Mixed Race Studies

Octavia Spencer, Queen Latifah To Bring Racially Charged ‘The Rhinelander Affair’ To Screen With Zero Gravity

Deadline Hollywood
2018-07-23

Anita Busch

REX/Shutterstock

EXCLUSIVE: It’s a great story that delves into the caste system, racism and sexism. The Rhinelander Affair, written by William Kinsolving, follows the controversial 1925 divorce trial in New York involving a man from an upper-class New Rochelle family who married a bi-racial, working-class woman. It is a ripped from the headlines story from the 1920s with many meaty roles in what was a roller coaster ride about money, love, racism and betrayal.

The project is now being produced for the big screen by Mark and Christine Holder (who found the story), Octavia Spencer, Queen Latifah and Shakim Compere’s Flavor Unit Entertainment and Dave Broome (The Day I Met El Chapo). The Kingsolving manuscript, repped by Trident, is going out to publishers this summer.

Alice Jones and Leonard (Kip) Rhinelander

The story revolves around Leonard Rhinelander and Alice Jones, who fell in love (she was 22 and he 18), and then were kept apart by Rhinelander’s family. However, they married in secret before it spilled into the papers and stayed that way for three years. At issue was whether Jones duped Leonard into marrying her by hiding the fact that she was bi-racial (she was the daughter of an English woman and an English-West Indian taxi driver). Leonard stood by Alice under intense media scrutiny until pressures — both internally with the family and externally — caused them to divorce…

Read the entire article here.

Overlooked by the Media, Women Like Me Took to Instagram

The New York Times
2017-07-28

Natasha S. Alford, Deputy Editor
The Grio

Monica Ramos

I rarely see Afro-Latinas on television. Online, it’s a different story.

I was about 11 years old when I started to think I wasn’t like the other Latina girls.

The summer before sixth grade, my mother put me in a beauty pageant sponsored by a Hispanic community organization in Syracuse, N.Y., where we lived. The stage wasn’t fancy — it was in a gymnasium on the West Side, one of the poorest areas of the city. But there was a lot at stake. The winner would represent the pride of the community during the Puerto Rican Day Festival parade.

I was mortified at the idea of competing. Aside from being a nerd with thick plastic glasses and a school marching band membership to match, I didn’t look Latina. At least not compared with my pageant competitors or the women and girls I saw in the media…

Read the entire article here.

Overlooked No More: Edmonia Lewis, Sculptor of Worldwide Acclaim

The New York Times
2018-07-25

Penelope Green

The 19th century sculptor Edmonia Lewis. The intense focus on her race both frustrated her and fueled her ambition. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum

As an artist she transcended constraints, and as a woman of color, she confronted a society that wished to categorize her.

Since 1851, obituaries in The New York Times have been dominated by white men. With Overlooked, we’re adding the stories of remarkable people whose deaths went unreported in The Times.

It was the middle of the 19th century, and Edmonia Lewis, part West Indian, part Chippewa, had the audacity to be an artist. It was risky enough for a free woman of color to pursue such a career, but to claim marble as her medium was to tilt at the Victorian conventions of the time, which decreed gentler aesthetic forms for the second sex, like poetry or painting.

Among the first black sculptors known to achieve widespread international fame, Lewis was raised Catholic, educated at Oberlin College in Ohio and mentored by abolitionists in Boston. She lived much of her life in Rome, sailing to Europe in 1865 and joining a community of American sculptors there who included female artists derided by the author Henry James as “a white marmorean flock.”…

Read the entire article here.

Interview: ‘White people are so fragile, bless ’em’ … meet Rhiannon Giddens, banjo warrior

The Guardian
2018-07-23

Emma John

‘I’m not here to be famous’ … Rhiannon Giddens, who is curating the Cambridge folk festival. Photograph: Tanya Rosen-Jones

She pours fire and fury into powerful songs that target everything from police shootings to slavery. The musician reveals all about her mission to put the black back into bluegrass – and Shakespeare

‘We’re all racist to some degree,” says Rhiannon Giddens. “Just like we’re all privileged to some degree. I have privilege in my system because I’m light-skinned. I hear people say, ‘I didn’t have it easy growing up either.’ But when did it become a competition?”

As someone on a mission to bridge such divides, Giddens thinks about this stuff a lot. The Grammy-winning singer and songwriter was born to a white father and a black mother in Greensboro, North Carolina, in the late 1970s. Her parents married only three years after the landmark Loving v Virginia decision, which reversed the anti-miscegenation laws that had made interracial marriage illegal. Their union was still shocking enough that her father was disinherited.

While much has changed in the 40 years that Giddens has been alive, her latest album, Freedom Highway, is a powerful testament to the inequality and injustice that remain. It opens with At the Purchaser’s Option, a devastating track inspired by an 1830s advert for a female slave whose nine-month-old baby could also be included in the sale. “It was kind of a statement to put that one first,” says Giddens. “If you can get past that, you’ll probably survive the rest.”…

Read the entire interview here.

Announcing the appointment of Dr. Minelle Mahtani as Senior Advisor to the Provost on Racialized Faculty

The University of British Columbia
Office of the Provost & Vice-President Academic
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
2018-07-17

The Provost is pleased to announce that Dr. Minelle Mahtani has been appointed to the role of Senior Advisor to the Provost on Racialized Faculty, a new position that will support the university’s institutional commitment to advancing equity and inclusion in the scholarly and leadership environment for faculty members at UBC. This 40% position is initially for a two-year term, commencing September 1, 2018. Dr. Mahtani holds her professorial appointment in the Institute of Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice in the Faculty of Arts.

Since 2009, Dr. Mahtani has been an Associate Professor in Human Geography and Journalism at the University of Toronto Scarborough, serving as the Associate Chair of the Department of Human Geography from 2014-2015. She received her PhD in Geography from University College London in 2000. Dr. Mahtani is the Past President of the Association for Canadian Studies, and former Chair of Metropolis-Ontario (CERIS – Centre for Excellence on Immigration and Settlement). She is the 2012 Winner of the Glenda Laws Award from the Association of American Geographers for outstanding contributions to geography and social policy, and a Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal Award winner. Dr. Mahtani is a former television news journalist with the CBC and has consulted with a variety of organizations on diversity and journalism, including Citizenship Immigration Canada and the Ministry of Multiculturalism and Integration, among other groups. She is the former strategic counsel for the not-for-profit IMPACS (Institute for Media, Policy and Civil Society).

Professor Mahtani’s research interests are in the areas of diversity initiatives; anti-colonial approaches in critical geography; global mixed-race theory and critical race theory; and structural and systemic racism as experienced among academics of colour…

Read the entire press release here.

Examining whites’ anti-black attitudes after Obama’s presidency

Politics, Groups, and Identities
Published online: 2018-03-05
DOI: 10.1080/21565503.2018.1438953

Nicole Yadon, Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Political Science
University of Michigan

Spencer Piston, Assistant Professor of Political Science
Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts

We develop and test competing theoretical expectations about the level and effects of white prejudice against blacks in the aftermath of America’s first black presidency. Using both cross-sectional and panel survey datasets of nationally representative samples of Americans, we find little evidence that any of the following declined during Obama’s presidency: white opposition to black leaders, white opposition to policies intended to benefit blacks, white prejudice against blacks, or the impact of prejudice on white vote choice. Furthermore, the impact of prejudice on policy opinion appears to have increased over this time period, even beyond existing findings indicating a spillover of racialization. These findings suggest that Obama’s rise to power increased whites’ perception that blacks threaten their dominant position in the United States.

Read or purchase the article here.

Do We Still Need Constitutional “Equal Protection” in a Growing Multiracial World?

Medium
2018-07-09

Tanya Hernández, Archibald R. Murray Professor of Law; Associate Director Center on Race, Law & Justice
Fordham University School of Law

Tanya Hernández is the author of the forthcoming book, Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination from New York University Press.

Reflections on the the 150th Anniversary of the 14th Amendment

July 9th, marks the 150th anniversary of the ratification of the 14th Amendment’s equality principle of the U.S. Constitution. Does the pursuit of racial equality look different 150 years after the ratification of the 14th Amendment’s equality principle in today’s growing multiracial world? In 2010, 9 million people constituting 2.9 percent of the population selected two or more races on the census. The Census Bureau projects that the self-identified multiracial population will triple by 2060. Yet, in my own exhaustive review of discrimination cases in a variety of contexts like the workplace, educational settings, housing rentals, access to public accommodations, jury service, and the criminal justices system, the cases demonstrate that racially-mixed persons continue to experience discrimination today…

Read the entire article here.

How the Use by Eugenicists of Family Trees and Other Genealogical Technologies Informed and Reflected Discourses on Race and Race Crossing during the Era of Moral Condemnation: Mixed-Race in 1920s and 1930s Britain

Genealogy
Volume 2, Issue 3 (September 2018)
Special Issue “Genealogy and Multiracial Family Histories”
2018-07-05
15 pages
DOI: 10.3390/genealogy2030021

Peter J. Aspinall, Emeritus Reader
Centre for Health Services Studies, University of Kent, Canterbury

In the 1920s and 30s, significant empirical studies were undertaken on mixed-race (‘hybrid’) populations in Britain’s seaport communities. The physical anthropologists Rachel Fleming and Kenneth Little drew on the methods of anthropometry, while social scientist Muriel Fletcher’s morally condemnatory tract belongs to the genre of racial hygiene. Whether through professional relationships, the conduct of their work, or means of disseminating their findings, they all aligned themselves with the eugenics movement and all made use of pedigree charts or other genealogical tools for tracing ancestry and investigating the inheritance of traits. These variously depicted family members’ races, sometimes fractionated, biological events, and social circumstances which were not part of genealogy’s traditional family tree lexicon. These design features informed and reflected prevailing conceptualisations of race as genetic and biological difference, skin colour as a visible marker, and cultural characteristics as immutable and hereditable. It is clear, however, that Fleming and Little did not subscribe to contemporary views that population mixing produced adverse biological consequences. Indeed, Fleming actively defended such marriages, and both avoided simplistic, ill-informed judgements about human heredity. Following the devastating consequences of Nazi racial doctrines, anthropologists and biologists largely supported the 1951 UNESCO view that there was no evidence of disadvantageous effects produced by ‘race crossing’.

Contents

• Abstract
• Introduction
• Genealogical Technologies
• Case Studies of the Eugenic Use of Genealogical Technologies in Studies of Mixed-Race
• Intersections between Eugenicists’ Use of Genealogical Technologies, Discourses on Race, and the Biological Consequences of ‘Race Crossing’
• Conclusions
• Funding
• Conflicts of Interest
• References

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Bristol’s new Lord Mayor removes 316-year-old portrait of controversial slave trader Edward Colston… from her office wall and replaces him with a picture of a lion

The Daily Mail
2018-06-19

Richard Spillett

Cleo Lake, the Lord Mayor of Bristol, has removed a portrait of Edward Colston from the wall of her office because of his role in the slave trade.

• Portrait of slave trader Edward Colston has hung in mayor’s office since the 50s
• But the new mayor has ordered it be removed because she can’t work next to it
• Colston helped make Bristol a rich city, but his company was behind the trafficking and deaths of thousands of slaves

The Lord Mayor of Bristol has removed a 300-year-old portrait of a slave trader from the wall above her desk.

Cleo Lake said she ‘simply couldn’t stand’ the sight of Edward Colston looking at her as she worked.

The portrait dates back to 1702 and was hung in 1953 when City Hall opened – but Cleo Lake has asked for it to be installed in a museum about the abolition of slavery.

It is the latest move by the city to dissociate themselves from Colston, with venues and schools having previously removed his name from their titles.

Cleo Lake, who describes herself as of Scottish, Bristolian and Afro-Caribbean heritage, was elected in May by fellow councillors…

Read the entire article here.

The Legacy of Monticello’s Black First Family

The New York Times
2018-07-04

Brent Staples
Photographs by Damon Winter

A view of Thomas Jefferson’s home from the main avenue where enslaved people were quartered at Monticello.

A recently opened exhibit at Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia estate gives new recognition to Sally Hemings and the role of slavery in the home — and in his family.

Plantation wives in the slave-era South resorted to willful blindness when their husbands conscripted black women as sexual servants and filled the household with mixed-race children who inevitably resembled the master. Thomas Jefferson’s wife, Martha, was several years dead when he set off on this path, fathering at least six children with Martha’s enslaved black half sister, Sally Hemings. The task of dissembling fell to the remaining white Jeffersons, who aided in a cover-up that held sway for two centuries and feigned ignorance of a relationship between Jefferson and Hemings that lasted nearly four decades.

The foundation that owns Monticello, Jefferson’s mountaintop home near Charlottesville, Va., broke with this long-running deception last month when it unveiled several new exhibits that underscore the centrality of slavery on the founder’s estate. The most important — in the South Wing, where Sally Hemings once lived — explores the legacy of the enslaved woman whom some historians view as the president’s second wife and who skillfully prevailed on him to free from slavery the four Jefferson-Hemings children who lived into adulthood.

The exhibit underscores the fact that the Jefferson estate was an epicenter of racial mixing in early Virginia, making it impossible to draw clear lines between black and white. It reminds contemporary Americans that slave owners like the Jeffersons often held their own black children, aunts, uncles and cousins in bondage. And it illustrates how enslaved near-white relations used proximity to privilege to demystify whiteness while taking critical measure of the relatives who owned them…

Read the entire article here.