Mixed Race Studies

Speaker Series: Memory, History, Race, and America’s National Parks

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
515 Malcolm X Boulevard
New York, New York 10037
Tuesday, 2016-10-18, 18:00-20:00 EDT (Local Time)

As a young girl Lauret Savoy developed a deeply personal connection to the American land, visiting numerous national parks with her parents. But as she traversed the well-worn paths of Yellowstone, Bryce Canyon and Zion, she began to wonder about the footsteps of her ancestors, and how they marked the very land she walked upon. From the Buffalo Soldiers who safeguarded Yosemite and Sequoia to the painful legacy of Japanese-American internment camps, national parks hold some of the most important yet muted narratives of the American identity.

In her newest work, Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape, Savoy explores how the country’s still unfolding history, and ideas of “race,” mark a person, a people, and the land. In distinctive and illuminating prose, she weaves together human stories of migration, silence, and displacement, as epic as the continent they survey, with uplifted mountains, braided streams, and eroded canyons.

Join Alan Spears for a conversation with [National Parks Conservation Association] NPCA Trustee Lauret Savoy about her journeys across the American Landscape and the oft forgotten stories of the places we cherish and call our national parks. She will challenge you to redefine current concepts regarding the meaning of public lands and their place in our shared history…

For more information, click here.

Federal officials may revamp how Americans identify race, ethnicity on census and other forms

Pew Research Center
2016-10-04

D’Vera Cohn, Senior Writer/Editor

Federal officials are moving ahead with the most important potential changes in two decades in how the government asks Americans about their racial and Hispanic identity. They include combining separate race and Hispanic questions into one and adding a new Middle East-North Africa category.

If approved by the Office of Management and Budget, the revisions would be made on the 2020 census questionnaire and other federal government surveys or forms. Federal statistics about race and Hispanic identity are used to enforce civil rights laws, assist in political redistricting and provide data for research that compares the status of different groups…

Read the entire article here.

One Drop of Love is Headed to Broadway!

Theater Row
410 West 42nd Street (between 9th and 10th Avenues)
New York, New York 10036
Thursday, 2016-10-13, 19:30 EDT (Local Time) Sold Out!
Sunday, 2016-10-16, 14:00 EDT (Local Time)

How does our belief in ‘race’ affect our most intimate relationships? One Drop of Love travels near and far, in the past and present to explore family, race, love and pain – and a path towards reconciliation. It is produced by Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon.

One Drop of Love is headed to Broadway as part of the 7th Annual United Solo Theatre Festival on Thursday, October 16th. Show starts promptly at 2:00 pm. No late seating. General admission $23.25.

When purchasing tickets from the Telecharge website, be certain you’ve chosen Sunday, October 16th at 2:00PM. See you there – bring friends!

Ticketholders are invited to a celebration and discussion with Fanshen at nearby Chez Josephine following the performance.

Purchase tickets here.

The Dilemma of Interracial Marriage: The Boston NAACP and the National Equal Rights League, 1912–1927

Historical Journal of Massachusetts
Volume 44, Number 1, Winter 2016

Zebulon Miletsky, Professor of Africana Studies
Stony Brook University, State University of New York

On a wintry evening on February 1, 1843, a group of Boston’s African American citizens gathered in the vestry of the African Baptist Church nestled in the heart of Boston’s black community on the north slope of Beacon Hill. The measure they were there to discuss was a resolution to repeal the 1705 Massachusetts ban on interracial marriage.  Led largely by white abolitionists, the group cautiously endorsed a campaign to lift the ban. Their somewhat reluctant support for this campaign acknowledged the complexity that the issue of interracial marriage posed to African American communities. In contrast, during the early twentieth century, black Bostonians attended mass meetings at which they vigorously campaigned against the resurgence of antimiscegenation laws led by the Boston branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and William Monroe Trotter’s National Equal Rights League (NERL). This change is indicative of both the evolution of thinking about the issue of interracial marriage and the dilemma that it had frequently represented for black Bostonians and their leaders.

Laws against interracial marriage were a national concern. In both 1913 and 1915 the U.S. House of Representatives passed laws to prohibit interracial marriage in Washington DC; however, each died in Senate subcommittees. In 1915 a Georgia Congressman introduced an inflammatory bill to amend the U.S. Constitution to prohibit interracial marriage. These efforts in the U.S. Congress to ban interracial marriage reflected widespread movements at the state level.

The 1913 bill (HR 5948) would have prohibited the “intermarriage of whites with negroes or Mongolians” in the District of Columbia and made intermarriage a felony with penalties up to $500 and/or two years in prison. The bill passed “in less than five minutes” with almost no debate, by a vote of 92–12. However, it was referred to a Senate committee and never reported out before the session expired. In 1915 an even more draconian bill was introduced (HR 1710). It increased penalties for intermarriage to $5,000 and/or five years in prison. The bill was first debated on January 11 and passed in the House of Representatives by a vote of 238–60. However, it too was referred to a Senate committee and never reported out. African Americans and their allies throughout the nation closely followed the passage of both bills and organized strong opposition, particularly to the 1915 bill. Most likely, their protests were key to the bill’s defeat in the Senate. As several authors have pointed out: Although a symbolic victory [the 1913 and 1915 passage by the U.S. House of Representatives], a federal antimiscegenation policy was not produced. The District of Columbia would continue to be a haven for interracial couples from the South who wished to marry. Indeed, Richard and Mildred Loving, the interracial couple who would be at the center of the Loving v. Virginia (1967) Supreme Court case that struck down state-level anti-miscegenation laws, were married in the District of Columbia in 1958. Although the bill to ban interracial marriage in Washington, DC, was successfully defeated, by 1920 thirty states had anti-miscegenation laws on their books. (The term “miscegenation” was coined in 1863 and was derived from the Latin word miscere, meaning “to mix.”) As late as 1967, when the Supreme Court declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional in the aptly named Loving v. Virginia decision, sixteen states still enforced them.

This article examines the political struggle over the issue of interracial marriage and the dilemma it posed for the Boston branch of the NAACP, as well as the national organization. The NAACP and its Boston chapter constituted the principal opposition to these efforts. The author examines the struggle to defeat similar bills that would have criminalized intermarriage in Massachusetts in 1913 and a second attempt in 1927.

Why Self-Identifying As Multiracial Is Still New And Not Automatic For Me

Swirl Nation Blog
2016-10-12

Sarah Ratliff

I grew up in New York City during the 1960s and 70s. Although I grew up in a very racially, ethnically and culturally diverse area—which included several interracial families—it wasn’t the norm to raise kids in that time period to self-identify as more than one race.

Although nobody specifically said so, all of us multiracial / Biracial kids were living according to the one-drop rule. For many of us, my family included, this had to do with which parent’s race was more discriminated against.

In my particular case, and I know I am hardly unique, my father’s father disowned my father for marrying my mother. I never met my grandmother or my father’s father. I saw my father’s brother and his family no more than a dozen times while I was growing up. My mother was an only child whose parents died before I was born and so the tragedy is that while I had grandparents living, one of them refused to meet his grandchildren and the other was too scared to try and have a relationship with her grandchildren.

This compounded my parents’ decision to raise us to self-identify as Black…

Read the entire article here.

One man’s quest to preserve the haunting black history of Pocahontas Island

The Washington Post
2016-09-26

Gregory S. Schneider

POCAHONTAS ISLAND, Va. — He roams from house to house along the quiet streets of this little neighborhood, giving voice to its history and spirits. The collection of modest homes, tucked between an empty lumber factory and an abandoned rail yard, doesn’t look like a rare and haunted place.

But in Richard Stewart’s eyes, Pocahontas Island is alive with an unexpectedly dramatic past. Using a black magic marker, Stewart scrawls the words of 12 generations of ancestors on old porch rails, doorways and window frames.

“Ain’t no looking back master I’m at the promised land.”…

…Outside, Stewart has bought the small house next door, which he said was built in the early 1800s by a mixed-race man whose white mother sold him into slavery as a child because she couldn’t be seen with him. Stewart painted it pink and yellow and covered it with words and pictures related to Nat Turner.

At least one man who helped Turner’s bloody slave rebellion in 1831 in nearby Southampton County hid, for a time, in the woods on Pocahontas Island, Stewart said…

…Stewart talks about slavery in an offhand way that can seem jarring. He credits his stature and strong build to what many regard as the myth of selective breeding. In colorful terms, he tells how mixed-race children were sent to live on the island: “We had a lot of out-of-wedlock mulattos over here. You might have seen a child walking along over here white as snow, and [the] mama walking along dark as a bag of coal.”…

Read the entire article here.

Tracing Your “Routes”

TEDx Talks: TEDxSBUWomen
Stony Brook University, State University of New York
2015-07-10

Zebulon Miletsky, Professor of Africana Studies
Stony Brook University, State University of New York

“He’s gonna have a hard time proving he’s a brother.”

Dr. Zebulon Miletsky discusses his journey through the multiple worlds of race and identity as he shares his experiences with researching his own family genealogy, the various “routes” this process led him to and how “tracing your routes” can lead to more than just knowledge about your background–it’s about how we treat one another along those “routes”.

Dr. Zebulon Miletsky teaches African-American History at Stony Brook University where he is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies. He is the author of numerous articles, essays and most recently a book chapter that appeared in the anthology “Obama and the Biracial Factor: The Battle for a New American Majority” which traces the contested meanings throughout history of terminology for multiracial people and the role that this historical legacy of “naming” plays into how President Obama is read as African American, but still asserts a strategic biracial identity through the use of language, symbols, and interactions with the media. Miletsky who is half-Jewish (white) and African-American/Afro-Caribbean, has done a great deal of genealogical research for a book manuscript in progress and is in the process of researching his own family tree. He lives in Brooklyn.

Projections of Passing: Postwar Anxieties and Hollywood Films, 1947-1960

University Press of Mississippi
2016-04-04
284 pages
40 b/w illustrations, filmography, bibliography, index
6 x 9 inches
Hardback ISBN: 9781496806277

N. Megan Kelley

How the cinematic act of passing embodied, exacerbated, and sometimes alleviated American fears

A key concern in postwar America was “who’s passing for whom?” Analyzing representations of passing in Hollywood films reveals changing cultural ideas about authenticity and identity in a country reeling from a hot war and moving towards a cold one. After World War II, passing became an important theme in Hollywood movies, one that lasted throughout the long 1950s, as it became a metaphor to express postwar anxiety.

The potent, imagined fear of passing linked the language and anxieties of identity to other postwar concerns, including cultural obsessions about threats from within. Passing created an epistemological conundrum that threatened to destabilize all forms of identity, not just the long-standing American color line separating white and black. In the imaginative fears of postwar America, identity was under siege on all fronts. Not only were there blacks passing as whites, but women were passing as men, gays passing as straight, communists passing as good Americans, Jews passing as gentiles, and even aliens passing as humans (and vice versa).

Fears about communist infiltration, invasion by aliens, collapsing gender and sexual categories, racial ambiguity, and miscegenation made their way into films that featured narratives about passing. N. Megan Kelley shows that these films transcend genre, discussing Gentleman’s Agreement, Home of the Brave, Pinky, Island in the Sun, My Son John, Invasion of the Body-Snatchers, I Married a Monster from Outer Space, Rebel without a Cause, Vertigo, All about Eve, and Johnny Guitar, among others.

Representations of passing enabled Americans to express anxieties about who they were and who they imagined their neighbors to be. By showing how pervasive the anxiety about passing was, and how it extended to virtually every facet of identity, Projections of Passing broadens the literature on passing in a fundamental way. It also opens up important counternarratives about postwar America and how the language of identity developed in this critical period of American history.

What Growing Up Mixed-Race Taught Me About Food

Spoon University
2016-09-13

Susanna Mostaghim
Virginia Tech

And why we’re the ultimate foodies.

Weird things come with being mixed-race. These include, but are not limited to: no one ever guessing your heritage correctly, random stereotypes you wouldn’t expect, a fusion of your parents’ cultures, and questions of “Wait, where did your parents meet?”

Being mixed-race, I commonly get mistaken for being of Hispanic origin, which is a laugh as neither of my parents are from the same continents as any Hispanic country. It’s my favorite bar game to have people guess my heritage when they ask, “But where are you really from?” (cue my desire to act like this).

It’s kind of like that Parks and Rec[creation] scene where Leslie asks Tom where he’s from, and it ends with him saying his mom’s uterus.

But what most people don’t realize is that the best part of being mixed-race isn’t that you don’t look like any certain race or anything physical. It’s the fusion of the different food styles your parents and community bring to the table…

Read the entire article here.

Paisley Rekdal Wins the 2016 AWP Award for Creative Nonfiction

University of Georgia Press
2016-10-05

Paisley Rekdal (photo credit: Austen Diamond)

Congratulations to Paisley Rekdal for winning this year’s Association of Writers & Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction with her work The Broken Country: On Trauma, a Crime, and the Continuing Legacy of Vietnam. Rekdal is an essayist, photographer, and poet. She is the author of The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee, a book of essays; a photo-text memoir called Intimate; and five books of poetry: A Crash of Rhinos, Six Girls without Pants, The Invention of the Kaleidoscope, Imaginary Vessels, and Animal Eye. She has received numerous awards and fellowships for her work. She currently holds the position of managing editor at Mapping Salt Lake City, a community-written web atlas of Salt Lake City of which she is creator. She is a professor of English at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and holds a Master of Arts from the University of Toronto and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Paisley Rekdal’s The Broken Country will be published by the University of Georgia Press in the fall of 2017…

Read the entire press release here.