Mixed Race Studies

How Race Is Conjured

Jacobin
2015-06-29

Karen E. Fields, Independent Scholar

Barbara J. Fields, Professor of History
Columbia University, New York, New York

Cabs in Albany, GA (1962). Warren K. Leffler / Library of Congress

The fiction of race hides the real source of racism and inequity in America today.

In the three years since Trayvon Martin was killed, the realities of police racism and violence, of segregation from schools to swimming pools, and of the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow have returned to mainstream discussions. And now as Confederate flags disappear in the wake of the murders in Charleston, racism is once again at the center of the popular consciousness.

There is a window, then, for the US left to push a deeper and broader conversation about the implications of racism and to build working-class organizations that fight for social justice for all.

But that opportunity will only be open to the degree we can overcome the ideological legacy of the last three decades. Since the 1980s, structural inequality has been increasingly replaced by personal responsibility as the main explanation for gross inequality. At the same time, attention to persistent and structural racism faded, supplanted by a focus on race and “race relations.”

This could not have been possible without the enshrinement of race as a natural category, the spread of the fiction that certain traits define members of one “race” and differentiate them from members of other races.

No one has better articulated why race cannot serve as the starting point for discussions about inequality in the United States — and what we miss when they are — than Barbara and Karen Fields, authors of the 2012 book Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life.

Barbara and Karen were interviewed for Jacobin last week by Jason Farbman, a member of the International Socialist Organization in New York…

Read the entire interview here.

Review: Misty Copeland Debuts as Odette/Odile in ‘Swan Lake’

The New York Times
2015-06-25

Alastair Macaulay, Dance Critic

Misty Copeland and James Whiteside in “Swan Lake.” Julieta Cervantes for The New York Times

When Misty Copeland made her New York debut in the double role of Odette/Odile in “Swan Lake,” the most epic role in world ballet, two aspects of the performance on Wednesday afternoon proved marvelous. One: that it all happened successfully. Two: the curtain calls.

Let everyone know henceforth that an African-American ballerina has danced this exalted role with American Ballet Theater at the prestigious Metropolitan Opera House. Let everyone know that other African-American dancers, Raven Wilkinson (who danced with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in 1955-61) and Lauren Anderson (who, with the Houston Ballet, was the first African-American ballerina to become a principal of an American ballet company), brought her bouquets onstage. And let everyone know that her fellow dancers shared her applause with pride. (The enthusiasm and affection shown by James Whiteside, who partnered her as Prince Siegfried, was especially engaging.)

As Odette, the Swan Queen, Ms. Copeland has moments of courage and grandeur when you feel the heroic scale of Tchaikovsky’s celebrated drama. She runs boldly around the stage like a creature accustomed to vast space; she raises her arms with the epic sweep of mighty wings. In other respects, she’s admirable but without striking individuality. The substance of “Swan Lake” is there, but in potential. I hope she dances it again and reveals more in it…

Read the entire review here.

Mat Johnson On ‘Loving Day’ And Life As A ‘Black Boy’ Who Looks White

Fresh Air
National Public Radio
2015-06-29

Terry Gross, Host

As a biracial child growing up in Philadelphia, writer Mat Johnson identified as black – but looked white. His new novel is about a man who returns to his hometown after inheriting a run-down mansion.

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross. In a personal essay called “Approving My Blackness,” my guest Mat Johnson wrote, I grew up a black boy who looked like a white one. His African-American mother and Irish-American father divorced when he was 4. He says, I was raised mostly by my black mom in a black neighborhood in Philadelphia during the Black Power movement. So there was quite a contrast between how he saw himself and how others saw him.

Race and identity are also themes of his novel “Pym” and his comic book “Incognegro.” The main character in Johnson’s new satirical novel “Loving Day” is a comic book artist who, like Mat Johnson, is biracial but to many people looks white. When the novel opens, he’s newly divorced and has just returned to Germantown, the Philadelphia neighborhood where he grew up because his father, who just died, bequeathed him a huge, old wreck of a mansion that he bought in an auction but was never able to renovate.

A mansion in the ghetto is how Johnson describes it. The character doesn’t know what to do with the mansion or his life. The book’s title, “Loving Day,” refers to the day of the Supreme Court’s 1967 decision Loving v. Virginia, which struck down all laws banning interracial marriage.

Mat Johnson, welcome to FRESH AIR. I’d love to start with a reading. So this reading happens when the main character is at a small comic book convention, and he finds himself placed on the panel of African-American comic book authors. And he knows because he looks white that people will assume, like, what is he doing there? And in fact, somebody asks, like, what are you doing on this panel? And if you could pick it up from there.

MAT JOHNSON: (Reading) Why am I at the black table? I’m a local writer just back in town, you know, peddling my wares, I tell them, then babble on a bit more, eventually getting to my name and the last book I worked on…

Listen to the interview here (00:38:01). Download the interview here. Read the transcript here.

What President Obama’s historic week means for his legacy

MSNBC
2015-06-28

Benjy Sarlin, Political Reporter

Every occupant of the White House experiences more than one presidency. There’s their actual time in office, an experience characterized by constant political conflict, a drumbeat of unanticipated crises large and small, and a trudging slog towards policy goals. Then there’s the version of their presidency that comes after they leave, as memories fade and history chisels away the various minor dramas until eventually all that remains for most Americans is an ultra­-condensed summary. This is the version passed down through generations, to those who never experienced that president’s tenure themselves and whose sense of history stems from one or two paragraphs in their high school textbook.

More than any other period in his presidency, the past week’s rapid succession of once­-in-­a-­lifetime moments closed the gap between President Obama’s day­ to ­day travails and his larger place in history.

“Progress on this journey often comes in small increments, sometimes two steps forward, one step back, propelled by the persistent effort of dedicated citizens,” as Obama put it in his response to the Supreme Court’s same sex marriage ruling Friday. “And then sometimes, there are days like this when that slow, steady effort is rewarded with justice that arrives like a thunderbolt.”

For a few days in June, change was dizzying in pace and so real it could be touched. Universal health care, as one conservative put it, is forever, thanks to the Supreme Court knocking down the Affordable Care Act’s last significant remaining challenge. Marriage equality is forever. This week’s bipartisan exorcism of the Confederacy’s 150­-year old demons is forever.

The avalanche of news sparked a discussion of two emerging views on Obama’s legacy – one focused on his policy accomplishments, the other as a symbol of underlying changes in the country that will long outlive his presidency…

…Obama’s election as the first black president – powered by landslide margins with black and Latino voters and historic turnout by younger voters – was hailed as a historic moment, but it was eclipsed almost immediately by the massive challenges that landed on his desk and the intense backlash his policy responses provoked on the right. The scope of this achievement came jarringly back into picture on Friday, however, when, as the Associated Press described it, ”America’s first black president sang [Amazing Grace], less than a mile from the spot where thousands of slaves were sold and where South Carolina signed its pact to leave the union a century and a half earlier.” It will move more and more to the forefront once there’s a new president dealing with the 24/7 reality show that is the White House and Obama settles into the more non-partisan, ceremonial role his surviving predecessors occupy today…

Read the entire article here.

Driven by Love or Ambition, Slipping Across the Color Line Through the Ages

The New York Times
2015-06-28

Rachel L. Swarns

Clarence King, a Yale-educated white man who worked as a geologist in the 1800s and dined at the White House, lived a secret life as James Todd, a black train porter with a wife and five children in Brooklyn.

The railroad carried him to the hot springs of Arkansas, the copper mines of Montana and the gold fields of the Pacific Northwest. Weary, lonesome and ailing, he sent letters of love and longing to his wife in New York City.

“I can see your dear face every night when I lay my head on the pillow,” he wrote. “I think of you and dream of you, and my first waking thought is of your dear face and your loving heart.”

Ada Todd saved those letters, symbols of devotion from her husband, James Todd, a fair-skinned black man from Baltimore who worked as a Pullman porter in the late 1800s, and spent weeks and sometimes months away from home.

His earnings allowed the family to move from a cramped, predominantly African-American section of Vinegar Hill in Brooklyn to a more residential street in Bedford-Stuyvesant, to a spacious 11-room house in Flushing, Queens. It was only when he was dying in 1901 that Ms. Todd finally began to piece together the truth: Her husband was not from Baltimore. He was not a Pullman porter. And he was not a black man…

…Yet 19th-century history is dotted with such cases. White men and women driven by love, ambition or other circumstances sometimes leapt across the racial chasm, defying state laws and social conventions designed to keep blacks and whites apart.

“We’ll never know how many people did it,” said Martha A. Sandweiss, a historian at Princeton University who documented Mr. King’s double life for the first time in her book “Passing Strange,” which was published in 2009.

“If they did it well,” she said, “they’re invisible.”

Clarence King did it well…

Read the entire article here.

Art is Cool || Episode 1 || Beth Consetta Rubel

Fum Fum Ko
2015-06-27

Art is Cool is a new documentary web series centered on inspirational artists. The series builds an intimate portrayal of the artist and their work.
Directed/Produced by Fum Fum Ko.

The premiere of the first episode features visual artist, Beth Consetta Rubel. Beth Consetta Rubel uses mix media to create breathtaking projects centered on her personal narrative, race, pop culture, and stereotypes. Check out her site: http://bethconsettarubel.com.

From her Artist Statement:

“I draw upon my personal narrative and am highly influenced by diversity, assimilation, and stereotypes in American culture. The intersection of race and pop culture are fundamental components that invigorate my paintings. The process of rummaging thrift stores to find antique photos, yellow and curling at the edges, vintage postcards, and cast iron objects with a history are a bases for my work. Nostalgic blues music and rhythmic jazz shape the atmosphere in which I work. I explore and dissect Deep South mentality, black face minstrel shows, and the stereotypes present in all outlets of media. I aggressively approach my paintings with an expressive application. I utilize layers of chalk pastel, acrylic, gouache, fabric and found objects and assemble paper cut outs to create a pop-up effect that speculate the irony of subtle racism that shape our society. Is racism permanently embedded in our culture, or is it a learned behavior that is exploited in media and fed to the masses? The subjects of my works include both historical and mainstream imagery that evaluate these questions and embrace contradictions that are philosophical, sexual and emotional.”

As a kid, I was biracial (and black). Today, I’m black (and biracial).

The Washington Post
2015-06-24

Kristal Brent Zook, Professor of Journalism, Media Studies, and Public Relations
Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York

The box we check on census forms is only half the story.

A recent Pew study, “Multiracial in America: Proud, Diverse and Growing in Numbers,” has unleashed a flurry of new commentary about a group that’s now growing at a rate three times as fast as the population as a whole. Pew says its numbers have been seriously underestimated by the U.S. Census, which only began offering a box for those of more than one race in 2000. In 2010, those who checked it were 2.9 percent of the population, but Pew now places the number as high as 6.9 percent, with a serious caveat: Fully 61 percent of those with a mixed racial background don’t consider themselves to be part of this “mixed race or multiracial group.”

I can relate.

Although my mother is African American and my father is Caucasian — which I’ve readily acknowledged to anyone who wants to know — the census box I’ve always chosen is African American. To officially consider myself “multiracial” rather than black would be a complicated and, for me, uncomfortable undertaking, fraught with emotional, social, political and cultural minefields.

The box we check, after all, is only half the story. What struck me most about the Pew study was what it called an “added layer of complexity.” No matter which box one chooses, the study found that “racial identity can be fluid and may change over the course of one’s life, or even from one situation to another. About three in ten adults with a multiracial background say they have changed the way they describe their race over the years, it went on to note, “with some saying they once thought of themselves as only one race and now think of themselves as more than one race, and others saying just the opposite.”

Once again, I can relate…

Read the entire article here.

America’s largest multiracial group doesn’t think of itself that way

Vox
2015-06-18

Jenée Desmond-Harris

People who have both white and Native American heritage make up America’s biggest multiracial group. But they’re the least likely to embrace the label.

This is one of the findings of a Pew Research Center study that took an incredibly detailed look at the lives of multiracial Americans. Pew did something unique to get this data: instead of studying only the people who checked off the “multiracial” box on the census, it looked at all the people who have reported having parents and grandparents of different racial backgrounds — a much bigger group…

Read the entire article here.

Texas woman discovers she’s white after 70 years

KHOU
Houston, Texas
2015-06-22

Marvin Hurst, Reporter
KENS 5 TV, San Antonio, Texas

Byrd with her adoptive family. (Photo: (Photo: Family Photograph))

The mere mention of Rachel Dolezal’s name sets Verda Byrd off like a stick of dynamite. “She lied about her race,” Byrd said. “I didn’t lie about my race because I didn’t know.”

Dolezal’s much publicized choice to identify herself as black has been under scrutiny. The former NAACP President in Spokane, Wash. is accused of deceiving the public by insisting she was not only of black descent but black herself.

Byrd considers herself African-American. Her preference in race comes through an incredible set of circumstances. She was born to Earl and Daisy Beagle in September 1942. They named her Jeanette. She describes her parents as white transients.

Earl walked out on his family. At the time, Daisy had five children to take care of. The struggling mother had to get a job to feed her kids and keep a roof over their heads. The woman fell 30 feet to the ground in a trolley accident. The state of Missouri took her children because she was in no shape to care for them…

Read the entire article here. Watch the story here.

Why Rachel Dolezal Needed To Construct Her Own Black Narrative

BuzzFeed
2015-06-13

Adam Serwer, BuzzFeed News National Editor

In order to pass as black, Dolezal took advantage of the black community’s long tradition of inclusion regardless of skin tone.

In 1895, when Justice Henry Billings Brown ruled that Louisiana’s law segregating train cars was constitutional, he didn’t want to get into the messy business of determining whether or not passenger Homer Plessy was actually black. Though only possessing “one eighth African blood,” with “the mixture of colored blood” not “discernible in him,” whether Plessy was black was a matter for the state to decide.

“[T]here is a difference of opinion in the different States, some holding that any visible admixture of black blood stamps the person as belonging to the colored race,” wrote Brown, “others that it depends upon the preponderance of blood; and still others that the predominance of white blood must only be in the proportion of three-fourths.”

Plessy v. Ferguson became the legal cornerstone of Jim Crow even though Homer Plessy was so light-skinned he could probably drive through Ferguson, Missouri, today without getting a ticket. In other words, who is black is a complicated question, one that remains fraught more than a hundred years after Brown’s ruling blessing racial apartheid in a country founded on the premise of equality under the law. But the long tradition of African-American resistance is one that excels in turning efforts to subjugate black Americans into advantages. One of these is the reversal of the infamous “one-drop rule,” which allows anyone who was a descendant of enslaved black Americans to identify as a member of the African-American community, which is why the NAACP’s Walter White used his racial ambiguity to report on lynchings in the South while passing as white. To claim is to be claimed; to love is to be loved in return. It is that very tradition of love and acceptance that Rachel Dolezal, the NAACP leader in Spokane, Washington, who for years passed as a light-skinned black woman, took advantage of by manufacturing a biography that reads like a racial caricature of a dystopian young adult novel.

Dolezal knew it wasn’t enough to perm and dye her hair and do whatever it is she did to her skin, and to tell everyone she was black. She also had to invent a history in which she and her family had borne the scars of racism, one in which she was born in a “tepee in Montana” and went hunting for food with bows and arrows. One in which she and her siblings endured beatings according to skin tone, and were lashed with “baboon whips” that were “pretty similar to what was used as whips during slavery,” to say nothing of the years she spent filing questionable reports with police about hate crimes. With that connection, even someone as light as her could be black.

The irony is that racial barriers in America have always been permeable and ambiguous, even when they have been most violently enforced…

Read the entire article here.