Mixed Race Studies

In Roxane Gay’s Difficult Women, you’re either difficult or you’re dead

Vox
2017-01-03

Constance Grady, Culture Writer

When Roxane Gay picks up a label, she’ll play with it, rip it apart a little, break it down, and finally embrace it. She did it in 2014 with her essay collection, Bad Feminist, which explored what it means to be a committed feminist who also likes to dance to “Blurred Lines,” who is not beholden to an ideological purity. And now she’s doing it again in her new short story collection, Difficult Women.

A difficult woman, in these stories, is usually a woman who has been hurt, typically by living under the patriarchy and under white supremacy. The injuries vary, ranging in scope from the blunt force of unimaginable trauma to the death-by-a-thousand-papercuts of daily microaggressions.

In “I Will Follow You,” the difficult woman was kidnapped by a child molester when she was 10 years old. In “La Negra Blanca,” she’s a mixed-race med student who moonlights as a stripper and is constantly fetishized by men who think of her as a white girl with a black girl’s ass. In “Best Features,” she’s a fat woman who is quietly furious at how worthless the world considers her to be…

Read the entire review here.

The unbelievable life of the forgotten genius who turned Americans’ space dreams into reality

Business Insider
2016-08-22

Meghan Bartels

There’s no protocol for women attending,” says a white man in a suit holding a sheaf of papers.

“There’s no protocol for a man circling the Earth either, sir,” Taraji P. Henson retorts in my favorite line from the new trailer for the movie “Hidden Figures,” due theaters this January.

Henson plays Katherine Johnson, a brilliant mathematician at NASA working on the space program in its earliest days, beginning in the 1950s. Many of NASA’s first missions were made possible by Johnson’s intrepid, unparalleled calculations.

The movie is based on a nonfiction book of the same name by Margot Lee Shetterly, who grew up near NASA’s Langley Research Center, where Johnson and her colleagues worked.

Johnson still lives near Langley in Hampton, Virginia, where she’ll be celebrating her 98th birthday later this month. Keep scrolling to learn the true story of her incredible life…

Read the entire article here.

The Obama Paradox

Slate
2017-01-09

Jamelle Bouie, Chief Political Correspondent

Our first black president has an unyielding faith in the goodness of America. It got him elected. And it will cost him his legacy.

The myth of Barack Obama usually begins with his speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention, and for good reason—it was the speech that jump-started his political career, putting the then–state senator on the fast track to national office. But it wasn’t the speech that made him president. That speech was delivered at a moment of crisis. His former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was in the middle of a media firestorm over a sermon he had given in 2003 in the wake of the Iraq invasion. “No, no, no. Not God bless America,” thunders Wright in the now-infamous video. “God Damn America!”…

…For Obama, who built his political appeal on his distance from this rhetoric—from the tenor and tone of traditional black politics—Wright’s sermon was a disaster in the making. To operate in the mainstream, to attain influence and power, black public figures have to navigate a narrow strait of acceptable behavior. They cannot indulge their anger or give way to their passions. And for Obama, who sought an office all but reserved for white men, he had to prove that he wasn’t an Al Sharpton or a Jesse Jackson, that he held no resentment or frustration with the country. And so on March 18, 2008, Obama delivered an address in Philadelphia now known as his “A More Perfect Union” speech. In it, he repudiated Wright’s anger without dismissing its sources, and along the way he demonstrated the qualities that have defined him as president: a sense of balance, a willingness to look to the better angels of his opponents, a belief that there is always common ground…

Read the entire article here.

The Verging Cities, Poetry

Center For Literary Publishing
2015
80 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-885635-43-3
6.5 x 8.5 inches

Natalie Scenters-Zapico

• Poets and Writers Top Debut Poets 2015
• Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award
• NACCS-Tejas Foco Best Poetry Book of 2015

Ninth in the Mountain West Poetry Series, edited by Stephanie G’Schwind & Donald Revell

From undocumented men named Angel, to angels falling from the sky, Natalie Scenters-Zapico’s gripping debut collection, The Verging Cities, is filled with explorations of immigration and marriage, narco-violence and femicide, and angels in the domestic sphere. Deeply rooted along the US-México border in the sister cities of El Paso, Texas, and Cd. Juárez, Chihuahua, these poems give a brave new voice to the ways in which international politics affect the individual. Composed in a variety of forms, from sonnet and epithalamium to endnotes and field notes, each poem distills violent stories of narcos, undocumented immigrants, border patrol agents, and the people who fall in love with each other and their traumas.

The border in Scenters-Zapico’s The Verging Cities exists in a visceral place where the real is (sur)real. In these poems mouths speak suspended from ceilings, numbered metal poles mark the border and lovers’ spines, and cities scream to each other at night through fences that “ooze only silt.” This bold new vision of border life between what has been named the safest city in the United States and the murder capital of the world is in deep conversation with other border poets—Benjamin Alire Saenz, Gloria Anzaldúa, Alberto Ríos, and Luis Alberto Urrea—while establishing itself as a new and haunting interpretation of the border as a verge, the beginning of one thing and the end of another in constant cycle.

Read an excerpt here.

Episode 199 – Michael Tisserand

Virtual Memories: The chief of the Inner Station
2017-01-02

Gil Roth, Host

“I always feel like Herriman’s a a step ahead of me. When I read Krazy Kat I think I know what I’m reading; the next week I read the same strip and I realize I’m reading something different than I thought I was reading.”

For our 199th episode, Michael Tisserand joins the show to talk about his fantastic new book, Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White (Harper). We discuss Krazy Kat, race in America and the phenomenon of racial passing, newsroom culture, conducting research on microfilm in the age of Google, the allure of New Orleans, what it was like to write the biography of an enigma, and a lot more. So don’t be a bald-faced gazooni! Give it a listen! And go buy KRAZY!

“Herriman treated language as something that wasn’t up to shouldering the kind of burdens that we put on it.”

Listen to the episode (01:31:23) here download the episode here.

Who Is Katherine Johnson?

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
2016-12-30

Heather S. Deiss
NASA Educational Technology Services

Denise Miller
NASA Educational Technology Services

Katherine Johnson
Credits: Katherine Johnson

This article is part of the NASA Knows! (Grades 5-8) series.

Katherine Johnson is an African-American mathematician who worked for NASA from 1953 until 1986. She was a human computer. In a time when minorities held very few jobs in mathematics and science, Johnson was a trailblazer. Her work in calculating the paths for spaceships to travel was monumental in helping NASA successfully put an American in orbit around Earth. Then her work helped to land astronauts on the moon.

What Was Katherine Johnson’s Early Life Like?

Katherine Johnson was born in 1918 in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. As a very young girl, she loved to count things. She counted everything, from the number of steps she took to get to the road to the number of forks and plates she washed when doing the dishes.

Johnson was born with a love for mathematics. At a young age, she was very eager to go to school. Now in her 90s, Johnson can vividly remember watching her older siblings go to school, wishing so much that she could go with them. When Johnson finally did start school, she so excelled that by age 10, she was in high school. By age 15, she’d started college!…

Read the entire article here.

Discourses of Citizenship in American and Brazilian Affirmative Action Court Decisions

American Journal of Comparative Law
Volume 64, Number 2, (Summer 2016)
pages 455-504
DOI: 10.5131/AJCL.2016.0015

Adilson José Moreira
Harvard University; Mackenzie Presbyterian University

American and Brazilian courts are traveling quite different paths regarding the question of racial justice. Race neutrality has become an influential interpretive approach in both jurisdictions, a perspective that articulates a depiction of these nations as culturally homogenous societies with the defense of liberal principles as a necessary requirement for social cohesion. Because of the representation of Brazil and the United States as democracies that facilitate integration of all racial groups, courts in these countries have developed an equal protection approach that combines the rhetoric of assimilation and formal equality. However, while the discourse of race neutrality gains continuous political force in the United States, race consciousness is acquiring increasing persuasive power in Brazil. As the implementation of affirmative action programs has expanded into different sectors, various social actors have questioned their constitutionality. Although state and federal courts in Brazil have condemned affirmative action because it supposedly subverts liberal principles and moral consensus about equal racial treatment, the Brazilian Supreme Court has recently classified race neutrality as a strategy of racial domination. Differently from American affirmative action cases, this decision formulated a notion of citizenship that functions as a counterhegemonic narrative. In articulating progressive constitutional principles and a group-oriented equal protection perspective, the Brazilian Supreme Court has significantly contributed to the deconstruction of the traditional discourse of race transcendence. The Court’s decisions may serve as an interesting point of comparison for the debate about affirmative action in the United States, since Brazilian history shows very clearly how race neutrality allows majoritarian groups to defend racial privilege while advocating formal equality as a way to promote social inclusion.

Read the entire article here.

BEST OF 2016: 12 on Tuesday with Matthew Braunginn

Madison365
Madison, Wisconsin
2016-12-21

Henry Sanders

Matthew Braunginn

A founder of the Young, Gifted and Black Coalition, Matthew Braunginn works to close the achievement gaps as a coordinator with UW’s PEOPLE program. [Since this came out, Braunginn has become the Student Engagement Specialist for the Middleton-Cross Plains Area School District. –Ed.] He’s also a regular columnist for Madison365.

Rank your Top five MCs. I love the Wu-Tang Clan. They’re for the kids, they’re also my favorite group and 36-Chambers is a better album than Illmatic, I stand by that. Listen to them side by side and you’ll know what I mean. But this is about MC’s and I’ll try and respect this rule here cuz I’m sure I’ll break many more as I go on. So let’s see here…my favorites:…

…What does it mean to be Interracial in Madison? This question…this is a massive question that I could write a dissertation on. But it’s unique in so many ways. I think that in one way I was able to see the depths of white supremacy in a way that few non-white, particularly black people, get to see.

I mean, this city “othered” me in so many ways, which, if you see me, can be laughable because I’m white-passing. It’s funny because ever since I wrote the piece “Not Quite White” for Madison365 I’ve had mostly mixed people or black people in mixed race relationships assume two things: One, they assume the background of my father is mixed because I’m light skinned. (There is mixing on my dad’s side of the family, but it shows how ignorant people are of the history of that in America.) And two, they assume I’m saying that something is wrong with being mixed. I mean, c’mon now, they didn’t read the piece, they didn’t see that it’s my lived experiences, mixed with understanding the history of the Black American experience that led me to say I’m a mixed-race, BLACK male. Not just mixed, not mixed with white, like there’s something wrong with being black, like I’m part white, why would I ever want to be Black? Which just shows the depths of white supremacy.

That’s the thing; I was never fully accepted as white, even though I’m white passing, which caused a lot of confusion growing up. I didn’t know how I was – was I black or white? Some ungodly mixed between the two, forever existing between the ether, never knowing when white people would decide I could pass for white or when they would want me to be Black. That is part of the diversity of the Black American experience. This isn’t about the “one drop” rule; it’s about how deep white supremacy goes that someone like me can still feel and experience it. That I can be in a group of white people that is in the middle of an encounter with cops, and the officers somehow are more aggressive towards me than the white people around me. I learned, through being aware enough of my experiences, that I am not white, nor will I ever be; white supremacy, white people will make sure to let me know that I am not white. So I claim my black identity with pride, as I want nothing to do with the legacy of white supremacy and want to help this nation break free of that. But more importantly I know there is nothing wrong with being black, that black is beautiful, that that is part of my history, it’s in my blood; my grandfather’s cousin A. Leon Higginbotham helped write the South African constitution, I mean, c’mon. And even more important I love my dashes of melanin and will glow in my blackness; I love my blackness and yours…

Read the entire article here.

Mixing It Up: Students, professors reflect on the definition of mixed race in modern society

HiLite: Your Source For CHS News
Carmel High School, Carmel, Indiana
2016-12-12

Allison Li, Calendar/Beats Editor, Feature Reporter

Junior Kiki Koniaris is Korean, Pennsylvanian Dutch and Grecian. Despite being of mixed race, Koniaris said she believes race should not define a person.

“I feel like (how you define yourself) should be based off of personal attributes in general,” Koniaris said. “Because if you start defining everyone by race, then at a certain point, it becomes this idea that we separate ourselves based on race, and I think history has shown us that that’s not the best idea. But with that being said, sometimes you want to say, ‘I’m different from everyone else because this is how my culture worked out.’”

But while Koniaris said race shouldn’t define people, the very recognition of people of mixed races is still relatively new in this country. In the 1967 Loving v. Virginia case, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down previous laws prohibiting interracial marriage. In 2000, the U.S. Census Bureau first allowed people to identify themselves. With those statistics in mind, in the just last 50 years, the population of people of mixed races has increased exponentially. According to a 2015 Pew Research study, between 2000 and 2010, the number of white and black biracial Americans has more than doubled, while people of white and Asian backgrounds have increased by 87 percent.

This inclusion of mixed races has led to societal changes, as well as some discomfort form those who discuss those changes. According to Matthew Hayes, assistant professor of political science at IU, when identifying people of mixed race, there has been a general accompaniment of ‘politically correct’ terminologies. That language comes both from those who are not of mixed backgrounds, as well as from those who are…

Read the article here.

“IT’S LIKE WE HAVE AN ‘IN’ ALREADY”: The Racial Capital of Black/White Biracial Americans

Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race
Published online: 2016-12-19
DOI: 10.1017/S1742058X16000357

Chandra D. L. Waring, Assistant Professor
Department of Sociology, Criminology and Anthropology
University of Wisconsin, Whitewater

The increasing bi/multiracial¹ community in the United States has generated much literature about racial identity and social psychological well-being. Drawing on sixty in-depth interviews with Black/White biracial Americans, this paper shifts the theoretical focus from identity and well-being to the conceptual development of how race shapes bi/multiracial Americans’ social interactions with both Whites and Blacks. The majority of participants reported interacting differently when in predominately White settings versus predominately Black settings. I offer the concept of “racial capital” to highlight the repertoire of racial resources (knowledge, experiences, meaning, and language) that biracial Americans use to negotiate racial boundaries in a highly racialized society. These findings reveal the continuing significance of racial boundaries in a population that is often celebrated as evidence of racial harmony in the United States.

Read or purchase the article here.