Mixed Race Studies

Coin given to US’s oldest park ranger by Barack Obama stolen in home invasion

The Guardian
2016-06-30

Sam Levin

Ranger Betty Soskin holds a photo of herself has a young woman. Photograph: Alamy

The White House is sending a replacement coin to 94-year-old Betty Soskin, who says she hopes she can recover the original from violent home intruder

The oldest park ranger in the US suffered a violent home invasion in which the suspect stole a commemorative coin Barack Obama gave to the 94-year-old woman, according to California police.

Park officials said on Thursday that the White House is sending a replacement coin to Betty Soskin, who works at the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front national historic park in northern California. But the ranger said she hopes she can recover the original…

…Soskin is well-known locally and within the park service for her talks and tours at the Rosie the Riveter park where she often tells personal stories about her life as a young black woman working at the Richmond shipyards during the second world war.

Meeting the president and receiving the coin was a powerful experience for Soskin, Leatherman said. At the time, she brought with her a picture of her grandmother, who was born into slavery…

Read the entire entire article here.

The 2020 Census and the Re-Indigenization of America

Truthout
2016-06-26

Roberto Rodriguez
Mexican American & Raza Studies Department
University of Arizona

As the 2020 US census looms, this arcane ritual will once again result in the painting of a false picture of the demographic makeup of the United States. While the nation has been getting “browner” for many decades, the US Census Bureau has actually been complicit in obfuscating this change, which I have long described as demographic genocide. Yet this time around, due to a long-overdue change in the census, rather than being corralled against their will into the “white” category, many Mexican, Central American, Andean and Caribbean peoples will no longer be checking the white racial box.

Countering the delusions of previous generations, we know that simply checking the white box has never meant being treated as white anyway. This time around, per this change, many of us will instead (again) be checking the American Indian box, while rejecting the bureaucratically imposed Hispanic/Latino box. Others will check and affirm both.

This change however, will not alter the historic de-Indigenization schemes of this society, including those of the Census Bureau, which has always been an ideological instrument of empire. The census does not just count people, but actually helps to shape the nation’s self-image, character and national narrative. It helps tell the world “who we are” — who the United States is.

And just precisely who or what is the United States supposed to be? God’s chosen people?…

Read the entire article here.

Babies Of Color Are Now The Majority, Census Says

National Public Radio
2016-07-01

Kendra Yoshinaga

Today’s generation of schoolchildren looks much different than one just a few decades ago. Nonwhites are expected to become the majority of the nation’s children by 2020, as our colleague Bill Chappell reported last year. This is now the reality among the very youngest Americans: babies.

Babies of color now outnumber non-Hispanic white babies (1 year or younger), according to new estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. The newest estimate shows that on July 1, 2015, the population of racial or ethnic minority babies was 50.2 percent…

…NPR could not reach any babies for comment.

Read the entire article here.

Colorblind

Salon
2007-01-22

Debra J. Dickerson

Barack Obama would be the great black hope in the next presidential race — if he were actually black.

I am confident that I have held out longer than any other pundit to weigh in on both the phenomenon that is Barack Obama and the question of whether race will trump gender as America looks toward election 2008.

I had irritably avoided columnizing on these crucial topics (though I have been quoted by others) for several, somewhat unorthodox, reasons. First, because the Clinton-Obama stand-off has been more than well-covered — and in an overly simplistic, insubstantial, annoyingly celebritized way. (Horrors, Obama smokes! But isn’t he hot in his swim trunks?) I was waiting for the discussion to get serious and, at last, it has. Finally, we’re asking the tough questions; instead of just crowing that he’s raised $20 million, we’re starting to wonder where it came from and what will be asked for in return for that much sugar. Why is the supposedly eco-friendly New Age senator supporting coal, however liquefied, as a way to wean ourselves off foreign oil? Wouldn’t be his home state’s powerful coal lobby, would it? And then there’s his support for ethanol, which, strangely enough, comes mainly from corn-rich Iowa — site of the first presidential caucus, if I’m not mistaken. All much more important than why he doesn’t wear a tie…

Read the entire article here.

What black America won’t miss about Obama

Cable News Network (CNN)
2016-07-01

John Blake

(CNN) President Barack Obama was delivering a speech before a joint session of Congress when a white lawmaker jabbed his right index finger at Obama and called him a liar.

The heckling came during his September 2009 address on health care. Obama was telling lawmakers that his plan wouldn’t cover undocumented immigrants when Republican Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina yelled, “You lie!”

Linnyette Richardson-Hall, an African-American event planner, watched Wilson’s outburst on live television in disbelief.

“My alter-ego, the hood-chick, came out of me,” says Richardson-Hall. “I said, ‘I know you just didn’t do that.’ To see him get disrespected so badly, it gut-punches you.”…

Richardson-Hall has restrained herself more than she ever expected in the past eight years. She fumed when she saw a poster of Obama dressed as an African witch doctor, online images of First Lady Michelle Obama depicted as a monkey, and racist Facebook comments by white people she thought she knew. Now, as Obama approaches his final months in office, she and others have come to a grim conclusion:

I didn’t know how racist America was until it elected its first black president…

…Change No. 3: He’s become ‘my brother from another mother’

It may be hard to remember now, but Obama wasn’t actually considered the first black president — Bill Clinton nabbed that honor. Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison described him that way in a 1998 New Yorker essay.

“After all,” she wrote, “Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.”

Obama wasn’t a beloved figure in the black community when he first ran for the presidency. Civil rights leaders were slow to warm to him. Others said he wasn’t black enough. His mixed-race heritage, exotic upbringing overseas and professorial Ivy League persona didn’t fit the traditional black leader mold.

Some black intellectuals said Obama wasn’t even African-American because his father was from the east African nation of Kenya.

“Obama isn’t black. Black, in our political and social reality, means those descended from West African slaves,” Debra J. Dickerson wrote in a 2007 column for Salon magazine.

If Obama wasn’t black then, he sure is now — because he’s been treated with such racial contempt, some blacks say…

Read the entire article here.

The Agonizing Collision Of Love And Slavery In ‘Thomas Jefferson’

Book Reviews
National Public Radio
2016-04-06

Jean Zimmerman

Did Thomas Jefferson dream of his enslaved concubine, Sally Hemings? No one knows. Jefferson himself never wrote a word about his constant companion of almost 40 years. But author Stephen O’Connor gives us a brave and wondrous dream of a novel that renders the fraught subject of their relationship a fascinating, complex and ultimately extremely addictive tale. At the core of O’Connor’s Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings lies a conundrum: How could the author of five words that shook the world — all men are created equal — keep his lover enslaved for decades?

Little is known of Hemings, while Jefferson is — after Lincoln — perhaps the most well documented of any figure in American history. She was the daughter of a slave and a Southern planter, the cousin of the two children whom she served at Monticello and who bore a spooky resemblance to their mother, Jefferson’s late wife. Begun when she was an adolescent, the affair lasted a lifetime, and despite the liberty-espousing statesman’s acute criticism of slavery, he never freed Sally Hemings. Together they produced four living children, who were also born into slavery, but freed upon Jefferson’s death — the only slave family so liberated by him…

Read the entire review here.

Sumter County, Fla., is Nation’s Oldest, Census Bureau Reports

United States Census Bureau
Washington, D.C.
2016-06-23
Release Number: CB16-107

Only County in Nation With Majority of Population Age 65 or Older

JUNE 23, 2016 — The nation’s only county with a majority of the population age 65 or older remains Sumter, Fla., where 54.8 percent had reached retirement age in 2015, up from 53.0 percent in 2014. Part of the nation’s fastest growing metro area (The Villages), Sumter County had a median age of 66.6 years on July 1, 2015, according to new U.S. Census Bureau population estimates released today.

The new detailed estimates by age, sex, race and Hispanic origin show the nation’s 65-and-older population grew from 46.2 million in 2014 to 47.8 million in 2015. This group continues to show rapid percentage growth, even as baby boomers and previous generation groups that make up this age group decline in population.

“Sumter County is unique as the only county with a majority age 65-and-older population,” said Jason Devine, assistant division chief for Population Estimates and Projections, “As the nation’s 65-and-over population grows, other counties with retirement communities like The Villages will get closer to this threshold.”…

…Two or More Races

Those who identify as two or more races had a total population of 8.2 million, up 3.1 percent from 2014. This was the second-fastest growing race group in the nation. Their growth is primarily due to natural increase.

This group had the youngest median age of any other race group at 20.0 years…

Read the entire news release here.

For Independence Day, a Look at Thomas Jefferson’s Egregious Hypocrisy

The Scientific American
2016-07-01

John Horgan

“While many of his contemporaries, including George Washington, freed their slaves during and after the revolution—inspired, perhaps, by the words of the Declaration–Jefferson did not,” historian Paul Finkelman writes. “Jefferson also “dodged opportunities to undermine slavery or promote racial equality.” Presidential portrait of Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale, 1800, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

To celebrate the 4th of July, when Americans commemorate their country’s birth, I’d like to offer a few comments on Thomas Jefferson.

No one is more closely associated with Independence Day than Jefferson. He was the principle author of the Declaration of Independence, which the American Congress formally adopted July 4, 1776. Jefferson, judged by his rhetoric, was a true man of the Enlightenment, who embraced reason, science and democracy and rejected superstition, tradition and tyranny.

I once admired Jefferson, seeing him as an essentially good, no, great man with one tragic flaw: The writer of the inspiring words “all men are created equal” owned slaves. Now, I see Jefferson as an egregious hypocrite, who willfully betrayed the ideals he espoused…

…^*DNA testing and other evidence have convinced most historians that Jefferson fathered six children with a slave, Sally Hemings. Hemings is believed to have been the daughter of Jefferson’s father-in-law, John Wayles, and one of his slaves. That means Hemings was the half-sister of Jefferson’s wife, Martha, who died in 1782.

^*Some writers, grotesquely, have romanticized the relationship between Jefferson and Hemings. As our Monticello guide pointed out, a relationship between a master and slave cannot be consensual, let alone romantic. The relationship might have begun as early as 1787, when Jefferson took Hemings to Paris for two years. He was 43, she 14. She gave birth to the first of their six children in 1795. Jefferson never freed Hemings. After his death in 1826, Jefferson’s daughter Martha allowed Hemings to leave Monticello and live out her days in nearby Charlottesville.

^*The Monticello website notes that “in the few scattered references to Sally Hemings in Thomas Jefferson’s records and correspondence, there is nothing to distinguish her from other members of her family.” Perhaps Jefferson viewed Sally Hemings merely as valuable livestock, or “capital.” He wrote this about female slaves in 1820: “I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man of the farm… What she produces is an addition to the capital, while his labors disappear in mere consumption.”…

Read the entire article here.

‘Free State of Jones’ leader Newt Knight in his own words

The New Orleans Times-Picayune
2016-06-24

James Karst, Senior Editor

A photograph of Newton Knight from the New Orleans Item on March 20, 1921.

This interview with Newton Knight of Mississippi was originally published in the March 20, 1921, edition of the New Orleans Item. It was believed at the time to have been the only time Knight spoke to the press about the “Free State of Jones,” the subject of a new movie starring Matthew McConaughey as Knight and filmed in Louisiana.

The Knight interview is reprinted here in its entirety.

By Meigs O. Frost

The New Orleans Item

Far up in the heart of Jasper County, Mississippi, amidst a forest of pine and oak, where winding woodland paths lead through a tangle of thick underbrush, lives a man now nearing his ninety-second year.

Volumes have been written around him. Testimony of men now living, of men long dead, has been taken for and against him. Frugal of speech, he has gone his way through the years, careless of what men said of him in the outside world into which he ventures rarely. In simplicity primeval he has lived, as in primeval simplicity he will die.

That man is Newton Knight, captain throughout the Civil War of the famous Knight’s Company that ranged Jasper County and “The Free State of Jones,” as the neighboring Jones County is christened in some histories.

“Uncle Newt” Knight here for the first time in all the years breaks his silence to tell his story to The Item. As he recounts the tale, it is an epic of the Civil War. About him, he says, were banded men who, owning no slaves, believing in the Union of Abraham Lincoln, hoped either to fight through the Confederate cordon and join the Union forces or hoped that the Yankee ranks would fight through to them.

As others in Jones and Jasper County, staunch Confederates throughout the war, tell the tale, Newt Knight’s Company was composed of “bushwhacking deserters” from the armies of the Confederate States.

More than half a century has passed since men in this part of Mississippi bore arms for the Lost Cause. Their sons and their sons’ sons since then have fought overseas for the United States of America.

Yet beneath the surface in Jones and Jasper Counties still rankles the feeling that Uncle Newt Knight’s Company engendered when from 1862 to the end of the Civil War it defied the armed forces of the Confederacy and remained unconquered, though surrounded by Confederate armies from start to finish.

Whether Knight’s Company was a band of men whose loyalty to the Union was beyond their loyalty to the South; whether it was a band of Confederate deserters who simply “hid out” in the brush to avoid army service — those are questions that will be debated in Jones and Jasper Counties of Mississippi when the headstone of the last combatant has been long overgrown with moss.

But here and now enters Newton Knight into the Court of Public Opinion with his tale — a story that he told to me in the ninety-first year of his age, speaking with a mind apparently as unclouded and keen as that of one five decades younger than he…

Read the entire article here.

Your Blackness Isn’t Like Mine: Colorism And Oppression Olympics

The Huffington Post
2016-06-28

Sil Lai Abrams

Monday night, actor and activist Jesse Williams gave a powerful speech at the BET Awards upon receiving the Humanitarian Award, during which he spoke eloquently, passionately, and dare I say — even lovingly to the audience of millions. I have seen hundreds of awards show acceptance speeches and Williams was the first Black man I witnessed stand up and acknowledge the sacrifices of Black women on this type of platform. In fact, through this speech he acknowledged damn near everyone, from “activists,” to “the civil rights attorneys, the struggling parents, the families the teachers, the students, that are realizing that systems built to divide and impoverish us cannot stand if we do.” He called out the names of those who have been killed by the police and railed against cultural appropriation and exploitation by White media corporations.

Williams’ speech was profound and emblematic of what it means to be “truly woke,” yet for some it wasn’t enough. While many tweeted their adoration for his message, there was a vocal group of people expressing their frustration that Williams — a light-skinned, biracial Black man, was being given center stage as “the face” for the Black Lives Matter movement. While criticizing his appearance, they conveniently ignored that there are plenty of prominent Black folks with darker complexions who haven’t said a damn thing their entire lives about social justice, stars with platforms even bigger than Williams…

Read the entire article here.