Mixed Race Studies

African Americans Reflect on Obama 2nd Inauguration

Voice of America
2013-01-15

Chris Simkins

WASHINGTON — Americans from across the nation will converge on Washington, DC, next  Monday (January 21) for the second inauguration of President Barack Obama. The moment will be especially meaningful for millions of African Americans who will again witness history as the first African American President is sworn in for a second four-year term.

Some Delta Sigma Theta sorority sisters are celebrating the second inauguration of President Barack Obama.  Francine and Cynthia Blake from Ohio see great significance in the president’s second term.
 
“We have come a long way, a long way.  It just touches and warms my heart because for me I may not ever see another African American in office as high as he is,”said Francine.

“The great significance and importance about it is the fact that he needs to promote and protect the middle class, the middle working class,” added Cynthia.

These women are in Washington to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the sorority—which is the largest African-American women’s organization in the world.  The 260,000-member group, along with other black voters, helped propel President Obama to victory last November. 

Political Science teacher Vanessa Kidd-Thomas says the election result illustrates the power blacks have at the ballot box…

Read the entire article here.

“Am I Black? Hell Yeah!”

(1)ne Drop Project
Journal
2013-01-16

Billy Calloway

“You make sure to keep a bonnet on that boy’s head. We don’t need to tip off the sales agent that a Black family is moving in.”

This was the first story I remember being told to me by my dad. My father grew up in Roanoke, Virginia during 1930’s. He was brown skinned. He graduated from high school at the age of 15 and was accepted at the University of Virginia. On the day that he was to register for class he was told the ‘porter’s quarters were down the hall.’ When he produced his acceptance letter he was ushered off the Charlottesville campus. He returned with an up and coming attorney, Thurgood Marshall, who forcible told the school officials that his client would sue if he were not admitted. UVA, instead of fighting my dad, negotiated a deal with him that they would pay for him to go to any other school, just not theirs. My dad went to all Black Fisk University, graduating first in his class at the age of 19 and then went to Meharry Medical College where he graduated second in his class at the age of 23.

My mom was born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1936. Her mom was a ‘light skin’ girl and her father was White. She’s what you call a ‘high yaller.’ Both of her parents died when she was very young and she was sent to live with ‘Nanna’ in New York. She was discovered by a talent scout who worked for John Johnson of Ebony and Jet magazine fame.  When the Ebony Fashion Fair toured the south it would be my mom who got off the bus to get food for the rest of girls and crew. She ‘passed.’  For my mom being so fair was not an advantage. She was resented by her ‘friends’ who were darker because they thought she went around ‘passing’ as White when in fact she didn’t and by Whites who called her ‘nigger lover’ because she lived in Harlem and associated with Blacks.

Am I Black? Hell yeah! I have light green eyes, when I had hair it was curly and blonde. My complexion is café au lait…

Read the entire article here.

I’m Not Black, I’m Hispanic!

Born Bicultural USA
2009-12-29

Alberto Padron

The first time I heard that statement coming out of a family member’s mouth, I was confused. In my mind, a violation of logic had occurred. After all, the person making this statement was blacker than the black hair on their head. I mean, this person is Black. Anyone with reasonable vision would agree. So what was meant by this apparently irrational statement made by an otherwise rational person?
 
I’ve concluded it’s a confusion of color (race) and culture (ethnicity). More specifically, an attempt to distance oneself from the term ‘black’ because of deeply seeded negative connotations associated with the word. This bothers me. The reasons for these unfair connotations will be discussed in a future blog entry.
 
So let’s address the basics. ‘Black’ refers to race. Culture refers to ethnicity. These terms often get confused. The moment we start hyphenating the term ‘Black,’ a clearer cultural picture begins to emerge…

Read the entire article here.

A 400 Year Old History of Tri-Racial People: In Real Life

Mixed Race Radio
2013-01-16, 17:00Z (12:00 EST)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

Marvin T. Jones, Executive Director
Chowan Discovery Group

Marvin T. Jones is the Executive Director of the Chowan Discovery Group (CDG).  The mission of the CDG is to research, document, preserve and present the 400+ year-old history of the landowning tri-racial people of color of the Winton Triangle, an area centered in Hertford County, North Carolina. Founded in 2007, the Chowan Discovery Group (http://www.chowandiscovery.org/) co-produced in 2009 its first major presentation, a stage production, scripted by Jones, called The Winton Triangle. The book, Carolina Genesis: Beyond the Color Line, features Jones’ summary of the Triangle’s history.

In addition to writing articles, Jones has made many presentations about the Winton Triangle’s history on national and regional radio, at colleges and universities, museums and to civic groups.  In 2011, the North Carolina Office of Archives and History accepted three of his nominations for highway historical markers.

Jones is the owner of Marvin T. Jones & Associates, a professional photography company in Washington, D.C.  He has been published in well-known magazines and has worked in South America, the Caribbean and Africa.  Howard University and Roanoke-Chowan Community College hosted Jones’ exhibit on Somalia.

For more information, click here.

New Orleans and the African Diaspora

American Historical Association
From the Suppliment to the 127th Annual Meeting
2012-12-23

Laura Rosanne Adderley, Associate Professor of History
Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana

Many people conceptualize the study of the “African diaspora” as focused on black experience beyond or separate from “African American” experience in the United States. But black experience in the United States fits fully within the wider African diaspora. Similarly, while black populations in New Orleans shared many—perhaps even most—of their experiences with the rest of the United States, they also lived through distinctive waves of multiple European colonizers and black and white emigration, with the concomitant rise of locally specific cultural production, social experience, and racial norms.

Africans in Early New Orleans

The city’s distinctive place in the development of African diaspora history and culture in the Americas began with the arrival of over 5,000 enslaved Africans in the first decade after the city’s founding in 1718. Legal enslavement of Africans and their descendants would continue in the city until the Civil War a century and a half later. Over the course of that period, people of African descent, both free and enslaved, regularly made up one third or more of the city’s population. A second large influx of new African arrivals came in the 1780s, halfway through the period from 1763 to 1802 when the city fell under Spanish rule. The relatively high percentage of enslaved people of African descent in the city and its environs, their critical role in building many of the city’s oldest neighborhoods (including the French Quarter), and generally making colonial life and commerce possible, has led historian Larry Powell to note that “France may have founded Louisiana as we know it, but it was [enslaved people] from Senegal and Congo who laid the foundation.” The legacy of the labor of enslaved Africans literally surrounds every visitor to the city…

…Racial Patterns and Racial Politics

Another distinctive aspect of New Orleans’s black diaspora developed in the late 18th century as Spanish legal practices increased the population of free people of color through much more liberal rules allowing masters to manumit or free enslaved people. Many, although by no means all, of those manumitted were people of mixed race. The presence of this large population of sometimes white-appearing mulattoes, looked similar to patterns in parts of the Caribbean, and contributed to New Orleans’s often-exaggerated reputation as a city of widespread racial mixture and greater racial tolerance than elsewhere in the United States. As several scholars have noted, ideas about what the mulattoes and quadroons of New Orleans signified were much more powerful in shaping perceptions of the city than knowledge of the day-to-day lives of people of mixed race, which could be alternately prosperous or relatively impoverished, comparatively privileged or fraught with racial and social uncertainty, and many steps in between. For all the significance of the large population of people of mixed race, most residents of the city continued to fit generally into communities defined largely as black or white, in ways similar to racial experience elsewhere in North America. Also, for all the comparisons with Caribbean slave societies, most parts of Louisiana—with notable exceptions in some sugar plantation areas in the 19th century—did not have slavery-era population ratios comparable to the overwhelming black majorities that existed in many Caribbean islands…

Read the entire article here.

Black in America: It’s not just about the color of your skin

In America: You define America. What defines you?
Cable News Network
2012-12-15

Moni Basu

(CNN) – What is black? Race. Culture. Consciousness. History. Heritage.
 
A shade darker than brown? The opposite of white?
 
Who is black? In America, being black has meant having African ancestry.
 
But not everyone fits neatly into a prototypical model of “blackness.”
 
Scholar Yaba Blay explores the nuances of racial identity and the influences of skin color in a project called (1)ne Drop, named after a rule in the United States that once mandated that any person with “one drop of Negro blood” was black. Based on assumptions of white purity, it reflects a history of slavery and Jim Crow segregation.
 
In its colloquial definition, the rule meant that a person with a black relative from five generations ago was also considered black.

Your take on black in America
 
One drop was codified in the 1920 Census and became pervasive as courts ruled on it as a principle of law. It was not deemed unconstitutional until 1967.
 
Blay, a dark-skinned daughter of Ghanian immigrants, had always been able to clearly communicate her racial identity. But she was intrigued by those whose identity was not always apparent. Her project focuses on a diverse group of people—many of whom are mixed race—who claim blackness as their identity.
 
That identity is expanding in America every day. Blay’s intent was to spark dialogue and see the idea of being black through a whole new lens…

…Black and white
 
California author Kathleen Cross, 50, remembers taking a public bus ride with her father when she was 8. Her father was noticeably uncomfortable that black kids in the back were acting rowdy. He muttered under his breath: “Making us look bad.”
 
She understood her father was ashamed of those black kids, that he fancied himself not one of them.
 
“My father was escaping blackness,” she says. “He didn’t like for me to have dark-skinned friends. He never said it. But I know.”
 
She asked him once if she had ancestors from Africa. He got quiet. Then, he said: “Maybe, Northern Africa.”
 
“He wasn’t proud of being black,” she says.
 
Cross’ black father and her white mother never married. Fair-skinned, blue-eyed Cross was raised in a diverse community.
 
Later, she found herself in situations where she felt shunned by black people. Even light-skinned black people thought she was white.
 
“Those who relate to the term ‘black’ as a descriptor of color are unlikely to accept me as black,” she says. “If they relate to the term ‘black’ as a descriptor of culture, history and ancestry, they have no difficulty seeing me as black.”
 
At one time in her life, she wished she were darker—she might have even swallowed a pill to give her instant pigment if there were such a thing. She even wrote about being “trapped in the body of a white woman.” She didn’t want to “represent the oppressor.”
 
She no longer thinks that way.
 
She doesn’t like to check the multiracial box. “It erases everything,” she says.
 
She doesn’t like biracial, either. Or mixed. It’s not her identity.
 
“There’s only one race,” she says, “and that’s the human race.”
 
“I am a descendant of a stolen African and Irish and English immigrants. That makes me black—and white—in America…

Read the entire article here.

The Evolution of Mixed-Race Historiography and Theory: Inaugural Sawyer Seminar

University of Southern California, Univeristy Park Campus
Doheny Memorial Library (DML)
East Asian Seminar Room (110C)
Friday, 2013-01-18, 14:00-17:00 PST (Local Time)

Presented by the Center for Japanese Religions and Culture’s “Critical Mixed-Race Studies: A Transpacific Approach” Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminars Series at the University of Southern California.

How has the study of mixed race been historicized and theorized in Western academia? Has our understanding of mixed race changed in the 21st century, or is our public discourse still bound by past ideology, experience, and debate? Does theorizing mixed race bind or liberate us from the ideological pitfalls of racialist thinking?

Conference Convenors:

Duncan Williams, Associate Professor of Religion
University of Southern California

Brian C. Bernards, Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures
University of Southern California

Velina Hasu Houston, Associate Dean for Faculty Recognition and Development, Director of Dramatic Writing and Professor
University of Southern California

ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION

Ariela Gross, John B. and Alice R. Sharp Professor of Law and History
University of Southern California

Paul Spickard, Professor of History
University of California, Santa Barbara

Falguni Sheth, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Political Theory
Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts

For more information, click here.

You Have No Right: Jane Webb’s Story

Out of the Box: Notes for the Archives @ Library of Virginia
Virginia Memory: Library of Virginia
2012-11-14

Greg Crawford, Local Records Coordinator

The colonial era Northampton County court records tell a fascinating story of a woman named Jane Webb. Born of a white mother, she was a free mulatto, formerly called Jane Williams. In 1704, Jane Webb had “a strong desire to intermarry with a certain negro slave … commonly called and known by the name of Left.” Webb informed Left’s owner Thomas Savage, a gentleman of Northampton County, of her desire to marry Left and made an offer to Savage. She would be a servant of Savage’s for seven years and would let Savage “have all the children that should be bornd [sic] upon her body during the time of [Jane’s] servitude,” but for how long the children were to be bound is not clear. In return, Savage would allow Jane Webb to marry his slave, and after Jane’s period of servitude ended, Savage would free Left. Also, neither Savage nor his heirs could claim any child born to Jane Webb and Left after her period of servitude. Savage agreed to Jane Webb’s offer, and an agreement was written and signed by both parties.

Jane Webb fulfilled her part of the agreement and served Savage for seven years. During that time, she had three children by her husband Left—Diana or Dinah Webb, Daniel Webb, and Francis Webb. After she completed her term of service in 1711, Jane Webb “in a kindly manner” demanded her husband from Savage as well as her children. Apparently, Jane Webb and Savage were at odds on how long the children she bore during her servitude were supposed to be bound to him, and Savage refused to free Left and the children. In April 1711, Savage submitted a letter to the county court of Northampton requesting that Jane Webb’s children be bound to him and his heirs, to which the court agreed…

Read the entire article here.

Census Race Change For Hispanics Sparks Criticism

The Huffington Post
2013-01-09

Tony Castro

Some Latino civil rights groups are questioning the U.S. Census consideration of designating Hispanics a race of their own, fearing the loss of national original designations.

The change, making “Hispanic” a racial instead of an ethnic category, would eliminate the check-off boxes for national origins such as Mexican, Cuban and Puerto Rican.

“There is no unanimity on what any of this stuff means,” says Angelo Falcón, director of the National Institute for Latino Policy and co-chair of a coalition of Latino advocacy groups that recently met with Census officials.

“Right now, we’re very comfortable with having the Hispanic (origin) question… Hispanic as a race category? I don’t think there’s any consensus on that.”

Scholars oppose “Hispanic” being considered a race

Fordham University law professor Tanya Hernández, author of the new book Racial Subordination in Latin America, is among the scholars opposing the proposal to join race and ethnicity as a “Hispanic” category.

“Census data is used in very important ways, for example to monitor compliance regarding civil rights and racial disparities,” says Hernandez, who fears that eliminating existing racial categories would have a negative impact…

Read the entire article here.

Biracial women pushed to undergo genetic screeening: Cobble Hill hospital focuses on mixed race

New York Daily News
2013-01-13

Simone Weichselbaum

As interracial families become more common, LICH docs quiz women on ethnicity

Doctors are pushing biracial Brooklyn women to undergo genetic counseling to learn if their racial mix makes them more prone to disease.
 
As interracial families have beome more common, Dr. Millicent Comrie, Chief of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Downstate Long Island College Hospital, has urged her staff of about 40 physicians to quiz patients about their ethnic backgrounds.
 
Those from multicultural backgrounds are are sent to talk with a DNA expert who maps out how their heritage could make them sick.
 
“Ethnicity plays a big part in your healthcare,” said Comrie naming a slew of hereditary diseases such as sickle cell anemia which plagues the black community and Tay-Sachs disease found in many Jewish families.
 
“We can’t worry about sensitivity when it comes to race. What you see isn’t always what you get,” Comrie said. “If we don’t ask the right questions. We will come up We will come up short.”…

Read the entire article here.