Mixed Race Studies

Lupita Nyong’o and Trevor Noah, and Their Meaningful Roles

Table for Three
The New York Times
2016-02-27

Philip Galanes

Lupita Nyong’o, an Oscar-winning actress, and Trevor Noah, the host of “The Daily Show,” at the Dutch in SoHo. Credit Malin Fezehai for The New York Times

The most intriguing stars seem to appear from out of nowhere.

Take Lupita Nyong’o, the Mexican-Kenyan actress who had not even graduated from Yale School of Drama before landing her star-making role as Patsey in “12 Years a Slave,” for which she won an Academy Award for best supporting actress in 2014.

Or Trevor Noah, the comedian from Johannesburg, who had appeared on “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central a scant three times before being named Jon Stewart’s successor last March.

Ms. Nyong’o, 32, has since appeared in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” and lent her voice to “The Jungle Book,” which will open in April. She has also acted on stage in an Off Broadway production of “Eclipsed,” about the struggles of a group of women during the Liberian Civil War. (“Eclipsed” will open on Broadway next month.) Ms. Nyong’o quickly became a fashion darling, too, as the first black face of Lancôme. She has appeared on the cover of Vogue twice…

Read the entire interview here.

New Du Bois Review Study Confirms the Obvious: U.S. Latinos Are Not ‘Becoming White’

Latino Rebels
2015-05-28

Julio Ricardo Varela

Last year, we spent a lot of time countering slippery claims and misreporting by several nationally recognized writers (specifically Jamelle Bouie and Nate Cohn) who were pushing a mainstream media narrative that more and more U.S. Latinos were becoming “White” in this country. The pieces we published from several contributors were quick to refute how writers like Bouie and Cohn lacked any real knowledge or understanding of this topic.

A new study called “LATINA/O WHITENING? Which Latina/os Self-Classify as White and Report Being Perceived as White by Other Americans?” was recently published in the Du Bois Review. Dr. Nicholas Vargas, the study’s author, is an Assistant Professor in the School of Economic, Political, and Policy Sciences at The University of Texas at Dallas. After reading Vargas’ study (you can download the full study here), our founder and publisher @julito77 sent Dr. Vargas a few questions via email. Here is what Dr. Vargas sent back to us:

What prompted you to do this study?

VARGAS: As I became more familiar with the scholarly literature on assimilation, a literature that is informed primarily by the assimilation trajectories of Eastern and Southern European groups of the early 20th century, I came across a number of arguments that Latina/os would soon be following in their footsteps. The argument is that Latina/os will come to identify as White and look back on their Latina/o identities much the same way that many Whites today look back to a detached Irish or Italian heritage. Some of these arguments suggested that Latina/o racial self-identification as White on the U.S. Census and other surveys could be a sign that the process of Latina/o Whitening is already underway. Journalists proclaimed that if Latina/os are identifying as White, then they are probably “becoming White” the same way that others have in the past…

Read the entire interview here.

Melissa Harris-Perry Walks Off Her MSNBC Show After Pre-Emptions

The New York Times
2016-02-26

John Koblin, Television Reporter

Melissa Harris-Perry said she had received no word about whether her MSNBC show had been canceled. Credit Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Melissa Harris-Perry said she was refusing to go on the MSNBC show she hosts this Saturday, following several weeks of pre-emptions and what she described as a loss of editorial control.

In an email sent to people she works with this week, which was obtained by The New York Times, Ms. Harris-Perry said that her show had effectively been taken away from her and that she felt “worthless” in the eyes of NBC News executives.

“Here is the reality: Our show was taken — without comment or discussion or notice — in the midst of an election season,” she wrote. “After four years of building an audience, developing a brand and developing trust with our viewers, we were effectively and utterly silenced.”…

…Ms. Harris-Perry is black, and Mr. Lack and Mr. Griffin are white. In the phone interview on Friday, Ms. Harris-Perry clarified her remarks and said she did not think race played a role in her recent absence from the air.

“I don’t know if there is a personal racial component,” she said. “I don’t think anyone is doing something mean to me because I’m a black person.”…

Read the entire article here.

Nella Larsen Reconsidered: The Trouble with Desire in Quicksand and Passing

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States
Volume 41, Issue 1 (Spring 2016)
pages 165-192
DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlv083

Rafael Walker
Department of English
University of Pennsylvania

This paper challenges the pervasive tendency to treat Larsen’s work as explorations of black women’s lives and examines the distinctly biracial perspective that her fiction attempts to elaborate. I argue that her novels employ narratives of frustrated desire in order to show the impossibility of the racially liminal subject in a society that thinks in black and white. In developing this argument, the essay explains the aesthetic and theoretical implications that ensue from taking this biracial perspective seriously. For instance, it shows how each novel mobilizes a distinct ontology of biracial identity—biraciality as synthesis in one case (Quicksand [1928]) and biraciality as oscillation in the other (Passing [1929]). In its discussion of the aesthetics of Larsen’s fiction, the essay demonstrates how this shift in racial perspective enables us to reassess her endings, which vexed critics in her day and continue to vex readers in ours (including the scholar arguably most responsible for Larsen’s current prominence, Deborah E. McDowell). Aware that aversion to the essentialist “tragic mulatta” trope has been one of the primary impediments to concentrating on biraciality in Larsen’s work, I offer ways of understanding Larsen’s focus on biraciality as more—rather than less—subversive of American racial ideology than previous studies suggest.

Read or purchase the article here.

Latina/o Whitening? Which Latina/os Self-Classify as White and Report Being Perceived as White by Other Americans?

Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race
Volume 12, Issue 01, Spring 2015
pages 119-136
DOI: 10.1017/S1742058X14000241

Nicholas Vargas, Assistant Professor of Sociology; Latino Studies
University of Florida

Some scholars argue that Latina/os in the United States may soon become White, much like the supposed Whitening of Eastern European immigrant groups in the early twentieth century. High rates of White racial identification on surveys among Latina/os is one explanation provided for this assertion. However, personal identification is but one element of racial boundary maintenance. It is when personal identification is externally validated that it is most closely associated with group-based experiences. This article maps components of the White-Latino racial boundary that may be permeable to White expansion by examining conditions under which Latina/os self-identify as White and report that they are externally classified as White by other Americans. Employing novel data from the 2006 Portraits of American Life Study, this article shows that nearly 40% of Latina/os sometimes self-identify as White, yet a much smaller proportion—only 6%—report being externally classified as White by others. Moreover, logistic regression analyses suggest that for those with light phenotypical features and high levels of socioeconomic status, the odds of reported external Whitening are increased. Interestingly, phenotypically light Latina/os with low-socioeconomic-status levels have low probabilities of reporting external classification as White when compared to their phenotypically light and high-socioeconomic-status counterparts, suggesting that the combination of both skin color and class may be central to the White-Latino racial boundary. Results also indicate that many who report external Whitening do not prefer to self-identify as White. In sum, multidimensional measures of racial classification indicate that only a very small minority of Latina/os may be “becoming White” in ways that some previous researchers have predicted.

Read or purchase the article here.

Trevor Noah Blasts Ben Carson for Claiming President Obama Was ‘Raised White’

The Daily Beast
2016-02-25

Matt Wilstein, Entertainment Writer

‘The Daily Show’ host hits back at the low-in-the-polls neurosurgeon for claiming Obama can’t relate to the ‘experience of black Americans.’

Believe it or not, Ben Carson is still running for president. And this week, he made some news by claiming in an interview that President Obama was “raised white” and therefore can’t identify with the “experience of black Americans.”

Trevor Noah isn’t having it. ”Like a glitched character on a video game, Ben Carson is just off facing the wrong direction,” The Daily Show host said Wednesday night. “Yeah, he is not attacking Trump or the other Republicans, but rather he’s chosen to attack President Obama. And it’s not for his policies and it’s not for his record. It’s for not being black enough.”

“So Ben Carson is saying that because Obama didn’t grow up poor, he didn’t grow up black,” Noah said after playing the clip of Carson’s comments. “That is such a bullshit argument. Being poor isn’t what makes you black.”…

Read the entire article here.

Did Obama Inspire A Big Debate On Identity? You Weighed In

Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity
National Public Radio
2016-02-23

Leah Donnella

Laurie Avocado/Flickr Creative Commons

Last week, Code Switch raised the curtain on “The Obama Effect,” our quest to understand what the nation’s first black president has to do with the big national conversations on identity and inclusion swirling in full force right now.

That quest began with you. On Friday, we took to Twitter with the hashtag #NPRObamaEffect and asked you to weigh in: If somebody else had come into office on Jan. 20, 2009, do you think we’d be having all these conversations about identity? Has the way you identify yourself as a person of color — or as a white person — changed over the last eight years? Have your personal politics around race shifted post-Obama?

Some people said yes, but weren’t lining up to credit Obama:…

Read the entire article here.

America Is Obsessed With Identity. Thanks, Obama?

Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity
National Public Radio
2016-02-17

Alicia Montgomery

Annette Elizabeth Allen for NPR

When Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, there was a lot of talk about “The Obama Effect”: how the nation’s first black president signaled a new era of racial harmony and understanding.

That didn’t happen. But what did? The Obama family’s tenure in the White House has overlapped a revolution in the way Americans deal with identity. From race to religion, from gender to sexual orientation and beyond, marginalized groups that historically worked and waited for “a seat at the table” increasingly demanded their share of cultural power.

And people who once assumed that they could define what it means to be American were called on to defend their ideas and “check their privilege…

Read the entire article here.

Author, 18, from Williamsburg examines race through his family’s eyes in book

The Virginia Gazette
Williamsburg, Virginia
2016-02-16

Heather Bridges, Contact Reporter

Canaan Kennedy, 18, is a freshman at Virginia Commonwealth University who grew up in Williamsburg. He recently published a book, his first, on family members’ experiences with race. (Heather Bridges / The Virginia Gazette)

Canaan Kennedy just wants to change the world.

He says it casually, as if the conviction is common. That’s the kind of drive Kennedy has, the drive he’s always known. His grandfather co-founded an international nonprofit. His grandmother is an award-winning playwright. His father is a writer, producer and publisher.

But as a biracial 18-year-old, Kennedy is still finding his place in the world he seeks to change.

The Williamsburg native recently wrote and self-published a book, “Struggles to Victory,” examining racism in America through the experiences of his father, grandmother and grandfather as African Americans. Kennedy combines biography, interviews and commentary to share his family’s stories…

Read the entire article here.

A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life

Emory University
2016-02-18

In this Race and Difference Colloquium, Allyson Hobbs, an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Stanford University, discusses her first book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, published by Harvard University Press in October 2014. The book examines the phenomenon of racial passing in the United States from the late eighteenth century to the present. A Chosen Exile won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award for best first book in American History and the Lawrence Levine Award for best book in American cultural history.

The Race and Difference Colloquium Series is sponsored by the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference, which supports research, teaching, and public dialogue that examine race and intersecting dimensions of human difference including but not limited to class, gender, religion, and sexuality.