Mixed Race Studies

Jewish Uses and Abuses of Martin Luther King’s Memory

Forward
2016-01-18

Jared Jackson, Founder/Executive Director
Jews in ALL Hues

Four years ago, I made a promise to myself: I would not accept any more invitations to speak to the Jewish community on Martin Luther King weekend. Since then, I have dutifully kept that promise. But this year, I’m breaking it.

Here’s the thing: I used to love MLK weekend. In fact, I still have a deep love for it. The service projects, the gathering of people from different religious and humanistic traditions, and learning just a bit more about the civil rights era from people who were there — it was always a time I could look forward to. As a Jewish professional, I noticed that this was also the time when many communities reached out to Jewish leaders of color for speaking engagements. And I used to go to those events and speak to some of those communities.

Then I realized how many Ashkenazi Jewish communities take credit for a social justice heritage to which they are not currently contributing. It’s fine to have an event honoring the legacy of Jewish involvement in the civil rights era, so long as there is a clear plan to continue the work that King, Abraham Joshua Heschel and many others started…

Read the entire article here.

Dearth of Faculty Diversity Leaves King Award Recipient ‘Neither Thrilled Nor Honored’

The Chronicle of Higher Education
2016-01-20

Eric Kelderman

Naomi Zack is one of just six people scheduled to receive a University of Oregon award on Wednesday honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

But the philosophy professor expressed mixed feelings about what the award means at a university where so few of her colleagues are minorities.

Ms. Zack, who describes herself as multiracial, said there are no women who identify as black in the College of Arts and Sciences and only two women of color, including herself, who qualify as full professors in the entire university. The other woman, she said, is the university’s vice president for equity and inclusion, Yvette M. Alex-Assensoh.

“I am neither thrilled nor honored to receive” the award, Ms. Zack plans to say, according to a copy of her prepared remarks. “I am embarrassed.”

“The absence of African-American senior faculty in what presents itself as a world-class research institution is an embarrassment for all members of our community,” the text reads…

Read the entire article here.

Misty Copeland, Brooklyn Mack coming to Columbia

The State
Columbia, South Carolina
2016-01-19

Erin Shaw

Misty Copeland

The principal ballerina and former Columbia dancer to speak at ballet fundraiser

Misty Copeland, one of the most famous ballerinas in the country, will appear in Columbia with professional ballet dancer and South Carolina native Brooklyn Mack for a fundraiser benefitting two of the city’s ballet companies.

Columbia Classical Ballet and Columbia City Ballet are jointly organizing a March 15 luncheon, for which costs and profits will be split evenly among both companies.

Copeland and Mack will speak about the arts at the ticketed event, which will have seating available for the public.

…Copeland has danced for American Ballet Theatre — one of the top companies in the country — since 2000, when she was the only African American woman in a company of 80 dancers.

In June 2015, she was promoted to principal dancer, making her the first African American woman to ever be promoted to the position in the company’s 75-year history…

Read the entire article here.

UNF professor explores the impact of skin tone on the everyday lives of African-American women

The Florida Times-Union
2016-01-18

Rhema Thompson

JeffriAnne Wilder always knew African-Americans came in many shades. She saw it in her own family, from her light-skinned older sister to her two dark-skinned brothers. Her complexion fell somewhere in the middle.

“I saw the variation at home, but I didn’t place any value on it,” she recalled.

Around age 10 that began to change. She noticed the light-skinned girls in her predominantly black Cleveland elementary class seemed to be treated differently. Other students seemed enamored by their creamy complexions and wavy hair.

Decades later, that sentiment hit closer to home when she became pregnant with her daughter.

“I had lots of people just assume because my ex-husband is biracial and light-skinned with green eyes that she was going to be light-skinned, too,” she said. “ ‘Oh, you’re going to have the prettiest daughter. She’s going to be so pretty. She’s going to be light and blah, blah, blah,’ and I remember telling people ‘What happens if she’s not light-skinned? What if she ends up like me?’ ”

Now, an associate sociology professor at the University of North Florida and director of the school’s new Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnic Relations, Wilder is sharing her observations and the experiences of 66 other black women in her first published book “Color Stories.”…

Read the entire article here.

Playwright Adrienne Dawes imagines an dystopian future — with humor

Austin American-Statesman
Austin, Texas
2016-01-16

Jeanne Claire van Ryzin, Arts Critic

Adrienne Dawes (Laura Skelding)

Adrienne Dawes donned denim recently when she stopped by Salvage Vanguard Theater for a rehearsal of her latest play to debut at the indie East Austin venue.

“Denim Doves” opens this weekend.

The play has been several years in development, but that the dystopian future world Dawes and her collaborators imagined is populated with people wearing all denim — well, that detail was decided on from the beginning…

…Dawes, a native Austinite, spent three years training and performing with Chicago’s famed Second City comedy troupe after college in New York. Under her “Heckle Her” production company, Dawes devises sketch comedy shows like the upcoming “Love Me Tindr,” a musical spoof of the online dating app, which opens Valentine’s Day weekend in Salvage Vanguard’s studio theater.

Dawes’ trenchant and intense drama “Am I White”, which played at Salvage Vanguard in October 2014, netted the David Mark Cohen New Play Award from the Austin Critics Table Awards.

A sharp and gutsy look at racial identity, “Am I White” is based on the real-life story of convicted felon Leo Felton, a white supremacist who hid his own biracial identity while plotting to bomb public sites.

Lauded by local critics, “Am I White” is currently being considered for production by theater companies around the country.

Dawes, who is herself of mixed race, spent years working on “Am I White,” and an early workshop version attracted the attention of the incarcerated Felton, who emailed Dawes from prison. Though Dawes exchanged a few emails with Felton during the development of “Am I White,” she declined to continue communication with him after the play’s premiere.

“The play is my creation, not his story,” she says with finality…

Read the entire article here.

The Audacity to be Black

The Chicago Maroon: The independent student newspaper of The University of Chicago since 1892.
2016-01-18

Vincente Perez

The word African American masks the political strife and oppression that comes with the word Black.

“Black is hurt.
Black is pain.
Black is strong.
Black is Love
Worked hard and long
Black is deserving
Black is unnerving
Because it is so Goddamn powerful
No matter what side of Blackness you represent
Remember
Always
Black is beautiful.”

—excerpted from B(lack)NESS & LATINI(dad)

I remember the first time I was teased for being Black. I was trying to fit in with the kids—all Mexican—so I wore my hair gelled down, but no amount of mousse or gel could hide my nappy curls. It was my turn to get roasted. They threw out the word Mayate (a slur for Black people) and laughed at how much product my hair required. I wasn’t “really” Mexican like they were. My father was Black and my mother Mexican, so I was something caught in between. “Mayate.” The word rang in my ears. For some reason, it hurt just like n***er did, but more than that, it threw me into a state of alienation. This word was flung at me from a language that shouldn’t be foreign to me, but is.

So where did I fit in? African American didn’t feel right. My mestizo family migrated to the U.S. in the 20th century and my mother didn’t meet my father until the 1990s. I’d never felt American. So what was I then? My mom told me: “You’re Black. There’s no need to be ashamed of it, it just is what it is.”…

Read the entire article here.

National Museum of the American Indian Presents Unprecedented Retrospective “Kay WalkingStick: An American Artist”

Newsdesk: Newsroom of the Smithsonian
2015-10-29

SI-423A-2015

For nearly five decades, Kay WalkingStick (Cherokee, b. 1935) has charted an artistic career that is not bound by singular definition. While her early work with Native themes celebrate heroic American Indian leaders with stately, abstract compositions and her more recent heroically scaled paintings recast American landscapes as Native places, WalkingStick’s artistic persona originates from roots in the New York art world of the 1960s and 1970s and her immersion in considerations of abstraction, minimalism and feminist art. “Kay WalkingStick: An American Artist” is the first major retrospective of WalkingStick’s work, including more than 75 works that trace her dynamic career from the 1970s to the present.

The exhibition will be on view from Nov. 7 through Sept. 18, 2016, in the National Museum of the American Indian’s third-floor gallery. The American Federation of the Arts will tour the exhibition to the Dayton Art Institute in Dayton, Ohio (Feb. 9, 2017–May 7, 2017), Montclair Art Museum in Montclair, N.J. (Feb. 3, 2018–June 17, 2018) and two additional venues in 2017. “Kay WalkingStick: An American Artist” is co-curated by Kathleen Ash-Milby (Navajo), associate curator, and David Penney, associate director for museum scholarship. It features both well-known works, such as WalkingStick’s “Chief Joseph” series and hallmark diptychs, as well as never-before-seen works, richly illustrated sketchbooks from the artist’s personal collection and a gallery film featuring the artist discussing her work and process. A press preview will be held Monday, Nov. 2.

“For her entire career, Kay WalkingStick has been rewriting the narrative about Native peoples through her artwork, which has defied categorization,” said Kevin Gover (Pawnee), director of the National Museum of the American Indian. “These seeming contradictions and complexity are part of being an American Indian today, and what makes her an American artist. Our nation itself is built upon diversity of culture and expression. WalkingStick’s background and art reflect this same richness and diversity.”…

Read the entire press release here.

Preview of DREAM OF THE WATER CHILDREN by Wendy Cheng

2Leaf Press: A Small Press with Big Ideas!
New York, New York
2016-01-18

Wendy Cheng, Assistant Professor
School of Social Transformation Faculty
Arizona State University

A Black-Japanese Amerasian reflects on life in the present, with the traces of wars and their aftermaths.

In Dream of the Water Children, Fredrick Kakinami Cloyd delineates the ways imperialism and war are experienced across and between generations and leave lasting and often excruciating legacies in the mind, body, and relationships. The book is particularly good in detailing these costs as experienced by women and children, most vividly in cataloguing the life and emotions of Cloyd’s mother, and of Cloyd himself as a child and young man.

In incident after incident of military violence, sexual violence, social ostracism, intrafamilial cruelty, self-harm, and bullying, Cloyd shows how the social conditions created by war reverberate in our most intimate relationships. At the same time, Cloyd and his mother are never just victims: Cloyd’s spirited mother in particular defies stereotypes of Asian women and war brides as passive and silent. Throughout, Cloyd also traces moments of friendship and communal support among women and children of other mixed-race military families, as they navigated the conditions of multiple societies and cultural norms…

Read the entire preview here.

Black like her: Is racial identity a state of mind?

The Washington Post
2015-06-16

Amy Ellis Nutt, Reporter

While people continue to question the motivations behind former NAACP official Rachel Dolezal’s claiming she is black, scientists say identity, even racial identity, doesn’t arise from any single place in the brain.

Individuals contain different selves, often contradictory selves, according to neuroscientists. There is no clump of gray matter or nexus of electrical activity in the brain that we can point to and say, “this is me, this is where my self is located.” Instead, we are spread out over our brain, with different areas of cortex controlling different aspects of who we are, from what we see and hear to how we think and feel.

For instance, the medial prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain located just behind the forehead, is activated whenever we think about ourselves. But when we think about how someone else thinks about us — does my spouse think I’m pretty? — the medial prefrontal cortex disengages and the posterior part lights up. Culture and community, neuroscience tells us is, are important constituents of identity, which may explain why children understand social interactions before they even learn to talk. Identity, in other words, is complicated.

Carolyn Yoon, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, says she doesn’t “see what the big controversy is” regarding Dolezal’s claim to identify as a black person.

“That’s a reasonable view in my book,” Yoon said. “Identity is highly malleable and is a function of what she comes in contact with, what she spends her time doing, is interested in and motivated by. Over time that will change your brain.”…

…There is certainly historical precedence for passing as black. Effa Manley was born to Bertha Brooks, a white woman, in Philadelphia in 1900. Brooks was married to an African-American man and so Effa grew up with six biracial siblings. She, however, was the product of an affair her mother had with a white man. Although blonde-haired, hazel-eyed Effa believed she also was biracial until her teens when her mother told her the truth.

Nonetheless, Effa lived our her life as a black woman: she married an African American, lived in Harlem and became the well-known co-owner of a Negro League baseball team. She also belonged to the NAACP and the Urban League and was once profiled in Ebony magazine.

Whether it was her early life experiences, self-deception or mirror neurons — or all three — Effa Manley saw herself as a black woman, which is why she could muse to a reporter when she was in her 70s, “I’ve always wondered what it would be like to associate with white people.”…

Read the entire article here.

Olbermann Ties Dolezal Race Manipulation to ‘Senseless’ Charleston Shooting

Breitbart News
2015-06-18

Trent Baker, Sports Reporter

On Thursday’s “Olbermann” on ESPN2, host Keith Olbermann opened his show with a monologue speaking about former Spokane NAACP head Rachel Dolezal, deceased American sports executive and the first woman inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame Effa Manley, who was white and identified as black after being raised by her black step-father, and the shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, which he tied all of them together at the end.

“The Effa Manley story is not about passing, but both lives rise from curiosity and story telling when one remembers that biologists long ago concluded genetically there are no “races” just one species we call human beings. In the stories of both Rachel Dolezal and Effa Manley the importance and meaning we have given to skin pigmentation prove to be amazingly easy to manipulate, proved to be flexible, prove to be impermanent; prove to be remarkably inaccurate, all of which means the madness and nightmare and terrorism that unfolded last night at the church in South Carolina all of that was even more senseless.”…

Read the entire story and watch the video here.