Mixed Race Studies

Emoji gods approve skin-tone options for couples of color

The Associated Press
2019-03-08

Leanne Itale

This undated illustration provided by Tinder/Emojination shows new variations of interracial emoji couples. In the world of emojis, interracial couples had virtually no options in terms of skin tone. But the emoji gods, otherwise known as the Unicode Consortium, recently rectified that, approving 71 new variations. Using six skin tones already available for one-person emojis, vendors such as Apple, Google and Microsoft will now be able to offer couples of color. Additions are expected later this year. (Tinder/Emojination via AP)

NEW YORK — In 1664, Maryland passed the first British colonial law banning marriage between whites and slaves. An 1883 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that state prohibitions on interracial marriage don’t violate the Fourteenth Amendment held for more than 80 years.

While such impediments to marriage were dismantled over time, there are still hurdles, however small, to overcome. Here, in 2019, interracial couples have a small victory to celebrate: The approval of 71 new variations of emoji for couples of color.

Capping a yearlong project thought up by, of all people, the folks at the swipe-right dating app Tinder, the emoji gods (known as the Unicode Consortium) recently approved the additions in characters technically referred to as people “holding hands.” A new “gender-inclusive” couple emoji was also approved among 230 new characters.

Until now, emoji of two or more people on various platforms and devices have been available only in the default yellow. While the Unicode Consortium, where Google, Microsoft and Apple have voting seats, signed off on the skin-tone additions, companies will decide for themselves starting later this year whether to add them and how they will look.

Jenny Campbell, the chief marketing officer for Tinder, isn’t worried about distribution after the company mounted a campaign and petition drive in support of the technical proposal it submitted to Unicode…

Read the entire article here.

A political awakening: How Howard University shaped Kamala Harris’ identity

The Los Angeles Times
2019-03-19

Evan Halper

Kamala Harris, right, protests South African apartheid with classmate Gwen Whitfield on the National Mall in November 1982. (Photo courtesy of Kamala Harris)

The war on drugs had erupted, apartheid was raging, Jesse Jackson would soon make the campus a staging ground for his inaugural presidential bid. Running for student office in 1982 at Howard University — the school that nurtured Thurgood Marshall, Toni Morrison and Stokely Carmichael — was no joke.

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) has been known to break the ice with voters by proclaiming the freshman-year campaign in which she won a seat on the Liberal Arts Student Council her toughest political race. Those who were at the university with her are not so sure she is kidding.

It was at Howard that the senator’s political identity began to take shape. Thirty-three years after she graduated in 1986, the university in the nation’s capital, one of the country’s most prominent historically black institutions, also serves as a touchstone in a campaign in which political opponents have questioned the authenticity of her black identity.

“I reference often my days at Howard to help people understand they should not make assumptions about who black people are,” Harris said in a recent interview…

Read the entire article here.

My First School Talk On Raising Mixed Kids

Sharon Chang: author | photographer | activist
2019-03-21

Sharon H. Chang

I gave the first, dedicated talk I’ve ever given on raising Mixed Race children in Seattle, Tuesday, March 5: “Raising Mixed Kids: Multiracial Identity & Development.”…

Teaching a rallying cry to K-2 students earlier this week. Omg look at these beautiful babies and all the hope/possibility they represent. Equity work can be so depressing. But this? GIVING ME LIFE. pic.twitter.com/4SnbDBna9H

— Sharon H Chang (@sharonhchang) March 22, 2019

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Up: ‘Racism made me feel sub-human. I used to pretend to be anything but black’

METRO.co.uk
2019-03-20

Natalie Morris, Senior lifestyle Writer

(Picture by Jerry Syder for Metro.co.uk)

Welcome to Mixed Up, a series that aims to elevate the under-heard narratives of mixed-race people…

…Billie Dee Gianfrancesco is half white and half black Caribbean.

She spent her childhood hating and denying her blackness, until a total breakdown in her mid 20s forced her to reassess her identity.

‘My mother was born in Hackney in London, my grandmother was a part of the Windrush generation and came to London from Dominica to be an NHS nurse,’ Billie tells Metro.co.uk.

‘We aren’t sure who my grandfather is or where he came from, but DNA tests show that he was black and that he probably came from somewhere in the Caribbean.

‘My father is white Australian, and I was born in Sydney. My parents divorced when I was five and I moved to Norfolk in the UK in 1998 when I was eight, with my mother, Italian-Australian step-dad, and younger sister.

‘I spent my entire life, up until the last few years, really struggling with my identity.’…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Up: ‘I have been accepted by black people and distanced by white people’

METRO.co.uk
2019-03-13

Natalie Morris, Senior lifestyle Writer

(Picture by Jerry Syder for Metro.co.uk)

…Elliott Reid is an osteopath with English and Jamaican heritage. He doesn’t believe in the concept of race – he sees it as nothing more than a social construct.

‘Specifically, I descend from the Maroons, the freedom fighters of Jamaica who resided in the eastern mountains of the island,’ explains Elliott.

‘My family names are chiselled into the Emancipation War Monument in Sam Sharpe Square in Montego bay; a monument to all those who fought in the greatest fight for freedom in the British Caribbean, as 60,000 Africans fought the English on Christmas Day, 1831…

Read the entire article here.

Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy [Kuryla Review]

Journal of American History
Volume 105, Issue 4, March 2019
pages 1073–1074
DOI: 10.1093/jahist/jaz127

Peter Kuryla, Associate Professor of History
Belmont University, Nashville, Tennessee

Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy. By Alisha Gaines. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. xvi, 213 pp. Cloth, $80.00. Paper, $27.95.)

In Black for a Day Alisha Gaines shows the limitations of a specific kind of white liberal empathy. If liberalism requires that political space include others that are imagined as reasonable and therefore capable of persuasion, then empathy seems central to the project. How should people imagine these others? How should they enact their understanding of the others around them, and how does empathy work amid the tangled, complex history of race and racism in the United States? What happened when white liberals took too literally one of Gunnar Myrdal’s central conclusions in An American Dilemma (1944)—that racism was a white problem? Gaines…

Read or purchase the review here.

Dwayne Johnson identifies as both ‘Black and Samoan’

IOL News
2019-03-20

Producer and cast member Dwayne Johnson poses at the premiere of the film “Fighting With My Family” during the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, Monday, Jan. 28, 2019, in Park City, Utah. Picture: AP

Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson responded to a social media debate between fans to confirm that he identifies as both Black and Samoan.

The Hollywood star and former WWE champion responded to a social media debate between wrestling fans regarding his ethnicity and how he was portrayed on screen, with one arguing that Johnson – whose father Rocky was Black Canadian and whose mother Ata came from a Samoan family – identified with the latter professionally…

Read the entire article here.

Experiencing Racial Identities: Passing in ‘Assassin’s Creed: Liberation’

Pop Matters
2012-10-30

G. Christopher Williams, Professor of English
University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point

In a recent issue of Game Informer, Matt Miller describes the addition of a new mechanic to the Assassin’s Creed series that involves taking on what Ubisoft Sofia is calling “personas” in Assassin’s Creed: Liberation. Miller explains that the first female protagonist in an Assassin’s Creed game, Aveline, is “a woman of mixed race who also has access to significant financial resources,” and as a result that the character will have “access to three personas as she wanders New Orleans [. . .] each represented by a change in abilities and clothing (“10 Cool Features You Don’t Know about Assasssin’s Creed III . . . and 5 More from Assassin’s Creed: Liberation, Game Informer. November 2012. p. 97). Barring the persona of the assassin, the two other personas available to Aveline are “the lady persona,” which consists of “the constraining dress of an affluent New Orleans woman” that will limit “her mobility [. . .], but she [will] gain the ability to charm her way past soldiers and other obstacles that would stand in her way.” The final persona puts her in the guise of “a local slave,” which allows her to “slip unnoticed past opponents or incite a riot with the local populace.”

Fans of the series will probably immediately recognize that what has previously been a mechanic enacted in the Assassin’s Creed series by hiring groups of prostitutes, gypsies, mercenaries, and thieves in order to create distractions and throw off guards in this stealth series has now become a mechanic directly associated with the protagonist herself. Now Aveline’s disguises will allow her to do what otherwise had previously only been accomplished by hiring some outside help…

Read the entire article here.

Black mixed-race men’s perceptions and experiences of the police

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 42, 2019 – Issue 2
pages 198-215
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2017.1417618

Lisa J. Long, Senior Lecturer in Criminology
Leeds Beckett University, Leeds, United Kingdom

Remi Joseph-Salisbury, Senior Lecturer in Education Studies
Leeds Beckett University, Leeds, United Kingdom

For black people in Britain, policing has long been a site of oppression and resistance. Whilst substantive change has been lacking, institutional racism within the British police has at least been acknowledged. Concomitantly, Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) has shown that much of the race and ethnicity literature ignores the experiences of mixed-race populations. In this paper, we utilize two studies to consider black mixed-race men’s perceptions and experience of policing in Britain. In total, we draw upon interviews with 17 black mixed-race men. Whilst we recognize that their experiences are often homogenized with blackness, in the context of police contact, we show that many black mixed-race men believe they are seen as part of a black monolith. We conclude that, in this context, mixedness does not bring about clearly differentiated experiences from that of black men. The absence of clear particularities to mixedness is of significance to CMRS.

Read the entire article here.

Sorry Music Journalists, Drake is Black.

Canadaland
2015-04-30

Kyrell Grant

Drake, born Aubrey Graham in a city where almost one in ten people are black, is black. Toronto’s greatest civic triumphalist since Jane Jacobs is black. And yet Drake’s own identity – his nationality, his mixed race background that includes Jewish heritage and upbringing, the neighbourhood he once lived in, the schools he went to – is often taken to mean that his black experience is somehow inauthentic.

It feels ridiculous to have to say this: Drake is black.

Drake, born Aubrey Graham in a city where almost one in ten people are black, is black. Toronto’s greatest civic triumphalist since Jane Jacobs is black.

He is a black man as much as any other black man. And yet Drake’s own identity – his nationality, his mixed race background that includes Jewish heritage and upbringing, the neighbourhood he once lived in, the schools he went to – is often taken to mean that his black experience is somehow inauthentic. While certainly not the first artist to have this kind of analysis imposed on him, Drake’s profile means that his art in particular has been prominently used to deny his black experience when it doesn’t conform to someone else’s narrow vision of race…

Read the entire article here.