Mixed Race Studies

Irish and ‘brown’ – Mixed ‘race’ Irish women’s identity and the problem of belonging

Women’s Movement: Migrant Women Transforming Ireland
Selection of papers from a conference held in
Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
2003-03-20 through 2003-03-21
pages 86-90

Angeline Morrison
Falmouth College of Arts

People are beginning to talk about the ‘invisibility’ of Whiteness. I am referring in particular to Richard Dyer’s project to ‘make Whiteness strange’, to hold it up for inspection and to question the tacit association of ‘Whiteness’ with ‘the human condition’ (Dyer 1997) I want to talk about another kind of Whiteness that has almost total invisibility—this is the Whiteness of the Mixed Race subject. I use the term ‘Mixed Race’ mindfully, aware that the term is contested and that some find its reference to the unscientific non-sense of ‘Race’ offensive (Harker 2000). For now, I want to define ‘Mixed Race’ people as the offspring of one White and one non-White parent. Such people have, inscribed on their bodies, evidence of migration somewhere along the line. Such people have, also, traditionally had problems at the tricky task of belonging. Although visually combining a phenotypic mixture of both White and Black features, the Mixed Race subject in a White, racialised society has, overwhelmingly, tended to be read by that society as, simply, ‘Black’. I am interested in also considering the Whiteness of the Mixed Race subject, particularly since this is something that both Black and White racialised societies alike – and by ‘racialised’ I mean operating according to what Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe has referred to as the ‘popular folk concept’ of ‘race’–have tended to deny. (Ifekwunigwe 2001:42).

So, the Mixed Race subject as I define her here, inhabits Blackness and Whiteness equally–but in a racialised society, she inhabits Whiteness invisibly. Her whiteness is like a deep stratum; present and felt, but rendered invisible by society. Whilst scholars have written about the cultural or behavioural Whiteness of Mixed Race subjects, I am so far unaware of any work that specifically foregrounds or makes visible the actual, lived, and (usually) ignored Whiteness that the brown-skinned subject of Mixed Race may claim as a birthright, should she so desire…

Read the paper here.

A White Woman From Kansas

The New York Times
2011-06-02

Roger Cohen

LONDON—For a long time Barack Obama’s mother was little more than the “white woman from Wichita” mentioned in an early Los Angeles Times profile of the future president. She was the pale Kansan silhouette against whom Obama drew the vivid Kenyan figure of his absent Dad in his Bildungsroman of discovered black identity, “Dreams from My Father.”

Now, thanks to Janny Scott’s remarkable “A Singular Woman,” absence has become presence. Stanley Ann Dunham, the parent who raised Obama, emerges from romanticized vagueness into contours as original as her name. Far from “floating through foreign things,” as one colleague in Indonesia observes, “She was as type A as anybody on the team.”

That may seem a far-fetched description of a woman who was not good with money, had no fixed abode and did not see life through ambition’s narrow prism. It was the journey not the destination that mattered to Dunham. She was, in her daughter Maya Soetoro-Ng’s words, “fascinated with life’s gorgeous minutiae.” To her son the president, “idealism and naïveté” were “embedded” in her.

Yet she was also a pioneering advocate of microcredit in the rural communities of the developing world, an unrivaled authority on Javanese blacksmithing, and a firm voice for female empowerment in an Indonesia “of ‘smiling’ or gentle oppression” toward women, as she wrote in one memo for the Ford Foundation…

…I found myself liking Dunham—the nonjudgmental irreverence; the determination to live what she loved; the humor (after a stomach-turning surfeit of peanuts, she notes, “Yes, peanuts do have faces—smirky, nasty little faces, in fact”); the frankness with friends—“I don’t like you in your arrogant bitch mode.” Her 52 years were rich.

She missed her son. The decision to send him to get educated in America was brave—and has changed the world in that Obama would not otherwise have become a black American. This is a central conundrum of a book that makes Obama’s white parent palpable for the first time.

In an affecting passage one colleague, Don Johnston, describes how Dunham “felt a little bit wistful or sad that Barack had essentially moved to Chicago and chosen to take on a really strongly identified black identity” that had “not really been part of who he was when he was growing up.” She felt that “he was distancing himself from her” in a “professional choice.”

Was it political calculation, love of Michelle Robinson, dreams of his father, or irritation with a dreamer-mother that made Obama black? After all, he was raised white. He chose black. Or perhaps he had no choice. Being biracial in the America Obama grew up in was not much of an option…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Obama’s story resonates in racially diverse Brazil

Washington Post
2011-03-18

Juan Forero, Staff Writer

RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazil is a big gumbo of ethnicities, its people proud of their diversity and confident their country is among the most tolerant of nations. But this country—a leading center of black culture—has never had a black president.

So like many Brazilians, Carlos Jose Melo said he would eagerly turn out for President Obama when he tours the country’s signature city on Sunday, a day after meeting with President Dilma Rousseff in Brasília.

Melo has spent most of his life in favelas, Rio’s rough-and-tumble shantytowns, which were first settled by former slaves and dirt-poor soldiers.

“In Brazil, we have all kinds of culture, people, and our inner identity comes from black people,” said Melo, 47, a drug abuse counselor in City of God, a favela Obama is expected to visit on Sunday. “That’s why I think Obama is important for the world, because a poor guy suddenly becomes the most important man in the world.”

Obama’s story—the humble beginnings and the rise to prominence and power—is familiar here. And so is his race, which has struck a chord in a country with the world’s second-largest black population, after Nigeria.

…T-shirt dealer Dilci Aguiar de Paula, who is black and has worked at the base of Sugar Loaf for 25 years, said she can hardly contain her excitement.

“He is a president the whole world likes, a black president,” she said. “I would give him a hug. I would tell him he is a good president.”…

Read the entire article here.

My Experience on the Indian-Negro Color Line

Indian Country Today
2011-12-27

Julianne Jennings
Arizona State University

Growing-up on the Indian-Negro color line (I am the daughter of a European mother and a black and Indian father), I lived with mixed signals and coded information by the dominant culture. It had determined that white European culture and people were superior in contrast to those who were generally classified as darker, “primitive” and “uncivilized.” Applying the adage “write what you know,” my master’s thesis was titled “Blood, Race and Sovereignty: The Politics of Indian Identity.” This work would not have been possible without the professors in the Department of Anthropology at Rhode Island College (RIC). They taught me how to challenge racial paradigms and stereotypes that Western society has about Indians; and how to brave racial orthodoxy and search new ways of thinking about our country’s seemingly insoluble problems with race.

Classroom discussions about race motivated me, at the age of 46, to reclaim my Indian ancestry by having my birth certificate changed from “Negro” to “American Indian.” The experience was emotionally overwhelming as I had been denied my birthright as an E. Pequot–Nottoway. Changing my birth certificate was not because I was ashamed of my multiracial identity; it was an affirmation of my survival as an Indian and an act of self-determination in a country that has gone so far to erase my ancestry from history. I assert my tri-racial identity, but most of America’s forms, like birth certificates, at present allow listing only one race. To employ biological over cultural definitions of American Indians reflects a fundamental ignorance of American history and its unprocessed shame of slavery and American Indian traditions. Thus, issues about race are especially important to me, as “mixed-blood” Indians are not considered “authentic” by mainstream society. We have to dress in buckskin; feathers and beads to be taken seriously, yet those with European ancestry do not have to wear tall black hats or buckled shoes to convince others of their ancestry…

Read the entire article here.

Talking Race w/ Social Critic/Legal Scholar Dorothy Roberts

Blogtalk Radio
Tuesday, 2011-10-11

Michelle McCrary, Host
Is That Your Child?

Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology; Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania

ITYC is honored to welcome leading legal scholar and social critic Dorothy Roberts to the podcast. Author of the over 75 articles and essays in books and scholarly journals, including Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, and Stanford Law Review, Robert’s latest work Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century, is an eye-opening look at the way race continues to be reproduced and legitimized in our society.

Roberts is the Kirkland & Ellis Professor at Northwestern University School of Law and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research. She is also the author of Killing the Black Body and Shattered Bonds and has received fellowships and grants from the National Science Foundation, Searle Fund, Fulbright Scholars Program, Harvard University Program in Ethics and the Professions, and Stanford Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.

..this was a book that really, completely, changed and challenged everything that I knew and I thought I knew about race. And I thank you for that, because it’s just one of those books that really, really kind of changes your life in a way because it sort of opens things up and makes you think about the world a completely different way, it’s a really powerful book.

Download the interview here (01:17:41).

Between Cultural Lines

Collide
Azusa Pacific University, Azusa, California
Student Magazine
2011-12-07

Chelsey Barmore, Staff Writer

For some, finding their identities as biracial or multiracial individuals can bring forth challenges. Someone born with blended ethnicities may experience the frequent question of, “What are you?” Mistaken for one race and not recognized for the other may at times create an identity crisis. There’s a pull to identify with one group or another, and sometimes, between multiple ethnicities simultaneously.
 
This is the case for Stephen Gephart, who is German, English, and Hispanic. Gephart, a sophomore applied health major says he’s proud of his Hispanic heritage. He grew up in a Catholic household and was raised by a Spanish-speaking mother. Cooking tamales for Christmas with his family became a memorable time for him. Even though his Hispanic heritage was dominant in his home, Gephart still accepted his English and German nationalities…

…Benjamin Bailey, contributor of the book “Multiracial Americans and Social Class” and an associate professor of communication at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, explained that several factors could influence the acceptance of personal ethnic identity: physical features, social interactions, and communities.
 
“I think now there are a lot of people in the United States who, with large-scale immigration, don’t fit the traditional categories so there’s more flexibility now,” said Bailey. “At one point, someone could say, ‘I don’t care who you are; you’re black to me.’”
 
Bailey explained that in the past a “one drop rule” was enforced. This rule claimed that any individual with “one drop” of African ancestry was to be considered fully African-American. Today, individuals cannot be fully defined by one ethnicity over another. Even the way a person acts can affect the way one is identified, according to Bailey…

Read the entire article here.

Speak, So I Might See You! Afro-German Literature

World Literature Today
Volume 69, Number 3, Multiculturalism in Contemporary German Literature (Summer, 1995)
pages 533-538

Leroy T. Hopkins, Professor of German
Millersville University, Millersville, Pennsylvania

In  recent decades Germany has struggled with the reality of being a multicultural society. The influx of political and economic refugees from Asia and Africa as well as growing friction between resident aliens euphemistically termed “Gastarbeiter” (guest workers) and the German population have created a political atmosphere conducive to neofascist and nationalistic elements expounding xenophobic policies. Simultaneously, the presence of diverse cultural, racial, and ethnic groups has created opportunities for literary perspectives that can diversify and enrich German culture. One such new perspective is that of race.

In and of itself, the German discussion of race is certainly no novelty. At least since the Age of Discovery and the first modem contacts with people of color, Europeans and Germans in particular have been so fascinated by exotic areas of the world that they collected flora and fauna from those regions to “adorn” their courts, museums, and universities and slake their hunger for the supposedly curious and bizarre. The growth of the slave trade and the resultant agitation to abolish it in the Atlantic world had a counterpart in the German states, where individuals such as Alexander von Humboldt and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach either spoke against the slave trade or extolled the numerous achievements of Africans.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the slave narratives, autobiographical statements from individuals who had removed themselves from bondage, played a central role in the international struggle against slavery: the victim served a double function. First, the acquisition of literacy demonstrated the ennobling impact of European education on the “primitive”; second, the inhumanity of slavery’ was verified in first-person narration. German receptivity for such accounts was not unproblematical. Although enthralled by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s fictionalized account of slave life, the German public was indifferent to the factual account presented by Frederick Douglass. The German translation of Douglass’s narrative of his life, published in 1860, appeared only in one edition and was not issued again until the GDR released a new translation in 1965. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, on the other hand, met with phenomenal success and sold over two million copies worldwide in just a single decade. This discrepancy in the respective receptions accorded to fictional and historical personages presages expectations about the African character (docility versus self-assuredness, object of pity versus autonomous individual, et cetera) that, fossilized by the German colonial experience and the pervasiveness of scientific racism, created a mind-set that would hinder rather than promote cross-cultural communication.

To discuss the perspective of race in contemporary German literature, it is worthwhile to focus on those writers associated with the programmatic efforts of the Afro-Germans, a heterogeneous, biracial group of individuals usually of German and African or African American heritage and born since 1945. In 1984 the late feminist author and scholar Audre Lorde presented a lecture and workshop in Berlin that apparently struck a resonant chord among the biracial women present. Lorde’s topic was African American and feminist literature. Allegedly the confrontation with African American literature and history led those present to call themselves “Afro-German” and to record “their-story.” The result has been organizational and publishing initiatives as well as a series of texts that include such disparate genres as lyric, film, essay, and rap. Perhaps the most interesting aspect in the evolution of Afro-German literature is the reception of the African American experience.

As an early step in their search for cultural identity the Afro-Germans organized a women’s group, ADEFA (for “Afrodeutschc Frauen” or Afro-German Women), and the ISD (for “Initiative Schwarze Deutsche” or Black German Initiative), with affiliated branches in major urban centers such as Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Frankfurt, and Stuttgart. Perhaps recognizing the necessity of a major public campaign to attract the attention of a populace faded by over a generation of self-recrimination because of war crimes, the Afro-Germans turned to the mass media. Two provocative television broadcasts aired in 1986 and the energies released by Audre Lorde in Berlin culminated in the publication of Farbe bekennen: Afrodeutschc Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichie (Acknowledging Color Afro-German Women on the Trail of Their History). Part essay, pan oral history, this fascinating cross section of the Afro-German experience from the Wilhelminian empire up to the very recent past allowed bicultural women of color to reflect on the daily racism and sexism that have stalked them since childhood. As such, the selections are reminiscent of…

Purchase the article here.

A Recovered Early Letter by Charles Chesnutt

American Literary Realism
Volume 40, Number 2 (Winter, 2008)
pages 180-182
DOI: 10.1353/alr.2008.0006

Randall Gann
University of New Mexico

In the preface to the first volume of their edition of Charles Chesnutt’s letters, Joseph McElraih and Robert Leitz III contend that Chesnutt “was among the most visible figures . . . testing the commercial viability of African-American authorship at the turn of the [twentieth] century.” In a letter to Houghton, Mifflin & Co. dated 8 September 1891, however, Chesnutt downplayed his racial heritage: In his case, he insisted, “the infusion of African blood is very small—is not in fact a visible admixture.” And in a recently discovered letter signed with a pseudonym—the earliest extant personal letter he sent anyone—Chesnutt both hid his biracial identity and seized the opportunity to vent his frustrations. Because this was a private letter, not intended for publication, it provides additional evidence that Chesnutt wanted to hide or at least obscure his racial identity.

In an article entitled “The Color Line” in Kate Field’s Washington for 19 December 1894, Field editorialized on a controversy over the admission of a black woman to the Chicago Woman’s Club. Although virtually unknown today, Kate Field (1838-1896) was the most prominent female journalist in the United States during the last half of the nineteenth century. She was a contributor to the early issues of the Atlantic Monthly and had numerous articles printed in the New York Tribune between 1866 and 1889. In her essay. Field argued that “Because men’s clubs draw the color line is the very reason why women should set their brothers a good example by displaying a more catholic spirit. . . . Were Christ to walk on earth he would assuredly make no distinction between while and black.” Chesnutt responded to Field’s editorial in a letter published in the paper a few weeks later but hitherto lost t0 scholarship:…

Read or purchase the article here.

Blackness Without Ethnicity: Constructing Race in Brazil

Palgrave Macmillan
August 2003
256 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-312-29374-1, ISBN10: 0-312-29374-7
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-312-29375-8, ISBN10: 0-312-29375-5

Livio Sansone, Vice Director of Centro de Estudos Afro-Asiaticos
Universidade Candido Mendes in Brazil

Drawing on 15 years of research in Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, Suriname, and the Netherlands, Livio Sansone explores the very different ways that race and ethnicity are constructed in Brazil and the rest of Latin America. He compares Latin American conceptions of race to US and European notions of race that are defined by clearly identifiable black-white ethnicities. Sansone argues that understanding more complex, ambiguous notions of culture and identity will expand international discourse on race and move it away from American definitions unable to describe racial difference. He also explores the effects of globalization on constructions of race.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: An Afro-Latin Paradox? Ambiguous Ethnic Lines, Sharp Class Divisions, and a Vital Black Culture
• Negro Parents, Black Children: Work, Color, and Generational Differences
• From Africa to Afro: Uses and Abuses of Africa in Brazil
• The Local and Global in Today’s Afro-Bahia
• Funk in Bahia and Rio: Local Versions of a Global Phenomena
• The Internationalization of Black Culture: A Comparison of Lower-Class Youth in Brazil and the Netherlands
• Conclusions: The Place of Brazil in the Black Atlantic

A First Time for Everything

The New York Times Magazine
The Lives They Lived
2011-12-22

Isabel Wilkerson

While poring over the Web site Legacy.com to prepare this issue, we noticed a trend. A search of the site’s database — which includes obituaries from more than 750 newspapers across the country—turned up hundreds of obits published in 2011 with one phrase in common.

A single thread appears and reappears, as a headline or an afterthought, in the final words written by the families of more than 300 people who departed this earth in the past year. In each of these obituaries was a phrase that read something like this: “The first black American to . . .” or “The first African-American .”

Eugene King was the first African-American milk-delivery man in the Gary, Ind., area. Eddie Koger was the first black bus driver in the state of South Carolina. Camillus Wilson was the first African-American meter reader for the Baltimore Gas and Electric Company. Nancy Hodge-Snyder was said to have “had the distinction of being the first black registered nurse in Kalamazoo.”

I scan the list, a spreadsheet of names and obituary excerpts, and cannot stop reading. How mundane the positions were, how modest the dreams had been. Added together, they somehow bear witness to how far the country has come and how it got to where it is. They speak to how many individual decisions had to be made, how many chances taken, the anxiety and second-guessing at the precise instant that each of these people was hired for whatever humble or lofty position they sought…

…Summie Briscoe was the first black certified automobile mechanic in Cleveland County, N.C. Harriet Braxton was the first African-American female housing inspector in the city of Harrisburg, Pa. Wilbert Coleman was the first African-American narcotics detective in Hackensack, N.J.

Sometime in the future, the phrase will be invoked for the biggest first of all, the first African-American elected to the Oval Office, a designation that surely the first milk-delivery man and the first postal clerk and the first business agent for Heavy Construction Laborers’ Union Local 663 in Kansas City, Mo., had, upon consideration, more than a little something to do with.

Read the entire essay here.