Mixed Race Studies

Is It Possible to Balance Two Cultures Perfectly?

Mixed Roots Stories
2015-08-06

Brittany Muddamalle, Guest Blogger

I met my husband in California during a program with our church. We were just two young kids falling in love. We were lost in our own world. The scope of our differences didn’t really come out until we were engaged. We decided to have a half Indian and half American wedding. We had this grand idea of a perfectly blended wedding, which would lead to a perfectly blended life.

We did pretty well bringing both cultures in, but the more we strived for perfection, the further away it got. I finally got to the point during all of my wedding planning where I decided to just let the pieces fall where they may. It ended up being just what we needed.

Our wedding was beautiful. I married my best friend. Afterwards, I sat there, during the reception, holding my husband’s hand. We were watching two cultures collide beautifully. Americans and Indians were dancing together to Bollywood and American music, wedding traditions from both sides were coming together smoothly, and everyone was having a great time celebrating.

Then I realized that perfection didn’t matter. All that mattered was my husband and I were bringing two cultures together into one family…

Read the entire article here.

Tony Gleaton, 67, Dies, Leaving Legacy in Pictures of Africans in the Americas

The New York Times
2015-08-18

Bruce Weber

Tony Gleaton, a photographer who turned his back on a career in New York fashion and embarked on an itinerant artistic quest, documenting the lives of black cowboys and creating images of the African diaspora in Latin America, died on Friday in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 67.

The cause was oral cancer, his wife, Lisa, said.

Mr. Gleaton made his photographs in the American West and Southwest, and then, most prominently, in Mexico, where he lived among little-acknowledged communities of blacks — descendants of African slaves brought to the New World centuries earlier by the Spanish — in villages on the coastal plains of Oaxaca, south of Acapulco.

An exhibition of those photos, “Africa’s Legacy in Mexico,” which appeared in galleries around the country for more than a decade beginning in the 1990s, was sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution.

Mr. Gleaton specialized in black-and-white portraits, their subjects — children and adults, alone or in groups — almost always in direct engagement with the camera and usually in tight frames that suggest but do not explore a specific setting, like a workplace or a barroom. In an interview with The Los Angeles Times in 2007, he called his pictures “abstractions from daily life,” saying “they may look natural but they are extremely crafted, very calculated.”…

Read the entire obituary here.

Showtime Adapting Mat Johnson’s Novel ‘Loving Day’ As Comedy About Racial Identity

Deadline Hollywood
2015-08-17

Nellie Andreeva, TV Editor

In a competitive situation, Showtime has acquired the rights to Mat Johnson’s recently published semi-autobiographical novel Loving Day as a potential comedy series. Talks are underway with high-end writers to collaborate with the author on penning the adaptation.

Loving Day offers a satirical look at a biracial man’s experiences with race, identity and fatherhood. It tells the story of Warren Duffy, an Irish/African-American living in Wales who returns to America after his comic book store closes, his marriage falls apart and his father dies. Now in possession of his late father’s deteriorated Philadelphia mansion – which might be haunted – a new surprise emerges: Duffy learns he has a teenage daughter who thinks she’s white. Spinning from these upheavals and revelations, Duffy sets off to remake his life with a reluctant daughter in tow and a litany of absurdly funny moments together as they bond over their newfound relationship and discoveries of their individual cultural identities…

Read the entire article here.

Exploring Racial Bias Among Biracial and Single-Race Adults: The IAT

Pew Research Center
2015-08-19

Rich Morin, Senior Editor

This report summarizes the results of an online experiment that utilized an Implicit Association Test (IAT) to measure racial bias in single-race whites, blacks, Asians and biracial adults with a white and black or a white and Asian racial background. The study sought to measure subconscious racial bias in the five racial groups and to see if biracial adults unconsciously view one of their racial backgrounds more favorably than the other. Pew Research Center worked with professors Shanto Iyengar of Stanford University and Sean Westwood of Dartmouth College to design and implement the IAT used in this experiment.

The report is a collaborative effort based on the input and analysis of the following individuals. Rich Morin, senior editor, analyzed the data and wrote the report. Kim Parker, director of social trends research; Scott Keeter, director of research; and Claudia Deane, vice president of research, provided editorial guidance. Survey Methodologist Andrew Mercer provided statistical and editorial guidance. Juliana Menasce Horowitz, associate director of research, edited the report. Number-checking was done by Research Assistant Renee Stepler. The report was copy edited by Molly Rohal. Michael Suh provided web support. Find related reports online at pewresearch.org/socialtrends.

Read the entire report here.

DNA Shows Warren Harding Wasn’t America’s First Black President

The New York Times
2015-08-18

Peter Baker, Chief White House Correspondent

WASHINGTON — Bill Clinton was called the first black president because he crossed racial lines so easily, a distinction he lost when Barack Obama became the first actual black president. But for decades, some Americans claimed that the nation’s first black president was really Warren G. Harding.

It turns out that he wasn’t, really. At least that is the result of new DNA testing that according to scientists showed for the first time that Harding almost certainly had no recent ancestors with African blood, despite assertions that were spread far and wide a century ago in efforts to sabotage everything from his marriage to his political career.

The finding was overshadowed last week by the determination through the same testing that Harding did father a child with a mistress, Nan Britton. But the conclusion about Harding’s racial ancestry likewise addresses a mystery that had puzzled historians for many years and provides a seemingly definitive resolution of a subplot that played out during his lifetime…

Read the entire article here.

Othello’s Daughter

The New Yorker
2013-07-29

Alex Ross, Music Critic

Aldridge, circa 1865, and his daughter Luranah, a singer, in an undated image. Credit Photographs by Billy Rose Theatre Division / The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; Mccormick Library of Special Collections / Northwestern University Library

The rich legacy of Ira Aldridge, the pioneering black Shakespearean.

In 1896, a thirty-six-year-old opera singer named Luranah Aldridge travelled to Germany to prepare for performances of Wagner’s “Ring of the Nibelung,” at the Bayreuth Festival. Dozens of young singers had made such a journey before her: thirteen years after Wagner’s death, Bayreuth had become a summit of the operatic world. Aldridge, though, was of mixed race: an English native, she was the daughter of an African-American and a Swede. The casting of a nonwhite performer in Wagner’s Nordic-Teutonic saga might have been expected to arouse opposition, given the notorious racism of the composer and many of his followers, yet an advance guide to the 1896 festival treats Aldridge simply as a promising novelty:

A name that may well ring strangely in the ears of even the most observant art lovers is that of Luranah Aldridge, who will sing one of the eight Valkyries. Of Luranah Aldridge one cannot say that she did not come from far off, as she hails—from Africa. She is the daughter of the African tragedian Ira Aldridge and studied singing in Germany, England and France, and has appeared with great success in operas and concerts outside of Germany. She is praised as the possessor of a true contralto voice with a wide range. In the course of the festival there will be an opportunity to put these statements to the test.

The singer fell sick during rehearsals and did not perform that summer. Despite encouragement from Cosima Wagner, the composer’s widow, Aldridge faded from view. A few reference works mention her; otherwise, she has vanished from the historical record…

Read the entire article here.

My Response to Critics Regarding My For Harriet Article about Mixed Race Identity

I’m Not Mixed Up, I’m Fully Mixed
2015-08-15

Shannon Luders-Manuel

On Wednesday, For Harriet published my article “What it Means to be Mixed Race During the Fight for Black Lives.” It quickly took off and has received over 23,000 Facebook shares/likes by the time of this blog post. I’m extremely humbled and honored to be sharing the experiences and viewpoints of so many mixed race people. Today I took the time to read what some of the critics had to say about my article. Here is a general response to the ones that seemed the most common…

Read the entire article here.

“Red Velvet” spins a fascinating true story

The Berkshire Eagle
Pittsfield, Massachusetts
2015-08-13

Jeffrey Borak, Entertainment Editor and Theater Critic

LENOX — Actor Ira Aldridge isn’t in the American Theater Hall of Fame; his name is barely a whisper in the annals of American theater. That shouldn’t be, say director Daniela Varon and actor John Douglas Thompson, who is playing Aldridge in “Red Velvet,” a new play by Lolita Chakrabarti that had its world premiere in October 2012 at the Tricycle Theatre in London and its American premiere in March 2014 at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Born a few years after the start of the French Revolution, Aldridge died a few years after the end of our Civil War — a megastar in Europe, but virtually unknown here.

“I was 17 when I first heard about Aldridge,” Varon said during a joint interview with Thompson in the lobby of Shakespeare & Company’s Tina Packer Playhouse, where the production officially opens at 7:30 tonight after a week of previews. It is scheduled to run in rotating repertory through Sept. 13.

“He gave up everything to go to England to become an actor,” Varon said.

Aldridge fashioned a career performing throughout through Europe and the UK. While he was known primarily as a tragedian, he also had a reputation as a good comedic actor.

He outraged London critics but awed audiences when, one night in 1833, he replaced the ailing Edmund Kean as Othello, at the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden.

…Born in New York in 1807, Aldridge emigrated to Liverpool, England in 1824, where he met and married Margaret Gill, a Yorkshire woman.

“He was 26 when he married her, She was 18,” Thompson said. “He already had had a lifetime of experience. He was not a young 26.” Despite a solid marriage, he was a notorious womanizer and fathered several children, in and out of wedlock.

Between 1825 and 1833, he played theaters throughout the United Kingdom. He made his first tour of Europe in 1852, playing not only Othello but also Lear, Richard III, Shylock, Macbeth. He died in Lodz in 1867, where he was given a state funeral…

Read the entire article here.

Cedric Dover, the Anglo-Indian Who Sought Worldwide Solidarity With Racial Minorities

The Wire
2015-08-10

Elisabeth Engel, Research Fellow
German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C.

Slate, Nico, The Prism of Race: W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and the Colored World of Cedric Dover (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)

The scholarship that takes up W.E.B. Du Bois’s thesis that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour line – the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea” fills libraries around the globe.

Ever since the African-American leader defined the concept in Souls of Black Folk in 1903, it figured prominently in research on the United States and the transnational contexts of Western imperialism. Nico Slate, a historian at Carnegie Mellon University, is no exception. His research on social movements in the United States and India has long explored how black Americans and colonial subjects advanced their struggles against white supremacy. His most recent book, The Prism of Race: W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and the Colored World of Cedric Dover, makes the case that this struggle did not just pose the problem of race, but also that of colour.

The story of the 20th century that unfolds from the perspective of people defined as coloured is the subject of Slate’s account. He traces it through the lens of Cedric Dover (1904–1961), an Anglo-Indian biologist, who dedicated his work to the study of race and his political ambition to the movement toward Afro-Asian solidarity. Dover was born in colonial Calcutta, one year after Du Bois’s historic prediction. Slate shows that Dover was one of those “men in Asia and Africa,” whose libraries were filled with Du Bois’s and other African Americans’ writings. Precisely, Dover’s personal library, comprising his writings and reading, is Slate’s main primary source…

Read the entire review here.

Negotiating cultural ambiguity: the role of markets and consumption in multiracial identity development

Consumption Markets & Culture
Volume 18, Issue 4, 2015
pages 301-332
DOI: 10.1080/10253866.2015.1019483

Robert L. Harrison III, Associate Professor of Marketing
Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan

Kevin D. Thomas, Assistant Professor
Stan Richards School of Advertising & Public Relations
University of Texas, Austin

Samantha N. N. Cross, Assistant Professor of Marketing
Iowa State University

Due to their growing social visibility and recognized buying power, multiracial individuals have emerged as a viable consumer segment among marketers. However, there is a dearth of research examining how multiracial populations experience the marketplace. In an attempt to better understand the ways in which multiracial individuals utilize consumption practices as a means of developing and expressing their racial identity, this study examined the lived experience of multiracial (black and white) women. Findings of this phenomenological study indicate that multiracial consumers engage with the marketplace to assuage racial discordance and legitimize the liminal space they occupy. This marketplace engagement is explored through themes such as living in two worlds, the mighty ringlets and forced choice. Multiracial identity is seen to be co-constituted by marketers and consumers. Existing theories proved ineffectual at fully capturing the lived experience connected to the consumer acculturation and socialization processes for those with two distinctly constructed racial backgrounds.

Read or purchase the article here.