Mixed Race Studies

I am not ‘non-white’

Daily Kos
2020-01-12

Denise Oliver Velez

Denise Oliver, minister of economic development of the Young Lords, pictured at the office headquarters in East Harlem. Photo by Hiram Maristany, c.1970.

I’m black.

I’ve been black, and proud to be black, my whole life. My parents raised me like that. They grew up as ‘Negroes.’ They had to drink at water fountains labeled ‘colored.’ They lived long enough to become Afro-Americans, and then African Americans.

I was, and still am, militantly black. I’ve lived through the “Ungawa Black Power” of Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown; the clenched, raised fists of the Panthers and Young Lords; and through this decade’s Black Lives Matter and #VoteLikeBlackWomen movements. My mom, who was never seen without her hair hot-comb pressed straight as a board, even accepted my Afro hairdo.

Though I was raised by a socialist dad and I was a member of revolutionary nationalist socialist movements as a young person, I do not want to hear anyone spouting that it is more important to address class issues before we deal with racism and white supremacy. The two are inextricably intertwined in this country founded on African enslavement. All the money and economic equality in the world won’t wipe away our blackness and potential death by a white-aimed bullet. Racial issues steeped in malevolent anti-blackness do not deserve “back of the bus” status…

Read the entire article here.

Beneath the Surface: A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners

Duke University Press
January 2020
368 pages
85 illustrations (incl. 39 in color)
Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-0642-8
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-4780-0538-4

Lynn M. Thomas, Professor of History
University of Washington

For more than a century, skin lighteners have been an ubiquitous feature of global popular culture—embraced by consumers even as they were fiercely opposed by medical professionals, consumer health advocates, and antiracist thinkers and activists. In Beneath the Surface, Lynn M. Thomas constructs a transnational history of skin lighteners in South Africa and beyond. Analyzing a wide range of archival, popular culture, and oral history sources, Thomas traces the changing meanings of skin color from precolonial times to the postcolonial present. From indigenous skin-brightening practices and the rapid spread of lighteners in South African consumer culture during the 1940s and 1950s to the growth of a billion-dollar global lightener industry, Thomas shows how the use of skin lighteners and experiences of skin color have been shaped by slavery, colonialism, and segregation, as well as consumer capitalism, visual media, notions of beauty, and protest politics. In teasing out lighteners’ layered history, Thomas theorizes skin as a site for antiracist struggle and lighteners as a technology of visibility that both challenges and entrenches racial and gender hierarchies.

Doing hair, doing race: the influence of hairstyle on racial perception across the US

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Published online: 2019-12-11
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2019.1700296

Jennifer Patrice Sims, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Alabama, Huntsville

Whitney Laster Pirtle, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of California, Merced

Iris Johnson-Arnold, Associate Professor
Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology
Tennessee State University

Hair is an easily changeable “racial marker” feature. Although growing interdisciplinary research suggests that hairstyle influences how one is racially perceived, extant methodological practices in racial perception research reduce external validity. This study introduces new experimental and analytical procedures to test the effect of hairstyle on racial perception across racial contexts. Over 1,000 participants from primarily white, black and multiracial test sites racially categorized a diverse group of women from matched pairs of pictures in which the women have different hairstyles. Results from multilevel regression show that altering hairstyle significantly alters how participants perceive mixed-race women, Latinas, most black and some white women and that this varies by racial context with perceptions of race being less swayed by hairstyle in the multiracial context. Our research thus demonstrates that doing hair is a context-dependent part of “doing race” that has theoretical, methodological, and legal implications.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Revisioners, A Novel

Counterpoint Press
2019-11-05
288 pages
5.5 x 8.25
Hardcover ISBN: 9781640092587

Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

Following her National Book Award– nominated debut novel, A Kind of Freedom, Margaret Wilkerson Sexton returns with this equally elegant and historically inspired story of survivors and healers, of black women and their black sons, set in the American South

In 1924, Josephine is the proud owner of a thriving farm. As a child, she channeled otherworldly power to free herself from slavery. Now her new neighbor, a white woman named Charlotte, seeks her company, and an uneasy friendship grows between them. But Charlotte has also sought solace in the Ku Klux Klan, a relationship that jeopardizes Josephine’s family.

Nearly one hundred years later, Josephine’s descendant, Ava, is a single mother who has just lost her job. She moves in with her white grandmother, Martha, a wealthy but lonely woman who pays Ava to be her companion. But Martha’s behavior soon becomes erratic, then threatening, and Ava must escape before her story and Josephine’s converge.

The Revisioners explores the depths of women’s relationships—powerful women and marginalized women, healers and survivors. It is a novel about the bonds between mothers and their children, the dangers that upend those bonds. At its core, The Revisioners ponders generational legacies, the endurance of hope, and the undying promise of freedom.

Bernardine Evaristo: ‘These are unprecedented times for black female writers’

The Guardian
2019-10-19

Bernardine Evaristo

‘These times really are extraordinary’ … Bernardine Evaristo. Photograph: Karen Robinson/The Observer

The first black woman to win the Booker prize argues that a revolution is sweeping through British publishing. But can it lead to lasting change?

Chidera Eggerue, AKA The Slumflower, is a social media star, south-east London homegirl and feminist. She first came to prominence in 2017 when she created the hashtag #SaggyBoobsMatter on Twitter in order to promote the body-positive message that women’s breasts and bodies are fine just as they are. It’s an important idea and antithetical to a beauty industry that berates us for our imperfections. A year later Eggerue published a self-help motivational book, What a Time to Be Alone: The Slumflower’s Guide to Why You Are Already Enough, which entered the Sunday Times bestseller list the week it was published in 2018, when she was 23. In her very pink, zanily illustrated book, Eggerue, a self-styled “guru, confidante and best friend” to her readers, offers advice on self-worth and self-acceptance. An earlier booklet called Little Black Book: A Toolkit for Working Women, by Otegha Uwagba, became a bestseller in 2016, paving the way for Eggerue. This, in turn, was probably influenced by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2014 essay We Should All Be Feminists.

These are unprecedented times for black female writers, in no small part due to the internet. It has reconfigured how we present ourselves to the world at large, as well as bringing previously marginalised social groups and writing to the fore in ways hitherto unimaginable. As a society we are beginning to recognise and take seriously the ills and pitfalls of social media, but it is still the most exciting channel of mass communication since history began…

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Historian Victoria Bynum on the inaccuracies of the New York Times 1619 Project

World Socialist Web Site
2019-10-30

Eric London

Victoria Bynum

An interview with the author of The Free State of Jones

Historian Victoria Bynum, author of The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2001) and Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South (University of North Carolina Press, 1992), spoke to the World Socialist Web Site’s Eric London on the historical falsifications involved in the New York Times’ “1619 Project.”

The 1619 Project, launched by the Times in August, presents American history in a purely racial lens and blames all “white people” for the enslavement of 4 million black people as chattel property.

Bynum is an expert on the attitude of Southern white yeomen farmers and impoverished people toward slavery. Her book The Free State of Jones studied efforts by anti-slavery and anti-confederate militia leader Newton Knight, who abandoned the Confederate army and led an armed insurrection against the Confederacy during the Civil War. It was adapted for the big screen in Gary Ross’s 2016 film Free State of Jones.

* * *

WSWS: Hello Victoria, it is a pleasure to speak to you. The New York Times writes that slavery is “America’s national sin,” implying that the whole of American society was responsible for the crime of slavery.

But [Abraham] Lincoln said in his second inaugural address in 1865 that the Civil War was being fought “until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.” What was the attitude of the subjects of your study toward slavery? Is it possible to separate those attitudes from the economic grievances that many white farmers and poor people harbored against the Confederate government of the slavocracy?

Victoria Bynum: Direct comments about the injustice of slavery are rare among plain Southern farmers who left few written records. Knowing this at the outset of my research, I was delighted to find clear and strong objections to slavery expressed by the Wesleyan Methodist families of Montgomery County, North Carolina, which I highlighted in my first book, Unruly Women. In 1852, members of the Lovejoy Methodist Church invited the Rev. Adam Crooks, a well-known abolitionist, to address their church…

…WSWS: Do you see parallels between the New York Times’ references to genetics (the historic “DNA” of the United States) and the argument, advanced by the slavocracy, that “one drop” of black “blood” was enough to count a light-skinned person in the expanded the pool of slave labor. Can you expand on this?

VB: The frequent correlation of identity with ancestral DNA continues to mask the historical economic forces and shifting constructions of class, race and gender that have far more relevance to one’s identity than one’s DNA can ever reveal. Historically, race-based slavery required legal definitions of whiteness and blackness that upheld the fiction that British/US slavery was reserved for Africans for whom the institution “civilized.” From the earliest days of colonization, however, both forced and consensual sexual relations created slaveholding and non-slaveholding households that were neither “black” nor “white,” but rather were mixed-race. The frequent rape of enslaved women by slaveholders produced multitudes of such children, but so also were many mixed-race children born to whites and free blacks. Slave law dictated that the child of an enslaved woman was also a slave—and therefore “black”—regardless of who fathered the child. Conversely, deciding the race of children born to free women who crossed the color line was not so easy, and became even more difficult after slavery was abolished. In the segregated South, where one’s ability to work, live, love, travel and enjoy the full benefits of American citizenship depended on one’s perceived race, such questions might end up in court, as was the case in 1946 for Newt Knight’s mixed-race great-grandson, Davis Knight, after he married a white woman. While custom dictated that Davis Knight was “black” based on his great-grandmother Rachel’s mixed-race status, state laws required more precise evidence. Under Mississippi law, unless one was proved to have at least one-fourth African ancestry, one was legally—though not socially—white. On this basis, Davis Knight went free…

Read the entire interview here.

Hollywood at the Intersection of Race and Identity

Rutgers University Press
2019-11-15
314 pages
31 b-w photographs
6 x 9
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8135-9931-1
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-9932-8
PDF ISBN: 978-0-8135-9935-9
EPUB ISBN: 978-0-8135-9935-9

Edited by:

Delia Malia Caparoso Konzett, Professor of English, Cinema/American/Women’s Studies
University of New Hampshire, Durham

Contributions by: Ruth Mayer, Alice Maurice, Ellen C. Scott, Delia Malia Caparoso Konzett, Jonna Eagle, Ryan Jay Friedman, Charlene Regester, Matthias Konzett, Chris Cagle, Dean Itsuji Saranillio, Graham Cassano, Priscilla Peña Ovalle, Ernesto R Acevedo-Muñoz, Mary Beltrán, Jun Okada, and Louise Wallenberg.

Hollywood at the Intersection of Race and Identity explores the ways Hollywood represents race, gender, class, and nationality at the intersection of aesthetics and ideology and its productive tensions. This collection of essays asks to what degree can a close critical analysis of films, that is, reading them against their own ideological grain, reveal contradictions and tensions in Hollywood’s task of erecting normative cultural standards? How do some films perhaps knowingly undermine their inherent ideology by opening a field of conflicting and competing intersecting identities? The challenge set out in this volume is to revisit well-known films in search for a narrative not exclusively constituted by the Hollywood formula and to answer the questions: What lies beyond the frame? What elements contradict a film’s sustained illusion of a normative world? Where do films betray their own ideology and most importantly what intersectional spaces of identity do they reveal or conceal?

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Hollywood Formulas: Codes, Masks, Genre, and Minstrelsy
  • Daydreams of Society: Class and Gender Performances in the Cinema of the Late 1910s / Ruth Mayer
  • The Death of Lon Chaney: Masculinity, Race, and the Authenticity of Disguise / Alice Maurice
  • MGM’s Sleeping Lion: Hollywood Regulation of the Washingtonian Slave in The Gorgeous Hussy (1936) / Ellen C. Scott
  • Yellowface, Minstrelsy, and Hollywood Happy Endings: The Black Camel (1931), Charlie Chan in Egypt (1935), and Charlie Chan at the Olympics (1937) / Delia Malia Konzett
• Genre and Race in Classical Hollywood
  • “A Queer, Strangled Look”: Race, Gender, and Morality in The Ox-Bow Incident / Jonna Eagle
  • By Herself: Intersectionality, African American Specialty Performers, and Eleanor Powell / Ryan Jay Friedman
  • Disruptive Mother-Daughter Relationships: Peola’s Racial Masquerade in Imitation of Life (1934) and Stella’s Class Masquerade in Stella Dallas (1937) / Charlene Regester
  • The Egotistical Sublime: Film Noir and Whiteness / Matthias Konzett
• Race and Ethnicity in Post-World War II Hollywood
  • Women and Class Mobility in Classical Hollywood’s Immigrant Dramas / Chris Cagle
  • Orientalism, Diaspora, and Indigeneity in Go for Broke! (1951) / Dean Itsuji Saranillio
  • Savage Whiteness: The dialectic of racial desire in The Young Savages (1961) / Graham Cassano
  • Rita Moreno’s Hair / Priscilla Peña Ovalle
• Intersectionality, Hollywood, and Contemporary Popular Culture
  • “Everything Glee in ‘America’”: Context, Race, and Identity Politics in the Glee Appropriation of West Side Story / Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz
  • Hip Hop “Hearts” Ballet: Utopic Multiculturalism and the Step Up Dance Films / Mary Beltrán
  • Fakin da Funk (1997) and Gook (2017): Exploring Black/Asian Relations in the Asian American Hood Film / Jun Okada
  • “Let Us Roam the Night Together”: On Articulation and Representation in Moonlight (2016) and Tongues Untied (1989) / Louise Wallenberg
• Acknowledgments
• Selected Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index

The difficulty with asserting your beauty identity when you’re mixed race

Dazed Beauty
2019-11-05

Layla Haidrani
London, United Kingdom

^©Rachel Rumai

We explore the confusion of navigating your personal identity when you have multiple heritages with conflicting beauty standards

I’ve grappled with the complex relationship between mixed race identity and beauty for a long time. Both my location and my heritage – I’m half-Lebanese, half-Pakistani – upheld beauty ideals that were at odds with each other. Looking too overdone would court much derision growing up in North London, but this minimalist approach conflicted greatly with Beirut’s – a city I spent most summers a teenager where ‘more is more’ is the unofficial beauty mantra. Once the plastic surgery capital of the Middle East, appearing permanently preened and polished with a face full of make-up isn’t just encouraged, it’s expected – even if you’re simply loitering in a shopping mall.

I’d never seen myself reflected in advertisements in the Middle East, where heavily groomed women subscribe to traditionally narrow ideas of femininity – carefully sculpted arched eyebrows, immaculate nails, hairless body, paired with long, sleek black hair – but that didn’t stop me from trying. In the lead-up to visiting for my holiday, I’d spend hours in beauty salons having head-to-toe treatments including a manicure and pedicure, eyebrow shaping, and a full-body wax. It wasn’t unusual for me to have an entirely separate make-up bag bursting with products. It was trickier when I factored in my Pakistani roots and when I spent time with my Desi London-based friends, I’d deliberately kohl my eyes and straighten my hair so our differences wouldn’t be glaringly obvious.

The fluidity of my beauty regime, which shifted according to the spaces I inhabited and the people I was surrounded by, felt stifling, as if there was only one ‘right’ way to look. This would be further exacerbated by Instagram, where I’d be confronted with dozens of images of what a ‘normal’ Lebanese or Pakistani girl should look like.

The term ‘mixed race’ itself tends to lump people as a monolith, and just as their experiences and heritages can wildly differ, so can their beauty identities. Dr Sarah Gaither, an assistant professor at Duke University who studies racial identity and social interactions, says that mixed race people report higher rates of social exclusion than other racial and ethnic groups. “They’re constantly being questioned about their racial backgrounds and denied their identities and group memberships,” she explains. “These experiences are known to cause increased levels of stress and depression at times and can be associated with more difficulties in forming a true sense of self and a sense of being an ‘imposter’.”…

Read the entire article here.

Color, culture or cousin: FSU researcher explores interracial dating

Florida State University News
Tallahassee, Florida
2019-11-15

Kara Irby, News and Media Relations Specialist

Shantel G. Buggs, assistant professor of sociology and African American studies. (FSU Photo/Bruce Palmer)

The U.S. Census predicts America will become a majority-minority country between 2040 and 2050, with great growth projected for multiracial populations.

A new study from Florida State University researcher Shantel G. Buggs examined how this growing population of multiracial women view interracial relationships and what that illustrates about American’s broader views about race.

Buggs wanted to determine how multiracial women classify interracial relationships and what factors influence their decision to engage with a potential suitor.

“As a multiracial person myself, I was always interested in what happens when multiracial people become adults who then have to navigate relationships with other people,” Buggs said. “It was a goal of this study to debunk this racial fetishizing that is common in society today — the idea that multiracial people are more attractive, are the best of both worlds and will end racism.”

Her findings are published in the Journal of Marriage and Family…

Read the entire article here.

Color, Culture, or Cousin? Multiracial Americans and Framing Boundaries in Interracial Relationships

Journal of Marriage and Family
Volume 81, Issue 5 (October 2019)
pages 1221-1236
DOI: 10.1111/jomf.12583

Shantel Gabrieal Buggs, Assistant Professor of Sociology and African American Studies
Florida State University

Abstract

• Objective: This article analyzes how some multiracial people—the “products” of interracial relationships—conceptualize what counts as an interracial relationship and how they discuss the circumstances that influence these definitions.
• Background: Scholars have argued that the added complexity expanding multiracial populations contribute to dating and marriage‐market conditions requires additional study; this article expands on the limited research regarding how multiracial people perceive interraciality.
• Method: The article uses in‐depth interviews with self‐identified multiracial women (N = 30) who used online dating platforms to facilitate their dating lives in the following three cities in Texas: Austin, Houston, and San Antonio.
• Results: In framing their relationships through lenses centered around skin color, cultural difference, and “familiarity” in terms of seeing potential partners as similar to non‐White male family members, multiracial women illustrate varied and overlapping means of describing their intimate relationships, providing additional nuance to sociological understandings of shifts in preferences and norms around partner choice across racial/ethnic lines and opening up opportunities to continue the exploration of the impact of racial inequality on partner choice.
• Conclusion: Multiracial people internalize racial, gendered, and fetishistic framings about potential partners similarly to monoracial people, demonstrating how racial boundaries and degrees of intimacy are (re)constructed for this growing demographic in the United States.

Read or purchase the article here.