Mixed Race Studies

‘One Drop of Love’ Creates Ripple Effect at UCSB

The Bottom Line
Weekly Newspaper of Associated Students, UC Santa Barbara: News, Features, Video & Investigative Journalism for UCSB
2013-05-13

Yuen Sin, Staff Writer

The personal is very much the political, as actress-playwright Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni illustrated through her solo show “One Drop of Love: A Daughter’s Search for her Father’s Racial Approval.” The show was performed at the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Multicultural Center on May 7.

First formulated as a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) thesis project, “One Drop of Love” began as Cox DiGiovanni’s personal attempt to revive her estranged relationship with her Jamaica-born father, who failed to show up at her wedding years before.

What ensued was a powerful multimedia, one-woman play laced with wit, warmth, and depth that fused her fragmented experiences with racial and cultural dispossession into a coherent narrative. The multidimensional show traversed back into the years of Cox DiGiovanni’s family history to untangle the weight of the socio-political events that have inevitably contributed to a crucial part of her identity and self-perceptions today…

…Cox DiGiovanni slipped in and out of multiple roles with dexterity, first imperiously bearing down at the audience as an anonymous U.S. Census Bureau officer, and then staggering affectionately across the stage with a lilting accent as her grandmother, revealing through her impressions the fluid and ultimately arbitrary nature of identity labels.

Her personal trajectory of “placelessness”—not seeing herself as “black” enough to join the Black Students Union, and yet having candy vendors in Cape Verde, West Africa, come up to her (while on a pilgrimage of sorts to trace back her African roots and understand her father’s pan-African attitudes) to ask her why she was so “white”—was interspersed with scenes that traced the evolution of the practice of racial categorization by the U.S. Census Bureau. The contrast brought to the forefront her sense of frustration from continually being racially defined by others, and the puzzling practice of placing someone in the category of “black” as long as they possessed even “one drop” of Negro blood—hence the play’s title.

At the post-show dialogue with UCSB’s professor of sociology G. Reginald Daniel, Cox DiGiovanni reiterated the importance of engaging in “scary conversations about race and racism,” reflecting that her work producing and performing “One Drop of Love” completely transformed the nature of her family relations after their involvement in her show…

Read the entire review here.

Ellen Gallagher: wigs, waterworlds and Wile E Coyote

The Guardian
2013-05-07

Bim Adewunmi

Adverts from black magazines, Plasticine, eyeballs – in the work of Ellen Gallagher, it’s all woven together into something new. Bim Adewunmi visits her chaotic Rotterdam studio

Throughout our interview, Ellen Gallagher makes frequent trips to a large bookcase on the other side of her studio, pulling out items she thinks are relevant and interesting. By the time I leave, I have a list of names written down on a piece of paper: people from the realms of visual art and literature whose work Gallagher implores me to seek out.

Overlooking the port of Rotterdam, her studio is a whitewashed space bathed in light, with vast windows and occasional glimpses of passing clouds via skylights. It is busy and not especially tidy: the artist’s red, paint-spattered desk is cluttered with books, little knives and intricate paper cutouts. You get the impression, however, that she knows where things are. On the walls are a couple of newer paintings: abstract, blue, serene. On a low table, there are proofs of the catalogue for AxME, her new show at the Tate Modern in London. Its title is a play on the fictional Acme corporation that supplied Wile E. Coyote with mail-order gadgets in the cartoon Roadrunner, as well as a reference to the African-American vernacular for “Ask me”.

Born in Rhode Island in 1965, to a black father of Cape Verdean extraction and a white Irish Catholic mum, Gallagher studied writing before attending art school in Boston. She is probably best known in the UK for Coral Cities, which appeared at Tate Liverpool in 2007. The show featured Watery Ecstatic, a series of paintings inspired by the myth of Drexciya, or the Black Atlantis – an underwater city populated by the descendents of Africans thrown off slave ships. Gallagher’s fantastical lost souls and eerie sealife fascinated the writer Jackie Kay, who called her work “jazz on a huge canvas”. The playwright Bonnie Greer is a big fan, too…

Read the entire article here.

slippery positions

The State
2013-05-17

Tiana Reid
Columbia University

As a self-defined Black, lesbian, mother, warrior poet, Audre Lorde is the model representative for intersectionality. As such, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches has become a ubiquitous text in undergraduate courses, for the theory and practice of intersectionality; a way to look at what women’s studies scholar Leslie McCall calls “the relationships among multiple dimensions and modalities of social relationships and subject formations.” Put crudely, intersectionality is an idea used to explain the links between positions or configurations of oppression. What’s more, as a Caribbean-American (her parents were born in Barbados and Carriacou), we could say Lorde straddled two worlds—or perhaps none at all.

Lorde’s poetry as poetry and not as purely a feminist rubric, however, has been written about far less. In Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde, writer and scholar Alexis De Veaux describes the genesis of the poem “Sahara,” published in Lorde’s 1978 book of poems, The Black Unicorn, in a moment while Lorde was on a plane in 1977 that passed over the Sahara desert after making a stop in Madrid to refuel. The poet, flying from New York City, was on her way to Lagos, Nigeria for FESTAC, the Second World African Festival of Arts and Culture. Lorde’s trip to Nigeria is meaningful not simply because the plane ride—the birds-eye view of the vastness of the Sahara—inspired the homonymous poem. By 1977, Nigeria had emerged as what De Veaux calls the “richest black-ruled nation” in Africa because of oil wealth. Bringing together Black activists, academics, writers, artists and spectators, FESTAC acted as a transnational spectacle establishing new political, literary and racial grounds.

What’s most significant here is that despite the literal and symbolic coming together of a black diasporic vision in the name of arts and culture, Lorde stayed on the fringes and felt separate from some sense of a monolithic group identity, an identity based seemingly solely on race—and not gender or sexuality. Lorde’s participation and view on FESTAC is mostly shrouded in mystery but what we do have is the poem “Sahara.” I read “Sahara” through Lorde’s trip to FESTAC and thus, envision landscapes of diaspora as heterogeneous and transformative. Her hesitation toward FESTAC parallels the poem’s fluctuating hesitation toward the Sahara desert. I say hesitation rather than outright fear despite the all-encompassing terror that can be gleaned from Lorde’s approach to the masculine desert: “grief of sand… male sand / terrifying sand.” The hesitation emerges from the heterogeneous incarnations sand is allowed to take. Rocks, what sand is made of, take millions and millions of years to become sand, meaning the image of a desert can’t be separated from its process, from its formation through finely divided particles, a prolonged breaking down…

Read the entire article here.

What Obama must say to African-American grads

CNN Opinion
Cable News Network
2013-05-18

Paul Butler, Professor of Law
Georgetown University

—”My brothers.”

That is how President Obama should begin one of the most significant speeches of his presidency: the commencement address at Morehouse College this Sunday. Addressing the historically black all male institution gives Obama an opportunity to rectify his strategic neglect of African-Americans. In this high-profile talk to his own demographic, the president has some explaining to do.

Obama’s identity as a black man is usually communicated subliminally, with the swag in his walk, the basketball court on the East Lawn, the sexy glances at the first lady, his overall cool. Now, however, comes the time to be explicit: to speak out loud his affiliation, his fraternal pride and concern. That’s the good work that calling us “brothers” would do…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

A Black Nurse, a German Soldier and an Unlikely WWII Romance

The New York Times
2013-05-14

Alexis Clark

The nurse and the soldier may never have met – and eventually married – had it not been for the American government’s mistreatment of black women during World War II.

Elinor Elizabeth Powell was an African-American military nurse. Frederick Albert was a German prisoner of war. Their paths crossed in Arizona in 1944. It was a time when the Army was resisting enlisting black nurses and the relatively small number allowed entry tended to be assigned to the least desirable duties.

“They decided they were going to use African-Americans but in very small numbers and in segregated locations,” said Charissa Threat, a history professor at Northeastern University who teaches race and gender studies.

Ms. Powell was born in 1921 in Milton, Mass., and in, 1944, after completing basic training at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., she was sent, as some other black nurses were, to tend to German prisoners of war in Florence, Ariz.

“I know the story of how they met,” said Chris Albert, 59, the youngest son of Elinor and Frederick Albert. “It was in the officers’ mess hall, and my father was working in the kitchen. He kind of boldly made his way straight for my mother and said: ‘You should know my name. I’m the man who’s going to marry you.’”

Frederick Karl Albert was born in 1925 in Oppeln, Germany. “He volunteered for the paratroops to impress his father, who served in WWI,” Mr. Albert said. “His father was an engineer and not really interested in his children. My dad ended up getting captured in Italy.”…

…The American military officially ended segregation after WWII, but for the Alberts, the issue of race would resurface throughout their lives. Their unlikely romance resulted in Stephen’s birth in December 1946. After Frederick was able to return to the United States, he and Elinor married on June 26, 1947, in Manhattan.

“I would say the first 10 years for my parents were a struggle to find some kind of economic security and a safe haven for an interracial family,” said Chris Albert, who plays the trumpet with the Duke Ellington Orchestra.

“They moved to Boston and my father worked several jobs,’’ he said. “At some point, he decided it was best if they moved to Göttingen, Germany, where his parents lived. He could work for his father’s cement manufacturing business.”

But Kristina Brandner, 70, a niece of Frederick Albert, said life in Germany was difficult. “Göttingen is a small town,’’ she said. “My grandmother never had contact with black people so it was strange and uncomfortable for her with Elinor. Kids used to ask me how come there was a black woman living with us, and why is your cousin another color. Sometimes, I saw Elinor in the kitchen crying.”

In less than two years, Frederick, Elinor, Stephen and Chris, who was an infant, returned to the United States….

Read the entire article here.

What We Mean When We Say ‘Race Is a Social Construct’

The Atlantic
2013-05-15

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Senior Editor

In a world where Kevin Garnett, Harold Ford, and Halle Berry all check “black” on the census, even the argument that racial labels refer to natural differences in physical traits doesn’t hold up.

Andrew Sullivan and Freddie Deboer have two pieces up worth checking out. I disagree with Andrew’s (though I detect some movement in his position.) Freddie’s piece is entitled “Precisely How Not to Argue About Race and IQ.” He writes:

The problem with people who argue for inherent racial inferiority is not that they lie about the results of IQ tests, but that they are credulous about those tests and others like them when they shouldn’t be; that they misunderstand the implications of what those tests would indicate even if they were credible; and that they fail to find the moral, analytic, and political response to questions of race and intelligence.

I think this is a good point, but I want to expand it. Most of the honest writing I’ve seen on “race and intelligence” focuses on critiquing the idea of “intelligence.” So there’s lot of good literature on whether it can be measured, its relevance in modern society, whether intelligence changes across generations, whether it changes with environment, and what we mean when we say IQ. As Freddie mentions here, I had a mathematician stop past to tell me I needed to stop studying French, and immediately start studying statistics — otherwise I can’t possibly understand this debate.

It’s a fair critique. My response is that he should stop studying math and start studying history…

…Our notion of what constitutes “white” and what constitutes “black” is a product of social context. It is utterly impossible to look at the delineation of a “Southern race” and not see the Civil War, the creation of an “Irish race” and not think of Cromwell’s ethnic cleansing, the creation of a “Jewish race” and not see anti-Semitism. There is no fixed sense of “whiteness” or “blackness,” not even today. It is quite common for whites to point out that Barack Obama isn’t really “black” but “half-white.” One wonders if they would say this if Barack Obama were a notorious drug-lord.

When the liberal says “race is a social construct,” he is not being a soft-headed dolt; he is speaking an historical truth. We do not go around testing the “Irish race” for intelligence or the “Southern race” for “hot-headedness.” These reasons are social. It is no more legitimate to ask “Is the black race dumber than then white race?” than it is to ask “Is the Jewish race thriftier than the Arab race?”…

Read the entire article here.

Soledad O’Brien: ‘OK, white person, this is a conversation you clearly are uncomfortable with’

The Washington Examiner
2013-05-13

Paul Bedard

Soledad O’Brien, recently yanked from her morning show “Starting Point” on CNN, plans to continue her focus on racial issues and is charging that whites are afraid of dealing with the nation’s black-white division.

O’Brien, just named a distinguished visiting fellow at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, told the school’s Institute of Politics that she’s often confronted by whites who want to take issue with her documentaries on race in America…

O’Brien is an award-winning correspondent who hosted and developed “Black in America,” one of CNN’s most successful international franchises.

Read the entire article here.

Half/Full

UC Irvine Law Review
University of California, Irvine Law School
Volume 3, Forthcoming
Online: 2013-04-07
pages 101-125

Nancy Leong, Associate Professor of Law
University of Denver, Sturm College of Law

Research suggests that multiracial identity is uniquely malleable, and I will focus here on the significance of that malleability for mixed-Asian individuals. At various times, mixed-Asian individuals may present themselves as “half” Asian; other times, they may present themselves as “full” Asian, “full” White, or, in some instances, fully ambiguous. Mixed-Asian racial identity negotiation, I will argue, often presents considerable challenges for mixed-Asian individuals. And mixed-Asian individuals are often targets of what I have elsewhere called “racial capitalism” by White individuals and predominantly White institutions. Still, I conclude that the malleability of mixed-Asian racial identity provides unique opportunities for destabilizing existing views about racial identity, reinvigorating stale conversations about race, and ultimately facilitating progress toward a racially egalitarian society.

Contents

• Introduction
• I. Mixed-Asian Identity
  • A. Sociology
  • B. Legal Discourse
• II. Using Mixed-Asian Identity
  • A. Commodification
  • B. Exploitation
  • C. Entrepreneurship
• III. Harms
  • A. Intrinsic Harms of Commodification
  • B. Harms to Individual Mixed-Asians
  • C. Harms to Society
• IV. Half Full

INTRODUCTION

About one out of six new marriages in America takes place between two people of different races—an all-time high. And Asian Americans are ahead of the curve: about one in three Asian Americans marries someone of a different race. Such relationships precipitate what commentators have described as an “interracial baby boom.”

Research suggests that multiracial identity is uniquely malleable, and I will focus here on the significance of that malleability for mixed-Asian individuals. At various times, mixed-Asian individuals may present themselves as “half” Asian; other times, they may present themselves as “full” Asian, “full” White, or, in some instances, fully ambiguous. Mixed-Asian racial identity negotiation, I will argue, often presents considerable challenges for mixed-Asian individuals. And mixed-Asian individuals are often targets of what I have elsewhere called “racial capitalism” by White individuals and predominantly White institutions—that is, these individuals and institutions derive value from mixed-Asian racial identity. Still, I conclude that the malleability of mixed-Asian racial identity provides unique opportunities for destabilizing existing views about racial identity, reinvigorating stale conversations about race, and ultimately facilitating progress toward a racially egalitarian society.

In Part I, the Essay examines the social scientific literature regarding mixed-Asian racial identity. As the result of a wide range of factors, including phenotypic characteristics, life experiences, and family dynamics, mixed-Asian individuals often view their racial identity differently from members of any of the traditional socially ascribed racial categories. In particular, mixed-Asian identity is often more fluid and dynamic, shifting from one context to the next. Such fluidity and dynamism is facilitated by a social view of mixed-Asian individuals as occupying a unique racial space. Part I also briefly notes the relative dearth of legal discourse relating to mixed-Asians.

Part II explores the way mixed-Asian racial fluidity is used, manipulated, exploited, and leveraged. Mixed-Asian individuals often engage in what scholars have described as “identity performance” or “identity work,” so as to present themselves in the manner most favorable in a particular social or employment context. For example, mixed-Asian individuals may be able to present themselves in a way that is more palatable to employers by displaying greater assimilation into dominant White norms of behavior and self-presentation. But mixed-Asian racial identity is also exploited by White individuals and predominantly White individuals. For example, an employer might count a mixed-Asian person for purposes of its diversity numbers even if that person does not personally consider herself a minority, or might incorporate photos of a mixed-Asian person on its website or in its promotional literature in order to advertise its nominal commitment to diversity without engaging harder questions of structural disadvantage and remediation.

Part III examines some of the negative implications of such uses of mixed-Asian identity, which harm both mixed-Asian individuals and society at large. For example, mixed-Asian individuals suffer identity demands that harm the integrity of their racial identity and submerge their own complex processes of identity negotiation. More broadly, exploitation of mixed-Asian racial identity by White individuals and predominantly White institutions often essentializes mixed-Asian individuals, impoverishes our discourse around race, fosters racial resentment by inhibiting the reparative work essential to improved racial relations, and detracts from more meaningful antidiscrimination goals.

Despite the many negative implications of manipulating mixed-Asian identity in the ways I have described, the Essay concludes in Part IV by suggesting that the fluidity and malleability of mixed-Asian identity also has the potential to serve as a powerful tool for racial reform. Mixed-Asian racial malleability has the potential to destabilize entrenched beliefs about race, to lay bare hidden demands of racial identity performance, and to engender a dramatic improvement in our conversations and policies regarding race.

Read the entire article here.

Lecture: What Would Be the Story of Alice and Leonard Rhinelander Today?

UC Davis Law Review
University of California School of Law
Volume 46, Number 4, April 2013
pages 939-960

Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Charles M. and Marion J. Kierscht Professor of Law
University of Iowa

On November 8, 2011, I presented this lecture as part of the annual Brigitte M. Bodenheimer Family Law Lecture Series at the University of California, Davis School of Law. I extend sincere thanks to the Bodenheimer family for endowing this special lecture. I feel honored to he a small part of this wonderful lecture series in family law. I feel particularly grateful because the University of California, Davis School of Law was my “birthplace” as a professor. Dean Rex Perschbacher, then-Associate Dean Kevin Johnson, and the law school faculty welcomed me into academia by giving me my first job as a tenure-track law professor and serving as fantastic mentors to me along the way. I did not have the honor of knowing Professor Bodenheimer, but I was very fortunate to be a part of her legacy at the law school in two important ways. First, I followed in the footsteps of Professor Bodenheimer, who was the first tenured woman law professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law, when I joined the faculty as one of its many female law professors. I also was lucky to be a part of Professor Bodenheimer legacy at the law school by following her and Professor Carol Bruch as the institution’s family law professor. This Essay is based on materials from my forthcoming book According to Our Hearts: Rhinelander v. Rhinelander and the Law of the Multiracial Family (Yale University Press 2013). It explores both how far we have travelled and how little we have travelled in terms of equality and interracial intimacy since the stunning annulment trial of Alice and Leonard Rhinelander in 1925.

Table of Contents

• I. Tragic Love: The Story of Alice and Leonard Rhinelander
• II. Lessons from Alice and Leonard Rhinelander
  • A. Marriage in Black and White
  • B. The Jim and Jane Crow of Love
  • C. Why Aren’t There More “Alices and Leonards”?
  • D. Race As an Acceptable Basis for Annulment Today?

Read the entire lecture here.

The Political Psychology of Personal Narrative: The Case of Barack Obama

Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy
Volume 10, Issue 1, December 2010
pages 182–206
DOI: 10.1111/j.1530-2415.2010.01207.x

Phillip L. Hammack, Associate Professor of Psychology
University of California, Santa Cruz

Guided by theories of narrative identity, racial identity development, and Freire’s (1970) notion of conscientização, this paper presents an interpretive analysis of Barack Obama’s personal narrative. Obama’s narrative represents a progressive story of self-discovery in which he seeks to develop a configuration of identity (Erikson, 1959; Schachter, 2004) that reconciles his disparate contexts of development and the inherited legacy of racism and colonialism. A major theme of his story centers on his quest to discover an anchor for his identity in some community of shared practice. Ultimately, he settles on a distinctly cosmopolitan identity in which he can foster conversation across axes of difference both within himself and among diverse communities. I discuss the extent to which election of a candidate with this personal narrative of cosmopolitan identity reflects a shifting master narrative of identity politics within the United States, as well as implications for Obama’s policy platform and governance style.

Read or purchase the article here.