Mixed Race Studies

Piesche Publishes Anthology on Audre Lorde

Hamilton College, Clinton, New York
College News
2012-12-02

In commemoration of the 20th anniversary of Audre Lorde’s death, Visiting Instructor of German & Russian Studies Peggy Piesche published a new anthology, Eurer Schweigen nützt euch nichts: Audre Lorde und die Schwarze Frauenbewegung in Deutschland (Your Silence Will Not Protect You:  Audre Lorde and the Black Women’s Movement in Germany). The book was launched with a discussion and reading on Nov. 21 in one of the main theaters in Berlin (Volksbühne)…

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De Blasio Takes His Modern Family on the Campaign Trail

The New York Times
2013-08-07

Michael Barbaro

As his S.U.V. sped down the West Side Highway a few days ago, 30 minutes late to a campaign stop, Bill de Blasio, a Democratic mayoral candidate, proposed a simple solution: let his wife do the talking instead of him.

“Is Chirlane there?” he asked an aide, as he began placing a call on his cellphone to his wife. “I already warned her she should be prepared to speak.”

For the next five minutes, Mr. de Blasio, the public advocate, and his wife, Chirlane McCray, traded talking points while she prepared to address an angry crowd of hospital workers in Brooklyn.

It was a small but telling glimpse into a candidacy that, to a remarkable degree, has thrust family into a starring role — in campaign literature and debate preparation sessions, at political rallies and at subway meet-and-greets…

…In a city where white residents are becoming a minority of the voting population, the family-centric strategy has allowed Mr. de Blasio, who is Italian-American, to portray himself as a paragon of modern, middle-class, multicultural New York: Ms. McCray is black and the couple has two children, Dante and Chiara, 18…

…In the most powerful moment of the new ad, Mr. de Blasio’s son takes aim at Mr. Bloomberg’s reliance on police stops and searches, which have had an outsize impact on young black men. Looking into the camera, Dante de Blasio promises that his father will be the “only one who will end an era of stop-and-frisk that unfairly targets people of color.”…

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New Marker Unveiling this Saturday in Manteo!

Chowan Discovery Group
2013-08-07

Marvin T. Jones, Executive Director

For decades, [North Carolina] NC Highway markers in Manteo have honored English exploration, the Lost Colony and Confederate forts.  No reference to the local people has been acknowledged.  Well, this Saturday, the first town encountered by the English, in 1585, will get its own marker.  This NC Highway Historical Marker for the Roanoke Indian town of Dasemunkepuec will be unveiled.  (We call it “Dase”.)

Black German culture, history highlighted at Amherst-sponsored conference

Amherst College News
Amherst College
Amherst, Massachusetts
2013-08-16

Peter Rooney, Director of Public Affairs

As more African-Americans are realizing they have German roots, and as Germans expand the notion of what it means to be German, a new academic discipline dedicated to examining the Black German experience is having its third International Conference at Amherst College this week.

Christian Rogowski, a professor of German at Amherst College, together with Sara Lennox of U Mass, helped organize this year’s conference of the Black German Heritage & Research Association Convention, which will be held from Thursday, August 8 to Saturday, August 10 and is free and open to the public.

“The conference is unique,” Rogowski said, “because it brings together researchers who work on issues of ethnicity and racial diversity and the situation of blacks in Germany with people who themselves fall into that category, people with hyphenated identities such as Afro-German, African-American German or Black German.”

One highlight of the conference is a screening of the film “Toxi”, recently released on DVD by the DEFA Library of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.  The German movie from 1952 about an African-American girl who is born to a German mother after World War II, shows the impact that birth has on the girl, her family and the community that surrounds her. The film will be screened at 4 p.m. Friday in Stirn Auditorium, where Angelica Fenner of the University of Toronto will moderate a discussion about it…

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Fannie’s legacy: How a mixed-race couple settled early Lake Worth

The Palm Beach Post
West Palm Beach, Florida
2013-08-06
pages D4-D5

Scott Eyman, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

They thrived until Jim Crow laws forced them from the town.

Before there was Lake Worth, there was a town called Jewell.

It wasn’t a big town — the initial population consisted of 13 people — but a town nonetheless, with those people mostly engaged in wrenching a living out of boggy soil, with a post office founded and manned by a black woman named Fannie James.

There are no extant photos of Fannie, or, for I that matter, of her husband Samuel, even though Fannie lived until 1915. But their immeasurable importance is attested to by the comments of their peers m the Jewell community as well as in the historical record. Historian Ted Brownstein reconstructs both of these lives and the town they helped found In “Pioneers of
Jewel,” recently published to celebrate the centennial of Lake Worth.

It’s a fascinating excavation of the past made possibly mainly by the profusion of on line databases that have become available in the last 20 years.

“The Post ran some articles about Fannie and Samuel in 1999, which is not that long ago,” says Brownstein. “At that time, It wasn’t known where they came from, whether they were black, Seminoles, or mulattos. There was nothing about their histories before they arrived at the Lake…

…Sam and Fannie were lightskinned, which probably worked to their advantage Sam’s death certificate states that his mother was Irish, more proof the early history of America was a place of fairly open intermarriage, far more than was acknowledged at the time, far, far more than was allowed In the 20th century, when the Jim Crow laws came down…

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Rereading Pauline Johnson

Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’études canadiennes
Volume 46, Number 2, Spring 2012
pages 45-61
DOI: 10.1353/jcs.2012.0018

Carole Gerson, Professor of English
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada

This essay argues for a broader appreciation of Pauline Johnson’s creative range and poetic accomplishment. Rereading her work in relation to some of J. Edward Chamberlin’s ideas about narrative and about home brings fresh perspectives to her writing and reception in relation to her reversal of the White masculine gaze in her representations of Native peoples, Canadian history, wilderness, and gender. Her first Euro-Canadian audience used her work to assist with their own indigenization and help them feel at home in Canada. Because most current readers construct Johnson as figure of resistance, concentrating on a small selection of her poetry on Native topics, they continue to ignore her poems that invoke a female voice to possess the wilderness, along with her innovative erotic verse that reinhabits the female body by empowering the female gaze.

Having written extensively about Pauline Johnson in the past—most recently in relation to celebrity (Gerson 2012)—I welcome the opportunity created by this collection of essays associated with the Grand River Forum to bring some of J. Edward Chamberlin’s observations about storytelling to bear on my current interest in returning approaches to Johnson. My goal is to bring fresh attention to the craft and range of her poetry and to the complexity of her reception. Chamberlin’s analysis of narrative as essential to human experience, however contradictory the stories on a given topic might seem, is amply borne out by the unusual life and career of Emily Pauline Johnson (1861-1913). The well-known part-Mohawk poet was closely associated with the Grand River region, where she honed her skills in canoeing and authorship, her talents converging in…

Disparity in Breast Cancer Between Black and White Women Can Be Eliminated by Regular Mammography Screening

Rush University Medical Center
News Release
2012-09-25

(CHICAGO) — Regular mammography screening can help narrow the breast cancer gap between black and white women, according to a retrospective study published in Breast Cancer Research and Treatment in August.

Earlier studies have shown that black women in Chicago are more than twice as likely to die of breast cancer compared to white women. Black women with breast cancer reach the disease’s late stages more often than white women, and their tumors are more likely to be larger and more biologically aggressive.

But according to the study, when women of both races received regular breast cancer screening — a mammogram within two years of breast cancer diagnosis — there was no difference in the rate of how many of them presented in the disease’s later stages…

Read the entire news release here.

Our Zip Code May Be More Important Than Our Genetic Code: Social Determinants of Health, Law and Policy

Social Determinants of Health
Rhode Island Medical Journal
Volume 96, Number 7 (July 2013)

Dannie Ritchie, MD, MPH, Clinical Assistant Professor of Family Medicine
Lead, Transcultural Community Health Initiative
Brown University Center for Primary Care and Prevention

Public health is defined as “what we, as a society, do collectively to assure the condition for people to be healthy.” (Institute of Medicine (IOM), 1988, 2003). This evokes the social determinants of health – where we live, learn, work and play has a greater impact on individual and population health than does access to health care. However, when we discuss health and health disparities, clinical care problems are often framed as the problems with the health-care system. Recently, the Institute of Medicine has moved to make the distinction that in public health, the clinical care system is but one part of the overall health system, which should help to avoid the conflation of health as only a product of medical care (IOM 2010)…

…This special issue contains a series of papers expanding key themes addressed in the seminars. Making real improvements in the health of our communities, especially the economically, socially and environmentally impoverished communities, requires much more than “fixing” our wasteful, fragmented and misdirected medical-care systems. If we are to achieve health equity, it is time for us to evaluate how to truly shift the dialogue, and not inadvertently replicate the same disparities we are trying to eliminate. We must examine how disparities impact us all across demographics and not only the most vulnerable, though they bear the greater burden. It is our intent with this edition to provide tools to better equip us to evaluate the social determinants of health and ways to take action through law and policy…

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Japanese-Canadian hapa woman makes opera fun

Global Asian Women: Stories for and about Asian women around the world
2013-07-31

Elizabeth Noh

Her name means a solo piece in an opera, and it just so happens that Aria Umezawa is a trained opera singer.

The mixed Japanese-Canadian is also the co-founder and artistic director of Opera 5, a small production company in Toronto, Canada.

Fate or coincidence? Her parents had no idea when they named her 25 years ago.

“My parents joke that if they knew I would follow my namesake, they would have named me lawyer or doctor,” says Aria.

Her calling came at the age of 6, when she saw her first opera, Turandot by Puccini. “The music touched me.”

The experience lead her to study at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto and later at McGill University in Montreal. She trained as an opera singer, but she found that she wasn’t cut out to be a performer and was more suited to be a director…

…Aria is bi-racial. Her mother is Caucasian from the province of Alberta in western Canada. Her father is Japanese who came to Canada as a teenager. Aria was born and raised in Toronto. She has two younger brothers.

Some people say Eurasian, but “hapa” is commonly used in North America. The term originates from Hawaii and means a person of mixed blood. We talk about her mixed background.

“Growing up, it never occurred to me that my family was different on any sort of substantial level. We ate foods that my friends didn’t eat, and I was enrolled in karate instead of ballet, but I figured every family had its quirks,” she says…

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New book details racism faced by black soldiers who helped build Alaska Highway

Edmonton Journal
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
2013-08-02

Chris Zdeb

EDMONTON – Author John Virtue admits he knew “absolutely nothing” about The Black Soldiers Who Built the Alaska Highway, which is also the title of his latest book, before he started researching the topic six years ago.

He was inspired to write the story at the suggestion of Monte Irvin, a former New York Giant and a member of the baseball Hall of Fame, who Virtue met while writing a book about the role of the Mexican League in desegregating American baseball.

Virtue had never heard about the black soldiers who worked on the highway, even though he was raised in Edmonton, the staging area for the project.

You’d think it would be hard to miss 5,000 black troops, almost half of the 11,000 American soldiers who spent 18 months working on two of the biggest construction projects of the Second World War…

…The black soldiers should have been especially newsworthy, since they were the first African-American troops to be deployed outside of the U.S. mainland during the Second World War.

“The main reason why the contributions of the black soldiers was ignored during the war,” the former journalist says from his Miami Beach home, “is because of the power of congressmen from the southern states, who thought that anything that glorified the contributions of the blacks would cause problems back home. They might agitate for improvement of their conditions once the war was over and they were back home.”…

…There was immediate opposition from Brig.-Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr., commander in charge of the defence of Alaska, to black soldiers being sent to the far north. On receiving a letter from Brig.-Gen. Clarence L. Sturdevant, assistant of the Corps of Engineers, informing him that two black regiments would be sent to the Yukon and Alaska to help with the highway, Buckner minced no words in his reply.

“I have no objections whatever to your employing them on the roads if they are kept far enough away from the settlements and kept busy and sent home as soon as possible,” wrote Buckner, a southern aristocrat raised in rural Kentucky.

“The very high wages offered to unskilled labour here would attract a large number of them and cause them to remain and settle after the war, with the natural result that they could interbreed with the Indian and Eskimos and produce an astonishingly objectionable race of mongrels which could be a problem from now on.”…

Read the entire article here.