Mixed Race Studies

Weeding Out the Riffraff

The New York Times
Home & Garden
2013-07-17

Penelope Green, Editor

At Home With Sheila Bridges

Sheila Bridges played the cancer card only once, when a state trooper stopped her for speeding on the Taconic Parkway.

At the time, Ms. Bridges, the interior designer Time magazine once celebrated as one of America’s best talents, was already notable for her race (as a black woman in a very white field, she stood out), her distinctive design style (a sensual and witty classicism) and her clients (music moguls like Andre Harrell, best-sellers like Tom Clancy and, famously, Bill Clinton). But she was not used to getting so much attention for her hair, or lack thereof.

In 2004, Ms. Bridges, now 49, was at a career apogee, juggling a television show, product lines, type-A suitors and high-maintenance clients, when her hair began to fall out. The diagnosis was alopecia, an autoimmune disorder. And as she recounts in “The Bald Mermaid,” her sharply told memoir, out this month from Pointed Leaf Press, rather than struggle with wigs or weaves, she decided to shave her head…

…Which takes us back to the speeding ticket Ms. Bridges dodged on the Taconic a few years ago. There she was, as she put it, “driving while black” in a Range Rover, when she was pulled over. While she steeled herself for the inevitable “Whose car is this?” challenge from the trooper, she noted his confusion at her baldness. When he asked where she was going in such hurry, she answered honestly that she had an appointment at Columbia University Medical Center (it was a dentist’s appointment, but she didn’t mention that). And in a response that had become frustratingly familiar since she shaved her head, the officer clocked her as a cancer patient and waved her on.

It is a rare day, Ms. Bridges said wryly, that she is not mistaken for some sort of patient. Last month, in line at the post office, a man tapped her on the shoulder. “I thought, ‘Here it comes,’ ” she recalled. “Then he asks me when I’m having kidney dialysis. To constantly have to engage in conversations about my appearance is exhausting. A natural boundary is erased when you don’t have hair. I was in a restaurant and a guy reached out and put both his hands on my head. I realize I’m a trigger for other people’s fears, of mortality, losing a loved one. But it creates all these other issues. I think I look great, and a man asks me if I’m having dialysis. Is that how men see me? No wonder I’m single.”

Ms. Bridges is a lively memoirist, habituated since childhood to navigating a familiar sea of misconceptions and prejudices with a tart wit and the “double consciousness,” to quote W. E. B. Du Bois, worn by so many African-Americans.

Although she grew up in Philadelphia, the child of a dentist and a teacher (a k a “the black girl” in her small Quaker school), she was nonetheless required to arrive at Brown University her freshman year a week early to attend its Third World Transition Program. There was a plus: because she moved in before her roommate, she was able to snag the bigger closet. “All the better,” she writes with characteristic humor, “to hang my Masai headdress and lion’s tooth necklace right next to my collection of polo shirts from Saks.”

That same week, she was also asked to join a biracial support group. (In those days, she was feathering her light brown hair in homage to Farrah Fawcett). “Biracial? I’d never even heard the word before,” she writes. “Around Philly, we adhered to the one drop rule when it came to determining race. Or as my mother used to say, jokingly, ‘It doesn’t matter how much milk you put into your coffee. Coffee with milk is still coffee.’ ”…

Read the entire article here.

Black And Jewish And Read All Over

The Jewish Week
2013-07-16

Julie Wiener

She may currently live on the Upper East Side, but Simone Weichselbaum, 31, remains a Brooklyn girl. Raised in Williamsburg and Crown Heights by her Ashkenazi Jewish dad (who freelances for The Jewish Week) and Jamaican mom, Weichselbaum, a Park East Day School grad (she formally converted to Judaism at age 7), covers Brooklyn for the Daily News.

Her coverage — “piercing, respectful, accurate and entertaining reporting of the multicultural borough, in particular its Orthodox Jews and Jews of color” — earned her the 2013 “Media Award” from Be’chol Lashon, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that celebrates and promotes cultural/racial diversity and inclusivity in American Jewish life.

Weichselbaum — who reports on everything from crime to the city’s bike-share program (she’s an avid cyclist who often commutes to interviews on her two-wheeler) — recently met with The Jewish Week at a café near her apartment. The following is a condensed and edited version of the conversation.

Q: So what was it like growing up in an interracial and Orthodox family?

A: My parents raised me Jewish — we never talked about race. They said, “You’re biracial.” I grew up with other kids who were like that too. Park East had other biracial Jews and Jews from around the world, so it wasn’t weird to be brown there.

So, do you identify as black?

I’m proudly biracial. I’m very adamant about this. I don’t understand why people pick one. I’m Jamaican and Jewish. I have friends who are biracial and say they’re black Jews or Latino Jews. I’m like, “You’re mom’s white, knock it off.” … I like [Shlomo] Carlebach and Biggie Smalls. I listen to both on a daily basis…

Read the entire article here.

Displaced looks: The lived experience of beauty and racism

Feminist Theory
Volume 14, Number 2, August 2013  
pages 137-151
DOI: 10.1177/1464700113483241

Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa, Lecturer in Sociology
Newcastle University

 With a focus on appearance and racialised perceptions of skin colour, this paper discusses the differences between being and feeling acceptable, pretty or ugly and the possibility of such displacement (from being to feeling or vice versa), as a way to understand what beauty does in people’s lives. The paper explores the fragility of beauty in relation to the visibility of the body in specific racialised contexts. It investigates the claim that beauty can be considered a feeling that emphasises processes (what beauty does) rather than contents (what beauty is). Drawing from life stories with Mexican women, I examine their concerns about visibility, temporality and appearance as expressions of racist practices and ideas, within a context where the racial project of mestizaje (racial mixture) is in operation. Beauty matters as it makes evident the pervasiveness of racism in the everyday. The lived experience of beauty, in its displacement and fragility, as a feeling and as resource, can also point to some of the strategies to resist, cope and get on.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Life and Times of Mary Musgrove

University Press of Florida
2012-10-21
296 pages
6 x 9
Cloth ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-4221-3

Steven C. Hahn, Associate Professor of History
St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota

One of the most recognizable names of the colonial Deep South

The story of Mary Musgrove (1700-1764), a Creek Indian-English woman struggling for success in colonial society, is an improbable one.

As a literate Christian, entrepreneur, and wife of an Anglican clergyman, Mary was one of a small number of “mixed blood” Indians to achieve a position of prominence among English colonists. Born to a Creek mother and an English father, Mary’s bicultural heritage prepared her for an eventful adulthood spent in the rough and tumble world of Colonial Georgia Indian affairs.

Active in diplomacy, trade, and politics—affairs typically dominated by men—Mary worked as an interpreter between the Creek Indians and the colonists–although some argue that she did so for her own gains, altering translations to sway transactions in her favor. Widowed twice in the prime of her life, Mary and her successive husbands claimed vast tracts of land in Georgia (illegally, as British officials would have it) by virtue of her Indian heritage, thereby souring her relationship with the colony’s governing officials and severely straining the colony’s relationship with the Creek Indians.

Using Mary’s life as a narrative thread, Steven Hahn explores the connected histories of the Creek Indians and the colonies of South Carolina and Georgia. He demonstrates how the fluidity of race and gender relations on the southern frontier eventually succumbed to more rigid hierarchies that supported the region’s emerging plantation system.

A complicated family history places black Md. woman in DAR’s ranks

The Washington Post
2013-06-29

Darryl Fears

Reisha Raney’s role in Friday night’s Daughters of the American Revolution ceremony for the military was minor. She carried Virginia’s flag in a procession that walked a few steps down a carpeted aisle at Constitution Hall and then stood perfectly still.

But for Raney, an African American raised in Prince George’s County, it was one of the most pivotal moments in her life. Her place in the DAR, a predominantly white organization whose annual convention at Constitution Hall in the District ends Sunday, was proof of her extraordinary family history.

The group certified research that traced Raney’s roots to William Turpin, a patriot who fought against the British in the Revolutionary War. Turpin’s mother was Mary Jefferson, the aunt of the nation’s third president, Thomas Jefferson.

Raney respects her ties to Jefferson, but he’s not the reason the 39-year-old Fort Washington resident went to a beauty salon, slipped on a flowing white gown and smiled like a beauty-pageant contestant as she walked the halls of a group that at one time barred black people.

She was honoring William Turpin’s son, Edwin, Jefferson’s second cousin, who purchased a slave, Mary, and married her in Canada. The two lived in neighboring houses on a plantation in Goochland County, Va. The houses were burned when word got out, and then were rebuilt, according to a family memoir. Before his death in 1868, Edwin wrote in a will that the children he had with “my woman Mary” were to be free…

Read the entire article here.

Some Thoughts on Biracialism and Poetry

Boston Review
2013-06-13

Paisley Rekdal, Associate Professor of English
University of Utah

To be a biracial and female writer might suggest one of two things: first, that my gender and race are the subject matter of my work or, second, that the forms of my writing reflect my identity. Between these two possibilities–race and gender as theme versus race and gender as enacted form—a tension exists, perhaps arising from our current distrust of both narrative and identity politics. To write from the first position—race and gender as theme—boils a poem down to the recounting of experience, most likely the narrator’s marginalization. It is an easy poetry to identify, and it is a type whose detractors (rightfully and wrongly) criticize as an attempt to engender in the reader both sympathy with and catharsis through the personal revelations of the narrator. It is a poetry that at its worst risks becoming performative cultural “kitsch” through its manipulation of readers’ sensitivities to race and racism but, at its best, illuminates some part of the complexity currently surrounding ideas of racial authenticity and identification.

The second option—identity as enacted form—is harder to pinpoint, relying as it does as much on the writer’s stated objectives for the work, as on readers’ stereotypes about what kind of poetic form female biracialism could take. On the surface, we might expect “biracial” forms to be highly skeptical of an imaginatively coherent first person. They could be poems that rely on fragmentation, that are deeply engaged with critical theory regarding perception and language. They could be ironic, self-reflexive, suspicious of catharsis, engaged more with the playful destruction of archetypal myths of identity than in reifying them. In short, they would be hard to distinguish from much of contemporary poetry today…

Read the entire article here.

Body Wellness Study

Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas
2013-06-22

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There is No There There: Women and Intermarriage in the Southwestern Borderlands

Common-Place
A Common Place, An Uncommon Voice
Volume 13, Number 3, Spring 2013

Amanda Taylor-Montoya

Amanda Taylor-Montoya is an independent scholar living in southern New Mexico.

Borderlands are fuzzy, slippery, ambiguous places. Whether imagined as a geographic region straddling an international border, “the contested boundaries between colonial domains,” or simply zones of intercultural contact where state or imperial power is weak, borderlands are spaces where social boundaries are unstable and social conventions appear more flexible. Cooperation and accommodation characterize the borderlands as much as conflict and violence. Historians often point to centuries of racial mixture to help explain the cultural fluidity and hybridization that prevail in the borderlands.

Tales of liaisons that transgressed racial boundaries (beginning with the relationship between Hernán Cortés and Malíntzin Tenépal) are so common in histories of the Southwestern borderlands that they function as a kind of creation story for the region and its peoples. Here, men exchanged women—as captives or wives—to establish, bolster, or consolidate economic and social relationships. Indigenous women not only provided sexual companionship and domestic labor, but also served critical roles as translators, guides, and cultural mediators in colonial encounters between Europeans and native peoples. Whether consensual or coerced, mixed unions figured prominently in the borderlands economy and culture…

…Spanish colonial society recognized a wide variety of mixed race peoples, but also maintained a stringent hierarchy between them. The racial system included not only españoles (Spaniards) and indios (Indians), but also people identified as mestizos (Spanish and Indian), mulatos (Spanish and African), castizos (Spanish and mestizo), castas (racial mixture), color quebrado (literally, “broken color”), and genízaros (Hispanicized Indians). One’s racial classification was determined not only by ancestry or phenotype, but also by occupation or class, and could change over time according to one’s circumstances.

Race and legitimacy were intertwined in colonial New Mexico, as many associated mixed unions with illegitimacy and illicit sex. Consequently, many marriages—particularly among the elite—were arranged, in order to ensure matches with someone of equal status to preserve family honor. Simply put, the state’s acknowledgment of mixed race people did not alter the association of racial mixture with dishonor. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, New Mexicans increasingly moved away from the nuanced racial hierarchy in place during the colonial period toward a more rigid racialization of two categories: Spanish and Indian…

Read the entire article here.

Mary Seacole: The Black Woman Who Invented Modern Nursing

Basic Books
2004-11-19
288 pages
5.5 x 1 x 8.3 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780786714148; ISBN-10: 078671414X

Jane Robinson

She was a black woman, and she flouted convention. In an age that put ladies in the parlor and preferred them to be seen and not heard, she was nursing the British wounded, not in hospital wards with Florence Nightingale but on the Crimean battlefields—and off them, she was running a restaurant and hotel. She purveyed homemade pickles in England; she mined for gold in Panama. For unabashed individuality, Mary Jane Grant Seacole knew no peer. Yet Punch, the Times, the Illustrated London News all ardently touted her, and Queen Victoria herself entertained her. Mary Seacole—childless widow of Horatio Nelson’s godson and “good ole Mother Seacole” to the soldiers at Sebastopol—was Britain’s first black heroine, and this robust, engaging biography by social historian Jane Robinson shows why. In a narrative driven by colorful adventure, Robinson charts Seacole’s amazing odyssey from her native Kingston, Jamaica, to her adopted London, via Panama, where she lent her doctoring and nursing skills to catastrophic outbreaks of cholera and yellow fever, and the Crimea, where she founded the famous British Hotel. Seacole makes numerous other eventful stops along the way, and everywhere, even in the face of disappointment, disaster, and loss, her indomitable spirit prevails.

Hay winner’s search for identity

BBC News
2003-05-27

A first-time writer who travelled halfway round the world to trace her roots has won the Welsh Book of the Year award at the Hay Festival.

Charlotte Williams’ tale of her search for her identity, entitled Sugar and Slate, took her to three different continents.

Ms Williams, who has Welsh, African and Latin American heritage, wrote the book following trips across the world to find more about her background.

She overcame challenges from 60 other writers to claim the £3,000 first prize.

The daughter of a white Welsh-speaking mother and a black father from Guyana in the Caribbean, Ms Williams said the journey to research her past became a confrontation with herself and the idea of Welshness.

In the book she recalls feeling as a child growing up in Llandudno, north Wales, that “somehow to be half-Welsh and half Afro-Caribbean was to be half of something but never quite anything whole at all”…

Read the entire article here.