Mixed Race Studies

The Era of Black Indian Transcendance

Refixico
2013-09-29

Phil Wilkes Fixico, Seminole Maroon Descendant, California Seminole Mico (Nation of One) and Heniha for the Wildcat/John Horse Band of the Seminoles of Texas and Old Mexico

I was a 52 yr. old African-American, when I discovered that I was really an African-Native American. This epiphany took place 14 years ago. Since then, my quest for identity has been featured in the Smithsonian Institution’s, book and exhibit, entitled: indiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas. It’s a banner show, that has been touring the U.S. since 2009.

A few years ago, I submitted a long held idea to Indian Voices, an online/on stand monthly newspaper, which is published by Rose Davis. My idea was to create a news entity, called the Bureau of Black Indian Affairs (BBIA).  A news column, designed to address some of the issues that affect Black Indians, who only have Oral History to go on. Mr. William L. Katz, the Father of Black Indian Studies in the United States, was fully in favor of my idea and came on board with the full force of his incredible body of work. I suggested that the BBIA be formed as a News Bureau—not as an organization whose mission it was to replicate what, the Official US Government’s Bureau of Indian Affairs has done, mostly for By-Bloods. It would report on the status of Black Indians. While the 3 co-founders were Phil Wilkes Fixico, Rose Davis and Wm. L. Katz; Rose Davis, a Black Seminole, is carrying on with it…

Read the entire article here.

Eating the Black Body: Miscegenation as Sexual Consumption in African American Literature and Culture

Peter Lang
2006
231 pages
0.340 kg, 0.750 lbs
Softcover ISBN: 978-0-8204-7931-6

Carlyle Van Thompson, Dean, School of Liberal Arts and Education
Medgar Evers College, the City University of New York

In this provocative and original exploration of racial subjugation and its aftermath, Carlyle Van Thompson illumines the racialized sexual desire that reduces Black people to commodities for consumption. Eating the Black Body examines the often-sadistic forms of sexual violence during the period of slavery and its aftermath. By looking at one poem and three novels—Richard Wright’s Between the World and Me, John Oliver Killens’ Youngblood, Gayl Jones’ Corregidora, and Octavia Butler’s Kindred—that examine slavery and the Jim Crow period, Thompson investigates a wide variety of Black bodies as sites of miscegenation and sexual desire. Thompson also examines a horrific case of White male police brutality in New York City in which a Black man was sodomized. Bold and persuasively argued, Eating the Black Body will engage readers in a broad range of literary, historical, and cultural studies.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Consuming Hot Black Bodies: Miscegenation as Sexual Violence in African American Literature and Culture
• Chapter 2: Speaking Desire and Consumption of the Black Body in Richard Wright’s “Between the World and Me”
• Chapter 3: Miscegenation as Sexual Consumption: The Enduring Legacy of America’s White-Supremacist Culture of Violence in John Oliver Killens’ Youngblood
• Chapter 4: Miscegenation, Monstrous Memories, and Misogyny as Sexual Consumption in Gayl Jones’ Corregidora
• Chapter 5: Moving Past the Present: Racialized Sexual Violence and Miscegenous Consumption in Octavia Butler’s Kindred
• Chapter 6: White Police Penetrating. Probing, and Playing in the Black Man’s Ass: The Sadistic Sodomizing of Abner Louima
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography

Art Review: In the New World, Trappings of a New Social Order

The New York Times
2013-09-19

Karen Rosenberg

‘Behind Closed Doors’ Regards Spanish Colonial Art

“Behind Closed Doors: Art in the Spanish American Home, 1492-1898,” at the Brooklyn Museum, leaves us in the strange position of marveling at the opulence of domestic life in the Spanish colonies while pondering some of the ugliest aspects of colonialism. This is awkward, to be sure, but also enlightening.

As its voyeuristic title suggests, the show follows the layout of a typical house belonging to an elite member of New World society. Drawn largely from the museum’s sizable collection of Spanish colonial art, it fashions a gorgeous set of temporary period rooms out of the fourth-floor special-exhibition galleries. They overflow with sumptuous textiles, family portraits bearing coats of arms, fine silver and porcelain and gilded everything — arranged in the more-is-more manner of the Spanish American upper crust, with cabinets stacked in pyramids and luxury goods laid out on carpeted platforms….

…Also on view are “casta” paintings that employ a rigid racial-classification system; one is called “From Spanish and Indian, Mestizo,” and shows a Spanish man and his indigenous wife with their mestizo, or mixed-race, baby. Here too are works that are not quite casta paintings but seem closely related, such as the group portrait “Free Women of Color With Their Children and Servants in a Landscape” by Agostino Brunias (an Italian working in the British colonies). The painting is not as progressive as it sounds; it reinforces colonial hierarchies of race and class by surrounding its fashionable young heroine — one of the “free women” of the title — with darker-skinned attendants who may well be her slaves…

Read the entire article here.

Northwestern sophomores form group for mixed race students

The Daily Northwestern
Evanston, Illinois
2013-09-26

Julian Gerez (@JGerez_news), Reporter

One year ago, Medill sophomore Kalina Silverman, a half-Chinese, half-White, Jewish student browsed through the bustling activities fair. Amid the numerous student cultural groups, Silverman couldn’t find a home.

“I went to a couple events hosted by the Chinese Students Association, and Hillel and I didn’t feel like I fully fit in,” Silverman said.

Silverman’s friend, SESP sophomore Tori Marquez, had a similar problem.

“I identify as mixed race because I don’t feel completely comfortable identifying myself just as Caucasian or just as Hispanic … Even as a Hispanic, I’m also Mexican and Peruvian,” Marquez said.

A year later, what started as two friends joking about forming a club for people like them became the Mixed Race Student Coalition, known as MIXED.

The club was recognized by the office of Multicultural Student Affairs this summer. Marquez and Silverman are now the co-presidents…

Read the entire article here.

Government forms limit mixed race people

Daily Trojan
University of Southern California
2013-09-26

Ida Abhari

According to The New York Times, the current generation of college students is the largest group of mixed race people in America so far. The number of individuals who identified as mixed race is at 9 million. Increasingly more Americans find themselves in a gray area when it comes to defining their races. You might have heard of “Hapas” — people of partially Asian/Pacific Islander ancestry — or “Blasians,” people of mixed black and Asian ancestry. Though these types of self-identification are becoming more common in everyday language, a conflict arises when the standard “Check the box” race forms can’t properly identify a growing population of Americans. Most people do not cleanly fit into the four standard racial categories of black, white, American Indian or Pacific Islander.

The  problem with racial identification lies in faulty methods of collecting data about such groups. Questions of race in the United States have always been a particularly sensitive topic. With its peculiar mix of European colonists, American Indians and Spanish and French explorers, the U.S. has always struggled with race relations. In an effort to better resolve and address race questions in the modern era, the federal Office of Management and Budget has issued Directive No. 15. According to the official White House website, this directive “requires compilation of data for four racial categories (White, Black, American Indian or Alaskan Native, and Asian or Pacific Islander), and an ethnic category to indicate Hispanic origin, or not of Hispanic origin.” And  here is the problem: A person is now forced to identify him or herself as one of only four races even though changing demographics show that there are more possibilities…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Romance and Rights: The Politics of Interracial Intimacy, 1945-1954

University Press of Mississippi
2005
224 pages
bibliography, index
Cloth ISBN: 9781578067053
Paper ISBN: 9781604732474

Alex Lubin, Associate Professor of American Studies
University of New Mexico

Romance and Rights: The Politics of Interracial Intimacy, 1945-1954 studies the meaning of interracial romance, love, and sex in the ten years after World War II. How was interracial romance treated in popular culture by civil rights leaders, African American soldiers, and white segregationists?

Previous studies focus on the period beginning in 1967 when the Supreme Court overturned the last state antimiscegenation law (Loving v. Virginia). Lubin’s study, however, suggests that we cannot fully understand contemporary debates about “hybridity,” or mixed-race identity, without first comprehending how WWII changed the terrain.

The book focuses on the years immediately after the war, when ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality were being reformulated and solidified in both the academy and the public. Lubin shows that interracial romance, particularly between blacks and whites, was a testing ground for both the general American public and the American government. The government wanted interracial relationships to be treated primarily as private affairs to keep attention off contradictions between its outward aura of cultural freedom and the realities of Jim Crow politics and antimiscegenation laws. Activists, however, wanted interracial intimacy treated as a public act, one that could be used symbolically to promote equal rights and expanded opportunities. These contradictory impulses helped shape our current perceptions about interracial romances and their broader significance in American culture.

Romance and Rights ends in 1954, the year of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, before the civil rights movement became well organized. By closely examining postwar popular culture, African American literature, NAACP manuscripts, miscegenation laws, and segregationist protest letters, among other resources, the author analyzes postwar attitudes towards interracial romance, showing how complex and often contradictory those attitudes could be.

Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science

University of Minnesota Press
September 2013
256 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/2
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8166-6586-0
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8166-6585-3

Kim TallBear, Associate Professor of Anthropology
University of Texas, Austin

Who is a Native American? And who gets to decide? From genealogists searching online for their ancestors to fortune hunters hoping for a slice of casino profits from wealthy tribes, the answers to these seemingly straightforward questions have profound ramifications. The rise of DNA testing has further complicated the issues and raised the stakes.

In Native American DNA, Kim TallBear shows how DNA testing is a powerful—and problematic—scientific process that is useful in determining close biological relatives. But tribal membership is a legal category that has developed in dependence on certain social understandings and historical contexts, a set of concepts that entangles genetic information in a web of family relations, reservation histories, tribal rules, and government regulations. At a larger level, TallBear asserts, the “markers” that are identified and applied to specific groups such as Native American tribes bear the imprints of the cultural, racial, ethnic, national, and even tribal misinterpretations of the humans who study them.

TallBear notes that ideas about racial science, which informed white definitions of tribes in the nineteenth century, are unfortunately being revived in twenty-first-century laboratories. Because today’s science seems so compelling, increasing numbers of Native Americans have begun to believe their own metaphors: “in our blood” is giving way to “in our DNA.” This rhetorical drift, she argues, has significant consequences, and ultimately she shows how Native American claims to land, resources, and sovereignty that have taken generations to ratify may be seriously—and permanently—undermined.

Table of Contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: An Indigenous, Feminist Approach to DNA Politics
• 1. Racial Science, Blood, and DNA
• 2. The DNA Dot-com: Selling Ancestry
• 3. Genetic Genealogy Online
• 4. The Genographic Project: The Business of Research and Representation
• Conclusion: Indigenous and Genetic Governance and Knowledge
• Notes
• Index

Behind the Curtain | Race is common theme in local exhibits

City Living Seattle
2013-09-19

Jessica Davis, Columnist

According to the 2000 Census, Washington state ranks ninth in the country for interracial marriages. Overall, people of color make up more than 34 percent of Seattle residents.

“RACE: Are We So Different?” at the Pacific Science Center and the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience’s exhibit “War Baby/Love Child” each take a different angle on racial themes and address some common misconceptions about race.

“There is a lot of great work being done by all sizes of local arts and cultural groups around the topic of race,” said Diana Johns, vice president of exhibits for Pacific Science Center. “Pacific Science Center is happy to be able to contribute to this continuum of broader community conversation alongside local institutions like the Wing.”…

…Different races, approaches

The Wing’s exhibit “War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art,” curated by DePaul University associate professor Laura Kina and San Francisco State University associate professor Wei Ming Dariotis, includes works by 19 mixed-race artists and brings to light the different approaches to the identities and experiences of mixed Asian Americans and mixed Pacific Islander Americans.

The project makes visible underrepresented histories with Asian-American studies, mixed-race studies and contemporary art. Through video, installation and other approaches, artists explore a range of topics, including multiculturalism, gender and sexual identity, citizenship and nationality, and transracial adoption.

One such piece, “Guardian,” a painting at the entrance of the exhibit, gives a nod to creator Louie Gong’s Native and Chinese roots, with two foo dogs and three eagles stacked like a totem pole…

Read the entire article here.

Uptown Girls

Sunday Book Review
The New York Times
2013-09-22

Martha A. Sandweiss, Professor of History
Princeton University

Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance, by Carla Kaplan Illustrated. 505 pp. Harper.

Time hasn’t been kind to the white women who participated in the Harlem Renaissance. As philanthropists and activists, authors and patrons, they sought a place for themselves in that remarkable outpouring of African-American art during the 1920s and ’30s. Some, constrained by social expectations, effaced the records of their work. Others made it difficult for historians to treat them with much seriousness. What, after all, can we do with someone like Nancy Cunard, a British steamship heiress raised on a remote English estate, who felt no shame in proclaiming “I speak as if I were a Negro myself”?

“Miss Anne” — the dismissive collective name given to white women — makes bit appearances in the literature of the era as a dilettante or imperious patron; later, she’s depicted as a thrill-seeking “slummer.” Always, she lurks in the shadows of her male counterparts in scholarly studies of the movement. But she was there, encouraging writers, underwriting cultural institutions, supporting progressive political causes. And many leading Harlem Renaissance figures — including Langston Hughes, Alain Locke and Nella Larsen — had reason to be grateful to her. At least for a while. Like everything else about Miss Anne, those relationships got complicated…

…The book is full of fresh discoveries. ­Kaplan learns that Lillian Wood, author of the radical 1920s anti-lynching novel “Let My People Go,” was actually white, not black, as other scholars have imagined…

…But the focus of the book remains squarely on the larger issues of racial identity raised by Miss Anne’s deep personal identification with African-American life. Miss Anne wanted to suggest that race was a constructed ideal, yet she stumbled over the internal contradictions of her impulses. She fought against racial essentialism and the perverse logic of America’s one-drop rule, which proclaimed that even a trace of African heritage made one black, but she also celebrated the seeming vitality and distinctiveness of black culture. Josephine Cogdell Schuyler wrote in her diary the night before her wedding: “To my mind, the white race, the Anglo-Saxon especially, is spiritually depleted. America must mate with the Negro to save herself.” In a similar expression of romantic racialism, the philanthropist Charlotte Osgood Mason lauded “the creative impulse throbbing in the African race.” As Kaplan suggests, white men could sometimes get away with ideas like this; a dose of black culture offered a useful inoculation against the debilitating sterility of the industrial world. But white women who sought an intimate connection with African-­American life were seen as traitors to the race, even sexual deviants.

What was race anyway? That’s the big question Miss Anne’s actions raised. If race was simply a myth or fiction, could one reimagine racial identity as something based on affiliation rather than blood? Some of the writers of the Harlem Renaissance asked much the same thing. In Nella Larsen’s “Passing” and James Weldon Johnson’s “Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man,” for example, light-skinned protagonists of African-American heritage successfully pass as white, demonstrating that racial identity could hinge on voluntary association and careful self-presentation. Their radical acts blur the color line and expose the absurdity of the one-drop rule. Approaching the color line from the other side, Miss Anne reframed the issues. If race wasn’t determined by biology, why couldn’t a white woman feel black? Why couldn’t she repudiate her own culture to embrace another?…

Read the entire article here.

Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance

HarperCollins Publishers
2013-09-10
544 pages
Trimsize: 6 x 9
Hardcover ISBN: 9780060882389; ISBN10: 0060882387
eBook ISBN: 9780062199126; ISBN10: 0062199129

Carla Kaplan, Stanton W. and Elisabeth K. Davis Distinguished Professor of American Literature
Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts

New York City in the Jazz Age was host to a pulsating artistic and social revolution. Uptown, an unprecedented explosion in black music, literature, dance, and art sparked the Harlem Renaissance. While the history of this African-American awakening has been widely explored, one chapter remains untold: the story of a group of women collectively dubbed “Miss Anne.”

Sexualized and sensationalized in the mainstream press—portrayed as monstrous or insane—Miss Anne was sometimes derided within her chosen community of Harlem as well. While it was socially acceptable for white men to head uptown for “exotic” dancers and “hot” jazz, white women who were enthralled by life on West 125th Street took chances. Miss Anne in Harlem introduces these women—many from New York’s wealthiest social echelons—who became patrons of, and romantic participants in, the Harlem Renaissance. They include Barnard College founder Annie Nathan Meyer, Texas heiress Josephine Cogdell Schuyler, British activist Nancy Cunard, philanthropist Charlotte Osgood Mason, educator Lillian E. Wood, and novelist Fannie Hurst—all women of accomplishment and renown in their day. Yet their contributions as hostesses, editors, activists, patrons, writers, friends, and lovers often went unacknowledged and have been lost to history until now.

In a vibrant blend of social history and biography, award-winning writer Carla Kaplan offers a joint portrait of six iconoclastic women who risked ostracism to follow their inclinations—and raised hot-button issues of race, gender, class, and sexuality in the bargain. Returning Miss Anne to her rightful place in the interracial history of the Harlem Renaissance, Kaplan’s formidable work remaps the landscape of the 1920s, alters our perception of this historical moment, and brings Miss Anne to vivid life.