Mixed Race Studies

James Blake and the Myth of an Unarrestable Black Man

The Daily Beast
2015-09-10

Tomás Ríos

Bill Bratton said race ‘had nothing at all to do’ with tennis star James Blake’s wrongful collaring and arrest. The numbers tell a different story.

What does a non-white person have to do for the police to leave them alone? The ready answer is that you have to be more famous than former tennis star James Blake.

Blake was leaving his Midtown Manhattan hotel to make corporate appearances at the U.S. Open when five white, plainclothes New York City police officers tackled and handcuffed him on Wednesday.

The real answer, of course, is that not being white means there is no escape from the consequences of not being white.

Among those who buy into the mythic moral righteousness of our police forces, there is a belief that people of color need only be perfect little humans to cancel out the realities of a racist society. Go to college, smile, pull up your pants, don’t smile at white women, and the prescription for transcending race goes on and on.

It seems not even James Blake—who attended Harvard, overcame scoliosis and a broken neck to become a world-class tennis player, and is now a cancer research philanthropist—can be that perfect. The numbers on incarceration make that much clear…

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The twisted irony of the NYPD wrongly assaulting and detaining black tennis star James Blake

The Daily Kos
2015-09-10

Shawn King

Yeah. This really happened.

Retired black tennis star James Blake, in an NYPD double-fault, was slammed to a Manhattan sidewalk and handcuffed by a white cop in a brutal case of mistaken identity.

The 35-year-old Blake, once ranked No. 4 in the world, suffered a cut to his left elbow and bruises to his left leg as five plainclothes cops eventually held him for 15 minutes Wednesday outside the Grand Hyatt Hotel.

“It was definitely scary and definitely crazy,” Blake told the Daily News. “In my mind there’s probably a race factor involved, but no matter what there’s no reason for anybody to do that to anybody.”

Of course, Blake is right. This absolutely should not have happened, but that much is a obvious to all of us. There are questions we should be asking, though…

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Police Tactics in Harsh Glare After Arrest of James Blake

The New York Times
2015-09-10

Benjamin Mueller, Al Baker and Liz Robbins

A New York Police Department officer was stripped of his gun and badge as Mayor Bill de Blasio and Police Commissioner William J. Bratton issued swift apologies on Thursday for the rough arrest of James Blake, the retired tennis star, after he was misidentified as a suspect in a fraudulent credit card ring.

Criticism swirled over the possibility that Mr. Blake, who is biracial, had been racially profiled in the episode on Wednesday. But it was Mr. Bratton’s acknowledgment that Mr. Blake may have been treated too aggressively when an officer threw him to the ground that put a renewed focus on the everyday arrest tactics long criticized by the city’s minority residents.

The incongruity of a Harvard-educated professional athlete being manhandled by six white plainclothes officers on a sidewalk in Midtown Manhattan quickly became an embarrassment for the Police Department and a headache for Mr. de Blasio, exposing the kind of unprovoked aggression that he and elected leaders across the country have sought to stamp out.

The officer’s decision to throw an unarmed, compliant man to the ground added to the sense that black people are often roughed up by the police out of view, with few resources to bring attention to their grievances. Mr. Bratton said the officers had failed to report the arrest, as they were required to do.

In a sign of the shifting discourse on race and policing, Mr. de Blasio and Mr. Bratton moved with unusual speed to contact Mr. Blake to apologize. But the gestures also raised questions about whether they would have moved so swiftly if the encounter had not involved a well-known figure…

…“I do think most cops are doing a great job keeping us safe, but when you police with reckless abandon, you need to be held accountable,” Mr. Blake, whose mother is white and whose father was black, said in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”…

…Mr. Sanders said he saw the officers shove Mr. Blake face-first into a large, mirrored building support beam near the Hyatt. With his head wrenched to the side and his hands cuffed behind him, Mr. Blake tried to talk.

Mr. Sanders said he saw the officers shove Mr. Blake face-first into a large, mirrored building support beam near the Hyatt. With his head wrenched to the side and his hands cuffed behind him, Mr. Blake tried to talk….

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Suit filed over mix-up at Downers Grove sperm bank is dismissed

The Chicago Tribune
2015-09-03

Clifford Ward

A judge Thursday dismissed a lawsuit filed by an Ohio woman against a west suburban sperm bank whose clerical error resulted in the birth of her mixed-race daughter.

DuPage County Judge Ronald Sutter tossed the suit after lawyers for Midwest Sperm Bank argued that the woman’s claims lacked legal merit. But the judge said Jennifer Cramblett of Uniontown, Ohio, could refile her lawsuit under a negligence claim.

Cramblett, who did not attend Thursday’s hearing, filed suit last year against the Downers Grove-based sperm bank alleging wrongful birth and breach of warranty following the birth of her daughter, who is of African-American ancestry.

Cramblett and her same-sex partner purchased sperm with the understanding that it was from a Caucasian donor, but later discovered that the sperm bank had sent material from an African-American donor. The mistake was caused by a clerical error, and the bank later issued an apology and a partial refund…

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Biological Determinism and Racial Essentialism

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Volume 661, Number 1, September 2015
pages 8-22
DOI: 10.1177/0002716215591476

W. Carson Byrd, Assistant Professor of Pan-African Studies
University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky

Matthew W. Hughey, Professor of Sociology
University of Connecticut

In August 2012, nine months after being artificially inseminated using a sperm donation from the Midwest Sperm Bank of Downers Grove, Illinois, a white Ohio woman named Jennifer Cramblett gave birth to a racially “mixed” and healthy baby girl named Payton. Despite the triumph, the woman soon filed a “wrongful birth” suit in Cook County Circuit Court, alleging that the sperm bank gave her sperm vials from an African American donor instead of a white donor, which in turn caused “personal injuries . . . pain, suffering, emotional distress and other economic and non-economic losses” (Circuit Court 2014, 8). The lawsuit states “that they now live each day with fears, anxieties and uncertainty about her future and Payton’s future” (Circuit Court 2014, 6).

The supposed racial mismatch between parent and child in Cramblett v. Midwest Sperm Bank reveals the presence of two powerful belief systems that haunt both the popular imagination and stalk the scientific landscape: the notions of “biological determinism” (that race is genetically inherited) and “racial essentialism” (that group-based biology maps to basic social behaviors). Together, biological determinism and racial essentialism form the “ideological double helix” that intertwines to shape beliefs about race and inequality and influence the theoretical approaches, analytic strategies, and interpretations taken by scholars conducting biomedical and social scientific research. The suit turns on the assumption that varied racial groups have bounded and characteristically unique arrangements of genetic material: as the complaint contends, “Their desire was to find a donor with genetic traits similar to both of them” (Circuit Court 2014, 2–3). Such devotion to racial essentialism motivates a belief that the two white parents in this case are more similar to each other (because of their shared “whiteness”) than they are to their child (because of an unknown “black” father), even though the…

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Why Right-Wing Bloggers Are Desperate To Prove Biracial People Aren’t Black

Think Progress
2015-08-21

Aviva Shen, Senior Editor

Shaun King, right, addresses the controversy over his racial identity.

Right-wing media has been abuzz over the past few weeks with rumors that Black Lives Matter activist and writer Shaun King is not actually black. Breitbart and other more mainstream outlets like the Daily Beast compared King to Rachel Dolezal, the Spokane NAACP leader whose parents revealed she was white earlier this year. The harassment escalated so much that King finally published an emotional personal account Thursday evening, explaining that his biological father is an unknown black man who had an affair with his mother.

Some of the same bloggers have apparently also “investigated” the parentage of Wesley Lowery, a biracial Washington Post reporter who covers the Black Lives Matter movement.

The harassment of King recalls a long American tradition of telling multiracial people what their identities can and cannot contain. The notorious “one drop rule” — which legally declared anyone with black ancestry, no matter how light-skinned or blue-eyed they were, as mulatto or colored — was central to maintaining a white supremacist hierarchy in the South well into the 20th century. Many people who could get away with it “passed” as white so as to enjoy the privileges of segregated services closed off to black people…

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Mark Duggan: mother of man shot dead by police in 2011 calls for urgent inquiry

The Guardian
2015-08-04

Diane Taylor

Pamela Duggan claims police could have done much more to track down the man who supplied a weapon to her son. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA

Call for new inquiry comes as demonstrators prepare to march to Tottenham police station close to where Duggan was shot by police four years ago

The mother of Mark Duggan, whose fatal shooting by police led to the 2011 London riots, is calling for an urgent inquiry by the home secretary into the events that led to her son’s death four years ago.

Demonstrators are due to march to Tottenham police station later on Tuesday close to where Duggan was shot by police on 4 August 2011, shortly after collecting a firearm from gun supplier Kevin Hutchinson-Foster.

The jury at the inquest into Duggan’s death found that police could have done more to take the gun off the street in the days before he picked it up. Photograph: Rex Features

A demonstration outside the same police station a few days after Duggan’s fatal shooting was followed by the biggest riots in the UK for years…

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Race, love, hate, and me: A distinctly American story

Daily Kos
2015-08-20

Shaun King

[Shaun King] 14 years old. Sophomore in high school

Over the past 72 hours I have been attacked with lies by the conservative media, lies that have been picked up by the traditional media and spread further. I have kept silent at the advice of friends and mentors, but I will do so no longer.

The reports about my race, about my past, and about the pain I’ve endured are all lies. My mother is a senior citizen. I refuse to speak in detail about the nature of my mother’s past, or her sexual partners, and I am gravely embarrassed to even be saying this now, but I have been told for most of my life that the white man on my birth certificate is not my biological father and that my actual biological father is a light-skinned black man. My mother and I have discussed her affair. She was a young woman in a bad relationship and I have no judgment. This has been my lived reality for nearly 30 of my 35 years on earth. I am not ashamed of it, or of who I am—never that—but I was advised by my pastor nearly 20 years ago that this was not a mess of my doing and it was not my responsibility to fix it. All of my siblings and I have different parents. I’m actually not even sure how many siblings I have. It is horrifying to me that my most personal information, for the most nefarious reasons, has been forced out into the open and that my private past and pain have been used as jokes and fodder to discredit me and the greater movement for justice in America. I resent that lies have been reported as truth and that the obviously racist intentions of these attacks have been consistently downplayed at my expense and that of my family…

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The Shaun King controversy, explained

Vox
2015-08-20

German Lopez, Staff writer

Shaun King (Source: Twitter)

Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King is currently at the center of a controversy that has nothing to do with a police shooting or brutality — it’s, instead, about his personal life and racial identity.

Over the past several weeks, conservative media outlets have published multiple pieces disputing different claims King has made about his life over the years. And the latest accusations — which caused the story to trend on Twitter — have called into question whether King is biracial, as he claims.

There’s a bit of history to this conflict. But the fact that a self-identified biracial man is being chastised by conservative media outlets as part of an attempt to discredit him shows just how fluid the entire concept of race can be, and that makes it difficult to know who’s right and wrong when questions about race come up…

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Tony Robinson’s mother files civil rights lawsuit over fatal police shooting of son

The Guardian
2015-08-13

Zoe Sullivan

Andrea Irwin alleges officer Matt Kenny violated 14th amendment equal protection rights and fourth amendment right against unreasonable searches

The mother of a biracial man killed by a white police officer in Madison, Wisconsin, has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit over her son’s death in March.

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday by Tony Robinson’s mother, Andrea Irwin, alleges that officer Matt Kenny violated the equal protection rights guaranteed by the 14th amendment as well as Robinson’s fourth amendment right against unreasonable searches.

At a rally Wednesday afternoon outside the state capitol, Robinson’s mother told the small crowd gathered that the lawsuit was part of an effort to end needless deaths of black men at the hands of police. “This will stop. If this is the only way that we can start to do this, then by God, this is how we will do this.”

Robinson was shot on 6 March during an altercation with Kenny, who told investigators that he thought he heard a disturbance in an apartment recently entered by Robinson…

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