Mixed Race Studies

Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson and the Ways We Talk About Our Past

The New York Times
2017-08-24

Annette Gordon-Reed, Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History; Professor of History, Faculty of Arts & Sciences
Harvard University

A photograph of Monticello from the late 1800s. Credit University of Virginia Library

It has been 20 years since the historian Annette Gordon-Reed published “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy,” a book that successfully challenged the prevailing perceptions of both figures. In a piece for The New York Times Book Review, submitted just before the tragic events in Charlottesville, Va., Gordon-Reed reflects on the complexities that endure in our understanding of Hemings and the language we use to characterize her.

Sally Hemings has been described as “an enigma,” the enslaved woman who first came to public notice at the turn of the 19th century when James Callender, an enemy of the newly elected President Thomas Jefferson, wrote with racist virulence of “SALLY,” who lived at Monticello and had borne children by Jefferson. Hemings came back into the news earlier this year, after the Thomas Jefferson Foundation announced plans to restore a space where Hemings likely resided, for a time, at Monticello. A number of news reports as well as comments on social media discussing the plans drew the ire of many readers because they referred to Hemings as Jefferson’s “mistress” and used the word “relationship” to describe the connection between the pair, as if those words inevitably denote positive things. They do not, of course — especially when the word “mistress” is modified by the crucial word “enslaved.”

When I published my first book, “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy,” in 1997, most people knew of Hemings from two works: Fawn Brodie’s biography “Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History” (1974) and Barbara Chase-Riboud’s novel “Sally Hemings” (1979), both of which sought to rescue Hemings’s personhood. More typically, the scholarship written to disprove her connection to Jefferson routinely diminished Hemings’s humanity. The arguments that the story couldn’t be true because Jefferson would never be involved with “a slave girl” and that such a person was too low to have influenced Jefferson recurred in various formulations in historical writings over many years, as if the designation “slave girl” told readers all they needed to know. My first book was designed to expose the inanity of those, and other, arguments. I wrote a second book, “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family,” to flesh out Hemings’s personal history…

Read the entire article here.

Sundance prize-winning doc ‘Unrest’ gets UK release

Screen Daily
2017-08-25

Tom Grater, Deputy online editor
London, United Kingdom

Unrest

Unrest, the feature documentary about ME (also known as chronic fatigue syndrome) which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, will get a UK release in October.

The film chronicles its director’s struggles with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME). A PHD student at Harvard, she was suddenly struck by the mysterious illness and left bedridden.

She has since become a filmmaker and activist for ME awareness and was invited to deliver a TED Talk on the subject in June 2016.

Unrest will be independently released by its co-producers, Jennifer Brea’s Shella Films based in Los Angeles, and Lindsey Dryden’s Little By Little Films based in Gloucestershire, UK…

Read the entire article here.

Living on the borderline: how I embraced my mixed-race status after years of denial

The Guardian
2017-08-26

Georgina Lawton

Solomon Glave as Heathcliff in Andrea Arnold’s 2011 adaptation of Wuthering Heights Photograph: Artificial Eye

I still have yet to uncover the full truth behind my heritage, but now feel that living in a racial no man’s land can actually be fun

Wuthering Heights has been one of my favourite books since I studied it for A-level seven years ago. I was fascinated by the tumultuous (and oddly asexual) relationship between Cathy and Heathcliff, but mostly with the theme of liminality that runs through the book, and many other works of gothic literature. Liminality refers to something – or someone – that sits on the boundary between two things; it’s a middle ground between polar opposites. Kind of like being mixed race.

I didn’t realise it at the time, but I identified with Heathcliff (he’s a dark-skinned Gypsy anti-hero) because I have been straddling the borders of race liminality my whole life. Growing up brown-skinned in a white family and facing questions as to why that was, I have had to navigate many different racial identities depending on who I was with, never quite owning one…

Read the entire article here.

A moment that changed me: realising I was black

The Guardian
2017-08-18

Micha Frazer-Carroll, Founder and editor-in-chief
Blueprint

‘Mixedness feels rich, full, and multifaceted.’ Photograph: Micha Frazer-Carroll

I always thought I was mixed race until someone at school called me black. That started me thinking about racial identity

“A ‘black girl’. How weird is that?” I laughed. I’m met with silence from my mum’s side of the dinner table.

“It’s not weird. It’s what you are.”

Like one million other people in the UK, I’m mixed race. Up until I was a teenager, I’d never considered I could be anything else.

It’s year 8 – I’m probably about 12 or 13. The day hasn’t been hugely out of the ordinary, but something had happened earlier that made me feel a bit odd. For the first time in my life, I’ve been referred to as “black”.

Sitting down to dinner that night, as a unit, my family look like a sort of Pantone colour chart of milky beige to deep brown; my mum’s black, my dad’s white, and me and my siblings are various shades of in-between – who’s darkest generally depends on who had been playing in the sun the longest. We exemplify the sort of image of modern Britain that was particularly prevalent during the run-up to the London Olympics. Despite the day’s confusion, early-adolescent me knows one thing for sure: while I am proud of my ethnicity, and being half black, I am not black, I am mixed race. Both parts are equally important to my identity. Mum is visibly getting a bit agitated now. “Most people don’t see that. Above all, you’re black.”…

Read the entire article here.

My Family Always ‘Passed’ as White, Until We Didn’t

Vice
2017-08-22

Mike Miksche

Images courtesy of the author

Each of my siblings’ names, skin, hair, and religious observances earned us different levels of privilege.

My family immigrated from Lebanon to Canada before I was born in order to flee a nasty civil war. Since we’re quite light-skinned, growing up people assumed we were some kind of white: Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese was mainly what I heard. My mom explained how back in those pre-9/11 days, people she met hardly knew where Lebanon was and hadn’t heard much about Islam either, so it was easy for us to live under the radar, hassle-free. This was before the hummus craze. But obviously, with everything going on today, things have changed. Now, the disclosure of who we are, along with some cultural clues, shifts how people see us regardless of our light skin tone. I suppose one could argue that it’s a privilege to be passable as white, or a variant thereof, but it’s a bit more complicated than that.

As a kid, my folks cultivated a dual identity within the Lebanon-like bubble of our southwestern Ontario home. We remixed the Lebanese Arabic dialect with English idioms and ate kibbeh with chicken nuggets and homemade fries. As Muslims, we studied the Qu’ran, prayed five times a day, and were forbidden to eat pork—including pepperoni and bacon, too. You’d expect it all to be confusing, but I was a happy kid living under the radar and felt my upbringing was normal…

Read the entire article here.

The Changeling — A Review of ‘In Full Colour’ by Rachel Doležal

Quillette
2017-03-27

Helen Dale

A review of In Full Color by Rachel Doležal. BenBella Books, Dallas, Texas (April 2017) 282 pages.

When I was a girl, my mother said wanting something too much often led to its opposite. It could mean I’d get something almost – but not completely – unrelated to what I desired, even something I hated. If this happened, she would say and that’s what the fairies sent you.

The fairies sent things and took them away all the time among my Irish kin, none more distressingly than changelings, where newborn natural children were stolen and replaced with fairy children. Fairy changelings were not like their parents, were greedy, and always unwanted. Changeling stories – present in Ireland, Scotland, Germany, Scandinavia, and among the Igbo people of Nigeria – seldom show the fairy child growing up to be loved and accepted by its human family.

Usually it is killed, but only after being beaten, dunked in the river, or left on a hot stovetop. Its parents complain about its ravenous hunger, its odd appearance, its sickliness, its colour, or its failure to speak. In Scotland, the fairies would often take blond or red headed children, leaving dark fairy children in their place.

Sometimes, an exchange could be made, but if so human children would return from fairyland bearing strange traces of their time there. Some never grew old, but still died at the appointed time. Others grew old but never died, like the Sybil of Roman myth. She shrivelled with age until she had to store herself in a glass jar. This was because, when Apollo granted her a wish, she forgot to ask him for eternal youth after asking for eternal life.

Of course, there’s more to the changeling myth than mere spookiness. It has with justice been described as Ireland’s most sinister superstition and there is evidence those called changelings were often disabled or of dubious parentage. Unable to contribute economically to the household, the ‘changeling’ label allowed parents to kill them, a crime that now goes by the name infanticide and was historically the fate of roughly 25 per cent of live births.

That’s what the fairies sent you

Rachel Doležal is a changeling in both directions. Her parents did not want what the fairies sent them. ‘I’d nearly killed Ruthanne as she’d laboured to deliver me,’ she says in her book, ‘and my hair at birth was almost black and my skin was much darker than my brother’s’…

Read the entire review here.

Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference 2018: Resisting, Reclaiming, and Reimagining (Call for Papers)

March 1-3, 2018 at the University of Maryland, College Park
Deadline: August 18, 2017
Notification: Early September 2017

Conference Description: Resisting, Reclaiming, and Reimagining, the next Critical Mixed Race Studies conference seeks to highlight resistance against white supremacy around the globe, the reclamation of community, kinship, and identity within the mixed-race community, and the reimagining of racial difference. The conference will be hosted at the University of Maryland, March 1-3 2018 and will include film screenings and a live performance showcase produced by Mixed Roots Stories. Recent events demonstrate that white supremacy, coupled with sexism, xenophobia, transphobia, homophobia, and unchecked capitalism, is still central as an organizing principle and tool of domination. For example, borders and walls (both real and imagined) are being invoked by the current United States administration to marginalize people and combat the inevitable demographic shifts which will see this country become majority minority. By focusing on the resistance, reclamation, and reimagination of multiraciality, this interdisciplinary and transnational conference will be a forum dedicated to fostering relationships between people of color, dismantling racial hierarchies, and affirming an ethics of love to subvert dominant paradigms of social identity.

Proposals: CMRS welcomes submissions from scholars from all fields, cultural workers, and activists and invites posters, panels, roundtables, and individual papers that address the conference theme in a broad sense. Presentation formats may be varied and diverse, and we welcome proposals that involve poetry, visual art, storytelling, and other non-academic formats. Although not limited to these examples, proposals might explore the following:

• A proposal from the social sciences might describe epistemological frameworks that center multiraciality and reclaim the heterogeneity of the mixed experience.
• In the humanities, presenters might share how dominant cultures drive cultural norms and how this informs the global mixed experience.
• Community activists and/or scholars engaged with the public may share how social justice work operates between and across minority communities.
• Historians might explore legacies of revolution and resistance shaping the mixed experience in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and beyond.
• Artists may share important works that decenter whiteness and reimagine social norms of identity.

IMPORTANT: Presenters at the conference must be members of the CMRS Association. Membership must be renewed annually and is available here. Presenters must be available to present on any of the 3 days of the conference.

Members of the CMRS Program Committee will be reviewing abstracts based upon the quality of the proposal. UMD class/meeting rooms are equipped with a Dell laptop, microphone and projector. Mac laptop users will need to provide their own projection adapters. Please note that all abstracts are to be submitted online using the CMRS form located here.

For more information, see our website. Contact us at: cmrsmixedrace@gmail.com

I’m black. Robert E. Lee is my ancestor. His statues can’t come down soon enough.

The Washington Post
2017-08-15

Karen Finney

Defenders of Confederate monuments are again trying to rewrite an ugly chapter in our nation’s history. If my family can move on, so can they.

As the biracial daughter of Jim Finney, a black civil rights lawyer descended from enslaved Virginians, and Mildred Lee, a white social worker and the great-great-great niece of Confederate General Robert E. Lee — of whom statues stand in many cities and towns, including, now infamously, Charlottesville — my American story is complicated.

About a year ago, I made a discovery that reminded me of just how complicated both my family’s and our nation’s painful journey on race and equality has been. I found two letters that my maternal grandmother, also named Mildred Lee, had written to my father. In the first, four-page, single-spaced typed letter, she laid out arguments why my dad should leave my mom and not marry her as they’d planned. Not only was marrying illegal in their respective home states of Virginia and North Carolina, in 1967, their forthcoming interracial marriage, she explained, was against the “natural order of things,” in which black and white have their place.”

Quoting the Bible, she argued that their marriage would bring permanent disrepute, shame and irreparable damage not only to my mother’s life but also the lives of the whole family. A month later, my parents were married in a simple ceremony in New York City. In a second letter, sent less than a week before I was born, my grandmother described miscegenation as a sin and a stain that would never be made clean, quoting the Bible and invoking “the way of things.”…

Read the entire article here

Halsey Covers Our Music Issue—and Proves No Topic is Off-limits

Playboy
20Q
2017-08-05 (September 2017 Issue)

By Rebecca Haithcoat
Photography by Ramona Rosales

With Hopeless Fountain Kingdom, the queen of New Americana is more outspoken than ever. Here, she covers everything from donating $100,000 to Planned Parenthood to the virtues of the dad bod.

Q1
Hopeless Fountain Kingdom hit number one on the Billboard 200. You’re the first woman to top that chart in 2017. How does it feel?

A lot of this accolade shit is super arbitrary: “Halsey is the first girl with blue hair from New Jersey to.…” It’s exciting but also enraging, because I know a lot of women who put out better albums than me who deserve massive accolades, and I’m the one who had to break the seal…

…Q14
How did you navigate growing up biracial?

I’m half black. My dad managed a car dealership, wore a suit to work, had a nice watch, was always clean-shaven, handsome, played golf on the weekends. And people would come up to him like, “Yo, brotha! What’s up!” And my dad would be like, “Hi.…”

Q15
How did that affect you?

I’m white-passing. I’ve accepted that about myself and have never tried to control anything about black culture that’s not mine. I’m proud to be in a biracial family, I’m proud of who I am, and I’m proud of my hair. One of my big jokes a long time ago was “I look white, but I still have white boys in my life asking me why my nipples are brown.” Every now and then I experience these racial blips. I look like a white girl, but I don’t feel like one. I’m a black woman. So it’s been weird navigating that. When I was growing up I didn’t know if I was supposed to love TLC or Britney.

Q16
How do people react when they do find out you’re biracial?

White guilt is funny, but this is a really hard time for white allies. People don’t want to do too much but want to do enough, and in my bubble of Los Angeles I’m surrounded by a lot of good people with a lot of good intentions. But as I learned in this past election, my bubble is just a small fraction of how this country operates. That is ultimately my greatest frustration with the public perception of any sort of activism: the mentality of “Well, it’s not affecting me.” Open your fucking eyes…

Read the entire interview here.

The Harlem Renaissance’s Hidden Figure

Ursinus College
English Summer Fellows Student Research
2017-07-21
23 pages

Jada A. Grice
Ursinus College, Collegeville, Pennsylvania

This project will seek to look at the Harlem Renaissance’s hidden figure, Jessie Fauset. Jessie Fauset was born to an A.M.E. minister and his wife as one of ten children in Camden County, New Jersey and raised in Philadelphia. From there she got her college degree and began teaching all over the country. She has written four novels, There is Confusion, Plum Bun, The Chinaberry Tree, and Comedy: American Style, all of which I have read this summer. Each novel focuses on the early twentieth century black family. I will be analyzing these novels under the four themes of passing, acceptance, romance, and Paris/escape. I will also be mapping the characters in the novel on a QGIS system in order to indicate where the majority of the novel takes place and to see if certain characters have more movement than others. I will finally map Jessie Fauset’s life in order to see if her life parallels with the lives of her characters. Mapping consists of a close reading of the novel, identifying locations in the book, creating an [Microsoft] Excel spreadsheet, and plotting the spreadsheet onto an online map on QGIS.

Read the entire paper here.