Mixed Race Studies

Growing, Faltering, Changing, Growing: Lessons From Kay WalkingStick

The New York Times
2018-06-07

Holland Cotter, Co-chief Art Critic

Kay WalkingStick’s “New Mexico Desert,” 2011, in which bands of Navajo patterning float across scrub land and mesas as if surveying and protecting them. National Museum of the American Indian

MONTCLAIR, N.J. — An artist’s career retrospective, if shaped with care, is more than a look at a life of labor. It’s also a record of contingent lives, cultural changes and a political passage in time. This is true of “Kay WalkingStick: An American Artist,” an era-spanning survey of this 83-year-old painter at the Montclair Art Museum here. Yet what powers the chronologically arranged show, first and last, is the personal: the sense it gives of one worker growing, changing, faltering, then growing and changing more.

Born in 1935 in Syracuse, Ms. WalkingStick was the child of a biracial marriage: “Syracuse Girl Weds Cherokee Indian” was the headline on the report of her parents’ wedding in the local newspaper. As it turned out, she saw little of her father over the years, though her mother, Scottish-Irish by descent, made a point of instilling pride in her daughter’s Native American heritage.

Ms. WalkingStick studied painting in college, and as a young wife and mother in suburban New Jersey in the 1960s, she continued to paint, keeping a close eye on what was happening in Manhattan. Among the earliest pieces in the show, from 1971, are two crisp, Pop-ish silhouette images in bright colors of female nudes. The artist herself was the model, and feminism — or at least the loosened-up spirit of it — a spur…

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DePaul among first to offer critical ethnic studies graduate program

DePaul University Newsline
Chicago, Illinois
2018-05-31

Nicole Ross, Executive Communications Assistant

Laura Kina, Vincent DePaul professor in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, left, and Alexis Beamon, graduate assistant. Kina is the director of the Critical Ethnic Studies MA program and is a visual artist whose research and teaching focuses on Asian American and mixed race history and representation. (DePaul University/Jeff Carrion)

At this year’s TEDxDePaulUniversity, Whitney Spencer encouraged the audience to question societal norms with her talk, Reimagining the Intellectual. A first-year graduate student in DePaul’s Critical Ethnic Studies program, Spencer highlighted that America’s understanding of what it means to be “an intellectual” is limited by preconceived racial stereotypes.

“As a first-generation college graduate, I aim to critique the construction of black intellectual ‘lack,’ disrupt restrictive ideologies and encourage the intellectual practices of black people,” Spencer says. “I’m continuing to explore this work as a CES graduate student at DePaul.”

DePaul University’s College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences is among the first in the nation to offer a Master of Arts in Critical Ethnic Studies, which supports the study of such topics by providing an advanced analysis of race and ethnicity. Founded in 2015, the program’s second cohort will graduate this June.

With Chicago as a classroom, students like Spencer examine the systematic marginalization of racial minorities within an urban context as well as the global implications of these structures. This includes a look at how groups use art, culture, political organization and other forms of social expression to respond and counter these forces.

“The program is interdisciplinary and intersectional – pulling from existing courses like women’s and gender and international studies,” says Laura Kina, professor of art, media and design and director of the Critical Ethnic Studies program. “This allows us to look at subjects in a comparative framework.”

Kina first noticed DePaul’s need and opportunity for such a master’s program several years ago. “I helped found the Critical Mixed Race Studies conference at DePaul in 2010, which garnered a lot of attention from the community – so much so that it eventually expanded into its own association,” Kina says. “Around 2011, other faculty members and I started crafting the master’s program to build upon our existing African America and black Diaspora and Latin American and Latino studies programs.”…

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Exposure to Biracial Faces Reduces Colorblindness

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
First published 2018-06-06
DOI: 10.1177/0146167218778012

Sarah E. Gaither, Assistant Professor of Psychology
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

Negin R. Toosi, Diversity Researcher
Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel

Laura G. Babbitt, Researcher
Department of Psychology
Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts

Samuel R. Sommers, Director of the Undergraduate Program; Professor of Psychology
Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts

Across six studies, we demonstrate that exposure to biracial individuals significantly reduces endorsement of colorblindness as a racial ideology among White individuals. Real-world exposure to biracial individuals predicts lower levels of colorblindness compared with White and Black exposure (Study 1). Brief manipulated exposure to images of biracial faces reduces colorblindness compared with exposure to White faces, Black faces, a set of diverse monoracial faces, or abstract images (Studies 2-5). In addition, these effects occur only when a biracial label is paired with the face rather than resulting from the novelty of the mixed-race faces themselves (Study 4). Finally, we show that the shift in White participants’ colorblindness attitudes is driven by social tuning, based on participants’ expectations that biracial individuals are lower in colorblindness than monoracial individuals (Studies 5-6). These studies suggest that the multiracial population’s increasing size and visibility has the potential to positively shift racial attitudes.

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Pondering My Black, Biracial and Multiracial Identity Post Hurricane Maria

Multiracial Media: Voice of the Multiracial Community
2018-05-27

Sarah Ratliff

I have been writing from the Biracial and Multiracial perspective since I co-authored the book, Being Biracial: Where Our Secret Worlds Collide in 2015. Being Biracial is an anthology of essays from either Multiracial people or parents of mixed race kids.

In my essay I wrote about being the product of a Black and Japanese mother and a White (German, Dutch and Irish) father who were married in New York City in 1960.

I wrote about my experiences being “light, bright and clearly half White” while being raised to self-identify as Black, and of course, having to explain for the elevendy millionth time why I self-identified this way. I shared moments of complete vulnerability and isolation because I grew so frustrated trying to explain that being Black isn’t just about complexion but lived experiences as well…

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A French-Rwandan Rap Star Turned Novelist From Burundi

The New York Times
2018-05-29

Tobias Grey

“Small Country,” by Gaël Faye, is about a boy, living in Burundi during the war between the Hutus and Tutsis, who loses his innocence in spite of desperately wanting to cling onto it. Elliott Verdier for The New York Times

PARIS — “It felt like an injustice to me,” said the rapper and novelist Gaël Faye, about having to leave civil-war-torn Burundi in 1995 to come live in France. Mr. Faye, who was 13 at the time, had to contend with the shock of a new culture and moving with his younger sister into the cramped space of his mother’s apartment in Versailles.

Months went by without unpacking his suitcases. “When I went to school I used to take what I needed and put it back afterward,” the 36-year-old author said in a recent interview in Paris. “I’d convinced myself that any day my father would ring up and tell us that the war had ended and we could come back. But the war ended up lasting until 2005 by which time I was an adult.”

In his first novel, “Small Country” — a huge hit in France when it was published in 2016 and where it sold 700,000 copies — Mr. Faye wrote with a rare and subtle yearning about his youthful escapades in and around Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi. It has now been translated from French into English by Sarah Ardizzone and is being released by Hogarth on June 5.

“Small Country,” which in its original language shares the title of one of Mr. Faye’s most popular songs, “Petit Pays,” is told from the perspective of Gabriel, a 10-year-old boy with a French father and a Rwandan mother (the same mixed-race parentage as Mr. Faye). He is part of a gang of young boys sneaking beers in cabaret bars and stealing mangoes from local gardens to sell on the black market…

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“The law recognizes racial instinct”: Tucker v. Blease and the Black–White Paradigm in the Jim Crow South

Law and History Review
Volume 29, Issue 2 (May 2011)
pages 471-495
DOI: 10.1017/S0738248011000058

John W. Wertheimer, Jessica Bradshaw, Allyson Cobb, Harper Addison, E. Dudley Colhoun, Samuel Diamant, Andrew Gilbert, Jeffrey Higgs, Nicholas Skipper

On January 24, 1913, the trustees of the Dalcho School, a segregated, all-white public school in Dillon County, South Carolina, summarily dismissed Dudley, Eugene, and Herbert Kirby, ages ten, twelve, and fourteen, respectively. According to testimony offered in a subsequent hearing, the boys had “always properly behaved,” were “good pupils,” and “never …exercise[d] any bad influence in school.” Moreover, the boys’ overwhelmingly white ancestry, in the words of the South Carolina Supreme Court, technically “entitled [them] to be classified as white,” according to state law. Nevertheless, because local whites believed that the Kirbys were “not of pure Caucasian blood,” and that therefore their removal was in the segregated school’s best interest, the court, in Tucker v. Blease (1914), upheld their expulsion.

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Mexico’s Color Line and the Cultural Imperialism of Light-Skin Preference

Truthout
2018-05-26

Roberto Rodriguez, Associate Professor in Mexican American Studies
University of Arizona

A busy street in Mexico City. (Photo: Getty Images)

The color of the people of Mexico is one of the things that had a most profound effect on my psyche when I first visited the place of my birth in 1976 at the age of 22. The people came in all colors, though primarily different shades of red-brown, owing to the nation’s Indigenous roots.

Having grown up in a white-dominant society, it was an affirmation of my own brown skin color, in sharp contrast with the artificial color of official Mexico. I was used to seeing government bureaucrats and those that graced the nation’s television screens with light skin, bleached blond hair and artificial blue or green eyes.

The truth is, more than 40 years later, the nation’s color line has seemingly not changed much at all. When I first noticed this preference for light skin in Mexico, it was present at every turn and every corner. It wasn’t just a case of difference, but also disdain. Apparently, all things that were light were “good” and all things dark were “bad.” This was especially true of television. White or light skin was preferred for virtually every role, except the ones for the subservient, demeaning and outlaw roles…

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Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire by Akala – review

The Guardian
2018-05-20

Afua Hirsch

Akala: ‘a disruptive, aggressive intellect’. Photograph: Rob Baker Ashton/BBC/Green Acre Films

In a powerful, polemical narrative, the rapper charts his past and the history of black Britain

In 2010, UK rap artist Akala dropped the album DoubleThink, and with it, some unforgettable words. “First time I saw knives penetrate flesh, it was meat cleavers to the back of the head,” the north London rapper remembers of his childhood. Like so much of his work, the song Find No Enemy blends his life in the struggle of poverty, race, class and violence, with the search for answers. “Apparently,” it continues, “I’m second-generation black Caribbean. And half white Scottish. Whatever that means.”

Any of the million-plus people who have since followed Akala – real name Kingslee Daley – know that the search has taken him into the realm of serious scholarship. He is now known as much for his political analysis as for his music, and, unsurprisingly, his new book, Natives, is therefore long awaited. What was that meat cleaver incident? What was his relationship with his family and peers like growing up? How did he make the journey from geeky child, to sullen and armed teenager, to writer, artist and intellectual?.

Natives delivers the answers, and some of them are hard to hear. In one of the most touching of many personal passages in the book, Akala retraces the steps by which he was racialised – as a mixed-race child – into blackness, and by which he realised that his mother, who fiercely protected her children’s pride in their heritage, enrolling them among other things in a Pan-African Saturday school, was racialised as white…

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A Métis Night at the Opera: Louis Riel, Cultural Ownership, and Making Canada Métis

Adam Gaudry, Ph.D.
2017-05-18

Adam Gaudry, Assistant Professor
Faculty of Native Studies & Department of Political Science
University of Alberta

Taking my seat at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, home of the Canadian Opera Company (COC) to watch the debut of Louis Riel, I snap a photo with my camera. (above). Immediately and out of nowhere an usher appears to inform me that I can’t take photos inside the hall, because the set design is copyrighted. I’m surprised by this, as the image used is clearly derived from a public domain photo of Riel, something that Métis rightfully regard as part of our historical legacy.

In truth though, I’m more annoyed that five minutes before this a number of Nisga’a—represented by the Git Hayetsk and Kwhlii Gibaygum Dancers—had presented to opera-goers on the theft of one of their songs by the opera’s composer, a lament song from the House of Sgat’iin. After contacting the COC, they had worked to educate the audience and the COC on how the composer took one of their sacred songs, without permission or prior knowledge, using Cree words in place of theirs and renamed the Kuyas Aria (read their critique in the opera’s program here).

The irony, of course, was that while the opera appropriated Indigenous songs and stories, my photo for Instagram was somehow violating the intellectual property of one of the many non-Native people who had decided to remix Indigenous culture, history, and imagery for non-Indigenous consumption. It reinforced the tightly held colonial notion that everything that once belong to us now belongs to “everyone,” and that in the name of art all is open to appropriation—and eventual ownership—by Canadians…

Read the entire article here.

Steve William’s Column: Invisible blackness, can you see it?

South Strand News
Georgetown, South Carolina
2015-05-25

Steve Williams

Steve Williams

Last weekend’s royal wedding in England was a beautiful thing to behold. Many have likened it to Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009.

Social media is abuzz with millions who witnessed it; perhaps because Meghan Markle, who is of mixed racial heritage, didn’t diminish her African heritage rather, she celebrated it. When talking about her mixed heritage, race isn’t something she leads with, but she’s clearly comfortable talking about it. She tells a story of growing up and having her mother pick her up from school; how her friends would often ask — “who’s that black lady? Is she your maid?”

A self-described feminist and egalitarian Meghan has proudly supported many causes for those who are marginalized. Her wedding ceremony spoke volumes for her character. Likewise, kudos must be given to Prince Harry and the royal family for allowing her to express it. Maybe they’re more progressive than I thought…

While more and more celebrities like Halle Berry, Mariah Carey, Alicia Keys, Sade, Drake, Vin Diesel, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson are celebrating their multicultural heritage today, this was not always the case — particularly those black celebrities who could “pass” for white…

…Yet, the question of race for many blacks in America was determined by the so-called “One Drop Rule.” The law adopted by most Southern states originated during slavery and reinforced under Jim Crow, said if an individual has one single drop of “black blood” in their ancestry, then that individual is black regardless of his or her appearance.

In the early 1900s, being “black” or “colored” had drastic practical consequences even for whites.

The story is told of John Kirby who was the son of Big John Godbolt. Godbolt was one-eighth African and seven-eighths European. That meant Big John was legally classified as “colored” under South Carolina law. But John Kirby’s mother was white which meant John Kirby and his siblings had less than one-eighth African blood and were legally not “colored.” Instead, having only one-thirty-second African blood they were legally coded as “white.”…

Read the entire article here.