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

Another Way Home: The Tangled Roots of Race in One Chicago Family

University of Chicago Press
2004
200 pages
22 halftones, 5-1/2 x 8-1/2
Cloth ISBN: 9780226318219
Paper ISBN: 9780226318233

Ronne Hartfield

In her prologue to Another Way Home, Ronne Hartfield notes the dearth of stories about African Americans who have occupied the area of mixed race with ease and harmony for generations. Her moving family history is filled with such stories, told in beautifully crafted and unsentimental prose. Spanning most of the twentieth century, Hartfield’s book celebrates the special occasion of being born and reared in a household where miscegenation was the rule rather than the exception—where being a woman of mixed race could be a fundamental source of strength, vitality, and courage.

Hartfield begins with the early life of her mother, Day Shepherd. Born to a wealthy British plantation owner and the mixed-race daughter of a former slave, Day negotiates the complicated circumstances of plantation life in the border country of Louisiana and Mississippi and, as she enters womanhood, the quadroon and octoroon societies of New Orleans. Equally a tale of the Great Migration, Another Way Home traces Day’s journey to Bronzeville, the epicenter of black Chicago during the first half of the twentieth century. Here, through the eyes of Day and, ultimately, her daughter, we witness the bustling city streets and vibrant middle-class culture of this iconic black neighborhood. We also relive crucial moments in African American history as they are experienced by the author’s family and others in Chicago’s South Side black community, from the race riots of 1919 and the Great Depression to the murder of Emmett Till and the dawn of the civil rights movement.

Throughout her book, Hartfield portrays mixed-race Americans navigating the challenges of their lives with resilience and grace, making Another Way Home an intimate and compelling encounter with one family’s response to our racially charged culture.

Read an excerpt here.

Table of Contents

Prologue
1. Alpha: The Long Mysterious Exodus of Death
2. Beginnings: Strange Fates
3. Sacred Wounds
4. On the Place
5. Matriarchy
6. The Lightning Fields
7. New Orleans
8. Day and the City
9. The Ring
10. A Stern Destiny: Chicago Found and Lost
11. The Post-Depression Years
12. Streetcars
13. In the Castle of Our Skin
14. Dining In
15. Go Down the Street
16. Naming the Holy
17. Strange Fruit
18. Our Father’s Freight Train Blues
19. Lifelines
20. Last Years
21. Omega
Epilogue
Acknowledgments

Red Dust Road: An Autobiographical Journey

Picador an Imprint of PanMacmillan
2010-06-04
304 pages
214mm x 135mm, 0.43 kg
ISBN: 9780330451055

Jackie Kay, Professor of Creative Writing
Newcastle University

‘What makes us who we are? My adoption is a story that has happened to me. I couldn’t make it up.’

From the moment when, as a little girl, she realizes that her skin is a different colour from that of her beloved mum and dad, to the tracing and finding of her birth parents, her Highland mother and Nigerian father, the journey that Jackie Kay undertakes in Red Dust Road is full of unexpected twists, turns and deep emotions.

In a book shining with warmth, humour and compassion, she discovers that inheritance is about much more than genes: that we are shaped by songs as much as by cells, and that our internal landscapes are as important as those through which we move.

Taking the reader from Glasgow to Lagos and beyond, Red Dust Road is revelatory, redemptive and courageous, unique in its voice and universal in its reach. It is a heart-stopping story of parents and siblings, friends and strangers, belonging and beliefs, biology and destiny, and love.

Coffee Colored Children: A film by Ngozi Onwurah

Women Make Movies
England, 1988
23 minutes
Color/BW, VHS/16mm/DVD
Order No. W99160

• National Black Programming Consortium, Prized Pieces
• San Francisco Film Festival, Golden Gate Award

This lyrical, unsettling film conveys the experience of children of mixed racial heritage. Suffering the aggression of racial harassment, a young girl and her brother attempt to wash their skin white with scouring powder. Starkly emotional and visually compelling, this semi-autobiographical testimony to the profound internalized effects of racism and the struggle for self-definition and pride is a powerful catalyst for discussion.

The work opens with a video essay showing adults and children of many ethnicities interacting harmoniously to an upbeat and soulful song with a chorus about “coffee-colored people.” Through narration by her and her brother and dramatization, Onwurah relays incidents from her own childhood. She recounts the brutal and racist vandalization of her apartment. In reenactments, she is seen making up her face with white makeup and scrubbing her body in the bathtub with chemical abrasives. At the close of the piece, she and her brother stand in front of a fire, burning symbolic mementos of their pain and confusion over their own physical identities. “Melting pot,” she asks, “or incinerator?” The work is approximately 16 and one-half minutes long.

Director:
Onwurah, Ngozi A.

Producers:
Onwurah, Ngozi A.
Onwurah, Simon K.

Editor:
Onwurah, Ngozi A.

Performers:
Onwurah, Madge
McKay, Haley
McKay, Michael
McKay, Anette
Onwurah, Ngozi A.
Onwurah, Simon K.

The Impossibility of Return: Black Women’s Migrations to Africa

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies
Volume 27, Number 2, 2006
pages 54-86
E-ISSN: 1536-0334 Print ISSN: 0160-9009
DOI: 10.1353/fro.2007.0009

Piper Kendrix-Williams, Professor of African-American Studies
The College of New Jersey

I was on an international flight, traveling from New York to Paris, when an older French woman inquired about my origins. She began with the questions about where I was from that seem to attend many trans-Atlantic encounters, deftly moving from geography to race when seemingly exasperated by my answers of America, Connecticut, and, finally, the place of my birth, Atlanta, Georgia. She finally asked, “But where were your people from before that?” Clearly she was asking about social or racial origins, not national ones. I told her I was African American with African, European, and Native American ancestry, but because I could trace back seven generations in the U.S., I could not tell her where “my people were from before,” although Africa seemed a good if not vague and oversimplified answer. Of course, I had to wonder, “before” what, the Atlantic slave trade, miscegenation, (un)forced migrations, returns and departures? This woman’s need to know my race exemplifies the preoccupation many people have with origins, other people’s as well as their own. It is as if she felt that when she could identify me within an established place or origin, she could then “know” me. Thinking of it in this way almost immediately becomes problematic, for it revolves around fictions of identifiable origins and consequently complicates for personal, individual identities that recognize the intersectional nature of race and gender.

The idea that people’s origins are somehow clear and not clouded by diverse histories, migrations, and relationships is for me a romantic (read: unrealistic) one, especially for blacks in the African diaspora, for whom “Africa” the continent, and not a particular nation, must be the answer to the question: “Where were your people from before?” As complicated a notion as the idea of identifiable origins is for me, many people who locate themselves in a larger diaspora engage in just this kind of thinking…

Read or purchase the entire here.

Half + Half: Writers on Growing Up Biracial and Bicultural

Pantheon an imprint of Random House
1998-06-09
288 pages
ISBN: 978-0-375-70011-8 (0-375-70011-0)

Edited by Claudine C. O’Hearn

As we approach the twenty-first century, biracialism and biculturalism are becoming increasingly common.  Skin color and place of birth are no longer reliable signifiers of one’s identity or origin.  Simple questions like What are you? and Where are you from? aren’t answered—they are discussed.  These eighteen essays, joined by a shared sense of duality, address the difficulties of not fitting into and the benefits of being part of two worlds.  Through the lens of personal experience, they offer a broader spectrum of meaning for race and culture.  And in the process, they map a new ethnic terrain that transcends racial and cultural division.

Table of Contents

• Introduction by Claudine Chiawei O’Hearn
• LOST IN PLACE by Garrett Hongo
• THE MULATTO MILLENNIUM by Danzy Senna
• THE DOUBLE HELIX by Roxane Farmanfarmaian
• CALIFORNIA PALMS by le thi diem thuy
• MORO LIKE ME by Francisco Goldman
• THE ROAD FROM BALLYGUNGE by Bharati Mukherjee
• REFLECTIONS ON MY DAUGHTER by David Mura
• LIFE AS AN ALIEN by Meri Nana-Ama Danquah
• LOST IN THE MIDDLE by Malcolm Gladwell
• THE FUNERAL BANQUET by Lisa See
• A WHITE WOMAN OF COLOR by Julia Alvarez
• A MIDDLE PASSAGE by Philippe Wamba
• FOOD AND THE IMMIGRANT by Indira Ganesan
• WHAT COLOR IS JESUS? by James McBride
• POSTCARDS FROM “HOME” by Lori Tsang
• FROM HERE TO POLAND by Nina Mehta
• TECHNICOLOR by Ruben Martinez
• AN ETHNIC  TRUMP by Gish Jen
• About the Authors

Mike Peden, a graduate of the University of Minnesota with a degree in journalism and minor in communication studies and an employee of the St. Paul Neighborhood Network is currently working on a second documentary about multiracial identity that will air on the station and online.  This is the second part in a series of shows about mixed race.  The original documentary was featured in the 2009 Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival in Los Angeles.

You can watch the original documentary, What Are You? A Dialogue on Mixed Race, by following the link here.

Mike is looking for men and women in the Twin Cities [Minneapolis/St. Paul] area of any age who are of multiracial heritage.  If you or someone you know has researched or participated in scholarly studies on multiracial identity, feel free to share those stories.  He believes the best way to educate others on the facets of multiracial identity is having his subjects guide the storytelling, so the show will be presented from a journalistic perspective with minimal input from him during the program.  His goal is to share professional and anecdotal stories with scientific research to provide a well-rounded forum.

If you would like to share your story, Mike can be reached by phone at 651-468-5451, or by e-mail at sportsbrain2005@aol.com.

Secret Daughter: A Mixed-Race Daughter and the Mother Who Gave Her Away

Viking Press an imprint of the Penguin Group
2006-05-17
320 pages
8.26 x 5.23in
Paperback ISBN: 9780143112112
eBook (Adobe reader) ISBN: 9781429515375
eBook (eReader) ISBN: 9781429517829
eBook (Microsoft Reader) ISBN: 9781429512923

June Cross, Professor of Journalism
Columbia University

June Cross was born in 1954 to Norma Booth, a glamorous, aspiring white actress, and James “Stump” Cross, a well-known black comedian. Sent by her mother to be raised by black friends when she was four years old and could no longer pass as white, June was plunged into the pain and confusion of a family divided by race. Secret Daughter tells her story of survival. It traces June’s astonishing discoveries about her mother and about her own fierce determination to thrive. This is an inspiring testimony to the endurance of love between mother and daughter, a child and her adoptive parents, and the power of community.

Visit the official website here.

Visit the PBS Frontline site about Secret Daughter here.

Drawing Battle Lines

Sarah Lawrence College Magazine
Spring 2003: Who Are You

Catherine McKinley[-Davis] was one of only a few thousand African-American and biracial children adopted by white couples in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Throughout her childhood and adolescence, her consciousness grew as she did. Her very identity—composed both of the whiteness and blackness mixed in her genes, and of the whiteness of her adoptive parents—began to tear her apart, and she eventually embarked on a quest to find her birth parents and move toward self-acceptance. In this excerpt from “The Book of Sarahs”, her new memoir, McKinley pinpoints a crucial moment: that time when her home became the field on which the combats of race, of identity, of being the outsider, began to be fought in earnest.

With my parents’ move to Vermont, it seemed as though a very final, pronounced line had been drawn between us. It was different from the boundaries I had drawn in the past, acting against the surety that they would still be standing right there no matter how firm I drew and redrew the battle lines.

In Attleboro, those lines were drawn like this: In our house, I built a haven for myself, constructing my bedroom the way I thought it would have been if I had grown up in a Black family. My shelves were filled with Black books, replacing the artifacts of a former self—the dolls from my grandmother’s travels, the complete Laura Ingalls Wilder boxed library, the collections of Scottish verse, the Peterson’s guides to wildflowers and the seashore. I stowed them in the crawl space under the eaves of the house and moved my mother’s copies of The Black Child: A Parent’s Guide, the SNCC freedom movement songbooks, Amiri Baraka’s The Dutchman and The Slave, the row of James Baldwin paperbacks, and Stokely Carmichael and James Hamilton’s Black Power out from between the Rachel Carson and Thoreau and Henry Beston books, the trail guides, and my father’s engineering manuals in the den. I covered my walls with clippings from Essence and Ebony and turned up the dial on the “civil rights station” (read: Black radio, aired only on late night and Sunday slots, picked up from the Boston airways) to let everyone know who was living there. And I put a ban on my room. My father, who was my ally, if only for his silence and quiet amusement at my lobbies against the family, was the only one allowed in, and only so that he could tend the African violets he grew on shelves he built into my bedroom windows. I liked the flowers; they were African, despite how suspicious they seemed to me, sitting in the living room of every old white lady in town…

Read the entire article here.

A Letter to My Father: Growing up Filipina and American

University of Oklahoma Press
2008
184 pages
5.5″ x 8.5″ x 0″
8 b&w illustrations, 2 maps
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8061-3909-8

Helen Madamba Mossman

Going from the jungles of the wartime Philippines to the schoolyards of northwestern Oklahoma is no easy transition. For one twelve-year-old girl, it meant distance not only across the globe but also within her own family.

Born to a Filipino father and an American mother, Helen Madamba experienced terrifying circumstances at a young age. During World War II, her father, Jorge, fought as an American soldier in his native Philippines, and his family camped in jungles and slept in caves for more than two years to evade capture by the Japanese. But once the family relocated to Woodward, Oklahoma, young Helen faced a different kind of struggle.

Here Mossman tells of her efforts to repudiate her Asian roots so she could fit into American mainstream culture—and her later efforts to come to terms with her identity during the tumultuous 1960s. As she recounts her father’s wartime exploits and gains an appreciation of his life, she learns to rejoice in her biracial and multicultural heritage.

Written with the skill of a gifted storyteller and graced with photos that capture both of Helen’s worlds, A Letter to My Father is a poignant story that will resonate with anyone familiar with the struggle to reconcile past and present identities.