Mixed Race Studies

Being More ‘Open:’ Black Women Negotiate Dating and Marrying White Men

Chinyere Osuji, PhD
2019-07-10

Chinyere K. Osuji, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Camden

When I was studying at Harvard in the early 2000s, I had a black professor who had built part of his career gas-lighting anti-black discrimination in favor of 1990s-style black cultural inferiority tropes. My grad school girlfriends and I awkwardly giggled over “the sex parts” of his book on black upward mobility. He cited statistics saying that black women did not perform oral sex as often as white women, making them less desirable sexual partners. Sexual incompatibility on this sex act was part of the motor driving black men to date interracially more than black women. I was struck by how he ignored scholarship showing how white women are lauded as the essence of beauty, domesticity, and ideal womanhood. Instead, in a reversal of the Jezebel stereotype, he explained this race-gender imbalance as due to black women being prudes. I remember that when we stopped laughing, we speculated on which black woman might have hurt him and whether this was scholarly revenge porn against black women. We also questioned how his much paler wife felt about this discussion.

Over a decade later, I noticed the increasing popularity of a similar dynamic: “Black women need to be more open!”

How many black women have heard this in reference to our dating and marriage prospects?…

…In my book, Boundaries of Love: Interracial Marriage and the Meaning of Race, I conducted over 100 interviews with people in black-white couples in Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro. I had the privilege of listening to men and women across racial pairings share the monotony, excitement, struggles, and joys of being married to a person on the other side of the ethnoracial hierarchy. Almost all couples seemed content in their relationships. Several were parents navigating how to raise children who were comfortable with the black, white, multiracial, and multi-ethnic sides of their extended families.

One thing that struck me about the black women whom I interviewed was how several of them complained about their white husbands who “just didn’t get it.” As people on the top of gender, racial, and often class hierarchies, these white men often could not make sense of the privileges they accrued in a society that fought very hard to occlude them. The work often fell on their black wives to teach them how they navigated the world as white middle class men. A few white husbands were “woke” to these dynamics. When I interviewed them individually, we laughed about their couple tactic of wives “tagging” them for interactions with customer service representatives and other outsiders. This strategy ensured that they used their race and gender privileges for the good of the family. Still, black women in other relationships described the emotional labor of explaining intersections of disadvantage to their oblivious white husbands…

Read the entire article here.

Historian, master storyteller

PUNCH Magazine
March 2019
pages 30-34

Sheri Baer, Editorial Director
Irene Searles, photography

Allyson Hobbs distinctly remembers the first time she saw Stanford University. After flying out from Chicago for a final interview in January 2008, she was chatting with a faculty member as they arrived on campus. “We were talking about Ohio State football and we turned down Palm Drive,” she recalls. “All of a sudden, my breath was taken away. I couldn’t believe the beauty of it. I thought to myself, ‘Wow! I desperately want to teach here.’”

Allyson secured the position and made the move. Now an associate professor of American History, she is also director of Stanford’s African and African American Studies program (AAAS), which is marking its 50th anniversary this year. Founded in 1969, AAAS was Stanford’s first ethnic studies program and the first of its kind at a private academic institution. “Many programs are having their 50th anniversary around this time,” Allyson notes, adding that it’s no coincidence. “These programs were created in response to student protests in the aftermath of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”

Originally from Morristown, New Jersey, Allyson says that she was raised in a very supportive community. “My parents really shielded me and gave me an idyllic childhood,” she says. “They always talked about how lucky we were to live in that kind of environment.” Allyson attended Harvard in the mid-’90s, where she was exposed to a broader perspective. “There was a robust conversation about race at that time in college, and I think that really ignited my interest.

Allyson especially appreciated the rich storytelling of her aunt, who served as the family historian. When Allyson came home fascinated by a story about racial passing, her aunt recounted the experiences of a distant cousin who had grown up on Chicago’s South Side in the ’30s and ’40s. According to her aunt, this cousin was very light-skinned and when she graduated from high school, her mother encouraged her to move to Los Angeles and pass as a white woman. “Her mother was insistent and believed that passing as white would give her daughter a better life,” Allyson was told.

That story inspired Allyson to write her first book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, tracing the practice back to the late 18th century. “People who passed were able to access better jobs and live in better neighborhoods, but I wanted to uncover what it really meant to the people who walked away, what they had to give up,” Allyson says. “Writing the history of passing is really writing the history of loss.”…

Read the entire article here.

Claiming to be Cherokee, contractors with white ancestry got $300 million

The Los Angeles Times
2019-06-26

Adam Elmahrek, Investigative Reporter

Paul Pringle, Investigative Reporter

Two years ago, when the mayor’s office in St. Louis announced a $311,000 contract to tear down an old shoe factory, it made a point of identifying the demolition company as minority owned.

That was welcome news. The Missouri city was still grappling with racial tensions from the 2014 fatal police shooting of Michael Brown, a black 18-year-old, in nearby Ferguson. After angry protests, elected officials had pledged to set aside more government work for minority-owned firms.

There was only one problem…

Read the entire article here.

Long Live the Tribe of Father­less Girls [Review]

Jewish Book Council
2019-07-04

Jessie Sza­lay

T Kira Madden, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, A Memoir (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019)

This stun­ning, com­pul­sive­ly read­able debut mem­oir tells the sto­ry of T Kira Madden’s com­ing-of-age in the swampy, sur­re­al world of wealthy Boca Raton, Flori­da. Despite her priv­i­lege wrought from her father’s shady deal­ings in gam­bling and stocks, young Mad­den faced crip­pling lone­li­ness and inse­cu­ri­ty. Her drug-addled par­ents were fre­quent­ly neglect­ful, strung out to what Mad­den calls ​“the oth­er place.” Though wealthy enough to attend prepara­to­ry school and own four hors­es, Mad­den fed her­self lit­tle but canned soup as a child. Her father rarely spoke to her and called her ​“son.” It’s no won­der that despite his phys­i­cal pres­ence for sub­stan­tial por­tions of her child­hood, Mad­den felt father­less. As a teenag­er, she fell into code­pen­dent friend­ships with oth­er ​“losers” who lacked sol­id parental sup­port. They found a sense of con­trol in drugs, eat­ing dis­or­ders, and sex, both enabling each oth­er in tox­ic behav­ior and being a lov­ing family.

It sounds like an aver­age ​“poor lit­tle rich girl” sto­ry. But Long Live the Tribe of Father­less Girls is much more than that, tak­ing tropes and ren­der­ing them with an undy­ing sense of com­pas­sion. The details of Madden’s ear­ly mem­o­ries are star­tling­ly vivid in a way that sug­gests she was in a per­sis­tent state of high alert, every pain etched in her brain for­ev­er. But for every men­tion of a ter­ri­fy­ing drug over­dose or her father leav­ing her at a base­ball game, there are sto­ries of her mother’s del­i­cate removal of lice from her daughter’s hair or her father’s ear­ly teach­ing of mag­ic tricks. Mad­den loves her fam­i­ly fierce­ly and in spite of it all, we nev­er doubt their deep-down love for her…

Read the entire review here.

Kamala Harris, Birtherism, Race and the Unscrupulous, Sinister Antics of the Far Right!

Medium
2019-07-04

Elwood Watson, Professor of History, African American Studies and Gender Studies
East Tennessee State University

Now that she has emerged as a serious contender for the 2020 democratic nomination for president, Kamala Harris has come under attack from a number of conservative political outlets. Various segments of the right wing echo chamber immediately began working overtime in an effort to discredit the former California attorney general, now U.S. Senator.

Partisan knives have been purchased, sharpened and some have been employed by their unethical owners in an unabashed effort to attempt to stab and discredit the senator’s claim of American roots. Fortunately, for Harris, her formidable mental agility coupled with her acute political acumen has been a tremendous weapon to protect herself and stave off a vicious onslaught of treacherous and wicked attacks.

The most recent genesis of such a sinister ploy originated by a Black conservative internet blogger, Ali Alexander whose online identity was previously known as Ali Akbar and Ali Abdul Razaq Akbar. Alexander is a Black right wing, MAGA-world internet personality who crafted and engineered a website for similar, conspiratorial, like-minded fringe elements of the extreme right who were unable or in some cases, unwilling to either embrace or find a stable home in more mainstream conservative media circles…

Read the entire article here.

Why ‘Raising a Black Son’ Is a de Blasio Campaign Theme

The New York Times
2019-07-01

Jeffery C. Mays

Dante de Blasio wrote an op-ed published in USA Today that expanded on how his father, Mayor Bill de Blasio, talked to him about being wary of the police. Sina Schuldt/Picture Alliance, via Getty Images

Dante de Blasio, whose giant Afro was featured in his father’s bid for New York City mayor, is playing a role in his presidential campaign.

The first frame in the now-famous 33-second ad is taken up almost entirely by Dante de Blasio’s giant Afro.

He was only 15 then, an unlikely star of his father’s equally unlikely victory in the 2013 mayor’s race in New York City.

Through Dante, his father, Bill de Blasio, was able to highlight his biracial family, offer a personal perspective on his policies on affordable housing and early childhood education and signal his intention to end the police practice, known as stop and frisk, that Dante said in the ad “unfairly targets” minorities.

Now, deep into his second and final term as mayor and in the midst of another long-shot candidacy, this time for president, Mr. de Blasio is once again leaning on his son for a boost…

Read the entire article here.

Social media trolls try but fail to give Kamala Harris the Obama-birther treatment

Think Progress
2019-07-01

Sam Fulwood III

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA – JUNE 30: Democratic presidential candidate U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) greets attendees during the SF Pride Parade on June 30, 2019 in San Francisco, California. An online smear campaign targeted Harris over the weekend, arguing she’s not a black American and raising fears of birtherism and racism intruding into the 2020 campaign. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Birtherism raises its ugly head, only to be lopped off by Harris supporters and rivals

A birther-style attack against Sen. Kamala Harris’ campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination failed to take hold after legions of her online supporters — including most of her political opponents — rushed to denounce social media postings challenging her legitimacy to speak as a black American.

Harris spoke passionately about racial issues during last week’s Democratic debate, and since then a misguided series of social media posts began sprouting on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter suggesting that her parentage — Harris’ mother was Tamil Indian and her father is Jamaican — disqualified her from the community of black people in the United States.

At one point in last week’s debate, Harris interrupted crosstalk on stage, demanding to be heard as “the only black person on this stage” during a heated discussion of racial justice policy.

At another point, Harris described her feelings confronting racism as a child. “Growing up, my sister and I had to deal with the neighbor who told us her parents said she couldn’t play with us because … we were black.”…

Read the entire article here.

Interracial Marriages among Asian Americans in the U.S. West, 1880-1954

University of Florida
2011
257 pages

Eunhye Kwon

A dissertation presented to the graduate school of the University of Florida in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

My work is about the first two generations of Chinese and Japanese Americans who married whites in the U.S. West between 1880 and 1954. It was a time when interracial marriage was illegal in most of the states. From two major archival sources—the Survey of Race Relations, 1924–1927, and records about Japanese American internees during World War II—, my work finds that more than two hundred Chinese and Japanese Americans and their white spouses could circumvent miscegenation laws and lived as legally married couples in the U.S. West before the 1950s.

Existing scholarship on the history of miscegenation laws has revealed the role of the laws in making racial categories and stigmatizing interracial intimacy between non-white men and white women. My work shows that marriages between white women and Chinese and/or Japanese men were major targets of racist and misogynist assumptions about interracial intimacy in the U.S. West. Such marriages were further marginalized by federal government’s policies on Asian exclusion and on the mixed marriage families during the World War II internment of Japanese Americans. Government policies upheld a white male citizen’s ability to assimilate his Asian wife and his patriarchal prerogative to his interracial family. The same government policies persistently denied the claims of white women married to Chinese and/or Japanese men that they, as wives and mothers, were assimilating agents in their interracial families.

My work uncovers the history of a small but significant number of interracial couples consisting of Chinese and/or Japanese husbands and white wives, who argued against the negative construction of their interracial marriages. My work also notes the emergence of a cultural pluralist defense of interracial marriage between non-white men and white women by progressive intellectuals such as Franz Boas, W.E.B. Du Bois, Sidney Gulick, and Robert Park in the early twentieth century. White women married to Chinese and/or Japanese men claimed that their interracial families were legitimate American families decades before postwar American liberals began to openly support interracial marriage.

Read the entire dissertation here.

Lunchtime Lecture: Eleanor Kipping

SVA MFA Art Practice
335 West 16th Street
New York, New York 10011
Telephone: 212.592.2781
Tuesday, 2019-07-02, 12:30-14:00 EDT (Local Time)

Without Borders Festival IV: Between You and Me, Lord Gallery (1200 Afro picks, gold leaf, rocking chair, book of poetry)

Eleanor Kipping is a socially engaged artist and educator. Her interdisciplinary creative practice is concerned with the Black female experience as Other in the United States regarding hair politics, colorism, and racial passing and how these topics may be explored at the intersection(s) of installation, performance, and social practice. She holds a BS from the New England School of Communications, an MFA from the University of Maine and has participated in residencies at Skowhegan and Gakko in Japan. Kipping is the 2019 Art Practice Artist-in-Residence.

For more information, click here.

‘Why am I different?’ Behind this WNBA player’s activism was a search for the answer.

The Washington Post
2019-06-22

Ava Wallace

Natasha Cloud in the Mystics’ locker room Friday, when she followed through on a “media blackout” to discuss only gun violence. (Doug Kapustin for The Washington Post)

Some 30 minutes after the Washington Mystics lost to the Seattle Storm on June 14 in Southeast D.C., starting guard Natasha Cloud moved from her seat along the back wall of the Mystics’ locker room to stand at the front, pausing twice to maneuver around various reporters pointing TV cameras and cellphones at her face.

She was not among the Mystics’ leading scorers that night, but she would be their only player to address the media.

Her voice quavering but strong, Cloud, 27, read a prepared statement on behalf of the team rather than answer questions about the game. She followed through on plans she announced the day before on Instagram to hold a “media blackout” to address only gun violence in Washington.

Cloud’s public action came together over little more than 24 hours. But it was the culmination of a long journey, the result of maturation, her increased status with the Mystics since the start of last season and, most importantly, a level of comfort in her own skin that took years to achieve.

“This is my fifth year in the league, and it took me five years to be like, I know something’s wrong, but how do I use my voice? What is my voice? Who am I to speak on the situation?” Cloud said. “You know, I didn’t grow up that way. I grew up in a privileged, white family. How do I correlate that?”…

Read the entire article here.