Mixed Race Studies

The legend of Merle

The Age
Docklands, Victoria, Australia
2002-08-21

Merle Oberon (1943)

She was one of the most glamorous stars of the 1930s and ’40s. A screen siren with smouldering looks, exotic features and almond-shaped eyes. Merle Oberon was described as graceful and hauntingly beautiful.

On her ascent, in 1939, she captivated the world in the box office Hollywood hit, Wuthering Heights, playing Cathy opposite Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff.

From the other side of the globe, Tasmanians glowed with pride. Oberon, according to a biography that read like a Hollywood film script, had been born in Hobart, the daughter of an upper-class white colonial family. She left Tasmania for India after her distinguished father died in a hunting accident, and was raised there by aristocratic godparents.

If Errol Flynn was the island state’s favourite son, Merle Oberon was its treasured daughter. In 1978, the Hobart Town Hall hosted a function attended by well-known local identities to welcome her back. Decades later, Tasmanians proudly recount stories and anecdotes about the hometown girl who blazed her way to Hollywood. Only Oberon wasn’t born in Tasmania. She was Anglo-Indian…

Read the entire article here.

Saskatchewan artist Leah Dorion features Métis women in stunning exhibit

CBC News
2015-11-08

Visual artist Leah Dorion said this painting is dedicated to Catherine Beaulieu Bouvier from Fort Providence, N.W.T. (Eric Anderson/CBC)

Country Wives and Daughters of the Country: Métis Women of This Land at the Affinity Gallery

Visual artist Leah Marie Dorion grew up in Prince Albert, proud of her Métis heritage, but she always wondered why Métis women were never represented in textbooks.

Now, Dorion’s doing something about it with her new exhibit of acrylic paintings and crafts.

“I have created paintings and dedicated them to specific Métis women of history,” Dorion told Saskatchewan Weekend host Eric Anderson. “These women I felt never really had a visual presence in the history books. There is a lot of oral history of these women and their contributions.”

It’s called Country Wives and Daughters of the Country: Métis Women of This Land…

Read the entire article here.

Discovering my blackness

Blavity
2015-10-27

Juan Robles
Brooklyn, New York

“Oh, you’re Latino. I thought you were black.”

For most of my life, I’ve had people pose some variant of that statement to me. In our society, the prevalent idea is that a person can either be Latino or black but not both. As a child, I would identify only as Latino. I didn’t see myself as black and I didn’t understand, and therefore denied, the fact that I have African ancestors. Sadly, this is the case for many Latinos in America…

Read the entire article here.

What’s Really Going On at Yale

Medium
2015-11-08

Aaron Z. Lewis, Senior
Yale University

Dean Jonathan Holloway; Photo credit: Yale Daily News

By now, you’ve probably seen the video of a Yale student yelling at a professor, the Facebook post about a “white girls only” party, or the email about offensive Halloween costumes. Unfortunately, the short YouTube clips and articles I’ve seen don’t even come close to painting an accurate picture of what’s happening at Yale. I’m a senior here, and I’ve experienced the controversy firsthand over the past week (and years). I want to tell a more complete story and set a few facts straight.

For starters: the protests are not really about Halloween costumes or a frat party. They’re about a mismatch between the Yale we find in admissions brochures and the Yale we experience every day. They’re about real experiences with racism on this campus that have gone unacknowledged for far too long. The university sells itself as a welcoming and inclusive place for people of all backgrounds. Unfortunately, it often isn’t…

Read the entire article here.

The Biobank as Political Artifact: The Struggle over Race in Categorizing Genetic Difference

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Volume 661, Number 1, September 2015
pages 143-159
DOI: 10.1177/0002716215591141

Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, Senior Research Scholar, Pediatrics
Center for Biomedical Ethics
Stanford University

This article discusses the institutional practices of classifying and creating taxonomies of difference within biobanks (repositories that store a broad range of biological materials, including DNA) and the technical and sociopolitical priorities that ultimately create biobanks. I argue that biobanks operate as political artifacts and that the social circumstances surrounding the development and use of biobanks determine what counts as meaningful difference within human genetic research. The massive collection of human DNA, blood, and tissues is critical to genomic medicine and the development and governance of biobanks structure knowledge that will ultimately bear on how population differences are interpreted and health disparities are framed. Careful consideration of how to avoid the conflation of concepts of race, ethnicity, and nationality with biological differences is necessary to identify effective interventions that will bear positively on health.

Read or purchase the article here.

Killing That “Tragic Mulatto” Bullshit

Ain’t I A Woman Collective
2015-10-28

Grace Barber-Plentie

Other than the photos of Lucille Bluth and J-Lo looking pissed off that I’ve carefully saved to use as reaction photos to white people doing, saying, or writing thoughtless stuff, there are about a million unfinished essays, or think pieces – whatever you want to call them – saved on my computer. All of them are about my identity as a black, or to be more specific, mixed race woman. And all of them are negative.

“Why,” I wail and moan in essay after essay, “do I not have a place in the world?”

“Why do I have to sit in-between cultures, in-between two worlds? Who am I? What does it all mean?”

(They’re actually a lot better than that, for example there’s one that, ignoring its negative tone, contains a great paragraph dedicated to Mariah Carey.)

I think there’s a reason I have never finished any of those essays, and I think that it is primarily because I am tired of feeling sorry for myself due to my mixed heritage. It’s time, after almost 21 years on this planet, to kill my “tragic mulatto bullshit.”…

Read the entire article here.

Why I teach about Whiteness.

Race and Reflection
2015-11-08

Lee Bebout, Associate Professor of English
Arizona State University

I will be teaching “the whiteness class” in a few weeks, and it seems like a good time to reflect on where I’ve been and where we’re going. Last spring was simultaneously a headache and a joy. I received national media attention, became the focus of neo-Nazi vitriol, and was asked not to respond to the media. But the class was great. One of those invigorating experiences that remind you why you became a professor: 19 of us gathered each week, committed to an in-depth interrogation of how race is made, experienced, and resisted.

Last year, many folks asked me why I teach critical whiteness studies. I was not speaking openly to the media, so I often could not answer. For those who asked and for myself, here is my answer: I do the work I do because racial inequality is a very real problem in the US and globally…

Read the entire article here.

Halle Berry and the Myth of the Black Man-Eating Bitch

For Harriet
2015-11-06

Kelly Davis
Brookyln, New York

I have a complicated relationship with Halle Berry. I have admired her work, mainly Losing Isaiah and Introducing Dorothy Dandridge. She inspired my haircut senior year of college, not long after she won her history-making Academy Award. She is beautiful—unbelievably beautiful, virtually keeping the same physique for over 20 years. She has stood for me, and women like me, in places we were previously forbidden—on the covers of high-fashion magazines, and the podiums of the world’s most exclusive awards. And yet, when I think of her and her body of work, I am mostly nonplussed.

I recognize that every barrier she has broken and every challenge she has surmounted as a Black woman has been facilitated by her proximity to whiteness. Her bone structure, frame, and facial features make her “good enough” to occupy spaces where other Black actresses have been historically disallowed. She is classically beautiful. She has worked hard to be where she is, but, as with all actresses, appealing to white male gaze gives to a leg up over the competition. Her inclusion has often meant the exclusion of other phenotypically Black girls who have more melanin and more talent…

…The myth of the Man-eating Bitch has a long and storied history, especially for Black and mixed-raced women. Since the days of Thomas Jefferson, brown girls like Sally Hemings have been repeatedly cast as irresistible harlots whose sexual wiles render men incapable of making sound decisions. White women can get away with this. We all found it entertaining and encouraging on Sex and the City’s Samantha Jones, but on Black women it’s filthy, tragic, pitiful, and reviled. Imagine the conversations that would commence if Being Mary Jane was on NBC instead of BET. Let’s think about the disgust that filled the blogosphere over Annalise Keating’s undesirability on How to Get Away with Murder. We all know the deal…

Read the entire artcle here.

Slavery’s Hidden History: An interview with historian Eric Foner

American Libraries
2015-10-27

George M. Eberhart, Editor

Eric Foner—Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, author of Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (W. W. Norton, 2015), Columbia University professor, and author of more than 20 history texts—spoke to American Libraries about his latest book and his plans for the future. Foner’s specialty is the American Civil War and Reconstruction, and he has been teaching a popular course on that topic to Columbia undergraduates for more than 30 years. His book Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (Harper and Row, 1988) is recognized as a definitive work on federal attempts to rebuild the South and establish equal constitutional rights for African-Americans. Foner is giving a talk about the Underground Railroad at the Chicago Humanities Festival on October 31.

Your most recent book is a fascinating look at the Underground Railroad and antislavery networks of pre–Civil War New York City. Explain how you came across the document that shed new light on these events.

ERIC FONER: It was totally accidental. Madeline Lewis, an undergraduate history major at Columbia who also worked for my family as a dog walker, was writing a senior thesis a few years ago about Sydney Howard Gay, an abolitionist editor here in New York City. Gay’s papers, about 80 boxes of them, are in the Columbia Rare Book and Manuscript Library. One day she said to me, “You know, Professor Foner, in one box there is a document having to do with fugitive slaves. I’m not quite sure what it is. It’s not relevant for my work, but you might find it interesting.” So I filed that in the back of my mind, and one day I was in the library and decided to look at that document. It was actually two little notebooks, dating from 1855 and 1856 when Gay was editing the National Anti-Slavery Standard and actively assisting escaped slaves. He kept a record of more than 200 men, women, and children who passed through New York City, and he called it the “Record of Fugitives.”…

Read the entire interview here.

‘Monstress’: Inside The Fantasy Comic About Race, Feminism And The Monster Within

The Hollywood Reporter
2015-11-03

Graeme McMillan

“I didn’t realize how massive it was until I started writing it,” creator Marjorie Liu tells THR.

Monstress, a new comic book series from Image Comics which launches this week, is all about hidden depths. Not only for the title character — a teenager who literally has a monster living inside her — but for the series itself, which uses the fantasy genre to explore real world issues in a new and fascinating way. Writer and series creator Marjorie Liu (Marvel’s Astonishing X-Men, the Hunter Kiss series of novels) talked to The Hollywood Reporter about the origins of the series, and why Monstress is even more than she anticipated.

“I didn’t realize how massive it was until I started writing it, and realized I had totally underestimated both the size of the project, and my own ability to wrap my head around it,” Liu says of the series. “I wanted to write about girls and monsters, which has been a theme of mine from almost the start of my career — girls and giant monsters, and the supernatural. I wanted to tell a story about war, and surviving war — and I wanted to set it all in an alternate Asia.”…

…Monstress was influenced by a number of people, ideas and experiences from Liu’s life, she explained. “For example, growing up with my Chinese grandparents who were always talking about WWII — how they survived, how they fought. It wasn’t just the war they discussed, but what came after: how they had to piece their lives back together. But what’s striking to me are the photos from this time, especially the ones of my grandmother. She’s always beaming. Her smile is amazing. You would never have dreamed she went through hell.”

That pushed Liu into considering inner strength — “What does it take to hold on to one’s humanity when you’re forced to suffer the long, continuous, dehumanizing experience of war? Is it just strength? Is it something in your character? Is it the kinds of friends you surround yourself with?” — which is one of the key themes to the series. “Other questions I’ve wrestled with, both in this book and others [are] what it means to be of mixed race, what it means to straddle the borderlands of two cultures,” she added.

“The world of Monstress is one that has been torn apart by racism, slavery, by the commodification of mixed race bodies that produce a valuable substance that humans require like a drug. Even if you look human, you might not be safe. It’s a familiar story to people of color in this country, and in the last four or five years I’ve found myself deeply immersed in the study of identity and race, especially in the Asian American context.”…

Read the entire article here.