Mixed Race Studies

Census releases data on American Indian population

Miami Herald
2012-01-25

Felicia Fonseca
Associated Press

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. — Almost half of American Indians and Alaska Natives identify with multiple races, representing a group that grew by 39 percent over a decade, according to U.S. Census data released Wednesday.

Of the 5.2 million people counted as Natives in 2010, nearly 2.3 million reported being Native in combination with one or more of six other race categories, showcasing a growing diversity among Natives. Those who added black, white or both as a personal identifier made up 84 percent of the multi-racial group.

Tribal officials and organizations look to Census data for funding, to plan communities, to foster solidarity among tribes and for accountability from federal agencies that have a trust responsibility with tribal members.

The bump in the multi-racial group from 1.6 million in 2000 to nearly 2.3 million in 2010 was higher than that of those who reported being solely of Native descent…

…The Blackfeet Nation in Montana had the highest proportion of people who reported being part of more than one racial group or tribe at 74 percent. Among Alaska Native groups, the Tlingit-Haida had the highest proportion of mixed-race Natives at 42 percent.

The number of Natives identifying with at least one other race increased in all but three states from 2000 to 2010, according to the Census…

Read the entire article here.

Telling His Story, Keeping His Promises: MOsley WOtta as performer and father

True North
Central Oregon Parenting
January/February 2012

Michelle Bazemore
photography by Kimberly Teichrow

Note from Steven F. Riley: I will be the co-host on the February 22, 2012 podcast of Mixed Chicks Chat with featured guest Jason Graham.

It’s difficult to spend time with Jason Graham without feeling like you’re in the presence of someone on the brink. Here is a person who has understood the art of performance since he was very small: a kid who could make his divorced parent laugh through her tears after a particularly nasty telephone conversation with her ex; an artist not content to kill it in his hometown; a man who empowers kids to find their voices by directing them to “tell your individual version. The theme has been done, but not your version.”

His version is a study in juxtaposition. He is a rapper, but doesn’t embody the mainstream definition of a hip hop star. He is modern, but inspired by ancient themes. He is physically graceful, yet enjoys playing a grotesque role to make his audience uncomfortable, and to relay a philosophy about superficiality. In his music he will break up a rapid-fire delivery of rap with a sudden drawn-out melodic phrase, often with a theatrical inflection a la Busta Rhymes.

To label Jason Graham a rapper is selling him rather short. Seemingly driven to express himself creatively with whatever medium he is given, Graham is rightly labeled a performance artist. A distinctive voice coupled with the ability to manipulate words into a rhythmic, thought-provoking stream of consciousness make him a natural spoken-word poet and emcee. But he also paints on anything that paint adheres to, from canvas to shovels to jackets, and uses his theater background to create masks, costumes, and props to evoke different characters on stage. Graham’s upbringing in a creative, multi-cultural family has influenced his artistry, adding depth to his performances.

Compared to many commercially successful rappers, Graham is unusually willing to express vulnerability and self-doubt. “I’m comfortable being uncomfortable,” he says without irony, “and that’s what makes me glorious.” As a mixed-race kid transplanted to Bend from Chicago when he was nine years old, he knows about being self-conscious, but says emphatically that he wasn’t “supposed to escape that one way or the other.” He has gradually become more comfortable with calling himself an artist. “It’s dangerous because you invest so much of your love into something you’ve been told time and time again may not work out,” he admits. “But just because you’re an investment banker doesn’t mean it’s going to work out either. Security’s very relative.” …

…The name MOsley WOtta refers to the water content of the human body. At most times during life, the human body is made up of more than 50% water, or “mostly water.” It’s an overt gesture to draw a line of internal commonality among people who are increasingly driven to express themselves as individuals externally through fashion, body art and other surface displays. “We’re always trying to find a balance between fitting in and being ourselves,” says Graham…

Read the entire article here.

Yellow Rose of Texas

The Handbook of Texas Online
Texas State Historical Association
2012-01-21

Jeffrey D. Dunn

James Lutzweiler

“The Yellow Rose of Texas,” one of the iconic songs of modern Texas and a popular traditional American tune, has experienced several transformations of its lyrics and periodic revivals in popularity since its appearance in the 1850s. The earliest published lyrics to surface to date are found in Christy’s Plantation Melodies. No. 2, a songbook published under the authority of Edwin P. Christy in Philadelphia in 1853. Christy was the founder of the blackface minstrel group known as the Christy’s Minstrels. Their shows were a popular form of American entertainment featuring white performers with burnt cork makeup portraying caricatures of blacks in comic acts, dances, and songs. The plaintive courtship-themed 1853 lyrics of “The Yellow Rose of Texas” fit the minstrel genre by depicting an African-American singer, who refers to himself as a “darkey,” longing to return to “a yellow girl,” a term used to describe a mulatto, or mixed-race female born of African-American and white progenitors. The songbook does not identify the author or include a musical score to accompany the lyrics:

There’s a yellow girl in Texas
That I’m going down to see;
No other darkies know her,
No darkey, only me;
She cried so when I left her
That it like to broke my heart,
And if I only find her,
We never more will part.

Chorus: She’s the sweetest girl of colour
That this darkey ever knew;
Her eyes are bright as diamonds,
And sparkle like the dew.
You may talk about your Dearest Mae,
And sing of Rosa Lee,
But the yellow Rose of Texas
Beats the belles of Tennessee.

Where the Rio Grande is flowing,
And the starry skies are bright,
Oh, she walks along the river
In the quiet summer night;
And she thinks if I remember
When we parted long ago,
I promised to come back again,
And not to leave her so.

Chorus: She’s the sweetest girl of colour, &c

Oh, I’m going now to find her,
For my heart is full of woe,
And we’ll sing the songs together
That we sang so long ago.
We’ll play the banjo gaily,
And we’ll sing our sorrows o’er,
And the yellow Rose of Texas
Shall be mine forever more.

Chorus: She’s the sweetest girl of colour, &c.

“Dearest Mae” and “Rosa Lee,” the only named females in the song, are the titles of two songs also appearing in Christy’s Minstrels songbooks. These songs were published earlier (1847–48) and are similar in style. Both are sung by a black man in a courtship setting with lyrics similar to those found in “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” Dearest Mae, who was from “old Carolina state,” was described as follows: “Her eyes dey sparkle like de stars, Her lips are red as beet,” and “She cried when boff [both] we parted.” Rosa Lee lived in Tennessee and had “Eyes as dark as winter night, Lips as red as berry bright.”

…In 2011 Yale Divinity School Library archivist Joan Duffy uncovered material indicating that the song’s composer might have been John Kelly, a famous minstrel banjoist, comedian, and composer who took the stage name “J. K. Campbell” in 1851 at the request of a fellow minstrel performer. According to Edward Le Roy Rice (1911), in 1859 and 1860 Campbell was working with George Christy’s Minstrels at Niblo’s Saloon in New York City under name of J. K. Edwards before changing his stage name back to J. K. Campbell. A minstrel “comic song” composed circa 1861 by “J. K. Campbell,” entitled “Ham Fat,” is similar in style to “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” One of the lines reads: “You may talk about your comfort, But Massa is the man…”…

Read the entire article here.

50 African Americans Who Forever Changed Academia

Online College
2012-01-24

Black History Month is celebrated every February as a time to recognize and honor African-Americans who made great contributions to some aspect of life in this country. Major figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks are often honored, but many lesser-known men and women made impacts on society by working through the channels of academia, breaking barriers for future African-Americans, or creating opportunities for children that they never had before. Here are 50 of those men and women to remember this February…

Read the entire article here.

‘MOsley WOtta’ Transcends Boundaries Of Music, Poetry And Art

OPB News
Oregon Public Broadcasting
2011-12-30

David Nogueras, Central Oregon Correspondent
Bend, Oregon

Note from Steven F. Riley: I will be the co-host on the February 22, 2012 podcast of Mixed Chicks Chat with featured guest Jason Graham.

It’s been a good year for Bend’s MOsley WOtta.  The hip-hop group played shows around the state, opening for acts such as Ice Cube and Tricky.  The band plans to close out this year with a New Year’s Eve show in Bend. That’s where the band will unveil its third official release, titled Amalgum X. Bend isn’t typically thought of for it’s hip hop scene. But MOsley WOtta isn’t your typical hip hop group.

“No matter where you come from, what era you come from, there is some kind of music inside of hip hop that will grab you,” says Bend artist MOsley WOtta.

“Light skin, blue blood, gentlemen and ladies, girls and boys, this is that love, pain, grow, if you are living and breathing right now.  You know exactly what I’m talking about.” MOsley WOtta is the alter ego of 28 year old Jason Graham.  It’s also the band that Graham fronts…

…“I think he’s a classic artist, a classic creative brain.  You might meet artists and creative people who are introverted or socially awkward.  This is not that case,” says Salmon. Up on stage, Jason Graham is in his comfort zone.   But growing up biracial in the 1980 he says he’s always kind of felt as if he lived between worlds.  He was born in what he describes as a somewhat rough neighborhood in Chicago and moved to Bend at age 9.  These days he’s tough to miss.  He’s tall, lanky and exudes energy.   Graham says sometimes people don’t quite know what to make of him.

“Maybe people come up and they’re like so are you Mexican?  Are you Filipino?  Indian right?  That is just like with the music, I do see a total correlation there.  Between it’s like well it’s not exactly one thing.  And it never will be one thing, cause I’m not one thing,” says Graham…

Read the entire article here.  Listen to the audio here (00:04:54).

The End of Race? Obama, 2008, and Racial Politics in America

Yale University Press
2011-12-12
320 pages
6 1/8 x 9 1/4; 32 b/w illus.
ISBN: 9780300175196

Donald R. Kinder, Philip E. Converse Collegiate Professor of Political Science; Professor of Psychology
University of Michigan

Allison Dale-Riddle, Doctoral Candidate of Political Science
University of Michigan

How did race affect the election that gave America its first African American president? This book offers some fascinating, and perhaps controversial, findings. Donald R. Kinder and Allison Dale-Riddle assert that racism was in fact an important factor in 2008, and that if not for racism, Barack Obama would have won in a landslide. On the way to this conclusion, they make several other important arguments. In an analysis of the nomination battle between Obama and Hillary Clinton, they show why racial identity matters more in electoral politics than gender identity. Comparing the 2008 election with that of 1960, they find that religion played much the same role in the earlier campaign that race played in ’08. And they argue that racial resentment—a modern form of racism that has superseded the old-fashioned biological variety—is a potent political force.

Freedom’s Child: The Life of a Confederate General’s Black Daughter

Algonquin Books
1998
288 pages
ISBN: 9781565121867

Carrie Allen McCray (1913-2008)

When Carrie Allen McCray was a child, she was afraid to ask about the framed photograph of a white man on her mother’s dresser. Years later she learned that he was her grandfather, a Confederate general, and that her grandmother was a former slave. In her late seventies, Carrie McCray went searching for her history and found the remarkable story of her mother, Mary [Rice Allen], the illegitimate daughter of General J. R. Jones, of Lynchburg, Virginia. Jones would later be cast out of Lynchburg society for publicly recognizing his daughter. Freedom’s Child is a loving remembrance of how Mary spent her life beating down the kind of thinking that ostracized her father. She was a leader in the founding of the NAACP and hosted the likes of Langston Hughes and W.E.B. Du Bois as they plotted the war against discrimination at her kitchen table. Carrie McCray’s memories reward us with an extraordinarily vivid and intimate portrait of a remarkable woman.

With DNA Testing, Suddenly They Are Family

The New York Times
2011-01-24

Rachel L. Swarns

ST. LOUIS — Growing up, Khrys Vaughan always believed that she had inherited her looks and mannerisms from her father, and that her appreciation for tradition and old-fashioned gentility stemmed from her parents’ Southern roots. But those facets of her self-image crumbled when she was told, at age 42, that she had been adopted.

She began searching for her origins, only to find out that her adoption records had been sealed, a common practice in the 1960s. Then Mrs. Vaughan stumbled across an ad from a DNA testing company offering to help people who had been adopted find clues to their ancestry and connections to blood relatives.

About five weeks after shipping off two tiny vials of her cells from a swab of her cheek, Mrs. Vaughan received an e-mail informing her that her bloodlines extended to France, Romania and West Africa. She was also given the names and e-mail addresses of a dozen distant cousins. This month, she drove 208 miles from her hometown here to Evansville, Ind., to meet her third cousin, the first relative to respond to her e-mails. Mrs. Vaughan is black and her cousin is white, and they have yet to find their common ancestor. But Mrs. Vaughan says that does not matter…

…Within minutes of receiving the names of her distant relatives, Mrs. Vaughan, a freelance project manager, was admiring their photographs on Facebook. Another adoptee who found family through DNA testing, Kathy Borgmann, a 49-year-old corn farmer in New Palestine, Ind., exchanged e-mails with cousins who delighted her by saying, “Welcome to the family.”…

…Not everyone is hoping to find new relatives. Some adoptees who have found genetic matches have been rebuffed by their distant kin. Most people take genealogical DNA tests to fill gaps in their family trees, not to find new members of their clans. Mr. Bogner said several cousins identified through DNA testing stopped communicating once they learned he was adopted. “It was horribly disappointing,” he said…

Read the entire article here.

“Race” & Ethnicity in Society in Social-Historical Context (AAS-SOC 338)

Lehman College, City University of New York
Spring 2012

Mark Christian, Professor & Chair of African & African American Studies

The idea of “race” since the 18th Century, and up to the present, has brought forth tremendous social inequality and, not to be over-dramatic, “social death” in a global sense. The ironic thing about “race” is that, from a scientific-biological sense, most authoritative commentators note that it is a problematic concept with little validity if one is arguing for “distinct races” among humankind. In other words, there are no distinct racial types of humans that can be separated from one another. Yes, there is some minor genetic difference among humans, such as skin color, hair texture, eye shape, lip-size; but when measured by what it is to be a human being these add up to only minor genetic differences. However there are still those who will try to put difference between humankind via pseudo-scientific racial theories. Some biologists use modern genetic science to distort the truth that we are all basically the same in humanity. A recent book by Dorothy Roberts called Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century (The New Press, 2011) gives a powerful insight into the abuse of modern genetics.

What is significant about “race” and ethnicity (ethnicity is largely related to shared cultural experiences of a specific racialized social group) is the reality of its social significance over time and place. Indeed, “race” has changed from one place to another. For example, what it is to be Black in South Africa is not the same in a social-historical context to what it is to be Black in the United States over time. We can make this point even more complex by stating what it was to be Black in the United States could once change from one state to another. The point here is to comprehend that “race” has been a socially constructed concept over time that has wielded a great amount of human misery and pain for certain social groups, and a great amount of power and privilege for other social groups. Our task is to come to an understanding of this complex topic and for this to be worthwhile intellectually we shall have to comprehend the idea of “race” from a social-historical context.

Given the social significance of White privilege in terms of “race” grouping and hierarchy, this course will focus on the how “whiteness” creates both a conscious and sub-conscious reality that is born out of the historical exploitation of people of color from the period enslavement and the plantation economy (17th – 19th Centuries) experience right through to the present. Even though we now live in a world whereby racism is largely outcast and a forbidden entity in social discourse and interaction, it still lurks beneath the surface in all things social. The current US statistical data on health, wealth, and other societal disparities between so-called “races” makes the comprehension of “whiteness” an important, indeed essential, part of our studies.

Although the course is taught primarily from a social-historical perspective, it is at bottom an interdisciplinary course involving aspects of knowledge from the humanities and social sciences. Having a positive and open mind that has a willingness to learn and work hard will be the key to your success in this class. We shall combine sociology, history, film & documentary to give a dynamic learning experience. The course will be taught via an interactive perspective whereby students will engage with the material and present in individual and group formats. Moreover, it is essentially a reading and writing class with interactive discussion. RESPECT for all in the classroom environment is imperative; regardless of one’s philosophical views or social background, gender, racialized self, or other human attribute.

Learning outcomes:
By the end of this course students should be able to demonstrate an understanding of:

• “Race” as a social construct and therefore “racialized” issues that produce social inequality in the US.
• “Race” as a problematic concept if put to biological scientific inquiry.
• The fallacy of “racial typology” classification.
• Whiteness in the social imagination.
• White privilege and white ethnic groups.
• Sociological theories of “race” & ethnicity.
• How to think critically about “race” & ethnicity.
• The “cultural minority” problematic in regard to peoples of color.
• Multicultural issues in a hierarchical “race” and social-cultural framework.
• Social inequality in terms of “race,” class and gender.
• How to talk about “racial issues” effectively, and get beyond racialized stereotyping.

Key Reading:

• Mark Christian. (Ed.) Integrated but Unequal: Black Faculty in Predominately White Space. (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2012)
• Nell I. Painter. The History of White People. (New York: Norton, 2010)
• Paula S. Rothenberg. (Ed.) White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism. (New York: Worth, 2011)
• Barbara Trepagnier. Silent Racism: How Well-Meaning White People Perpetuate the Racial Divide, 2nd Edition. (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2010)

Developing identity formation and self-concept in preschool-aged biracial children

Early Child Development and Care
Volume 111, Issue 1, 1995 (Special Issue: Focus on Caregivers)
pages 141-152
DOI: 10.1080/0300443951110110

Johnetta Wade Morrison, Professor of Human Development and Family Studies
University of Missouri, Columbia

Eleven mothers of biracial preschool-aged children were interviewed regarding identity formation, self-concept development, developmental issues and problems for their children. The racial attitude levels of their children were ascertained using PRAM II. Analysis includes the presentation of variables the mothers identified as a part of the child rearing practices to promote the dual heritages of their biracial children. Results indicate these mothers form two perspectives in promoting identity development. Self‐concept was viewed as a paramount issue for development. These findings have implications for practitioners.

Read or purchase the article here.