Mixed Race Studies

“Hafu” an AMAZING Start But We Need to Go Deeper

Multiracial Asian Families
2014-05-20

Sharon Chang

About a week ago I had the chance to do something I’ve been wanting to do (and bugging the filmmakers about for a long time)—finally go to a local screening of the documentary Hafu, meaning “half,” which represents 5 stories of mixed heritage Japanese folks navigating their multi/identities in Japan today. The film was made by a production team of mostly mixed-race Japanese themselves many either having been raised, born and raised, or with very close ties to the country. The movie shares with us the lived lives of: Edward (Venezuelan/Japanese), The Oi Family particularly their son Alex (Mexican/Japanese), David (Ghanaian/Japanese), Fusae (Korean/Japanese), and Sophia (Australian/Japanese)…

…Overall I think this documentary is a must-see. But (and you knew there was gonna be a “but”)—I would like to see the conversation go deeper. To me it felt like there was the proverbial elephant-in-the-room that never quite got called out. A missing critique of the systems and institutions of state, nation and global race politics that press against mixed heritage peoples, intrude upon, limit, and often direct their ID construction…

Read the entire review here.

Almost Free: A Story about Family and Race in Antebellum Virginia by Eva Sheppard Wolf (review) [Padraig Riley]

Civil War History
Volume 60, Number 2, June 2014
pages 199-201
DOI: 10.1353/cwh.2014.0041

Padraig Riley, Assistant Professor of History
Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

Wolf, Eva Sheppard, Almost Free: A Story about Family and Race in Antebellum Virginia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012)

Almost Free is the story of Samuel Johnson of Warrenton, Virginia, a mixed-race slave who worked successfully to free himself and then purchased his wife and children in the early nineteenth century. Less successfully, he then struggled for many years to free his extended family, and to establish a legacy of black freedom in the heart of the slaveholding republic. Relying on a remarkable series of petitions Johnson sent to the Virginia state legislature from 1811 to 1837, Wolf reconstructs the man’s life and identity. This entails considerable speculation, but Wolf’s imaginings are balanced by a rich archival source base covering much of Johnson’s life. This accessible book is ideal for undergraduate instruction, and it is an important addition to scholarship on race and slavery. For Wolf, Samuel Johnson demonstrates that free blacks were not simply “slaves without masters” and that race in the antebellum South was a fluid concept, rather than a simple black-and-white proposition.

Wolf contends that race was not dictated by statute but rather was “something people themselves created and re-created in their multiple interactions with one another” (3). Samuel Johnson became free in 1812, well after an 1806 statute that compelled all freed slaves to leave the state within a year, under threat of being sold back into slavery. Because he wanted to remain in Virginia, he had to petition the state legislature. While most such petitions failed, Johnson’s succeeded because he was backed by both local whites and a few influential political figures. Thus, at the local level, whites did not simply act out the 1806 statute or Thomas Jefferson’s fears about the dangers of slave emancipation. They instead accepted Samuel Johnson as their neighbor, quite literally in the case of John and Maria Smith, who lived next door to him.

As a free man, Johnson saved money to purchase his wife and children, becoming, like many free black slaveholders, the master of his own family. He also owned land and sued white men in court. But, ultimately, the law left him and his family vulnerable. Despite numerous petitions to the state legislature, his family members were never allowed to remain in Virginia as free inhabitants. Had Johnson freed his family, they would have been legally bound to leave the state within a year; had he unexpectedly died, his family would have remained enslaved, subject to sale. In addition, Johnson suffered numerous other legal restraints as a free man of color, from restrictions on owning firearms to being unable to testify against a white man in court. He could be a white man’s neighbor, but he was very far from being his equal.

Why, then, did Johnson stay? Wolf poses this question quite poignantly by contrasting Johnson with Spencer Malvin, a free African American man who married Johnson’s daughter Lucy in 1826. Malvin, born free, knew the evils of slavery firsthand: as a teenager, he had been apprenticed to one Fielding Sinclair, who killed his adolescent slave. Sinclair was charged with murder, but the case was dismissed for lack of evidence, perhaps because Malvin could not testify against a white man. After Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831, Malvin openly attacked slavery, circulating antislavery papers in Warrenton. He left Virginia and his family in 1832, along with a fugitive named Sandy, eventually settling in Pennsylvania.

But Johnson and his daughter Lucy remained, even after white hostility to free blacks increased in the wake of Turner’s rebellion. Many of the local whites who had supported Johnson’s petitions in the past now requested that the state legislature support the colonization of all free blacks outside of Virginia. For Wolf, Johnson’s decision to remain under such circumstances suggests an act of resistance: “In staying, they rejected racial exclusion. . . . They challenged the notion that Virginia belonged to white people” (107).

On the one hand, this contention is clearly true. But in other respects, Samuel Johnson’s life was marked by deference, rather than challenge, and white support for his limited freedom was a sign of condescension rather than recognition. Thus Philip Pendleton Barbour, as Wolf shows us, one of the foremost defenders of slavery during…

Beyond the One-Drop Rule: Views of Obama’s Race and Voting Intention in 2008

Sociological Science
Volume 1, March 2014 (2014-04-17)
pages 70-80
DOI: 10.15195/v1.a6

Simon Cheng, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Connecticut

David Weakliem, Professor of Sociology
University of Connecticut

We use data from a national survey of likely voters conducted before the 2008 election to study the association between Obama’s perceived racial identity and voters’ choices. Voters who saw Obama as biracial were substantially more likely to vote for him, suggesting that many Americans regard a biracial identity more favorably than a black identity. The relationship was stronger among Democrats than among Republicans. The potential implications of our findings for the future of race in American politics are discussed.

Read the entire article here.

Things to Know When Talking About Race and Genetics

Psychology Today
2014-05-13

Agustín Fuentes, Professor of Anthropology
University of Notre Dame

On May 5th, 2014, I shared the platform in a webinar debate with Nicholas Wade (former NYTimes Science Writer) about his new book “A Troublesome Inheritance – A discussion on genes, race and human history.” The debate was sponsored by the American Anthropological Association.

Wade’s assertions in the book (and our discussion) are that Humans are divided into genetically identified “continental races” and that there are significant differences in genetically based social behaviors between these “races” as a result of the last 50,000 years of human evolution.

Wade argues that social scientists are covering up these ideas and claims that a true discussion on race is repressed by most academics out of political correctness. These points were also made by Charles Murray in a laudatory review of Wade’s book in the Wall Street Journal. They are both wrong.

I am an academic and I love to talk about the data on race, so do many of my colleagues. The scientific data on human genetic variation and human evolution refute the claims there are multiple biological races in humans today and in the debate I offered articles, datasets, and work by biologists, geneticists, evolutionary theorists and even anthropologists to demonstrate this. Unfortunately, in such discussions the bulk of data, and its complexity, are too often ignored.

Avoiding direct challenge is a common tactic by people trying to use select slices of genetic data to “prove” that there are multiple biological races in humans today. This is a problem because dialogue on such an important topic should be encouraged and as open minded as possible, but it must also be accurately informed by the science of human biology. So here is a mini-primer on what we what we know about human genetics to help such a discussion (see the bibliography at the bottom of this post for very good articles on the topic)…

…5) Nearly all the genetic variation in our entire species is found in populations just in Africa, with most of the variation found in all populations outside of Africa making up a small subset of that variation…

…Given these facts, here is the key argument you need to remember: While different populations vary in some of the .1% of the genome, the way this variation is distributed does not map to biological races, either by continent or otherwise.

For example, when you compare people from Nigeria, Western Europe and Beijing you do get some patterned differences…but these specific groups do not reflect the entire continental areas of Africa, Europe, and Asia (the proposed “continental races” of African, Caucasian and Asian). There are no genetic patterns that link all populations in just Africa, just Asia or just Europe to one another to the exclusion of other populations in other places. If you compare geographically separated populations within the “continental” areas you get the same kind of variation as you would between them. Comparing Nigerians to Western Europeans to people from Beijing gives us the same kind of differences in variation patterns as does comparing people from Siberia, Tibet and Java, or from Finland, Wales and Yemen, or even Somalia, Liberia and South Africa— and none of these comparisons demonstrates “races.”…

Read the entire article here.

Can ‘Belle’ End Hollywood’s Obsession with the White Savior?

The Daily Beast
2014-05-04

Keli Goff

The black characters in films like ‘The Help’ and ’12 Years A Slave’ always seem to need a white knight. But the black protagonist in ‘Belle,’ a new film about racism and slavery in England, takes matters into her own hands.

The film Belle, which opens this weekend in limited release stateside, is inspired by a true story, deals with the horrors of the African slave trade, and its director is black and British. For these reasons, comparisons to the recent recipient of the Best Picture Oscar, 12 Years a Slave, are inevitable

But there are some notable differences.

Among them, Belle is set in England, while 12 Years a Slave is set in America. 12 Years a Slave depicts—in unflinching detail—the brutalities of slavery, while Belle merely hints at its physical and psychological toll. But the most significant deviation is this: whereas 12 Years a Slave faced criticism for being yet another film to perpetuate the “white savior” cliché in cinema, in Belle, the beleaguered black protagonist does something novel: she saves herself.

“Belle marks the first film I’ve seen in which a black woman with agency stands at the center of the plot as a full, eloquent human being who is neither adoring foil nor moral touchstone for her better spoken white counterparts,” the novelist and TV producer Susan Fales-Hill told The Daily Beast…

Read the entire article here.

Exploring the Political Exploitation of Blood Quantum in the U.S.

Indian Country Today Media Network
2013-05-17

Vincent Schilling, Executive Vice President
Schilling Media, Inc.

Arica L. Coleman is an assistant professor of Black American Studies at the University of Delaware. She is African American and Native American (Rappahannock), which may help explain why she has conducted research for the past 12 years on what she calls the “intersections between Native American, African American and European peoples in the southeastern United States with a focus on the etymology of race, the ideology of racial purity and its historical and contemporary effects on racial and identity formation.” In non-academic terms, that means she has done a lot of thinking about the relations and interactions of blacks, Indians and whites on the East Coast, primarily in Virginia.

Coleman has turned her Ph.D. dissertation into an upcoming book, That the Blood Stay Pure: African Americans, Native Americans and the Predicament of Race and Identity in Virginia, and agreed to talk with ICTMN about her experiences as an African American woman who gets a lot of grief for also being an American Indian.

Wouldn’t you say that back in the day, American Indians and African Americans all went to the same parties?

Yes, we went to the same parties and we also worked the slave plantations together. This is what a lot of people do not understand when you talk about slavery. My African American brothers and sisters will have a problem with this because they like to look at slavery only in terms of black and white. The truth is—and specifically in Virginia—there was Indian slavery. The first slaves in the Americas were Native American and this business that the Native Americans died off as a result of disease and war [is inaccurate]—those were not the only reasons for their demise, there was the Indian slave trade, which is something we do not discuss a lot.

When you had people of African descent being brought across the Atlantic to the Americas, you also had Native American people throughout the Americas being dispersed throughout the world, including portions of South Africa and Angola. When you look at the records of the South—and specifically in Virginia—they talk about Indian, Negro and mulatto slaves…. From the 16th century through the 19th century, you had Native American peoples identified as Negro and as mulatto.

When you look in those records and see these terms you cannot automatically assume that these folks were African, because they could have been a mix of Native American or European as well. Racial labels have never been constant or used with consistency…

Read the entire interview here.

Beyond Biracial: When Blackness Is a Small, Nearly Invisible Fraction

The Root
2014-05-12

Jenée Desmond-Harris, Senior Staff Writer and White House Correspondent

In the past, these Americans would have been labeled “quadroons” or “octoroons.” Today their options are so much broader. What can they teach us about race in 2014 and in the future?

Stephanie Troutman, a 36-year-old professor at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., has a white mother and a black father. She has her own family’s racial elevator speech down to a single sentence: “I’m a mixed woman who has a child with a black man and a child with a white man.” Her 7-year-old son, Rex, is unambiguous when it comes to his racial identity and “very pro black,” even protesting when he’s described as merely “brown,” she says.

With her 11-year-old daughter, Melora—whose pale, golden-hued skin; light eyes; and long, copper-colored hair prompt strangers to ask if she’s “Mediterranean” or “Arab”—things aren’t as simple.

“For now I’ve told her that she’s a person of color. That’s the best way I can explain it. I want to take it away from black and white because those are weird options for her,” Troutman says. “But I always kind of knew that I’d have a kid who looked white, and I was right. When Melora was born, my friends were like, ‘How did her dad’s white hippie granola genes completely beat out your biracial genes?’ ”

Despite those biracial genes, Troutman realized as a teen that most people see her as “just light skinned” (in other words, black). That hit home one day in the mid-1990s when, in a classically tragic black-identity-forming moment, a Florida stranger yelled “nigger” at her from a passing car.

“At first I was like, ‘Damn, that’s kind of messed up. Who are they yelling at?’ And then I realized I was the only person on the street.”

Read the entire article here.

2014 Independent Publisher Book Awards Results

Independent Publisher
May 2014

Congratulations to all of this year’s medalists and sincere thanks to the 2,500+ independent authors and publishers who participated. Even if you didn’t win a medal, know that the competition was very fierce, and that everyone involved in the independent publishing movement is a winner!

Listed here are the 78 National Category medalists, 275 in all, chosen from about 4,000 entries. Click the links below to visit the Regional, Ebook and Outstanding Book of the Year medalist pages.

The 2014 IPPY Awards medal ceremony will be held on May 28th in New York, on the eve of the BookExpo America convention…

29. Multicultural Non-Fiction Adult

Gold: (1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race, by Yaba Blay, Ph.D. (BLACKprint Press)

Reflections of an Undercover Black Girl from San Francisco

50 Shades of Black: Sexuality and Skin Tone in the Formation of Identity
2014-05-07

Stacy Jethroe

My skin is tan. My hair is wavy. In Nina Simone’s “Four Women” I might be considered a Saffonia, though my father was neither rich nor white.

As a child living in a 1970’s San Francisco, I looked exactly like what I was: a nappy-headed mixed child. Born to a fair-skinned, Caucasian mother and a medium-toned Black/Italian/Cherokee father, I have been told I look Brazilian or Cape Verdean or just Plain Ol’ Regular White Girl. As I aged, my skin naturally lightened and my hair relaxed of its own accord.

At the age of nine, I moved to the Midwest. I wasn’t exactly Black or White or what was easily recognized, and my racial backstory became a constant topic. As a nappy-headed mixed child in San Francisco, I never lied about my ethnicity; there was no need for it. But, living in the Midwest, even my maternal grandmother held issue with my color; she lied to protect herself against the judgment she believed would be passed by others and, I believe, her own loathing of her non-White grandchild. Following suit, I began to tell the same lie. I hated the curliness of my hair and spent hours each day straightening it, trying to look White. White is right…right? I don’t believe that now, but I believed it then…

Read the entire article here.

Portrait of the mystery lady: The incredible story behind the 18th-century painting that inspired a new movie

The Daily Mail
2014-05-03

Paula Bryne

Attributed to Johann Zoffany (circa 1778)

Until recently, little was known about the mixed-race girl in an 18th-century painting associated with Kenwood House in London. But a new book and film reveal that Dido Elizabeth Belle was, in fact, the illegitimate daughter of a slave whose privileged upbringing helped change racial injustices for ever

The artist must have known that it was an unusual commission. The double portrait has a long and distinguished tradition. Typically, the subject would be a husband and wife, a mother and child, or sisters. The composition above conforms to that of a portrait of sisters but, as far as we know, this is the only portrait of its era to show a white and a black girl together in a sisterly pose.

The portrait was commissioned in the late 1770s or early 1780s by the 1st Earl of Mansfield, William Murray, who as Lord Chief Justice was the most admired judge in 18th-century Britain. His name by this time was irrevocably linked with the rights of slaves as a result of his judgment in the infamous Somerset case of 1772.

But these are not his daughters. He and his wife were childless. The girl in the foreground is Lady Elizabeth Murray, his great niece, who was brought up at Kenwood House on the edge of London’s Hampstead Heath, where this portrait was painted, after the death of her mother when she was a young child. It was believed until the 1980s that the other girl was some kind of household servant. She was, in fact, a blood relative of the girl in pink and the Mansfield family and her name was Dido Elizabeth Belle, now the subject of a major new film…

Read the entire article here.