Mixed Race Studies

Boy, Snow, Bird: A Novel

Riverhead Press (an imprint of Penguin Press)
2014-03-06
320 pages
5.74 x 8.58in
Hardcover ISBN: 9781594631399

Helen Oyeyemi

From the prizewinning author of Mr. Fox, the Snow White fairy tale brilliantly recast as a story of family secrets, race, beauty, and vanity.

In the winter of 1953, Boy Novak arrives by chance in a small town in Massachusetts, looking, she believes, for beauty—the opposite of the life she’s left behind in New York. She marries a local widower and becomes stepmother to his winsome daughter, Snow Whitman.

A wicked stepmother is a creature Boy never imagined she’d become, but elements of the familiar tale of aesthetic obsession begin to play themselves out when the birth of Boy’s daughter, Bird, who is dark-skinned, exposes the Whitmans as light-skinned African Americans passing for white. Among them, Boy, Snow, and Bird confront the tyranny of the mirror to ask how much power surfaces really hold.

Dazzlingly inventive and powerfully moving, Boy, Snow, Bird is an astonishing and enchanting novel. With breathtaking feats of imagination, Helen Oyeyemi confirms her place as one of the most original and dynamic literary voices of our time.

Black history month is a token tribute, but Afro-Latinos don’t even have that

The Guardian
2014-02-26

Icess Fernandez Rojas

The US has a designated celebration for about every group, but if you’re of mixed heritage, you’re on your own

I cringe every time February rolls around. For me, black history month has become predictable. First, it’s the arguments against it: “What about white history month?” Then up come the defenses: “How come black history month is the shortest month of the year?” Then, when we eventually get around to honoring the heroes and heroines of the hour, we dust off the biographies, documentaries, and frankly, Wikipedia entries, of the following: Martin Luther King Jr, Rosa Parks, and that guy who invented peanut butter. By the time it’s the end of the month, we’ve in fact forgotten what in fact we were meant to be celebrating and move on, confident that we’ve done our duty.

Yes, February is cringe-worthy for me. But the above reasons, although valid, aren’t why I recoil at the calendar. February is the month when everyone forgets that I’m black, too.

If you’re Afro-Latino, February isn’t the month for you because it simply doesn’t celebrate the diversity of your heritage. It doesn’t even try. If you’re Afro-Latino, you’re expected to lump your experience of being a person of African descent into the predictability of the month’s celebration…

Read the entire article here.

After first-term caution, Obama dives deeper on race

USA Today
2014-02-27

Aamer Madhani, White House Correspondent

WASHINGTON — During his first term, President Obama waded gingerly into the issue of race, mindful of the historic nature of his presidency while at the same time downplaying its significance.

With a couple of exceptions — criticizing a police officer who arrested a prominent black Harvard University scholar as he fumbled to open the door to his home and speaking in personal terms about the shooting death of Trayvon Martin — Obama didn’t make any big headlines on the issue early in his presidency.

But deep into his second term, Obama talks about race with a frequency and frankness that has left some black policymakers and activists cautiously optimistic about the nation’s first black president’s final years in office.

In recent weeks, the president has begun to draw the outlines for the legacy he hopes to leave on race and civil rights…

Read the entire article here.

Afro Latinos’ Mixed Identity Can Leave Them Out of the Mix

NBC News
2014-02-27

Patricia Guadalupe and Suzanne Gamboa

Afro Latino Marco Davis laughed when he recalled the lengths he went to keep in touch with black and Latino alumni groups when he graduated from Yale University.

“One year I would put down that I was Hispanic so I could keep in touch with the Latino groups on campus that I was involved with, and another year I would put down black, so I could get their information. I would alternate because I wasn’t able to put down that I belonged to both,” said Davis, 43, who has a Jamaican father and a Mexican mother. “The university said they didn’t have it built in to their computers to check off more than one box at a time, and I had to do just one.”

Like Davis, other Afro Latino Americans feel they straddle two communities, each with a distinct heritage and history celebrated in the U.S. eight months apart. Black History Month comes to a close Friday and Hispanic Heritage Month begins in mid-September.

Black Latinos say there is little understanding of their mixed heritage, and little knowledge of the history of the importation of slaves by Spanish-speaking countries of which many, though not all, are descendants.

Yet growing racial pride and a move to a more multiracial society with changing demographics are helping this group stake a claim to being both black and Latino…

…Filmmaker Dash Harris, who is of Panamanian descent, hopes to bring more exposure to the Afro Latino experience though a documentary series, Negro. Harris said the work grew from her own frustrations.

“I was exhausted trying to explain who I am,” Harris said. “I’m not here to convince anyone about their African ancestry because that’s a fact. It’s about educating the next generation.”

Afro Latina Sarita Copeland Singh, a Washington lawyer married to a Trinidadian with Indian roots, said she sees change afoot.

“We definitely need to hear and learn more about Afro Latinos so that it won’t seem so unusual,” said Singh, 30, who is of Panamanian descent. “My young daughter already moves easily between both worlds.”

Read the entire article here.

The Strategies of Forbidden Love: Family across Racial Boundaries in Nineteenth-Century North Carolina

Journal of Social History
Volume 47, Issue 3 (Spring 2014)
pages 612-626
DOI: 10.1093/jsh/sht112

Warren E. Milteer Jr.

This article contends that although local beliefs and legal edicts attempted to discourage sexual and familial relationships between women of color and white men in North Carolina, free women of mixed ancestry and white men developed relationships that mimicked legally-sanctioned marriages. These unions often produced children who maintained frequent interaction with both parents. In nineteenth-century Hertford County, North Carolina, free women of mixed ancestry and their white partners developed creative strategies to deal with the legal limitations inherent in their situation. Women and men in these relationships found ways to secure property rights for women and children and developed methods to prevent legal scrutiny of their living arrangements.

Read or purchase the article here.

News Nation with Tamron Hall (with guest Yaba Blay)

News Nation with Tamron Hall
2014-02-25

Drexel University Professor Yaba Blay discusses her new book (1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race with host Tamron Hall.

Watch the interview here.

President Obama calls for minority youth outreach programme

BBC News
2014-02-27

US President Barack Obama has called for a national campaign to improve opportunities for black and Hispanic boys and young men.

Called My Brother’s Keeper, his new initiative aims to overcome the socioeconomic conditions keeping such youth from thriving.

The White House said businesses had pledged $150m (£89m) to promote it.

The president said it was an “outrage” that black and Hispanic men in the US fared so much worse than white men.

“I believe the continuing struggles of so many boys and young men – the fact that too many of them are falling by the wayside, dropping out, unemployed, involved in negative behaviour, going to jail, being profiled – this is a moral issue for our country,” Mr Obama said at the White House on Thursday, with more than a dozen black and Hispanic young men and boys standing behind him.

“It’s also an economic issue for our country.”

In a memorandum released on Thursday, the White House said the task force would focus on issues facing boys and young minority men under the age of 25.

Obama’s ‘bad choices’

America’s first black president has generally avoided policies defined by race, the BBC’s Beth McLeod reports from Washington DC, but in an emotional speech Mr Obama said it was an outrage that young Hispanic and African-American men have the odds stacked against them in US society…

…He spoke of visiting a school near his home in Chicago and sharing with the boys there his own experience of growing up without a father, acknowledging to them that he had been angry about that and had made “bad choices” and “got high without always thinking about the harm that it could do”.

“I could see myself in these young men,” Mr Obama told the audience at the White House. “And the only difference is that I grew up in an environment that was a little bit more forgiving, so when I made a mistake the consequences were not as severe.”…

Read the entire article here.

Dynamic representations of race: processing goals shape race decoding in the fusiform gyri

Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
Volume 9 Issue 3 (March 2014)
pages 326-332
DOI: 10.1093/scan/nss138

Christian Kaul
Department of Psychology and Center for Neural Science
New York University

Kyle G. Ratner
Department of Psychology
New York University

Jay J. Van Bavel, Assistant Professor of Social Psychology
New York University

People perceive and evaluate others on the basis of social categories, such as race, gender and age. Initial processing of targets in terms of visually salient social categories is often characterized as inevitable. In the current study, we investigated the influence of processing goals on the representation of race in the visual processing stream. Participants were assigned to one of two mixed-race teams and categorized faces according to their group membership or skin color. To assess neural representations of race, we employed multivariate pattern analysis to examined neural activity related to the presentation of Black and White faces. As predicted, patterns of neural activity within the early visual cortex and fusiform gyri (FG) could decode the race of face stimuli above chance and were moderated by processing goals. Race decoding in early visual cortex was above chance in both categorization tasks and below chance in a prefrontal control region. More importantly, race decoding was greater in the FG during the group membership vs skin color categorization task. The results suggest that, ironically, explicit racial categorization can diminish the representation of race in the FG. These findings suggest that representations of race are dynamic, reflecting current processing goals.

Read or purchase the article here.

A Roanoke Island Colony Remembered

Chowan Discovery Group
2014-02-25

Marvin T. Jones, Executive Director

The Winton Triangle has ties to the subject of the latest Chowan Discovery-nominated marker, that of the Roanoke Island Freedmen’s Colony. During the Civil War when the colony existed, several Winton Triangle men enlisted in the United States Colored Troops in 1864. In 1865, William David Newsom, a post-war leader in the Winton Triangle, taught there. In 1866, another Triangle leader, Lemuel Washington Boon, led the founding of the Roanoke Missionary Baptist Association there.

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Race America: Identities and Culture

Fifteenth Annual American Studies Conference
Macalester College
1600 Grand Avenue
Saint Paul, Minnesota 55105
2014-02-27 through 2014-02-28

Keynote Address
Thursday, 2014-02-27, 18:00-19:30 CST (Local Time)
Alexander G. Hill Ballroom
Kagin Commons, Macalester

Keynote Speakers:

Ralina L. Joseph, Associate Professor of Communication
University of Washington

Author of: Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial (Duke University Press, 2012).

Laura Kina, Associate Professor Art, Media and Design and Director Asian American Studies
DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois

Co-editor of: War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art (University of Washington Press, 2013).

Cover design by Ricardo Levins Morales

The American Studies Department at Macalester College is honored to host the 15th annual American Studies Conference, “Mixed Race America: Identities and Culture.”

Held every February during Black History Month, the conference brings renowned scholars to campus to present their work and engage with faculty, staff, students, alumni and Twin Cities residents. The conference seeks to highlight the links between scholarship, activism and civic engagement. Each year a different theme is selected based on pertinent issues.

The American Studies Department serves as the academic focal point for the study of race and ethnicity in a national and transnational framework.

For more information on the American Studies Department or this event, contact Kathie Scott at scott@macalester.edu.

For more information, click here. Read the program guide here.