Mixed Race Studies

Photographing Multiracial Families In Scotland: Celebrating mothers, daughters and diversity through portraits

Medium for Pixel Magazine
2015-12-17

Interview by Emily von Hoffmann and Polarr

Image courtesy of Kim Simpson.

Portrait photographer Kim Simpson began her Exottish project after her daughter, who is of mixed heritage, experienced a series of racial insults in her primary school in Scotland.

Kim says she hopes her portraits — which feature families with some “visual differences” between their members — will encourage viewers to revisit their engrained ideas of what it looks like to be Scottish.

For Polarr, Emily von Hoffmann spoke with Kim about the work and her experience as a parent in a multiracial family.

Emily von Hoffmann: “Girls and Their Mothers” is one part of the larger Exottish project. What does “Girls and Their Mothers” entail? Who are these women?

Kim Simpson: “Girls and Their Mothers” is a collection of portraits of mixed race girls, of all ages, with their mothers — 48 portraits featuring 16 different families in a mix of individual and group portraits.

Instead of questioning their ancestry or scrutinizing their appearance, I chose to photograph girls and women of mixed heritage and their mothers with an intent to question social perception. These images display their relationships, linking these girls and their mothers together while at the same time respecting their disparity…

Image courtesy of Kim Simpson.

…EvH: What sort of national dialogue, or vocabulary even, around race and appearance exists in Scotland? Is it discussed in school, for instance? I’m interested in thinking about this in comparison to the current Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S., and the greater mainstream attention to identity issues of multiracial individuals.

KS: Black Lives Matter is extremely relevant in Scotland, especially at the moment. We have had an awful tragedy that saw the senseless end of Sheku Bayoh’s life at the hands of police officers as he was suffocated during an arrest in Fife, Scotland. Justice has not been served in this instance and it echoes all the hallmarks of what has been going on across the water with concerns of interactions between police officers and members of the black community…

Read entire the interview here.

When Ancestry Search Led To Escaped Slave: ‘All I Could Do Was Weep’

Fresh Air (From WHYY in Philadelphia)
National Public Radio
2016-01-18

Terry Gross, Host

When she was in fifth grade, Regina Mason received a school assignment that would change her life: to connect with her country of origin. That night, she went home and asked her mother where they were from.

“She told me about her grandfather who was a former slave,” Mason tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. “And that blew me away, because I’m thinking, ‘Slavery was like biblical times. It wasn’t just a few generations removed.’ ”

But for Mason, slavery was a few generations removed. She would later learn that her great-great-great-grandfather, a man named William Grimes, had been a runaway slave, and that he had authored what is now considered to be the first fugitive slave narrative.

“William Grimes’ narrative is precedent-setting,” Mason says. “[It] was published in 1825, and this was years before the abolitionist movement picked up slave narrative as a propaganda tool to end slavery. It sort of unwittingly paved the way for the American slave narrative to follow.”

Grimes’ original narrative tells the story of his 30 years spent in captivity, followed by his escape in 1814 from Savannah, Ga. He describes how his former owner discovered his whereabouts after the escape and forced him to give up his house in exchange for his freedom. (An updated version, published in 1855, includes a chapter about Grimes’ later life in poverty.)

Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave was again republished in 2008 by Oxford University Press. The latest edition was edited by Mason and William Andrews, a scholar of early African-American autobiography…

…Interview Highlights

On learning from her mother that her ancestors had been slaves

She talked about Grandpa Fuller, who was a mulatto slave. And I inquired about his parentage and she told me that his father, from what she knew, was a plantation owner, and his mother was an enslaved black woman. …

And I’m asking, “Well, that’s weird. Did his father own him?” … I mean, how do you explain … to children that slavery existed in freedom-loving America, No. 1; and No. 2, how do you explain to a child about an enslaved heritage shrouded in miscegenation? It’s not an easy thing to do…

Read the story highlights here. Listen to the interview (00:35:55) here. Download the interview here.

Ladies and Gentlemen, (Is This) The Next President of the United States(?)

Vibe Magazine
September 2007 (Volume 15, Number 9)
pages 172-181

Jeff Chang

Photographed by Terry Richardson on June 20, 2007 in Washington, D.C.

Can the freshman senator from Illinois stick to his ideals and still become the first man to rock Air Force Ones on Air Force One?  We’re entering the most hotly contested election of our lifetime. It s time to decide. Is Barack Obama our man?

On a Tuesday afternoon in May, the lines fora Barack Obama rally are as long as they would be for the rock concerts that are the normal fare here at the Electric Factory, a vast, converted warehouse in North Philadelphia. Even for this mixed city, the crowd is stunningly cosmopolitan. The orderly line includes a coed reading The Bookseller of Kabul, South Asian engineering majors from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Arab-American law students from the University of Pennsylvania, veteran activists from the National Hip-Hop Political Convention in crisp suits, community organizers in ACORN T-shirts, youngwhitc, black, and Latino parents with kids in strollers, elderly people in wheelchairs, and everywhere, high schoolers —some sporting HOT CHICKS DIG OBAMA buttons, some from North Philly in their school uniforms, others from South Jersey in Abercrombie & Fitch, drawn like the faithful to Mecca.

They have all donated $25 to $50 — star prices for the B-Rock — to be, in Common’s words, ignited. Obama pitches himself as the candidate of change, and many here hope he can turn around a nation polarized by George W. Bush, war, the economy, race, religion, political parties, and even hip hop.

Beverly Washington from the Mount Olivet Tabernacle Baptist Church is wearing her red Sunday power worship suit and gripping her varnished brown cane. Four generations from her congregation have come on buses. The last time she felt this good about politics was two decades ago. “Jesse was real. But now Barack is coming,” she says. “He’s fresh, he’s new, he’s inspiring.”

Carmen Mitchell, 14, got her cousin Anthony Lewis, 17, to ask his mom to write them fake doctor’s notes that morning. They dressed in their summer-bright polos, grabbed their black D&G stunna shades, and skipped classes to catch a train from the boondocks of Conshohocken. Then they hiked two miles from 30th Street Station to be the first in line at their first political rally. They want the wars in Iraq and in their old West Philly neighborhood to end. “He makes us feel like he’s really talking to us,” Carmen says.

Obama arrives backstage, a retinue of Secret Service agents trailing behind. He introduces himself to the employees, looking them in their eyes. On the decks, King Britt cues Aretha Franklin’s “Think,” and she wails, “Oh, freedom! Freedom!” Now it really is Obama time. This crowd of 3,000 isn’t the biggest he has seen — there were 12,000 in Oakland, 20,000 in Atlanta and Austin — but as he ascends to the stage, it is deafening. “Spring is here in America,” he says in his soothing baritone. “It’s time for us to renew the spirit of America, and that’s what this campaign is all about.”

When he first ran for state office in 1996, Obama continues, “People would say to me, ‘You seem like a nice guy.’” The crowd laughs. “‘You’ve got a fancy law degree. You could be making a lot of money. You’ve got a beautiful family. You’re a churchgoing man. Why would you want to go into something dirty and nasty like politics?’” Obama talks slowly, as if he’s unsure whether he’s really made up his mind, and when he has an opportunity to go hard, he often gets complicated instead. But while his voice is doing one thing, his body is doing another. He carries his slim 6′ 2″ frame with a hint of streetball swagger. And when he comes to a money line, he holds his position like he’s daring you to charge. His is the opposite of in-your-grill. Obama’s game is finesse.

“We feel as if we can’t make a difference, and so half of us don’t even vote,” Obama says, to swelling cheers. “This nation is founded on a different tradition.” he says, his voice rising, “a very simple idea that we all have mutual obligations toward each other, that we all rise and fall together, that we can value our individualism and our self-reliance, but ultimately we have to lift up this idea that we are connected. And if there are children in Philadelphia right now that are killing each other and shooting each other, and without an education and dropping out, that impacts all of us.”

The crowd goes bananas.

When he’s done, he comes offstage to shake hands, followed by the men in headsets. A throng of bodies push toward the barriers. People hold up copies of his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope (Crown). An elderly black woman fights back tears. Carmen and Anthony reach out to clasp his hand. Aretha sings, “You need me…and I need you.”…

…Obama’s “blackness” has also come into question. “Obama isn’t black,” Salon.com columnist Debra Dickerson wrote. “‘Black,’ in our political and social reality, means those descended from West African slaves.” The debate exposed fears that a discussion about race that expands to include immigrants of color and their descendants might thwart continuing attempts to address the terrible legacies of slavery. And could someone who grew up in Hawai’i and Indonesia really be “black?” Obama’s Southside-for-life wife, Michelle, plays this line for laughs on the campaign trail when she talks about her first impressions of him: “I kind of thought any black guy who was raised in Hawai’i had to be a little off!”

“We as a culture are still confused about race,” Obama says carefully. “There’s this assumption that there’s only one way of being black. That if you are not conforming to a certain pattern of behavior, that somehow you may not be authentic enough. And those of us in African-American culture know that there’s as much diversity in the African-American community as there is in any other community.”

Some took just one look at him to make up their minds. On May 4, CBSNews.com disabled all user comments on its articles about Obama because the Web site was receiving too many racist posts. That same month, he was granted full Secret Service protection, the earliest ever for a presidential candidate who had not previously served — for reasons which reportedly include racist emails sent to his office. Only Jesse Jackson Sr., during his 1984 and 1988 runs, required similar arrangements. “He is both black and black enough for whatever individual or individuals unnerved his handlers enough to seek Secret Service protection,” observed Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr.: “That’s a truth that cuts the clutter.”

When asked what he thinks of the “Is he black enough?” discussion, Obama grins. Perhaps it’s that bit of Ali in him. “If you go to my barbershop, the Hyde Park Hair Salon, 53rd Street on the Southside, and you ask my guys in there, people don’t understand the question,” he says. “But it’s something I worked out a long time ago. I know who I am. My friends, my family, my constituency know who I am, and by the time this campaign is all over, America will know who I am.”…

Read the entire article here.

Who’s Hispanic? Who’s Filipino?

The Multiracial Activist: Covering news of interest to multiracial individuals and interracial couples since 1997.
2016-01-15

Emily Monroy

A few years ago, I wrote an essay called ‘Who’s White?’ I asked this question about several individuals, both famous (controversial shooter George Zimmerman) and not-so-famous (two boyfriends of mine). I ended the piece by discussing whether my daughter, who is part American Indian on her father’s side (he’s from Nicaragua), would be considered White or not. Conclusion: maybe, maybe not.

Since then, a few new developments have occurred. Members of a Scandinavian club whose events I occasionally attend seem to think that my daughter looks Italian – which doesn’t surprise me because both her father and I have some ancestry from Italy. I wasn’t so prepared, though, when at least two people asked me if my daughter was part-Filipino (both were Filipino themselves, incidentally). In one case, the question came after I mentioned that my daughter had a Spanish last name from her father: having been under Spain’s rule for more than 300 years, most surnames in the Philippines are Spanish. One of my daughter’s surnames is Ramos, the name of the Philippines’ 12th president. In the other instance, a man working at my daughter’s school thought she might be Filipino because of her eyes.

I’ll concede that my daughter could probably ‘pass’ as a Filipino mestiza (Spanish word used in Latin America and the Philippines for a woman of mixed racial origins). These exchanges also got me asking my own questions: How Spanish are Filipinos? Are they an Asian people who just happen to have Spanish names? Or are they, like most of the inhabitants of Spanish America, all mestizo?…

Read the entire article here.

Staceyann Chin Worries About Money, and Selling Out

The New York Times
2016-01-14

Laura Collins-Hughes

The day she traded in her little two-door convertible for a crossover S.U.V. — “a mom car,” she calls it — the performance poet Staceyann Chin went home and cried. It wasn’t enough that pregnancy had forever altered her body. Now, as she saw it, motherhood was taking away her sex appeal, too.

“But those are the ways it changes your life,” said Ms. Chin, 43, who has a curly, deep-red mohawk, a Jamaican lilt to her speech and, at her throat, a pair of silver necklaces, one of which is emblazoned with a single word: BadAss.

“And then you meet a whole bunch of other people who think moms are sexy,” she added cheerfully over dinner on Lafayette Street before a performance of her latest solo show, “MotherStruck!,” at the Culture Project. “Very strange, but true. They’re everywhere.”

The play tells the story of Ms. Chin’s determined quest to have a child in the face of considerable obstacles, such as being a cash-strapped, single, lesbian artist-activist with paltry health insurance. (In vitro fertilization? Definitely not included.) When at last she does get pregnant, it’s a victory, but a fragile one. At 14 weeks, she begins to bleed. And bleed…

Read the entire article here.

The Complicated History of Nikki Haley

The New Yorker
2016-01-13

Jelani Cobb, Staff Writer; Professor of History
University of Connecticut

Like President Obama, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley—who delivered last night’s Republican response to the State of the Union—has harnessed the rhetoric and symbolism of racial progress. Credit Photograph Courtesy C-SPAN

Set aside the feuding policy particulars and last night’s pairing of Barack Obama and Nikki Haley, in the State of the Union address and Republican response, becomes a far more compelling exercise. There was a particular symmetry to the speakers: two people of color with multiracial families, both of whom have deployed the rhetoric and symbolism of racial progress at key moments in their careers.

Last summer, Haley, the two-term governor of South Carolina, gained national attention for her decision to remove the Confederate flag from the grounds of the State Capitol, in Columbia, South Carolina. Coming days after the massacre of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, the move marked an audacious if symbolic reckoning with the racial ugliness of the past.

The decision did not obviously fit into Haley’s broader vision for South Carolina, which preceded the events at Emanuel A.M.E. by several years. To a greater extent than any of her gubernatorial peers, Haley has promulgated and benefitted from the idea of a “New South,” which has shaken the grip of dead tradition and can serve as a model for the rest of the country. (It’s worth noting that even the concept of a New South is dated. When the Atlanta newspaper publisher Henry Grady used the term in the post-Reconstruction era, he, too, was hoping to cast off a moribund past and self-defeating tradition. The novelty of the South is that there is now a history of its efforts to move beyond its history.)…

Read the entire article here.

A Russian-Chinese woman witnesses the ups and downs of the two nations’ ties

Global Times: Discover China, Discover The World
2015-10-30

Zhou Yu

Li Yingnan stands in her home. Her home is filled with Chinese and Russian books and decorations. Photo: Li Hao/GT

It was a sunny August day in Moscow when three shuttle buses stopped at Red Square. A group of women were the first of the dozens of tourists to step off the buses. Though their appearances were barely different from those of ordinary Russians, they were, in fact, Chinese citizens, aged between 50 to 80.

“I was born in Moscow,” said one 80-year-old lady tearfully.

The ladies belonged to a tour group called Russian Mothers Seeking Roots in Russia, and all were the descendants of Russians. It was the first time since the end of World War II that a group of people seeking their roots had been organized by Chinese citizens.

For the next seven days, they would tour major sites in Moscow and St. Petersburg. These old ladies were so excited to see their ancestors’ hometowns, some even dancing on Red Square. Russian WWII veterans told them about the joint military operations between the two countries during the war.

Most of the group members’ mothers were Russians who came to China during the 1930s. In the 1920s, there were around 200,000 Chinese laborers who lived and worked in Russia doing construction work or running shops. Some Chinese workers participated in the Russian Revolution in 1917, and others even joined Russia’s Red Army.

At the end of the 1920s, when the Soviet Union’s strict economic planning system was implemented, the Soviet government closed down all private shops and forced Chinese shop owners to leave the country. Many of these Chinese businessmen had married Russian women, who followed their husbands back to China. Due to Russia’s geographical proximity of Xinjiang, most of these Russian-Chinese couples settled in Xinjiang and the women became Chinese citizens. There are around 15,000 such descendants of Russians still in China…

Read the entire article here.

Too Black to be Arab, too Arab to be Black

Media Diversified
2016-01-16

Leena Habiballa, Co-Editor
Qahwa Project

Edited by: Mend Mariwany, Middle East & North Africa Editor

Within every Sudanese diasporan is an unceasing internal dialogue about where we fit in the dominant racial order. Sudan is one of the most ethnically, culturally, linguistically and religiously diverse places on the African continent. It was also home to some of the most ancient civilisations in African memory. But today it suffers from the brutal legacy of Arab slavery, Ottoman imperialism and British colonialism.

My early childhood was spent living in various Arab countries, where I learnt from a young age that my darker skin tone threatened my claim to Arabness. To be authentically Arab, it wasn’t enough to speak Arabic or have facets of Arab culture syncretised into my own. My Blackness needed to be invisible. My identity as an Arab was, therefore, always contested and fraught, though nevertheless an important part of my being and, ultimately, self-evident. When others denied my Arabness I felt its existence affirmed, for how could something be stripped off if it didn’t exist?

It wasn’t until my mid to late teens that I was forced to see Blackness and Arabness as ontologically separate. This was the result of being introduced to the Western concept of race. Being racialised within this schema gave me a new sense of self, one which was innately linked to my skin colour and its difference to others. I had previously equated ‘Arab’ with Arab culture, and ‘Black’ with skin tone, not an identity. The concept of race, however, meant not only that I now saw Black and Arab as representing very different racial identities but also as invariably competing and mutually exclusive. I came to embody these two irreconcilable racial categories, and my body had become the site of a visceral and daily contradiction.

Too Black to be Arab, too Arab to be Black. This is the daily discourse that I grappled with. I was racially perplexed and traumatised…

Read the entire article here.

#MemeOfTheWeek: The Racial Politics Of Nikki Haley

National Public Radio
2016-01-16

Sam Sanders, Reporter, Washington Desk

Gov. Nikki Haley, R-S.C. at Charleston, S.C., Republican presidential debate Thursday. Andrew Burton/Getty Images

Depending on whom you ask, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s State of the Union response this week was either going to save the modern Republican Party or kill conservatism.

This week, those differing responses evoked two different hashtags. Both, in some ways, were about Haley’s heritage, and they bring to light the tricky way she’ll have to navigate race should she take on a more prominent role in the 2016 election.

#DeportNikkiHaley

After Haley gave the Republican response to President Obama’s seventh and final State of the Union address this week, some conservatives were not impressed. Haley said in her speech that fixing immigration “means welcoming properly vetted legal immigrants, regardless of their race or religion. Just like we have for centuries.” She offered a tacit rebuke of Donald Trump when she said, “During anxious times, it can be tempting to follow the siren call of the angriest voices. We must resist that temptation.”

(She confirmed on NBC’s Today show the next day that she was, in fact, referring to Trump.).

The response to those lines, and other conciliatory notes in Haley’s speech, was swift. And some of it was brutal. Conservative firebrand Ann Coulter probably went the farthest, writing, “Donald Trump should deport Nikki Haley.”….

….In some ways, Haley seems to face the same conundrum former Louisiana Gov. and failed Republican presidential candidate Bobby Jindal did — not seeming “brown enough” for some voters of color, while being “too brown” for others. (We won’t bore you with the details, or subject you to some of the graphic tweets, but just take a look at the #JindalSoWhite hashtag to see what we’re talking about.)

Of course, Twitter is not exactly or entirely representative of the real world, and even thousands of tweets for or against Nikki Haley might not accurately depict actual support or disapproval of her…

Read the entire article here.

Obama: A Nation Divided

Medium
2016-01-14

Delonte Harrod

I was at grad school during the time President Obama campaigned for and eventually was elected to the highest office in this country. I remember listening to people talk about the potential of him becoming president. Some of my white friends complained, and were genuinely confused, about some black people’s fidelity to a biracial man, who is part African, running for president. I remember sitting across a table listening to some of my black friends talk about how some of their relationships with their white friends had become strained because of Obama’s popularity and the possibility of him becoming president. The obvious is clear, for various reasons, some of their white friends did not like it — and they let their blacks friends know it.

I listened and thought…

Read the entire article here.