Mixed Race Studies

How art can disrupt our ideas and identities

news@Northeastern
Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts
2015-09-23

Thea Singer

Artist Favianna Rodriguez makes bold, sparkling works that light up a room even as they reveal dark cul­tural inequities.

She is known for her activism and political posters addressing issues such as racism, women’s rights, displacement, and climate change. Now, for the first time, her abstract prints—multilayered col­lages of vibrant colors and rever­ber­ating shapes—are on dis­play: 27 of them line the walls in Northeastern’s Gallery 360 in an exhibit called “The Multiverse of Identity” as she begins her week­long stint at North­eastern as artist in res­i­dence. The exhibit opened ealier this month and runs through mid-December.

Rodriguez will be talking about her vision of art as both an agent of social change and individual narrative on Wednesday, Sept. 23, at 6 p.m., in Blackman Auditorium…

…Her process

Rodriguez’s process for making her abstract works—intaglio printing, using an etching plate—is “very, very elaborate.” Each piece takes months. To start, she applies ink to create tex­ture on mul­tiple sheets of Japanese paper, pro­ducing a “library of colors.” “I think of the prac­tice as creating the container in which I’m going to play,” she says. She then cuts the paper into shapes—now spikey, now undulating—and arranges them in a “playful way.” “The arranging—repeating shapes, refining them—is what gives each piece its own char­acter,” she says.

The colors smack you in the face. “For me, color is about possibility,” she says. It characterizes both her art and her com­mit­ment to breaking apart assumptions—for herself, for all of us. “I don’t like when people put me in the woman box or the Latina box or the political artist box,” she says. “That limits who I am as an individual. I want to instead embrace the possibility of who I can be. That’s where ulti­mate freedom is.”…

Read the entire article here.

Ten black composers whose works deserve to be heard more often

The Guardian
2015-06-02

John Lewis

English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912). Photograph: Unknown/Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS

The newly formed Chineke orchestra aims to include a work by a composer of ethnicity in each of its concert programmes. John Lewis looks at some of the neglected writers whose music might finally get an airing

In the past 200 years, dozens of prominent black composers from America and other parts of the African diaspora have fought to be recognised by the western classical tradition. The earliest example is Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1745-99). Born in Guadeloupe, the son of a wealthy plantation owner and a female slave, Saint-George was brought to France at a young age. As well as being a champion fencer, a violin teacher to Marie Antoinette and a colonel in the republican army, his prodigious musical talents led to him being dubbed “le Mozart noir”. He was a prolific composer (with several operas, 15 violin concertos, symphonies and numerous chamber works to his name) and a rare French exponent of early classical violin composition. (Listen to Chi-chi Nwanoku’s radio documentary about him here.)…

Read the entire article here.

Obama has vastly changed the face of the federal bureaucracy

The Washington Post
2015-09-20

Juliet Eilperin, White House Bureau Chief

Friday afternoon announcements in Washington are usually aimed at attracting as little attention as possible, but last Friday was different. President Obama’s decision to nominate Eric Fanning — an openly gay man — to head a branch of the military which only four years ago did not allow gays and lesbians to serve openly, was both historic and attention-grabbing.

And it underscored an often-overlooked feature of the Obama presidency: Obama has presided over the most demographically diverse administration in history, according to a new analysis of his top appointments. The majority of top policy appointments within the executive branch are held by women and minorities for the first time in history.

The transformation partly reflects a broader trend in U.S. society, but it also reflects the results of a calculated strategy by the nation’s first African American president. The shifts are significant enough, experts say, that they may have forever transformed the face of government…

Read the entire article here.

EXCLUSIVE: Race relations in America are ‘getting worse,’ says James Blake’s mother Betty, a white Briton who raised 2 black sons in New York

The New York Daily News
2015-09-17

Betty Blake, Special to the New York Daily News

Betty Blake with her youngest son James Blake at the 2012 Legends Ball in New York City. Michael Hickey/WireImage

Betty Blake, 80, is the mother of retired tennis star James Blake. Betty, who is white and grew up in England, talks about raising two sons who are black.

In an interview about the events last week that happened to my youngest son, I said that it takes an incident like this to make me truly realize that two of my sons are black.

When you love someone you see the inside, not the outside. I know James wants to focus on the unnecessary aggression, and he’s right, but when you hear (all too often lately) of a confrontation between a white police officer and a young black male, the inference is unavoidable…

Read the entire article here.

To Be Black And Boricua

La Respuesta
2015-09-17

At this year’s Afro-Latino Festival of New York, La Respuesta teamed up with Project Bronx, the community-focused web series, for an exciting video collaboration. We spoke with festival attendees, artists, and vendors about a theme central to the festival’s focus.

For the past 3 years, the Afro-Latino Festival “celebrates the contributions that people of African descent from Latin America and the Caribbean have made to our city and the global culture as a whole.” The festival this year featured more than a dozen artists and groups, among them the New York-based Bombazo Dance Company, and the Puerto Rico-based Cultura Profética.

As official media partners of the Afro-Latino Festival, we at La Respuesta joined with Project Bronx to document views on Afro Boricua identity. As a Boricua publication, one of our key commitments is to highlight and honor the depth and legacy of our connection to African culture. We asked Puerto Ricans attending the event how our African/Black roots are celebrated. We also asked why many downplay or even deny their own African/Black ancestry. Here’s what they had to say…

Rachel/Racial Theory: Reverse Passing in the Curious Case of Rachel Dolezal

Transition Magazine
2015-06-26

Damon Sajnani (AKA ProfessorD.us), Professor of African Cultural Studies
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Rachel Dolezal has done more than break the internet and fuel Black twitter and emcee cyphers with innumerable punchlines. She has provided the first high-profile contemporary case of racial passing from white to Black.

The vast majority of responses on mainstream and social media, even those claiming attention to nuance, pretty much accept—without justification or interrogation—that her parents’ version of the story is right and that she is wrong. Specifically, both her critics and most of her sympathizers accept the following as a “fact”: Rachel was pretending to be Black when she was really white all along. My aim here is not to defend or to condemn her, but to show that this one simple “fact” is neither simple nor self-evident.

Race is a social construct. It is a social reality, not a biological one. This fact is widely acknowledged by academics but many of them misunderstand it. Often, people who claim to know that race is a social construct make statements exposing that they really do not recognize it as such.

In “The Passing of Anatole Broyard,” Henry Louis Gates Jr. recounts the details of how “Broyard was born black and became white” (181-2). Throughout American history untold numbers of light skinned Blacks assumed white identities. This phenomenon became known as “passing” in the 1920s. Some did so temporarily, as for a job open only to whites. Sometimes they were white during the work day and Black when they returned to their families in the evening. But in many other cases, such as Broyard’s, people cut themselves off from their families completely, marrying white and raising white children oblivious to their Black ancestry. If we think of race as biological, as we have been taught, then these people were living a deception their whole lives and their children were not really white. But when we understand race as a social construct, we understand that they actually became white. There is nothing more to being, or not being, a given race than the social acceptance and societal ascription of a race to a person…

Read the entire article here.

White or black? Sometimes it’s not so clear-cut

StarNews Online
Wilmington, North Carolina
2015-10-03

Beverly Smalls

In June, as Rachel Dolezal of Spokane, Wash., confused members of the NAACP as well as her family, friends and the public about her choice to identify as an African-American, new conversations began.

Dolezal was accused of being a white person trying to pass as a black person. She stepped down as head of the NAACP’s chapter in Spokane.

Ironically, Americans of mixed heritage who appeared to be white in past centuries could gain better socio-economic opportunities by relocating to regions far from relatives known to be part African or Native American.

Unlike Dolezal, they preferred the advantages of being classified as white.

A different term, “mulatto,” defined those of mixed race, often with one white and one black parent.

If it were known, one drop of Indian or African blood in a family line could propel an individual or group of people into a lifetime of forced segregation and disadvantages in a minority community.

Having pale African-American skin could have provided advantages or separations from other black people, according to a 1930s Federal Writers’ Project.

A Wilmington man known as “Uncle Jackson,” born in 1851 and interviewed for the New Deal writers’ project, reported that there were lots of “mulatto Negros” in this region. Having a father who was part Indian and a mother who was considered mulatto, Jackson said he was not allowed to even play with “common chil’en,” white or colored.

Bygone cultural identity practices in 20th century Wilmington resulted in notable memories from descendants of mixed-race families…

Read the entire article here.

Bill de Blasio, Chirlane McCray are now empty nesters as daughter goes to college

The New York Daily News
2015-09-17

Jennifer Fermino, City Hall Bureau Chief

Chiara de Blasio, seen here with her mom, First Lady Chirlane McCray, left for college on Thursday. David Wexler/New York Daily News

The city’s First Family is officially empty Gracie Mansion-ers.

Chiara de Blasio left for college Thursday, marking the first time in 21 years that Mayor de Blasio and his wife, Chirlane McCray, won’t have one of their kids living under their roof.

Chiara’s younger brother, Dante, left for his freshman year at Yale in late August.

“In a few hours, I will be experiencing the empty nest for the very first time,” a bittersweet de Blasio told the Daily News.

He said it’s the first time they haven’t had a child at the house since Dec. 6. 1994 — Chiara’s birthday…

Read the entire article here.

Marisa Franco

The Graduate School
University of Maryland
2015-05-21

“My graduate degree is shaping my life and career in a number of ways. The research skills I have gained at the University of Maryland have prepared me for a career in research in academia. An International Graduate Research Fellowship, in addition, gave me the opportunity to do research abroad, in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, and to develop skills in cross cultural research and its communication.”

Marisa Franco earned her PhD in counseling psychology in May 2015. She holds an MS in psychology from UMD, and a BS in applied psychology from New York University, where she graduated magna cum laude.

Franco’s research focuses on “racial identity invalidation,” with particular emphasis on its psychological impact on Black/White mixed-race individuals.

For her innovative work, Franco received a number of Graduate School awards, including the ALL S.T.A.R award, granted to 16 campus graduate students with outstanding records as both researchers and graduate assistants, as well as the International Graduate Research Fellowship. Franco is the only student who has been awarded both a Flagship Fellowship, granted to ten outstanding incoming graduate students, and a McNair Graduate Fellowship, granted to five outstanding incoming graduate students who are alumni of Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Programs.

Franco also has received numerous external awards for her research, including the Michael Sullivan Diversity Award and the Association of Black Psychologists Graduate Research Award.

Franco hopes to become a professor in psychology.

Learn more about her in the interview below:…

Read the entire interview here.

Chris Harper Mercer: details emerge of Oregon college killer

The Guardian
2015-10-02

Ben Jacobs and Nicky Woolf

Chris Harper Mercer, the alleged gunman in the Oregon shootings. He had captioned this photo: ‘Me, holding a rifle.’ Photograph: Myspace

Umpqua college shooter, who was born in England according to media reports, had a varied online presence that indicated support for the IRA

The Umpqua shooter has been named as Chris Harper Mercer, a 26-year-old who lived with his mother at an apartment only a few miles from the college.

American media reports said he was born in England and moved to the US at a young age: his stepsister, Carmen Nesnick, told CBS Los Angeles that he travelled to the US as a young boy. Other accounts report that Nesnick specified that Harper-Mercer was born in England…

Read the entire article here.