Mixed Race Studies

Blackberries and Redbones: Critical Articulations of Black Hair/ Body Politics in Africana Communities

Hampton Press
July 2010
484 pages
Paper ISBN: 978-1-57273-881-2
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-57273-880-5

Edited by

Regina E. Spellers, President and CEO
Eagles Soar Consulting, LLC

Kimberly R. Moffitt, Assistant Professor of American Studies
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

This book features engaging scholarly essays, poems and creative writings that all examine the meanings of the Black anatomy in our changing global world. The body, including its hair, is said to be read like a text where readers draw center interpretations based on signs, symbols, and culture. Each chapter in the volume interrogates that notion by addressing the question, “As a text, how are Black bodies and Black hair read and understood in life, art, popular culture, mass media, or cross-cultural interactions?” Utilizing a critical perspective, each contributor articulates how relationships between physical appearance, genetic structure, and political ideologies impact the creativity, expression, and everyday lived experiences of Blackness. In this interdisciplinary volume, discussions are made more complex and move beyond the “straight versus kinky hair” and “light skin versus dark skin” paradigm. Instead efforts are made to emphasize the material consequences associated with the ways in which the Black body is read and (mis)understood. The aptness of this work lies in its ability to provide a meaningful and creative space to analyze body politics—highlighting the complexities surrounding these issues within, between, and outside Africana communities. The book provides a unique opportunity to both celebrate and scrutinize the presentation of Blackness in everyday life, while also encouraging readers to forge ahead with a deeper understanding of these ever-important issues.

Table of Contents

• Foreword, Haki R. Madhubuti
• Introduction, Regina E. Spellers and Kimberly R. Moffitt
• SECTION ONE: Hair/Body Politics as Expression of the Life Cycle
  • The Big Girl’s Chair: A Rhetorical Analysis of How Motions for Kids Markets Relaxers to African American Girls, Shauntae Brown White
  • Pretty Color ’n Good Hair: Creole Women of New Orleans and the Politics of Identity, Yaba Amgborale Blay
  • Invisible Dread: From Twisted: The Dreadlocks Chronicles, Bert Ashe
  • Social Constructions of a Black Woman’s Hair: Critical Reflections of a Graying Sistah, Brenda J. Allen
  • What it Feels Like for a (Black Gay HIV+) Boy, Chris Bell
• SECTION TWO: Hair/Body as Power
  • Dominican Dance Floor, Kiini Ibura Salaam
  • Covering Up Fat Upper Arms, Mary L. O’Neal
  • Cimmarronas, Ciguapas, and Senoras: Hair, Beauty, and National Identity in the Dominican Republic, Ana-Maurine Lara
  • Of Wigs and Weaves, Locks and Fades: A Personal Political Hair Story, Neal A. Lester
  • “Scatter the Pigeons”: Baldness and the Performance of Hyper-Black Masculinity, E. Patrick Johnson
• SECTION THREE: Hair/Body in Art and Popular Culture
  • From Air Jordan to Jumpman: The Black Male Body as Commodity, Ingrid Banks
  • Cool Pose on Wheels: An Exploration of the Disabled Black Male in Film, Kimberly R. Moffitt
  • Decoding the Meaning of Tattoos: Cluster Criticism and the Case of Tupac Shakur’s Body Art, Carlos D. Morrison, Josette R. Hutton, and Ulysses Williams, Jr.
  • Blacks in White Marble: Interracial Female Subjects in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Neoclassicism, Charmaine Nelson
  • Changing Hair/Changing Race: Black Authenticity, Colorblindness, and Hairy Post-ethnic Costumes in “Mixing Nia”, Ralina L. Joseph
  • “I’m Real” (Black) When I Wanna Be: Examining J. Lo’s Racial ASSets, Sika Alaine Dagbovie and Zine Magubane
• SECTION FOUR: Celebrations, Innovations, and Applications of Hair/Body Politics
  • Diaspora in My Hair: A Poetic Narrative of My Experience in Europe, Nadège Tanite Clitandre
  • Broken Mirrors and Reflections of One’s Self: Blackness, Indianness, and Hybridity, Hershini Bhana Young
  • Sun Kissed or Sun Cursed?: Exploring Color Consciousness and Black Women’s Tanning Experiences, Regina E. Spellers
  • African Men in the United States: Stories of Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Power, Hameed S. (Herukhuti) Williams
  • Weaving Messages of Self-Esteem: Empowering Mothers and Daughters through Hair Braiding, Tracey Y. Lewis-Elligan
• SECTION FIVE: Contradictions, Complications, and Complexities of Hair/Body Politics
  • Divas to the Dance Floor Please!: A Neo-Black Feminist Readin(g) of Cool Pose, D. Nebi Hilliard
  • Coming Out Natural: Dreaded Desire, Sex Roles, and Cornrows, L. H. Stallings
  • “I am More than a Victim”: The Slave Woman Stereotype in Antebellum Narratives by Black Men, Ellesia A. Blaque
  • Two Warring Ideals, One Dark Body: Hegemony, Duality, and Temporality of the Black Body in African-American Religion, Stephen C. Finley
  • The Snake that Bit Medusa: One (Phenotypically) White Woman’s Dreads, Kabira Z. Cadogan
• Author Index
• Subject Index

Arts and Mixedness [eConference]

Runnymede Trust
2010-07-09

Runnymede is currently hosting an online debate on mixed-race identity and the arts.

There is a comment from columnist and broadcaster Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: Mixed-Race Britain: Where Next?

Playwright and poet Sabrina Mahfouz also writes about her thoughts on mixed-race identity: A Reflection on Mixedness. 

There are also contributions from noted arts practitioners Patricia Cumper – director of the Talawa theatre company, Jane Earl – Director of the Rich Mix Arts Centre, and Jennifer Williams – Founding Director of the British American Arts Association in our live discussion thread.

They discussed issues of cultural representation in art, the role of funding bodies and policy, the need for specific ‘mixed’ representation and the benefits / dangers of defining mixedness, race or art. Read and contribute to the discussion thread live now.

Discussion thread started by Nina Kelly on 2010-07-09 at 09:43Z.

Read the entire thread here.

Lone Mothers of Mixed Racial and Ethnic Children: Then and Now

Runnymede Trust
June 2010

Chamion Caballero, Senior Research Fellow
Families & Social Capital Research Group
London South Bank University

Rosalind Edwards, Professor in Social Policy
Families & Social Capital Research Group
London South Bank University

Information from the UK Census indicates that parents of children from mixed racial or ethnic backgrounds constitute one of the highest lone parent groups in the country. Like all other groups of lone parent families, these are overwhelmingly headed by mothers.

In this research report Dr. Chamion Caballero and Prof. Rosalind Edwards, of the London South Bank University, pulls together data from interviews with mothers of mixed-race children whose fathers are absent. Some of the anecdotal evidence is from those who brought up their children decades ago, and this is compared with the experiences of women doing the same today.

The report explores the specific racisms, prejudices and stereotypes that this group of women and children have been faced with – both then and now – and where, if anywhere, they have been able to turn for support.

To read the report, login or register for free here.

Mixed Race Britain: Where Next?

Runnymede Trust
2010-07-09

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Independent Journalist

My two books on mixed race Britons, Colour of Love (1992) and Mixed Feelings (2001) were among the first non-academic explorations of racial mixing in Britain. In the nine years between the two publications, awareness had grown of the fast rising number of mixed heritage families in Britain (some going back three generations) but recognition of multiple identities was yet to come. Public policies, community politics and, arguably, mixed race people and couples themselves, still worked within established mono-racial categories. Black activists forcefully argued that mixed raced people could only be black because that is how society saw them. They, in fact, appropriated the old one drop rule applied during the days of slavery. It wasn’t right in the bad old days and certainly made no sense in the late 20th century. Now that mixed race Britons are set to overtake most other ‘ethnic minority’ groups, the hope must be that old classifications and disagreements will give way to the newer, more pertinent, voices of those who are themselves biracial or even tri-racial and we will find fresh language, modernised concepts and better understanding of human desire and multifarious identities. This hasn’t happened yet. We are in a lacuna at present- in the UK and the US too…

Read the entire article here.

The more things change, the more they stay the same

Thinking Twice: RACE
The Stanford Review
2009-01-29

C. Matthew Snipp, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity
Stanford University

Last week, we inaugurated our first African American president, and coincidentally our first mixed race president, and our first Hawaiian president. The first of these three events captured the public imagination while the other two have passed with barely a comment, and for good reason. Few Americans know the sordid history behind the acquisition of Hawaii. Fewer still have parsed what it means to be multiracial in America. But most Americans are well aware of the travails of African Americans, from slavery to Jim Crow to the Civil Rights movement.

Trolling the news outlets since the November elections yields two seemingly dissonant messages. One is that Obama’s election signals a new era in race relations—that we are living in a “post-civil rights” era, an era of “color blindness.” The New York Times recently published a glowing story about an interracial couple who suddenly have found it less awkward to have to conversations with their friends about racial differences. In contrast, others are quick to point out that racism is alive and well in America, and that Obama’s election will mean little for changing the racial partition that has existed in this country since its inception….

Read the entire article here.

Why Obama is Black Again

Thinking Twice: RACE
The Stanford Review
2009-01-29

Michele Elam, Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor of English and Olivier Nomellini Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education
Stanford University

Barack Obama’s inauguration was for so many an awe-inspiring, historic and transnational event: It was full of grand pageantry and a good-humored pomp and circumstance that made D.C. the place to be. People were called together in many ways, and one of the more important ways they were asked to unite was over the contentious matter of race.

But it is worthwhile noting that this unlikely racial consensus was achieved through a strategic kind of absenting: Gone from the inaugural coverage were all the hand-wringing equivocations preceding the Democratic nomination about whether Obama’s person and politics went “beyond race” (and if that was a good thing or not), whether he even met the minimum standards for blackness (it was never clear who got to wield this racial measuring stick), or whether he was capitalizing on what novelist Danzy Senna calls the “mulatto millennium” of mixed-race celebrities…

Read the entire article here.

Research Project on Mixed Race Identity

Are you of a mixed racial background? Do you identify as ‘mixed’ or ‘mixed race’? Do you identify with a mixed racial identity?

This project is being conducted for a Master’s thesis in the Department of Sociology at the University of Alberta.

The purpose of the project is to explore a whole range of perspectives and experiences, and the multiple ways that ‘mixed race’ can be understood.

Male and female participants between 20-30 years of age, who are of ‘mixed racial’ parentage and who grew up in Canada, and who live or have lived in the Edmonton, Alberta area are being recruited.

Interviews will be conducted with participants, and will take approximately one hour.

If you would like to be part of this study, please contact Jillian Paragg at paragg@ualberta.ca or if you know of someone who may be interested in participating, please pass this message on to them.

Barack Obama and the Charm of the Stranger

The Zeleza Post
2009-01-25

Francis Njubi Nesbitt, Associate Professor of Africana Studies
San Diego State University

What is source of Barack Obama’s charm? Why was he able to win over whites, blacks and Latinos in a country that is famously partisan? Arguably, there are politicians who are equally gifted but there is seems to be a special aura about Obama.

Commentators have noted how he seems to absorb difference. They project their hopes and dreams on him. He has an aura of objectivity. People trust him. These are all qualities of a particular type of personality referred to in the literature as “the stranger,” “the outsider,” or “the marginal man.”

In an influential essay titled “The Stranger,” the Jewish scholar Georg Simmel argued that the stranger is by nature “no owner of the soil” and thus is able to absorb difference and project an aura of objectivity. Some may be comfortable confessing to the stranger actions and thoughts that hey keep from insiders. According to Simmel: “The stranger may develop charm and significance as long as he is considered a stranger in the eyes of the other, he is not an owner of the soil.”

Both Georg Simmel in “The Stranger,” and his student, Robert E. Park in “Migration and the Marginal Man,” argue that this personality type is often found among people of mixed race or excluded minorities who are caught between two cultures. They are forced to learn both their native ways and the ways of the majority population. W. E. B. Du Bois, Park’s contemporary and also a biracial man, put it eloquently in his famous lament about “double consciousness” that he wished to “merge my double self into a new and truer self.”

The problem, of course, is that it was not possible to resolve this double consciousness because of the one-drop rule that defined biracial individuals as black. The Jewish intellectual in Germany faced the same dilemma. He is caught between cultures, the rural and the urban, the Jewish and the German. One could not be both Jewish and German at the same time just like one could not be black and white at the same time…

Read the entire article here.

We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity

Harvard University Press
2005
336 pages
5-1/2 x 8-1/4 inches
Paperback ISBN: 9780674025714

Tommie Shelby, Professor of African and African American Studies and of Philosophy
Harvard University

2005 New York Magazine Best Academic Book

African American history resounds with calls for black unity. From abolitionist times through the Black Power movement, it was widely seen as a means of securing a full share of America’s promised freedom and equality. Yet today, many believe that black solidarity is unnecessary, irrational, rooted in the illusion of “racial” difference, at odds with the goal of integration, and incompatible with liberal ideals and American democracy. A response to such critics, We Who Are Dark provides the first extended philosophical defense of black political solidarity.

Tommie Shelby argues that we can reject a biological idea of race and agree with many criticisms of identity politics yet still view black political solidarity as a needed emancipatory tool. In developing his defense of black solidarity, he draws on the history of black political thought, focusing on the canonical figures of Martin R. Delany and W. E. B. Du Bois, and he urges us to rethink many traditional conceptions of what black unity should entail. In this way, he contributes significantly to the larger effort to re-envision black politics and to modernize the objectives and strategies of black freedom struggles for the post-civil rights era. His book articulates a new African American political philosophy–one that rests firmly on anti-essentialist foundations and, at the same time, urges a commitment to defeating racism, to eliminating racial inequality, and to improving the opportunities of those racialized as “black.”

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Introduction: Political Philosophy and the Black Experience
• 1. Two Conceptions of Black Nationalism
• 2. Class, Poverty, and Shame
• 3. Black Power Nationalism
• 4. Black Solidarity after Black Power
• 5. Race, Culture, and Politics
• 6. Social Identity and Group Solidarity
• Conclusion: The Political Morality of Black Solidarity
• Notes
• Index

Danbury’s multiracial students to star in film

The Connecticut Post
2010-04-02

Eileen FitzGerald, Staff Writer

Danbury, Connecticut—The three boys wore jeans and long-sleeve T-shirts. The two girls each wore a dozen bracelets and necklaces. They looked like typical students in the library media center at Broadview Middle School.

It was their differences, however, that brought them together Monday. They’re subjects in a documentary in which Western Connecticut State University professor Marsha Daria is examining the identity and social relationships of multiracial children.

Daria is interviewing elementary, middle and high school students to help educators and teacher training programs consider multiracial students in the curriculum and school issues…

Read the entire article here.