Mixed Race Studies

‘Evoking The Mulatto’ In Mixed-Race America

On Point with Tom Ashbrook
WBUR 90.9 FM
Boston, Massachusetts
2015-11-23

Tom Ashbrook, Host

Guests:

• Lindsay Catherine Harris, multimedia artist and creator of “Evoking the Mulatto.”
• Ko Smith, painter based in New York City. Featured in “Evoking the Mulatto.”
• Kaliya Warren, filmmaker based in New York City. Featured in “Evoking the Mulatto.”

(Clockwise From Top Left) Filmmaker Lindsay Catherine Harris, Ko Smith, Kailya Warren and Bryant Koger in still images from Harris’ “Evoking the Mulatto” multimedia project. (Courtesy the Filmmaker)

Mixed-race America in the time of Black Lives Matter and demographic change. We’ll talk race, identity and the film project “Evoking the Mulatto”.

Mixed race America is a fast-growing piece of the American pie. Ten percent of American births now, and growing. Until 1967, interracial marriage was illegal in many states. Today, relationships regularly cross all the old racial lines. What is it like to be that American? A new film project with the provocative title “Evoking the Mulatto” talks with lots of mixed race Americans about their everyday experience and their most intimate thoughts on love, beauty, justice, racial identity, and the American future. This hour, On Point, we’re listening to mixed race Americans.

Listen to the story (00:47:49) here. Download the story here.

Editorial: Biracial in the Time of Black Lives Matter

NBC News
2015-11-22

Amity Paye

I’ll never forget the first Black Lives Matter protest I attended in New York. After years of rallying against police violence in New York, this was the first night where race was the central message. As a Black woman it spoke to the deeply personal feelings I already had about police killings.

With each victim killed by the police without recourse, I feared for my life, for my family members, my friends and my future children. But I am also biracial. A Peace Corps baby, my white mother met and later married my Black father while teaching in in Liberia. When I go home to visit family almost every face at the table, most of my closest loved ones are white.

Across the country, Black people are combating institutionalized racism and demanding justice. But what happens when the very people doing this work are biracial: biologically connected to our current Black movement and also the white power systems we are searching to change?…

Read the entire article here.

Who’s telling who to STFU at American universities? Observations on teaching at a HWCU.

Historiann: History and sexual politics, 1492 to the present
2015-11-21

Ann M. Little, Associate Professor of History
Colorado State University

Ah, yes: freedom of speech. What some really mean when they evoke it is, “my right to have my say and not have you talk back,” like all of those crybabies who have cancelled their appearances at commencement ceremonies in the last few years because not every student and faculty member greeted their future appearance on campus with hugs and cocoa and slankets.

If you really believe in liberty of speech, then stop telling others to STFU. In my view, the people who are being criticized most vigorously for speaking up lately at Yale and the University of Missouri are all too often quiet about their experiences, silent on campus, and eager not to draw attention to themselves, and it’s these students whose voices we need to listen to the most.

Too many people have zero imagination about what it is to be African American or Latin@ on a historically white college or university (HWCU) campus. But everyone who has ever attended or taught or worked at a HWCU knows that African Americans on HWCUs are viewed with suspicion just for being there, let alone when they try to unlock their own damn bikes or organize a protest about their marginalization…

Read the entire article here.

What Happened in Missouri Puts the Nation on Notice

Time
2015-11-10

Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., William S. Tod Professor of Religion and African-American Studies
Princeton University

Imagine what could happen at Ohio State or UCLA or any other major university. The activists already have.

What happened at the University of Missouri has sent shockwaves throughout this country: A startling coalition of students and faculty just forced the top leadership of the University to resign. The students had had enough. A swastika drawn with human feces on a residential dorm was the latest incident in a long list of ugly incidents, which made it clear that some people believed that black students did not belong at the University of Missouri. The image and the medium spoke volumes about those who composed it.

President Wolfe’s tepid response sealed his fate, but as with every other issue involving race in America, change is never given; it must always be won. And the student protests, Jonathan Butler’s hunger strike, the faculty’s threat of a walk out, and the strike among black football students announced that a new wave of campus activism has arrived, armed with the power to bring real change. The nation has been put on notice.

We have seen something like this before. In 1968 and 1969, black students organized protests across some two hundred campuses in the United States. These were among the first significant wave of black students on predominantly white campuses, and they brought with them the energy and expectation of the black freedom movement—particularly the militancy of Black Power. They pushed for the hiring of black faculty, argued for an increase in financial aid for African American students, and pressed administrators to support black living spaces. In short, they challenge the whiteness of American universities and colleges…

…What we saw in Columbia, Missouri, was something different. There was nothing nostalgic about it. The protests were decidedly of this moment. These students are shaped by the startling contrast of the nation’s first black president and the black lives matter movement. They have seen the viral videos of police brutality, and many have watched family and friends struggle to recover from the economic devastation that has left their lives in shambles. They have witnessed, some even participated in, the convulsions of Ferguson and Baltimore…

Read the entire article here.

“It’s difficult in Brazil to point out racism,” says Alexandre Ciconello, a human rights expert and adviser to Amnesty in Rio de Janeiro. “It’s a taboo for the elite of the country and for politicians and authorities. They always say ‘Brazil is a mixed country, we are not the US, we are not South Africa,’ and if you raise racial questions, you’re seen as trying to separate that.”

Will Carless, “Brazil’s ‘Black Lives Matter’ struggle — even deadlier,” Public Radio International, November 3, 2015. http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-11-03/brazils-black-lives-matter-struggle-even-more-dire.

Brazil’s ‘Black Lives Matter’ struggle — even deadlier

GlobalPost
Public Radio International
2015-11-03

Will Carless

The police committed more than 1 in every 6 of Rio de Janeiro’s homicides between 2010 and 2013.

And 4 out of 5 of those who are slain overall were under 29 years old — and of African descent.

These startling figures come from an analysis of official homicide data by Amnesty International. The problem spans far beyond Rio, and more recent incidents have raised concern that it’s not going away.

Earlier this month, five police officers in Rio de Janeiro were arrested after a cellphone video showed them altering a crime scene by placing a gun in the hands of a black teen they had just shot dead.

Echoing United States movements like #BlackLivesMatter and #RiseUpOctober, activists in Brazil are fighting to draw attention to the problem of killings of young black Brazilian men, frequently by police. One of the leading local movements is Amnesty International’s “Jovem Negro Vivo,” meaning “Young Black Alive.”

It’s one of several awareness campaigns that are also aiming to dismantle a stricture that’s long existed in the country: a reluctance to talk about important social issues in terms of race.

“It’s difficult in Brazil to point out racism,” says Alexandre Ciconello, a human rights expert and adviser to Amnesty in Rio de Janeiro. “It’s a taboo for the elite of the country and for politicians and authorities. They always say ‘Brazil is a mixed country, we are not the US, we are not South Africa,’ and if you raise racial questions, you’re seen as trying to separate that.”…

Read the entire article and listen to the story here.

Goucher Social Justice Committee Presents: Rosa Clemente

Goucher College
Kelly Lecture Hall
1021 Dulaney Valley Road
Baltimore, Maryland
Thursday, 2015-10-29, 18:00 EDT (Local Time)

Rosa Clemente is a Black Puerto Rican grassroots organizer, hip-hop activist, journalist, and entrepreneur. She was the vice presidential running mate of 2008 Green Party Presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney in the 2008 U.S. Presidential election.

Rosa Clemente will be speaking on the Black Lives Matter Movement, the contours of Afro Latina identity and the Black Radical Tradition.

Co-sponsored by The Center for Race, Equity and Identity.

For more information, click here.

Designing Afro-Latino Curriculum for Self-Determination

Zambombazo
2015-10-23

Zachary & Betsy Jones

Introduction

During the 2015 Afrolatino Festival of New York in a panel discussion on the contextualization of blackness, William Garcia briefly mentioned working to implement Afro-Latino curriculum in schools, which greatly intrigued us. Thus, we reached out to him to learn more. His amazingly detailed and extensive response, published below, recommends “looking for solidarity between oppressed people in the United States but also involves questioning African American and Latino nomenclature”. Prior to beginning, it is noteworthy that William Garcia describes these topics as “difficult conversations”. Thus, we encourage critical analysis, respect, and “productive dialogues with parents, students, communities, family members, and friends”, perhaps along with cultural resources from our Afrodescendent Population in Latin America unit.

Designing Afro-Latino Pedagogy for Self-Determination (by William Garcia)

“American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future.” —Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (1874-1938)

With an increased media attention to police violence there is an emergence of educators utilizing Black Lives Matter as a movement to create and develop curriculums of social justice (Rethinking Schools 2015). The recent article “Black Students’ Lives Matter: Building the school-to-justice pipeline” (2015) posits:

For the past decade, social justice educators have decried the school-to-prison pipeline: a series of interlocking policies—whitewashed, often scripted curriculum that neglects the contributions and struggles of people of color; zero tolerance and racist suspension and expulsion policies; and high-stakes tests—that funnel kids from the classroom to the cellblock. But, with the recent high-profile deaths of young African Americans, a “school-to-grave pipeline” is coming into focus.

But yet what does it mean to be black in the United States? Am I as an Afro-Latino allowed to call myself Black? Who gets to be African American?…

…Fixed categories of blackness do not allow Afro-Latinos to identify and explore their identities, which creates an invisibility of how policy, especially in the realm of education, has not been developed to attend to their academic needs. There is a need to redefine what it means to be black in this country [Editor’s Note: See Soulville Census: Learning about the Nuances of Blackness]. Essentialist forms of blackness in the U.S. make it difficult for students to relate to the way that we can understand race critically and politically as well as teaching in ways that are culturally relevant for them….

Read the entire article here.

Playing and Praying at Wild Goose — Student Kenji Kuramitsu

The “CURE” for Your Vocation
McCormick Theological Seminary
Chicago, Illinois
2015-08-26

Ryan Kenji Kuramitsu

I had heard of Wild Goose Festival from friends who had braved the woods in years past, but I wasn’t sure it was my kind of thing. I certainly didn’t expect to be a part of the gathering anytime soon. Then my friend Micky asked me to attend. She wanted to know if I would speak on a panel she was moderating, and invited me to present my own workshop as well.

I didn’t know what I would find in Hot Springs, North Carolina other than spending a few days camping out, thinking about God, smiling, and playing music with a bunch of progressive, hippie Christians, many of whom I was only tangentially connected to on social media. I was nervous, but I wanted to see what this festival was all about, and as a lifelong Boy Scout, I felt like I could handle myself in the woods. I told Micky I would come.

I spent the next few weeks trying to think of something productive to contribute to the “Revolutionary Love and Militant Nonviolence” panel that I would speak on with clergy and racial justice advocates Leah Gunning-Francis, Traci Blackmon, and Ethan Vessley-Flad, publically reflecting on our involvement in the Black Lives Matter movement as the one year anniversary of Mike Brown’s death approaches. For my own workshop, I created an hour long presentation exploring how both traditional theological teachings about Christ and contemporary critical mixed race theory can empower multiethnic and mixed race people to live whole, integrated lives…

Read the entire article here.

“That’s one of the fundamental paradoxes of Obama’s presidency — that we have the Black Lives Matter movement under a black president,” says Fredrick Harris, a political scientist at Columbia University. “Your man is in office, and you have this whole movement around criminal-justice reform asserting black people’s humanity?”

Jennifer Senior, “The Paradox of the First Black President,” New York Magazine, October 7, 2015. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/10/paradox-of-the-first-black-president.html.