Mixed Race Studies

Passing in White America

Chicago Humanities Festival
2015-12-18

Between the 18th and 20th centuries, countless African Americans passed as white, leaving behind families, friends, and community. It was, as Stanford historian Allyson Hobbs writes, a chosen exile, a separation from one racial identity and a leap into another. Her work explores the way this racial indeterminacy offered an escape from slavery in the antebellum South and helped defy Jim Crow. But in looking back at both American history and the story of her own family, Hobbs also uncovers the terrible grief, loneliness, and isolation of passing, and the ways it continues to influence our thinking about racial identity and politics.

This program is presented as part of the annual Karla Scherer Endowed Lecture Series for the University of Chicago and is presented in partnership with the Stanford Humanities Center.

This program was recorded on October 25, 2015 as part of the 26th annual Chicago Humanities Festival.

Old Dixie Highway renamed President Barack Obama Highway in Florida city

The Washington Post
2015-12-19

Elahe Izadi, Reporter

Workers install a new sign in Riviera Beach, Fla., on Thursday. (City of Riviera Beach)

Old Dixie Highway is no more in Riviera Beach, Fla. Instead, motorists are driving on President Barack Obama Highway.

Riviera Beach officials renamed the portion of the highway in their city limits, and the new sign carrying the name of the nation’s first black president went up Thursday. Old Dixie, officials said, paid homage to an era that glorified slavery.

The name was “symbolic of racism, symbolic of the Klan, symbolic of cross burnings, and today we are stepping up to a new day, a new era,” Riviera Beach Mayor Thomas Masters told WPTV on Thursday.

The street itself carried a painful history for some. Dora Johnson, 77, told the television station that she once witnessed a cross-burning on Old Dixie Highway. Johnson will be given the old sign that has been removed, Masters told the Palm Beach Post.

The city council’s August vote to rename Old Dixie came at a time when many communities in the South were reconsidering Confederate flags and monuments. A national debate over such symbols began anew following the June shooting of nine parishioners by a white gunman inside a historic black church in South Carolina…

Read the entire article here.

New York Times Just Boarded the Post-Racial Express: A critical response to “Choose Your Own Identity”

Multiracial Asian Families
2015-12-16

Sharon H. Chang

screen shot from NY Times Magazine

This Monday, The New York Times Magazine published a very unfortunate essay about multiracial Asian children: Choose Your Own Identity, by author and mother Bonnie Tsui. In it, Tsui (who is not multiracial herself) puzzles over her children’s mixed-race identities, what they may or may not choose to be one day, while taking a brief foray back/forward in time to consider the sociohistorical context of mixed-race and America’s impending multiracial future. After mulling on the subject for about ten paragraphs, she concludes with a seeming liberatory message on behalf of her children: “…the truth is, I can’t tell my sons what to feel…I can only tell them what I think about my own identity and listen hard to what they have to tell me in turn.”

Sounds innocent enough, yes?

No…

Read the entire article here.

Forward Passes

The New York Review of Books
2015-12-17

Darryl Pinckney

Loving Day by Mat Johnson; Spiegel and Grau, 287 pp., $26.00

The importing of human beings into the US from Africa to be sold as slaves was outlawed in 1808, after which the slave markets of the southern states traded in black people born in America. The rules of New World slavery decreed that a person’s status was derived from that of the mother, not the father. A slave owner’s children by an enslaved woman were, firstly, assets. Neither Frederick Douglass nor Booker T. Washington considered himself mixed-race, because of the one-drop rule that determined how much black blood made a person black. They loathed the thought of their slave-owning white fathers. Douglass never saw his mother’s face in the daylight, because she was always going to or coming back from the fields in the dark.

What outraged white southerners about Uncle Tom’s Cabin was not only that Harriet Beecher Stowe asserted that black people were better Christians than white people; she was also frank about the immorality of the white man’s relations with the black women in his power. But Stowe had as much trouble as Lincoln in imagining the social destiny of mixed-race people who were pink enough in fact to pass for white (a problem central to Mat Johnson’s brilliantly satirical new novel Loving Day)…

Read the entire review here.

Bombay To Brooklyn: New York’s Indian Jews Strive To Preserve Heritage

News India Times
New York, New York
2015-12-14

Ela Dutt, Managing Editor

Siona Benjamin. Photo by Sami studio

Siona Benjamin, a greater New York City artist, hangs her “very typical” Indian Jewish Mezuzah, a prayer scroll in an engraved casing, on her door to remind her of her cultural roots. “Every time I walk through my main door, it reminds me of my Indian Jewish background,” especially so during Hanukkah, the Jewish Festival of Lights that began Dec. 6 and stretches over 8 days.

Originally from Bombay, Benjamin’s art is a blend of her background growing up in a Hindu and Muslim society, educated in Catholic and Zoroastrian schools, raised Jewish and now living in America. She is among the barely 100 or so Bene Israelis left in the Tri-state area, and the 350 or so around the U.S. according to Rabbi Romiel Daniel, rabbi and president of the Rego Park Jewish Center who since 1995, has tried to keep his flock together and raise awareness among the second and third generation Bene Israeli youth.

Some of the history of this small and unique community is captured in the exhibit “Baghdadis & the Bene Israel in Bollywood & Beyond” that opened in early November at the Center for Jewish History in New York City and will be on till April 1. Presented by the American Sephardi Federation, most of the items at the exhibit come from the Joyce and Kenneth Robbins collection, and highlight how Indian Jews, women in particular, were leaders in Bollywood and beyond at a time when custom and tradition kept many other Indian women out of Bollywood.

In exploring the largely forgotten history of the Bene Israel of India, the exhibition showcases the careers of Pramila (Esther Victoria Abraham), (Florence Ezekiel) Nadira, Sulochana (Ruby Myers), Abraham and Rachel Sofaer, Ezra Mir, RJ Minney, and Joseph David Penkar, each of whom played multiple roles in front of and behind-the-scenes in Bollywood…

Read the entire article here.

History Matters: Nanticoke tribe seeks to sustain its identity

Delaware Public Media: Delaware’s source for NPR News
WDDE 91.1, Dover
WMPH 91.7, Wilmington
2015-06-26

Anne Hoffman, Youth Producer and General Assignment Reporter

History Matters examines the Nanticoke Tribe of Delaware’s fight to maintain its identity.

They’re called Delaware’s Forgotten Folks.

In the second part of a two-part History Matters – produced in conjunction with the Delaware Historical Society, we continue our in-depth look at the Nanticoke Tribe.

“My name is William Daisey. And my Native American name is Thunder Eagle. And I’m chief of the Nanticoke Indian Tribe of Delaware.”

Chief Daisey was born in 1931 in Millsboro. Back then, he says, transportation was just “Model T’s” and “horse and buggies.” So the farming town in Southern Delaware where he grew up felt a million miles away from bustling Wilmington or even Dover.

“We were taught how to hunt, fish make bow and arrows, rabbit traps. We were taught which berries to pick, which fruit was edible,” said Daisey.

Families back then passed on what are called lifeway traditions, curing illnesses with old remedies and using Native American ways to gather more food than just that year’s harvest. From the time he could walk, Chief Daisey was learning…

Read or listen to the story here. Download the story here.

Do White-Passing People of Color Have Privilege?

Everyday Feminism
2015-09-07

Marina Watanabe

Today I’m going to be answering a question from one of my Patreon patrons (which sounds really redundant) about being a person of color who happens to be white-passing.

Before I start this, I want to explain the concept of white-passing. It basically means what it sounds like. It’s when you’re a person of color, whether that be Asian, Native American, black or mixed raced and other people perceive you, either some of the time or all of the time as white.

The question I received is from a person named Susie. She actually has a channel on YouTube which I’m going to link below. She titled her question “Passing Privilege” and she said,

“I am half Native Alaskan and half white but since I look mostly white, I am constantly told by strangers, specifically non-Natives, that I am not Native. It’s a weird concept. I know you’ve talked about it before in a video but is it the same with Asian culture? With Native culture you can be extremely cultural but if you don’t have dark skin, you aren’t really ‘Native.’”

As someone who is half Asian and half white, I totally feel you on this. One of the weirdest things I’ve noticed about being on YouTube is that typically in my everyday life, a lot of people read me as Asian or Japanese but then on the internet when I make videos, they assume that I’m white much more often…

Read the entire article here.

History Matters: Delaware’s Forgotten Folks

Delaware Public Media: Delaware’s source for NPR News
WDDE 91.1, Dover
WMPH 91.7, Wilmington
2015-06-05

Anne Hoffman, Youth Producer and General Assignment Reporter

History Matters examines the Levin Sockum case and its impact on the Nanticoke Tribe of Delaware

They’re called Delaware’s Forgotten Folks.

For the next two editions of History Matters – produced in conjunction with the Delaware Historical Society, we’ll be taking an in-depth look at the Nanticoke Tribe. Part II is here.

They were one of the first tribes to meet Europeans back in 1608, and very soon after the tribe began to mix with Africans and whites.

Members of the Nanticoke tribe have fought a long battle to be fully recognized as Native Americans. They say that battle has been difficult.

Tribal members speak of what they call a paper genocide, pointing to early Census takers who were instructed to mark Nanticoke people as simply black or mixed race.

Perhaps the earliest instance of this paper genocide occurred during an 1855 court case that lives on in the memories of Nanticoke people today…

…And so what began as a simple case about selling gun shot became decisive in the destiny of the Nanticoke people.

“The question was, was he an Indian, or was he black? And the assessment was, if he were to be found that he were black or mulatto, then it would have been illegal for him to have made the sale. So it ended up being a racial trial,” says historian Gabrielle Tayac.

And here’s where things got a little crazy. The prosecution brought out an 87 year old woman named Lydia Clark. They argued that she was the last real Nanticoke, and that Levin Sockum could not be Nanticoke…

Read or listen to the story here. Download the story here.

Stateless in the Dominican Republic

Columbia Law School
2015-12-15

Media Contact: Public Affairs, 212-854-2650 or publicaffairs@law.columbia.edu

Human Rights Lawyers Champion the Rights of Disenfranchised Dominicans of Haitian Descent, in a Talk at Columbia Law School

New York, December 15, 2015—The plight of more than 200,000 people in the Dominican Republic who were stripped of their citizenship two years ago by that nation’s highest court was discussed by two human rights attorneys at Columbia Law School. The newly stateless people were Dominican-born to undocumented Haitian immigrant parents or grandparents, and they now face the threat of forced deportation, leading the lawyers to draw parallels to the current debate in the United States over birthright citizenship.

The Nov. 19 event—“Immigration and Black Lives: Haitian Deportations in the Dominican Republic”—was sponsored by Columbia Law School’s Latino/a Law Students Association and Black Law Students Association, and cosponsored by Social Justice Initiatives, the Columbia Journal of Race and Law, and the Human Rights Institute. It was organized by Daily Guerrero ’17, who came to the United States from the Dominican Republic when she was six years old.

Cassandre Théano, an associate legal officer for the Open Society Justice Initiative, explained that in 2013, the Dominican Republic’s highest court denied the daughter of Haitian migrants her “cédula”—or identity papers—confiscated her birth certificate, and applied the decision to anyone born after 1929, revoking the citizenship of Haitian descendants who had been living in the Dominican Republic for generations. “Pretty much every international organization was shocked, and there was a lot of uproar,” Théano said…

“This is really a racial justice issue,” said Natasha Lycia Ora Bannan, president of the National Lawyers Guild and an associate counsel at LatinoJustice PRLDEF, which works with low-wage Latina immigrant workers in the United States. Nearly three-quarters of the Dominican Republic’s population is made up of people of mixed-race heritage, while 95 percent of the Haitian population is black. A language difference also exists, as most Dominicans speak Spanish and Haitians Haitian Creole. “These policies are targeting black and brown people,” Bannan said…

Read the entire article here.

Mexico ‘discovers’ 1.4 million black Mexicans—they just had to ask

Fusion
2015-12-15

Rafa Fernandez De Castro

For the first time in its history, Mexico’s census bureau has recognized the country’s black population in a national survey that found there are approximately 1.4 million citizens (1.2% of the population) who self-identify as “Afro-Mexican” or “Afro-descendant.”

The survey found that more women identify as black than men, by about 705,000 to 677,000. It also found that most Afro-Mexicans live in the states of Guerrero, Oaxaca and Veracruz, which is not entirely unsurprising given Mexico’s history.

Miguel Cervera, director general of sociodemographic statistics for the country’s census bureau (known as INEGI), told Fusion the 2015 survey is a preliminary effort to register demographic changes in preparation for the 2020 national census. He says Afro-Mexicans have always been included in past surveys, but were never given the option to identify themselves as such…

Read the entire article here.