Mixed Race Studies

Barack Obama in Hawai’i and Indonesia: The Making of a Global President

ABC-CLIO Praeger
September 2011
276 pages
6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-313-38533-9
Electronic ISBN: 978-0-313-38534-6

Dinesh Sharma, Senior Fellow
Institute for International and Cross-Cultural Research
St. Francis College, New York

Distinguishing itself from the mass of political biographies of Barack Obama, this first interdisciplinary study of Obama’s Indonesian and Hawai’ian years examines their effect on his adult character, political identity, and global world-view.

Barack Obama is the first American president born and raised in Hawai’i, the most diverse state in the Union, and the first American president to have spent a significant part of his childhood in a Muslim-majority nation, namely, Indonesia. What effect did these—and other early experiences—have on the man who is now, arguably, the world’s most popular political leader?

The first 18 years of President Obama’s life, from his birth in 1961 to his departure for college in 1979, were spent in Hawai’i and Indonesia. These years fundamentally shaped the traits for which the adult Obama is noted—his protean identity, his nuanced appreciation of multiple views of the same object, his cosmopolitan breadth of view, and his self-rooted “outpost” patriotism. Barack Obama in Hawai’i and Indonesia: The Making of a Global President is the first study to examine, in fascinating detail, how his early years impacted this unique leader.

Existing biographies of President Obama are primarily political treatments. Here, cross-cultural psychologist and marketing consultant Dinesh Sharma explores the connections between Obama’s early upbringing and his adult views of civil society, secular Islam, and globalization. The book draws on the author’s on-the-ground research and extensive first-hand interviews in Jakarta; Honolulu; New York; Washington, DC; and Chicago to evaluate the multicultural inputs to Obama’s character and the ways in which they prepared him to meet the challenges of world leadership in the 21st century.

Features

• Foreword
• Photographs
• Timelines
• Figures
• Appendices

Highlights

• Offers the first systematic study of Barack Obama’s Indonesian and Hawai’ian years and their effect on his adult character and political identity
• Shows how Obama’s early experiences fostered a repertoire of social and psychological skills ideally suited to dealing with the complex cultural and geopolitical issues that confront 21st-century America
• Provides new keys to understanding Obama by looking at the varied cultural and religious influences that shaped his attitudes, beliefs, and hybrid cultural identity
• Examines Ann Dunham’s doctoral dissertation, based on her social anthropological fieldwork in Indonesia, for clues to the perceptual prisms she inculcated in her son, Barack Obama

Bynum: The Long Shadow of the Civil War (2010)

The Civil War Monitor: A New Look at America’s Greatest Conflict
2011-10-19

Laura Hepp Bradshaw
Carnegie Mellon University

The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies by Victoria E. Bynum. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Cloth, ISBN: 0807833819.

“Few histories,” Victoria Bynum laments, “are buried faster or deeper than those of political or social dissenters” (148). By resurrecting the histories of three anti-secessionist communities in the South, Bynum’s latest book about the Civil War home front and post-war aftermath brings previously ignored strains of political and social dissent back to life through an intricate examination of the period rooted in race, gender, and class politics. Ultimately guided by three central questions designed to probe the prevalence of Unionism among southerners during the war, the effects of Union victory on freedpeople and southern Unionists, and the Civil War’s broader legacies, Bynum finds answers in the Piedmont of North Carolina, the Piney Woods of Mississippi, and the Big Thicket of Hardin County, Texas. These regions, though miles apart, are united in Bynum’s analysis by kinship and the political alliances of non-slaveholding, yeoman farming families…

…These home front battles, Bynum tells us, had a lasting effect on the political and social clime of the Reconstruction era, and beyond.  When Republican Reconstruction ended and Jim Crow Reconstruction segregated the South, former southern Unionists like Jasper and Warren Collins of the Big Thicket region rejected the two-party political system in favor of alternative platforms such the Populists or Socialists, in addition to the predominant southern religions.  Newt Knight and his descendants struggled against the rising tide of white supremacy that sought to divide white, black, and Native American demographics by living openly as a multi-racial community.  Furthermore, Bynum highlights the challenges faced by women in the Reconstruction period, as Jim Crow also regulated sexual mores and relations between both the sexes and races.

Thematically, the book harnesses examples of gender, class, and race on the wartime home front and in the post-war period. Yet, even though a vast portion of the book is devoted to discussing the anti-secessionist personalities of Newt Knight, Jasper and Warren Collins, and to a lesser extent, Bill Owens, an explicit examination their gender is curiously overlooked. Bynum mentions that “southern Unionists, Populists, and Socialists” were portrayed as “cowards and traitors,” but she fails to examine the implications of those labels within the broader context of southern masculinity (114). That said, Bynum’s sophisticated, multi-layered analysis of class relations, especially during the Civil War, more than make up for this shortcoming. She thoroughly illustrates a web of complex, inter-community class tensions that linked the conscripted poor, men fortunate to wave Confederate service, and the home guard. Bynum successfully explicates the repercussions of a segregated South on people of mixed race descent who were forced to either claim their black identity, like Anna Knight, a descendant of Newt Knight, or to “pass” as white by relocating away from the communities of their birth and obscuring their ancestry, as many other Knight Company descendants were forced to do…

Read the entire review here.

New Photo Essay: (1)ne Drop

(1)ne Drop
2011-09-26

Yaba Blay

Comments by Steven F. Riley: In keeping with the non-commercial aspect of this site, I have modified the fundraising press release to provide informational content about the book project. There is howerver, a short fundraising request at the end of the video.

PHILADELPHIA, PA – Africana Studies scholar Yaba Blay, Ph.D., and award-winning photographer Noelle Théard [photographs] are collaborating on an innovative new project: a photo essay book that explores the “other” faces of Blackness – those folks who may not be immediately recognized, accepted, or embraced as Black in our visually racialized society. Entitled (1)ne Drop, a reference to the historical “one-drop rule,” the project seeks to challenge narrow, yet popular perceptions of what “Blackness” is and what “Blackness” looks like by pairing candid personal narratives with beautifully captured portraits.

“With this project, I wanted to look at the other side, or at least another side. When we talk about skin color politics, for the most part, we only discuss the disadvantages associated with being dark-skinned. We know about the lived experience of being dark-skinned in a society where lighter skin and White skin are privileged,” says Blay, the author for the project.  “This is not to say that that discussion is over or resolved or that we need to stop discussing it. But we also need to start having more balanced and holistic conversations about skin color.”…

From the “About” page.

People of African descent reflect a multiplicity of skin tones and phenotypic characteristics. Often times, however, when met by people who self-identify as “Black,” but do not fit into a stereotypical model of Blackness, many of us not only question their identity, but challenge their Blackness, and thus our potential relationship to them. A creative presentation of historical documentation, personal memoirs, and portraiture, (1)ne Drop literally explores the “other” faces of Blackness—those who may not immediately be recognized, accepted, or embraced as “Black” in this visually racialized society. Through portrait documentaries (book and film), photography exhibitions, and public programming, the project intends to raise social awareness and spark community dialogue about the complexities of Blackness as both an identity and a lived reality.

(1)ne Drop seeks to challenge narrow, yet popular perceptions of what “Blackness” is and what “Blackness” looks like—if we can recalibrate our lenses to see Blackness as a broader category of identity and experience, perhaps we will be able to see ourselves as part of a larger global community. In the end, (1)ne Drop hopes to awaken a long-overdue and much needed dialogue about racial identity and skin color politics.

For more information, click here.

Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana

Lousiana State University Press
2004-10-30
344 pages
6.00 x 9.00 inches / 8 halftones, 3 maps
ISBN-10: 0807130265; ISBN-13: 978-0807130261

Caryn Cossé Bell, Professor of History
University of Massachusetts, Lowell

Jules and Frances Landry Award

With the Federal occupation of New Orleans in 1862, Afro-Creole leaders in that city, along with their white allies, seized upon the ideals of the American and French Revolutions and images of revolutionary events in the French Caribbean and demanded Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. Their republican idealism produced the postwar South’s most progressive vision of the future. Caryn Cossé Bell, in her impressive, sweeping study, traces the eighteenth-century origins of this Afro-Creole political and intellectual heritage, its evolution in antebellum New Orleans, and its impact on the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. Revolution and the Origins of Dissent
• 2. The Republican Cause and the Afro-Creole Militia
• 3. The New American Racial Order
• 4. Romanticism, Social Protest, and Reform
• 5. French Freemasonry and the Republican Heritage
• 6. Spiritualism’s Dissident Visionaries
• 7. War, Reconstruction, and the Politics of Radicalism
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Membership in Two Masonic Lodges and Biographical Information
• Bibliography
• Index

Mixed But Not Divided: Multi-ethnic populations redefine racial lines

City on a Hill Press: A Student-Run Newspaper
University of California, Santa Cruz
2011-10-20

Chelsea Hawkins

When I was six or seven years old, I would spend my Saturday afternoons at the local Korean Baptist Church. A pink textbook opened in front of me, oversized hangul lightly sketched on sheets of paper. I kept my eyes turned downward behind a veil of straight brown hair as I avoided speaking. My face would become red and hot with embarrassment, as the guttural sounds got caught in my throat and I fumbled over words — the syllables swirled around in my mouth, only to be spit out awkwardly, a jumble of sounds always a little off.

Korean school was a short-lived experience — I hated going because even though I wasn’t sure what it was, I knew I was different. I looked different. I was shy and out of place. I hated my limited Korean and I hated feeling like an outsider. I spent more afternoons hiding in the secret places of a little garden than talking to my peers.

I am — like 4.2 million Americans — multiracial. My mother is Native American and white; my father, Korean and white. If my parents had followed the life paths their families had in mind, I would not be here. A product of teen parents, I stumbled through life and grew up with them. And when they came into the picture, my two younger brothers joined our little family.

Among American children, the multiracial population has increased almost 50 percent to 4.2 million people since 2000, according to The New York Times. The 2000 census report was the first time that Americans had the option to select more than one race — and reports flooded in, indicating the number of mixed race people in the United States…

…Mark-Griffin, who is a native of Michigan and former UCSC student, had an experience unique compared to a multiracial Californian: He was one of the only Asian-American students in his school.

While Mark-Griffin said he doesn’t want to portray Michigan or the Midwest as a racist area, he did emphasize that it wasn’t nearly as diverse as California. But as a result of the differences in culture between California and Michigan, Mark-Griffin has seen the way people’s perceptions can change with communities.

“In Michigan, most people identify me as Asian, but here in California, I’m a white guy,” Mark-Griffin said…

Read the entire article here.

Tracing Trails of Blood on Ice: Commemorating “The Great Escape” in 1861-62 of Indians and Blacks into Kansas

Negro History Bulletin
Jaunary-December 2001

Willard B. Johnson

My heart raced and emotions surged before I consciously grasped the meaning of what I was reading in that footnote. Reading all the footnotes had become routine for me, because ages ago I learned that important information about my people and my interests would more often than not be buried there, if mentioned at all. But, here was something really startling to me—mention of Humboldt, Kansas. That tiny southeast Kansas town had been the lifelong hometown of my grandmother, Gertrude Stovall (who was 101 years old when she died in 1990), and it is where I plan to be buried, amidst five previous generations of my mother’s family. Here it was being specifically proposed as the place for an event that, had it occurred, might very significantly have impacted if not altered American history during the Civil War.

The footnote quoted a letter to President Lincoln from emissaries of Opothleyahola, a legendary leader of the traditionalist faction of the Muskogee Indians (whom the whites called “Creeks”). I had come to focus on this leader in my quest to understand the famous “Trails of Tears” over which almost all of the Indians of the southeastern states had trekked when they were forced out of their traditional homeland to “Indian Territory” (now Oklahoma).

In the letter, the Native American leader was proposing to convene all the mid-western Indian tribes in a gigantic General Council meeting, to demonstrate their continued loyalty to the Union and to secure enforcement of the treaties that his people had signed with the United States government decades before. Now they needed to meet to make good on those pledges. Of all places, Opothleyahola proposed to hold that meeting in Humboldt!

In researching the story behind this note, I was able to tie together many disjointed strands of family and folk history. The answers to questions such as why it was that so much of the black family folklore of this region spoke so vaguely of having Indian connections; how it was that some of our black families seemed to have been among the first settlers in that area of Kansas; how it was that some spoke of having come through Indian Territory; and why and how it was that after the Civil War so many black families returned to or stayed in Indian Territory became more clear.

Understanding the connections between African Americans and Native Americans is difficult and sometimes painful because these connections were quite complex and ranged from marriage, brotherhood, and adoption into families, to Indian enslavement of blacks. That many African Americans had shared the suffering of Native Americans on the Trail of Tears had come to my attention through the writings of a family friend, former Cherokee principal chief, Ms. Wilma Mankiller.  Many of the blacks who were forcibly relocated with the Indians were natural or adopted family members, or incorporated communities, but perhaps as many as four thousand of them had been slaves.  They shared all the ordeals of the removals…

…In pursuit of information about my own ancestors I was struck by several features of the 1860 federal census rolls for Arkansas, which includes the schedules for Indian Territory. Most notably, nearly all the Creek Indians were listed as “Black.” Would that designation have today’s significance?

I had read about extensive African and Creek mixing. After all, it was probably to the Creeks that blacks had escaped as early as 1526 from L. Vasquez deAyllon’s shipwrecked settlement on the Carolina coast. I had read about the ancient Creek migrations from the Southwest, where the indigenous populations were considerably darker than the Cherokee and other Iroquoian speaking peoples of the East, and may have mixed with Africans during early Spanish exploration and colonial times, as seems evident among Mexican populations, and some say even well before that! But could such mixing have been so extensive as to affect the majority of the Creeks?

I began to suspect these particular white census enumerators impulsively listed persons of dark complexion simply as “black.” This would not necessarily reflect the standard “one-drop” American practice and imply “African.” Moreover, many of the dark Creek Indians have very straight hair, so I became skeptical.

Another interesting feature of the census for Indian Territory was the special note by the enumerator that the Seminoles refused ever to allow a listing of “slaves”; it seemed to be a reaffirmation of the earlier removal-treaty negotiation experience. However, the Seminoles, whose Nation arose out of a significant social, political, and genetic integration of persons of Native American and African American background, were not all listed as “black.” Perhaps the color designations for the Creeks were valid clues to their identity after all.

The key breakthrough in this genetic conundrum came with an examination of an adjutant general’s descriptive record of the First Indian Home Guard Regiment, where color designations were quite nuanced. Seven variations were used, from “light,” to “Indian,” through “red” and “copper” to “black” and “Negro” and even “African.” The majority did not fall on the darker end of this range, but I did count about fifty persons in the last three categories…

Read the entire article here.

Challenges and resilience in the lives of urban, multiracial adults: An instrument development study.

Journal of Counseling Psychology
Volume 58, Issue 4 (October 2011)
pages 494-507
DOI: 10.1037/a0024633

Nazish M. Salahuddin

Karen M. O’Brian

Multiracial Americans represent a rapidly growing population (Shih & Sanchez, 2009); however, very little is known about the types of challenges and resilience experienced by these individuals. To date, few psychological measures have been created specifically to investigate the experiences of multiracial people. This article describes 2 studies focused on the development and psychometric properties of the Multiracial Challenges and Resilience Scale (MCRS). The MCRS was developed using a nationwide Internet sample of urban, multiracial adults. Exploratory factor analyses revealed 4 Challenge factors (Others’ Surprise and Disbelief Regarding Racial Heritage, Lack of Family Acceptance, Multiracial Discrimination, and Challenges With Racial Identity) and 2 Resilience factors (Appreciation of Human Differences and Multiracial Pride). A confirmatory factor analysis with data from a second sample provided support for the stability of this factor structure. The reliability and validity of the measure, implications of these findings, and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Preacher and the Politician: Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama, and Race in America

University of Virginia Press
October 2009
160 pages
5 1/2x 81/4
Cloth ISBN: 0-8139-2886-9

Clarence E. Walker, Professor of History
University of California, Davis

Gregory D. Smithers, Visiting Associate Professor of History
Virginia Commonwealth University

Barack Obama’s inauguration as the first African American president of the United States has caused many commentators to conclude that America has entered a postracial age. The Preacher and the Politician argues otherwise, reminding us that, far from inevitable, Obama’s nomination was nearly derailed by his relationship with Jeremiah Wright, the outspoken former pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ on the South Side of Chicago. The media storm surrounding Wright’s sermons, the historians Clarence E. Walker and Gregory D. Smithers suggest, reveals that America’s fraught racial past is very much with us, only slightly less obvious.

With meticulous research and insightful analysis, Walker and Smithers take us back to the Democratic primary season of 2008, viewing the controversy surrounding Wright in the context of key religious, political, and racial dynamics in American history. In the process they expose how the persistence of institutional racism, and racial stereotypes, became a significant hurdle for Obama in his quest for the presidency.

The authors situate Wright’s preaching in African American religious traditions dating back to the eighteenth century, but they also place his sermons in a broader prophetic strain of Protestantism that transcends racial categories. This latter connection was consistently missed or ignored by pundits on the right and the left who sought to paint the story in simplistic, and racially defined, terms. Obama’s connection with Wright gave rise to criticism that, according to Walker and Smithers, sits squarely in the American political tradition, where certain words are meant to incite racial fear, in the case of Obama with charges that the candidate was unpatriotic, a Marxist, a Black Nationalist, or a Muslim.

Once Obama became the Democratic nominee, the day of his election still saw ballot measures rejecting affirmative action and undermining the civil rights of other groups. The Preacher and the Politician is a concise and timely study that reminds us of the need to continue to confront the legacy of racism even as we celebrate advances in racial equality and opportunity.

Table of  Contents

• “They Didn’t Give Us Our Mule and Our Acre”: Introduction
• “The “Chickens Are Coming Home to Roost”: Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama, and the Black Church
• “I Don’t Want People to Pretend I’m Not Black”: Barack Obama and America’s Racial History
• “To Choose Our Better History?” Epilogue
• Text of Barack Obama’s March 18, 2008, Speech on Race
• Notes
• Index

She Just Loved Baseball

Black Athlete Sports Network
2010-02-28

Bill Carroll

NEW YORK—Effa Manley was seemingly yet another “lost” pioneer in Negro Leagues Baseball before being posthumously honored in 2006 with induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

She was part of a class of players and executives selected by a special committee chaired by former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent. But a plaque for the only woman inducted in the Hall of Fame barely touches the surface of an often controversial life.

Manley was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her mother, Bertha Ford Brooks, was of German and East-Indian descent. Bertha, who was a seamstress, gave birth to Effa after becoming pregnant by her wealthy White employer, John M. Bishop.

Bertha’s husband, Benjamin Brooks, who was Black, sued Bishop and received a settlement of $10,000 before he and Bertha divorced.  Bertha later remarried, and Effa was raised in a household with a Black stepfather and Black half-siblings.

Inheriting somewhat dark skin from her mother, she chose to live as a Black person, leading most people to assume her stepfather was her biological father and to classify her as Black.

After graduation from high school in Philadelphia, she moved to New York to work in the millinery business. She met Abe Manley, an African-American man 24 years older than she, at the 1932 World Series at Yankee Stadium, where she had gone to see her favorite player, Babe Ruth…

…The Newark Eagles were founded in 1936 when the Newark Dodgers merged with the Brooklyn Eagles. The Eagles sported the likes of Hall-of-Famers Larry Doby, Monte Irvin, Ray Dandridge, Leon Day, and Willie Wells.  The Eagles shared Ruppert Stadium with the Newark Bears, beginning in 1936…

…In addition to managing her baseball team, Manley was also a social activist for Civil rights. She organized a boycott of Harlem stores when they wouldn’t hire Black salesclerks. It took only six weeks for the stores to give in.

As a result, one year after the boycott, 300 stores employed Blacks. She held an “Anti-Lynching Day” at Ruppert Stadium and was treasurer for the Newark chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)…

Read the entire article here.

Documentary Genocide: Families Surnames on Racial Hit List

Richmond Times-Dispatch
2000-03-05

Peter Hardin, Former Washington Correspondent
 
Long before the Indian woman gave birth to a baby boy, Virginia branded him with a race other than his own.
 
The young Monacan Indian mother delivered her son at Lynchburg General Hospital in 1971. Proud of her Indian heritage, the woman was dismayed when hospital officials designated him as black on his birth certificate. They threatened to bar his discharge unless she acquiesced. The original orders came from Richmond generations ago.
 
Virginia’s former longtime registrar of the Bureau of Vital Statistics, Dr. Walter Ashby Plecker, believed there were no real native-born Indians in Virginia and anybody claiming to be Indian had a mix of black blood.
 
In aggressively policing the color line, he classified “pseudo-Indians” as black and even issued in 1943 a hit list of surnames belonging to “mongrel” or mixed-blood families suspected of having Negro ancestry who must not be allowed to pass as Indian or white.
 
With hateful language, he denounced their tactics.
 
“ . . . Like rats when you are not watching, [they] have been ‘sneaking’ in their birth certificates through their own midwives, giving either Indian or white racial classification,” Plecker wrote.
 
Twenty-eight years later, the Monacan mother’s surname still was on Plecker’s list. She argued forcefully with hospital officials. She lost…

…“It’s not that we’re trying to dig him [Plecker] up and re-inter him again,” said Gene Adkins, assistant chief of the Eastern Chickahominy Tribe.
 
“We want people to know that he did damage the Indian population here in the state. And it’s taken us years, even up to now, to try to get out from under what he did. It’s a sad situation, really sad.”
 
Said Chief William P. Miles of the Pamunkey Tribe: “He came very close to committing statistical genocide on Native Americans in Virginia.”…

Read the entire article here.