Mixed Race Studies

Looking at Indians, white Americans see themselves

The Economist
2018-02-10

Thinking about natives in an era of nativism

IN EARLY 1924 the blue-bloods of Virginia found themselves with a problem. To criminalise interracial marriage, the state had drafted a law that classified anyone possessing even “one drop” of non-white blood as “coloured”. Awkwardly, that would include many of the so-called First Families of Virginia, because they traced their descent to a native American woman, Pocahontas, who had been abducted and married by a member of the Jamestown colony three centuries before. This ancestry had been considered far from shameful. It was a mark of American aristocracy, the real-life Pocahontas having been reinvented (she probably did not save the life of a colonist called John Smith) as an “American princess”. To fix matters, a clause known as the “Pocahontas exception” was added to the racist law, to exempt anyone with no more than one-sixteenth Indian blood.

This episode, documented in a new exhibition at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC, on Indian myths and reality, helps explain a cultural puzzle. It has become clear that the pre-Columbian Americas were much more densely populated, by more sophisticated civilisations, than was previously thought. By one estimate North America, the more sparsely populated continent, had 18m people when Columbus sailed, more than England and France combined. Yet in the popular imagination it remains a vast wilderness, peopled by a few buffalo-hunters. The reason for this gigantic misunderstanding, suggest the Smithsonian’s curators, goes beyond bad schooling…

Read the entire article here.

Delia Graff Fara Explored a Philosophical Concept With a Heap of Sand

The Lives They Lived
The New York Times Magazine
2017-12-28

James Ryerson, Senior Story Editor

Tackling a paradox: Fara in 2004. Credit Steve Pyke

She philosophized about vagueness — and lived with it too

The “paradox of the heap” seems at first like a trick, a brainteaser that must have some clever catch. But it reveals itself, as it defies easy understanding, to be a philosophical problem. You might approach it as a puzzle, only to end up devising a solution so deep that it would challenge our thinking about language, knowledge and the nature of reality. By the time of her death from brain cancer in July at 48, Delia Graff Fara, a philosopher at Princeton, had done just that.

Start with a heap of sand. If you remove a single grain, it remains a heap. Repeat this process enough times, however, and you have a heap of sand that contains, say, one grain. This is absurd: One grain is not a heap. Something has gone wrong, but it is not obvious what. Either there is a precise number of grains at which point a heap becomes a nonheap, or there is no such thing as a heap, or classical logic is flawed (perhaps it is only ever sort of true that something is a heap). Which bullet to bite?…

…When it came to racial diversity, an area in which philosophy is similarly lopsided, Fara was also a champion, if more circumspect. Her mother, who raised Fara as a single parent in New York, was African-American; her father, who died when she was a child, was of Irish and Jewish descent. Because of her appearance, Fara was often assumed to be white or queried clumsily about where she was “from.” She told her husband she hoped to avoid being defined by her race. But as much as she let misperceptions slide, or answered politely that she was “born in Queens,” it was an issue she could never fully escape…

Read the entire article here.

You Do Not Belong Here

KR Online
Kenyon Review
September 2017

Jaquira Díaz
Gambier, Ohio
June 2017

A few years ago, during a summer in Puerto Rico, I went back to my old neighborhood, El Caserío Padre Rivera. When I was a girl, El Caserío, one of the island’s government housing projects, was a world of men, of violence. A world that at times wasn’t safe for women or girls. There were shootouts in the streets, fourteen-year-old boys carrying guns as they rode their bikes to the candy store just outside the walls. We watched a guy get stabbed right in front of our building once, watched the cops come in and raid places for drugs and guns. Outsiders were not welcome. Outsiders meant trouble.

What you didn’t know unless you lived there, unless you spent time there, was that most people in El Caserío were just trying to raise their families in peace, like anywhere else. The neighbors kept an eye on all the kids, fed them, took them to school, took them trick-or-treating on Halloween. All over the neighborhood, people told stories. El Caserío was where I learned about danger and violence and death, but it was also where I learned about community, where I learned to love stories, to imagine them, to dream. And it’s a place I love fiercely.

That summer, I drove into El Caserío to look at our old apartment, my first elementary school, the basketball courts where my father taught me to shoot hoops. I’d been there less than five minutes when a boy on a bike approached the car, motioned for me to roll down my window.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“Just visiting,” I said. “I was born here.”

He kept his hands on the handlebars, looked inside the car for a while, then gave me directions to the nearest exit, even though I hadn’t asked for them. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen.

“I know my way around,” I said. “I used to live here.”

“You do not belong here,” he said, then pedaled away, disappearing around the corner…

Read the entire article here.

RCM Museum celebrates the life of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

Classical-music.com: The official website of BBC Music Magazine
2017-10-19

Anna Maria Barry, Museum Research Assistant
Royal College of Music’s Museum of Music

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

The composer’s musical fight for civil rights is the focus of an intriguing new digital exhibition, explains Anna Barry

The Royal College of Music Museum has launched a new digital exhibition about composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (above). Released to coincide with Black History Month, the exhibition, entitled Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and the musical fight for Civil Rights celebrates the composer’s important role within civil rights movements in the UK and the US at the turn of the 20th century. Coleridge-Taylor was a student at the college and the exhibition draws on his remarkable collections which are held at its museum.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was born in London in 1875. His mother Alice was British, while his father hailed from Freetown in Sierra Leone. Dr Daniel Taylor had met Alice while studying in Britain, but most likely returned to West Africa without realising that she was pregnant. He never met his son. The young Coleridge-Taylor was given a violin by his maternal grandfather, and soon displayed great musical talent. He joined the Royal College of Music in 1890, studying composition under Charles Villiers Stanford. Coleridge-Taylor soon became a musical celebrity thanks to his trilogy of cantatas, known collectively as The Song of Hiawatha. Until World War II, this was one of the most performed choral pieces in Britain, rivalled only by Handel’s Messiah and Mendelssohn’s Elijah…

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How Battersea Gave The UK ‘Its Own Barack Obama’

Londonist
2017-03-21

Will Noble

John Richard Archer began his mayoralty with a cheeky dig at his detractors

He has been described as Britain’s Barack Obama. Except John Richard Archer was elected to power almost a century before the 44th US president. And his seat wasn’t in Washington DC, but Battersea, London.

Born in Liverpool in 1863, Archer’s rise to political stardom was by way of being a naval man, medical student and photographer. In the early 1900s he set up a photography studio on Battersea Park Road. Ironically, it’s said he didn’t allow photographs taken of himself without consent, leading to some papers purposefully publishing dated images of him.

Voted onto Battersea’s council in 1906, Archer was elected Mayor of Battersea on 10 November 1913. He won by a single vote; the margin may have been slim, but the result was monumental. (Though the first mayor in London to be black, Archer was not the first in the UK. That was Allen Glaser Minns of Thetford, Norfolk, elected in 1904.)

Not everyone was pleased for Archer; during his campaign, and following his victory, he was battered with the kind of racist abuse and cockamamie conspiracy theories that will sound familiar to those who’ve followed politics in recent years…

Read the entire article here.

Xenia Rubinos is Behind the New Theme Song for NPR’s Latino USA

Remezcla
2018-01-03

Julyssa Lopez
Berlin, Germany

Photo by Max Schiano. Courtesy of Xenia Rubinos

Boricua-Cuban artist and multi-instrumentalist Xenia Rubinos is no stranger to Latino USA, the longest-running Latino-focused radio program on American public media, distributed nationally by NPR. She’s a devoted listener who says she’s regularly tuned in to learn about everything from Pedro Almodóvar movies to the Puerto Rican debt crisis—and she’s also been on the show herself to discuss her music and identity with Latino USA host Maria Hinojosa.

“They are able to educate through really personal storytelling, which instantly brings you in and keeps you listening,” Rubinos told Remezcla. “I’m also a huge fan and admirer of Maria Hinojosa; she is a hero of mine. I think she will be an iconic and important voice in American journalism for many years to come…she’s a totally fierce badass journalist and woman.”

So, Rubinos was absolutely floored last July when the Latino USA team asked her to compose the program’s first-ever theme song, which will open each episode of Latino USA moving forward. Latino USA announced this week that in addition to its Rubinos-designed theme song, it is also premiering a new format. The team will focus on deep-dives into single stories and topics, dropping multiple 15- to 30-minute podcasts weekly and covering extended cuts of interviews, roundtable discussions and short “explainers” of the news. Devotees who want to stick to the original Latino USA hour can still get the whole show on terrestrial radio…

Read the entire article here.

Passing and Being Passed Over in the United States

Los Angeles Review of Books
2017-12-15

Kavita Das

We Wear the Mask: 15 True Stories of Passing in America
By Brando Skyhorse, Lisa Page
Published 10.10.2017
Beacon Press
216 Pages

IN THE YEARS preceding the 2016 presidential election, the “birther” movement that had dogged Barack Obama during his initial run for president raised its ugly head once again, revived by Donald Trump, a bombastic businessman/reality-show celebrity, and one of Obama’s most outspoken critics. Using the platform afforded to him as a rich and powerful white man, Trump made claims that Obama was not an American citizen, calling for him to prove otherwise by producing his birth certificate. This claim was made — and repeated often — despite the abundance of unassailable proof to the contrary.

Trump — and the rest of the “birther” movement — essentially accused President Obama of passing as an American citizen. According to Brando Skyhorse, co-editor of the new anthology We Wear the Mask: 15 True Stories of Passing in America, passing is the “knowing decision about hiding or omitting one’s background to obtain acceptance into a community.” Skyhorse knows whereof he speaks since he acknowledges engaging in the practice himself. The phenomenon of passing is neither new nor unique to the United States. Age-old fairy tales like “Cinderella” and “The Little Mermaid” depict young women who pass as something other than their true selves in order to meet their Prince Charmings. Despite our country’s founding documents declaring that “all men are created equal,” endowed with rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” entrenched inequalities and stigmas associated with race, class, and sexuality have helped contribute to a long history of passing in the United States: African Americans and other people of color passing as white, poor people passing as affluent, LGBTQ individuals passing as straight…

Read the entire review here.

Phoebe Collings-James: the artist and model taking on tokenism

The Chain
The Guardian
2017-11-14

The British artist’s paintings, video and sculpture explore desire, sexuality and violence. She’s the second link in The Chain. Scroll down to see images from her day

British artist Phoebe Collings-James grew up a poster girl for teen-zine, mixed-race models. But rather than being the break-out star, she broke out of the industry. She was 18 and increasingly uncomfortable with the casting process and lingerie shows under the male gaze. “As a model, I have often felt very conflicted as a reluctant acceptable face of blackness,” the Hackney-born, Goldsmiths graduate in fine art told Nylon magazine last year. “I have been used as a token black woman purely because I am ‘not too dark’.”…

Read the entire article here.

Jefferson’s Three Daughters — Two Free, One Enslaved

Book Review
The New York Times
2018-01-26

Mary Beth Norton, Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History History
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

JEFFERSON’S DAUGHTERS
Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America
By Catherine Kerrison
Illustrated. 425 pp. Ballantine Books. $28.

Martha Jefferson Randolph
Credit Thomas Jefferson Foundation

Fawn Brodie would be astonished — and gratified. In 1974, her biography “Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History” contended that the third president had fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings. For this, Catherine Kerrison, a professor of American history at Villanova University, accurately notes, Brodie was “excoriated by a cadre of Jefferson experts.” A lot has changed, and largely because of the work of Annette Gordon-Reed, who took seriously Hemings family stories and, bolstered by a DNA study, convinced nearly all scholars, including Kerrison, that Brodie was correct. “Jefferson’s Daughters,” Kerrison’s beautifully written book, takes the relationship’s existence as a given.

And so, to a nuanced study of Jefferson’s two white daughters, Martha (born 1772) and Maria (born 1778), she innovatively adds a discussion of his only enslaved daughter, Harriet Hemings (born 1801). The result is a stunning if unavoidably imbalanced book, combining detailed treatments of Martha’s and Maria’s experiences with imaginative attempts to reconstruct Harriet’s life…

Read the entire review here.

Indian Slavery Once Thrived in New Mexico. Latinos Are Finding Family Ties to It.

The New York Times
2018-01-28

Simon Romero

St. Thomas the Apostle Church in Abiquiú, N.M., a village settled by former Indian slaves, or Genízaros, in the 18th century. Credit Adria Malcolm for The New York Times

ALBUQUERQUE — Lenny Trujillo made a startling discovery when he began researching his descent from one of New Mexico’s pioneering Hispanic families: One of his ancestors was a slave.

“I didn’t know about New Mexico’s slave trade, so I was just stunned,” said Mr. Trujillo, 66, a retired postal worker who lives in Los Angeles. “Then I discovered how slavery was a defining feature of my family’s history.”

Mr. Trujillo is one of many Latinos who are finding ancestral connections to a flourishing slave trade on the blood-soaked frontier now known as the American Southwest. Their captive forebears were Native Americans — slaves frequently known as Genízaros (pronounced heh-NEE-sah-ros) who were sold to Hispanic families when the region was under Spanish control from the 16th to 19th centuries. Many Indian slaves remained in bondage when Mexico and later the United States governed New Mexico.

The revelations have prompted some painful personal reckonings over identity and heritage. But they have also fueled a larger, politically charged debate on what it means to be Hispanic and Native American…

…Many Hispanic families in New Mexico have long known that they had indigenous ancestry, even though some here still call themselves “Spanish” to emphasize their Iberian ties and to differentiate themselves from the state’s 23 federally recognized tribes, as well as from Mexican and other Latin American immigrants.

But genetic testing is offering a glimpse into a more complex story. The DNA of Hispanic people from New Mexico is often in the range of 30 to 40 percent Native American, according to Miguel A. Tórrez, 42, a research technologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and one of New Mexico’s most prominent genealogists.

…“I have Navajo, Chippewa, Greek and Spanish blood lines,” said Mr. Tórrez, who calls himself a mestizo, a term referring to mixed ancestry. “I can’t say I’m indigenous any more than I can say I’m Greek, but it’s both fascinating and disturbing to see how various cultures came together in New Mexico.”…

Read the entire article here.