Mixed Race Studies

Mixed Britannia: Part 3 of 3 (1965-2011)

BBC Two
2011-10-20

George Alagiah, Host

Below is the last episode as four 15-minute videos.

Obama’s Racial Identity Is His Call

Poynter.
2008-12-16

Tom Huang, Sunday & Enterprise Editor
The Dallas Morning News
Also Ethics and Diversity Fellow at The Poynter Institute

Not long ago, I sat on a journalism panel in which the question of “What are you?” came up…

…I thought about the “What are you?” question when I read Jesse Washington’s recent Associated Press story about the hubbub surrounding Barack Obama’s racial identity.

Obama self-identifies as African American, because, as he’s explained in the past, “that’s how I’m treated and that’s how I’m viewed. I’m proud of it.”

 It turns out that some people are less than comfortable with that. Some argue that it’s too simplistic to call him “black.” After all, he was raised by his white mother and white grandparents. Others argue that it’s more accurate to identify Obama as “biracial” or “multiracial.”…

…Well, let’s give the individual the power of self-identification. If Obama wants to be identified as “black,” let’s give him that choice. If Tiger Woods wants to be identified as “multiracial” (or “Cablinasian,” for that matter), more power to him.

The reality is we still live in a society in which racial constructs, however antiquated they might be, still matter. They help us be mindful about how our cultural traditions have shaped our identities. They help us remember how centuries of oppression and discrimination shaped our politics, economic divide and social strata…

Read the entire article here.

Barack Obama in Hawai’i and Indonesia: The Making of a Global President

ABC-CLIO Praeger
September 2011
276 pages
6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-313-38533-9
Electronic ISBN: 978-0-313-38534-6

Dinesh Sharma, Senior Fellow
Institute for International and Cross-Cultural Research
St. Francis College, New York

Distinguishing itself from the mass of political biographies of Barack Obama, this first interdisciplinary study of Obama’s Indonesian and Hawai’ian years examines their effect on his adult character, political identity, and global world-view.

Barack Obama is the first American president born and raised in Hawai’i, the most diverse state in the Union, and the first American president to have spent a significant part of his childhood in a Muslim-majority nation, namely, Indonesia. What effect did these—and other early experiences—have on the man who is now, arguably, the world’s most popular political leader?

The first 18 years of President Obama’s life, from his birth in 1961 to his departure for college in 1979, were spent in Hawai’i and Indonesia. These years fundamentally shaped the traits for which the adult Obama is noted—his protean identity, his nuanced appreciation of multiple views of the same object, his cosmopolitan breadth of view, and his self-rooted “outpost” patriotism. Barack Obama in Hawai’i and Indonesia: The Making of a Global President is the first study to examine, in fascinating detail, how his early years impacted this unique leader.

Existing biographies of President Obama are primarily political treatments. Here, cross-cultural psychologist and marketing consultant Dinesh Sharma explores the connections between Obama’s early upbringing and his adult views of civil society, secular Islam, and globalization. The book draws on the author’s on-the-ground research and extensive first-hand interviews in Jakarta; Honolulu; New York; Washington, DC; and Chicago to evaluate the multicultural inputs to Obama’s character and the ways in which they prepared him to meet the challenges of world leadership in the 21st century.

Features

• Foreword
• Photographs
• Timelines
• Figures
• Appendices

Highlights

• Offers the first systematic study of Barack Obama’s Indonesian and Hawai’ian years and their effect on his adult character and political identity
• Shows how Obama’s early experiences fostered a repertoire of social and psychological skills ideally suited to dealing with the complex cultural and geopolitical issues that confront 21st-century America
• Provides new keys to understanding Obama by looking at the varied cultural and religious influences that shaped his attitudes, beliefs, and hybrid cultural identity
• Examines Ann Dunham’s doctoral dissertation, based on her social anthropological fieldwork in Indonesia, for clues to the perceptual prisms she inculcated in her son, Barack Obama

To Make a New Race: Gurdjieff, Toomer, and the Harlem Renaissance

University Press of Mississippi
1999
202 pages
Cloth: 157806130X (9781578061303)
Paper: 1578061318 (9781578061310)

Jon Woodson, Professor of English
Howard University, Washington, D.C.

Jean Toomer’s adamant stance against racism and his call for a raceless society were far more complex than the average reader of works from the Harlem Renaissance might believe. In To Make a New Race Jon Woodson explores the intense influence of Greek-born mystic G. I. Gurdjieff on the thinking of Toomer and his coterie—Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, George Schuyler, Wallace Thurman—and, through them, the mystic’s influence on many of the notables in African American literature.

Gurdjieff, born of poor Greco-Armenian parents on the Russo-Turkish frontier, espoused the theory that man is asleep and in prison unless he strains against the major burdens of life, especially those of identification, like race. Toomer, whose novel Cane became an inspiration to many later Harlem Renaissance writers, traveled to France and labored at Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. Later, the writer became one of the primary followers approved to teach Gurdjieff’s philosophy in the United States.

Woodson’s is the first study of Gurdjieff, Toomer, and the Harlem Renaissance to look beyond contemporary portrayals of the mystic in order to judge his influence. Scouring correspondence, manuscripts, and published texts, Woodson finds the direct links in which Gurdjieff through Toomer played a major role in the development of “objective literature.” He discovers both coded and explicit ways in which Gurdjieff’s philosophy shaped the world views of writers well into the 1960s. Moreover Woodson reinforces the extensive contribution Toomer and other African-American writers with all their international influences made to the American cultural scene.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Jean Toomer: Beside You Will Stand a Strange Man
• 2 Wallace Thurman: Beyond Race and Color
• 3 Rudolph Fisher: Minds of Another Order
• 4 Nella Larsen: The Anatomy of “Sleep”
• 5 George Schuyler: New Races and New Worlds
• 6 Zora Neale Hurston: The Self and the Nation
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Desdemona’s Fire – Review

African American Review
Volume 35, Number 2 (Summer 2001)
pages 342-343

Lesley Wheeler, Henry S. Fox Professor of English
Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia

Ruth Ellen Kocher. Desdemona’s Fire. Detroit: Lotus P, 1999. 62 pp.

This shapely first collection, 1999 winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award, rises with independent grace from its framework of myth and allusion. The title, Desdemona Fire, certainly signals the book’s chief subject. Desdemona, here a “poor white girl from the edge of town,” bears a child by a traveling African American jazz pianist. The “fire” designates both the mother’s passion and its product, a restless girl who prowls the volume in a red nightgown. In the title poem, the speaker addresses her father, cast as Othello: “I am writing myself into your story/because you murder again/not knowing my birth.” Kocher’s references, in fact, range from Louise Gluck and Wallace Stevens to Greek myth and Buddhism. However, this volume finds a deeper coherence in its autobiographical voice, which appealingly balances vivid poetry with spare forthrightness. While these poems sometimes treat stock situatiions–sessions of braiding and straightening hair, the sounds of violence in the projects—Kocher often u ses allusion to defamiliarize these scenes, and the restraint of her style highlights her scrupulous fairness in writing a complex world. As she remarks in “Odyssea Home,” “Sometimes, words are simply/too accurate for anger and lust.”

The structure of Desdemona’s Fire dramatizes Kocher’s attractive unpredictability. It divides roughiy in half, a binary which suggests the obvious racial and cultural split within the speaker. Part I circles obsessively around the absent black father, but while Part II offers many complementary versions of the speaker’s white mother, the volume doesn’t really work so neatly. Instead, from one half to another this collection changes spirit. While abandonment and murder darken the first half of the book, the second half seeks and finds moments of reconciliation.

Kocher’s best poems explore how agonizing differences and tentative connections can coexist among people, accessibly sketching how race, especially, complicates human feelings. “The Migrant,” a powerful poem several pages in length, provides a memorable example of these concerns. Kocher recounts the “First time I saw another/brown face”: While staying at a farm rented by her white mother’s relatives, she watches black migrant workers pick tomatoes. The little girl strongly feels the paradox of her situation and hides from both groups, the migrants whom she physically resembles and the gathered family to whom she also belongs. While she imagines the workers’ angry children rushing the porch to smash the heaped tomatoes, she also projects forward to real violence, an attack by her white cousin she will experience years in the future. As in the rest of the volume, Kocher expresses estrangement from her white kin in sorrowful or bitter tones; after all, they ought to claim her, while the darker women eyeing her curiously from the fields owe her no such debt, or at least a far frailer one. Elsewhere, Kocher finds generous community with the neighborhood women of color who braid her hair (“Braiding”), in sharp contrast to the alienation she feels from mother and scowling grandmother in “Liturgy of the Light-Skinned.”…

Read the entire review here.

Sun uses it’s Arsenal to divide us

Lester Holloway
2011-08-17

Lester Holloway, Liberal Democrat Councillor, Journalist & Equality Campaigner
London Borough of Sutton

Top footballers are good at what they do but the Government does not turn to Ashley Cole or John Terry for economic advice. By the same token, their views on race shouldn’t set the agenda. That was my first reaction to the full page devoted to Theo Walcott’s experiences in today’s Sun.
 
I have no issue with the Arsenal and sometime England winger–his history and childhood memories are his own–but when a few paragraphs in his new autobiography are plucked out and spun into a full page in Britain’s biggest-selling newspaper you have to ask: ‘what it going on?’…

…Let’s start with the headline:”People call me black but I’m mixed race.” Again, he’s perfectly entitled to that view, but it’s not one shared by all who recognise that being “mixed race” means you are seen as a person of colour just as those who have two black parents. The political term ‘black’ has never excluded the ‘white side’ of the family, but is in part a uniting umbrella term recognising shared African ancestry. That makes it a term of power–power in numbers and from the spiritual and cultural legacy of the continent.
 
Fracturing a united black community by prizing away “mixed race” people is really about breaking up that power, dividing and ruling. Some of the worst apartheid and colonial regimes have been built upon a colour and shading heirachy, while shadism and the caste system still blights the world today. Clearly Walcott wasn’t trying do advance any of these notions! But I strongly suspect The Sun’s aim was to reduce the size, and therefore the influence, of the black community by emphasising “mixed race” as being seperate from black.
 
I’m not entirely clear what “mixed race” is anyway. I am of mixed parentage, and therefore dual heritage, but I am not a member of any distinct “mixed race”; indeed there is no such thing. Pick two mixed people at random, and I will put money on them having less ancestry in common than if you compared them to any randomly picked person with two black parents. If “mixed race” people are grouped together exclusively on grounds of skin shade, that is quite insulting and not a little “racist!”…

…Walcott is not an activist; I have no expectations of him apart from delivering pinpoint crosses from the touchline (and Lord knows, Arsenal will need plenty of them this season!) It matters not that he grew up in a small Berkshire town and is dating a white young woman. What matters is that we have an holistic debate, and that if papers such as The Sun are going to get excited about a footballer declaring himself mixed race as opposed to black, they should give other perspectives an airing too.
 
Failure to do so can only reinforce suspicions that they–or certainly the rich and powerful in Britain–wish to ensure that the rapidly growing numbers of people of mixed parentage do not identify black. After all, creating difference, tension and envy between black people on the basis of skin colour is a tactic that has been tried and tested for many generations…

Read the entire essay here.

Bynum: The Long Shadow of the Civil War (2010)

The Civil War Monitor: A New Look at America’s Greatest Conflict
2011-10-19

Laura Hepp Bradshaw
Carnegie Mellon University

The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies by Victoria E. Bynum. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Cloth, ISBN: 0807833819.

“Few histories,” Victoria Bynum laments, “are buried faster or deeper than those of political or social dissenters” (148). By resurrecting the histories of three anti-secessionist communities in the South, Bynum’s latest book about the Civil War home front and post-war aftermath brings previously ignored strains of political and social dissent back to life through an intricate examination of the period rooted in race, gender, and class politics. Ultimately guided by three central questions designed to probe the prevalence of Unionism among southerners during the war, the effects of Union victory on freedpeople and southern Unionists, and the Civil War’s broader legacies, Bynum finds answers in the Piedmont of North Carolina, the Piney Woods of Mississippi, and the Big Thicket of Hardin County, Texas. These regions, though miles apart, are united in Bynum’s analysis by kinship and the political alliances of non-slaveholding, yeoman farming families…

…These home front battles, Bynum tells us, had a lasting effect on the political and social clime of the Reconstruction era, and beyond.  When Republican Reconstruction ended and Jim Crow Reconstruction segregated the South, former southern Unionists like Jasper and Warren Collins of the Big Thicket region rejected the two-party political system in favor of alternative platforms such the Populists or Socialists, in addition to the predominant southern religions.  Newt Knight and his descendants struggled against the rising tide of white supremacy that sought to divide white, black, and Native American demographics by living openly as a multi-racial community.  Furthermore, Bynum highlights the challenges faced by women in the Reconstruction period, as Jim Crow also regulated sexual mores and relations between both the sexes and races.

Thematically, the book harnesses examples of gender, class, and race on the wartime home front and in the post-war period. Yet, even though a vast portion of the book is devoted to discussing the anti-secessionist personalities of Newt Knight, Jasper and Warren Collins, and to a lesser extent, Bill Owens, an explicit examination their gender is curiously overlooked. Bynum mentions that “southern Unionists, Populists, and Socialists” were portrayed as “cowards and traitors,” but she fails to examine the implications of those labels within the broader context of southern masculinity (114). That said, Bynum’s sophisticated, multi-layered analysis of class relations, especially during the Civil War, more than make up for this shortcoming. She thoroughly illustrates a web of complex, inter-community class tensions that linked the conscripted poor, men fortunate to wave Confederate service, and the home guard. Bynum successfully explicates the repercussions of a segregated South on people of mixed race descent who were forced to either claim their black identity, like Anna Knight, a descendant of Newt Knight, or to “pass” as white by relocating away from the communities of their birth and obscuring their ancestry, as many other Knight Company descendants were forced to do…

Read the entire review here.

Clench: What are You Fighting For?

Commissioned By: Runnymede Trust-UK’s Leading Race Equality Think Tank
2011
Written and directed by Riffat Ahmed
Produced by Shane Davey, Courtney Edwards, Riffat Ahmed and Fabien Soazandry of Davey Inc
Running Time: 00:15:39

Starring: Hussina Raja as Ash
With: Kevin Morris, Jeff Caffrey, Afreen Mhar, Allan Hopwood, and Danny Randall

Made as part of the Runnymede Trust’s Generation 3.0 project, which looks at how racism can be ended in a generation, this short film tells the story of Ash, a mixed-race girl from Old Trafford, Manchester.

On a youth referral scheme, we see Ash travel to the iconic Salford Lads Club where she takes up boxing as a way of dealing with her troubled past. By portraying Ash’s experience of the sport, the film highlights how the boxing ring can be a neutral space where race and neighbourhood politics are left outside.

The film looks at not only Ash’s own experience of racism, but also the preconceptions she holds about other people and places.

Clench demonsrates how boxing can become the ultimate visual tool for communication between generations, highlighting that every person has a story to tell regardless of how they look.

Music: Sam Baws
Director of Photography: Jake Scott
Sound Design: Ashley Charles
Editor: Vid Price

Supporting Cast: Ezzo DeVaugn, Billy Wain, Kane Hannaway, Charell Anerville, Philip Mulher, Adam Crosby, Sam Walker, Rico Stewart, Dan McCan, Anna Baatz, and Patrick O’Brien

Gaffer: Gwyn Hemmings
Focus Puller: Matt French
Second AC/DIT: Jan Koblanski Bowyer
Sound Recordist: Shaun Hocking
Make up: Sophie Mechlowitz and Leah Tesciuba
Red Camera: HH Films Manchester
Anamorphic Lenses: Nick Gordon Smith
Lighting: Arri Manchester
Colourist: Martin Southworth @ Nice Biscuits

Shot on location in Manchester, England

New Photo Essay: (1)ne Drop

(1)ne Drop
2011-09-26

Yaba Blay

Comments by Steven F. Riley: In keeping with the non-commercial aspect of this site, I have modified the fundraising press release to provide informational content about the book project. There is howerver, a short fundraising request at the end of the video.

PHILADELPHIA, PA – Africana Studies scholar Yaba Blay, Ph.D., and award-winning photographer Noelle Théard [photographs] are collaborating on an innovative new project: a photo essay book that explores the “other” faces of Blackness – those folks who may not be immediately recognized, accepted, or embraced as Black in our visually racialized society. Entitled (1)ne Drop, a reference to the historical “one-drop rule,” the project seeks to challenge narrow, yet popular perceptions of what “Blackness” is and what “Blackness” looks like by pairing candid personal narratives with beautifully captured portraits.

“With this project, I wanted to look at the other side, or at least another side. When we talk about skin color politics, for the most part, we only discuss the disadvantages associated with being dark-skinned. We know about the lived experience of being dark-skinned in a society where lighter skin and White skin are privileged,” says Blay, the author for the project.  “This is not to say that that discussion is over or resolved or that we need to stop discussing it. But we also need to start having more balanced and holistic conversations about skin color.”…

From the “About” page.

People of African descent reflect a multiplicity of skin tones and phenotypic characteristics. Often times, however, when met by people who self-identify as “Black,” but do not fit into a stereotypical model of Blackness, many of us not only question their identity, but challenge their Blackness, and thus our potential relationship to them. A creative presentation of historical documentation, personal memoirs, and portraiture, (1)ne Drop literally explores the “other” faces of Blackness—those who may not immediately be recognized, accepted, or embraced as “Black” in this visually racialized society. Through portrait documentaries (book and film), photography exhibitions, and public programming, the project intends to raise social awareness and spark community dialogue about the complexities of Blackness as both an identity and a lived reality.

(1)ne Drop seeks to challenge narrow, yet popular perceptions of what “Blackness” is and what “Blackness” looks like—if we can recalibrate our lenses to see Blackness as a broader category of identity and experience, perhaps we will be able to see ourselves as part of a larger global community. In the end, (1)ne Drop hopes to awaken a long-overdue and much needed dialogue about racial identity and skin color politics.

For more information, click here.

The Bondage of Race and the Freedom of Transcendence in Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom

Postgraduate English: A Journal and Forum for Postgraduates in English since 2000
Durham University
Issue Number 4 (September 2001)

Briallen Hopper, Lecturer in English
Yale University

Frederick Douglass has a strange way of describing what he feels like when he feels most free. When trying to convey how ardently enthusiastic he was when he first lived among abolitionists, he writes, “For a time I was made to forget that my skin was dark and my hair crisped” (Douglass 366). He echoes this expression of elation and lost self-consciousness when he writes about why he loves living in England: “I meet nothing to remind me of my complexion” (Douglass 374). Douglass was born into a racist society, and it is natural and perhaps inevitable that losing the awareness and memory of his body should be a freeing feeling for him; but when this feeling is described in a work of propaganda so carefully constructed as My Bondage and My Freedom, the reader expects it to be interpreted so as to fit with a larger message that there is nothing intrinsically imprisoning about dark skin and “crisped” hair, and Douglass refuses to interpret it in this way. To Douglass, the feeling of freedom seems to be uncomfortably close to the feeling of being invisible-or white.

 I do not pretend to be able to ease the discomfort that Douglass creates in modern readers when he describes the pleasure of losing awareness of his hair and skin, but I believe these readers can understand Douglass better if they read his descriptions of transcendence of race in My Bondage and My Freedom as in part a reaction to the racialist attitudes towards individuals and cultures that prevailed in antebellum culture, including abolitionist culture. In the first two parts of this essay, “‘The African Race Has Peculiarities’: Transcending a Racialized Body,” and “‘A Little of the Plantation Manner’: Transcending a Racialized Culture,” I will describe how the racialism in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and in the Garrisonian abolitionists’ expectations for black abolitionists constrained Douglass in a way that was analogous to slavery.

Any attempt to free people from a bondage based on racial identity by an appeal to a liberating discourse which is also based on racial identity is bound to be problematic; as Robyn Wiegman writes, “If identities are not metaphysical, timeless categories of being; if they point not to ontologies but to historical specificities and contingencies; if their mappings of bodies and subjectivities are forms of and not simply resistances to practices of domination-then a politics based on identity must carefully negotiate the risk of reinscribing the logic of the system it hopes to defeat” (Wiegman 6). My claim about My Bondage and My Freedom, put into anachronistic terminology, is that Douglass felt that the politics of racialist abolitionism did not negotiate the risk of reinscription carefully enough; furthermore, he did not believe it was possible for identity politics to avoid reinscribing the logic of slavery.

Douglass’s desire for transcendence was not simply a reaction to racialism. It can also be understood as a positive expression of what he desired for himself and for African-Americans generally: a desire historically described as “assimilationism” and now pejoratively referred to as “universalism” or “bourgeois liberalism”; a desire that is evoked by Martin Luther King’s mythical phrase about children who are judged “by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.” In the third part of this essay, “‘Race is Transient’: Transcending Race,” I discuss how Douglass, in a strangely postmodernist-yet-universalist way, deconstructs race in order to make assimilation possible. In My Bondage and My Freedom and in countless speeches, Douglass describes the racial self-designations and un-self-designations he makes when traveling on trains (following Douglass’s lead, both the Supreme Court and W.E.B. Du Bois have at times recognized trains to be an ultimate test of the validity of racial identities). These designations and undesignations are breathtaking examples of an American’s willful transcendence of race…

Read the entire essay here.