Mixed Race Studies

Understanding Hapa Identity: More Research, Not Manifestos

AAPI Voices: Amplifying the voices of Asian Pacific America.
2014-05-29

Danielle Lemi, Guest Columnist and doctoral student
University of California, Riverside

As more details about the tragic events at UC Santa Barbara come to light, so too have details about Elliot Rodger, particularly with respect to his racial background. In response, bloggers have begun discussing racial identity issues among hapas, focusing heavily on issues of internalized racism or psychological problems because of supposed racial identity crises.

But what does the research say?  Do multiracial individuals have more mental health problems than those not identified as such?  Early research that was poorly designed said yes, but more recent research indicates otherwise…

Read the entire article here.

‘Good Hair’: A Cape Verdean Struggles With Her Racial Identity

The Chronicle of Higher Education
2014-05-27

Ana Sofia De Brito

Ana Sofia De Brito graduated from Dartmouth College in 2012 with a major in Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean studies. This essay is adapted from a chapter in the book Mixed: Multiracial College Students Tell Their Life Stories, edited by Andrew Garrod, Robert Kilkenny, and Christina Gómez (Cornell University Press, 2014).

The issue of race has always been a problem in my Cape Verdean family—and in my life. We constantly argue about whether we’re white or black. My dad says he stayed with my mom to better his race, by lightening the color of his children, and I’d better not mess up his plan by bringing a black boy home.

It wasn’t until I was away at college that I started to question him seriously about his past. It was in Mozambique that my father’s views about race were formed. As the Cape Verdean son of an official in the administration of a Portuguese colony, my father led a privileged life, living in a big house with many servants.

All of that changed when he went away to a boarding school attended almost entirely by the children of white Portuguese settlers. My dad was neither Portuguese nor white, so he was constantly bullied, beaten up, made fun of, and humiliated. The whiter students called him “nigger” and other epithets, the very names he now calls people who are darker than he is. Had my dad’s family stayed in Cape Verde, where color lines are blurred and there is no outright racism, I believe my dad would not be the way he is.

My mother is the lightest in our family, and her thin, fine hair goes with the rest of her features. She has round dark eyes and a straight, European-­looking nose, the thin lips associated with being white, and a pale complexion. My brother and I both inherited many of her features, but our noses differ. Mine is broader and his is straighter, on account of our having different dads. And even though we have similar features and complexions, we have different mind-sets. We both identify strongly as Cape Verdean; he, however, identifies with being white, whereas I identify with being black.

It gets complicated when my family talks about skin color. They believe that black is ugly, but so is being “too white”; our Cape Verdean color is just right. The reality is that Cape Verdeans are mixed both culturally and racially, and are many different shades…

Read the entire article here.

Future Children

Campus MoveFest
2014-05-03

Emily Eaglin—Captain, Director, Writer, Producer, Editor
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

A comedy/documentary about race relations especially pertaining to racial micro-aggressions of those who are more than one race.

Created by Emily Eaglin’s Crew at University of Maryland, Baltimore County in 2014 as part of Campus MovieFest, the world’s largest student film festival.

For more information, click here.

The Politics of Race in Panama: Afro-Hispanic and West Indian Literary Discourses of Contention

University Press of Florida
2014-04-15
200 pages
6 x 9
Cloth ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-4986-1

Sonja Stephenson Watson, Associate Professor of Spanish
University of Texas, Arlington

This volume tells the story of two cultural groups: Afro-Hispanics, whose ancestors came to Panama as African slaves, and West Indians from the English-speaking countries of Jamaica and Barbados who arrived during the mid-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries to build the railroad and the Panama Canal.

While Afro-Hispanics assimilated after centuries of mestizaje (race mixing) and now identify with their Spanish heritage, West Indians hold to their British Caribbean roots and identify more closely with Africa and the Caribbean.

By examining the writing of black Panamanian authors, Sonja Watson highlights how race is defined, contested, and inscribed in Panama. She discusses the cultural, racial, and national tensions that prevent these two groups from forging a shared Afro-Panamanian identity, ultimately revealing why ethnically diverse Afro-descendant populations continue to struggle to create racial unity in nations across Latin America and the Caribbean.

Race: More Than Skin Deep

HuffPost Live
2014-05-28

Alyona Minkovski, Host

Multiracial people are the fastest growing demographic in the U.S., but for these Americans, race isn’t a black and white issue. HuffPost Live explores the experience of multiracial Americans and how outward appearance shapes their identities.

Guests:

• Alexi Nunn Freeman (Denver, Colorado) Director of Public Interest & Lecturer, Legal Externship Program, University of Denver Sturm College of Law
• Jenee Desmond-Harris @jdesmondharris (Washington, D.C.) Writer, The Root
• Stephanie Troutman @KittyKahlo (Boone , North Carolina) Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies, Berea College
• Zebulon Miletsky @zebulonmiletsky (Stony Brook, New York) Visiting Assistant Professor of Africana Studies, Stony Brook Univesity

‘Black Atlantic’ Cultural Politics as Reflected in Panamanian Literature

University of Tennesee, Knoxville
August 2005
256 pages

Sonja Stephenson Watson

A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree

The diaspora experience is characterized by hybridity, diversity and above all, difference. The nature of the diaspora experience therefore precludes an exclusive articulation of identity. Black identity in Panama is one characterized by this same multiplicity. My dissertation examines race, culture, and ethnicity in the development of Panamanian national identity and is informed by the critical theories of Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, and Frantz Fanon. The articulation of Afro-Panamanian identity is both intriguing and complex because there are two groups of blacks on the Isthmus: Spanish speaking blacks who arrived as a result of slavery (15th -18th centuries) and English speaking blacks who migrated from the West Indies to construct the Trans-isthmian Railroad (1850-1855) and Panama Canal (1904-1914).

The country’s cultural and linguistic heterogeneity not only enriches the study of Panama and illustrates that it is a nation characterized by multiplicity, but it also captures the complexity of the African Diaspora in the Americas. This plurality is evidenced in Afro-Panamanian literary discourse from its inception in the late nineteenth century to the present. This study analyzes the representation of Afro-Hispanics and Afro-Antilleans during different time periods in Panamanian literature, the literature written by Afro-Hispanics, and the literature written by Afro-Antilleans which emerged during the latter half of the twentieth century. Finally, I address how the discourse of both groups of blacks converge and diverge.

Panamanian literature has been grossly understudied. While its history, geography, and political ties to the United States have been examined extensively by intellectuals from the United States and Latin America, with the exception of a few studies, its literature has been virtually ignored by the Hispanic literary canon. Within the field of Afro-Hispanic literature, black Panamanian literature has also been understudied. With the exception of works published about Gaspar Octavio Hernández, Carlos Guillermo Wilson, and Gerardo Maloney, Afro-Panamanian literature has not been examined comprehensively. My dissertation seeks to fill this void in the field of Afro-Hispanic literature and, hopefully, it will enrich the field of Latin and Central American literature and literary criticism.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Chapter one: The Rhetoric of Nation and the Invisibility of Blackness in the New Republic of Panama
• Chapter two: The Black Image in Early Twentieth-Century Panamanian Literature
• Chapter three: The Social Protest Novels of Joaquín Beleño Cedeño: A Study of the Inherent Conflicts and Contradictions of Anti-imperialism and Negritude in the Canal Zone
• Chapter four: The Afro-Caribbean Works of Carlos “Cubena” Guillermo Wilson and his (Re) Vision of Panamanian History
• Chapter five: Race, Language, and Nation in the Works of Three Contemporary Panamanian West Indian Writers: Gerardo Maloney, Melva Lowe de Goodin, and Carlos E. Russell
• Conclusion: Afro-Panamanian Discourse: From Invisibility to Visibility
• List of References
• Vita

Read the entire dissertation here.

Herb Jeffries, a.k.a. ‘Bronze Buckaroo’ of Song and Screen, Dies at 100 (or So)

The New York Times
2014-05-26

William Yardley

Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.

Herb Jeffries, who sang with Duke Ellington and starred in early black westerns as a singing cowboy known as “the Bronze Buckaroo” — a nickname that evoked his malleable racial identity — died on Sunday in West Hills, Calif. He was believed to be 100.

The cause was heart failure, said Raymond Strait, a writer who had worked on Mr. Jeffries’s autobiography with him.

Mr. Jeffries used to say: “I’m a chameleon.” The label applied on many levels.

Over the course of his century, he changed his name, altered his age, married five women and stretched his vocal range from near falsetto to something closer to a Bing Crosby baritone. He shifted from jazz to country and back again, and from concert stages to movie theaters to television sets and back again…

…Mr. Ferro also recalled Mr. Jeffries saying: “You know, I’m colored. I’m just not the color you think I am.”

Mr. Jeffries’s racial and ethnic identity was itself something of a performance — and a moving target. His mother was white, his father more of a mystery. He told some people that his father was African-American, others that he was mixed race and still others that he was Ethiopian or Sicilian.

In the crude social math of his era, many people told Mr. Jeffries he could have “passed” for white. He told people he chose to be black — to the extent that a mixed-race person had a choice at the time.

“He told me he had to make this decision about whether he should try to pass as white,” the jazz critic Gary Giddins recalled in an interview for this obituary. “He said: ‘I just knew that my life would be more interesting as a black guy. If I’d chosen to live my life passing as white, I’d have never been able to sing with Duke Ellington.’ ”

In 1951, Life magazine published an extensive feature on Mr. Jeffries that dwelled heavily on his racial heritage.

“Jeffries’s refusal to ‘pass’ and his somewhat ambiguous facial appearance have let him in for so many cases of prejudice and mistaken identity that he is practically a one-man minority group,” the article said. It described his “smoky blue eyes” and noted that he was frequently mistaken for Mexican, Argentine, Portuguese “and occasionally a Jew,” but that he had chosen to be “what he is — a light-skinned Negro.”

Mr. Jeffries cited his race as Caucasian on marriage licenses. (All five of his wives were white; his second wife was the stripper Tempest Storm.)

Late in life he said that his father, Howard Jeffrey, was actually his stepfather, and that his biological father was Domenico Balentino, a Sicilian who died in World War I.

In a 2007 documentary about him, “A Colored Life,” Mr. Jeffries said that the name on his birth certificate was Umberto Alejandro Balentino, and that he was born on Sept. 24, 1913, two years later than he had sometimes told people. The documentary included a mock birth certificate bearing that name.

Firm evidence of Mr. Jeffries’s race and age is hard to come by, but census documents from 1920 described him as “mulatto” and listed his father as a black man named Howard Jeffrey. They give his birth year as 1914, which matches what he told Life in 1951.

“It’s always been the big question, you know — where do we really come from?” Romi West, one of Mr. Jeffries’s daughters from his first marriage, said in an interview…

Read the entire obituary here.

“MUTT” at Impact Theatre—laughs, topic, and a great cast make it worth it

Examinier.com
2014-05-12

John A. McMullen II
Oakland Theater Examiner

Sometimes a mediocre play jumps to life when you assemble an extraordinary cast with a primo director.

Christopher Chen’s “MUTT” at Impact Theatre means to be sardonic and poignant. Some of the scenes are funny and quirky and insightful, but it is overwritten without much change of mood.

The idea is that the Repubs need a multi-racial candidate to win back the votes. They introduce a new term to this Caucasian audience member: “hapa,” i.e., a person of mixed race, seemingly with a necessary Asian component. They vett a half-Chinese, half Caucasian Congressman played by Matt Lai—an actor who has the extraordinary ability of naturalness, whose every move and line seems as if it just occurred to him, which is my functional definition of extraordinary acting, the kind you see in the cinema. Lai’s Congressman character doesn’t pass the Conservatives’ test because he wants to be himself and not-so-moldable, so they find a former soldier-hero in the stolid-acting Michael Uv Kelley, whose character is an even more mixed race and whatever-they-want him-to-be malleable…

Read the entire review here.

Geraldo Rivera: On Being Jew-Rican, A Rare Mixed Breed

Fox News Latino
2014-05-16

Geraldo Rivero, Senior Correspondent
Fox News

(From my speech May 14, 2014 at The Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey’s Women’s Philanthropy luncheon)

I’d like to talk about being Jewish in a Puerto Rican family by telling you the story of my Bar Mitzvah. First, some interesting background. Lily Friedman, my mom, now 94 and the pride of Siesta Key, Sarasota, Florida met my late dad Cruz Rivera of Bayamon, Puerto Rico in 1939 at Child’s Cafeteria on the corner of 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue [in New York City]. He had just emigrated from the island, literally arriving on the weekly banana boat; she was from Newark and was working as a waitress. He was in charge of the restaurant’s Latino dishwashers.

It was love at first sight. They married in Manhattan. Her family sat Shiva (went into mourning) in Newark. We lived on the Lower East Side. My dad was a sergeant in the Army during WWII. When he got out, we moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where my sister Irene and I attended PS 19, the local public school. Then we moved to West Babylon, Long Island where mom and dad bought a house for $10,000 under the GI Bill.

In West Babylon, we were not just the only Puerto Rican family, but also the only Jewish family. There was no Temple in West Babylon, so our tiny congregation held its services and my Bar Mitzvah in the local Volunteer Fire Department hall in North Lindenhurst, right near the tracks of the Long Island Railroad…

Read the entire article here.

Herb Jeffries, jazz balladeer and star of all-black cowboy movies, dies

The Washington Post
2014-05-26

Adam Bernstein, Editor

Source: Wikipedia

Herb Jeffries, a jazz balladeer whose matinee-idol looks won him fame in the late 1930s as the “Bronze Buckaroo” — the first singing star of all-black cowboy movies for segregated audiences — died May 25 at a hospital in West Hills, Calif. He was widely believed to be 100, but for years he insisted he was much older.

The cause was stomach and heart ailments, said Raymond Strait, a friend of 70 years who had been working with Mr. Jeffries on his autobiography. Mr. Jeffries liked to exaggerate his age to shock listeners. “He wanted people to say, ‘Wow, he can still sing pretty good for 111,’ ” Strait said.

Mr. Jeffries had a seven-decade career on film, television, record and in nightclubs. His baritone voice — extraordinarily rich but delicate — was memorably captured on his greatest musical success, a 1941 hit recording of “Flamingo” with Duke Ellington’s big band.

With a towering physique and a square jaw, Mr. Jeffries was perfectly suited to capitalize on the singing-cowboy movie craze that Gene Autry and Roy Rogers popularized in the 1930s…

…Mr. Jeffries was coy about his background. He claimed, at times, to have been born Umberto Alejandro Balentino to an Irish mother and Sicilian father of mixed race. Other sources say he was born Herbert Ironton Jeffries in Detroit, probably on Sept. 24, 1913 — the date Strait said was correct. Other reported dates of birth range from 1909 to 1916.

He told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2008 of his heritage: “I’m all colors, like everyone else. If we all go back 10 or 15 generations, we don’t know what we have in us. I don’t think there’s one person from around the Mediterranean who doesn’t have Moorish blood. I have Sicilian blood, and I have Moorish blood. I am colored, and I love it. I have a right to identify myself the way I do and if nobody likes it, what are they going to do? Kill my career?”

Mr. Jeffries never knew his father. He was raised by his mother in a boardinghouse she ran and where many singers and actors stayed. It was this exposure to show business that led Mr. Jeffries to appear, as a young man, in Detroit nightclubs and ballrooms…

Read the entire obituary here.