Mixed Race Studies

PARADE Exclusive: A Conversation With the Obamas

Parade Magazine
2012-09-12

Lynn Sherr, Contributor

Maggie Murphy, Editor in Chief

President and Mrs. Obama photographed in the White House Map Room on Aug. 10. [Photo: Ben Baker]

You hear him before you see him. After a hearty hello to the men and women working on the ground floor of the White House, President Barack Obama bounds into the Map Room with a warm smile and an open hand. Soon the president’s eyes fall on a shimmering but empty silver tea set that has been placed on the coffee table by photographer Ben Baker. “Tea? What about chips and salsa?” With the tea service sent to the sidelines, the president settles down next to his wife, Michelle, whose gift for easy elegance is reinforced by her Tracey Reese top and J. Crew skirt. On this day before Gov. Mitt Romney would announce Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate, the first couple ­alternately kid and cuddle for pictures. But befitting a room where decisions about World War II were once made, they quickly strike a more serious pose ­during an interview conducted by PARADE editor in chief Maggie Murphy and contributor Lynn Sherr. As they address questions from our readers about the economy, the political stalemate in D.C., and their family life, the couple hold hands, nod in support of each other’s answers, and make a case for their first four years in office and what they hope to accomplish next….

…PARADE: If you were female, we would ask, “How has being female affected your ability to govern?” So, how has being black affected your ability to govern?

President Obama: I’m sure it makes me more determined in assuring that everybody’s getting a fair shot—in the same way that being a father of two daughters makes me want to make sure that every woman is getting equal pay for equal work, ’cause I don’t want my daughters treated differently than somebody else’s sons. By virtue of being African-American, I’m attuned to how throughout this country’s ­history there have been times when folks have been locked out of opportunity, and because of the hard work of people of all races, slowly those doors opened to more and more people. Equal opportunity doesn’t just happen on its own; it happens because we’re vigilant about it. But part of this is not just because we’re African-American—it’s also because Michelle and I were born into pretty modest means. And so I think about my single mom and what it was like to go to school and work at the same time. And I think about Michelle’s dad, who had a disability and was working every day and didn’t have a lot of money to spare. But somehow our parents or grand­parents were able to give us these opportunities partly because they lived in a society that said that was important. And as president, I want to ­affirm that that’s important and reject the idea that if we just reward those at the top, that somehow that’s going to work for everybody—’cause that hasn’t been how America got built.

Read the entire interview here.

Is Obama still black?

Aljazeera
2012-09-06

Harvey Young, Associate Professor of Theatre, Performance Studies; African American Studies; Radio/Television/Film Studies
Northwestern University
(also Fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University)

Barack Obama, to many, is not “as noticeably” or, perhaps, “meaningfully black as he once was”, writes Young.

Race is an attribute that generally proves less and less noticeable as a person becomes more and more familiar to us. When we first encounter strangers, we pay attention to appearance. You can learn a lot by looking at a person. Or, so we presume. My mother used to tell my sister that the truth of a man could be gleaned from a glimpse at his shoes. An ex-girlfriend once confessed to me that my having clean, trimmed fingernails when we first met was sufficient evidence that I was good boyfriend material…

…Interestingly, as we spend more time with people, we become so well acquainted with them that we begin to overlook those visibly dramatic features that we could not help but notice during an initial encounter. Over time, and depending upon the social situations in which we locate ourselves, we can forget a person’s race as easily as husbands (or wives) can misremember their partners’ eye colour or fail to recognise a new hairstyle. Proximity and familiarity results in an overlooking of detail and, arguably, forgetting.

Shift in perspective

Thanks to the ubiquitous presence of the President of the United States, regardless of the person who actually holds the office, there are few international figures more familiar to global audiences. The US President is omnipresent, with his image appearing in major newspapers and magazines among other media outlets almost every day across the globe.

Four years ago, when Barack Obama was a stranger who travelled the US and Europe in an attempt to introduce himself to the world, he was clearly, noticeably, identifiably and undeniably black. He was the black candidate for the US presidency. As the black candidate, he felt compelled to give a major talk on race and the dangers of racist vitriol. Voters, who didn’t want to vote for him, faced accusations of being a racist. Voters, who did vote for him, often cited race as an influential factor (and sometimes the only factor) in their vote. When Obama won the election, newspapers across the country resurrected the image and voice of Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. to proudly proclaim “Dream Fulfilled”…

Read the entire article here.

Rep. Mike Honda: Obama is First Asian-American President

U.S. News & World Report
2012-09-05

Lauren Fox, Political Reporter

The details of Bill Clinton’s youth, along with a number of his hobbies while in the White House, often led some people to call Clinton “America’s first black president.”

Now that the country’s actual first black president has been in office for some time, California Rep. Mike Honda, Vice Chair of the Democratic National Committee, wants to draw attention to whom he says is America’s first Asian-American president: Barack Obama.

“Everyone looks at him and says he’s black and he’s white,” Honda says. “He’s Asian in his upbringing. You cannot come out of Hawaii and not have an Asian approach to things.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Dougla in Trinidad’s Consciousness

History in Action: Online Journal of The University of the West Indies (St. Augustine. Trinidad and Tobago) Dept. of History
Volume 2, Number 1 (April 2011)
7 pages
ISSN: 2221-7886

Feme Louanne Regis
University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Trinidad and Tobago

Trinidad is a complex multi-ethnic society where the two major ethnic groups – Africans and Indians – are in competition for power: economic, political and social. These contestations force the meeting and mixing of these two groups but militate against their merger. This is a reality that impacts significantly on the lives of their offspring the Dougla who are birthed into this complex social, cultural and linguistic situation and whose social position within this divide remain unclear and uncertain. Before 2011, Douglas were not designated in official censuses as a marginal ethnic community or even a biracial minority group leaving them free to declare themselves African, Indian or members of the umbrella categories Mixed and Other. Despite the steady increase in the number of people who define themselves as Douglas, their position in Trinidadian society remains ambivalent and indeterminate. This presentation maps the comparative invisibility of Douglas in Trinidadian society from the second half of the 19th and 20th centuries via an examination of social history and anthropology, creative writing, and popular culture.

Introduction

Douglas, the offspring of Indo-African unions, occupy an ambiguous position in Trinidadian society. Etymologically, the word Dougla is linked to dogla which is of India origin and is defined by Platts (1884, 534) as “a person of impure breed, a hybrid, a mongrel; a two-faced or deceitful person and a hypocrite.” In Bihar, Northern India, from where many Indian indentured labourers migrated to Trinidad, dogla still carries the meaning of a person of impure breed related specifically to the “progeny of inter-varna marriage, acquiring the connotation of ‘bastard’, meaning illegitimate son of a prostitute, only in a secondary sense” (Reddock 1994, 101). We do not know how and when the term Dougla became equated to the offspring of Indian-African unions in Trinidad but we may surmise that it originated in traditional Indian contempt for the darker-skinned (Brereton 1974, 24).

Recognition of Douglas

Wood (1968) does not recognise a Dougla presence in 19th century Trinidad. He trusts the official report of the Protector of the Immigrants that as late as 1871, 26 years after their arrival, “no single instance of co-habitation with a Negro existed among the 9,000 male and female indentured labourers” (1968, 138). He overlooks the 1876 testimony of John Morton, to the effect that “a few children are to be met with, born of Madras and Creole parents and some also of Madras and Chinese parents—the Madrasee being the mother” (Moore 1995, 238).

Ramesar (1994) accepts the reality of inter-racial sexual relations in the early twentieth century, but seems reluctant to acknowledge Africans as sexual partners for Indians and nowhere mentions the word Dougla. The Dougla presence is instead hidden in the generic term “Indian Creoles.” Examining the statistics testifying to Indian inter-racial sexual liaisons, Ramesar argues that such relationships happened more readily in Port of Spain and in Cedros than in central Trinidad, where the majority of Indian communities were located. Yet, the demographic evidence indicates African-Indian unions even in areas dominated by Indians (Harewood 1975).

According to Ramesar, the Indian fathers of mixed-race children were “probably westernized individuals who sought educated spouses.” She concedes, however, that “changed social relationships had also affected the lower levels in society” (146). Yet, the literary works of C.A. Thomasos (1933), C.L.R. James (1929; 1936), and Alfred Mendes (1935) demonstrate that inter-racial mixing was not necessarily inspired by social climbing. In these works, Douglas are presented as deracinated individuals engaged, as part of Black urban lower class, in the amoral struggle for survival.

In the 2005 feature address at the launch of the Indian Arrival Day Heritage Village, Elizabeth Rosabelle Sieusarran, a University of the West Indies lecturer, said:

In our quest for establishing unity among our people, it is imperative for us to note a rapidly increasing phenomenon of westernisation of the Indian community. This has resulted in the prevalence of inter-caste, inter-religious and inter-racial marriages. The Indian community has to decide how to handle the offspring of this significant group locally referred to as douglas. Do we accept them or ostracise them? Whatever course is adopted, the fragmentation of the Indian community must be avoided (Trinidad Express 16th May 2005, 5).

Sieusarran thus reduces the problems caused by westernisation to the fragmentation within the Indian community allegedly created by exogamy. She then ignores the progeny of many such relationships and targets Douglas as the source of that fragmentation. While acknowledging the organic connection of the Douglas to the Indian communities, Sieusarran indicates that Douglas are still perceived as a problem by some Indians even while they advocate co-existence in a multi-cultural society….

Read the entire article here.

Four years later, Barack Obama still a mystery in some ways

The Dallas Morning News
2012-09-01

From staff and wire reports

File: The welcome in Austin in 2007 was warm and Texan for presidential candidate Barack Obama.

Still somewhat unknown

Even after four years as president, Barack Hussein Obama remains unknown in some ways. He seemed to come out of nowhere. He had served seven years in the Illinois Senate — and less than four years in the U.S. Senate a meager political resume, augmented by a stirring speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Just four years later, he won the presidency over John McCain by almost 9.5 million votes. Now, at age 51, he appears to face a much closer battle for re-election.

Roots in Africa, America, Asia

Obama was born on Aug. 4, 1961, in Honolulu. His story was like no president before him — son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. Obama was just months old when his father, a brilliant but troubled economist, left to study at Harvard. He would never return. Obama spent his youth alternately in the care of his grandparents in Hawaii and his mother, who moved to Indonesia and a short-lived marriage to a geologist there. He studied at Occidental College in California, Columbia University and Harvard Law, and along the way struggled to come to terms with his identity as a black man of mixed heritage in a white society. He went to Chicago, where he learned to identify with the black community as a social activist.

Calm manner

A supporter dubbed him “No-Drama Obama” in the 2008 campaign, and it stuck because it reflects his personality. “The president is an intellectually ambitious man who is temperamentally cautious,” says Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton. His measured approach has not always worked in his favor; he has frustrated supporters who say he does not express righteous anger when he should…

Read the entire article here.

Roots: Saint Lucia’s Hindu Legacy

Hinduism Today
October/November/December 2012

Gajanan Nataraj
Saint Lucia

I am a Saint Lucian citizen. I was born in the US Virgin Islands and lived briefly on the mainland (USA), but for the better part of 23 years I was raised on the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia. I am roughly two-quarters Indian and two-quarters Negro–meaning both my parents were themselves of mixed heritage. This is common in Saint Lucia. We are called dougla–which comes from doogala (“two necks”), a demeaning label meaning mixed race or half-caste in Bhojpuri and Hindi. In Saint Lucia, the term is sometimes used affectionately, sometimes not so affectionately.

Though many on the island are of Indian heritage, I am one of the very few Hindus. I have a Hindu name, perform daily puja to Lord Ganesha and consider the cow a sacred creature. I believe in karma, dharma, reincarnation, the divinity of the Vedas and in the need for a satguru to guide my spiritual journey. Of all the Indian families who came to Saint Lucia from Kolkata as indentured workers in the 19th century, mine is one of the few to reclaim our Hindu heritage. In being Hindu, I am almost unique among the fifth generation of Indian immigrants. Even among my close relatives, almost all are Christians.

How did I come to be a Hindu in a land where Christianity reigns supreme, even among Indians? I attribute my discovery of this beautiful religion to the interplay of my soul’s natural calling and God’s blessing of being born to parents who are ardent seekers of spiritual truth. Indeed, my growth from non-religious, Christian-influenced spiritual confusion can only be credited to the marvelous journey of my parents…

Read the entire article here.

Latinos may get own race category on census form

The Seattle Times
2012-08-30

Lornet Turnbull, Staff Reporter

Under proposed changes under consideration by the Census Bureau in its once-a-decade census forms, Latino and Hispanic would be added to the list of government-defined races, rather than being listed separately as an ethnicity. And people from the Middle East and North Africa, now counted as white, would be allowed to write in their country of origin.

U.S. residents of Spanish origin typically have no trouble checking the box on their census form that asks whether they are Latino, Hispanic or Spanish.

It’s a different question — the one that asks their race — that apparently gives some of them pause.

In the 2010 census, well over one-third — perhaps unsure how to answer that question — either checked “some other race” or skipped the question entirely.

Now, in advance of the 2020 count and as part of its ongoing effort to allow Americans to better reflect how they see themselves, the U.S. Census Bureau is researching ways to clear up the confusion by adding Latino or Hispanic to a list of government-defined race categories that includes White, Asian, Pacific Islander, Black and American Indian, along with a “two or more races” option…

…Luis Fraga, a political-science professor at the University of Washington who directs its Diversity Research Institute, said, “identifying ourselves by racial grouping is at the very core of who we are as a nation and how we understand political power.”

Results from the decennial survey not only help direct more than $400 billion in federal funds are distributed each year, but they also help evaluate how well government policies are responding to historical disparities among various racial and ethnic groups.

“As much as we hope we become a country where these racial distinctions don’t matter — and that’s a worthy goal — it is central to how we understand ourselves as a people and how we decide who has opportunity, rights, privileges and protection under the law,” Fraga said…

Read the entire article here.

Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America (review)

Shakespeare Quarterly
Volume 63, Number 2 (Summer 2012)
pages 244-246
DOI: 10.1353/shq.2012.0017

Virginia Mason Vaughan, Professor of English
Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts

If you teach Shakespeare’s plays at an American university, college, or secondary school (as I do), and if you’ve ever felt a disconnect between what you do in the classroom and the real lives of your students, this book is the antidote you need. With unfailing honesty, clarity, and courage, Ayanna Thompson’s Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America confronts the elephant in the room we so seldom admit to seeing—race—particularly in regard to Shakespeare’s cultural authority. Thompson casts her questioning gaze on the ways Shakespeare is studied, taught, and performed in twenty-first-century America; less traditionally, she examines the plays’ appropriation in film, novels, prison and reform programs, and new media such as YouTube. Her wide-ranging inquiry compels the reader to question all sorts of assumptions—about Shakespeare, race, and (most often) the ways both of these are entwined in American thought and practice.

Thompson explains her title’s significance in her introduction. In his address to the Venetian Senate, Othello describes Desdemona’s fascination with his adventures; she found his stories “‘passing strange’” and listened to them “with a greedy ear.” The phrase conveys the unusual wonder Desdemona felt, but Thompson connects the words to the American trope of “passing,” often used in narratives about individuals who pretend to be a member of a racial category other than their own; passing implies the creation of an alternative identity and reflects the desire to “rewrite a story from a different point of view” (11). Finally, “passing” also connotes the changes that take place through time. She stresses that Shakespeare “was / is always defined through the recreation of his identity, image, texts, and performances. . . . [He] needs to be rendered as contingent—as in process and as passing—as the creative moment in which his name, image, text, and performance are invoked” (17).

In the next chapter, Thompson tackles assumptions about Shakespeare’s universalism as reflected in two contemporary films: the small-budget, independent Suture (1993) and the Hollywood comedy Bringing Down the House (2003). Although neither film is about Shakespeare, Thompson shows how the concept of Shakespeare as a universal figure can be appropriated to stand for white, Western culture. Thompson next interrogates the implications of Maya Angelou’s often-repeated claim that Shakespeare was black. She frames Farrukh Dhondy’s Black Swan, a young adult novel whose Afro-Caribbean hero tries to seize Shakespeare’s cultural capital for himself, as a kind of “strategic essentialism”—“the practice of promoting racial differences as inherent, fundamentally different, and therefore fixed in order to create affiliation, cohesion, and unity within a racialized group” (13, 49). Even though most readers will not be familiar with these texts, they will find Thompson’s detailed analysis intriguing.

Chapter 4 moves to multicultural theater, a topic in which Thompson, who edited the collection Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance (2006), has particular expertise. Here, she probes the inconsistencies in contemporary casting practices. Although most regional Shakespeare festivals profess to be multicultural, their actual practices can be divided into four categories: (1) colorblind casting, assigning actors according to ability without regard to race; (2) societal casting, assigning actors of color to roles that were originally written for white actors; (3) conceptual casting, assigning actors of color to roles that will “enhance the play’s social resonance” (76); and cross-cultural casting, moving the play’s milieu to a different location and culture. Yet, Thompson argues, theater practitioners seldom interrogate their own practices or face up to those practices’ messy contradictions. Using the Oregon Shakespeare Festival as her primary example, Thompson calls for theater practitioners to recognize and discuss the semiotics of race in their productions.

Thompson’s next topic is even more nervous making: whether a role originally intended for a white actor in blackface (Othello, for example) should ever be performed according to “original-staging” practices. As someone who has written on this controversial topic, I appreciated…

People Can Claim One or More Races On Federal Forms

The New York Times
1997-10-30

Steven A. Holmes

The Clinton Administration today adopted new rules for listing racial and ethnic makeup on Federal forms, allowing people for the first time to identify themselves as members of more than one race.

The change, which could affect Government policies like affirmative action and the drawing of legislative districts, is the first revision in the Government’s definition of racial and ethnic groupings since 1977. It means that on Federal forms people can identify themselves in a single racial category or a combination.

The Administration rejected a ”multiracial” classification that would have covered all people of mixed racial heritage…

…But the Administration has yet to say how people who select this option will be counted in studies like the census. The Administration has not decided how to count someone who lists a racial makeup of black and white. More complicated is what to do with people listing themselves as black, white and Asian. Should such a person be counted as black, white or Asian or some combination?

The counting issue is important because Federal policy under measures like the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and aid for bilingual education is based on the percentage of certain racial groups in a given location. For example, legislative districts must be drawn in such a manner to insure that black residents are adequately represented, and block-by-block census counts are essential to the process…

…Officials at the Office of Management and Budget said they would meet with officials from other Federal agencies, interest groups, demographers, planners and social scientists to work out a policy for counting people who list themselves as members of more than one race. The officials said they hoped to put out recommendations on the issue by the fall of 1998.

The fight over how to count people will be arduous. The Association of Multiethnic Americans will argue that mixed-race residents be counted separately, Mr. Fernandez said.

Such a view is bound to raise concerns among some minority critics who have contended all along that the drive for a changing the racial categories was a way to attack affirmative action and other race-based government programs.

”I believe the same people who are against affirmative action are the same people who are pushing this,” said Robert Hill, the director of the Institute of Urban Research at Morgan State University in Baltimore…

Read the entire article here.

Banneker’s family tree still bears rich fruit

The Baltimore Sun
2006-06-12

Gregory Kane

And so Molly Welsh, an Englishwoman sentenced to indentured servitude in 17th-century Maryland, wed an African slave named Bannaka. And they begat four daughters, one of whom was named Mary.

And Mary wed a slave named Robert, who took her last name, which, by the time of their nuptials, had become Bannaky. Mary and Robert begat one son and three daughters. One of the daughters, Jemima, wed Samuel D. Lett. From that union came eight children, including a son named Aquilla.

“Aquilla Lett eventually moved to Ohio,” Gwen Marable said Saturday afternoon. A number of generations later, “that’s how I came to be born in Ohio,” she said. Marable eventually found her way to Maryland. She may be in these parts for good.

“The project has really kept me here,” Marable said.

That project would be the Benjamin Banneker Historical Park and Museum in Baltimore County. That son Mary and Robert Bannaky had was none other than Benjamin Banneker—the farmer, astronomer, mathematician, surveyor and publisher—whose farm once sat on the site where the park is now located. Marable described herself as a collateral descendant of Banneker, not a direct descendant…

…”It’s been said that she married Bannaka to keep him from running off,” said Cole Wiggins, a board member of the Friends of the Banneker Historical Park and Museum. “But don’t quote me on that. It’s never been proved.”

Actually, wisecracking husbands might say that Welsh’s marrying Bannaka might have been the sure way to make him run off. What may be closer to the truth is that marriages between white, female indentured servants and black men—whether slave or “free men of color”—could have been quite common at the time…

Read the entire article here.