Mixed Race Studies

Sleeping with the enemy

Sick Chickens: A blog for enthusiasts of American history and politics
2014-12-23

James Owen Heath, PhD Candidate
University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom

I have never been struck by the intelligence of Jon Stewart’s remarks in the past but I have to agree with him that it is indeed possible to be outraged by the execution of two NYPD officers and also deeply concerned by police treatment of black Americans, simply because the two are not mutually exclusive. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio may have committed political suicide by making remarks which suggest sympathy or even solidarity with black Americans as a result of insensitive policing, but this does not suggest that he has betrayed his city’s police force. The very idea that his remarks incited a deeply disturbed man to go out and execute two police officers before taking his own life is just absurd.

This debate is simply illustrative of the dogmatic attitudes which exist at each end of the political spectrum, and how these continue to dominate US politics without any sensible middle ground being in view. But the real reason for the appalling manner in which de Blasio has been scapegoated is quite evident in the photo above…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed: Race cannot be invisible

The Daily of the University of Washington
2012-10-27

Hayat Norimine

For most of my life, I was opposed to the concept of “diversity.” Half-Japanese, half-Syrian, I was the definition of racially diverse, but I also loathed being labeled.

I thought diversity was difficult to define. I thought race alone was never a good indication of someone’s personal experiences.

I was afraid of what my race meant. And of all the superpowers that I could wish for, invisibility was always my choice — not just for me, but for the world. Colorblindness seemed like the opposite of racism to me: Ignore race and move beyond seeing race as essential. To be completely free from judging eyes is something I would have wished on everyone growing up. To be both colorblind and color-free…

…We don’t live in a post-racial world. Luckily, we live in a world after Martin Luther King Jr. We live in a country in which “diversity” is no longer used as slander and is actually seen as a positive attribute. But even in Brazil — arguably the most diverse country in the world — where there are up to 500 racial categorizations, there is still discrimination. There is still historical oppression…

Read the article here.

White? Black? A Murky Distinction Grows Still Murkier

The New York Times
2014-12-24

Carl Zimmer

In 1924, the State of Virginia attempted to define what it means to be white.

The state’s Racial Integrity Act, which barred marriages between whites and people of other races, defined whites as people “whose blood is entirely white, having no known, demonstrable or ascertainable admixture of the blood of another race.”

There was just one problem. As originally written, the law would have classified many of Virginia’s most prominent families as not white, because they claimed to be descended from Pocahontas.

So the Virginia legislature revised the act, establishing what came to be known as the “Pocahontas exception.” Virginians could be up to one-sixteenth Native American and still be white in the eyes of the law.

People who were one-sixteenth black, on the other hand, were still black.

In the United States, there is a long tradition of trying to draw sharp lines between ethnic groups, but our ancestry is a fluid and complex matter. In recent years geneticists have been uncovering new evidence about our shared heritage, and last week a team of scientists published the biggest genetic profile of the United States to date, based on a study of 160,000 people…

Read the entire article here.

Why I Passed For White

The Archipelago: Stories about community, identity, and the ongoing quest to belong.
Medium
2014-12-19

Shawna Ayoub Ainslie

I erased my own heritage to feel safe. I hope to teach my children not to do the same.

When I was 16, I started letting people believe that I was white.

In 1996, my family relocated upward from the Bible Belt. We moved from the southwest corner of Arkansas to the Midwest. At sixteen, I experienced a new definition of self — which, for me, meant shedding my ethnic heritage and the abuse that came with it. My coming of age was more than an exit from youthful innocence. It was an escape.

Innocence, in this case, is a misleading term. The naivete that defines the wishful, carefree young was lost to me much earlier than 16. It began at the age of 9, the fourth year in a row I was assigned the part of Native American in the school Thanksgiving play because I “looked the part.” That year, I stood onstage dressed in a paper-bag-cum-leather-vest with an Indian-American boy. Both of us sported handmade headbands with oversized feathers. Our single spoken line was accompanied by the arcing of one folded arm upward. “How!” I shouted, having practiced the line with aplomb. “How,” my cohort whispered, barely gumming the word and ducking his head as though ashamed. Our white peers were grouped together at the Pilgrim’s table, waiting to take the giant ears of paper mache corn we handed them.

It was weeks later, during International Day, when we were both paraded once more onstage, when I began to understand my fellow actor resistance to the role of food-bearing native. After all, even though Native Americans had saved the Pilgrims with offerings of corn and hunting instruction, the Pilgrims were the true saviors; they came bearing God and civility to the dark-skinned heathen.

That International Day, we were exhorted to wear our ethnic best, and so we came to school in costume. Indian-American boy, Arab-American girl, dressed in pantaloons and tunic and ornate housedress. I came with jeans and a t-shirt in my bag because those were the items most comfortable. But the boy, whose name I cannot recall, had only his waist-tie pants. After we were questioned onstage about our weird, foreign at-home customs, we exited stage right. Just off the stage in the cafeteria’s corner, the tie must have let go. My peer lost his pants. They slipped soundlessly down around his ankles. He turned, his brown eyes meeting mine. He was not panicked. He said nothing. He simply looked resigned.

I had shifted to block him from view, but a redhead named Ashley caught sight of the spectacle. He ran toward the dispersing classes to notify everyone he knew. “Shawna was there!” he squealed. “Shawna saw it.”

Here it was: the moment that could elevate me beyond the nickname Gorilla — a nod to my hairy, Arab legs. The boy was not my friend, but neither were the children who clamored around me. I looked back into the boy’s brown eyes. He waited.

“Did you see his underwear?” someone asked. “Are they as weird as his clothes?”

In that moment I found a kinship in the brownness the boy and I shared. I squared my feet. “It didn’t happen,” I said. And then, “Ashley is lying.”

Aside from my body hair, the thing I was most known for was honesty. The story was deflated. Ashley narrowed his eyes at me. I had made an enemy. I looked around. The brown boy was gone.

I wish I could remember his name. I have thought about assigning one to him, but it feels disingenuous. Of the peers that litter my history, he is one who deserves a label other than ethnicity. Especially as he ushered me out of my innocence into an awareness of my physical self and its perception. Still, he remains nameless, like so many of our other dark-skinned brothers…

Read the entire article here.

Chowan Discovery Group, Marvin T. Jones

Backintyme.biz
Blog Talk Radio
2014-12-20

Stacey Webb, Host

Marvin T. Jones, Executive Director
Chowan Discovery Group

Author & Historian Marvin T. Jones, Executive Director & owner of Marvin T. Jones and Associates, specializing in corporate communications photography and photographic design. His love of the community of his birth led him to create the now defunct Rowan-Chowan.com website, a personal website of stories and photo essays. jones is a native of Cofield, North Carolina. He attended the Winton Triangle’s C.S. Brown School and graduated from Ahoskie High School.

Marvin also wrote a chapter in Carolina Genesis, Beyond The Color Line and presents the first history of the Winton Triangle. Marvin’s essay “The Leading Edge of Edges-The Tri-Racial People of the Winton Triangle”, tells the story of a people who emerge from the meeting of the New and Old Worlds and how they created success from century to century in northeastern North Carolina. Highlights of the essay include: Origins of the Winton Triangle and the Triangle’s contribution to the Civil War in expanding freedom in the United States, Founding of Pleasant Plains Baptist Church & the C.S. Brown & Robert L. Vann Schools, and the achievements of their members & graduates. Leadership in worship, education, business & government.

Associates; Laverne Jones, Director & Dr. Harold Mitchell, Director.

Mission of the Chowan Discovery Group is to Collect, Preserve & present materials that describe & illustrate the Winton Triangle history. Dating back to the 1740’s, North Carolina’s Winton Triangle is one of the oldest communities if land-owning people of color in America. The Triangle originally encompassing the towns of Winton, Cofield & Union. In the late 19th century the Triangle expanded toward the newly incorporated town of Ahoskie.

Lacey Schwartz came to terms with her true racial identity in ‘Little White Lie’

The New York Daily News
2014-11-30

Justin Rocket Silverman, Senior Features Writer

Documentary film chronicles how she grew up believing she was a white Jewish girl and then learned her biological father was black

Lacey Schwartz didn’t know she was black — until the college she applied to classified her as that.

“I come from a long line of New York Jews,” the 37-year-old filmmaker says in “Little White Lie,” her new documentary feature. “I wasn’t pretending to be something I wasn’t. I actually grew up believing I was white.”

The story of how Schwartz came to understand her real identity is the subject of “Little White Lie,” now playing in select theaters. The movie is more than a decade in the making, as Schwartz began filming herself in her college dorm room and in sessions with her therapist, often in tears, as she struggled to understand who, and what, she is.

That story began in 1968, the year her white Jewish parents were married. Her mom got a job that same year at a playground in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, and met a black man there who would become Schwartz’s biological father. But Schwartz’s mom never told her husband that her child wasn’t really his. Instead, the baby’s dark complexion was explained as a genetic echo of an Italian grandfather…

Read the entire article here.

CNN’s Candy Crowley interviews President Barack Obama

Cable News Network (CNN)
2014-12-21

For his last interview of the year, President Obama sat down, exclusively, with CNN’s Candy Crowley to discuss North Korea’s cyber-attack on Sony Pictures, normalizing relations with Cuba, Russia, Iran, race relations in America and Guantanamo Bay.

The interview aired Sunday, December 21st, on CNN at 09:00 and 12:00 EST

Text highlights and a transcript of the discussion are below…

…CROWLEY: …And I thought, you know, do you think that you look at race matters somewhat differently because, yes, you’re the first African-American president, but your mother was white.

OBAMA: Right.

CROWLEY: You were raised by your mother and your white grandparents.

OBAMA: Yes.

CROWLEY: Does that give you a different perspective, do you think?

OBAMA: I think it probably does. I – you know, I wrote a whole book about this. And, uh, there’s no doubt that, you know, I move back and forth between the racial divides, not just black-white, but Asian and Latino and, you know, I’ve got a lot of cultural influences.

I – I think what it does do for me is to recognize that most Americans have good intentions. I said a little bit about this in the press conference earlier today.

I assume the best rather than the worst in others. But it also makes me mindful of the fact that there’s misunderstanding, there’s mistrust and there are biases both overt and sometimes hidden that operate in ways that disadvantage minority communities.

And that’s a carryover. There’s a long legacy in this country that has gotten enormously better, but is still there. And when you look at what’s happened in law enforcement across the country over the last several years, um, that’s not news to African-Americans. What’s different is simply that some of it’s now videotaped and people see it.

And the question then becomes, you know, what practical steps can we take to solve this problem?

And I believe that the overwhelming majority of white Americans, as well as African-Americans, want to see this problem solved.

So I have confidence that by surfacing these issues, we’re going to be able to make progress on them…

Read the entire interview transcript here.

‘I move back and forth between the racial divides’: President Obama opens up on his mixed-race background and says it helps him recognize that most Americans have good intentions

The Daily Mail
London, United Kingdom
2014-12-21

Francesca Chambers, Political Reporter

• ‘There’s no doubt that…I move back and forth between the racial divides,’ Obama told CNN host Candy Crowley. ‘I’ve got a lot of cultural influences’
• Obama’s discussion with Crowley, taped on Friday, took a step further reflections he shared with reporters earlier that day at his year-end presser
• The president argued ‘people are basically good and have good intentions’ and ‘the vast majority of people are just trying to do the right thing’
• ‘If critics want to suggest that America is inherently and irreducibly racist, then why bother even working on it?’ he told Crowley

President Barack Obama is crediting his racial make up and exposure at a young age to an array of demographic groups with his ability to see the good in people.

‘There’s no doubt that…I move back and forth between the racial divides,’ Obama told CNN host Candy Crowley during a one-on-one interview that aired this morning on the news network.

‘Not just black-white, but Asian and Latino and, you know, I’ve got a lot of cultural influences,’ he added. ‘I think what it does do for me is to recognize that most Americans have good intentions.’

As he writes about in detail in his memoir, Dreams from My Father, Obama was born to a white woman from Kansas and black man from Kenya. The couple met while studying at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

The young couple separated after days after Barack Obama was born and formally divorced a few years later. Obama’s mother soon remarried and she and her son moved to her husband’s home country of Indonesia.

Four years later Obama returned to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents and to finish his schooling. His mother and sister eventually relocated to Hawaii for several years, as well, before moving back to Indonesia again, but Obama remained in Hawaii with his mother’s parents.

After graduating high school Obama moved to the contiguous United States, where he has lived ever since with his wife Michelle, whom he met while in law school, and their two children, Sasha, and Malia.

Obama’s discussion with Crowley about his personal history, taped on Friday, took a step further the life reflections the first mixed-race president first shared with reporters at his year-end press conference earlier that day.

The president had argued that ‘people are basically good and have good intentions,’ even though ‘sometimes our institutions and our systems don’t work as well as they should…

Read the entire article here. Read the CNN transcript here.

The Whiteness Project: Facing Race In A Changing America

National Public Radio
All Things Considered
2014-12-21

Karen Grigsby Bates
Los Angeles Correspondent

Whitney Dow found participants in the Whiteness Project by putting out a call for interested white folks in Buffalo to talk about whiteness on tape.

The voices in the Whiteness Project vary by gender, age and income, but they all candidly express what it is like to be white in an increasingly diverse country.

“I don’t feel that personally I’ve benefited from being white. That’s because I grew up relatively poor,” a participant shared. “My father worked at a factory.” These are the kind of unfiltered comments that filmmaker Whitney Dow was hoping to hear when he started recording a group of white people, and hoped to turn their responses into provocative, interactive videos.

“I was essentially giving people permission to discuss this,” he says. “And I believe there’s a huge hunger in this country to engage this topic.”…

…”It is not typical for white people to think about their race,” says Catherine Orr, who teaches critical identity studies at Beloit College in Wisconsin. She says that many white people who don’t feel privileged struggle against the notion that race gives them an inherent advantage. “I think white folks are terribly invested in our own innocence,” she points out. “We don’t want to think about how what we have is related to what other people don’t have.”…

Listen to the story here. Download the story here.

Obama’s message of hope and change is all but lost amid the chaos of Ferguson

The Guardian
2014-08-22

Patricia Williams, James L. Dohr Professor of Law
Columbia University, New York, New York

The president is being pressed to take sides in a personal, political and structural tragedy in a divided nation

In 2008, the year that Barack Obama became president of the United States, the New York-based artist Carrie Mae Weems created a video installation in which Obama’s face melts from one thing to another: model citizen, communist infiltrator, immigrant, foreigner, friend, black Jesus, brown Hitler, American dream, chicken, monkey, zebra, joker, minstrel. As Weems’s voiceover describes it: “A reason to hope, a reason to change, a reason to reason …”

Of course, Obama has always been somewhat shape-shifting in his symbolism – it’s probably what got him elected to begin with. The “hope and change” that became his trademark was more than mere slogan; the very idea of a first black president became a mirror for whatever people wanted to see in him.

Now we come to a situation all too familiar in America with the death of Michael Brown at the hands of a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Obama is being pressed to take one of two sides in a layered personal, political, and structural tragedy for which carelessly drawn lines in the sand could not be more unhelpful. The last two weeks of anguish in Ferguson cap a difficult season for Obama. Already besieged by the situations in Ukraine, Iraq, Gaza, Libya, Afghanistan and Pakistan, he has had to manoeuvre his way through attacks at home from every side. From Congressional Republicans threatening to sue him for trying to implement healthcare reform to the snarkily undermining comments of Hillary Clinton – this summer has been a season of confrontation. Is Obama too aggressive in his exercise of executive power? Or too chicken to invade? Is he passive on immigration? Too intemperate with Congress? Rarely has a president been so buffeted by such a variety of inconsistently projected personality traits…

Read the entire article here.