Mixed Race Studies

EXCLUSIVE: Misty Copeland on overcoming adversity, fighting for diversity in ballet

The State
Columbia, South Carolina
2016-03-09

Erin Shaw

Misty Copeland Provided photo

• The prima ballerina talks body image and being named the first black woman principal dancer
• Copeland comes to Columbia for a ballet fundraiser with Elgin native Brooklyn Mack

There was time when Misty Copeland, one of the world’s most recognizable dancers, felt lost and insecure. That was before being named the first black principal ballerina for a major ballet company, before the Under Armour sponsorship, the book deal and the documentary on her life.

Copeland, 33, who is a source of inspiration for young women, minorities, dancers and athletes, will share her story in Columbia on Tuesday, March 15 at a fundraising luncheon for Columbia Classical Ballet and Columbia City Ballet. She will be joined by Brooklyn Mack, the Elgin native who now dances for The Washington Ballet and is also breaking barriers as a black dancer…

…What are some of the topics you plan to discuss when you come to speak in Columbia?

Copeland: I think it’ll be a sharing of our experiences and opening people’s eyes up to the lack of diversity in ballet, and for me what it is to be a part of a company where you’re the only black woman. (Brooklyn and I) are both proof of success in the classical ballet world. It should be an organic conversation…

Read the entire interview here.

An Emerging Entry In America’s Multiracial Vocabulary: ‘Blaxican’

Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity
National Public Radio
2016-03-08

Adrian Florido

When Melissa Adams and her sister were growing up in Lynwood, near Compton, Calif., their black father and Mexican mother taught them to be proud of all aspects of their identity: They were black, and they were Mexican.

At home, that came easy. Publicly, it was harder. Consider the time Melissa was named valedictorian of her middle school when she was 13. It was the first time anyone could remember a black student winning that honor at her school.

“Everyone was excited,” she said over breakfast at her family’s house recently. “It was the first black valedictorian!” School administrators planned a special ceremony for her, and the dean called Adams into her office to congratulate her.

But when Adams walked in, the dean’s smile melted away…

…Like Adams and Tillman, many have struggled to explain their racial identity to the outside world, and sometimes even to understand it themselves.

Much of this has to do with the fact that biracial identity in the United States has often been understood in terms of black and white. And to the extent that labels are helpful for quickly self-identifying, they don’t always exist for the diversity of racial possibilities that mixed Americans increasingly want to see recognized. When it comes to mixed-race in America, Mexican-American author Richard Rodriguez has written, we rely on an “old vocabulary — black, white,” but, “we are no longer a black-white nation.”

This may be why in LA, many young people who are both black and Mexican are turning to a handy word to describe themselves: “Blaxican.”

It’s not a new term. Walter Thompson-Hernandez, a researcher at the University of Southern California who focuses on immigration and race, has traced references back to the 1980s. But it has gained new prominence in the past few years, since he launched a project called “Blaxicans of L.A.” It’s an Instagram account featuring photos of Blaxicans — with their varied hues, hair textures and facial profiles — accompanied by a quote from each person offering an insight on the Blaxican experience…

Read the entire article here.

Variations on racial tension

The Harvard Gazette
2016-02-26

John Laidler, Harvard Correspondent

For every nation, a different set of challenges, panelists say

A panel discussion Wednesday highlighted striking contrasts in how nations perceive and grapple with racial inequality.

Tracing evolving attitudes toward race and discrimination in Latin America, Europe, and the United States, a trio of experts painted a picture of a multidimensional issue resistant to simple explanations or solutions.

The panel was the second of four in a Weatherhead Center series on comparative inequality.

Patrick Simon, director of research at the National Institute of Demographic Studies in France, said post-war Europe followed a conscious strategy to ban the use of racial terminologies to describe populations, a practice that persists.

“We are all aware that talking about race is not a straightforward situation in Europe,” said Simon, currently a fellow at City University of New York. “Basically, if you don’t talk about race, the name itself is simply not there.”

Simon said the strategy was contradicted at first by continuing racial categorizing in European colonies. That ended with decolonization, but as citizens of those countries migrated to Europe, “race is back in the picture,” he said, “in societies not prepared to address racial issues.”

“Now that there is real racial diversity, this color-blind strategy finds its limits,” Simon said, arguing that the approach — including resistance to directly including race in official data collection — hinders efforts to “change the dynamics of racializing.”

Alejandro de la Fuente, Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin-American History at Harvard and director of the University’s soon-to-launch Afro-Latin American Research Institute, said Latin-American nations have long promoted ideals of mestizaje, or mixing of races, and racial democracy…

Read the entire article here.

The ‘anti-racist’ crowd have resorted to the old politics of racism

The Spectator
2016-03-07

Brendan O’Neill

The self-important slayers of ‘cultural appropriation’ have gone too far this time. Clearly they didn’t get a big-enough moral kick from chastising white people who do yoga (on the basis that yoga has ‘roots in Indian culture’), moaning about Beyonce donning a sari (‘how is this different from white folks wearing cornrows?’, the racial police demanded), and fuming about middle-class indie kids who wear Native American headdresses at music festivals (apparently this ‘perpetuates damaging, archaic and racist stereotypes’).

So now they’re turning their fire on a black actress who, in their view, is not black enough to play Nina Simone. Yes, even black people can now be accused of being insufficiently black for certain cultural pursuits.

The actress in question is Zoe Saldana, a fine actress whose curious combination of vulnerability and steeliness has made her the darling of the modern Hollywood blockbuster. She’s one of the best things in the Star Trek reboot movies and she even managed to inject some humanity into James Cameron’s otherwise soulless, eco-miserabilist epic, Avatar. And next she will play Simone, in a big biopic, the trailer for which was released last week.

But the identity-politics mob isn’t happy. Why? Because Saldana is a light-skinned black person, a ‘half black’, as some have foully put it, and she used make-up to make herself as black as Simone…

Read the entire article here.

Why Zoe Saldana was the wrong black woman to play Nina Simone

The Telegraph
2016-03-04

Emma Dabiri

With her long silky hair and brown tan skin, Zoe Saldana may well be black. But is she “black enough” to play Nina Simone?

Some people seem to think not. Ms Simone’s surviving family have asked Saldana, who darkened her skin with make-up to star in the upcoming biopic Nina, to “take [her] name out of your mouth for the rest of your life.” Many Americans agree.

.@zoesaldana Cool story but please take Nina's name out your mouth. For the rest of your life.

— Nina Simone (@NinaSimoneMusic) March 3, 2016

To some it may seem strange that a woman with parents from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic – where 85 per cent of people have African ancestry – should be regarded as not being “black”. But to understand this, we need to consider the way race has been constructed by our society.

As a mixed women with a white mother and black father, I should logically be regarded as “half-white” as often as I am “half-black”. Yet this doesn’t happen, because race is not logical. Instead, whiteness is a social construct which depends on a myth of racial purity and exclusivity, with no room for anyone with visibly African ancestry, no matter how light our skin. In the USA, this was typified by the “one drop rule” – a legal principle which decreed that anyone with a single African ancestor was “black” for the purposes of segregation. For many people, black is simply black.

This can be a powerful concept: I identify as black, not mixed-race, precisely because it is an inclusive category which allows unity between a very wide range of people. But that plurality can also obscure things. I am always sensitive to the advantages I might have in comparison with darker skinned black women, because the truth is that there is a huge difference in how society treats us…

Read the entire article here.

The Lucky Seven Interview, with Adebe DeRango-Adem

Open Book: Toronto
2016-02-28

Grace O’Connell, Senior Editor

The metaphor of striking out to explore unknown land is a particularly apt one for the act of writing, so the title Terra Incognita (Inanna Publications) fits Adebe DeRango-Adem’s new collection of poetry perfectly.

Exploring racial discourse in both contemporary and historical contexts, Terra Incognita teases out cultural memory and the impact of social and racial histories on the personal experience. Questioning what these forces mean for the creation (and imposition) of identity, Adebe’s deft verse mimics the physical and spiritual movement of those seeking identity within and beyond social and political borders.

We’re thrilled to welcome Adebe as our March 2016 writer-in-residence at Open Book!

Check out our conversation with Adebe, part of our Lucky Seven series, where she tells us about seeing eye to eye with your words, good advice from Ta-Nehisi Coates and the insurgency of a great book.

Open Book:

Tell us about your new book, Terra Incognita.

Adebe DeRango-Adem:

Titled after the Latin term for “unknown land” — a cartographical expression referring to regions that have not yet been mapped or documented — Terra Incognita is a collection of poems that explores various racial discourses and interracial crossings both buried in the grand narratives of history and the everyday experiences of being mixed-race. In my most recent book, the quest for the meaning of identity in the interracial context becomes part of the quest to unearth the territory of those who cross borders — racially, ethnically, culturally and geographically…

Read the entire interview here.

“But how Indian are you?”: notes on being a mixed-race Indigenous person.

A Halfbreed’s Reasoning
2012-11-15

Samantha Nock

I am mixed. It’s not like it’s a secret. I am a mixed-race, mixed-blood, hybrid, mud blood, halfbreed; these things I know to be true. The thing is, I know my identity. I am accepted by my community, yet when I tell folks, especially non-Native folks, I get one of two reactions:

1. “Really? But like, how much Indian are you? Like what fraction of your blood is Native?”
2. They lean in really close, like they’re going to tell me a secret. They cock their head to the left and squint their eyes like they’re searching each line in my face, each pore, each chicken pox scar for some trace of their cigar shop Indian. It’s like, somewhere hidden in my features their untamed savage is hiding: maybe it’s behind my eyes, or maybe its somewhere in the space between my cheek bone and my jawline. When they’re done searching for hidden Indigenous clues, they always pull back, smile, and say, “yeah I can kind of see it! Look at your cheeks!”

It’s not the act itself that bothers me, as a light skinned, white passing, Indigenous individual, I get it. But it’s the fact that people assume that because I am mixed that I am less of an individual, that now, my parts don’t make a whole and each aspect of my identity is up for scrutiny. Automatically, I lose sovereignty over my identity and my body because I become a subject to be “made sense of.” Invasive questions about blood and family are deemed okay, because I have become the embodiment of anti-dichotomous reasonings of identity: “but how can you be more than one thing!”…

Read the entire article here.

​black girls rule: celebrating brazilian women of colour

i-D
2016-03-08

Hattie Collins

Weudson Ribeiro’s new photobook Black Girl Power is shining a light on black female identity and LGBT women of colour in brazil.

Brasilia based photographer, journalist and political scientist Weudson Ribeiro is known for his images celebrating Brazilian queer culture. In his latest series, Superafro: BLACK GIRL POWER, Ribero documents Brazilian LGBT women who proudly express their sexuality and their blackness as a political statement…

Tell us about Black Girl Power and what you wanted to document, not only regarding black female identity, but that of LGBT women of colour.

With Superafro: BLACK GIRL POWER, I intend to document the huge diversity within the Afro-Brazilian spectrum, celebrate the beauty of women of colour and, hopefully, make a positive difference in the fight for freedom and equality by raising awareness of issues that affect the reality of black people in Brazil, since we live in a society moulded by racism, pigmentocracy, disenfranchisement and sexism. With the phenomenal rise of feminism amongst young women and a greater access to information provided by digital inclusion, I notice females feel more encouraged to wear their hair natural, or as they will, express their sexuality and reject euphemisms employed to address Afro features as though Negroid was a burden…

…What do the women of your pictures represent?

Those women represent the stand against the odds of a judgemental society. Personally, meeting such beautiful and smart black women was a watershed. Being the only son of mixed-race parents, I had a hard time understanding and accepting my own blackness. It’s a problem that affects the vast majority of Brazilians as a result of our highly mixed ethnic backgrounds. So, as in the womb, this series marks to me a rebirth as a proud black LGBT man, after 24 years struggling with my racial identity…

Read the entire interview here.

The Curious Presidency of Barack Obama

Political Insight
Volume 7, Number 1 (April 2016)
pages 8-11
DOI: 10.1177/2041905816637452

James D. Boys, Associate Professor of International Political Studies
Richmond University, London, United Kingdom

After two terms in the White House, Barack Obama’s Presidency has entered its final year. James D. Boys assesses his record in office and finds an historic US President who leaves behind a nation more divided than ever.

In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald published the incredible tale of a man who effectively lives his life in reverse: born old, he grows younger as each subsequent year passes. In many ways, Fitzgerald’s Benjamin Button encapsulates the Presidency of Barack Obama, a President who has lived his Presidency in reverse.

Tradition holds that a president enters office with as much political capital as he will ever have and that over the course of his presidency (be that one or two terms) he expends it to such an extent that by the end of his tenure, he is a spent force, or rather, a lame duck. Tradition also suggests that as his time in office ends, a period of reflection begins, during which he is lauded for his achievements.

This has not happened, however, in the case of Barack Obama. Instead, he arrived in office garnered in plaudits, but struggled to achieve concrete goals or to find his presidential voice until late in his second term, when he suddenly hit his stride in terms of foreign policy achievements and his willingness to champion gun control efforts. Passage of ‘Obamacare’, the signature achievement of his first term, was an important exception to his narrative, but Obama’s most definable achievements have come in his second term when he was beyond the will of the electorate and when Vice President Biden had chosen not to seek office. Both aspects reveal telling factors about the Obama Presidency which betray his bold and optimistic clarion call for change that carried him to office in the election of 2008…

Read the entire article here.

Colored Perceptions: Racially Distinctive Names and Assessments of Skin Color

American Behavioral Scientist
Volume 60, Number 4 (April 2016)
pages 420-441
DOI: 10.1177/0002764215613395

Denia Garcia
Department of Sociology
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

Maria Abascal
Department of Sociology
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

Scholars are increasingly employing skin color measures to investigate racial stratification beyond the dimensions of self- or other-classification. Current understandings of the relationship between phenotypic traits, like skin color, and racial classification are incomplete. Scholars agree that perceptions of phenotypic traits shape how people classify others; it remains to be seen, however, whether racial classification in turn shapes people’s perceptions of phenotypic traits. The present study is based on an original survey experiment that tests whether assessments of others’ skin color are affected by a subtle racial cue, a name. Results indicate that skin color ratings are affected by the presence of a racially distinctive name: A significant share of people will rate the same face darker when that face is assigned a distinctively Hispanic name as opposed to a non-Hispanic name. In addition, ratings of male faces are more sensitive to racially distinctive names. The findings bear important lessons for our understanding of the social construction of race and its role in producing inequalities.

Read or purchase the article here.