Mixed Race Studies

In Their Siblings’ Voices: White Non-Adopted Siblings Talk About Their Experiences Being Raised with Black and Biracial Brothers and Sisters

Columbia University Press
May 2009
248 pages
5 tables
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-231-14850-4
Paper ISBN: 978-0-231-14851-1

Rita J. Simon, University Professor Emerita
Department of Justice, Law and Society
American University, Washington, D.C.

In Their Siblings’ Voices shares the stories of twenty white non-adopted siblings who grew up with black or biracial brothers and sisters in the late 1960s and 1970s. Belonging to the same families profiled in Rita J. Simon and Rhonda M. Roorda’s In Their Own Voices: Transracial Adoptees Tell Their Stories and In Their Parents’ Voices: Reflections on Raising Transracial Adoptees, these siblings offer their perspectives on the multiracial adoption experience, which, for them, played out against the backdrop of two tumultuous, politically charged decades. Simon and Roorda question whether professionals and adoption agencies adequately trained these children in the challenges presented by blended families, and they ask if, after more than thirty years, race still matters. Few books cover both the academic and the human dimensions of this issue. In Their Siblings’ Voices helps readers fully grasp the dynamic of living in a multiracial household and its effect on friends, school, and community.

Racial Categorization in the 2010 Census

U.S. Commision on Civil Rights
Briefing Report
March 2009
59 pages

A Briefing Before The United States Commission on Civil Rights Held in Washington, DC on 2006-04-07.

On April 7, 2006, a panel of experts briefed members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on racial categorization in the 2010 Census. Charles Louis Kincannon, Director, U.S. Census Bureau; Sharon M. Lee, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Sociology, Portland State University; Kenneth Prewitt, Carnegie Professor of Public Affairs, Columbia University; and Ward Connerly, Chairman, American Civil Rights Institute, made presentations and offered their expertise on 1) the current racial categories in the 2010 Census; 2) proposed alternative racial categories in the 2010 Census; 3) the proposed elimination of racial categories in the 2010 Census; and 4) the legal and policy implications of Office of Management and Budget guidance to federal agencies on allocation of multiple responses. The briefing was held in Room 226 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building.

A transcript of this briefing is available on the Commission’s Web site (www.usccr.gov), and by request from the Publications Office, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 624 Ninth Street, NW, Room 600, Washington, DC, 20425; (202) 376-8128; publications@usccr.gov.

Read the entire report here.

Telling a Tall Tale, Family-Style—Author and Cultural Historian Scott Sandage Delivers 17th Annual Levine Lecture

Rider University News
Rider University, New Jersey
2008-10-16

For all his traditional academic rearing, Scott Sandage readily concedes that the revival of narrative has brought a new vitality to the discipline of history. “It was long considered unintellectual to tell stories,” explained Sandage, an associate professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “But today, with the rise in history writers like David McCullough, it’s become a way to compete with them for people’s attention.”

Sandage, who presented the 17th Annual Levine Lecture at Rider University on October 16, arrived with a new twist on a story that had been often told on the old American frontier, but was unfamiliar to the capacity audience in the Sweigart Auditorium. In doing so, Sandage not only shone a new light on the social conceptions of race, but framed it in a surprisingly personal context.

A noted author and cultural historian, Sandage specializes in the 19th century United States and in the changing aspects of American identity. He spoke in support of his current book project, Half-Breed Creek: A Tall Tale of Race on the Frontier, which focuses on a little-known, mixed-race Native American reservation in southeast Nebraska and investigates how family folklore has shaped racial identity in the United States.

“This is a story of what race is and how Americans have determined what race a person belongs to based on what stories can be told about them,” Sandage began. He set the scene of the so-called Half-Breed Creek, a reservation established by the United States government in 1856 as a place for those who claimed partial, but not full, Native American lineage. “The thinking was that the smart, educated half of the half-breed would organize the Indians into making trouble” in the already tenuous location, situated in the only spot in the United States where slave, free and Indian territories met at the same time, he explained…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed: Portraits of Multiracial Kids

Chronicle Books
2010-03-17
264 pages
7 x 7 in; 127 color photographs
ISBN 9780811874083
ISBN10 0811874087

Kip Fulbeck, Professor of Performative Studies, Video
University of California, Santa Barbara

Foreword by Dr. Maya Soetoro-Ng

Afterword by Cher (Cherilyn Sarkisian)

Mixed — From beloved writer and artist Kip Fulbeck, author of Part Asian, 100% Hapa, this timely collection of portraits celebrates the faces and voices of mixed-race children. At a time when 7 million people in the U.S. alone identify as belonging to more than one race, interest in issues of multiracial identity is rapidly growing. Overflowing with uplifting elements—including charming images, handwritten statements from the children, first-person text from their parents, a foreword by Dr. Maya Soetoro-Ng (President Obama‘s sister), and an afterword by international star Cher (who is part Cherokee)—this volume is an inspiring vision of the future.

Visit the official website at www.MixedKids.com.

Interview with Ngozi Onwurah

African Women in Cinema
African Literature Association Conference
April 1997
East Lansing, Michigan

Originally published in Sisters of the Screen: Women of Africa on Film Video and Television. Africa World Press, Trenton, NJ,  2000.

In another conversation, we talked about your identity as an African woman filmmaker based in London.  You stated that you wanted to describe some of the ways that you find that portrayal problematic, especially when it is imposed externally.

As a black woman filmmaker, I get invited to a lot of different things and sometimes they want me to wear different hats.  Sometimes I am a woman filmmaker and that’s the priority at that particular event.  Where it gets particularly muddy is when it has to do with being an African filmmaker.  Because the way that black America has appropriated the word African American, the context in which people refer to Africa gets very muddy.

As a filmmaker who works out of London, the problems that I have making films are completely different to a woman who, say, lives in Nigeria, who lives and works in Zambia, or Zaire, or Tanzania.  The problems that she has as a filmmaker are completely different to the problems that I have as a filmmaker, or the people who we make the films for are different.  So, in terms of who I am on a professional level, it gets very complicated.

It is less complicated on a personal level.  On a personal level, I know who I am; I know where I am from.  But in terms of talking about it, you cannot lump together a woman who lives in London, who gets funding from the BBC to make films, with someone who is living in Nigeria, where literally the budgets, the facilities, everything, would be completely different in terms of how she has to work.  So it gets complicated and sometimes I don’t think there is enough differential made between black people or people of African descent working outside of Africa and people of African descent working in Africa.  It is two different experiences.

In terms of how you bring your identity into your work, would you say that your work often centers around being of mixed race within the context of being British as well as Nigerian?

The fact that I have a white mother and a black father is essential to my identity.  Obviously, it gives me a unique perspective politically.  Politically I am black; emotionally I’m black.  But once you say that “unequivocally, I’m black,” there are specifics that come out of the fact that I have a white mother and a black father and that I lived half my childhood in Africa and half my childhood in an all-white neighborhood in Newcastle in England, that give me a specific viewpoint on everything I see.

On another level, there are issues around a kind of polarization, especially in America, but also in England, though nowhere near to the extent as in America: The two races are incredibly polarized in America, there’s black and there’s white and they seem to very rarely mix.  They seem to very rarely live in the same neighborhoods, and that’s not the case in England.

If I had to choose…if someone says to me, choose…if there was a war between black people and white people and someone says choose who you are going to shoot, obviously I’d go over to the black side, but I don’t particularly want my mother to be my enemy and I think that informs a lot of what I do.  Basically, the woman, the person who has loved me most in my life—who has loved me more than Malcolm X, who has loved me more than Mandela, has loved me more than any person on the face of this earth—is my mother; second my grandmother.  These are two white women.  These are the people who have formed me.  And yet I am completely removed from them culturally and politically, there is a whole world between us.  This is a strange place to be.  It informs everything you do basically.

In the context of African cinema, how do you situate yourself as a filmmaker in terms of being African, in terms of being black British?  You talk about different hats, I had not before necessarily associated you as an African woman filmmaker, I am familiar with you more as a black British filmmaker.  A lot of your work appears to address your experiences as a black British, as a mixed-race woman, where, as the director of Monday’s Girls, you are viewed as an African woman filmmaker.

It’s more complicated than that.

Could you talk about these complicated identities?

It is incredibly complicated.  All I can say is that my whole life has been a training ground to live this life.  Basically, since I came out of my mother’s womb it’s been a chameleon situation for me.  It’s much more complicated than saying I have a lot of hats I wear.  I have a lot of hats I have to wear but I wear them all simultaneously…

Read the entire interview here.

A Knock Out: A film by Tessa Boerman and Samuel Reiziger

Women Make Movies
Netherlands, 2004
53 minutes
Color, VHS/DVD
Subtitled
Order No. W05882

Boxing champion Michele Aboro grew up in South London, where life for a girl was never easy, let alone for a mixed-race lesbian girl. Thanks to her tenacious spirit and an uncanny talent for combat sports, she put her difficult past behind her and managed to sign a contract with the biggest boxing promoter in Europe. She won all 21 fights, 18 of them with a knockout – an exceptional achievement in women’s boxing. But despite her spectacular record in the ring, her career came to a sudden halt when her promoter broke her contract under the belief that she was not “promotable.”

Refusing to vamp up her image and pose naked in magazines, this undefeated world champion was abandoned by an industry more interested in selling sex than sport. A Knock Out interweaves Aboro’s personal story with interviews with boxers whose wild success strikes a painful contrast with Aboro’s struggles. Searching for logic behind Aboro’s case, this poignant documentary captures a universal story of fighting for one’s identity and offers a probing look at the intersection of gender, ethnicity, sexuality and the increased commercialization of women’s sports.

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.

IC Documentarians: Incongruities Investigator – Nisma Zaman

Ithica College Quarterly
2006/4

Mbeti Hyess

Nisma Zaman ’92 solidified her passion for documentary filmmaking at IC, where she began work on a short 16mm film exploring mixed-race identities. Beyond Black and White went on to debut at the Asian American International Film Festival in 1995 and remains in distribution with Women Make Movies.

After graduating, Zaman began a four-year stint at the New York Center for Visual History, a nonprofit arts and culture documentary organization, where she worked on a variety of productions including the PBS series American Cinema. Simultaneously she moonlighted on the postproduction of Jennifer Fox’s acclaimed film series American Love Story, following the lives of an interracial family. In 1996 Zaman served as a production coordinator on Walk This Way, a program exploring children’s experiences of race and difference for USA Network’s “Erase the Hate” campaign. This provided a perfect segue into her ever-increasing role on Nickelodeon’s Little Bill, a 52-episode digital animation series based on Bill Cosby’s children’s books, for which she won an Emmy as a coordinating producer…

Read the entire article here.

Misplaced Bodies: Probing Racial and Gender Signifiers in Ngozi Onwurah’s The Body Beautiful

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies
Volume 29, Number 1 (2008)
pages 37-50
E-ISSN: 1536-0334 Print ISSN: 0160-9009
DOI: 10.1353/fro.0.0004

Diana Adesola Mafe, Assistant Professor of English
Denison University, Granville, Ohio

Exalted by poets, painters and sculptors, the female body, often reduced to its isolated parts, has been mankind’s most popular subject for adoration and myth, and also for judgment, ridicule, esthetic alteration and violent abuse.

Susan Brownmiller, Femininity

In her seminal text Femininity, Susan Brownmiller identifies what can simply be termed the mythic proportions of the female body. Idealized, worshiped, ravaged, and reviled-the female body is forever being measured (usually against the unattainable paradigms of a male imagination) and found lacking. The myth of the female body’s inadequacy is crucial to my discussion of Nigerian British director Ngozi Onwurah’s 1991 film, The Body Beautiful. In the spirit of Brownmiller’s claim that “biological femaleness is not enough. Femininity always demands more,”21 wish to posit Onwurah’s film as a seldom discussed yet highly subversive text where cinematic representations of the (lacking) female body and the racialized performance of femininity are concerned.

Neither a documentary nor a fictional film, The Body Beautifuloperates as a memoir, merging the memories and imaginations of both the director and her mother to create a twenty-three-minute film of their lives. Onwurah, played by actress Sian Martin, appears in the film as a confident, attractive, and sexual young woman of mixed race. Her mother Madge (who plays herself) is a visibly scarred older white woman who has undergone a mastectomy. The dissimilar female bodies of mother and daughter are constantly juxtaposed, reminding viewers that “how one looks is the chief physical weapon in female-against-female competition.” And, bearing out the epigraph of this paper, the young Ngozi, a fashion model, seemingly epitomizes the role of the female body as “subject for adoration” while Madge remains subject to “judgment, ridicule, [and] esthetic alteration.” But Onwurah, as director, points to the commonality of these raced and gendered bodies, both of which are subject to myths of inadequacy despite their differences.

Notably, race cannot be extricated from this discussion of the female body and its idealization. Even the beautiful young Ngozi is rendered lacking because her body is, in the words of Homi Bhabha, “almost. . . but not quite” the (white) Western feminine aesthetic. Ngozi’s modeling success thus hinges on her manipulation at the hands of a white male photographer, who urges her to fulfill the stereotypical role of the sexualized “black” woman as he clicks the camera, saying, “Give me sex. Give me passion.” For Madge, a survivor of breast cancer and a mastectomy, the “lack” is literal and symbolic. Although biologically female, she is consistently situated by social discourses (as represented in the film) outside the sphere of femininity.

Indeed, I suggest that discursive practices are unable to accommodate either Madge, an aging, arthritic, breastless woman, or Ngozi, an attractive, young, mixed-race woman caught between the myths of white beauty and black sexuality, except through essentialized notions of gender and race. Although excluded from the sphere of “real” femininity, Madge is included in the category of majority white British society. Her visibly raced daughter, on the other hand, while coded as highly attractive and feminine, is very much excluded from that white world and read, in typically Manichean terms, as a black model. But despite these respective exclusions and inclusions in vexed categories of identity as a result of their visibly marked bodies, neither of these women is ever adequately “placed,” and therein lies the fallibility of identification, which, as Stuart Hall aptly states, is “never a proper fit.”

Incidentally, the mixed-race woman of African and European descent has long functioned as a recognizable signifier for illicit sexuality and racial ambiguity in Western literary traditions. In both Europe and the Americas, the origins of the “mulatta” as cultural icon are linked to the erotic/exotic fantasies of a white (male) imagination. In early modern travel narratives dealing with the African coast and the Caribbean, European men often made careful observations about mixed race women. And the mulatta character appears with enough frequency in British novels to betray an ongoing British fascination with that figure. By critiquing her own stereotypical role as an eroticized/exoticized mixed-race woman, Onwurah also challenges the problematic iconography of the mulatta figure. Since the very process of identification is fraught, that is, “lodged in contingency,” the self-identification or self-representation of the mixed-race subject becomes a useful starting point for understanding and theorizing (white-black) mixedness. The Body Beautiful, a rare example of a film with a mixed-race woman behind and in front of the camera, literally speaks to these exigencies where representations of interraciality are concerned…

Read the entire article here.

Miscegenation Facts […From 1879]

Daily British Colonist
Vicoria, British Columbia
1879-10-07
21st Year
Page 1, 2nd Column

David W. Higgins, Editor and Proprietor

The child of colored parents of different tints, such as quadroon and mulatto, or mulatto and black, will be nearer to the tint of the darker parent.  If both parents of the same color, the child will be a shade darker, and singularly enough, the second child will be darker than the first, the third darker than the second, and so on to the last. In other words, a colored community, left to itself, is fatally destined to return to the original African black after a limited number of generations.  Thus, while each alliance with an individual of pure Caucasian blood brings the negro a step nearer to the white standard, the reverse is the case the moment the Caucasian element is withheld, and the color retrogrades from light to dark…

Continue reading the “facts” in this article here.