Mixed Race Studies

Guadalupe and the Castas: The Power of a Singular Colonial Mexican Painting

Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos
Volume 31, Number 2
pages 218-247
DOI: 10.1525/mex.2015.31.2.218

Sarah Cline, Research Professor of History
University of California, Santa Barbara

A mid-eighteenth-century casta painting by Luis de Mena uniquely unites the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe and casta (mixed-race) groupings, along with scenes of everyday life in Mexico, and the natural abundance of New Spain. Reproduced multiple times, the painting has not been systematically analyzed. This article explores individual elements in their colonial context and the potential meanings of the painting in the modern era.

Una pintura de Luis de Mena sobre las castas, de mediados del siglo xviii, reúne de manera singular la imagen de la Virgen de Guadalupe, los agrupamientos de castas y escenas de la vida cotidiana en México, junto con la abundancia natural de Nueva España. Aunque reproducida en múltiples ocasiones, la pintura no ha sido analizada sistemáticamente. Este artículo explora sus elementos individuales en el contexto colonial y los significados potenciales de la pintura en la época moderna.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Many Faces of Korla Pandit

Los Angeles Magazine
June 2001
pages 73-77, 146-151

RJ Smith, Senior Editor

He was a handsome holy man, an organ virtuoso, a star from the East. Korla Pandit mesmerized generations–while keeping a secret until his dying day

Korla Pandit wandered the West, from big cities to hamlets, throughout his life. Wherever he went, he made the ground beneath his feet seem like the center of a vast turning wheel. However much he was on the move, he let those surrounding him feel they were the ones in motion. People—intersting, glamorous, bizarre people—came to him hoping he’d show them how to get to where he so blissfully stood. They wanted to feel his peace.

He was in his mid seventies when I met him seven years ago. We talked at a coffee shop that no longer exists, in what was the first of many conversations. I was interviewing him about the lounge music revival, which had led to a modest boost in the old man’s career. Soon I became one more neophyte snared by his beatific smile, his mysterious eyes, his strange stories of séances with Marilyn Monroe and how Liberace had stolen his very soul. When you got near Korla Pandit, he took you to some synthetic place.

He came, he explained, from halfway around the world. He had a privileged childhood in New Delhi, where his father, a Brahman, was a government bureaucrat and friend of Gandhi’s. His mother mas a French opera singer. Korla was playing the piano at the age of two; by five he was a prodigy. able to perform complicated pieces after hearing them only once. He studied in Europe, then came to the United States when he was 12. and later attended the University of Chicago.

As Korla prepared to leave his family behind and begin the life of a professional musician on the stages of the West, his father gave him a warning: “Son. get your education first. Show business is a dangerous world. You’re a hero today and a bum tomorrow.” In recounting the story Korla would pause and then add, “Well, he sure knew what he was talking about.” Korla came anyway, and he conquered the West, or at least the West Coast, and especially Los Angeles. His TV show, Adventures in Music with Korla Pandit, was the first all-music show on television, and Korla was one of the first stars of the medium.

As it happened, I attended the last performance Korla ever gave. It was in 1998 in San Francisco, at a lounge renovated to 1950s vintage called Bimbo’s. There were paintings of clowns, and the carpet, banquettes. and walls were as red as tenderloin. A mermaid swam in a large aquarium over the bar. Bimbo’s was a lot like Korla himself. an exemplar of a distant time that once embodied suave sexuality but now registered as camp…

…There was a joke made often in the vicinity of Korla, passed along by any who spent time with him. Everybody who told it seemed to think they were the first to make the crack. The thing about Korla, we’d say, was that while he never spoke on his television show, in person he was hard put to stay quiet. Korla loved to talk, about India and his past and the meaning of life. But for all the talking he did, he kept a secret, one that he protected all his life. Korla Pandit wasn’t his real name, and he wasn’t Indian at all. He was African American…

Read the entire article here.

Color film was built for white people. Here’s what it did to dark skin

Vox
2015-09-18

Estelle Caswell

The biased film was fixed in the 1990s, so why do so many photos still distort darker skin?

For decades, the color film available to consumers was built for white people. The chemicals coating the film simply weren’t adequate to capture a diversity of darker skin tones. And the photo labs established in the 1940s and 50s even used an image of a white woman, called a Shirley card, to calibrate the colors for printing:

Concordia University professor Lorna Roth has researched the evolution of skin tone imaging. She explained in a 2009 paper how the older technology distorted the appearance of black subjects:

Problems for the African-American community, for example, have included reproduction of facial images without details, lighting challenges, and ashen-looking facial skin colours contrasted strikingly with the whites of eyes and teeth.

How this would affect non-white people seemingly didn’t occur to those who designed and operated the photo systems. In an essay for Buzzfeed, writer and photographer Syreeta McFadden described growing up with film that couldn’t record her actual appearance:

The inconsistencies were so glaring that for a while, I thought it was impossible to get a decent picture of me that captured my likeness. I began to retreat from situations involving group photos. And sure, many of us are fickle about what makes a good portrait. But it seemed the technology was stacked against me. I only knew, though I didn’t understand why, that the lighter you were, the more likely it was that the camera — the film — got your likeness right.

Many of the technological biases have since been corrected (though, not all of them, as explained in the video above). Still, we often see controversies about the misrepresentation of non-white subjects in magazines and advertisements. What are we to make of the fact that these images routinely lighten the skin of women of color?…

Read the entire article here.

Looking at Shirley, the Ultimate Norm: Colour Balance, Image Technologies, and Cognitive Equity

Canadian Journal of Communication
Volume 34, Number 1 (2009)
pages 111-136

Lorna Roth, Professor of Communication Studies
Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Until recently, due to a light-skin bias embedded in colour film stock emulsions and digital camera design, the rendering of non-Caucasian skin tones was highly deficient and required the development of compensatory practices and technology improvements to redress its shortcomings. Using the emblematic “Shirley” norm reference card as a central metaphor reflecting the changing state of race relations/aesthetics, this essay analytically traces the colour adjustment processes in the industries of visual representation and identifies some prototypical changes in the field. The author contextualizes the history of these changes using three theoretical categories: the ‘technological unconscious’ (Vaccari, 1981), ‘dysconsciousness’ (King, 2001), and an original concept of ‘cognitive equity,’ which is proposed as an intelligent strategy for creating and promoting equity by inscribing a wider dynamic range of skin tones into image technologies, products, and emergent practices in the visual industries.

Jusqu’à récemment, en raison d’un préjugé favorisant la peau claire dans les films couleurs et dans la conception des caméras numériques, la reproduction des couleurs de peaux non-caucasiennes a été très déficiente, exigeant le développement de diverses techniques de compensation et d’amélioration. Utilisant la carte de référence normative « Shirley » comme métaphore pour refléter l’évolution des rapports entre les races et leurs pratiques esthétiques, cet essai analyse les processus d’ajustement de la couleur dans les industries de la représentation visuelle et identifie certains prototypes de changements dans le domaine. L’auteur situe ces changements historiquement en se rapportant à trois concepts théoriques : « l’inconscient technologique » (Vaccari, 1981), la « dysconscience » (« dysconsciousness » – King, 2001), et un concept original, « l’équité cognitive », proposé comme stratégie intelligente pour créer et promouvoir l’équité en inscrivant un plus grand éventail de couleurs de peau dans les technologies et produits de l’image et dans les pratiques émergeantes des industries visuelles.

Read the entire article here.

Raising a Biracial Child as a Mother of Color

The Atlantic
2015-09-19

Lara N. Dotson-Renta

A mother’s reflection on her own childhood and that of her biracial child—and the inevitable differences of the two.

A few months ago, I was walking home from the bus stop with my eldest daughter during the last week of kindergarten. She was lagging behind as usual, picking up sticks and shiny rocks, when she casually asked, “Mama, are the kids with browner skin more trouble? Why can some of them not read too well? Why do some people think Spanish is not good?”

In that moment, the heart that lives in my stomach jumped, and a mild nausea set in. At six years old, my now first-grade daughter is privileged, more than she understands, in ways that are painful and complicated for me to discern as both a highly educated, upper-middle-class parent, and as a woman of color who did not start out with such advantages.

…My daughter is half white, has a non-Latino last name, and navigates a space in between, of mixed heritage and lineage. She is frequently complemented on how “beautifully tanned” her skin is in the winter. When I say we speak Spanish in the home and our family is together, we are complimented on our efforts to make her bilingual. But, when I am out alone with my two daughters, the youngest yet too little to notice, we are looked askance at for not using English. Sometimes at the park I am mistakenly assumed to be their nanny, suddenly keenly aware of how the sun catches the blond streaks in their hair. It is strange that language can stake so many claims; so often are my children presumed not to be my own…

Read the entire article here.

‘Remnants of Slavery’ column shows racial ignorance

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
2015-09-20

Rebecca Keller
O’Hara Township, Pennsylvania

I’m greatly troubled by Jack Kelly’s historically flawed column “Remnants of Slavery” (Sept. 13) because it falsely enables an often unhearing percentage of the white majority to tell people of color that our modern-day experiences with racism are an illusion.

As a biracial woman who was adopted into a white family and has been raised in white-dominant environments, I have a unique perspective on both racism and white privilege: two things that undeniably exist…

Read the entire letter here.

What does race do?

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 38, Issue 8, 2015
Special Issue: Ethnic and Racial Studies Review
pages 1401-1406
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2015.1016064

Alana Lentin, Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Social Analysis
University of Western Sydney, Australia

In writing on ‘John Rex’s Main Mistake’, Michael Banton reveals more about Banton than he does about Rex. I use Banton’s discussion of the differences between his own and John Rex’s ‘mistakes’ to explore why, in my view, race continues to have analytical purchase in a purportedly ‘post-racial’ age

Why race?

Michael Banton claims that while he ‘wanted to supersede the use of race in sociology altogether’, Rex argued that its meaning should be expanded to ‘cover other beliefs of a deterministic kind’ (Banton this volume, original emphasis). This was born of Rex’s insistence on the significance of class and colonialism for understanding racial categories. Banton notes Rex’s neglect of other concepts that may have been ‘fit for purpose’, such as ‘gender, faith, or social origin’ (Banton this volume). However, the search for alternatives seems a fruitless one, even for Banton, who has devoted his entire career precisely to attempting to answer the question ‘why race?’

…Race as ordering, as management, sedimentation, sifting, as correction and disciplining, as empowering some while causing others to buckle under that power has always relied on a plurality of processes. Racism’s genocidal impulses have been condemned by those who live by the logics of division that ultimately enable the other’s annihilation. To be clearer: I can be utterly opposed to deaths in police custody while doubting whether I should send my child to the public school in the Aboriginal neighbourhood. So, race, not as wrong-headed theorization of inherent difference, but as a logic that gathers a suite of rationales in its armoury, persists precisely because so much has been invested in dismissing it as unreasonable. This is why Jared Sexton (2008, 27), following Albert Memmi, rightly points to the problem of attempting to unveil racism’s ‘secure foundation’. The arguments of those who call for race to be abandoned because it somehow participates in the reproduction of racism miss the point that there is no way of separating between race and racism as though racism were easily definable in relation to a pre-prescribed series of actions, beliefs or policies. On the contrary, while racism is ‘incoherent, unjustified’, according to Sexton, this does not mean that it is not ‘systemic, structuring and governing for the whole racist complex’ (27). In other words, it is not by treating racism as irrational that that very irrationality dissipates. Rather, as Sexton so presciently remarks, ‘racism does its most essential work in the shadow of the very attempt to explain it’ (27). We can see this most clearly in the workings of the supposedly ‘anti-racist racist states’ that most readers, I wager, inhabit…

Read the entire article here.

The Science Behind ‘They All Look Alike to Me’

The New York Times
2015-09-20

Rachel L. Swarns

The outcry was immediate and ferocious when a white New York City police officer tackled James Blake, the retired biracial tennis star, while arresting him this month in a case of mistaken identity. The officer mistook Mr. Blake for a black man suspected of credit card fraud, according to the police.

Racism, pure and simple, some said.

But was it?

Scientists, pointing to decades of research, believe something else was at work. They call it the “other-race effect,” a cognitive phenomenon that makes it harder for people of one race to readily recognize or identify individuals of another.

It is not bias or bigotry, the researchers say, that makes it difficult for people to distinguish between people of another race. It is the lack of early and meaningful exposure to other groups that often makes it easier for us to quickly identify and remember people of our own ethnicity or race while we often struggle to do the same for others.

That racially loaded phrase “they all look alike to me,” turns out to be largely scientifically accurate, according to Roy S. Malpass, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Texas at El Paso who has studied the subject since the 1960s. “It has a lot of validity,” he said…

Read the entire article here.

Why some Muslims don’t want Ahmed Mohamed’s blackness to be ignored

The Washington Post
2015-09-17

Abby Phillip, General Assignment Reporter

Ahmed Mohamed is now a 14-year-old with a national following and a long list of powerful people on his calling card.

After he was arrested for bringing a homemade clock to school to impress his teachers, the ninth-grader has become symbolic of the worst skeletons in America’s closet: growing hysteria and over-criminalization in American schools, Islamophobia and racism.

As the news of Mohamed’s plight spread, some of the earliest accounts associated the teen, who is of Sudanese descent, with the word “brown,” a fuzzy bit of racial jargon that typically refers to non-black people of South Asian or sometimes Latin American descent.

And others openly wondered how the world might have reacted to Mohamed’s story if he had been black.

But Mohamed’s racial identity is as complex as the country of his descent. The African nation of Sudan is predominantly Muslim and is comprised of some 600 ethnicities. Arabs and indigenous Africans have intermarried and mixed there for centuries and most speak Arabic…

Read the entire article here.

In Memoriam: Tony Gleaton

The afrolatin@ forum
2015-09-01

Tony Gleaton, among the first photographers to document Latin Americans of African descent, passed away last week. He leaves behind an impressive body of work which undoubtedly contributed to the growing Black consciousness movement throughout the Americas.

Tony began his Latin American photographic journey in the southern Pacific coast of Mexico in 1986; by the time his project was completed he had traveled through most of Central and South America in his search for “Black folk.” …

Read the entire article here.