Mixed Race Studies

University of Salford installs new Chancellor, Professor Jackie Kay MBE

University of Salford
Salford, United Kingdom
Friday, 2015-05-01

The University celebrated the official installation of it’s sixth Chancellor, renowned poet Professor Jackie Kay MBE, at a grand ceremony in Peel Hall on Wednesday 29 April 2015.

Jackie Kay MBE was formally initiated in a ceremony that saw celebrated Accrington writer Jeanette Winterson and Salford City Mayor Ian Stewart sing the praises of the renowned Scottish poet who will now head up the university.

The role of Chancellor will see distinguished, award-winning writer of fiction, poetry and plays act as the ceremonial head of the institution and play an important part in representing the University of Salford and supporting the work of students and the wider community.

In addition to her role as Chancellor, Jackie will also take up the position of University ‘Writer in Residence.’ This role involves contributing major commissions to enhance learning and teaching, and broaden the students’ experience at the University…

…Jackie has published five collections of poetry for adults and several for children. Jackie’s first book of poetry, The Adoption Papers won the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year and a commendation from the Forward Poetry Prize judges.

Her other awards include the Guardian First Book Award Fiction Prize for her celebrated first novel Trumpet and the Somerset Maugham Award for Other Lovers.

She also writes extensively for the stage and screen. Her play Twice Over was the first by a Black writer to be produced by Gay Sweatshop Theatre Group in 1988. Her plays have been performed at The Royal Exchange and more recently she wrote Manchester Lines for the Library Theatre.

Her drama The Lamplighter looks in depth at the Atlantic slave trade and was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and published by Bloodaxe.

Jackie has lived in Manchester for over 15 years and is Cultural Fellow at Glasgow Caledonian University. Jackie is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle and her 2010 book Red Dust Road is currently being made into a play for television…

Read the entire article here.

University of Salford officially appoints renowned poet Professor Jackie Kay as their new chancellor

Manchester Evening News
Manchester, England
2015-05-09

Charlotte Dobson, Social Affairs Reporter

Prof Jackie Kay MBE appointed as the Chancellor of the University of Salford

Professor Jackie Kay MBE was formally initiated at a ceremony attended by fellow celebrated writer Jeanette Winterson on Wednesday.

A celebrated poet has been appointed as the Chancellor of the University of Salford.

Prof Jackie Kay MBE, an award-winning writer of fiction, poetry and plays, said it was an honour to be chosen for the role.

Prof Kay will also take up the position of university writer in residence.

Prof Kay said: “I feel honoured to have been chosen as the new chancellor for the University of Salford and look forward to being a hands-on chancellor, as well as a ‘shaking hands’ chancellor…

Read the entire article here.

Cracking The Code

The New Yorker
2015-05-14

Jesmyn Ward, Associate Professor of English
Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana

Illustration by Rebekka Dunlap

I had always understood my ancestry to be a tangle of African slaves, free men of color, French and Spanish immigrants, British colonists, Native Americans—but in what proportion?

When my father moved to Oakland, California, after Hurricane Camille wrecked the Mississippi Gulf Coast, in 1969, strangers he encountered from El Salvador and Mexico and Puerto Rico would spit rapid-fire Spanish at him, expecting a reply in kind. “Are you Samoan?” a Samoan asked him once. But my father, with his black, silky hair that curled into Coke-bottle waves at the ends, skin the color of milky tea, and cheekbones like dorsal fins breaking the water of his face, was none of these things. He attended an all-black high school in Oakland; in his class pictures, his is one of the few light faces. His hair is parted in the middle and falls away in a blowsy Afro, coarsened to the right texture by multiple applications of relaxer.

My father was born in 1956 in Pass Christian, a small Mississippi town on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, fifty miles from New Orleans. He grew up in a dilapidated single-story house: four rooms, with a kitchen tacked onto the back. It was built along the railroad tracks and shook when trains sped by; the wood of the sloped floor rotted at the corners. The house was nothing like the great columned mansions strung along the man-made beach just half a mile or so down the road, houses graced with front-facing balconies so that the wealthy white families who lived in them could gaze out at the flat pan of the water and the searing, pale sand, where mangrove trees had grown before they’d bulldozed the land.

Put simply, my father grew up as a black boy in a black family in the deep South, where being black, in the sixties, was complicated. The same was true in the eighties, when I was growing up in DeLisle, a town a few miles north of Pass Christian. Once, when I was a teen, we stood together in a drugstore checkout line behind an older, blondish white woman. My father, an inveterate joker, kept shoving me between my shoulder blades, trying to make me stumble into her. “Daddy, stop,” I mouthed, as I tried to avoid a collision. I was horrified: Daddy’s going to make me knock this white woman over. Then she turned around, and I realized that it was my grandaunt Eunice, my grandmother’s sister—that she was blood. “I thought you were white,” I said, and she and my father laughed.

Coastal Mississippi is a place where Eunice—a woman pale as milk, with blond hair and African heritage—is considered, and considers herself, black. The one-drop rule is real here. Eunice wasn’t allowed on the beaches of the Gulf Coast or Lake Pontchartrain until the early seventies. The state so fiercely neglected her education that her grandfather established a community school for black children. Once Eunice graduated, after the eighth grade, her schooling was done. She worked in her father’s fields, and then as a cleaning woman for the white families in their mansions on the coast. On the local TV station, she watched commentators discuss what it meant to be a proper Creole, women who were darker than her asserting that true Creoles have only Spanish and French ancestry. Theirs was part of an ongoing attempt to write anyone with African or Native American heritage out of the region’s history; to erase us from the story of the plantations, the swamps, the bayou; to deny that plaçage, those unofficial unions, during the time of anti-miscegenation laws, between European men and women of African heritage had ever taken place…

Read the entire article here.

Why You Can Kiss My Mulatto Ass

BuzzFeed
2015-05-26

Mat Johnson, BuzzFeed Contributor

“The recent re-emergence of mulatto identity isn’t about race, it’s about actively acknowledging a multiethnic reality in a simplistically racialized world.”

Yo, I’m a mulatto. And I have to tell you, it’s great. I was black for most of my life, which is also great, but the thing is I look white and, coincidentally, my dad’s also white (he’s great too), and after a while I needed a word that offered me a better fit, and acknowledge my father and his whole family’s impact on my life, which was also a big part of my identity. So I converted to mulatto, which I see as a subset of the larger African American experience.

I actually love the word mulatto. I love it for its rolling linguistic sound — moo-lah-toe — sliding off my tongue the way Lolita did for Humbert Humbert. But I also love mulatto for the illicit pleasure of watching the uncomfortable cringe the word sometimes elicits from others, even when I say it to describe myself: an African American novelist who just happens to look like a washed-up Latvian rugby player. The discomfort is a response I’ve encountered from black people, from white people, and even sometimes from many mulattoes — or rather, I should say, “first-generation mixed people of black and white ancestry.” That inelegant mouthful is what mulatto means, but I can’t shorten it without saying “mulatto,” because there is no other word in the English language that captures that meaning while connecting it with the larger sociopolitical history of North America.

The word mulatto is at some level absurd: Of course it’s absurd; it’s an antiquated relic of a racist past. Just like the reductive racial classifications of black and white, which are equally absurd in the face of the overwhelming complexity of ethnicity, caste, and historical context…

Read the entire article here.

“You get a cookie for being offended”: Mat Johnson on the fine art of racial satire

Salon
2015-05-24

Laura Miller

The author of “Pym” talks about his new novel, his love-hate relationship with Twitter and being a black nerd

Mat Johnson is a little apprehensive about his new novel, “Loving Day,” a satire of race relations and identity politics set in Philadelphia’s Germantown neighborhood. While writing it, he thought, “people were going to be pissed off. Black people were going to be pissed off and white people were going to be pissed off, and they were all going to be pissed off for slightly different reasons.” That’s because Johnson’s narrator, Warren Duffy, is “mixed,” the child of a black mother and an Irish-American father; he identifies as black, but his light-colored skin often leads strangers to mistake him for white.

Warren — who has failed as a comics artist, comics store owner and husband — returns to Philly from Wales, where he’s been hiding out from the conundrum of his own identity. He comes back to sell the decrepit mansion he inherited from his recently deceased father, a partially roofless and entirely creepy 18th-century estate house looming over the surrounding ghetto, a defunct “artifact of rich white folks’ attempt at dynasty.” Once there, he discovers he has a teenage daughter, Tal, the result of a one-night stand with a Jewish classmate. Vowing to do right by her, Warren becomes entangled with the Mélange Center, an eccentric organization that runs a charter school for mixed-race people who want to claim multiple identities. Warren calls it “Mulattopia,” and suspects it of being a cult, but Tal does love that school.

Meanwhile, Warren has seen two strange figures darting around corners and into outbuildings on the grounds of his mansion by night. Tal thinks they’re the ghosts of the first interracial couple. Warren is sure they’re just crackheads. Since “Loving Day” is Johnson’s follow-up to his celebrated 2011 novel, “Pym” — a brazen fusion of academic satire and two-fisted Arctic adventure yarn — the truth is likely to be very strange indeed.

I spoke with Johnson recently about his membership in the tribe of black nerds, his love-hate relationship with Twitter and why humor is an indispensable tool when you’re writing about race…

Read the entire interview here.

Schools for European and Eurasian children in India: Making of the official policy in colonial India and its contemporary significance

Policy Futures in Education
Volume 13, Number 3 (April 2015)
pages 315-327
DOI: 10.1177/1478210315569040

Heeral Chhabra, M.Phil Research Scholar
Department of History
University of Delhi, India

The history of education in India has been looked into with a view which has been narrow in its expanse, often missing out on many social categories which had a relatively limited, yet important, presence in colonial India. Sufficient attention has been paid to the official policies of the British Indian government (starting from Macaulay’s Minute). However, a critical analysis of it is assumed to be provided by the nationalist discourse, which is popularly perceived as almost an antithesis of colonial education. In the entire process, the discussion on education broadly gets limited to two sections – the ruler and the ruled, thereby eschewing the diversity within the realm of those seeking and providing education. In this paper, an attempt will be made to understand the emerging importance of ‘Europeans and Eurasians’ as a social category with a peculiar position in colonial India. Though technically part of the ruling ‘race’, their economic standing was not always congruent with their assumed racial superiority. Termed as ‘poor whites’ their presence in India posed challenges to the British government especially after the 1857 mutiny. Employed in the ‘communication network’ of the British Raj, their presence in postal, railways and telegraph departments was imperative for its successful working. The first part of the paper seeks to explore the making of these European and Eurasian communities in India. An official stand regarding schooling of European and Eurasian children was formulated for the first time through Canning’s Minute of 29 October 1860. Analysis of this Minute is vital to understand the very nature of education extended along with religious overtones providing these schools with a distinct identity and status. Using archival sources, this paper seeks to explore the making of distinct schools for them at hill stations and in the plains. Many of these hill schools still exist and have become a symbol of ‘modernity’. Quite ironically their association with the colonial past provides them with a certain elite reputation in independent India (where nationalism is closely tied to education). Analysis of this opens up scope to investigate the ways in which ‘modernity’ is not only understood but professed and adapted through such an educational setup.

Read or purchase the article here.

How A Latina-Asian American Ascended Amazon’s Ranks

NBC News
2015-05-29

Stephen A. Nuño, Associate Professor of Politics & International Affairs
Northern Arizona Univeristy

If you have ever bought anything from the online retail giant, Amazon.com, you probably didn’t know that a multicultural woman is one of the managers leading the work behind the scenes with software developers, user interface (UI) designers and product teams to help you spend your money.

In an age where the tech industry has increasingly come under fire for being mostly male and for its lack of diversity, women like Erica Gomez are serving as role models and urging others to break through the technology ranks. Currently Amazon’s Senior Technical Program Manager, Gomez has also worked at Microsoft as an engineer and program manager for the Bing search platform and at Boeing as a software developer for real-time aircraft monitoring programs.

A lover of trivia and a tennis athlete, Gomez illustrates the proliferation of people who identify with multi-ethnic backgrounds since the U.S. Census began allowing respondents to check multiple boxes for their racial and ethnic identity in 2000. She is also an example of the growing diversity among Latinos.

Gomez’s mother, who is of Japanese-Scottish descent, was born on an Air Force base in Texas and grew up mainly in Taipei. Gomez’s father is Puerto Rican; her grandparents moved from Puerto Rico to Los Angeles before her dad was born and he grew up bouncing between the island and Los Angeles. His family eventually settled in San Clemente, California, a sleepy surfers’ haven in Orange County…

Read the entire article here.

#471: Mixed Race in a Box: Teaching Mixed Race in the 21st Century

The 28th Annual National Conference on Race & Ethnicity in American Higher Education (NCORE)
Washington Hilton
1919 Connecticut Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20009
2015-05-26 through 2015-05-30

Friday, 2015-05-29, 15:30-17:30 EDT (Local Time)

In Fall 2013, The Asian American Literary Review published Mixed Race in a Box, a multimedia project equal parts art piece, anthology, and innovative educational tool. It has since been adopted as a course text for teaching race and mixed race in over 80 college and university classrooms in 6 countries—the U.S., Ireland, Argentina, Hong Kong, Poland, and Germany.

Popular consciousness of “multiracialism” is at an all-time high, and with it, student (and faculty) needs for reflecting personally and academically on mixed identities and the histories and realities of mixed race. But what exactly does it mean to teach mixed race? What are we teaching, and how, and why? Where—in what disciplines? And who are we teaching—what understandings of race and mixed race are our students, across the U.S. and beyond, bringing into the classroom?

This proposed session will outline Mixed Race in a Box as a pedagogical experiment, opening to a larger discussion of teaching mixed race and race more generally. It will explore how we can best equip students and teachers to think critically about race while, as the saying goes, “meeting them where they are.” Produced by an editorial team of University of Maryland students, featuring collaborative projects by leading artists, scholars, poets, and writers, the Box includes a range of unusual materials—a foldout map of mixed Native poetics, a deck of playing cards, three pocket books, photo slideshows and video art—and offers a wealth of different approaches to teaching race and mixed race. The session will examine some of these particular strategies and discuss the challenges and successes of employing them in various classrooms, with varying student constituencies, across the country. Prospective presenters will include a senior editor of the Box, a student editor of the Box, and two scholar-writers who contributed pieces to the Box and taught it in their respective classrooms.

Presenters

Jennifer Kwon Dobbs
St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota

Zohra Saed
Hunter College, City University of New York, Brooklyn, New York

Lawrence-Minh Davis, Director
Asian American Literary Review, College Park, Maryland

Andrew Mayton
University of Maryland, College Park

Mystery, and Discovery, on the Trail of a Creole Music Pioneer

The New York Times
2015-05-28

Campbell Robertson, Southern correspondent

PINEVILLE, La. — Somewhere among the thousands beneath a grassy hill here lies the body of Amédé Ardoin.

He was singular in life: one of the greatest accordion players ever to come out of south Louisiana. A Creole prodigy who traveled the countryside playing his bluesy two-steps and waltzes, he changed Cajun music and laid down the roots for zydeco.

At his death at the age of 44 in 1942, he was Case No.13387 in the state psychiatric hospital, destined for an anonymous burial.

Years of attempts to recover the body of Amédé, as he is widely known, have come to nothing. As with Mozart’s grave, Amédé’s is known only by its general vicinity: the area where the blacks were buried. But a desire for some sort of physical commemoration of his life, beyond a few documents and a blurry photograph, has not gone away.

“I started thinking of possible symbolic ways of bringing Amédé home, placing a kind of image of him in the culture, something physical,” said Darrell Bourque, a former state poet laureate, who has been trying to raise funds to have a statue erected, most likely in Eunice, La., where Amédé spent much of his life.

Mr. Bourque described Amédé as bringing the white Cajun and black Creole traditions together in a society that policed racial boundaries so rigidly that it ultimately brought about his death. His music, Mr. Bourque said, represented “a little pocket of possibility that didn’t get replicated in the larger culture.”

It was only after he began looking for Amédé that Mr. Bourque came to learn how complicated those boundaries could be for whites and blacks at that time — and how deeply connected he was to the people who crossed them…

Read the entire article here.

#312: Mixed Foundations: Supporting and Empowering Multiracial Student Organizations

The 28th Annual National Conference on Race & Ethnicity in American Higher Education (NCORE)
Washington Hilton
1919 Connecticut Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20009
2015-05-26 through 2015-05-30

Thursday, 2015-05-28, 08:30-10:00

Multiracial college students face pervasive monoracist attitudes and structural oppression. These students, like many students from historically marginalized backgrounds, experience greater satisfaction and retention rates when their identities are understood and their needs accommodated. This session will focus on supporting and empowering multiracial students and mixed race student organizations on college campuses. Presenters will utilize student affairs research and identity development theory to address common challenges that multiracial organizations face and how to effectively confront them. Participants will learn about the importance of creating inclusive spaces for multiracial students, equipping them with strong leadership skills, and advising them through political and administrative hurdles.

Presenters

Victoria Malaney, Special Assistant to the Dean of Students
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Kendra Danowski, Program Coordinator for Civic Engagement & Social Justice
Eugene Language College, New York, New York