Mixed Race Studies

My Response to Critics Regarding My For Harriet Article about Mixed Race Identity

I’m Not Mixed Up, I’m Fully Mixed
2015-08-15

Shannon Luders-Manuel

On Wednesday, For Harriet published my article “What it Means to be Mixed Race During the Fight for Black Lives.” It quickly took off and has received over 23,000 Facebook shares/likes by the time of this blog post. I’m extremely humbled and honored to be sharing the experiences and viewpoints of so many mixed race people. Today I took the time to read what some of the critics had to say about my article. Here is a general response to the ones that seemed the most common…

Read the entire article here.

Amanda Aldridge, Teacher and Composer: A Life in Music

Journal of Singing
January 2010
ISSN: 10867732

Joyce Andrews, Adjunct Instructor of Music
Ripon College, Ripon, Wisconsin

Aldridge was a remarkable person who devoted her lifetime to music, enriching the musical culture of Great Britain through her multi-talents as composer (published under the nom de plume “Montague Ring”) and as teacher, singer, and pianist. She mentored and inspired many young musicians and became a central figure in the black community in London.

ALTHOUGH THE NAME OF MONTAGUE RING is not familiar to most musicians today, this London composer wrote music that was extremely popular in Europe in the early twentieth century. Major music publishing firms published numerous songs in London by Ring between the years 1907 and 1925. Written predominantly in a romantic parlor song style fashionable in that day, Montague Ring’s songs for voice and piano numbered almost thirty, although the composer’s output included various compositions for other instruments that also gained considerable recognition.

A bit of investigation into this little known composer with the distinguished-sounding British high society name reveals a surprise – that Montague Ring was merely the pseudonym adopted by Afro-British female composer Amanda Ira Aldridge, born Amanda Christina Elizabeth Aldridge (1866-1956). Although reasons vary as to why composers opt to publish under a name other than their own, in Amanda Aldridge’s case, it may well be that her chosen pseudonym allowed her a degree of separation between her varied career pursuits. Amanda Aldridge was an active, accomplished musician during her long career and gained public attention through the various “hats” she wore as concert singer, piano accompanist, and voice teacher, as well as the composer Montague Ring. Particularly impressive is the musical circle in which she traveled in London as well as her vocal pedigree – she was an early pupil of Jenny Lind (famously known as the “Swedish Nightingale”) at the Royal College of Music in London. Aldridge is also attributed with providing voice instruction to some of the most acclaimed artists of the twentieth century, including African American singers Roland Hayes, Marian Anderson, and Paul Robeson. The accomplishment of so many careers was certainly inspired, and reinforced, by an additional significant detail about Amanda Aldridge she was the daughter of one of the most acclaimed tragedians of his time in Europe, the African American actor Ira Aldridge…

Read the entire article here.

“Red Velvet” spins a fascinating true story

The Berkshire Eagle
Pittsfield, Massachusetts
2015-08-13

Jeffrey Borak, Entertainment Editor and Theater Critic

LENOX — Actor Ira Aldridge isn’t in the American Theater Hall of Fame; his name is barely a whisper in the annals of American theater. That shouldn’t be, say director Daniela Varon and actor John Douglas Thompson, who is playing Aldridge in “Red Velvet,” a new play by Lolita Chakrabarti that had its world premiere in October 2012 at the Tricycle Theatre in London and its American premiere in March 2014 at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Born a few years after the start of the French Revolution, Aldridge died a few years after the end of our Civil War — a megastar in Europe, but virtually unknown here.

“I was 17 when I first heard about Aldridge,” Varon said during a joint interview with Thompson in the lobby of Shakespeare & Company’s Tina Packer Playhouse, where the production officially opens at 7:30 tonight after a week of previews. It is scheduled to run in rotating repertory through Sept. 13.

“He gave up everything to go to England to become an actor,” Varon said.

Aldridge fashioned a career performing throughout through Europe and the UK. While he was known primarily as a tragedian, he also had a reputation as a good comedic actor.

He outraged London critics but awed audiences when, one night in 1833, he replaced the ailing Edmund Kean as Othello, at the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden.

…Born in New York in 1807, Aldridge emigrated to Liverpool, England in 1824, where he met and married Margaret Gill, a Yorkshire woman.

“He was 26 when he married her, She was 18,” Thompson said. “He already had had a lifetime of experience. He was not a young 26.” Despite a solid marriage, he was a notorious womanizer and fathered several children, in and out of wedlock.

Between 1825 and 1833, he played theaters throughout the United Kingdom. He made his first tour of Europe in 1852, playing not only Othello but also Lear, Richard III, Shylock, Macbeth. He died in Lodz in 1867, where he was given a state funeral…

Read the entire article here.

Cedric Dover, the Anglo-Indian Who Sought Worldwide Solidarity With Racial Minorities

The Wire
2015-08-10

Elisabeth Engel, Research Fellow
German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C.

Slate, Nico, The Prism of Race: W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and the Colored World of Cedric Dover (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)

The scholarship that takes up W.E.B. Du Bois’s thesis that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour line – the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea” fills libraries around the globe.

Ever since the African-American leader defined the concept in Souls of Black Folk in 1903, it figured prominently in research on the United States and the transnational contexts of Western imperialism. Nico Slate, a historian at Carnegie Mellon University, is no exception. His research on social movements in the United States and India has long explored how black Americans and colonial subjects advanced their struggles against white supremacy. His most recent book, The Prism of Race: W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and the Colored World of Cedric Dover, makes the case that this struggle did not just pose the problem of race, but also that of colour.

The story of the 20th century that unfolds from the perspective of people defined as coloured is the subject of Slate’s account. He traces it through the lens of Cedric Dover (1904–1961), an Anglo-Indian biologist, who dedicated his work to the study of race and his political ambition to the movement toward Afro-Asian solidarity. Dover was born in colonial Calcutta, one year after Du Bois’s historic prediction. Slate shows that Dover was one of those “men in Asia and Africa,” whose libraries were filled with Du Bois’s and other African Americans’ writings. Precisely, Dover’s personal library, comprising his writings and reading, is Slate’s main primary source…

Read the entire review here.

Negotiating cultural ambiguity: the role of markets and consumption in multiracial identity development

Consumption Markets & Culture
Volume 18, Issue 4, 2015
pages 301-332
DOI: 10.1080/10253866.2015.1019483

Robert L. Harrison III, Associate Professor of Marketing
Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan

Kevin D. Thomas, Assistant Professor
Stan Richards School of Advertising & Public Relations
University of Texas, Austin

Samantha N. N. Cross, Assistant Professor of Marketing
Iowa State University

Due to their growing social visibility and recognized buying power, multiracial individuals have emerged as a viable consumer segment among marketers. However, there is a dearth of research examining how multiracial populations experience the marketplace. In an attempt to better understand the ways in which multiracial individuals utilize consumption practices as a means of developing and expressing their racial identity, this study examined the lived experience of multiracial (black and white) women. Findings of this phenomenological study indicate that multiracial consumers engage with the marketplace to assuage racial discordance and legitimize the liminal space they occupy. This marketplace engagement is explored through themes such as living in two worlds, the mighty ringlets and forced choice. Multiracial identity is seen to be co-constituted by marketers and consumers. Existing theories proved ineffectual at fully capturing the lived experience connected to the consumer acculturation and socialization processes for those with two distinctly constructed racial backgrounds.

Read or purchase the article here.

Holocaust Art By A Jew Who Was Black Josef Nassy’s Vision Of Nazi Camps Has Its First U.s. Show Here.

The Philadelphia Inquirer
1989-04-04

Leonard W. Boasberg, Inquirer Staff Writer

There are strength and pathos in the drawings. There are loneliness and community, a sense of the desperation of the individual – the prisoner, the victim – who, in the grasp of malevolent brutality, nevertheless maintains his will to survive.

There are watchtowers and barbed wire and closed gates and prison bars and armed guards, and there are portraits of pensive men who might be anywhere but are, in fact, confined for no crime but their existence.

The works are by Josef Nassy, a black artist of Jewish ancestry, who survived three years of Nazi prison camps during World War II and, in his art, left a lasting record of what he saw and felt.

A collection of Nassy’s works – about 115 paintings, drawings and ink washes – is now on exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Judaica, located in the synagogue of Congregation Rodeph Shalom, 615 N. Broad St. The exhibit, titled In the Shadow of the Tower, is the first U.S. public showing of Nassy’s works, which are on a three-year international tour that will take them to Jerusalem; Hamburg, West Germany; Brussels, Belgium; Chicago, and New York…

Read the entire article here.

I’m More Than An ‘Other’

Elle UK
2015-08-17

Meghan Markle

Meghan Markle (Source: ELLE UK)

Meghan Markle, star of the hit show Suits, opens up about creating her identity and finding her voice as a mixed race woman

What are you?’ A question I get asked every week of my life, often every day. ‘Well,’ I say, as I begin the verbal dance I know all too well. ‘I’m an actress, a writer, the Editor-in-Chief of my lifestyle brand The Tig, a pretty good cook and a firm believer in handwritten notes.’ A mouthful, yes, but one that I feel paints a pretty solid picture of who I am. But here’s what happens: they smile and nod politely, maybe even chuckle, before getting to their point, ‘Right, but what are you? Where are your parents from?’ I knew it was coming, I always do. While I could say Pennsylvania and Ohio, and continue this proverbial two-step, I instead give them what they’re after: ‘My dad is Caucasian and my mom is African American. I’m half black and half white.’

To describe something as being black and white means it is clearly defined. Yet when your ethnicity is black and white, the dichotomy is not that clear. In fact, it creates a grey area. Being biracial paints a blurred line that is equal parts staggering and illuminating. When I was asked by ELLE to share my story, I’ll be honest, I was scared. It’s easy to talk about which make-up I prefer, my favourite scene I’ve filmed, the rigmarole of ‘a day in the life’ and how much green juice I consume before a requisite Pilates class. And while I have dipped my toes into this on thetig.com, sharing small vignettes of my experiences as a biracial woman, today I am choosing to be braver, to go a bit deeper, and to share a much larger picture of that with you…

Read the entire article here.

The Japanese women who married the enemy

BBC News Magazine
2015-08-16

Vanessa Barford

Seventy years ago many Japanese people in occupied Tokyo after World War Two saw US troops as the enemy. But tens of thousands of young Japanese women married GIs nonetheless – and then faced a big struggle to find their place in the US.

For 21-year-old Hiroko Tolbert, meeting her husband’s parents for the first time after she had travelled to America in 1951 was a chance to make a good impression.

She picked her favourite kimono for the train journey to upstate New York, where she had heard everyone had beautiful clothes and beautiful homes.

But rather than being impressed, the family was horrified.

“My in-laws wanted me to change. They wanted me in Western clothes. So did my husband. So I went upstairs and put on something else, and the kimono was put away for many years,” she says.

It was the first of many lessons that American life was not what she had imagined it to be…

…”The war had been a war without mercy, with incredible hatred and fear on both sides. The discourse was also heavily racialised – and America was a pretty racist place at that time, with a lot of prejudice against inter-race relationships,” says Prof Paul Spickard, an expert in history and Asian-American studies at the University of California…

…The War Brides Act of 1945 allowed American servicemen who married abroad to bring their wives home, but it took the Immigration Act of 1952 to enable Asians to come to America in large numbers.

When the women did move to the US, some attended Japanese bride schools at military bases to learn how to do things like bake cakes the American way, or walk in heels rather than the flat shoes to which they were accustomed.

But many were totally unprepared.

Generally speaking, the Japanese women that married black Americans settled more easily, Spickard says…

Read the entire article here.

Julian Bond, Former N.A.A.C.P. Chairman and Civil Rights Leader, Dies at 75

The New York Times
2015-08-16

Roy Reed

Julian Bond, a charismatic figure of the 1960s civil rights movement, a lightning rod of the anti-Vietnam War campaign and a lifelong champion of equal rights for minorities, notably as chairman of the N.A.A.C.P., died on Saturday night in Fort Walton Beach, Fla. He was 75.

He died after a brief illness, the Southern Poverty Law Center said in a statement Sunday morning.

Mr. Bond was one of the original leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee while he was a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta. He was the committee’s communications director for five years and deftly guided the national news media toward stories of violence and discrimination as the committee challenged legal segregation in the South’s public facilities.

He gradually moved from the militancy of the student group to the top leadership of the establishmentarian N.A.A.C.P. Along the way, Mr. Bond was a writer, poet, television commentator, lecturer and college teacher, and a persistent opponent of the stubborn remnants of white supremacy…

…Horace Julian Bond was born Jan. 14, 1940, in Nashville, to Horace Mann Bond and the former Julia Washington. The family moved to Pennsylvania five years later, when Mr. Bond’s father became the first African-American president of his alma mater, Lincoln University.

Julian Bond’s great-grandmother Jane Bond was the slave mistress of a Kentucky farmer. Julian’s grandfather James Bond, one of Jane Bond’s sons, was educated at Berea and Oberlin Colleges and became a clergyman. His son Horace Mann Bond expected his own son Julian to follow in his footsteps as an educator, but the young man was attracted instead to journalism and political activism…

Read the entire obituary here.

Half-white, half-Asian, but no less Irish

The Irish Examiner
Dublin, Ireland
2015-08-15

Dean Van Nguyen

Half white, half Asian Dubliner Dean Van Nguyen speaks to other mixed-race Irish people in their twenties and thirties about growing up in a primarily white culture, being subjected to racist taunts, and coming to terms with their own sense of self.

Who am I? It’s a simple question, but one we as human beings frequently ask ourselves – it defines our sense of self identity, from childhood right throughout our lives, and can play a major role in shaping the people we become.

When it comes to self-concept, there are some obvious factors that we know from an early age just by examining our circumstances.

For generations of people born in Ireland, many of the key questions seemed pre-answered: You were Irish. You were white. You were Christian.

As African-American comedian Reginald D. Hunter joked at a Vicar Street gig in 2011, Ireland is “where they make white people”.

While the country is becoming ever more pluralist as we get deeper into the 21st century, for those of mixed-race now in their twenties and thirties, the answers to these questions of self-identity have been less simple…

Read the entire article here.