Mixed Race Studies

New book ‘A Chosen Exile’

WREG-TV
Memphis, Tennessee
2015-12-17

For nearly 200 years, countless African-Americans chose to leave their families, friends and communities to live in exile.

Allyson Hobbs reveals this piece of history and how it affected race relations in her new book “A Chosen Exile.”

Watch the interview here.

The Rise and Rise of Misty Copeland

The Year in Style 2015
The New York Times
2015-12-18

Ruth La Ferla

This year, Misty Copeland’s fame rose from her performances in ballet, on Broadway and in commercials. Credit Bon Duke for The New York Times, taken at Steps on Broadway in New York City.

Captivating a general audience, the prima ballerina is a crossover star: from ballet to Broadway to commercial fame.

Cherry Peace stood, feet firmly planted, at the stage door of the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in October. She was waiting for Misty Copeland, who had just wrapped up a matinee performance of Paul Taylor’s “Company B” at the American Ballet Theater, to kick off her toe shoes and exit.

There was no sign of Ms. Copeland, but Ms. Peace, 52, a writer who had traveled from Reno, Nev., expressly to see her, stayed rooted to the spot, hoping, if not for an autograph, at least for a glimpse of her idol.

“When you get older,” she said, “there are certain things you want to do. Seeing Misty Copeland was on my bucket list.”

Ms. Peace was among legions of fans — schoolgirls and seniors, New Yorkers and visitors, balletomanes and oddly assorted thrill seekers — who had thronged to Lincoln Center to see Ms. Copeland perform, in the Taylor ballet, and as Odile/Odette in “Swan Lake,” a crowning role for many dancers, and the first in the company for a black ballerina…

Red the entire article here.

Putting racism, white supremacy, and white privilege in context

Chimes: The official student newspaper of Calvin College
Grand Rapids, Michigan
2015-12-11

Joseph Kuilema, Professor of Social Work

A group of students went to write positive messages on snow on cars following the racist comments that were written. Photo Credit Katelyn Bosch

On Sunday, Nov. 22, two members of our community wrote “white power” and drew a swastika in the snow on a car. Many members of our community condemned these actions as hateful and totally incompatible with our mission. In some ways, that’s the easy part. What has been more difficult is to acknowledge that what occurred was not an isolated incident, a freak occurrence in an otherwise loving and inclusive community. While few members of this community openly espouse white supremacy, many members of our community continue to deny white privilege. It must be clearly stated that those who deny white privilege functionally believe in white supremacy, whether they have the courage to write it on a car or not.

In his remarks on the incident, President Le Roy rightly identified the statement “white power” and the swastika with white supremacy and the ideology that shaped Nazi Germany, apartheid South Africa, chattel slavery in the U.S. and the Jim Crow South. He focused on two scriptures, the story of Jesus and the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53-8:11), and Jesus warning that before we remove the splinter in the eye of the other we ought to attend to the plank in our own (Matthew 7:1-5, Luke 6:37-42). He did this largely in the context of not demonizing those who committed these acts, and that is an appropriate concern. Christians should never reduce anyone to the worst thing they have done. None of us stands innocent before the Lord.

However, we should never mention Nazi Germany, apartheid South Africa or the Jim Crow South without identifying the connections to us here at Calvin College and the brutality right here in Grand Rapids…

…At the same time, I have to respectfully disagree with President Le Roy’s assertion that we are all racists. I, Joseph Kuilema, am certainly a racist. As a white male, I benefit tremendously from institutions and systems that have been built by and for people like me. This is how the social sciences define racism, not as merely the product of prejudice, explicit or implicit bias, but a system of power based on the invention of the “white race” by people in power. By this definition, we are not all racists…

Read the entire article here.

Play means to help people of mixed race find sense of belonging

MPR News
Minnesota Public Radio
2015-12-15

Marianne Combs, Arts and Culture Reporter

“Purple Cloud,” written by Jessica Huang and directed by Randy Reyes, looks at three generations of hapa, or mixed race, Chinese immigrants as they search to find a place where they belong. Courtesy Keri Pickett | Mu Performing Arts

“What are you?” It’s a question that people of mixed race get all the time.

“Purple Cloud,” a new play produced by Mu Performing Arts, explores what it means to be of mixed race. It’s inspired by playwright Jessica Huang’s own experiences growing up mixed race, and it tells the story of one family’s journey of self-discovery.

“For most of my life I had been struggling with feeling outside, because I’m not white and I’m not Chinese, and I didn’t really know where I belonged,” she explained. “But there was a theater director in town … and she saw me across the room and she pointed at me and said, ‘You — you’re hapa.’

“And I had no idea what that word meant.”…

Read or listen to the story here.

Rethinking Multiracial Formation in the United States: Toward an Intersectional Approach

Sociology of Race and Ethnicity
Volume 2, Number 1 (January 2016)
pages 27-41
DOI: 10.1177/2332649215591864

Celeste Vaughan Curington
Department of Sociology
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

This article forwards an integrative multiracial formation perspective that analyzes race, class, and gender as complex social systems, predicated on racism, patriarchy, and economic exploitation. I apply this new framework to three distinct racial projects—slavery, miscegenation law, and the multiracial movement of the 1990s. An analysis of the linkages between the several racial projects that have produced multiraciality over time shows the larger context in which those in power were able to shape the meaning of multiraciality in a way that was created by and constitutive of privilege and power at the intersections of class, gender, and racial hierarchies in the United States.

Read or purchase the article here.

Putting History in Its Place: An Interview with Bernardine Evaristo

Contemporary Women’s Writing
Volume 9 Issue 3 November 2015
pages 433-448
DOI: 10.1093/cww/vpv003

Jennifer Gustar, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies
University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus, Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada

Bernardine Evaristo was born in Woolwich, London, to an English mother of Irish descent and a Nigerian father, who had immigrated to the UK. She has been actively publishing since the release of her first book of poetry, Island of Abraham (1994). She has published six other works since: the semiautobiographical Lara (1997); The Emperor’s Babe (2001), a novel in verse, based in Roman Londinium; Soul Tourists (2005), a hybrid of poetry and prose that explores the spectral black history of Europe; Blonde Roots (2008), a satirical novel that inverts the historical realities of the transatlantic slave trade; Hello Mum (2010), an epistolary novella that explores a fourteen-year-old boy’s sense of disenfranchisement and the consequent lure of gang culture; and, most recently, Mr. Loverman (2013), the story of a closeted homosexual Trinidadian-British Londoner, who must confront the damage perpetuated by his own silences. Evaristo has served as coeditor of two literary anthologies: NW15 (Granta/British Council, 2007) and Ten New Poets (Bloodaxe, 2010). As editor, she has been instrumental in both mentoring and promoting the visibility of black British writers. In 2010, she guest-edited an issue of Wasafiri, entitled Black Britain: Beyond Definition, that celebrates contemporary black writing in the UK. Her 2012 guest-edited volume of the UK’s leading poetry journal Poetry Review, entitled Offending Frequencies, features more poets of color than any previous single issue. In September of 2014, she investigated the publishing industry’s attitude toward women of color as guest editor of Mslexia. She currently works as a Reader in Creative Writing at Brunel University, where, in 2011, she instituted the Brunel University African Poetry Prize. Two of her works have been adapted for radio: The Emperor’s Babe for BBC 1 (2012) and Hello Mum for BBC 4 (2012). She was elected Fellow of the…

Read or purchase the article here.

Rachel Dolezal: ‘I wasn’t identifying as black to upset people. I was being me’

The Guardian
2015-12-13

Chris McGreal, Senior Writer
Guardian US

Rachel Dolezal at her home in Spokane. Photograph: Annie Kuster for the Guardian

She became a global hate figure this year when she was outed as a ‘race faker’. Here, she talks about her puritanical Christian upbringing, the backlash that left her surviving on food stamps – and why she would still do the same again

Anyone looking for clues to the real Rachel Dolezal would do well to begin with her birth certificate. In the bottom right-hand corner, under the names of the parents who brought her world crashing down by outing her as a white woman masquerading as black, is a box for the identity of the medic who delivered her as a baby. In it is written “Jesus Christ”…

Read the entire interview here.

Choose Your Own Identity

The New York Times Magazine
2015-12-14

Bonnie Tsui

A series of portraits from “The Hapa Project” by the artist Kip Fulbeck. Kip Fulbeck/The Hapa Project

I never realized how little I understood race until I tried to explain it to my 5-year-old son. Our family story doesn’t seem too complicated: I’m Chinese-American and my husband is white, an American of English-Dutch-Irish descent; we have two children. My 5-year-old knows my parents were born in China, and that I speak Cantonese sometimes. He has been to Hong Kong and Guangzhou to visit his gung-gung, my father. But when I asked him the other day if he was Chinese, he said no.

“You’re Chinese, but I’m not,” he told me, with certainty. “But I eat Chinese food.” This gave me pause. How could I tell him that I wasn’t talking about food or cultural heritage or where we were born? (Me, I’m from Queens.) I had no basis to describe race to him other than the one I’d taken pains to avoid: how we look and how other people treat us as a result.

My son probably doesn’t need me to tell him we look different. He’s a whir-in-a-blender mix of my husband and me; he has been called Croatian and Italian. More than once in his life, he will be asked, “What are you?” But in that moment when he confidently asserted himself as “not Chinese,” I felt a selfish urge for him to claim a way of describing himself that included my side of his genetic code. And yet I knew that I had no business telling him what his racial identity was. Today, he might feel white; tomorrow he might feel more Chinese. The next day, more, well, both. Who’s to say but him?

Racial identity can be fluid. More and more, it will have to be: Multiracial Americans are on the rise, growing at a rate three times as fast as the country’s population as a whole, according to a new Pew Research Center study released in June. Nearly half of mixed-race Americans today are younger than 18, and about 7 percent of the U.S. adult population could be considered multiracial, though they might not call themselves that. The need to categorize people into specific race groups will never feel entirely relevant to this population, whose perceptions of who they are can change by the day, depending on the people they’re with…

Read the entire article here.

First Baptist unveils historic marker

The Tennesseean
Nashville, Tennessee
2015-12-09

Jennifer Easton

If people of faith go to First Baptist Church on East Winchester Street looking for a sign, they’ll find it.

Sumner County’s oldest known African-American church celebrated another milestone Dec. 6 with the dedication of a historic marker commemorating the 150-year-old church’s early beginnings and role in the community.

Sunday’s event closed out a year of special events marking the church’s sesquicentennial celebration that kicked off last January.

Founded in 1865 by the Rev. Robert Belote, an 80-year-old ex-slave from Castalian Springs, services were first held in a log cabin on the church’s present-day site.

“Its first members were freed slaves. They had no jobs, no education, no organizations to help them, no schools and nowhere to go,” said the Rev. Derrick Jackson, pastor of First Baptist since 2001…

…Expansion and Education

The church experienced tremendous growth and expansion under the leadership of the Rev. Peter Vertrees, who served as pastor from 1874-1926.

Vertrees was a prominent local leader who established numerous churches and schools. He founded East Fork Missionary Baptist Association, made up of 28 churches in Sumner, Davidson, Trousdale, Robertson, Macon and Wilson counties. He is considered one of the most influential figures in Sumner County and Middle Tennessee history.

Born in Kentucky in 1840 to a white mother and mulatto father, he served in the Civil War as a black Confederate soldier, and afterward he moved to Gallatin.

Under Vertrees’ leadership, First Baptist expanded its congregation and built a framed church, according to Brinkley. A violent windstorm destroyed the framed building around 1905, and a new building was erected from bricks Vertrees purchased cheaply from an old penitentiary. He served as principal of South Gallatin School, adjacent to First Baptist Church…

Read the entire article here.

Ghost Stories: Allyson Hobbs uncovers the fascinating history of racial passing in the United States

Chapter 16: a community of Tennessee writers, readers & passersby
2015-12-11

Aram Goudsouzian, Professor of History
University of Memphis, Memphis, Tennessee

In A Chosen Exile, Allyson Hobbs analyzes how and why black people passed as white throughout American history. An assistant professor of history at Stanford University, Hobbs’s extensive research yields the stories of runaway slaves, Reconstruction-era politicians and their wives, esteemed intellectuals, and ordinary people who made fateful decisions about how they defined themselves—finding new opportunities as whites, but losing their old identities as blacks. The Organization of American Historians awarded A Chosen Exile both the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize, for the best first book on the subject of American history, and the Lawrence Levine Prize, for the best book on American cultural history.

Prior to her upcoming appearance at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Hobbs answered questions via email from Chapter 16:

Chapter 16: One might assume that writing a history of racial passing is nearly impossible, given that those who crossed the color line kept their actions hidden, out of the historical record. How did you come to believe this was a viable project, and what sources were available to you as a historian?

Allyson Hobbs: When I was in my first year of graduate school, my aunt told me a story about our family that was so compelling, but also so tragic, that I simply could not stop thinking about it. A distant cousin of ours grew up on the South Side of Chicago in the 1940s and attended Wendell Phillips High School, the first predominantly African-American high school in Chicago. But after she graduated from high school, her life took a radically different turn. She was very light-skinned—she looked white—and in the hopes of improving my cousin’s life, her mother insisted that she move to California and assume the life of a white woman. My cousin pleaded that she did not want to leave her family, her friends, and the only life she had ever known. But her mother was determined, and the matter had been decided.

Years later, after my cousin had married a white man and raised white children who knew nothing of their mother’s past, she received an inconvenient telephone call. Her mother was calling to tell her that her father was dying and she must come home immediately. Despite these dire circumstances, my cousin never returned to Chicago’s South Side. She was a white woman now, and there was simply no turning back…

…Conventional wisdom tells us that a history of passing cannot be written: those who passed left no trace in the historical record, and only novelists, playwrights, and poets could write about this clandestine practice. But I believed that the sources were out there, just waiting to be discovered. So I went into the archives looking for ghosts, hoping to tell their stories.

To find these ghosts, I had to seek out unconventional stories that varied at different historical moments. I started with literature. There was an explosion of literature on passing during the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, so I began by reading the correspondence of the authors who wrote about passing. Some of these novelists and poets had passed themselves, while others were fascinated by the topic because they had friends and family members who were passing. Luckily for me, they wrote about passing in their letters. “Guess who I saw? John. And he is passing!” This was a familiar refrain in much of the correspondence that I read in the archives.

I also looked at runaway-slave advertisements, diary entries, newspaper accounts of sensational cases, the papers of eugenicists who crafted laws designed to police the “one drop rule,” students’ records at colleges and universities who passed as white, and articles in popular magazines. At first I worried that I wouldn’t find anything. But soon I realized that the sources on passing are abundant. It was an embarrassment of riches…

Read the entire interview here.