Mixed Race Studies

“My Kids Are Getting The Message Loud And Clear: Being Black Is A Burden”

Vogue UK
2020-07-05

Christabel Nsiah-Buadi

^©Misan Harriman

Unable to shield her children from the global conversation on anti-Black racism, Christabel Nsiah-Buadi is leaning in to celebrating her kids’ #BlackBoyJoy and #BlackGirlMagic. But, she writes, real change takes time.

A few weeks ago, my daughter handed me one of her final pieces of first-grade homework. It was a memory book. On the front page, she had coloured all of the kids with brown skin. Inside, she drew a picture of herself hugging her teacher, who is Asian American. She coloured both of them with pink skin.

I found that strange, because it was the first time my kid had done that in her nearly eight years. As a child with a white father and a black mother, she is used to seeing people of different skin colours in her life. Indeed, my husband and I have made a conscious effort to make sure she could see the power in being a brown-skinned girl, because we knew that by being a Black kid living in the US or the UK, it was only a matter of time before she’d be told – by someone in her life, or something she heard, saw or watched – that she was less valued than her white friends…

Read the entire article here.

Brit Bennett: ‘Last week was truly the wildest week of my life’

The Guardian
2020-07-05

Simran Hans

‘I’m Californian, so nobody really reads me as anxious’: Brit Bennett. Photograph: Leonardo Cendamo/Getty Images

The US author on topping the bestseller charts with her new novel, why being right is overrated, and the TV show bringing her joy in lockdown

Brit Bennett, 30, was born and raised in southern California. She attended Stanford University and earned an MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan. Her acclaimed first novel, The Mothers, was published in 2016, when she was 26. Her follow-up, The Vanishing Half, has spent the past three weeks in the top five of the New York Times bestseller list and the screen rights have been optioned by HBO in a seven-figure deal.

HBO had to outbid 17 rival TV companies in the race to adapt your book for the screen. How does that feel?
Last week was truly the wildest week of my life. It was my birthday week, so I’ve never been sent so many bottles of champagne or bouquets of flowers in my life, and probably never will be again.

And that was on top of your book debuting at No 1 in the NYT bestseller list. What were you doing when you heard the news?
It was maybe 5 o’clock in the evening and I was just sitting on my couch, and my editor called out of nowhere. We were optimistic, but I never imagined that. The people who are No 1 are household names, like Stephen King!

Describe The Vanishing Half.
It’s a story about twin sisters, Desiree and Stella, who decide to live their lives on opposite sides of the colour line – one as a white woman and one as a black woman…

Read the entire interview here.

HBO Wins ‘The Vanishing Half’ Auction In 7-Figure Deal; 17 Bidders Pursued Brit Bennett Bestseller

Deadline
2020-06-29

Mike Fleming Jr

HBO

EXCLUSIVE: HBO won a wild auction that sources said saw 17 bidders vying for The Vanishing Half, the novel by Brit Bennett that is currently atop The New York Times bestseller list. Sources said HBO will pay low seven-figures for the book and the author will be executive producer of what HBO will develop as a limited series.

The novel focuses on the Vignes sisters, identical twins who, after growing up together in a small, southern black community, run away at age sixteen. It’s not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it’s everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Ten years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other passes for white, hiding her identity from her husband, who knows nothing of her past. Even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters’ storylines intersect?…

Read the entire article here.

Pierce Freelon Breaks Down the Invention of Whiteness in a New Animated Musical Series

Indy Week
2020-07-02

Brian Howe

Whoopi Goldberg and Pierce Freelon photo courtesy of the artist

“Hey you, Caucasian,” Pierce Freelon raps with confiding urgency as the video begins. He goes on to break down the formation of American whiteness from varied ethnic groups—something defined not by what it was, but by what it wasn’t, meaning Black and Indigenous—over an energetic collage of animated images.

It’s the first trailer for The History of White People in America, which premieres Monday, July 6 on PBS World. Freelon—Blackspace founder, former Durham mayoral candidate, and soon-to-be “family album” creator—is the co-director, writer, and musical composer of the series, which was selected by curator Whoopi Goldberg for the Tribeca Film Festival’s animated-shorts category…

Read the entire article here.

Shadow Child

Grand Central Publishing
2018-05-08
352 pages
Hardcover ISBN-13: 9781538711453
eBook ISBN-13: 9781538711446

Rahna Reiko Rizzuto

For fans of Tayari Jones and Ruth Ozeki, from National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Rizzuto comes a haunting and suspenseful literary tale set in 1970s New York City and World War II-era Japan, about three strong women, the dangerous ties of family and identity, and the long shadow our histories can cast.

Twin sisters Hana and Kei grew up in a tiny Hawaiian town in the 1950s and 1960s, so close they shared the same nickname. Raised in dreamlike isolation by their loving but unstable mother, they were fatherless, mixed-race, and utterly inseparable, devoted to one another. But when their cherished threesome with Mama is broken, and then further shattered by a violent, nearly fatal betrayal that neither young woman can forgive, it seems their bond may be severed forever–until, six years later, Kei arrives on Hana’s lonely Manhattan doorstep with a secret that will change everything.

Told in interwoven narratives that glide seamlessly between the gritty streets of New York, the lush and dangerous landscape of Hawaii, and the horrors of the Japanese internment camps and the bombing of Hiroshima, Shadow Child is set against an epic sweep of history. Volcanos, tsunamis, abandonment, racism, and war form the urgent, unforgettable backdrop of this intimate, evocative, and deeply moving story of motherhood, sisterhood, and second chances.

No Room for Beige Tears

Alison Hart
2020-06-08

Alison Hart

After the video went viral of George Floyd mercilessly murdered in the street by police, held down, knee on neck, for eight minutes and forty-six seconds, the whole world woke up to the American dream for what it is. Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Sandra Bland, and many more Black lives brutalized and murdered by police and white supremacists in a country that claims “liberty and justice for all.” We still haven’t gotten off the plantation the racist system locked in place, four hundred years of Black resistance—locked in place—lock them up in prisons, in poverty as disposable citizens.

In Alameda, California, where I live, a Black man was recently arrested for dancing on the street. That’s right, dancing. He was doing his usual morning exercise routine and a white neighbor called the police. The result: police pinned him to the ground, handcuffed, arrested, and detained him. It’s on video, you can look it up. It could have turned deadly when he reached for his keys, deadly at any moment. White people policing Black bodies by calling police because of their unchecked discomfort and racial bias too often yields fatal results and should be charged as hate crimes.

White America is uncomfortable, and I say get used to it. As a mixed race Black, Native American, Irish, Scottish, English woman I have developed the skill to decenter in this racially stratified society. In order to have empathy for another’s experience, I need to decenter my own. I am able to hold my disequilibrium when in any group of people. Decentering is the first step that allows you to feel empathy outside your experience. Wherever I am I do not expect people to “get” me, to make my existence okay, or validate me…

Read the entire article here.

Soledad O’Brien: A MeToo Moment for Journalists of Color

The New York Times
2020-07-04

Soledad O’Brien

Soledad O’Brien Roy Rochlin/Getty Images

We’re finally feeling empowered to speak openly about racism in the newsroom.

Every journalist of color has a story.

My first job as an on-air reporter was at KRON in San Francisco from 1993 to 1996. I saw my new colleagues having a lively conversation and wanted to jump in. I discovered that they were talking about the “affirmative-action hire,” who turned out to be me. That’s how they saw me — it didn’t matter that I’d been a researcher and producer at NBC News or that I had gone to Harvard.

At that same job, the managers half-joked that they had taken their lives into their own hands when their morning commute was rerouted through Oakland. I was the bureau chief for the East Bay, which includes Oakland, and they would be signing off on my reports hours later.

So, as other journalists of color in these recent weeks have spoken up about their lack of representation and influence in newsrooms, and how that warps coverage, I know exactly what they’re talking about: how treatment leads to unfair coverage. What’s most disturbing, though, is how much their stories, in 2020, sound like mine from several decades ago…

Read the entire article here.

The Confederate Flag Finally Falls in Mississippi

The New Yorker
2020-07-01

W. Ralph Eubanks, Visiting Scholar in Southern Studies
University of Mississippi

Even after the civil-rights movement changed Mississippi and America, the state held on to its flag, asserting that it had everything to do with heritage and nothing to do with hate. Photograph by Dan Anderson / EPA-EFE / Shutterstock

Even after digging deep into my memory bank, I can’t remember the team that played at my first home football game, in 1974, when I was a student at the University of Mississippi. What reverberates from that day into my consciousness is both a sound and a vision: the abrupt thud of a bundle of flags, bearing the bright and unmistakable pattern of the Confederate stars and bars, landing at my feet. Acting on impulse, I pushed this unwanted object down a row in the stadium with my foot. Confederate flags always looked and felt like a threat, whether on the back of a pickup truck on a lonely country road or in the hands of angry white men and women on the sidelines of a civil-rights march. Given their abrupt arrival near my body, and years of conditioning as a black Mississippian, I could not resist the urge to shove them away as if they were an intruder or a bully.

Later that sunny fall afternoon, after a more amenable recipient got hold of the bundle of flags, they were passed down the row where my date and I were sitting. Both of us were dressed according to game-day tradition, me in a blazer and she in a dress and heels. When the flags reached us again, we leaned back, our hands gripping the wooden bleachers, to keep from touching what we viewed as objects of intimidation. We didn’t want to spread them. Soon, though, we were lost in a sea of the Confederate cantons that mirrored the image of the Mississippi state flag. In spite of how perfectly we conformed to the dress code, we felt as if we did not belong in the stadium. But we refused to leave—we wanted to prove that we had a right to be there…

Read the entire article here.

My message to biracial people questioning their role in Black Lives Matter

TODAY
2020-06-30

Dr. Sarah E. Gaither, Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience
Duke University

As a biracial Black and white woman with white skin and brown wavy hair, does my anger in response to the countless racist murders taking place across our country even matter? Because of how I look, I find myself questioning whether the pain I feel right now should even be acknowledged.

Over the past few weeks, I have received countless emails and Twitter messages from other biracial people — some friends, others complete strangers — asking for guidance in thinking about their own identities. One said, “I have always identified as Black, but these past few weeks have made me feel so white that now I’m questioning if I ever should have identified as Black because maybe I am too white-looking to claim that part of me.”…

Read the entire article here.

MLB’s Ian Desmond, in a powerful post about racism and social injustice, opts out of the 2020 season

Cable News Network (CNN)
2020-06-30

Scottie Andrew and Jillian Martin, CNN

Ian Desmond of the Colorado Rockies won’t play in the upcoming 2020 MLB season.

(CNN) Major League Baseball player Ian Desmond is opting out of the truncated 2020 season. Coronavirus concerns factored into his decision, but so did the national reckoning with racism — something Desmond says needs to happen within the league, too.

The Colorado Rockies outfielder, in a lengthy and emotional Instagram post, detailed how he made his decision and how racism impacted his life within the sport and outside of it as a biracial Black man.

Desmond, an 11-year MLB veteran, has played the past three seasons with the Rockies after signing a five-year, $70 million contract…

Read the entire article here.