Mixed Race Studies

Love and hate: interracial couples speak out about the racism they’ve faced

The Guardian
2015-11-26

Nell Frizzell

‘I asked them to share any negative comments they’d overheard about themselves.’ All photographs by Donna Pinckley

A couple stand by a flower bed. Her arm is wrapped about his waist like a rose climbing a tree. He rests his cheek on the top of her head. They stare down the lens, their bodies pressed together from thigh to neck in the late afternoon sun. “They are disgusting”, reads a handwritten caption below the image – as jarring as a rock to a toe.

This shot is one of US photographer Donna Pinckley’s ongoing series Sticks and Stones, which pairs interracial couples with the abuse they’ve received, sometimes directly, sometimes overheard. A southern girl at heart (she tells me that she could never move further north than Little Rock, Arkansas, where she lives), Pinckley works in black and white and the couples she depicts include a wide range of ethnicities and sexualities…

Read the entire article and view the photographs here.

Identity Does Not Define Experiences

The Oberlin Review
Oberlin, Ohio
2015-04-24

Taiyo Scanlon-Kimura, College senior

To the Editors:

My name is Taiyo Scanlon-Kimura. I take he, him and his. I am a mixed-race Japanese American. I am cisgender and heterosexual; I am from Ohio and a strictly middle-class background. (I received a federal Pell Grant one year and not others because my family is right on the cusp of certain federal guidelines.) My father is an immigrant with no college degree, while my mother has a Master’s degree. (You might be surprised at who makes more money.) I am the oldest and only son of four children. I am graduating in May and have gained tremendously from my Oberlin education.

This introduction is meant to highlight both my social privileges and challenges. (These are in fact relative terms, which means some elements of my identity have simultaneously advantaged me and been used to discriminate against me.) Asian Americans (particularly Midwestern ones and Ohio students in general) make up a fraction of Oberlin’s student body, while students of Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Indian descents are disproportionately represented, relative to their national populations, in American college campuses. In this country, people generally refer to me as part Asian, whereas in Japan I am overwhelmingly thought of as White. I will graduate from Oberlin with roughly $35,000 in loans (higher than the national average), yet statistics indicate I am better positioned to find a good job and start a family than my peers on this campus who come from low-income backgrounds.

There are many layers to my life story. I straddle the boundary between majority and minority, sometimes enjoying the benefits of one while enduring the hardships of the other…

Read the entire letter here.

The quadroon concubines of New Orleans on Wanton Weekends

Jude Knight
2015-10-25

Jude Knight

In New Orleans at the end of the 18th Century, a wealthy white man would generally live on his plantation with his wife and children, but he would also have a townhouse in New Orleans where his other family lived: his quadroon mistress and the children he had made with her.

To the men and women involved, these marriages de la main gauche (left-handed marriages) were honourable arrangements. The women were faithful to their protectors, and the men were expected to provide for their children. It was what a gentleman did…

Read the entire article here.

Hapa-Palooza 2015 | Talking Hapa With Canadian Broadcaster Margaret Gallager

Schema Magazine
2015-09-17

Marissa Willcox

Hapa-palooza is here! Celebrating what Vancouver does best: mixed-heritage and blended cultural identities. Drawing from the Hawaiian origin of the word “hapa” (used by many people in Canada and U.S. who identify as being of mixed-heritage) Vancouver is a perfect venue this year’s diverse array of speakers, workshops and family events.

This festival spans over four days and features many mixed-heritage voices, including Vancouver’s much-loved broadcaster Margaret Gallager. An award winning CBC radio host, she joins Lawrence Hill on September 17th for a much-anticipated evening of stimulating conversation at the GoldCorp Centre for the Arts. Marissa Willcox had a chance to ask her a few questions about her cultural identity and work in Canada’s public broadcaster.

Marissa Willcox: As a broadcaster and community member of mixed-heritage, to what extent is Vancouver’s ethnic and cultural diversity an aspect of the stories you cover?

Margaret Gallager: As someone who works for the public broadcaster, it’s part of my job (and privilege) to reflect Canadian society through the stories I bring to air. And diversity is a huge part of who we are, especially in Vancouver. So, if you’re doing your job right, some of those stories are naturally going to come from diverse communities.

I’d say that cultural diversity is better reflected in the media these days than it was when I was growing up, whether that is in the stories that are told, or the people who are presenting them. And I think that change came about in part through a conscious effort that has taken years…

Read the entire interview here.

“Watch me go invisible”: Representing Racial Passing in Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece’s Incognegro

South Central Review
Volume 32, Number 3, Fall 2015
pages 45-69

Sinéad Moynihan, Senior Lecturer
University of Exeter, Exeter, Devon, United Kingdom

This essay examines the potential of the graphic novel as a vehicle to explore one of the most enduring tropes in American culture: racial passing. As what Hillary Chute and Marianne DeKoven term a “hybrid project,” graphic narrative has the potential to pose “a challenge to the structure of binary classification that opposes a set of terms, privileging one.” Since passing narratives are themselves devoted to unsettling binaries – racial binaries – this essay considers the marrying of the graphic novel and the passing narrative in Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece’s Incognegro (2008). How, in other words, can what Scott McCloud terms “the art of the invisible” (comics) depict what Joel Williamson memorably calls “invisible blackness”?

The essay is particular interested in two aspects of Incognegro’s hybridity, one of which relates content, the other to form. First, in terms of content, the collaborators make several significant revisions to the comic book’s signature character, the superhero, amalgamating the conventions of the superhero story with those of passing narratives in order to destabilise some of both genres’ most telling assumptions. Second, in terms of formal devices, this essay examines the particular combination of visual and textual vocabularies deployed in Incognegro to portray the ambiguously-raced subject, comparing it to the ways in which such subjects have been racially-encoded in more conventional literary and cinematic narratives of passing. Ultimately, this essay considers whether Incognegro’s hybrid properties offer new political possibilities for the narrative of racial passing.

Read or purchase the article here.

Allyson Hobbs, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life [Varlack Review]

49th Parallel
Issue 37 (2015-11-19)
pages 66-68
ISSN: 1753-5894

Christopher Allen Varlack, Lecturer
Department of English
University of Maryland

Allyson Hobbs, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. 382 pp.

Popularized in part during the Harlem Renaissance of the early to mid-twentieth century, the passing novel, including James Weldon Johnson’s 1912 The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Walter White’s 1926 Flight, and Jessie Redmon Fauset’s 1928 Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral, has received a wide range of scholarship. Elaine K. Ginsberg’s 1996 study, Passing and the Fictions of Identity explores the politics of passing from the early experiences of African slaves through the present day while Gayle Wald’s 2000 Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture explores cinematic and literary representations of passing produced in the United States. Together, these works reveal the struggle of an African-American community marginalized and disenfranchised within an American society defined by its Jim Crow culture and racial hierarchy. Under these circumstances, racial passing is most often an attempt to obtain what Cheryl L. Harris terms “whiteness as property” as a result of the very limited opportunities and restricted social mobility afforded to blacks. Such scholarship provides insight into the historical function of passing and the ways in which the passing novel brings to the forefront of the American consciousness an increased awareness of its changing socio-racial landscape.

In her critical work, appropriately titled, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, Allyson Hobbs seeks to add a new dimension to this existing conversation, her book is “an effort to recover those lives” lost in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as “countless African Americans [knowingly] passed as white, leaving behind families, friends, and communities without any available avenue for return” (4). Hobbs’ work, a welcomed addition to the field, thus uses the lives of the everyday participants of passing to show not only what they gained from assuming their white identities—economic opportunity, social mobility, increased acceptance, etc.—but also what they lost along the way—the all-important connection to family and community that had long sustained the African-American people in the midst of cultural oppression…

Read the entire review here.

PART 1: Dispatches from Dream City: Zadie Smith and Barack Obama

Electric Lit
2010-10-19

The Editor

Reading and re-reading Zadie Smith’s spookily empathetic essay about Dreams of My Father and the natural linguistic flexibility of the biracial, upwardly mobile figure, the inevitable thought occurred to me: Is Zadie Smith the Barack Obama of literature?

Consider the parallels between the two: both are biracial (Zadie Smith had a white English father and a black Jamaican mother). Both are precocious strivers who came from somewhat déclassé origins and rose to become shining examples of their respective countries’ meritocratic aspirations (Zadie Smith grew up in a council flat, the English equivalent of a housing project, and received a scholarship to Oxford). Both give evidence of having been closer to their white parent. Both seem to promise liberation from the bad faith that has existed on both sides of the color line since the start of the post-civil rights era. Both are figures who because they smoothly speak the language of progressivism (in Smith’s case, the language of progressivism is the language of avant-garde literature and abstruse academic theory) appear–or in the case of Obama, appeared–less cautious and conservative than they really are. Changing My Mind is the title of Zadie Smith’s collection of what she calls ‘occasional essays;’ it might as well be titled ‘Only Connect,’ to use the credo of her beloved E.M.Forster’s Howards End–like Forster and like Obama, Zadie Smith is a builder of bridges and a reconciler of the seemingly irreconcilable.

There is a remarkable essay, “Two Directions for the Novel,” which is a kind of Beer Summit for contemporary fiction: on one side of the table is Joseph O’Neill, author of the Gatsbyesque 9/11 novel Netherland, on the other side is Tom McCarthy, writer of manifestos (still, after a century, a prerequisite for avant-garde credentials) and author of the astringently difficult novel Remainder…

Read the part 1 of the article here. Read part 2 here.

Pitching Chaos, an interview with Mat Johnson, author of Loving Day

Electric Lit
2015-05-26

Dwyer Murphy

This week marks the release of Loving Day, the new novel from Mat Johnson, author of Pym, Drop, Hunting in Harlem, Incognegro, and others. Johnson and I spoke last week on Skype. I caught him in his car, heading home from a school tour, and we continued our chat as he walked across the campus of the University of Houston, where he’s a faculty member in the creative writing program. Johnson has an energetic, incisive way of speaking. He works historical analysis, social observation, literary critique and wicked one-liners into the span of a sentence or two, always with the kind of conversational ease that makes you feel like he’s been mulling things over for a while and you were just the person he was hoping to see. We talked about race and culture in Philadelphia, prioritizing entertainment in literature, fatherhood, the book community on Twitter, and “the idea of being a straight male interacting with the feminine” (yes – sex – but other stuff, too…).

Dwyer Murphy: Over the course of your career, you’ve shifted between novels, graphic novels, comics, and non-fiction. With Loving Day, you’re back to the novel. How do you decide which medium to work with? Does the story dictate the format?

Mat Johnson: Usually it starts with the idea. I would say I’m a novelist first, but if the idea doesn’t fit into a novel, then I look for other ways to tell it. The graphic novel is kind of my way of doing a short story. I don’t usually write short stories, but I’ve found that pieces that are about the length of a story and have a strong visual aspect tend to work really well as graphic novels, so that’s how I’ll tell those particular stories…

Read the entire interview here.

The Octoroon, a Tragic Mulatto Tale of the Old South

Jubilo! The Emancipation Century
2011-01-23

Alan Skerrett, Jr, Editor
Washington, D.C.

The Octoroon is a tragic mulatto play by Irish playwright and actor Dion Boucicault. It opened on Broadway in 1859, just a few years before the American Civil War. The play was based on Mayne Reid’s novel, The Quadroon, and the incidents relating to the murder of the slave in Albany Fonblanque’s novel, The Filibuster…

…The play centers around its heroine Zoe, a Louisiana octoroon in the pre-Civil War era. An octoroon is a person who has one biracial grandparent, while the other three grandparents are white. An octoroon is the child of a white parent and a quadroon parent. A quadroon is the child of a white parent and a biracial parent.

Octoroons are very often light enough to appear white. However, under the era’s one-drop rule, they were considered black. Additionally, any child born to a slave was automatically considered a slave. So, an octoroon born to a quadroon mother, where the quadroon mother was born to a biracial slave mother, was herself a slave…

Read the entire review here.

We Must Be Alive: Among the Wild Mulattos & Other Tales by Tom Williams

Electric Lit
2015-11-13

Rosie Clarke

In his 1991 hit song, Black or White, Michael Jackson meditates on racial equality, singing, “I’m not going to spend/My life being a color.” However, Jackson’s well-documented, complicated relationship with his African American appearance speaks to the contrary. In a way, Jackson’s transformation from his natural skin tone to an eerie, bleached white speaks not just of his profound personal battle with identity, but a broader problem in America as a whole. The simple fact is, that as a result of systematic white supremacy, many African Americans do spend their lives “being a color.” This troubling issue forms the central motif of Kentucky-born writer and academic Tom Williams’ short story collection, Among the Wild Mulattos & Other Tales.

The burdens of oppression, violence, and inequality shouldered by black Americans weigh heavy. But how are bi or multiracial people affected—the shades of grey, if you will, in the simplified divisions of ‘black’ and ‘white’—and how are they recognized and represented in cultural phenomena like literature? Here, Williams attempts to address these matters in their multifarious forms…

…Author of The Mimic’s Own Voice and Don’t Start Me Talkin’, and currently Chair of English at Kentucky’s Morehead State University, Williams explores in detail the experience of biracial Americans in a contemporary environment that claims, albeit falsely, to be ‘post-racial.’ The eponymous ‘mulatto’ is a term traditionally denoting a person with one black and one white parent, or sometimes referring to someone with mixed black and white ancestry. Not commonly used today, mulatto is regarded as at best archaic and at worst a racial slur, which is reasonable considering the etymology of the word is based in the Latin mūlus, or mule, the infertile offspring of a horse and donkey.

Perhaps unsurprising given his own mixed race heritage, Williams is explicitly concerned with representations of biracial identity, using fiction to consider the ways in which biracial individuals navigate a world that is unsure whether to treat them as black or white. The majority of these stories are located in the Southern and Midwestern states, where racism remains rife, and racial tension is high. One character, in ‘Who Among Us Knows the Route to Heaven?,’ describes his reception as a biracial child in 1970s Ohio as “(o)dder than two-headed calves, stranger than Uri Geller,” and when watching TV at that time, that “(n)ever once did I see a face or family that looked like mine.” It is this alienation that Williams is most curious about, and the steps some biracial people feel forced to take to in order to counteract it…

Read the entire review here.