Mixed Race Studies

In ‘Loving,’ an American story about a marriage worth fighting for

PBS NewsHour
2016-11-15

A new movie, “Loving,” tells the real-life story of Richard and Mildred Loving, a Virginia couple who were arrested because interracial marriage was illegal in their home state. They appealed their case and won a landmark civil rights ruling at the Supreme Court. Jeffrey Brown speaks with director Jeff Nichols and others about how they brought the love story to the screen.

HARI SREENIVASAN: The film “Loving” opened nationwide over the weekend. It tells the true story of Richard and Loving, rural Virginians of different races who married in Washington, D.C.

On return to their home in Virginia, they were arrested for violating laws against interracial marriage. Their case eventually made it to the Supreme Court.

Jeffrey Brown has our story.

JOEL EDGERTON, Actor, “Richard Loving”: I’m going to build you a house right here, our house.

JEFFREY BROWN: “Loving” tells the real-life love story of Richard and Mildred Loving, a Virginia couple who married in 1958 in Washington, D.C., because interracial marriage was illegal in their home state…

Read the entire story here.

How To Fix Our Sub-Conscious Racism: A Mixed-Race Perspective | Elizabeth Dobson | TEDxLehighRiver

TEDx Talks
2016-11-15

Elizabeth Dobson

Liz’s TEDxLehighRiver Talk is based on one of the unique perspectives of many multiethnic people, and how that perspective is critical to help all of us learn how to engage and connect with each other across stereotypical race “color lines”. She offers strategies for overcoming sub-conscious racism.

Elizabeth Dobson is a multiracial woman and the youngest of three children adopted into her all white family. She grew up in rural Pennsylvania where she thrived socially and academically despite being one of few minorities in her hometown. Liz recently created a blog to educate and empower a growing demographic of interracial and adoptive families. She understands they have important and unique challenges and perspectives within their families and communities.

Prevalence of High-Risk Sexual Behaviors Among Monoracial and Multiracial Groups from a National Sample: Are Multiracial Young Adults at Greater Risk?

Archives of Sexual Behavior
Volume 45, Issue 2, February 2016
pages 467–475
DOI: 10.1007/s10508-015-0647-5

Antoinette M. Landor, Assistant Professor
Department of Human Development and Family Science
University of Missouri, Columbia

Carolyn Tucker Halpern, Professor
Department of Maternal and Child Health
Gillings School of Global Public Health
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

The present study compared the prevalence and variation in high-risk sexual behaviors among four monoracial (i.e., White, African American, Asian, Native American) and four multiracial (i.e., White/African American, White/Asian, White/Native American, African American/Native American) young adults using Wave IV data (2008–2009) from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (N = 9724). Findings indicated differences in the sexual behavior of monoracial and multiracial young adults, but directions of differences varied depending on the monoracial group used as the referent and gender. Among males, White/African Americans had higher risk than Whites; White/Native Americans had higher risk than Native Americans. Otherwise, multiracial groups had lower risk or did not differ from the single-race groups. Among females, White/Native Americans had higher risk than Whites; White/African Americans had higher risk than African Americans. Other comparisons showed no differences or had lower risk among multiracial groups. Variations in high-risk sexual behaviors underscore the need for health research to disaggregate multiracial groups to better understand health behaviors and outcomes in the context of experiences associated with a multiracial background, and to improve prevention strategies.

Read or purchase the article here.

Being Blackanese: The Evolving Embrace of Self and Community

College of San Mateo
CSM College Center Building 10, Room 193
1700 West Hillsdale Boulevard
San Mateo, California 94402 USA
Friday 2016-11-18, 18:30 PST (Local Time)

Being Blackanese: The Evolving Embrace of Self and Community brings together an award winning literary artist, a scholar activist, and an independently published author in an examination and affirmation of Black Japanese American life. The “Blackanese” experience – of a world where divisiveness remains common and cultural ambiguity can equate to invisibility within one’s own communities – will be exposed through readings, presentations and Q&A.

Featuring readings and presentations by:

• Alyss Dixson will read from “The Club”, her short fiction piece about Ai, a determined Black Japanese girl who decides to sneak a ride on her father’s old Harley until an encounter with a thief puts her between fear of the stranger and fear of her dad’s punishment.
• Fredrick Cloyd will read selections from his memoir, Dream of the Water Children: Memory and Mourning in the Black Pacific, covering his struggles as a half-Black Japanese boy born of an African American military father and that of his mother who was looked down upon for having a child by an American, as well as his life as an Amerasian after migrating to the United States.
• Ramon Calhoun will read excerpts from his independently-published novel, Blackanese Boy, the coming of age story of Rafael Halifax. Raised by a single mother, Rafael tries to cope with and understand the complexity of his mixed-identity, born of his Japanese American mother and Black father, an infrequent yet powerful presence in his life.

The readings will be followed by a Question & Answer session facilitated by Dr. Frederick Gaines, Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies, College of San Mateo.

For more information, click here.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave: Written by Himself, Critical Edition

Yale University Press
2016-10-25
264 pages, 5 1/2 x 8 1/4
7 b/w illustrations
Paperback ISBN: 9780300204711

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895)

Edited by:

John R. McKivigan, Mary O’Brien Gibson Professor of History
Indiana University–Purdue University, Indianapolis

Peter P. Hinks

Heather L. Kaufman, Research Associate
The Douglass Papers

A new edition of one of the most influential literary documents in American and African American history

Ideal for coursework in American and African American history, this revised edition of Frederick Douglass’s memoir of his life as a slave in pre-Civil War Maryland incorporates a wide range of supplemental materials to enhance students’ understanding of slavery, abolitionism, and the role of race in American society. Offering readers a new appreciation of Douglass’s world, it includes documents relating to the slave narrative genre and to the later career of an essential figure in the nineteenth-century abolition movement.

Passing in the Age of Rachel Dolezal, or Is Everyone Catfishing?

Response: The Digital Journal of Popular Culture Scholarship
Issue One (November 2016)

Judy Phagan, Associate Professor of English
St. Joseph’s College, New York

Rachel Doležal

It was revealed in the New York Times and on national television in the summer of 2015 that Africana Studies professor and N.A.A.C.P. director of the Spokane chapter, Rachel Dolezal, had possibly falsified her ethnicity. She was subjected to national scrutiny and ridicule after it appeared she fabricated her own racial background. The Times also wondered if Rachel Dolezal would give up her “part-time teaching position in African American Studies at Eastern Washington University.” She did. It is fascinating to me that this little story garnered so much national attention. What ensued was a Swiftian tempest in a teapot in which pundits labeled Dolezal a “liar.” She was living as a black woman while her parents outed her as white. They even went on national television to show Rachel Dolezal’s baby pictures. The combination of white parents and a white little girl added up to one conclusion—that Dolezal was indeed white. It felt like everyone I knew that summer was angry at Dolezal. She seemed to be a white woman “passing” as an African American. Historically, passing was usually performed by African Americans light-skinned enough, often of mixed racial background, to “pass” as white. There are dozens of books on the topic by sociologists, psychologists, and historians. Passing is anything but new, as this paper will discuss. Passing, as a sociological phenomenon, is generally studied in terms of race, class, gender, sexual orientation and/or (dis)ability. Add the 21st century concern for our personal image (think Facebook) and the issue gets even muddier. We see reflected in television and film, Youtube, the blogosphere and the Twitterverse discussions of passing, although we may not immediately recognize it as such. This is no doubt a reflection of our American obsession with race, which has again hit the media (and our hearts) this summer of 2016. This paper will explore many facets of passing as the term is used in 2016 and demonstrate that passing is merely a part of one’s identity formation; it is not a crime…

Read the entire article here.

“We Were Married on the Second Day of June, and the Police Came After Us the 14th of July.”

The Washingtonian
2016-11-02

Hillary Kelly, Design & Style Editor

Richard and Mildred Loving. Photograph by Grey Villet.

An oral history, nearly 50 years later, of the landmark Virginia case that legalized interracial marriage—and is the subject of a talked-about movie out this month.

In June 1958, Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving drove from their home in Central Point, Virginia, to Washington, DC, to be married. Twenty-four states, including Virginia, still outlawed interracial marriage at the time. Mildred was part Native American and part African-American; Richard was white. Their union would eventually result in their banishment from the state and a nine-year legal battle.

On November 4, almost 50 years after the Supreme Court’s 1967 decision that the Lovings’ marriage was valid—and that marriage is a universal right—Hollywood is set to release Loving, already on Oscar lists. As director Jeff Nichols explained when asked why he took on the project, “We have very painful wounds in this country, and they need to be brought out into the light. And it’s gonna be an awkward, uncomfortable, painful conversation that’s going to continue for a while.”

The movie focuses on Mildred and Richard’s romance. We looked behind the scenes of the struggle itself, talking to insiders including the couple’s attorneys—then just out of law school—to revisit the case. One remarkable aspect: Unlike other civil-rights champions of their era, the Lovings never set out to change the course of history. “What happened, we real­ly didn’t intend for it to happen,” Mildred said in 1992. “What we wanted, we wanted to come home.”

This is the story of how a quiet couple from rural Virginia brought about marriage equality for themselves, and for all…

Read the entire article here.

How Trevor Noah went from biracial youth in S. Africa to leading light on U.S. TV

The Washington Post
2016-11-12

Karen Heller, National Features Writer

“Daily Show” host Trevor Noah has a new memoir about growing up mixed race in apartheid South Africa. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)

NEW YORK — Trump. Trump. Clinton. The Obamas dancing like dorks.

Such is the stuff of a recent pre-election morning meeting at “The Daily Show” headquarters. Trevor Noah enters, water bottle and orange in hand, and wedges himself in among the writers, his back never pressing against the sofa.

“Can we talk about Brexit?” he asks. “I find Brexit fascinating, because in the U.S., people see it as done and dusted.”

They talk of Brexit, how British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson resembles a Muppet. But then the discussion swiftly returns to the steady drip of Trump, Trump, Trump.

You may hire a guy for his global perspective, but comedy comes back to the familiar fast.

Last year, after a 16-year reign, Jon Stewart was replaced by a young comedian who is nothing like him: foreign, biracial, cool, GQ-photogenic and utterly unknown to Americans, having appeared on the show only three times before being tapped as the successor….

Read the entire article here.

Opinion/Commentary: The facts behind loving, law, and ‘Loving’

The Daily Progress
Charlottesville, Virginia
2016-11-13

Jeff E. Schapiro, Politics columnist
Richmond Times-Dispatch, Richmond, Virginia

Focus Features via AP Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga protray an interracial couple from Virginia whose romance and marraiage made history. The story or Richard and Mildred Loving is told, Hollywood-style in the movie “Loving.”

In 1963, Bernie Cohen, a lawyer in Alexandria, was representing Richard and Mildred Loving, a mixed-race couple from Virginia facing a predicament considered unthinkable today: They’d been banished from the state for 25 years for violating its prohibition on interracial marriage.

Living in Washington, D.C., where interracial marriage was legal and where they were wed in 1958, the Lovings wanted to return home, to rural Caroline County. To get there would require a long journey through the courts.

Having lost the initial challenge in state court, Cohen consulted with his constitutional law professor at Georgetown University, Chester Antieau. He introduced Cohen to another former student, Phil Hirschkop.

Cohen and Hirschkop were alike: Both were Jewish boys from Brooklyn who had settled in segregationist Harry Byrd’s Virginia. They also were liberals, committed to racial equality and social justice at a time when both could be scarce, especially in the American South.

It was Cohen’s and Hirschkop’s different legal backgrounds — the former was a trial lawyer; the latter, a civil rights lawyer — that would bring them together for the successful battle that concluded with a 1967 ruling by a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court voiding Virginia’s anti-miscegenation statute and those of 15 other states.

The decision allowed the Lovings — he was white; she was black — to openly live out their days in Caroline County.

Ahead of the 50th anniversary of a ruling on marriage equality that would presage the Supreme Court order legalizing same-sex marriage in 2015, a new film by Jeff Nichols, the writer-director, recounts the couple’s ordeal…

Read the entire article here.

‘Loving’ revisits a landmark Supreme Court case with radical restraint

The Washington Post
2016-11-10

Ann Hornaday, Film Critic

‘Loving’ is a quietly radical movie. A portrait of Richard and Mildred Loving, who became unwitting activists for interracial marriage when they wed in 1958, this gentle, deeply affecting story dispenses with the usual conventions of stirring appeals to the audience’s social conscience.

Viewers expecting a climactic showdown at the United States Supreme Court — which in 1967 handed down the landmark decision bearing the Lovings’ name, declaring anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional — or highly pitched speeches about civil rights, privacy and marriage equality will be surprised by a film that steadfastly avoids the most obvious and tempting theatrical manipulations. Instead, viewers are confronted by something far more revolutionary and transformative, in the form of two people’s devotion to each other, and the deep-seated psychological and state forces driven to derangement by that purest emotional truth.

Based on Nancy Buirski’s wonderful 2012 HBO documentary “The Loving Story” and judiciously dramatized by writer-director Jeff Nichols, “Loving” gets underway just as Richard (Joel Edgerton) and Mildred (Ruth Negga) decide to get married, after Mildred discovers she’s pregnant. A longtime couple in the rural town of Central Point, Va., Richard and Mildred reflect the organic ethnic integration of a community in which white, black and Native American citizens routinely befriended and relied on each other…

Read the entire review here.