Mixed Race Studies

Portrait Of: ‘The Latinos Of Asia’

Latino USA
2018-05-22

Janice Llamoca, Digital Media Editor
Futuro Media Group

When you hear of last names like Torres, Rodriguez or Santos, you might automatically think of Latin America—and you’re not completely wrong. Those surnames are common throughout Latin America, but they’re also common in the Philippines.

Because of Spanish colonization, Filipinos and Latinos also share —aside from last names— religion, food and even similarities in language. These lines become even clearer here in the United States, as Filipino-Americans grow up in a cities with large Latino populations, like Los Angeles.

Anthony Ocampo, associate professor of sociology at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, breaks down these similarities in his book, The Latinos of Asia: How Filipino Americans Break the Rules of Race.

Maria Hinojosa talks to Ocampo about the book, his experience growing up in Los Angeles as a Filipino-American and what his research tells us about the link between Filipinos and Latinos…

Listen to the interview (00:19:30) here.

Steve William’s Column: Invisible blackness, can you see it?

South Strand News
Georgetown, South Carolina
2015-05-25

Steve Williams

Steve Williams

Last weekend’s royal wedding in England was a beautiful thing to behold. Many have likened it to Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009.

Social media is abuzz with millions who witnessed it; perhaps because Meghan Markle, who is of mixed racial heritage, didn’t diminish her African heritage rather, she celebrated it. When talking about her mixed heritage, race isn’t something she leads with, but she’s clearly comfortable talking about it. She tells a story of growing up and having her mother pick her up from school; how her friends would often ask — “who’s that black lady? Is she your maid?”

A self-described feminist and egalitarian Meghan has proudly supported many causes for those who are marginalized. Her wedding ceremony spoke volumes for her character. Likewise, kudos must be given to Prince Harry and the royal family for allowing her to express it. Maybe they’re more progressive than I thought…

While more and more celebrities like Halle Berry, Mariah Carey, Alicia Keys, Sade, Drake, Vin Diesel, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson are celebrating their multicultural heritage today, this was not always the case — particularly those black celebrities who could “pass” for white…

…Yet, the question of race for many blacks in America was determined by the so-called “One Drop Rule.” The law adopted by most Southern states originated during slavery and reinforced under Jim Crow, said if an individual has one single drop of “black blood” in their ancestry, then that individual is black regardless of his or her appearance.

In the early 1900s, being “black” or “colored” had drastic practical consequences even for whites.

The story is told of John Kirby who was the son of Big John Godbolt. Godbolt was one-eighth African and seven-eighths European. That meant Big John was legally classified as “colored” under South Carolina law. But John Kirby’s mother was white which meant John Kirby and his siblings had less than one-eighth African blood and were legally not “colored.” Instead, having only one-thirty-second African blood they were legally coded as “white.”…

Read the entire article here.

We Are the Original Southerners

The New York Times
2018-05-22

Malinda Maynor Lowery, Associate Professor; Director, Center for the Study of the American South (and Lumbee Indian)
University of North Carolina

An Indian delegation visited the White House Conservatory in 1863 during the Civil War. The story of American Indians during that period is largely overlooked in the contemporary struggle over statues of Confederate soldiers and politicians. Mathew Brady/Buyenlarge, via Getty Images

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — The people clamoring over whether to keep or remove Confederate monuments agree on one thing: This is a black-white issue. Last month, a graduate student doused the University of North Carolina’s Confederate monument in a mixture of her own blood and red ink. The monument, she said, “is the genocide of black people.”

I recognize my blood on these statues, too.

When people see Southern history in black and white, where are American Indians? Most people believe that the American Indian genocide took place long ago. But it wasn’t completely successful. There are over six and a half million American Indians, and many of them live in the South. North Carolina is home to the Lumbee Tribe, the largest tribe of American Indians east of the Mississippi (55,000 strong), of which I am a member. We are the original Southerners, and we shaped and continue to shape Southern history.

And yet even the most progressive Americans don’t seem to realize this. The coalition organized to oppose the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., last August did not invite any representatives of Virginia’s seven American Indian tribes to participate…

…Indian communities defied the logic of racial segregation; their very existence belied whites’ insistence that there were two races, never to be mixed. In 1924, the Virginia legislature passed the Racial Integrity Act, which outlawed interracial marriage, in part by reclassifying American Indians as “colored.” The act erased the distinct identity that people like Chief Branham are still today trying to protect…

Read the entire article here.

Declared Defective: Native Americans, Eugenics, and the Myth of Nam Hollow

University of Nebraska Press
May 2018
246 pages
9 photographs, 1 illustration, 3 maps, 2 tables, 8 charts, index
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4962-0200-0

Robert Jarvenpa, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology
State University of New York, Albany

Declared Defective is the anthropological history of an outcast community and a critical reevaluation of The Nam Family, written in 1912 by Arthur Estabrook and Charles Davenport, leaders of the early twentieth-century eugenics movement. Based on their investigations of an obscure rural enclave in upstate New York, the biologists were repulsed by the poverty and behavior of the people in Nam Hollow. They claimed that their alleged indolence, feeble-mindedness, licentiousness, alcoholism, and criminality were biologically inherited.

Declared Defective reveals that Nam Hollow was actually a community of marginalized, mixed-race Native Americans, the Van Guilders, adapting to scarce resources during an era of tumultuous political and economic change. Their Mohican ancestors had lost lands and been displaced from the frontiers of colonial expansion in western Massachusetts in the late eighteenth century. Estabrook and Davenport’s portrait of innate degeneracy was a grotesque mischaracterization based on class prejudice and ignorance of the history and hybridic subculture of the people of Guilder Hollow. By bringing historical experience, agency, and cultural process to the forefront of analysis, Declared Defective illuminates the real lives and struggles of the Mohican Van Guilders. It also exposes the pseudoscientific zealotry and fearmongering of Progressive Era eugenics while exploring the contradictions of race and class in America.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables
• Series Editors’ Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Menace in the Hollow
• 1. Native Americans and Eugenics
• 2. Border Wars and the Origins of the Van Guilders
• 3. A “New” Homeland and the Cradle of Guilder Hollow
• 4. From Pioneers to Outcastes
• 5. The Eugenicists Arrive
• 6. Deconstructing the Nam and the Hidden Native Americans
• 7. Demonizing the Marginalized Poor
• Conclusion: The Myth Unravels
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

The Life-Giving Art of Adrian Piper

Shondaland
2018-04-20

Rebecca Carroll, Editor of Special Projects
WNYC New York Public Radio, New York, New York

GETTY IMAGES/PHOTO BY SUZANNE KREITER/THE BOSTON GLOBE

I went to college at a small, private liberal arts school in rural Massachusetts on a full financial scholarship. There I navigated two sets of friends: my black friends, and my white friends. The school was, of course, predominantly white, but the students of color created a strong and robust community. For the first couple of years, though, still legit messed up by being adopted by a white family and raised in an all-white town, I placed an inordinate amount of value on proximity to white folks. So I went ahead and kept up with them Saab-driving, co-op shift-having, jazz-loving white friends, who largely performed their wokeness and ignored or exotified my blackness. Enter: the conceptual artist Adrian Piper, who pretty much gave me my life…

Read the entire article here.

Meghan Markle and the Bicultural Blackness of the Royal Wedding

The New York Times
2018-05-20

Salamishah Tillet, Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies
University of Pennsylvania

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle during their wedding ceremony in St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle on May 19, 2018 in Windsor, England. Pool photo by WPA

“Who are your people?” is the question that repeatedly came to me as I watched Doria Ragland, Meghan Markle’s mother, sitting a few feet away from her daughter at Saturday’s royal wedding. A common expression among southern African-Americans when greeting a stranger, it is never simply a matter of bloodline or individual biography. Rather, responses like “I’m the daughter of so and so” or “My family comes from here by way of there” serves the greater purpose of attesting to one’s place in history and potential bonds of kinship.

Despite Ms. Ragland’s being the sole member of Ms. Markle’s family at the wedding, we still know so little about her. In contrast to the media obsession with Ms. Markle’s father and his children from his first marriage, Ms. Ragland is a bit of a mystery who rarely gives interviews. As a result of her silence, we are left to deduce meaning from her physical image. As she sat across from the British monarchy in her pale green Oscar de la Renta dress and coat, it was the symbolism of her long dreadlocks, quietly tucked underneath her hat, that spoke volumes as it reminded us that black women’s natural hair is regal too.

Among the group of black women with whom I watched the ceremony early Saturday morning in New Jersey, she was a source of pride. Yet out of a sense of sisterly protection, we were also worried about her as she sat there alone, without siblings or friends. The wedding itself helped alleviate our fears, for even if none were not physically present at St. George’s Chapel, the ceremony was filled with gestures, big and small, that explicitly celebrated her “people” and the various black worlds in which she raised Ms. Markle.

But it was “what are you?” — a substantially more alienating question than “who are your people?” — that Meghan Markle recalls hearing almost every day of her life. In a 2015 essay for Elle magazine, she wrote, “I’m an actress, a writer, the Editor-in-Chief of my lifestyle brand The Tig, a pretty good cook and a firm believer in handwritten notes. A mouthful, yes, but one that I feel paints a pretty solid picture of who I am.” But such an answer is insufficient. Ms. Markle went on, “But here’s what happens: they smile and nod politely, maybe even chuckle, before getting to their point, ‘Right, but what are you? Where are your parents from?’ I knew it was coming, I always do.”…

Read the entire article here.

In the Wake of His Damage

The Rumpus
2018-05-12

Shreerekha
New York, New York

Rumpus original art by Aubrey Nolan

All the sleeping women
Are now awake and moving.
– Yosano Akiko (1911)

For all women who already know this narrative;
For all women touched by the Great Writers, named, unnamed, and some listed as letters;
For all who commune in the trauma and healing promised herein;
For all who believe in the power of radical transgressive border-crossing love;
For my Happiness, and my son and my daughter, so that you may walk differently;
For the ex with whom love remains the last transgression —

The Autobiographical

The year after I started teaching in Texas, his novel came out. Ten years after the event of our relationship, ten tortured years where we continued to communicate, a sort of communication that involved him reaching out, letting me know I made all the wrong decisions in my life, and then, asking for forgiveness and another chance, I thought I should teach his novel in my classes. The novel itself was important, won the Pulitzer, and by teaching it enough times, I thought it would do the trick. The classroom is sacral: all that goes through it turns magical and I would emerge whole. I would finally be rid of my ghost-love and I could sanitize our past through the distance offered by teaching and making a monument of his work for my students. Somehow, that plan failed.

What I do is teach, write, and think on, most often, feminist texts and theories. Such a pedagogy has not just carried me through the classrooms over the decades, but become a mooring post in life. It offers me a vision and a strategy, a way to love radically, think fearlessly, and keep renewing, as I can, the bridges between projects of feminism and social justice. Gloria Anzaldua’s vision, a vision that has carried many a woman through a dark day, has been valuable in thinking through the rubble of this event in my life. In Borderlands, Anzaldua offers a prophetic amalgam that helps women identify the productive potential of the mestiza way, the middle spaces she calls the nepantla. For women of the many elsewheres, women who continually travel and cross borders, Anzaldua’s psychic restlessness gives a fist bump of legitimacy, an anchor in the cultural collisions many of us remain mired in. Rather than a counter stance, she speaks of developing a position that is inclusive, inaugurating for us the amasamiento, a creature of both light and darkness.

I identify in a category not formalized or accepted in colonial census charts or western ways of understanding the other, as a black South Asian. I am an Indian who lays claim to the global community of black consciousness, and I reside between so many worlds of belonging and unbelonging. In racializing colorism and politicizing my own experience of antipathy witnessed toward the color of my skin, I crafted my own passport into marooned and shapeshifting black communities that gave credence to ontologies and a posteriori narratives over normative constructions of race, ethnicities, and nationalities…

Read the entire article here.

Jesmyn Ward: ‘Black girls are silenced, misunderstood and underestimated’

The Guardian
2018-05-11

Lisa Allardice, Editor
Guardian Review

Jesmyn Ward: ‘I fought from the very beginning.’ Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

The author of Sing, Unburied, Sing, had a tough childhood in Mississippi, survived Hurricane Katrina, and became the first woman to win two US national book awards for fiction

If Jesmyn Ward’s fiction tends towards the epic, that is maybe because her life has been marked by monumental events. “I fought from the very beginning”, she says. Born prematurely at just 26 weeks, she was badly attacked by her father’s pit bull as a small child, her younger brother was killed at 19, and, along with several generations of her family, she sheltered from Hurricane Katrina in a truck. Yet today she is the first woman to win the US national book award for fiction twice, hailed by a leading reviewer as “one of the most powerfully poetic writers in the country”. And on the morning we meet, it has just been announced that she has been shortlisted for the Women’s prize for fiction for her novel Sing, Unburied, Sing…

Ward’s subject is what it means to be poor and black in America’s rural south, where “life is a hurricane”. Modern Mississippi, she says, “means addiction, ground-in generational poverty, living very closely with the legacy of slavery, of Jim Crow, of lynching and of intractable racism”. In her first novel, Where the Line Bleeds (2008), she felt she “protected” her characters from these brutal realities, because she knew and cared about them too much: “So I kept pulling my punches. And later I realised that was a mistake. Life doesn’t spare the kind of people who I write about, so I felt like it would be dishonest to spare my characters in that way.”…

Read the entire interview here.

Talking about race with your own mom can be hard. Here’s why it’s worth it

PBS NewsHour
Public Broadcasting Service
2018-05-15

Judy Woodruff, Host

Ijeoma Oluo

When Ijeoma Oluo got a voicemail from her mom saying that she had had an epiphany about race, Oluo didn’t want to call her back. But, she says, as awful and awkward as the conversation was, she is glad it happened. Oluo shares her humble opinion on why that talk can be so fraught and why it’s so important.

Watch the video and read the transcript here.

Meghan Markle Is ‘Changing Discussions About What It Means to Be Biracial in America’

PEOPLE
2018-05-19

Breanne L. Heldman, Senior Editor

Ben Birchall/PA Wire

Meghan Markle didn’t just become the Duchess of Sussex on Saturday when she married Prince Harry in a gorgeous ceremony at St. George’s Church in Windsor Castle. She also became an important cultural icon of positive change in race relations around the world.

“The U.K. has one of the fastest-growing mixed-race populations in the world,” notes Dr. Sarah E. Gaither, an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University who also runs the Duke Identity and Diversity Lab. “To the biracial community, she’s really serving as a symbol of this changing demographic that Britain is facing in addition to the United States.”

“Meghan and Harry’s marriage is really significant because the British monarchy has always been viewed as so, so white,” DaVette See, correspondent for Black Girl Nerds, tells PEOPLE. “Now, they will be seen as more a part of a multicultural world.”.

“Being a biracial American, I didn’t grow up with a lot of biracial exemplars in mainstream media or the books I read,” says Gaither, “so Meghan Markle is really an inspiration for a lot of women of color, a lot of girls of color across the United States in showing that you can help change the historical ties. You can start changing discussions about what it means to be biracial and what it means to be black in America and, now in Britain as well.”…

Read the entire article here.