Mixed Race Studies

Backing Barack Because He’s Black: Racially Motivated Voting in the 2008 Election

Social Science Quarterly
Volume 92, Issue 2, June 2011
pages 423–446
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6237.2011.00776.x

Ray Block Jr., Assistant Professor of Political Science/Public Administration
University of Wisconsin, La Crosse

Read or purchase the article here.

Loving in Virginia: A teacher’s work brings new life to an old case.

University of Virginia College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences
Newsletter
February 2013

Caroline County, Virginia, 1958. Newlyweds Richard and Mildred Loving wake at 2 a.m. to the sound of their front door being kicked in. Before they are out of bed, the sheriff and two deputies place them under arrest. Their crime: Marriage. Richard, a white man, and Mildred, a black and American Indian woman, had violated Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act, which prohibited interracial marriage. They plead guilty, are convicted on felony charges, and are banished from Virginia. The Lovings spend the next nine years trying to get home.

Most students in historian Grace Hale’s Southern History seminars find it difficult to believe that the Loving’s story is factual, and perhaps even more extraordinary that such events occurred only 55 years ago. Yet in June of 1958, 24 states, including Virginia, prohibited interracial marriage. With Hale they talk through the Voting Rights Act of 1964[5] and the Civil Rights Act of 1965[4]. But these topics, important in their own right, capture only a portion of the important history she teaches. For Hale, the history comes more alive through the story of the Lovings and their nine-year battle that resulted in the 1967 Supreme Court Decision that invalidated all state laws prohibiting interracial marriage. Though she has taught the case for some time, only recently has it carried more weight to her. Just last year, HBO premiered The Loving Story, a documentary that tells the Loving’s dramatic tale, for which Hale served as an historical advisor…

Read the entire article here.

The Mulatto Murders Lily’s Son (1948)

Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal
Volume 8: Issue 1 (Bahamian Literature) (2011-04-22)
Article 9
2 pages

Nicolette Bethel, Assistant Professor of Sociology
The College of the Bahamas

1. Irvin goes to calm a raging friend

Irvin’s fishmeat skin gleamed white despite the dark,
despite the shot that hung the blackout curtains on his world.
His blood unmade the rage of Bert Molina, black enough
to blot the whiteness Irvin carried like a flag.

The gunstock bruised Bert’s collarbone. The bullet
burned the air the way rage burned that space
between his lungs where no-one held his heart.
The blood wrapped Irvin’s brightskin in the night…

Read the entire poem here.

The Rumpus Interview with Joe Mozingo

The Rumpus
2013-03-04

Peter Orner

I recently finished a powerful book about a journey to find the origin of a name. It’s called the The Fiddler on Pantico Run: An African Warrior, His White Descendants, A Search for Family by Joe Mozingo. The book details Mozingo’s search for the origin of the name “Mozingo,” which, he comes to understand, is one of the few African names to survive not only the Middle Passage, but the history of American slavery itself.

The book takes Mozingo, a Los Angeles Times reporter, on a great chase—from Los Angeles, to the American South, to Angola—as he traces the history of the first American Mozingo, Edward Mozingo, a former slave from West-Central Africa who eventually won his freedom by suing for it in a Virginia court. Some Mozingos fought for the Union; others for the Confederacy. Some were abolitionists; others were in the Ku Klux Klan. One thing they all have in common is Edward Mozingo, a man who—in spite of everything—held onto his royal name…

…The Rumpus: Your story is especially remarkable in that Mozingo is only one of two African names to survive slavery. Since you had no idea how significant your name actually was when you went into this, could you trace how the revelation came about?

Joe Mozingo: The understanding that I descended from this African man who kept his African name came in different waves. First there was puzzlement—how could this be?—then deep curiosity, then frustration, and eventually this exhilaration. The frustration was this: I needed to envision my ancestor, Edward, but subconsciously I harbored this white-black binary view that has been bestowed to us by American history. I was white. So it was hard to envision him as my ancestor at first. But that blockage gave way as I researched more, visited the places Edward lived, met more Mozingos—black, white, and in-between—and went to Africa. The exhilaration came then, when I felt that link to him, to this lineage spinning back to the beginning. In Angola, where he sailed off into the Atlantic for Jamestown, that connection to this eternal system just welled up inside. It was this great feeling of opening up…

Read the entire interview here.

The Fiddler on Pantico Run: An African Warrior, His White Descendants, A Search for Family

Free Press (an Imprint of Simon & Schuster)
October 2012
320 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9781451627480
eBook ISBN: 9781451627619

Joe Mozingo

“My dad’s family was a mystery,” writes prize-winning journalist Joe Mozingo. Growing up, he knew that his mother’s ancestors were from France and Sweden, but he heard only suspiciously vague stories about where his father’s family was from—Italy, Portugal, the Basque country. Then one day, a college professor told him his name may have come from sub-Saharan Africa, which made no sense at all: Mozingo was a blue-eyed white man from the suburbs of Southern California. His family greeted the news as a lark—his uncle took to calling them “Bantu warriors”—but Mozingo set off on a journey to find the truth of his roots.

He soon discovered that all Mozingos in America, including his father’s line, appeared to have descended from a black man named Edward Mozingo who was brought to the Jamestown colony as a slave in 1644 and won his freedom twenty-eight years later. He became a tenant farmer growing tobacco by a creek called Pantico Run, married a white woman, and fathered one of the country’s earliest mixed-race family lineages.

But Mozingo had so many more questions to answer. How had it been possible for Edward to keep his African name? When had some of his descendants crossed over the color line, and when had the memory of their connection to Edward been obscured? The journalist plunged deep into the scattered historical records, traveled the country meeting other Mozingos—white, black, and in between—and journeyed to Africa to learn what he could about Edward’s life there, retracing old slave routes he may have traversed.

The Fiddler on Pantico Run is the beautifully written account of Mozingo’s quest to discover his family’s lost past. A captivating narrative of both personal discovery and historical revelation that takes many turns, the book traces one family line from the ravages of the slave trade on both sides of the Atlantic, to the horrors of the Jamestown colony, to the mixed-race society of colonial Virginia and through the brutal imposition of racial laws, when those who could pass for white distanced themselves from their slave heritage, yet still struggled to rise above poverty. The author’s great-great-great-great-great grandfather Spencer lived as a dirt-poor white man, right down the road from James Madison, then moved west to the frontier, trying to catch a piece of America’s manifest destiny. Mozingos fought on both sides of the Civil War, some were abolitionists, some never crossed the color line, some joined the KKK. Today the majority of Mozingos are white and run the gamut from unapologetic racists to a growing number whose interracial marriages are bringing the family full circle to its mixed-race genesis.

Tugging at the buried thread of his origins, Joe Mozingo has unearthed a saga that encompasses the full sweep of the American story and lays bare the country’s tortured and paradoxical experience with race and the ways in which designations based on color are both illusory and life altering. The Fiddler on Pantico Run is both the story of one man’s search for a sense of mooring, finding a place in a continuum of ancestors, and a lyrically written exploration of lineage, identity, and race in America.

MIT Scholar Vivek Bald uncovers forgotten history of South Asian immigrants’ New York City arrival

New York Daily News
2013-01-17

Erica Pearson

New book chronicles little-known story of Muslims from what’s now Pakistan and Bangladesh, who built a multiracial community in Harlem decades before they were legally allowed to immigrate to the U.S.

Virtually all Asian immigration to the U.S. was banned when Aladdin Ullah’s father — who left East Bengal to work on a British steamer — jumped ship in the 1920s and settled in New York.

Like hundreds of other Muslim sailors at the time, he found a home in Harlem — marrying a Puerto Rican woman and opening one of the city’s first Indian restaurants. He stayed there until his death in 1983.

“I see, now that I’m older, he kind of romanticized what Harlem was to him,” said Ullah, 44, a comedian and playwright who grew up in the George Washington Carver Houses.

“I think my father looked at Harlem as where, ‘Here is where people greet you, These people embraced me for what I am.’ ”

Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and filmmaker Vivek Bald, is the author of “Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America,” published this month by Harvard University Press.

Bald believes Ullah’s family is the last in East Harlem with a direct connection to a little-documented community that thrived decades before the first large waves of South Asian immigration to the U.S…

… In many ways, the histories of these early immigrants became lost because they were forced into the shadows, Bald said. Race-based immigration laws — starting with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and extending until the quota system was overhauled in 1965 — made their presence illegal.

“If you were an Asian person, with very few exceptions you were legally barred from entering the U.S. like other immigrants,” said Bald. “You were not deemed fit to become a citizen, and in many states you could not legally own property.”

But in Harlem, Bengali immigrants married into African-American and Puerto Rican families and found jobs as doormen or dishwashers. In the 1940s, Bengali vendors sold hotdogs from carts along Madison, Lexington and Third Aves…

Read the entire article here.

Nigeria’s dangerous skin whitening obsession
 
Al Jazeera
2013-04-06

Mohammed Adow

Nigeria has the world’s highest percentage of women using skin lightening agents in the quest for “beauty”.

Lagos, Nigeria – After carefully washing her face, legs and arms, Taiwo Solomon vigorously rubs cream over her body. She is meticulous and makes sure she covers her entire face. Soloman, 32, is bleaching her skin. She believes fairer skin could be her ticket to a better life. So she spends her meager savings on cheap black-market concoctions that promise to lighten her pigment.

This has been a daily routine for the past 15 years. Now several shades lighter she says her new skin makes her feel more beautiful and confident.

“Bleaching just makes me feel special, like am walking around in a spotlight,” she told Al Jazeera. “I am not seeking to be totally white, I just want to look beautiful. I cannot stop using the lightening agents,” she adds.

Solomon is not alone. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), 77 percent of women in Nigeria use skin-lightening products, the world’s highest percentage. That compares with 59 percent in Togo, and 27 percent in Senegal. The reasons for this are varied but most people say they use skin-lighteners because they want “white skin”.

In many parts of Africa, lighter-skinned women are considered more beautiful and are believed to be more successful and likely to find marriage.

It’s not only women though who are obsessed with bleaching their skins. Some men too are involved in the practice…

…Dangerous consequences

Skin bleaching comes with hazardous health consequences. The dangers associated with the use of toxic compounds for skin bleaching include blood cancers such as leukemia and cancers of the liver and kidneys as well as severe skin conditions.

Hardcore bleachers use illegal ointments containing toxins like mercury, a metal that blocks production of melanin, which gives the skin its colour, but can also be toxic…

Read the entire article here.

It’s Not Always Black And White: Caught Between Two Worlds

Outskirts Press
2013-01-18
100 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9781478716693

John Reed, Ph.D.

John Reed knows from experience how difficult the life of a biracial person can be. He was born in Germany after World War II to a German-Caucasian mother and an African-American father. The difficulty of finding a place in society was compounded by his mother’s rejection of him; he spent the first year of his life in a convent, cared for by nuns. As the physical, mental, and verbal abuse John suffered from his mother were mirrored by a judgmental and racist society around him, he found himself in a crisis of identity and shattered self-esteem. In this searingly honest and thought-provoking memoir, John shows us how racism is still very much alive in our current “politically correct” world, and the ways in which biracial people struggle with knowing whether they are truly accepted, or if the people around them are just playing the game. John’s path to personal healing, which included learning about and embracing his heritage, and severing ties with those who abused and failed to accept him, is an inspiration to anyone who has fought the questions of acceptance and identity. No matter what your personal background and heritage, It’s Not Always Black And White will enlighten you about what it’s like to be a person of color in a world where being white is the norm, and will vividly show you that every person, regardless of color, deserves to be treated with dignity, love, and respect.

Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America [Event]

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
Langston Hughes Auditorium
515 Malcolm X Boulevard
New York, New York 10037-1801
2013-04-06, 17:30-20:30 EDT (Local Time)

A book event with theater, film, and community forum presented by afro-latin@ forum, Asian American Writer’s Workshop and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Join us for a celebration of the publication of Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Harvard University Press) by scholar and documentary filmmaker Vivek Bald. This special event will explore the little-known stories of Muslim men from the Indian subcontinent who settled in Harlem in the 1920s-50s, married Puerto Rican, African American, and West Indian women, and became a small but significant part of the neighborhood, selling hotdogs from pushcarts, opening the neighborhood’s first Indian restaurants, and interacting with Harlem’s other Muslim communities. 

Bald will read from his book, which traces out these and other early histories of Indian Muslim men who settled in places like Tremé in New Orleans and Black Bottom in Detroit. East Harlem actor/playwright Alaudin Ullah will perform an excerpt from his one-man show “Dishwasher Dreams,” which focuses on the story of his father Habib, who was one of the first Bengali men to settle in Harlem. The event will also include an excerpt from “In Search of Bengali Harlem,” the documentary film on which Bald and Ullah are collaborating, followed by a panel discussion and community forum with children and descendants of some of the Bengali men who settled in Harlem in the mid-twentieth century. Plus a special guest DJ set by Himanshu Suri, aka Heems, formerly of the rap group Das Racist.

For more information, click here.

Are Hapa White Asian Americans?

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu
2012-02-01

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu
Stanford University

Some people seem to think hapa means white Asian American, even though it originally refers to Hawaiian mixtures and is not confined to hapa haole. I never had that impression myself, as one of my first hapa friends was Margo Okazawa-Rey and she called herself, Afro Asian or black Japanese. One of my earliest colleagues was Velina Hasu Houston, who more than anyone publicly acknowledged the blackness while asserting her Japanese identity.
 
But the reality is that black Asians may still feel like they do not fully belong in hapa circles. In her blog, Grits and Sushi (gritsandsushi.com), Mitzi Uehara Carter writes of how she would meet other black Asians at the gatherings of hapa organizations and “we almost always whispered that we weren’t feelin’ the hapaness.” Not that she wasn’t feeling the “commonalities between us all–but the vast majority of the folks were Asian and white American. When I met with the other black Asians in the group, that’s when I felt a real connection emerge.”…

Read the entire article here.