to keep out Mexicans, and had scapegoated blacks. We who are black, unlike many of our fellow Americans, were hardly surprised.

For years, Trump attempted to illegitimize Obama’s presidency by stoking the Birther movement and yet still managed to win the support of a cross-section of Republican leaders, including US senators and governors, from North and South. We hoped in vain for a chorus of condemnation, and instead watched a shameful parade of Republican leaders, including House Speaker Paul Ryan, pledge their support or remain silent. Rather than an aberration, Trump’s rise seems the inevitable undraping of a sizable portion of white America that has always lurked in the shadows, stubbornly refusing to sync their customs with national ideals…

…Trump’s nomination and strong appeal in the general election recalls a more candid period at the turn-of the 20th century when many of the nation’s most esteemed leaders proudly flaunted their anti-immigration and anti-Black rhetoric. It behooves us to recall that, in 1916, Madison Grant’s wildly popular book The Passing of the Great Race advocated the cleansing of America from “inferior races” through birth control, racial segregation, and anti-miscegenation and anti-immigration laws. Grant, a New York high-society lawyer and co-founder of the Bronx Zoo, infamously warned:

Whether we like to admit it or not, the result of the mixture of two races, in the long run, gives us a race reverting to the more ancient, generalized and lower type. The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a negro is a negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.

The book was hailed by President Roosevelt as “a capital book—in purpose, in vision, in grasp of the facts,” and was later praised by Hitler…

Read the entire article here.

The End of the Postracial Myth

The New York Times Magazine
2016-11-15

Nikole Hannah-Jones

Pundits are quick to say that it couldn’t be about prejudice in states like Iowa, where Obama voters went for Trump. But racial anxiety is always close to the surface — and can easily be stoked.

On a cold, clear night in January 2008, when Iowa Democrats selected Barack Obama over a white woman and a white man in the state’s first-in-the-nation caucus, the moment felt transformative. If voters in this overwhelmingly white, rural state could cast their ballots for a black man as president, then perhaps it was possible for the entire nation to do what had never been done; perhaps America had turned far enough away from its racist past that skin color was no longer a barrier to the highest office of the land. In the months that followed, as Obama racked up primary victories, not just in the expected cities but also in largely white Rust Belt towns and farming communities, it seemed evidence for many Americans that the nation had finally become “post-racial.”

Of course, that post-racial dream did not last long, and nothing epitomizes the naïveté of that belief more than the election last week of Donald J. Trump. As I watched my home state of Iowa join the red flood that overtook the electoral map last Tuesday, I asked myself the same questions that so many others did: What happened? Why had states that reliably backed Obama — states like Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — flipped Republican?

I was struck by how quickly white pundits sought to tamp down assertions that race had anything to do with it. It was, it seemed to me, almost a relief to many white Americans that Trump’s victory encompassed so many of the heavily white places that voted for a black man just years before. It was an absolution that let them reassure themselves that Donald Trump’s raucous campaign hadn’t revealed an ugly racist rift after all, that in the end, the discontent that propelled the reality-TV star into the White House was one of class and economic anxiety, not racism.

But this analysis reveals less about the electorate than it does about the consistent inability of many white Americans to think about and understand the complex and often contradictory workings of race in this country, and to discuss and elucidate race in a sophisticated, nuanced way.

While we tend to talk about racism in absolute terms — you’re either racist or you’re not — racism and racial anxiety have always existed on a spectrum. For historians who have studied race in the United States, the change from blue to red in heavily white areas is not surprising. In fact, it was entirely predictable. “There are times when working-class whites, whether rural or urban, will join an interracial alliance to get the short-term gains they want,” Robin Kelley, a history professor at U.C.L.A., told me. “They don’t ever do it without kicking and screaming.”…

Read the entire article here.

Our Kids, Their Fears, Our President?

Literary Hub
2016-11-07

Mira Jacob and Emily Raboteau on Raising Children of Color in Trump’s America

Writers Mira Jacob and Emily Raboteau conducted this conversation via email during the week before the election, at night after getting their kids to bed.

Emily Raboteau: Mira, Lit Hub has invited us to converse about the election and this historical moment as mothers, so I think jumping off from something about how our kids are handling the election (their fears, our fears, the way their fears mirror ours) and how we answer their tough questions might be a good entry point. I am a mother of two—G is five, and D is three. He will be a ninja for Halloween (a bad one, he insists, not a good one) and D will be a skeleton. G is interested in and seduced by bad guys, horror, the nature of evil, the power of evil embodied by Darth Vader, wolves in fairy tales, dark gods in myths, the power of natural disasters, tornadoes, hurricanes, gods attached to natural disasters, superhero villains, and the like, and so has an understanding of Trump as a real-life bad guy—a force to battle. He intuits that we are frightened of him, and so, is frightened of him. I think he considers the election a battle between good and evil. He asked me the other day whether it would be ok/appropriate for us to kill Trump if/when he shows up at our apartment door. I wonder if your son has asked you questions about Trump, Clinton, the election. And how you have fielded those questions? How old is he now?

Mira Jacob: Wow. I read this and thought, ok, so we’re all just in it now. I hate to be relieved by that, but I am. Your son is that scared of a potential presidential candidate. Last month, my son Z, who just turned eight, said, “But Trump doesn’t like brown boys like me. If he’s president, does that mean the government won’t like me? The army? What about the police?” This, as he is falling asleep.

I find myself giving answers that feel much too complex for an eight-year-old, but how else can I modulate what he hears about—pussy grabbing, nasty women, Mexican rapists, Muslim terrorists, and whatever this week will hold? How do I explain, after he has just seen a TV clip of people of color being beaten and pushed out of Trump rallies—that even though his grandparents from his father’s side support Trump, they still love him dearly? I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel sad about that. I have no idea what to do with that sadness in myself. It feels like a broken bone. But they love my son, they love my husband, and they are wonderful parents and grandparents to both of them. I don’t want my family falling apart over this nightmare…

Read the entire conversation here.

Citizen Monsters: Race and Cannibalism in Suzette Mayr’s Venous Hum

Andrea Beverley, Assistant Professor of Canadian Cultural and Literary Studies
Mount Allison University, Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada

Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’études canadiennes
Volume 47, Number 1, Winter 2013
pages 36-58

Halfway through Suzette Mayr’s 2004 novel Venous Hum, a number of the central characters are revealed to be cannibalistic vampires, some of whom are reformed and loveable while others are violent and villainous. The novel is funny and satirical with connections to cult horror films and canonical Canadian literature. By reading Venous Hum in terms of magic realism and literary cannibalism, this essay focusses on the ways in which Mayr’s evocations of vampires and cannibals lead readers towards a politicized questioning of the relationship between perceived differences and official nation-state discourse. This essay thus examines the novel’s magic realist monster imagery in relation to racialization and the politics of interpellation, visibility, inclusion, and assimilation in multicultural Canada. Mayr makes ironic use of the colonial resonances of cannibalistic discourse in order to critique the relationship between the nation-state and its varied citizens, and between official multicultural policy and the lived experience of racialization.

Growing up Indigenous when you don’t look it

Unreserved
CBC Radio
2016-11-06

Rosanna Deerchild, Host

From r: Trevor Jang, Julie Daum, and Daniel Bear. (Supplied)

Has anyone ever asked you where you come from? Or what your ethnic background is?

Ethnicity and how the world perceives you don’t always go together. Which presents a challenge for a growing number of Indigenous people who might not look exactly like their ancestors.

This week on Unreserved we are speaking with several Indigenous Canadians who are not visibly Indigenous…

…”For young Indigenous people who don’t look Indigenous, they want to explore their culture but they don’t want to be judged … well what’s worse? Being judged or not having a culture?”…

Read the introduction here. Listen to the story (00:19:26) here.

Half and Half

Sunday Book Review
The New York Times
2007-02-11

Bliss Broyard

David Matthews, Ace of Spades, A Memoir (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2007).

Twenty minutes into David Matthews’s first day of fourth grade in a new school in a new city, his classmates surround him and demand to know what he is. When Matthews doesn’t answer, they trail him down the hallway — “as though I were a reprobate head of state ambushed by reporters outside a lurid hotel” — shouting out their guesses: “Black! White! You crazy?! He(’s) too light/dark to be black/white!” One jokester suggests he’s Chinese.

One possible response is that Matthews is mixed: his father is African-American, actually a “prominent black journalist” who counted Malcolm X and James Baldwin among his friends, and his mother is Jewish, although she disappeared to Israel shortly after Matthews was born. But this scene takes place in 1977 in a Baltimore public school that sits between a “Waspy enclave of tony brownstones” and a “world of housing projects, roaming street gangs and bleating squad cars,” and the difference between black and white seems too vast to allow for any unions — or their byproducts — across the conceptual divide. (Although we learn that Matthews needn’t look any further than his own life for exceptions: his best friend, his stepbrother and his half brother are also mixed, though none of them quite so indeterminately as he is.) In the lunchroom, Matthews heads to the table of students he resembles most — in skin color, yes, but also in character. The white kids, with their “nerdy diction” and “Starsky and Hutch” lunchboxes, are similarly introverted and unthreatening, while the black kids, playing the dozens and double Dutch on the playground, are “alive and cool,” and frightening. When a white boy assigned by the homeroom teacher to be Matthews’s buddy for the day makes room for him to sit down, this small, serendipitous gesture sets the dye of his racial identity for the next 20 or so years…

Read the entire review here.

Zadie Smith: By the Book

The New York Times
2016-11-17

Zadie Smith Credit Illustration by Jillian Tamaki

The author, most recently, of “Swing Time” says the best gift book she ever received was from her dying father, who “gave me his copy of ‘Ulysses,’ along with the confession he had never read it.”

What books are on your night stand now?

I’m on a reading jag after a long period of only writing, so there’s a towering “to read” pile: “Sudden Death,” by Álvaro Enrigue; “Using Life,” a novel by the imprisoned Egyptian Ahmed Naje; “Homegoing,” by Yaa Gyasi; “Heroes of the Frontier,” by Dave Eggers; “The Underground Railroad,” by Colson Whitehead; “Diary of the Fall,” by Michel Laub; “The Good Immigrant,” edited by Nikesh Shukla; “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty,” by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson; “Birth of a Bridge,” by Maylis de Kerangal; “Known and Strange Things,” by Teju Cole; “The Little Communist Who Never Smiled,” by Lola Lafon; “The Fire This Time,” edited by Jesmyn Ward; “At the Existentialist Café,” by Sarah Bakewell; “Time Reborn,” by Lee Smolin; “Moonglow,” by Michael Chabon; and let’s say the last four or five novels by Marías, several by Krasznahorkai, and — as always — unfinished Proust. I much prefer reading to writing: I can’t wait…

Read the entire interview here.

Life in Trump’s America: A mixed-race educator in the rural South speaks

The Daily Dot
2016-11-18

Courtney Parker West

Photo via Gage Skidmore / Flickr (CC-BY-SA) Photo via dolgachov / GettyImages | Remix by Jason Reed

This is the first in a series of essays on what lives look like in post-election America.

One woman shares how her community has been affected by Trump’s win.

It’s been just over a week in “Trump’s America.” Across the nation, there has been an increase in reported hate crimes, as those once considered to represent a fringe sentiment of society have been emboldened by the election of a president endorsed by the KKK. Not one to distance himself from that endorsement, Trump has begun building a cabinet that includes individuals tied to white nationalism.

In my home state of North Carolina, we’ve seen an increase in racial taunting and violence, including the assault of a black trans woman in Charlotte with a hatchet. Overtly racist, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim graffiti has appeared in Durham, including one message that said, “Black Lives Doesn’t [sic] Matter and Neither Does Your Vote.” My Facebook feed has been filled with personal stories of fear as my black, Muslim, brown, and queer friends and family are reporting being harassed, taunted, and intimidated; meanwhile, a lot of my liberal white friends are debating with people of color about the effectiveness of wearing a safety pin…

Read the entire article here.

Black and British by David Olusoga review – reclaiming a lost past

The Guardian
2016-11-17

Colin Grant

David Olusoga at St Michael’s Church, Burgh-by-Sands. Photograph: Des Willie/BBC/Des Willie

Olusoga’s insightful ‘forgotten history’ amounts to much more than a text to accompany a TV series. Yet despite its many attributes, is it too temperate?

How do you make black British history palatable to white Britons? Actually, hold on a second. How do you make it palatable to black Britons? Let’s start again. How do you compose a history of Britain’s involvement with black people? The answer during my childhood was to accentuate the positive; to tweak the past, for instance, so that schoolchildren were left with the impression that slavery was somehow an abhorrent North American practice and that the British, through the good works of William Wilberforce, should be commended for their part in bringing about the end of the Atlantic slave trade.

Three decades ago Peter Fryer offered a corrective, stripping off the historical bandage. Fryer’s Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain was an excoriating book by a tireless Marxist historian skewering British imperial mendacity, which, when young black readers stumble across it, delivers a punch to the sternum, a remembrance real or imagined of tragedy and sorrow. But it also elicits a flush of excitement and pride. At last! A history that is not sanitised or sugar-coated; and one written by a proxy black man, namely a white man who in his own apologia aimed to “think black”. The British-Nigerian David Olusoga has a head start on Fryer. But whereas Fryer had an independent radical publisher (Pluto) at his elbow, Olusoga had to satisfy BBC managers – the book accompanies a TV series – who are largely petrified about “race”…

Read the entire review here.

Sophie Okonedo Is Queen Margaret in ‘The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses’ (On PBS Dec 11-25)

Shadow And Act
2016-11-17

Sophie Okonedo

“The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses” is a lavish three-part follow-up to the BAFTA winning “The Hollow Crown,” which aired in 2013 on THIRTEEN’s “Great Performances.”

The first series of “The Hollow Crown” covered the so-called Henriad comprising Richard II, Henry IV, Parts I and II and Henry V. Now, “The Wars of the Roses” – which comes to “Great Performances” on three consecutive Sundays beginning December 11 at 9 p.m. – picks up the story with epic film versions of Henry VI (in two parts) and Richard III…

The new series aired to great acclaim on the BBC this May. A Neal Street co-production with Carnival/NBCUniversal and THIRTEEN for BBC Two, the series was filmed in locations around the UK. Award-winning director Dominic Cooke (former Artistic Director of The Royal Court theatre) makes his TV directorial debut with the three films.

The series features some of the UK’s finest acting talent including Sophie Okonedo who has been cast to play Queen Margaret.

Okonedo joins Benedict Cumberbatch as Richard III, Tom Sturridge as Henry VI, Hugh Bonneville as Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, Judi Dench as Cecily, Duchess of York, Sally Hawkins as Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester, and Keeley Hawes as Queen Elizabeth…

Read the entire article here.