Mixed Race Studies

The legend of Lone Star Dietz: Redskins namesake, coach — and possible impostor?

The Washington Post
2013-11-06

Richard Leiby

Reading, Pa. — Here lies the celebrated Lone Star Dietz — in a donated cemetery plot, aside a back road, under a drooping evergreen. A simple marker, paid for by friends, bears only one word that hints at his legend: “Coach.”

Finally, we have found him, the Washington Redskins’ namesake. Dietz coached the inaugural Boston Redskins team 80 years ago, before it moved to Washington. He was a Sioux Indian, and the team was named in his honor, “out of respect for Native American heritage and tradition.”

That is what the team’s attorneys have said, anyway, in court filings battling an effort by Native Americans to cancel the Redskins trademark as disparaging — a campaign more than two decades old. Now the objections to the name are reaching an unprecedented volume, including Tuesday’s D.C. Council vote condemning the team name as “racist and derogatory.”

In the midst of this criticism, team owner Dan Snyder wrote a letter to season-ticket holders last month in which he mentioned the team’s former Native American head coach and called the name “a badge of honor.”

But what if Coach Lone Star Dietz wasn’t an Indian?…

…A half-century after his death, it seems that no one has decisively pinned down the heritage of William Henry “Lone Star” Dietz. This makes the Redskins’ flat-out assertions that the First Coach was an Indian even more problematic for some…

…Dietz’s claims about his Sioux origins were accepted and repeated for decades by researchers and credulous reporters.

I was one of them. Ninety years after The Post first took note of Dietz and his artistry at the 1904 World’s Fair, I wrote about him. “His father was German, his mother Sioux,” I said in a story about how the Redskins got their name.

At the time, my understanding of Dietz’s heritage was based on the available scholarship and a number of interviews. Indians I talked to did not raise questions about his self-proclaimed Sioux identity…

Read the entire article here.

De Blasio Is Elected New York City Mayor

The New York Times
2013-11-05

Michael Barbaro

David W. Chen, City Hall Bureau Chief

Bill de Blasio hugged his son, Dante, at an election night party on Tuesday. Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Bill de Blasio, who transformed himself from a little-known occupant of an obscure office into the fiery voice of New York’s disillusionment with a new gilded age, was elected the city’s 109th mayor on Tuesday..

His overwhelming victory, stretching from the working-class precincts of central Brooklyn to the suburban streets of northwest Queens, amounted to a forceful rejection of the hard-nosed, business-minded style of governance that reigned at City Hall for the past two decades and a sharp leftward turn for the nation’s largest metropolis.

Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat who is the city’s public advocate, defeated his Republican opponent, Joseph J. Lhota, a former chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

It was the most sweeping victory in a mayor’s race since 1985, when Edward I. Koch won by 68 points, and it gave Mr. de Blasio what he said was an unmistakable mandate to pursue his liberal agenda….

…To an unusual degree, he relied on his own biracial family to connect with an increasingly diverse electorate, electrifying voters with a television commercial featuring his charismatic teenage son, Dante, who has a towering Afro…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed race families are becoming more common in advertising

The Oklahoma Daily
University of Oklahoma
Norman, Oklahoma
2013-11-04

The Editorial Board

If an artist was assigned to paint a portrait of the average American family 75 years ago, odds are, he or she would paint a family of one race — typically either white parents with white children or black parents with black children.

Today, however, families are more diverse than ever, and this is a good thing for our country. As our nation progresses toward equality for everyone, regardless of sexuality or race, families are looking a lot more colorful than they used to.

Marriages between spouses of a different race or ethnicity from each other increased to 15.1 percent in 2010, according to a Pew Research report. In that same year, the report states interracial or interethnic marriages in America reached an all-time high of 8.4 percent. If that was in 2010, imagine how many more interracial couples there are today.

The increase in mixed families clearly demonstrates the historical barriers of segregation are crumbling down, but while much of the U.S. is making headway, some Americans are still lagging behind the times, letting their actions and words showcase their ignorant social morality…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

79-173 Freshman Seminar: Barack Obama and the History of Race in America

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Department of History
2013-2014

Well before he was elected the forty-fourth President of the United States, Barack Obama challenged Americans to think anew about the history of race in this country. In this course, we will examine President Obama’s life, writings, and speeches as the foundation for a larger investigation into the history of race and, in particular, the struggle to achieve racial equality within the United States. We will read President Obama’s first biography and several of his key speeches as well as a recent history of the Civil Rights Movement. Our goal will be not only to probe the life and ideas of President Obama but to examine the larger history of race in America. Topics will include the geographic and temporal diversity of the Civil Rights Movement, the shifting meanings of “mixed-race,” race and American foreign policy, the history of racial inequality in housing, education, and employment, affirmative action, and race and immigration.

Trayvon, Postblackness, and the Postrace Dilemma

boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture
Volume 40, Number 3 (Fall 2013)
pages 139-161
DOI: 10.1215/01903659-2367072

Richard Purcell, Assistant Professor of English
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

If President Barack Obama crystallizes the intersection of postrace and postblack idealism, nothing has exposed the fraught relationship between the two than the shooting death of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin on February 26, 2012. What Trayvon Martin’s death has brought to the fore is what contemporary intellectuals are attempting to think when they think postblackness and, for that matter, postrace. What way of understanding race knowledge in our present does postblackness offer us, especially in a postrace era? The answer: both blindness and insight. Through a meditation on the relationship between Trayvon Martin, postrace, and postblackness, this essay aims to demonstrate this blindness and insight. On the one hand, postblackness has the potential to provide a bulwark against the persistent biologisms in contemporary race thinking. Yet, it is also used in our postrace era as a term to indulge in a weaker mode of criticism: debunking—a critical posture that has allowed critics to ignore and even circulate more insidious forms of race thinking.

Read or purchase the article here.

New Book on Racial Identity by Dr. Yaba Blay to be Released on Black Friday with Launch Party at the Painted Bride

Drexel Now
Drexel University
2013-11-04

News Media Contact: Alex McKechnie, News Officer, University Communications
Phone: 215-895-2705; Mobile: 401-651-7550

On Black Friday, Nov. 29, a new book on racial identity by Drexel University’s Dr. Yaba Blay, one of today’s leading voices on colorism and global skin color politics, will be released from Blay’s recently launched independent press, Black Print Press.

To celebrate the release, a launch party will take place at The Painted Bride Art Center (230 Vine St.) on Nov. 29 from 6 p.m. – 9 p.m. A concurrent photography exhibition is currently on display at The Painted Bride through Dec. 21.

The book, entitled (1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race, seeks to challenge narrow perceptions of what Blackness is and what it looks like. By combining candid narratives and photos from 60 contributors hailing from 25 different countries, the book provides a living testimony to the diversity of Blackness. It is intended to spark dialogue about the intricacies and nuances of racial identity and the influence of skin color politics…

Read the entire press release here.

Diverse Neighborhood Has Mixed Enthusiasm About New York City Mayor’s Race

The New York Times
2013-11-03

Cara Buckley

The last presidential candidate Steve Waldman voted for was Hubert H. Humphrey. The last mayor he cast a ballot for was Edward I. Koch. And he’ll be darned if he is going to break his nonvoting streak by partaking in the mayoral election on Tuesday.

The Republican candidate, Joseph J. Lhota, reminds him too much of Rudolph W. Giuliani, of whom he takes a dim view. The Democratic candidate, Bill de Blasio, strikes him as likely to help people who abuse welfare. Mr. Waldman, a 65-year-old computer supplier, sees the city is on a reverse Robin Hood course — with parking fines, bridge tolls and assorted high taxes — and extracting more dollars from people like him…

…With New York City on the verge of electing a new mayor for the first time in 12 years, the people of Sheepshead Bay, with its mosaic of Russians, Irish, Italians and Jews, have views on the city’s prospects that are as diverse as their neighborhood. The community can at times seem ethnically segmented, but the four-decade-old El Greco serves as an enduring melting pot, and draws hordes of local residents by the boothful each weekend…

…Ms. McField, who works as an accountant for the Administration for Children’s Services, said she yearned for an end to the Police Department’s controversial stop-and-frisk tactics that Mr. de Blasio has vowed to change. Ms. McField said that many of her family members had been harassed by the police, including her husband, John McField, 36, a former corrections officer who recently returned from serving as an Army specialist in Afghanistan.

“Being black in New York, we see a lot of things that other people don’t see,” Ms. McField said as her family tucked into brunch. “It’s emotional for me,” she added, her eyes welling, “It’s targeting.”…

…Yet Luchia Larrazabal, a caregiver who was eating with her daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren, said she pinned her hopes on Mr. de Blasio to help bridge one of the city’s enduring issues — racial schisms. After all, he is white, his wife is black and their two children are biracial.

“Because of the mixed race,” Ms. Larrazabal said, “I look forward to him uniting everyone.”

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial America Makes Census Boxes Obsolete

The Root
2013-11-04

Keli Goff

As the nation becomes more multiracial, some question whether the survey can accurately reflect the country’s true diversity.

Editor’s note: This is the first of three in a series.

(The Root) — In 30 years, America will look very different than it does now. According to analysis of census data, by 2043 white Americans will no longer be a majority. But an equally significant population milestone will arrive in 2020. That is the year in which the next census takes place, and it will be the first one tasked with successfully chronicling the most racially and culturally mixed population in American history.

Governing the nation at the very time the census is grappling with this issue is the country’s first biracial president. Though President Obama has said he identifies as black on the census, there is a growing population of people who may share a similar background but do not wish to identify as he has chosen to. Helping to ensure that these Americans are adequately and accurately counted through his administration’s efforts to perfect a modern census could end up being a significant part of the Obama legacy.

Multiracial Americans are the fastest growing demographic in the country, yet the U.S. Census Bureau has struggled with how to effectively capture the changing racial makeup of America. In his new book What Is Your Race: The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans, Kenneth Prewitt takes the census to task for its many shortcomings when it comes to painting an accurate portrait of America’s racial and cultural landscape. Prewitt, though, is not just any run-of-the-mill critic. He is a former director of the U.S. Census Bureau, where he served from 1998 to 2001.

In an interview with The Root, Prewitt explained that America is unique in its racial categorization and its reasons for categorizing. “We decided why we wanted racial statistics and the purpose of them, and then designed statistics to accomplish those purposes.”…

Read the entire article here.

Written records agree with Melungeon DNA results

Jack Goins’ Melungeon and Appalachian Research
October 2013

William E. Cole
University of Tennessee

Joe Stevenson Looney
University of Tennessee

Written records agree with Core Melungeon DNA Results. The Core Melungeon DNA Project was formed with Family Tree DNA on July 25, 2005. The goal of the project was to determine the origin of the Melungeons and to find matches in the data base. Our project results were submitted to a peer review board and published April 24, 2012 in the Journal of Genetic Genealogy and published by Associated Press reporter Travis Loller in May 2012, the results of the first generation are offspring of Sub-Saharan African men and white women of Northern and central European origin. http://www.jogg.info/72/files/Estes.pdf.

The majority of the male core groups were haplogroup E1b1a Sub-Saharan African and the maternal mtDNA group was European. The first mixed generation was the children from Sub-Saharan African men and white women of Northern and central European origin, the exact date of this mixing is unknown. Some from this first mixed generation eventually intermarried with white settlers in colonial Virginia and took their names. Part of this tri-racial clan may have remained in Colonial Virginia and others migrated to North Carolina who would eventually become known as Melungeons (Calloway Collins told Will Allen Dromgoole the Collins and Gibsons, had stolen those names from white settlers in Virginia where they were living as Indians, before migrating to North Carolina”). Calloway Collins was a great grandson of Benjamin whose origin was African and we also know all Africans took English surnames, even the ones who became slaves…

Read the entire article here.

Reading Series: Quantifying Bloodlines

Brooklyn Historical Society
Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations
Othmer Library
Saturdays, 2013-11-16, 2013-12-07 and 2014-01-25; 15:00-18:00 EST (Local Time)

Quantifying Bloodlines is a monthly reading group organized by anthropologist and oral historian Jennifer Scott.  Join others interested in exploring the relationship between biology and race, as we discuss three widely acclaimed books. Each work offers different examples of tracing family history—through a surname, through biological cells, through a specific geographic locale, through four generations of women’s lives. Through stories, we will discuss how we segment heritage and explain descent, paying close attention to past and existing ideas of purity, racial and economic privilege, and scientific thinking.

All sessions meet in the Othmer Library at the Brooklyn Historical Society. Light refreshments will be provided.

Sign up for individual sessions for $20, or join us for all three at a discounted price of $45! All sessions are available for a sliding scale fee, and no-one will be turned away for lack of funds.

What’s Biology Got to Do with It? The Social Life of Genetics
November 16th, 2013, 3:00 PM
Reading: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
Guest Speaker: Sociologist Ann Morning, author of The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach about Human Difference

What’s Purity Got to Do with It? Searching Family History and Genealogy
December 7th, 2013, 3:00 PM
Reading: The Fiddler on Pantico Run: An African Warrior, His White Descendants, A Search for Family by Joe Mozingo

What’s History Got to Do with It? Evolving Classifications of Race
January 25th, 2014, 3:00 PM
Reading: Cane River by Lalita Tademy

Quantifying Bloodlines Reading and Discussion Series is co-sponsored by MixedRaceStudies.org

For more information, click here.