Mixed Race Studies

Being Black

The Barry Morgan Show
CJAD, 800 AM
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
2012-02-10

Barry Morgan, Host

Yaba Blay, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies
Lafayette College

Have you ever heard of the (1)ne Drop Project? I never had until I spoke with its pioneer, Yaba Blay, visiting Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Lafayette College.
 
Blay studied people who identify as black but don’t who don’t exactly look black (many are often mistaken for Latino) to find out how they define their ‘blackness.’
 
She uses portrait documentaries (book and film), photography exhibitions, and public programming for the purpose of raising social awareness and sparking community dialogue about the complexities of Blackness as both an identity and a lived reality.
 
The (1)ne Drop effectively seeks to challenge narrow, yet popular perceptions of what “Blackness” is and what “Blackness” looks like.
 
(1)ne Drop basically hopes to awaken a long-overdue and much needed dialogue about racial identity and skin color politics.

Listen to the interview here.

The color of Black: Professor explores racial identity in college students

Scope: Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education
Stanford University
2011-10-10

Barbara McKenna

There are lots of different ways to be Black and to have a strong Black identity,” says Camille Charles. But, she adds, research and social definitions of Black identity don’t generally consider those multi-faceted dimensions.
 
Charles discussed her research on identity in Black college students on October 3 in a talk titled, “Say it Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud?): Understanding the Racial Identities of Upwardly Mobile Black College Students.” The talk was the first SCOPE Brown Bag Seminar of the 2011-12 year.
 
Charles, the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor in the Social Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Center for Africana Studies, says that traditional academic theories on Black identity have changed in the face of shifting demographics and politics. Throughout the 20th century, the one drop rule was the measure of race; any person with one drop of Black blood was socially and legally Black. More recently, Black racial identity was generally based on one’s political views. Black individuals were labeled as either assimilationist (for those who valued integration into the larger American society) or nationalist (for those who renounced efforts to integrate with white peers or institutions). “When, in fact,” Charles says, “one can hold aspects of both at the same time.”
 
Ironically, she notes, in recent times the one drop rule has been flipped to bring into question the authenticity of mixed-race people identifying as Blacks—a conversation heard often during the 2008 presidential campaign.

But this “unidimensional” definition is out of step with both current demographics and mindsets, she says. According to the 2010 Census, 10 percent of the Black U.S. population was immigrant and there was an increase as well in those identifying as mixed-race Black. “Two fields of study challenge the traditional unidimensional definition of Black identity: studies of multiraciality and of Black ethnic identity,” Charles says. These changes have helped broaden definitions of identity somewhat, but both academic and lay depictions of black identity continue to apply outdated unidimensional definitions of black identity…

Read the entire article here.  View the slideshow presentation here. View the video of the lecture here.

Author Hill speaks on race, place, and identity at ‘City of Words’ series

University of Toronto, Scharborough
2012-02-06

Kurt Kleiner

Writer Lawrence Hill has always felt attachment to people, not places. Nevertheless, the place he grew up – Don Mills in the early 1960s – shaped him as a person and as a writer.
 
Hill is the best-selling and critically acclaimed author of The Book of Negroes and many other works of fiction and non-fiction. He spoke at UTSC on Feb. 1 about the importance of a sense of place to a writer, about the surprise success of The Book of Negroes, and about the new novel he is just completing.
 
Hill, the son of a black father and a white mother, grew up in an all-white neighborhood. He had good friends, did well in school, played hockey, and usually faced no questions about his racial identity – until suddenly someone would fling a racial slur at him.
 
“I was so confused about who I was and how to perceive myself,” he says. “Nine days out of 10 I’d just be sailing along … It would come out of the blue. But that ambiguity was a great crucible in which to become a writer.”
 
The City of Words reading series is intended to give voice to writers who come from or write about Scarborough. More generally it examines the role of geography in shaping a writer, says Karina Vernon, professor of English at UTSC and lead organizer of the reading series. Not only is Don Mills right next door to Scarborough, but many of Hill’s experiences there are similar to those of people growing up in Scarborough now.
 
“Lawrence Hill is one of the most gifted authors in Canada today, and one of the foremost theorists of the black and mixed-race experience in Canada,” Vernon said as she introduced Hill…

Read the entire article here.

When the Mirror Speaks: The Poetics and Problematics of Psychic Performance for métisse Women in Bristol

Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, Visiting Associate Professor of African and African American Studies
Duke University

Chapter in: Ethnicity, Gender and Social Change
Macmillan
1999
pages 206-222
ISBN-10: 0312217633; ISBN-13: 978-0312217631

Edited by:

Rohit Barot, Harriet Bradley, and Steve Fenton

Note from Steven F. Riley. Click here to read a definition of the term métis and the reasoning of its usage and subsequent dis-usage by Dr. Ifekwunigwe.

Contents

• Introduction
• Setting the State
• Is English Synonymous with Essential Whiteness?
• Akousa: Is Being Dark-Skinned the Primary Criterion for Essential Blackness?
• Sarah: Narratives of Space, Place, and Belongings
• Ruby: Accepting Blackness when Praying Doesn’t Make One White
• Similola: Dressing ‘The Part’
• Yemi: Re-Defining ‘The Issues’
• Bisi: Racism in Our Families or Origin or Nowhere to Hide
• Beginnings by Way of Concluding Remarks
• Acknowledgments

We can try to deprive ourselves of our realities but in the darkest hour of the night, when no one else is around and we have gone to the loo to spend a penny, we must look in the mirror. Eventually that moment comes when we look in the mirror and we see a Black woman…

Sharon

Sharon is a woman in her thirties who grew up in racial isolation in care in the north of England without either her White English mother or her Black Ghanaian father. In an English society which codes its citizens on the basis of their colour, Sharon must reconcile the psychic split between a genealogical sense of herself which is Ghanaian and English and a racialized self which is Black and White. As her statement reveals, the psychological struggle begins when she realizes that hi-racialized English society dictates that she embrace her Blackness and deny her Whiteness.

Her sentiments reflect the profound existential paradox facing individuals whose lineages historically situate them as grandchildren of both the colonizers and the colonized. I refer to such individuals métis(se). In England, the multiplicity of terms in circulation to describe individuals who straddle Black and White racial borders drove me in search of a new formulation. More often than not, received terminology either privileges presumed ‘racial’ differences (‘mixed race’) or obscures the complex ways in which being métis(se) involves both the negotiation of constructed ‘Black’/’White’ racial categories as well as the celebration of converging cultures, continuities of generations and overlapping historical traditions. The lack of consensus as to which term to use as well as the limitationsof this discursive privileging of ‘race’ at the expense of generational, ethnic, and cultural concerns, led me to métis(se) and métissage.

In the French African (Senegalese) context, in its conventional masculine (métis) and feminine (métisse) forms, métis(se)refers to someone who, by virtue of parentage, embodies two or more world views, for example, French mother and Black Senegalese father (Diop, 1992; Koubaka, 1993). However, it is not exclusively a ‘racial’ term used to differentiate individuals with one Black parent and one White parent from those with two Black or White parents. Métis(se) also pertains to people with parents from different ethnic/cultural groups within a country, for example in Nigeria, Ibo and Yoruba, or in Britain, Scottish and English. By extension, métissageis a mind set or a shorthand way to describe the theorizing associated with métis(se) subjectivities: oscillation, contradiction, paradox, hybridity, polyethnicities, multiple reference points, ‘belonging nowhere and everywhere’,  métissage also signals the process of opening up hybrid spaces and looking at the sociocultural dynamics of ‘race’, gender, ethnicity, nation, class, sexuality, and generation and their relationship to the mechanics of power.

Sharon is one of twenty five métis(se) individuals who were participants in my two-year-long ethnographic study based in Bristol, England. Their individual and collective voices represent the significant part of a greater multigenerational whole comprising people in England with Black continental African or African Caribbean fathers and White British or European mothers. By virtue of the aforementioned contradictory bi-racialized classification in Britain, métis(se) individuals’ narratives of self and identity both reflect the gender, generational, racial and ethnic tensions of English society and are located outside it in an imagined but not imaginary ‘grey’ space. That is, the ways in which the women and men I worked with tell their stories are as newfangled griot(te)s. They simultaneously construct dual narratives, which embody lived stories. At the same time, their memories preserve and reinterpret senses of past interwoven cultures. In his essay, The Choices of Identity,’ Denis-Consant Martin talks about identity as narrative (1995,
pp. 7-8):

The narrative borrows from history as well as from fiction and treats the person as a character in a plot. The person as a character is not separable from its life experiences, but the plot allows for the re-organization of the events which provide the ground for the experiences of the person/character… Narrative identity, being at the same time fictitious and real, leaves room for variations on the past—a plot can always be revised—and also for initiatives in the future.

These métis(se) narratives of identity provide scathing sociopolitical commentaries and cultural critiques of contemporary English African Diasporic life and its manifest bi-racialized problematics.

However, the specific focus of this chapter is the differcnts ways in which cultural memories shape contradictory meanings of ‘race’, self and identity for six women who by virtue of birth transgress boundaries and challenge essentialized constructions of self, identity, place and belonging. Their specific lived realities epitomize psychosocial struggles to make sense of explicit epistcmological tensions between subjectivity and alterity. In particular, drawing on their testimonies, I will address the ways in which six métissewomen confront problematic tensions between being métisse and becoming Black. English and Ghanaian philosopher Anthony Appiah (1992, p. 178) formulates an ethos of identities politics which reflects this complexity:

identities arc complex and muliiple and grow out of a history of changing responses to economic, political, and cultural forces, almost always in opposition to other identities… that they flourish despite what I earlier called our ‘misrecognition’ of their origins; despite that is, their roots in myths and lies… there is, in consequence, no large place for reason in the construction—as opposed to the study and management of identities.

The principal narrators are: Similola who has a White German mother and a Black Tanzanian father and Ruby, whose mother is middle class White English and her father middle class Black Nigerian, both of whom were brought up in children’s homes; Yemi and Bisi, who are sisters, grew up in a middle class family in Ibadan, Nigeria with both their White Northumberland English mother and their Black Yoruba-Nigerian father; and another set of sisters, Akousa and Sarah who came of age in a working class, predominantly Black African Caribbean community in Liverpool, with their orphaned White Irish mother and without their Black Bajan (from Barbados) father. Each woman’s mother is at once White and Irish, English or German. Their fathers are both Black and either Bajan, Nigerian or Tanzanian.

Accordingly, as their stories reveal, most of their identities work concerns the management and negotiation of polycthnicity in social and cultural contexts which frequently demand that they choose an essentialized Black identity. This is despite the fact that by virtue of lineage, they can and do situate themselves within at least two specific and yet over-lapping historical narratives…

Read the entire chapter here.

Woman traces her Tanzanian roots in film

The Citizen
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
2012-02-04

Tyrone Beason

Sometimes a journey begins with a song. In the case of Seattle documentary filmmaker Eli Kimaro, it was a transporting version of the classic lullaby Summertime from the African-American opera Porgy and Bess, this one sung by the Benin-born artist Angelique Kidjo as a West African spiritual, full of cooing background vocals and soul-tapping percussion.

Kimaro’s father is Tanzanian. Her mother is Korean. She’d always been comfortable with her mixed-race background, but something about hearing that song eight years ago sparked a longing to better understand the people she came from, particularly the relatives in Kilimanjaro region, where her father grew up and where she’d visited many times as a child.It dawned on her that she should make a film about her father’s side of the family, even though she’d never directed a movie in her life.

The result, A Lot Like You, debuted at the Seattle International Film Festival last year to positive reviews.

The film helps raise the profile of a population in the United States that many people who identify with just one racial or ethnic group scarcely understand…

…Elikimaro is part of a new wave of multiracial pride, discussion and activism rooted in a very real demographic shift.

America is, in fact, more multiracial. According to the 2010 U.S. census, more than 9 million Americans identified themselves as belonging to two or more racial groups, or about 2.9 per cent of the total population, up from 2.4 per cent a decade ago.

Since 2000, the census has made it easier than ever for people answering its surveys to pick more than one racial group; and Americans who have mixed-race backgrounds, long a cause for derision and marginalization, are ever more comfortable checking all the boxes that apply to them…

Read the entire article here.

Black Is a Multiracial Country

The Atlantic
2011-02-15

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Senior Editor

Tami [Tamara Winfrey Harris] finds out she’s 30 percent white. This changes nothing:

So, now, after discovering that I am 70 percent sub-Saharan African with cultural ties to Balanta and Fula peoples in Guinea-Bissau, the Mende people in Sierra Leone, and the Mandinka people in Senegal… that I am part of Haplogroup L1b, one of the oldest female lineages on Earth… and that I am also 30 percent European…Who am I now?

Well… the same person I was before. I am a black American woman with all the rich, cultural history that implies. Thirty percent European biogeographical ancestry (likely derived through oppression and sexual violence), doesn’t change my identity. I don’t think 60 percent European ancestry would change my identity. I am a black American—my culture is my culture. I would also add that learning more about my African roots doesn’t make me Senegalese or Fula or Mende. I am a black American—my culture is my culture.

I’ve been thinking about my response to the whole beiging of America story, and part of it is premised on the arguments, but I think another part (and perhaps the deepest part) is premised on my own understanding of identity. I haven’t been tested, but I recently “discovered” that some generations back I also had “white” ancestors. My response was basically the same as Tami’s—I’m black…

…The point here is that when we discuss a “beiging of America” as though it’s new, it really ignores the fact that beige people are as old this country. But sometime in the 17th century, for rather embarrassing reasons, we decided to call them “black.” Therein is the diabolical lesson of American racism. Prejudice is arbitrary. There are no fixed, natural rules that say who is in and who is out. As soon as the people change, given a good reason, “race” and “racism” change with it…

Read the entire article here.

Normal Families Facing Unique Challenges: The Psychosocial Functioning of Multiracial Couples, Parents and Children

The New School Psychology Bulletin
Volume 9, Number 1 (2011)
Print ISSN: 1931-793X; Online ISSN: 1931-7948

Joshua Wilt
Department of Psychology
Northwestern University

The number of interracial couples in the United States has increased rapidly since anti-miscegenation laws were repealed in 1967. Early stereotypes conceptualized interracial couples as pathological, highlighting the importance of research addressing the psychosocial functioning of these couples and multiracial families. This article provides a summary of research on the psychosocial functioning of interracial couples, multiracial children, and parent-child relationships in multiracial families. Results across these domains suggest that multiracial families are not pathological but rather that they are normal families faced with unique challenges. Counseling options to support multiracial families navigate such challenges are discussed. Themes emerging from research on the psychosocial functioning of multiracial families are identified and avenues for future research are suggested.

Read the entire article here.

Passing: How posing as white became a choice for many black Americans

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
2003-10-26

Monica L. Haynes, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

The young unkempt woman still in her pajamas shuffled into her 8 a.m. college psychology class and sat down next to Barbara Douglass.

“I’m sure glad there are no niggers in this class ’cause I can smell them a mile away,” the young woman declared.

But Douglass, who lives in Wilkinsburg, is a 53-year-old black woman. She could pass for white but she has never tried, she said.

“Growing up, I knew of people who did, and I was even instructed not to say, at that time, that they were colored. In order to get their jobs, they had to say they were white.”

The new film “The Human Stain,” based on a novel of the same name by Philip Roth, provides a glimpse into the world of blacks so fair they can live undetected among whites.

Thelma Marshall knows that routine.

During the 1950s and early ’60s, she did what her mother before her had done. What her grandmother and aunts had done.

She passed for white.

“One time I told a woman I was black, colored in those days,” Marshall recalled. “She said, ‘You won’t get the job unless you pass for white.’ ”

So that’s what Marshall did.

“I passed for white on lots of jobs,” she said. “I had to be white to get the jobs.” …

…”We are a child of God first. We are human beings first,” Douglass remembered her mother saying.

In fifth grade, she learned that the United States is a melting pot, and she declared to her mother that she would be a melting pot.

Her mother decided it was the perfect definition, seeing as how her ancestors were Cherokee, black, Dutch, German and Irish.

Maybe all blacks would have defined themselves that way given the chance. Since black people first came to the New World in 1619, they’ve mingled and mixed with every race and ethnic group here.

It is not just the fair-skinned blacks who can lay claim to that melting pot definition. Those blacks who have the mark of Africa in their features and skin tone also have multicultural ancestry. They just can’t pass.

Most blacks were never afforded the luxury of defining themselves. After the Civil War, Southern whites, not wanting this swirling of races to get out of hand and seeking to keep the white race as pure and powerful as possible, instituted a rule that anyone with “one drop” of black blood was black.

That spurred even more fair-skinned blacks to cross over and escape Jim Crow laws that kept blacks in the shackles of second-class citizenship…

Read the entire article here.

Don Lemon: Legacy of ‘one drop’ rule inspires search for family history

Cable News Network (CNN)
In America: You define America. What defines you?
2012-01-29

Don Lemon, Anchor
CNN Newsroom

This is  final installment of  a three-part series about the (1)ne Drop Project. Read Don Lemon’s column, “It only takes one drop,” and Yaba Blay’s column, “What does Blackness look like?“

You never know from where inspiration will come.
 
I am often envious of my friends who can recite stories about ancestors that have been handed down through generations. I can’t do that. As a descendant of slavery in America, that hasn’t felt possible for me. Truthfully, I didn’t think about it much until a few weeks ago, after I was asked by CNN’s In America team to write about the impact of a mixed racial background on my life, the idea that “one drop” of black blood makes you black.
 
In that article, I wrote about how my aunt and grandmother in Louisiana often were mistaken for white. I wrote about the extremes they went to in order to protect their husbands, who were black, from beatings by white men, or worse.
 
As I began to write the article, I sent a text message to my mother asking that she email photos of my aunt and grandmother. She sent me what she had, but asked why I wanted them. I told her I’d call to explain once I got home that evening.
 

When I finished the draft of the article, I zipped off a copy to her via email. A few minutes later, as I was driving home from work, my phone rang. When my mother began to tell me the stories of my aunt and grandmother, I had to pull over in a parking lot to take it all in. Some of it I knew. Much of it I didn’t…

Read the entire article here.

Opinion: What does Blackness look like?

Cable News Network (CNN)
In America: You define America. What defines you?
2012-01-21

Yaba Blay, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies
Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Editor’s note: Yaba Blay, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of Africana studies who teaches courses at Lafayette College. Her research focuses on black identity, with specific attention to skin color and hair politics. She is the recipient of a 2010 Leeway Foundation Art and Change Grant through which she embarked upon the book project, (1)ne Drop: Conversations on Skin Color, Race, and Identity.

I always thought I could spot a Black person anywhere. My eyes were trained in New Orleans—home to a historically preeminent group of folks who self-identify as “Creoles.”   Many of them would make it a point to announce that they are different—not White, not Black, but “Creole.”  A mix of African, Native American, French, and sometimes Spanish heritage, some Creoles are light-skinned enough to be mistaken for—or “pass”—for White people. We call them “passé blanc.”

One of my favorite pastimes as a youth in New Orleans was “picking out Black people” – people whom everyone else might have thought were White or “something else,” but whom I knew for a fact were Black. Somehow. Without even knowing it at the time, I had blindly accepted the “one-drop rule,” the early 1900’s law turned social rule that held that anyone with 1/32 of “African Black blood” was Black. And somehow I made it my mission to identify that “one-drop” any chance I could get. Maybe it was my way of retaliating against those who didn’t want to be associated with my kind – those whom I felt were somehow rejecting their own kind.

In my limited experiences, it seemed that people whose physical appearance gave them the “option” to be something else, chose to be something else.  So in my adult life, when I left New Orleans and began to meet people who were very adamant about their black identity, even though they could have easily identified as “mixed” or “Latino” or “Creole” or could have even “passed” for white, I found myself intrigued. On one particular occasion, I was on a panel hosted by the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI); and for as “learned” and as well-versed as (I thought) I was in global skin color politics, I found myself somehow taken aback each time either of my co-panelists, whom I would have identified as “Latino/a,” self-identified as “Black” and “African.”  In that moment, I felt ashamed of myself for questioning their identities based upon the stereotypical visions of “Blackness” that lived in my head. Afterwards, as I continued to struggle with myself, I knew that I wanted to do something with my feelings that could be useful to others like myself. I wanted to explore the “other” sides of Blackness.

So began my journey into the (1)ne Drop project…

Read the entire opinion piece here.