Mixed Race Studies

“Dreadful Deceit”: Race is a myth

Salon
Sunday, 2013-12-15

Laura Miller, Staff Writer

A historian argues that one of the defining elements of American culture is merely a “social fiction”

Jacqueline Jones’ provocative new history, “Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race From the Colonial Era to Obama’s America,” contains a startling sentence on its 265th page. It comes after Jones quotes Simon Owens, the last of five African-Americans whose life stories she describes in the book. Owens — an auto worker, labor activist and writer who died in 1983 — stated, “I understood as a Negro first, in the South, the North, in the union, in the NAACP, in the C.P. [Communist Party] and in the S.W.P [Socialist Workers Party].” Jones adds, “Because generations of white people had defined him and all other blacks first and foremost as ‘Negroes,’ he had no alternative but to acknowledge — or, rather, react to — that spurious identity.”

That racial identities are “spurious” is the foundational argument of this fascinating book. Race is a cultural invention, rather than a biological fact (on this scientists widely agree), and Jones, a history professor at the University of Texas and recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, wants to show how pernicious and persistent this falsity is. In the book’s epilogue, she points to an article from the 2012 edition of the New York Times titled “How Well You Sleep May Hinge on Race,” based on a study showing that living in high-crime neighborhood or having chronic conditions like diabetes or hypertension can cause insomnia. But, as Jones observes, these are problems deriving from poverty, not race, and so the article “blatantly conflated socioeconomic status with the idea of race.”

Of the five people whose life stories are told in “Dreadful Deceit,” the first is essentially voiceless: an enslaved man named Antonio, abducted from his homeland in Africa and murdered while being “corrected” by a colonial landowner in 17th-century Chesapeake. As Jones relates, Antonio’s race “had no practical meaning” to the man who purported to own him, Symon Overzee. Describing in well-researched detail the economic and political milieu of the time, she argues that what created Antonio’s vulnerability to Overzee was not his skin color or any other physical trait but his uprootedness, “without a tribe or a nation-state to protect and defend him in the Atlantic world.”…

…None of the life stories in the book supports this argument more forcefully than that of Richard W. White, a Civil War veteran elected to the office of clerk of the Chatham County Superior Court in Georgia. One of his opponents in the election filed suit against White, charging that he was ineligible to hold office in Georgia because he was “colored.” White, who was relatively new in town and “from unknown parts and of unknown lineage,” appeared to be “white.” The evidence marshaled to prove that White was not white consisted, as the judge freely admitted, of “the reputation of the person in his community, that is what he says of himself — what others say of him — his associates and his general reputation.” In other words, Jones underlines, a man’s race in this community “would be a matter not of ethnicity or heritage or appearance or biology. It would be, purely and simply, a social fiction — one without any appreciable basis in physical reality.”…

Read the entire review here.

Afro-Mexico: Dancing between Myth and Reality by Anita González (review)

Latin American Music Review
Volume 34, Number 2, Fall/Winter 2013
pages 288-291
DOI: 10.1353/lat.2013.0019

Alex E. Chávez, Visiting Assistant Professor
Latin American and Latino Studies Program
University of Illinois, Chicago

Anita González, Afro-Mexico: Dancing between Myth and Reality. With photographs by George O. Jackson and José Manuel Pellicer. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011. 183 pp. ISBN 978-0-292-72324-5.

In a mixed-race country like Mexico, being “black” means being part of an ethnic group, but in addition to the unstable inhabitations of racial identities, the richness of expressive culture therein also has much to do with carving out senses of community. With this understanding, González explores the cultural negotiations of Afro-Mexican identity in terpsichorean traditions throughout Mexico—with specific focus on Veracruz and the Costa Chica of Guerrero and Oaxaca. She elaborates on various quotidian dance practices embedded with an African cultural subtext of influence that demonstrates how socially and historically constituted ethno-racial constructions are voiced through performance. Taking cues from methodologies in performance, theater, and dance studies, she homes in on the communicative potential of the gesticulant. Moreover, she incorporates ethnography and relies on photographs to illustrate the dance forms.

Although there is existing scholarship that privileges broader socio-historical questions concerning the African diaspora in Latin America, studies focused on African-derived expressive forms in Mexico are few (Cruz Carretero, Martínez Maranto, and Santiago Silva 1990; McDowell 2000; Pérez Fernández 1990). In her efforts to show how Afro-Mexicans have been instrumental in cultural life in that country, González skillfully attends to the mobile history of ethnic encounter and exchange among Africans, indigenous groups, and the Spanish that has informed the hybridity of expressive forms and subjectivities over time. This approach in some ways gestures toward the types of analyses offered in Robin Moore’s Nationalizing Blackness (1997) and John Chasteen’s National Rhythms, African Roots (2004) in their own interrogations of the complicated nexus of performance, nation, and racial formation in Cuba and South America, respectively.

Mexico’s own fraught ideologies of mestizaje and mexicanidad constitute an officialized discursive field that has promoted a unified national culture by way of de-emphasizing localized and pluri-ethnic productions of subjectivity; and as it pertains to González’s study, this ideological scaffolding has obfuscated—if not entirely excluded—the African component. In this regard, apart from considering phenotype, González suggests that racial identities are also defined by geographic locale to the extent that “most Afro-Mexicans are unaware of the historical circumstances that explain their presence in Mexico,” which places particular importance on the cultural negotiations of social location as such (37).

At the core of Afro-Mexico lies González’s ambition to present a “diversity of perspectives about blackness” (103). She succeeds in this ambition as it relates to the dance forms in question. And by returning to the issues of archetype and stereotype repeatedly, she opens the door for considering the iterative relationship between racialization and performativity. Yet bringing the implicit connections between everyday life and institutionalized racial knowledges to the surface early in the book would have served in demonstrating more clearly how expressive culture fits within the arch of broader racial ideologies with implications for understandings of embodiment, performance, and the viscosity of race.

Nonetheless, the unique contribution of the book emerges from González’s own position of expertise as an artist and dancer so that when she contends that “the bent body posture and looseness of the upper body” in certain forms have aesthetic roots in African dance (66), her own bodily knowledge is involved in making that statement. Dances, she argues, consist of gestures within musical phrases. Possibilities for storytelling exist therein that “express social outlooks” (46). These stories unfold at different levels, from personal to communal, from political to mythical—often simultaneously. Her analysis likewise operates on several levels—form and content of the dance, musicality, historical roots, and ultimately the playing out of contemporary politics, since many of the dances are “theatrical scenarios that include attacks, public whippings, sexual overtones, and other disreputable acts” (40). Still, her descriptions in some ways beg for a more in-depth ethnographic rendering of these expressive flows to illustrate how they communicate beliefs and ideas, the very representations that become myths about blackness over time and how they unfold in relation to larger and contested understandings of nation and racial formation. Afro-Mexico is premised on the contention that in a society where ethno-racial identities are disputed, myths contain within them…

Book Review of (1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race

The Skanner
Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington
2013-12-10

Kam Williams

Yaba Blay and Noelle Théard (dir. of photography), (1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race (Philadelphia: BLACKprint Press, 2013)

Traditionally, in America, if you were just a teeny-weeny bit black, you’d always been considered black. This arbitrary color line was even codified by the Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, an 1896 case brought by an octoroon light enough to pass who sued for the right to sit in the “white only” section of a segregated train traveling through the South…

…This means that folks, who only a generation ago would’ve been forced to identify themselves simply as black, now feel much more freedom to avail themselves of an array of alternatives along the ethnic spectrum. (1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race is a collection of essays reflecting on racial identity by 60 introspective individuals who until relatively recently would’ve been labeled black in the eyes of the law.

This enlightening opus was edited by Dr. Yaba Blay, a professor of Africana Studies at Drexel University, and each contributor’s entry is accompanied by a proud portrait photographed by Noelle Théard, a professor at Florida International University. The book breaks down the contributors by three categories: “Mixed Black,” “American Black” and “Diaspora Black.”

Although “Black” Kathleen Cross has a black father and a white mother, she has resisted the invitations to join the “Multiracial Movement, which she sees as divisive. By contrast, Harlemite Jozen Cummings describes himself as “Mixed,” with parents who are Japanese, Puerto Rican and African-American…

Read the entire review here.

A Study of Tri-Racial Isolates in Eastern United States

Human Heredity
Volume 6, Number 3, 1956/1957
DOI: 10.1159/000150862
pages 410–412

C. J. Witkop
National Institute of Dental Research, National Institutes of Health, Public Health Service, U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Bethesda, Maryland, U.S.A.

There are known to exist in the eastern part of the United States some 28 well defined tri-racial isolates. These groups represent gene pools of various proportions of Caucasian, Negro, and American Indian races. These groups are known as mixed bloods in their own communities. They are not accepted into the white community and do not consider themselves Negroes. As a result, they maintain their racial integrity by in-marriage within a few family names. They all represent the remnants of eastern Indian tribes.

A preliminary survey of each group was made by a questionnaire letter to the county health officer in whose district these groups reside. On the basis of subsequent studies it has been shown that about 10% of the genetically determined conditions that actually exist in these groups are reported by this method. One of these groups was selected for a detailed genetic study.

Detailed Study

A detailed study of the medical, dental, mental health, and social aspects of one of these groups comprising 5 000 living members is in progress in southern Maryland. We are trying to determine all of the hereditary pathological traits present in the group. This group was selected for study for the following reasons:

1. This group marries for the most part within only 14 family surnames. 2. Records indicate that the group has in-married for nearly 250 years. 3. These people reside in a limited geographic area of 2 counties of…

Read or purchase the article here.

Poll Finds Hope Is Running High for Next Mayor of New York City

The New York Times
2013-12-13

Kate Taylor and Dalia Sussman

With Bill de Blasio’s inauguration less than a month away, New Yorkers are highly optimistic about his mayoralty — but they remain skeptical that he can achieve major changes on some of the core issues that defined his candidacy, like the widening gap between the rich and poor and the scarcity of affordable housing, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll.

Despite his four years as the city’s public advocate, Mr. de Blasio — who surged from behind late in the primary season to capture the Democratic nomination, and then coasted to a landslide victory in November — remains unfamiliar to many New Yorkers. More than half of city residents said they did not yet know enough about the mayor-elect, who takes office on Jan. 1, to form an opinion of him.

Still, 73 percent of city residents said they were generally optimistic about the next four years. About two-thirds said Mr. de Blasio would bring about real change in the way things are done. And while most said the Bloomberg administration favored the wealthy, a plurality said they expect Mr. de Blasio to treat rich, poor and middle-class New Yorkers equally. A majority said they believe he would have a positive effect on schools…

…Mr. de Blasio, whose wife, Chirlane McCray, is black, featured her and their two children prominently in his mayoral campaign, and captured 96 percent of the black vote in the general election, according to an exit poll by Edison Research. More than half of black New Yorkers polled said they believed that having the first biracial couple as mayor and first lady would help transform race relations in the city.

Mr. de Blasio has made clear that his wife will play an active role in his administration. Half of city residents, including a majority of women and six in 10 blacks, said they supported this, though 85 percent said they did not know enough about Ms. McCray to have an opinion of her…

Read the entire article here.

Campaign highlights abuse of mixed-race Irish in institutional care

The Irish Times
Dublin, Ireland
2013-11-18

Marie O’Halloran, Parliamentary Reporter

‘I was in a class all of my own, beneath everybody else along with the dogs and the pigs’

A campaign has been launched for recognition of mixed-race survivors of institutional abuse who believe they suffered racism while in State care.

Rosemary Adaser and Evon Brennan of the campaign group Call to Action Mixed Race Irish, have 20 members, but believe there are about 200 Irish people of mixed race who were in institutional care here between the 1950s and 1980s.

Ms Brennan, a London-based singer-songwriter, said they were looking at the “colour-specific nature of abuse”. That abuse “has been under the radar all these years” and they want an acknowledgement that “Ireland in the ’50s and ’60s was a racist country”…

…Ms Adaser said: “The key point is that if you were mixed race back in the ’50s and ’60s you were 99 per cent sure of being put in an institution.”

Put into State care at the age of three months, she was in homes on the Navan Road, Dublin, and spent 11 years in St Joseph’s, Kilkenny, where her baby son was forcibly taken from her by the nuns when she was 17.

‘Performing monkey’

“I have absolutely nothing good to say about it. I was the only black girl there, seen as an oddity, treated as an alien, at best a performing monkey, at worst a savage, a savage to be civilised.

“I was in a class all of my own, beneath everybody else along with the dogs and the pigs on the farm. That’s where I was told I belonged.”…

Read the entire article here.

Lenny Kravitz’s Halfway Mark

The New York Times
2013-12-06

Amy Chozick, National Political Reporter

You grew up between the Upper East Side and Bed-Stuy. Which neighborhood did you feel more comfortable in?

Well, after I was in first grade, Monday through Friday was Upper East Side going to P.S. 6, and Friday night through Sunday night was Bed-Stuy. But I didn’t like one more than the other. I had two different lives, and in fact two different names. My name in Bed-Stuy was Eddie.

Why?

These people that lived next door to my grandmother’s were from down South, and they had very thick Southern accents — they were extremely country. I remember being about 6 years old, and they said, “What’s your name, boy?” I said, “Lenny.” They said, “Eddie?” I said, “No, Lenny.” They said, “Eddie?” I said, “Lenny,” and they said, “Oh, Eddie.” So that was it, I was Eddie…

…Do you think things have changed in terms of being biracial? 

Kids now and young adults, they don’t even know about this. Say you were 10 years old when Obama first took office; your thing is: What are you talking about? All my friends are mixed, and the music I listen to is mixed…

…I read that when you started out in the ’80s, producers were telling you your music wasn’t black enough or white enough.

They would always say, “Look, we’ll sign you, we’d love to give you a deal, but you cannot do this, you have to make this kind of music.” I always told them back off — and believe me, I needed the money. I was living in a car. I still don’t know to this day what stopped me…

Read the entire interview here.

Passing for white and straight: How my looks hide my identity

Salon
2013-12-08

Koa Beck
Brooklyn, New York

I’m neither straight nor white, but I’m frequently mistaken for both — and it’s taught me a lot about privilege

I first became aware of my passing as a young child confronted with standardized testing. My second grade teacher had walked us through where to write our names in capital letters and what bubbles to fill in for our sex, our birth date and ethnicity. But in the days before “biracial” or “multiracial” or “choose two or more of the following,” I was confronted with rigid boxes of “white” or “black” – a space that my white father and black-Italian mother had navigated for some time.

But even at 8 years old, I knew I could mark “white” on the form without a teacher’s assistant telling me to do the form over with my No. 2 pencil. I could sometimes be “exotic” on the playground to the grown-ups who watched us for skinned knees and bad words. But with hair that had yet to curl and a white-sounding last name, I was at first glance – and many after – a dark-haired white girl with a white father who collected her after school…

…Because with my invisibility has come her privilege, an experience that has undeniably marked most of my life.  Due to my passing, I have the W.E.B. Du Bois-patented “double consciousness” for the opportunities that have been placed before me, scholastic and professional, from generally white and hetero establishments that look at me and always see their own. Is it the presumed commonality that garnered me those interviews? Those smiles? Those callbacks? Those firm handshakes?

When I read statistics about how employers are more likely to hire white people than people of color, I know that I can count myself in the former, despite the fact that I identify as the latter. I’m hyper-aware that when a bank, a company or any public office hears the sound of my voice and reads my legal first name (under which this article does not appear), they assume that they’re talking to a white woman, and therefore give me better service…

…My privilege in passing reflects a racism and heterosexism that continues to flourish, despite romantic notions that racial mixing and gay marriage will create a utopian future free of prejudices…

Read the entire article here.

Prince George’s Political Duo, Jolene and Glenn Ivey Focus on Family

AFRO
Prince George’s County News
2013-10-16

Zenitha Prince, Special to the AFRO

He’s a former two-term state’s attorney for Prince George’s County who is now a partner in the prestigious K Street law firm of Leftwich & Ludaway. She’s the chairman of the Prince George’s delegation in the Maryland House of Delegates and a candidate for lieutenant governor of Maryland.

At the characterization that they are a “power couple,” however, Glenn Ivey, 52, laughs heartily. Jolene Ivey, also 52, has a similar reaction.

“We find that pretty amusing,” she said with a soft chuckle. “We’re always buried in laundry and trying to get our children to soccer practice.”…

…Jolene Ivey said her father and stepmother, Gigi Stephenson, nurtured in her a love of community service and advocacy in their Northeast Washington home.

“They were always a good example of how to be good citizens in the world,” she said.

But running for public office was never her plan, said Jolene Ivey, who earned a bachelor’s in communication at Towson and a master’s in journalism from Maryland.

“I decided to run for public office because it is a great vehicle to make things happen for people,” she said.

In Annapolis, she has often focused on issues related to women, children and families. If she is elected, her agenda will include working with Gansler to increase the minimum wage, close the achievement gap and improve diversity in government.

“It is exciting to be in a position where I’m going to be able to have a real impact on the direction the state is heading,” she told the AFRO.

Jolene Ivey’s racial identification has become something of a subhead in the coverage of the campaign. Though light-skinned enough to be mistaken for White—her birth mother was Caucasian—Jolene Ivey identifies herself as African American.

“It doesn’t affect me inside because I know who I am—I’m Black,” she said. “My family is Black…and I’m the mother of five Black sons. The only issue arises when other people make assumptions about me based on my outward appearance, but I can’t do anything about that.”…

Read the entire article here.

In Japan, Will Hafu Ever Be Considered Whole?

The Diplomat
Tokyo, Japan
2013-10-03

J.T. Quigley, Assistant Editor

Mixed-race individuals and their families seek acceptance in a homogeneous Japan.

“Spain! Spain!” the boys shouted at her and her brother, day in and day out at a summer camp in Chiba prefecture. The incessant chanting eventually turned into pushing and hitting. One morning, she even discovered that her backpack full of clothes had been left outside in the rain.

“It was the worst two weeks of our lives,” recalls Lara Perez Takagi, who was six years old at the time. She was born in Tokyo to a Spanish father and Japanese mother.

“When our parents came to pick us up at the station, we cried for the whole day. I remember not ever wanting to do any activities that involved Japanese kids and lost interest in learning the language for a long time, until I reached maturity and gained my interest in Japan once again.”

By the year 2050, 40 percent of the Japanese population will be age 65 or older. With Japanese couples having fewer children than ever before, Japan is facing a population decline of epic proportions. However, one demographic continues to grow: Japanese and non-Japanese mixed-race couples. But in one of the world’s most homogeneousous countries, is Japan ready to accept their offspring?

Biracial Japanese nationals like Takagi are an increasingly common sight in Japan. The latest statistics from the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare indicate that one out of every 50 babies born in 2012 had one non-Japanese parent. Additionally, 3.5 percent of all domestic marriages performed last year were between Japanese and foreigners. To put those numbers into perspective, the earliest reliable census data that includes both mixed race births and marriages shows that fewer than one out of 150 babies born in 1987 were biracial and only 2.1 percent of marriages that year were between Japanese and non-Japanese.

Takagi is one of a growing number of hafu – or half Japanese – who have grown up between two cultures. The term itself, which is derived from the English word “half,” is divisive in Japan. Hafu is the most commonly used word for describing people who are of mixed Japanese and non-Japanese ethnicity. The word is so pervasive that even nontraditional-looking Japanese may be asked if they are hafu.

Rather than calling someone mixed-race or biracial, some believe that the term hafu insinuates that only the Japanese side is of any significance. That could reveal volumes about the national attitude toward foreigners, or perhaps it’s just the word that happened to stick in a country where mixed-race celebrities are increasingly fixtures on television…

Read the entire article here.