Mixed Race Studies

Review: In New Biopic ‘Barry,’ The Real Obama Remains Hidden

Newsweek
2016-12-16

Tom Shone

While President Barack Obama decides on his future—a return to his roots as a community organizer? A de facto leader for the Trump resistance? More writing?—pop culture has stepped in to give him the Mount Rushmore treatment. First we had Southside With You, a sweet, inoffensive Sundance hit about his and Michelle Obama’s first date. Now we have Barry, Vikram Gandhi’s film for Netflix about Obama’s year as a transfer student at Columbia University, a period in which the future president read a lot of books, smoked a ton of cigarettes and eventually decided to become a community organizer. This is Obama: The Awakening.

Taking the lead is Australian actor Devon Terrell, who is more strapping than his subject but gets just the right mixture of Vulcan self-possession and self-doubt, giving him a slight stammer as ideas struggle for expression through multiple thought-menus. Casting a non-American actor was a smart move. The film records not just Obama’s first encounter with New York—the Big Apple of Ronald Reagan’s first term, with its beatboxes, graffiti and break-dancers—but with a kind of urban black experience he hadn’t experienced in Hawaii. Passing between worlds, he belongs wholly to neither…

Read the entire review here.

Children’s and Adults’ Predictions of Black, White, and Multiracial Friendship Patterns

Journal of Cognition and Development
Published online: 2016-11-22
20 pages
DOI: 10.1080/15248372.2016.1262374

Steven O. Roberts, Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Psychology
University of Michigan

Amber D. Williams, National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow
University of Texas, Austin

Susan A. Gelman, Heinz Werner Distinguished University Professor of Psychology and Linguistics
University of Michigan

Cross-race friendships can promote the development of positive racial attitudes, yet they are relatively uncommon and decline with age. In an effort to further our understanding of the extent to which children expect cross-race friendships to occur, we examined 4- to 6-year-olds’ (and adults’) use of race when predicting other children’s friendship patterns. In contrast to previous research, we included White (Studies 1 and 2), Black (Study 3), and Multiracial (Study 4) participants and examined how they predicted the friendship patterns of White, Black, and Multiracial targets. Distinct response patterns were found as a function of target race, participant age group, and participant race. Participants in all groups predicted that White children would have mostly White friends and Black children would have mostly Black friends. Moreover, most participant groups predicted that Multiracial children would have Black and White friends. However, White adults predicted that Multiracial children would have mostly Black friends, whereas Multiracial children predicted that Multiracial children would have mostly White friends. These data are important for understanding beliefs about cross-race friendships, social group variation in race-based reasoning, and the experiences of Multiracial individuals more broadly.

Read or purchase the article here.

How ‘Barry’ Gets Obama Right—And Wrong

Newsweek
2016-12-21

Matthew Cooper, Political Editor

President Barack Obama during a White House news conference in Washington, December 16. A new Netflix production, “Barry,” charts his college years in New York, when “Barry,” as he was known, wrestled with his racial identity. JONATHAN ERNST/REUTERS

There’s less than a month left of Barack Obama’s presidency, but the 55-year-old remains enigmatic. His remarkable ascent—as the son of a mixed-race marriage, the child of a single mother in Hawaii—to the Oval Office is as great a Log Cabin tale as that of any of his 43 predecessors. Maybe it’s because of his swift rise or his outlier/insider duality that he remains, even in his last days in office, the object of so much dispute.

The president has already penned two deservedly acclaimed memoirs and more are planned. And he’s been the subject of two biopics, this summer’s charming Southside with You, about his first date with Michelle (nee Robinson), and now Barry, a Netflix production that charts his college years in New York, when “Barry,” as he was known, wrestled with his racial identity…

Read the entire article here.

New Book Confronts Colorism in 21st Century America

NBC News
2016-12-21

Lesley-Ann Brown

“The Masque of Blackness” (1605) is an early Jacobean era “masque” — a popular form of 16th & 17th century amateur dramatic theatre — and is quite possibly the first instance in English literature where the topic of skin color is not only discussed, but where Blackness is cast in an unfavorable light.

Project Muse writes, “In The Masque of Blackness (1605) and its plot sequel “The Masque of Beauty” (1608), Ben Jonson represents the transformation of African people to Europeans when they travel to England from Africa.” The period in which it was commissioned and produced coincides with England’s expansion of her Atlantic journey into slavery, sugar and empire and so it ought not be underscored the role literature is enlisted to play in terms of the color hierarchy it was meant to entrain. The masque, commissioned by Anne of Denmark, queen consort of King James I, was also one of the first documented cases of “blackface” a practice so novel at the time that many of the English court found it disturbing…

…In “Same Family, Different Colors: Confronting Colorism in America’s Diverse Families,” Lori Tharps, an assistant professor of journalism at Temple University and author of “Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America” and “Kinky Gazpacho: Life, Love & Spain,” Tharps gives voice to a dynamic that as she notes, “…doesn’t even exist. Not officially. It autocorrects on my computer screen. It does not appear in the dictionary. So, how does one begin to unpack a societal ill that doesn’t have a name?”…

Read the entire article here.

Are Brazilians Latinos? What their identity struggle tells us about race in America

The Conversation
2016-12-20

Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Columbia University, New York, New York

Bikini waxes, keratin hair blowouts and all-you-can-eat steakhouses.

In the United States, all three are closely associated with the word “Brazilian.” Yet, although none of these things are linked to Latino identity, one of the questions that journalists frequently ask me is, “Are Brazilians Latinos?” Surprisingly, many Brazilian-Americans also ask me the same question. As one of my students put it, “Because ‘Brazilian’ is not an option in any census, job or college form, you get older and wonder, where do I fit in?”

The confusion is warranted.

It illuminates how U.S. public discourse and policy classifies 57 million people from very different ethnic, racial and national backgrounds into the categories of “Latino” and “Hispanic.” That Brazilians do not quite fit the box enables us to probe the terms “Latino” and “Hispanic” and their implications. This is important at a time when Latinos are reaching 18 percent of the U.S. population…

Read the entire article here.

Seeing Santa in Black and White

The New York Times
2016-12-20

Sa’iyda Shabazz

Sa’iyda Shabazz and her son visited the black Santa at Macy’s Herald Square store last week.

When my friend posted an adorable picture of her son with a black Santa in New York City, I was drawn to the idea of visiting a Santa who reflected my family’s skin tones. I’m black, and my 3-year-old son’s father is white. I am raising him as a single mom with the help of my parents. Why should white Santa be the default?

Of course, you can find children’s books that feature a black Santa Claus, and he appears in some ornaments and other products. The website blacksanta.com, founded by the former N.B.A. player Baron Davis, sells products like T-shirts, hats and ornaments featuring images of black Santa. In a classic episode of “The Cosby Show,” Dr. Huxtable explains to one of the children that as Santa drops down each chimney, his race morphs to match that of the family he’s visiting – Asian, African-American, Caucasian and so on.

It’s a nice sentiment, but the reality is that black Santas are pretty hard to find. When the Mall of America in Minnesota enlisted a black Santa this year, he was popular with children but his presence prompted an unpleasant racial backlash online…

Read the entire article here.

China Machado, Breakthrough Model Until the End, Dies at 86

The New York Times
On The Runway
2016-12-19

Vanessa Friedman

China Machado, the first non-Caucasian to appear in the pages of an American glossy fashion magazine and a model who broke not only the race barrier but also the age barrier, died on Sunday in Brookhaven, N.Y., on Long Island. She was 86.

Her family said the cause was cardiac arrest.

Ms. Machado (whose first name was pronounced CHEE-na) lived a colorful life: She was born Noelie de Souza Machado on Christmas Day 1929, in Shanghai; fled the country with her parents in 1946, after the Japanese occupation; had an affair with Luis Dominguín, the Spanish bullfighter, who left her for Ava Gardner; and socialized with François Truffaut…

Read the entire obituary here.

Avoiding the One-Drop Rule

The Harvard Advocate
Fall 2016

Eli Lee

This past January, I attended a concert at Philadelphia’s First Unitarian Church. The audience in the church’s dimly lit basement was tattooed, bedecked in social justice slogans and, like most punk show crowds, predominantly white. Two hours into the show, a local hardcore band with both white and Black members took the stage. As they launched into their blistering set, I followed my instinct and, bobbing to the rhythm, started to work my way forward through the crowd. By the time the band had finished playing their first song, I had made significant progress toward the stage. That’s when the band’s lead singer leaned into the mic and yelled: “It’s fuckin’ 2016! BROWN PEOPLE TO THE FRONT!”

As the drummer counted in the next song of the set, I began to experience a minor identity crisis. I am a person of mixed Jewish and Vietnamese heritage, and my skin is several shades darker than that of the average Anglo- American. Indeed, even during the dimmest days of winter, my complexion never brightens beyond an even tan. But at that moment, I asked myself: am I brown or not? And if not, then what was I doing pushing myself towards the front of the crowd? I didn’t know the answer to the rst question—or maybe I couldn’t decide—and so I found myself frozen, rooted to my spot, unable to even pogo.

That confusion—that sense of misplacedness and strangeness in the face of a racial binary—is nothing new in America. Since anti-miscegenation laws were ruled unconstitutional in 1967, the population of multiracial Americans has grown to represent nearly seven percent of the country. Today, multiracial America is expanding at a rate three times as fast as the country’s population at large…

Read the entire article here.

‘Barry’ director on race, identity and why the young Obama matters

Mashtable
2016-12-20

Proma Khosla

Vikram Gandhi didn’t direct the Netflix biopic Barry because he cared about Barack Obama. He made it because he cared about a kid named Barry.

Gandhi set out to discover who Barack was before he was Barack, back in 1981. The film follows a portion of Obama’s life then as a student at Columbia University, and how it shaped who he would grow up to be.

“I don’t know who Barack Obama is,” Gandhi told Mashable in a phone interview. “I didn’t study that. I studied who Barry was. I related with Barry. The things that he’s struggling with are things that people around me have struggled with, I’ve struggled with, and I think that I still struggle with. Barack Obama’s the president; I have no idea what that’s like, but I know what it’s like to be a confused kid, a 20-year-old kid in New York City trying to figure out where you belong.”

The 1981 iteration of Barack Obama held particular resonance for Gandhi, who studied at Columbia some 17 years later. He remembered the classes, the bars, the diners — he even lived next door to the building that once housed a future president. The film is an intersection of two identity crises: What it means to grow up and what it means to be mixed race in America…

Read the entire article here.

The Problem With Obama’s Faith in White America

The Atlantic
2016-12-13

Tressie McMillan Cottom, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Virginia Commonwealth University

The president’s optimism about race blinded him to the pervasiveness and stubborn persistence of racism.

I screamed a lot while reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s My President Was Black. When I was done reading and screaming, I cried.

The last time I felt this far removed from this president was when I first worked so hard to elect him.

In 2007, the very idea of a President Barack Obama was ridiculous to me. I was and am southern, god bless. I am black. I come from black people who are southerners even when they were New Yorkers for a spell. We are the black American story of enslavement, rural migration, urban displacement, resistance, boostrapping, mobility, and class fragility. In this milieu we, as a friend once described it, know our whites. To know our whites is to understand the psychology of white people and the elasticity of whiteness. It is to be intimate with some white persons but to critically withhold faith in white people categorically. It is to anticipate white people’s emotions and fears and grievances because their issues are singularly our problem. To know our whites is to survive without letting bitterness rot your soul…

Read the entire article here.