Mixed Race Studies

Nawal El Saadawi: “All people are mixed blood, the more mixed you are the better”

African Arguments
2016-06-24

Zahrah Nesbitt-Ahmed, Research Fellow; Founder: Bookshy Blog
Institute of Development Studies, Brighton, United Kingdom

The iconic Egyptian writer speaks out about being ignored by “colonial capitalist patriarchal powers” and how today’s African women writers are leading a revolt.

With a career spanning half a century and encompassing some 60 works of fiction and non-fiction, Nawal El Saadawi is today one of the Arab world’s and Africa’s most pre-eminent figures.

Over several decades, the 84-year-old Egyptian’s books have challenged the status quo of patriarchal, religious and capitalist structures. And the writer has developed an international reputation as a courageous activist who carries on questioning those in power in spite of the dangers that can come with it.

According to Saadawi, she inherited her rebellious side from her parents and paternal grandmother, and her willingness to speak out has been clear throughout her writing. In her many works, she has tackled a range of controversial topics such as female genital mutilation, sex work, violence against women, and religious fundamentalism. And she has explored these complex issues through both fiction – in the likes of Women at Point Zero, Searching, and God Dies by the Nile – and non-fiction – such as in Women and Sex and various memoirs.

As a feminist writer and activist, Saadawi has raised awareness around women’s rights globally, but she has had a particularly strong influence on the feminist movement in her home country and amongst young Egyptians…

Read the entire article here.

Chi-chi Nwanoku: A classical legacy and an African heritage

Music Africa Magazine
2016-06-16

Ed Keazor

A short biography of Chi-chi Nwanoku MBE, world-renowned classical baroque bassist and Professor of Music, covering her life, influences and deep connections to her African roots.

Dr Michael Nwanoku adjusted himself in his seat as the next announcement was about to be made. He and his wife Margaret had looked forward to this day for several weeks and he had made the point of wearing his full Igbo Chief’s regalia, complete with the “Ozo” Cap and Coral beads. After all it was not every day one visited Buckingham Palace, neither was it every day that one witnessed one’s daughter receiving the award of a national honour from Queen Elizabeth II herself. His daughter, through sheer talent and hard work, had conquered years of adversity and some might say, prejudice to emerge as one of Britain’s finest Classical Musicians and academics. Almost in the same way, he and his Irish wife had conquered racism and ignorance in the course of their long and happy marriage. Dr and Mrs Nwanoku had too many good reasons to be proud of their eldest daughter, the talented Chi-chi Nwanoku, now Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) as she received her award from the Queen.

Chinyere (Chi-chi) Adah Nwanoku, was born in Fulham, London, in 1956 to Michael Nwanoku and the former Margaret Ivey. Her parents had met at a chance encounter at a dance in London, in 1955 and were inseparable from then on and they got married shortly afterwards. The young couple faced prejudice on account of their Interracial relationship at the time, recalling a period in Britain, where signs on Houses, advertising lodging vacancies, would boldly state, “No blacks, no dogs, no Irish”. The couple humorously recalled thanking God they didn’t have a dog (since they were both black and Irish)…

Read the entire article here.

‘Free State of Jones’ depicts realities of Reconstruction

The Post and Courier
Charleston, South Carolina
2016-07-03

Adam Domby, Assistant Professor of History
College of Charleston, Charleston, South Carolina

“Free State of Jones” is the film Reconstruction historians have been waiting for. Reconstruction, which encompassed the decade following the Civil War, is perhaps the most overlooked era in American history. It is the only period that doesn’t have a National Park Service site commemorating it.

Reconstruction, which witnessed the passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments and the first widespread political enfranchisement of African-Americans, is ripe with stories for filmmakers.

Yet, since the racist celebration of the Ku Klux Klan in “Birth of a Nation” (1915) and “Gone With the Wind” (1939), no major Hollywood film has addressed the violence and drama of the era.

Director Gary Ross has begun to fix this oversight by making a Reconstruction film disguised as a Civil War action flick…

Read the entire article here.

Mary Seacole statue unveiled at London ceremony

Nursing Standard
2016-07-01

Alistair Kleebauer

More than 200 years after her birth and 12 years after a campaign started to recognise her achievements, a statue to nurse heroine Mary Seacole has been unveiled in London.

To applause and loud cheers the permanent memorial to Mrs Seacole was unveiled in the garden of St Thomas’ Hospital on the banks of the River Thames.

The Jamaican-born nurse set up the British Hotel near Balaclava to provide soldiers with food and care during the Crimean War…

…British Army

Mrs Seacole, who was born in 1805 and died in 1881, nursed victims of cholera outbreaks in Jamaica and Panama in the 1850s, cared for victims of a yellow fever epidemic in 1853, and supervised British Army nursing services in Jamaica.

She was named the greatest black Briton in a 2004 poll.

The Times’ Crimean War correspondent Sir William Howard Russell wrote the following words about Ms Seacole’s service during the conflict, which have been inscribed on a memorial disc at the back of the statue:

‘I trust that England will not forget one who nursed her sick, who sought out her wounded to aid and succour them, and who performed the last offices for some of her illustrious dead.’…

Read the entire article here.

Ranger’s voice spans East Bay history

San Francisco Chronicle
2010-01-31

Lee Hildebrand, Special to The Chronicle

Betty Reid Soskin is a “phenomenal woman,” to borrow the title of a famous poem by Maya Angelou. In her 88 years, Betty has been a shipyard worker, proprietor of a record store, housewife and mother of four, singer and composer of art songs, community activist and, for the past three years, a ranger at Rosie the Riveter National Historical Park in Richmond.

She’s the oldest active National Park Service ranger in the country and works at the park six hours a day, five days a week, doing community outreach and giving guided tours of the now dormant Kaiser Shipyards where she worked during World War II.

Born in Detroit

She was born Betty Charbonnet in Detroit in 1921 to bilingual Creole parents from New Orleans. She has traced her European ancestry to France in the 17th and 18th centuries. The earliest relative of African heritage she’s been able to identify was her great-great-grandmother, a former slave named Celestine who married her former master, Cajun plantation owner Eduouard Breaux. Their daughter, Betty’s great-grandmother Leontine Breaux, was 19 when they married.

“Marriages were relatively common between Cajun slave owners and their slaves,” Soskin explains. “Their marriage papers are dated 1865, at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation. His signature is there alongside her ‘X’. Her name is given, in French, as ‘Celestine of no last name.'”…

Read the entire article here.

Coin given to US’s oldest park ranger by Barack Obama stolen in home invasion

The Guardian
2016-06-30

Sam Levin

Ranger Betty Soskin holds a photo of herself has a young woman. Photograph: Alamy

The White House is sending a replacement coin to 94-year-old Betty Soskin, who says she hopes she can recover the original from violent home intruder

The oldest park ranger in the US suffered a violent home invasion in which the suspect stole a commemorative coin Barack Obama gave to the 94-year-old woman, according to California police.

Park officials said on Thursday that the White House is sending a replacement coin to Betty Soskin, who works at the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front national historic park in northern California. But the ranger said she hopes she can recover the original…

…Soskin is well-known locally and within the park service for her talks and tours at the Rosie the Riveter park where she often tells personal stories about her life as a young black woman working at the Richmond shipyards during the second world war.

Meeting the president and receiving the coin was a powerful experience for Soskin, Leatherman said. At the time, she brought with her a picture of her grandmother, who was born into slavery…

Read the entire entire article here.

The 2020 Census and the Re-Indigenization of America

Truthout
2016-06-26

Roberto Rodriguez
Mexican American & Raza Studies Department
University of Arizona

As the 2020 US census looms, this arcane ritual will once again result in the painting of a false picture of the demographic makeup of the United States. While the nation has been getting “browner” for many decades, the US Census Bureau has actually been complicit in obfuscating this change, which I have long described as demographic genocide. Yet this time around, due to a long-overdue change in the census, rather than being corralled against their will into the “white” category, many Mexican, Central American, Andean and Caribbean peoples will no longer be checking the white racial box.

Countering the delusions of previous generations, we know that simply checking the white box has never meant being treated as white anyway. This time around, per this change, many of us will instead (again) be checking the American Indian box, while rejecting the bureaucratically imposed Hispanic/Latino box. Others will check and affirm both.

This change however, will not alter the historic de-Indigenization schemes of this society, including those of the Census Bureau, which has always been an ideological instrument of empire. The census does not just count people, but actually helps to shape the nation’s self-image, character and national narrative. It helps tell the world “who we are” — who the United States is.

And just precisely who or what is the United States supposed to be? God’s chosen people?…

Read the entire article here.

Babies Of Color Are Now The Majority, Census Says

National Public Radio
2016-07-01

Kendra Yoshinaga

Today’s generation of schoolchildren looks much different than one just a few decades ago. Nonwhites are expected to become the majority of the nation’s children by 2020, as our colleague Bill Chappell reported last year. This is now the reality among the very youngest Americans: babies.

Babies of color now outnumber non-Hispanic white babies (1 year or younger), according to new estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. The newest estimate shows that on July 1, 2015, the population of racial or ethnic minority babies was 50.2 percent…

…NPR could not reach any babies for comment.

Read the entire article here.

Colorblind

Salon
2007-01-22

Debra J. Dickerson

Barack Obama would be the great black hope in the next presidential race — if he were actually black.

I am confident that I have held out longer than any other pundit to weigh in on both the phenomenon that is Barack Obama and the question of whether race will trump gender as America looks toward election 2008.

I had irritably avoided columnizing on these crucial topics (though I have been quoted by others) for several, somewhat unorthodox, reasons. First, because the Clinton-Obama stand-off has been more than well-covered — and in an overly simplistic, insubstantial, annoyingly celebritized way. (Horrors, Obama smokes! But isn’t he hot in his swim trunks?) I was waiting for the discussion to get serious and, at last, it has. Finally, we’re asking the tough questions; instead of just crowing that he’s raised $20 million, we’re starting to wonder where it came from and what will be asked for in return for that much sugar. Why is the supposedly eco-friendly New Age senator supporting coal, however liquefied, as a way to wean ourselves off foreign oil? Wouldn’t be his home state’s powerful coal lobby, would it? And then there’s his support for ethanol, which, strangely enough, comes mainly from corn-rich Iowa — site of the first presidential caucus, if I’m not mistaken. All much more important than why he doesn’t wear a tie…

Read the entire article here.

What black America won’t miss about Obama

Cable News Network (CNN)
2016-07-01

John Blake

(CNN) President Barack Obama was delivering a speech before a joint session of Congress when a white lawmaker jabbed his right index finger at Obama and called him a liar.

The heckling came during his September 2009 address on health care. Obama was telling lawmakers that his plan wouldn’t cover undocumented immigrants when Republican Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina yelled, “You lie!”

Linnyette Richardson-Hall, an African-American event planner, watched Wilson’s outburst on live television in disbelief.

“My alter-ego, the hood-chick, came out of me,” says Richardson-Hall. “I said, ‘I know you just didn’t do that.’ To see him get disrespected so badly, it gut-punches you.”…

Richardson-Hall has restrained herself more than she ever expected in the past eight years. She fumed when she saw a poster of Obama dressed as an African witch doctor, online images of First Lady Michelle Obama depicted as a monkey, and racist Facebook comments by white people she thought she knew. Now, as Obama approaches his final months in office, she and others have come to a grim conclusion:

I didn’t know how racist America was until it elected its first black president…

…Change No. 3: He’s become ‘my brother from another mother’

It may be hard to remember now, but Obama wasn’t actually considered the first black president — Bill Clinton nabbed that honor. Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison described him that way in a 1998 New Yorker essay.

“After all,” she wrote, “Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.”

Obama wasn’t a beloved figure in the black community when he first ran for the presidency. Civil rights leaders were slow to warm to him. Others said he wasn’t black enough. His mixed-race heritage, exotic upbringing overseas and professorial Ivy League persona didn’t fit the traditional black leader mold.

Some black intellectuals said Obama wasn’t even African-American because his father was from the east African nation of Kenya.

“Obama isn’t black. Black, in our political and social reality, means those descended from West African slaves,” Debra J. Dickerson wrote in a 2007 column for Salon magazine.

If Obama wasn’t black then, he sure is now — because he’s been treated with such racial contempt, some blacks say…

Read the entire article here.