Mixed Race Studies

The Emotional Tug of Obama

The New York Times
2012-05-26

Frank Bruni

FORGET your political affiliation. Never mind your assessment of his time in office so far. If you have any kind of heart, you’re struck by it: the photograph of Barack Obama bent down so that a young black boy can touch his head and see if the president’s hair is indeed like his own. It moves you. It also speaks to a way in which Obama and Mitt Romney, whose campaigns are picking up the pace just as polls show them neck and neck, are profoundly mismatched.

Pete Sousa/White House

In a story that quickly went viral, The Times’s Jackie Calmes wrote last week about the photograph, which was taken three years ago when the boy, then 5, visited the White House. It has hung there ever since, left on the wall even as other pictures were swapped out, as is the custom, for newer, fresher ones.

David Axelrod, one of the chief architects of Obama’s political career, told Calmes: “It doesn’t take a big leap to think that child could be thinking, ‘Maybe I could be here someday.’ This can be such a cynical business, and then there are moments like that that just remind you that it’s worth it.”

Axelrod’s words, meanwhile, are a reminder that more than three and a half years after Obama made history as the first black man elected to the presidency, he still presents more than a résumé and an agenda. He still personifies the hope, to borrow a noun that he has used, that we really might evolve into the colorblind, fair-minded country that many of us want. His own saga taps into the larger story of this country’s fitful, unfinished progress toward its stated ideal of equal opportunity.

And that gives many voters an emotional connection to him that they simply don’t have to most other politicians, including Romney, a privileged and intensely private man whose strengths don’t include the easy ability to humanize himself. There’s a Mitt-versus-myth element to the 2012 campaign, and it influences the manner in which Romney’s supporters and Romney himself engage the president and make their pitch. They must and do emphasize job-creation numbers over personal narrative, the technocratic over the touchy-feely.

Obama and his advisers don’t exactly tack in the opposite direction. Understandably concerned about longstanding prejudices, they don’t invoke his racial identity all that frequently.

But when they do, it’s powerful. The photograph released last week instantly reminded me of one taken in mid-April, when Obama visited a museum in Dearborn, Mich. It showed him seated in the bus that Rosa Parks made famous. And it, too, pinged fast and far around the Web…

Obama aboard the Rosa Parks bus in Dearborn’s Henry Ford Museum, April 18, 2012. (Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Obama, Zombies, and Black Male Messiahs

In Media Res
2009-10-01

Elizabeth McAlister, Associate Professor of Religion, African American Studies and American Studies
Wesleyan University

Insofar as they occupy the symbolic place of messiah in these zombie apocalypses, it interesting that from Ben in Night, to Peter in Dawn, and John in Day, to Robert Neville in I Am Legend, a central male hero is Black, two of whom are West Indian. All are solid, dependable, capable Black men who strategize and fight their way to survive the zombie outbreak. All Romero’s Black men make alliances with the one White woman in each group, who also makes it to the post-apocalypse.   What can we make of this interesting pattern that zombies seem to be the monsters it is the province of Black men to vanquish? We might wonder, in turn, what it is about whiteness in zombie films that the Black male secular messiah characters point to… …Obama has been said to possess an image in the American psyche that lends itself to being cast as a Magical Negro; he has also been referenced in a messianic idiom, and scores of commentators have noted the many times that people use exalted, prophetic vocabulary in describing Obama. Obama was elected in the teeth of an economic super-crisis, a hero who would slay the zombie-banks threatening to cannibalize the nation’s funds. Obama is also figured as a multi-racial person who will usher in America’s multiracial future (the implicit future of these zombie films)…

Read the entire essay here.

Framing a Deterritorialized, Hybrid Alternative to Nationalist Essentialism in the Postcolonial Era: Tjalie Robinson and the Diasporic Eurasian “Indo” Community

Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies
Volume 16, Numbers 1/2, (Spring/Fall 2007)
pages 1-28
DOI: 10.1353/dsp.2007.0002

Jeroen Dewulf, Queen Beatrix Professor in Dutch Studies
University of California, Berkeley

In her study of Transnational South Asians (2008), Susan Koshy highlights the systematic neglect by scholars of the perspectives and activities of such seemingly peripheral actors as diasporic subjects in the macro-narratives of nationalism and globalization. Such neglect was even more pronounced in the case of the “repatriates” from European colonies in Asia and Africa. The epistemological implications of the dislocated, de-territorialized discourse produced by repatriates from former European colonies remain largely overlooked. One of those groups that seem to have slipped between the pages of history is the diasporic Eurasian “Indo” community that has its roots in the former Dutch East Indies. In this article, I focus on Tjalie Robinson, the intellectual leader of this community from the 1950s to the mid-1970s. In recent decades, there has been a growing interest in what Homi Bhabha, inThe Location of Culture (1994, 38), called “the conceptualization of an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity.” Long before Bhabha, Robinson had already published substantially on hybrid, transnational identity. As the son of a Dutch father and a British-Javanese mother, Robinson had made a name in Indonesia with his writings. He left Indonesia in 1954, and soon became the leading voice of the diasporic Indo community in the Netherlands and, later, also in the United States. His engagement resulted in the founding of the Indo magazine Tong Tong and the annual Pasar Malam, the world’s biggest Eurasian festival. With his writings, Robinson played an essential role in the cultural awareness and self-pride of the Indo community through the acceptance of their essentially hybrid and transnational identity.

Read or purchase the article here.

Slaves, Cannibals, and Infected Hyper-Whites: The Race and Religion of Zombies

Anthropological Quarterly
Volume 85, Number 2, Spring 2012
pages 457-486
DOI: 10.1353/anq.2012.0021

Elizabeth McAlister, Associate Professor of Religion, African American Studies and American Studies
Wesleyan University

The first decade of the new millennium saw renewed interest in popular culture featuring zombies. This essay shows that a comparative analysis of nightmares can be a productive method for analyzing salient themes in the imaginative products and practices of cultures in close contact. It is argued that zombies, as the first modern monster, are embedded in a set of deeply symbolic structures that are a matter of religious thought. The author draws from her ethnographic work in Haiti to argue that the zonbi is at once part of the mystical arts that developed there since the colonial period, and comprises a form of mythmaking that represents, responds to, and mystifies the fear of slavery, collusion with it, and rebellion against it. In turn, some elements of the Haitian zonbi figure can be found in patterns that haunt recent American zombie films. Zombies in these films are read as figures in a parable about whiteness and death-dealing consumption. This essay suggests that the messianic mood surrounding the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama was consistent with a pattern in zombie films since the 1960s where many zombie-killing heroes are figured as black American males. Zombies are used in both ethno-graphic and film contexts to think through the conditions of embodiment, the boundaries between life and death, repression and freedom, and the racialized ways in which humans consume other humans.

Read or purchase the article here.

An Estimate of Assimilation Rate of Mixed-Blood Aborigines in New South Wales

Oceania
Volume 32, Number 3 (March, 1962)
pages 187-190

J. Le Gay Brereton

Some anthropologists have suggested that the Aboriginal population of New South Wales (very largely mixed-bloods) will prefer integration to assimilation. It is therefore important to obtain some estimate of the rate of assimilation in recent years (Elkin, 1960; Bell, 1960).

Assimilation here is taken to have occurred if mixed-bloods (1) no longer mix predominantly with mixed-bloods but find their friends as much or more among white Australians ; (2) live in houses typical of white Australians, dispersed among white Australians, at a standard of living like that of white Australians ; and (3) for purposes of census regard themselves as white Australians, and not mixed-blood or Aboriginal Australians.

An estimate of crude birth-rate and death-rate of mixed-bloods was made from published records of Stations in the Reports of the Aboriginal Welfare Board for the years 1944 to 1959. The birth-rates and death-rates were calculated for each year and the variation analysed by the linear regression of these rates on time. No trend was demonstrable for birth-rate, but the death-rate showed a fall which was significant (P<0.01). The average birth-rate and death-rate over the whole period was 41.8748 and 13.2056 per 1,000 persons per year, giving a crude net increase of 28.6692. No countries have a higher rate than this except Mexico (34.0 persons per 1,000 persons per year) (Commonwealth Year Book, 1959). Although it has been shown that the erode death-rate is falling, it will be assumed that the life table is fixed; in this way the population capacity to increase is underestimated. The crude net increase (28.6692) is not an ideal figure for estimating the growth of the population. It would be better to use the true rate of natural increase (Dublin and Lotka, 1925). However, this cannot be calculated owing to the lack of reliable life-tables and age-specific fecundities for the mixed-blood population. Nevertheless calculations were made using various life-tables and age-specific fecundities, and a standard mean length of a generation (28.5 years). These results are set out in Table 1. They show that to obtain a crude birth-rate as high as 23.0 live births per 1,000 persons per year, a population must have a good survival rate, and in contrast to most high age-specific fecundity schedules, high fertility in the 15-19 and 20-24 years age classes.  The crude birth-rate on stations is considerably higher than this,…

Examining the Legacy of European Names in the Elmina-Cape Coast Area of Ghana

Afroeuropa: Journal of Afroeuropean Studies
Volume 1, Number 3 (2007)
22 pages

Amma Kyerewaa Akrofi
Texas Tech University

Lawrence Owusu-Ansah
Texas Tech University

The prevalence of European family and place names in Fante areas of Ghana is one of the best known vestiges of the interaction between African and European cultures, but there has been little systematic study of it. The aim of this research was to investigate the European and Europeanized names commonly found in the Cape Coast–Elmina area. Using data obtained from interviews and a variety of written sources, the names were collected, classified, and their linguistic characteristics analyzed. The results of the study show that 1) there is a pervasiveness of such names still used by the citizens of the area under study, 2) the names are classifiable according to origin, and 3) there is a tendency toward hybridization.

1. Ancient Cities Marked by History

The interaction between Europe and modern day Ghana dates back to the fifteenth century. Francis K. Buah (1980) recounts that the Portuguese were the first European power to arrive on Ghana’s shores in January 1471, lured by the rich trade in gold. They operated from Elmina where, in 1492, they built the Sao Jorge da Mina castle and settled for about a century and a half being engaged in trade. Later, the Dutch came and conquered the Portuguese and, after staying there for about half a century, they also left, selling their holdings to the English. Buah further informs us that about a century and a half after the advent of the Portuguese, the English settled in Cape Coast and in 1664 built the Cape Coast Castle. From there they traded in merchandise and slaves and later ruled the colony until the capital was moved to Accra in 1876. Joseph Brookman-Amissah (1972) supports Buah’s account and provides further evidence of other Europeans frequenting the coastal towns of Cape Coast and Elmina. Notable among them were the French, the Danes, the Swedes and even the German Bradenbergers, the latter two staying for only a short time. Therefore, Mylène Rémy and Jean-Claude Klotchkoff’s (1992, 109) description of Elmina and Cape Coast as ancient cities marked by history is appropriate. Rémy and Klotchkoff elaborate this portrayal (1992, 109) with an assertion that the past seems more present than the present itself in both towns. However, in making this statement, Rémy and Klotchkoff’s thoughts seem to dwell more on historical monuments like the castles and forts and colonial architecture than on anything else, as evidenced by the following description of central Elmina as an aggregate of:

old creole-style houses, a totally unexpected Italian palace, and the equally startling statue of a doughty Queen Victoria in the middle of one of the town squares (Rémy and Klotchkoff 1992, 109).

But it is not only the antiquated European architecture that gives the two towns their nostalgic charm. They get their charm also from a unique characteristic –the prevalence of European and Europeanized family names. Buah (1980, 75) referred to this phenomenon as another lasting result of European activities in the country.

It is most intriguing that after 50 years of independence, the people of Cape Coast and Elmina still maintain the pre-colonial and colonial practice of giving European and Europeanised family names to their offspring. However, apart from brief and scattered comments such as the one by Buah quoted above, no systematic study has been made of those names, although they constitute some of the most obvious vestiges of the interaction between Europe and Ghana. This study attempted to establish that the names are an important record not only of that interaction but also of the different European powers who visited that part of the world. We asked the following research questions: 1) what kinds of European and Europeanized names are currently used in the area, 2) why are they used, and 3) what are the future trends? The cordial relationship between the Europeans and the Africans as evidenced by those names is a living testimony of the oneness of humanity, a fact that is often ignored in a world struggling to come to terms with ethnic conflicts and racial intolerance…

…6. Reasons for Adopting European and Europeanized Names

The informants who were interviewed gave five main reasons for adopting European or Europeanized names: European ancestry, conversion to Christianity, acquisition of formal education, to obtain colonial jobs, and miscellaneous reasons. We discuss these below.

6.1. European ancestry

Several of the European names, especially those of Portuguese and Dutch origin, were given directly by European fathers to their children with African women and these have been passed down to the present generation. A very good example of this is the name Bartels, which is common in Elmina. Originally German, it came to Elmina when Governor Bartels, whose family had migrated to Holland earlier, married a Fante woman.2 The Bartels family in Elmina today is descended from the children of this marriage, including Johann Carl Bartels who was a very rich merchant in his day. In addition to this, many families whose histories are not well documented claim direct descent from European forebears, e.g. the LeJeune and Guichard families of Elmina and Cape Coast, respectively. In both cases, as in many others, bi-racial characteristics support the claim…

Read the entire article here.

Does The Heritage Controversy Tell Us More About Warren Or The Media?

Radio Boston
WBUR
2012-05-22

Dan Mauzy, Associate Producer

Hosts

Meghna Chakrabarti, Co-Host

Anthony Brooks, Co-Host

Guests

Kevin Noble Maillard, Associate Professor of Law (member of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma)
Syracuse University

David Catanese, National Political Reporter
Politico

Here’s a bit of a problem that political reporters have to contend with: How should we handle those stories that appear to distract from what most regard as the big, important issues of the day? When a particular campaign or a political party fans the flames of one of these sidebar stories in an effort to keep a controversy alive, what should the media do?
 
The story about Elizabeth Warren’s claims of Native American ancestry presents one of those challenges.
 
The Harvard law professor who’s challenging Sen. Scott Brown has talked proudly about her Native American heritage, and we’ve learned that she listed herself as a “minority” for nearly a decade back in the late 1980s and early 90s. Warren has tried to explain why and there’s no evidence that Harvard, or any other university, hired her because of her claim…

Read the entire article here. Listen to the interview (00:25:32) here. Download it here.

The Relationship Between Colour and Identity in the Literature of Nella Larsen and Richard Wright

Lethbridge Undergraduate Research Journal
Volume 3, Number 2 (June 2008)
ISSN 1718-8482

Elisabeth Hudson
King’s College London

The fiction of Nella Larsen and Richard Wright explores the struggle of African-American men and women to forge an identity for themselves that is free of the bonds placed on them by society. The protagonists of Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing and Wright’s Black Boy all have one thing in common: they do not wish for their identities to be defined by their race. Helga Crane, Irene Redfield, Clare Kendry, and the young Richard Wright all try to create identities for themselves that transcend racial boundaries. Because of this desire, they all have trouble relating completely to either white society or black society and, as a result, feel estranged from their communities.

In Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, the protagonist Helga Crane, who Hazel Carby called ‘the first truly sexual black female protagonist in Afro-American fiction,’ is trapped between two racial identities. The daughter of a white Danish woman and a black jazz musician she has never known, Helga has never had a black family member, and therefore struggles with the disconnect between her outward appearance and her external reality. Helga never truly feels at home in the company of either black people or white people and, as a result, is constantly fleeing from place to place in search of a society wherein she can ‘fit in.’ Wherever Helga finds herself, she is portrayed as the ‘other.’ In black society, she feels ostracised because of her colourful, flamboyant clothing, her distaste for ‘the race problem,’ and her ethnic identity as a mulatto. In white society, she is objectified as an exotic, primitive creature without agency. She is portrayed as a spectacle, almost never as spectator. Because she does not belong to one race completely, she never truly finds a place where she belongs. Helga’s sense of self is always censored by society’s restrictions and expectations. She never finds a version of reality that is not mediated by her surroundings…

Read the entire article here.

Clare Kendry’s “True” Colors: Race and Class Conflict in Nella Larsen’s Passing

Callaloo
Volume 15, Number 4 (Autumn, 1992)
pages 1053-1065

Jennifer DeVere Brody, Professor of Drama
Stanford University

Interpretations of Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) often have failed to explain the complex symbolism of the narrative. Indeed, dismissive or tendentious criticisms of the text have caused it to be eclipsed by Larsen’s “earlier and more intriguing” book, Quicksand (1928). This essay reexamines Passing as a work concerned with the simultaneous representation and construction of race and especially class, within a circumscribed community. As such, my paper contributes to debates within Black feminist criticism about the value of these aspects of identity in relation to the production of black female subjectivities. I contend that the novel’s main characters are neither purely “psychological” beings, as Claudia Tate asserts, nor are they essentially “sexual” creatures, as Deborah McDowell argues. Rather, I read Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry as representatives of different ideologies locked in struggle for dominance.

In her introduction to Passing Deborah McDowell one of the most astute critics of Larsen’s work, states that “many critics have been misled by the novel’s epigraph … [since] it invites the reader to place race at the center of any critical interpretation.” It would appear that McDowell herself has been misled by Passing’s obviously unreliable narrator. So too, McDowell seems to agree with Claudia Tate’s belief that, “Race is peripheral to Passing. It is more a device to sustain the suspense than a compelling social issue.” I disagree with these assertions because it seems to me that the text is “all about race” or rather, the mediation of race in relation to sexuality and class.

McDowell recognizes certain tropes employed by Larsen and, like many other critics, she maintains that Irene Redfield is the primary referent of the novel’s title. Ultimately, however, McDowell is unable to give a full explication of the texf s meaning since she tries to read/uce the text as a tale of latent sexual passion without discussing the key issues of race and class. Thus, while her discussion is certainly valuable, one might also say that it reifies sexuality at the risk of not exploring how sexuality is connected inextricably with other historically produced phenomena such as race and class. In order to sustain her ingenious reading of Passing as a tale that “passes for straight” and sublimates lesbian desire, McDowell misses the more intricate implications addressed by Larsen’s work. The iconography McDowell reads as sexual is simultaneously racial: it also expresses class positionality. For example, the objective correlative envelope used in the first paragraph of the novel signifies not only the “sexual” (McDowell reads it as a “metaphorical vagina”) but also the sender’s race (alien) and class (elite). Thus, my reading emends McDowell’s by insisting on the importance of race and class in Passing.

If race as well as class conflict must occupy a primary position in any discussion of…

The Hypervisible Man: Obama as the First Black, Mixed-Race, Asian American and now Gay President

Mixed Dreams: towards a radical multiracial/ethnic movement
2012-05-24

Nicole Asong Nfonoyim

“I have always sensed that he [Obama] intuitively understands gays and our predicament—because it so mirrors his own. And he knows how the love and sacrifice of marriage can heal, integrate, and rebuild a soul. The point of the gay-rights movement, after all, is not about helping people be gay. It is about creating the space for people to be themselves. This has been Obama’s life’s work. And he just enlarged the space in this world for so many others, trapped in different cages of identity, yearning to be released and returned to the families they love and the dignity they deserve.” −Andrew Sullivan, “The First Gay President,” Newsweek

I admit, I’ve missed quite a bit being oceans and continents away from the US of A. But one watershed moment managed to reach my little apartment in Udaipur last week as I was sipping my morning chai. Front page of the Times of India was Obama’s declaration of support for marriage equality. Between you and I, I was always of the camp that believed Obama’s previous stance was no more than a mere (albeit calculated and predictable) front to protect his political hide as the over-hyped newbie presidential candidate. Seems my sentiments were shared by Andrew Sullivan in his cover article in this week’s edition of Newsweek, which featured the above image and the headline “The First Gay President.”

Reading Sullivan’s article, I remembered a talk I attended at Oberlin College for Asian Pacific American Month in 2010 where the speaker’s last slide was entitled “The First Asian-American President” beneath two photographs of Obama, one as a child in Indonesia and one hugging his sister Maya Soetoro-Ng at his high school graduation in Hawaii. The speaker insisted that Obama’s early childhood spent in Indonesia with  his mother and stepfather, his youth spent in Hawaii, his identity as a hyphen American, and immigrant son made his experience akin to that of many Asian-Americans and thus earned him the title “First Asian-American President.” And in those terms it totally made sense. Obama could be Asian-American. Obama’s identity lends itself quite easily to repeated acts of reading and (re)interpretation. Though he’s self-identified as African-American, many still call him “The First Multiracial President.” Because it matters much less what Obama thinks of himself than what we the people think of him—what images we project onto his being.

In my course, I used Obama’s story, his identity as a tool to understand how multiraciality contains multitudes and how a multiracial critique could be instrumental in breaking down monolithic notions of identity. So I encouraged students to talk about multiraciality as part of black identities, as part of Asian-American identities, Latin@, Native, White, adoptee and queer identities. If anything multiraciality benefits a great deal from a queer critique—queering race. And there’s increasingly more out there in Academe that works at the rich intersection. That being said, I still found myself a bit surprised to see such a bold act of race queering on the cover of a mainstream American publication such as Newsweek…

Read the entire essay here.