Mixed Race Studies

Why ‘Raising a Black Son’ Is a de Blasio Campaign Theme

The New York Times
2019-07-01

Jeffery C. Mays

Dante de Blasio wrote an op-ed published in USA Today that expanded on how his father, Mayor Bill de Blasio, talked to him about being wary of the police. Sina Schuldt/Picture Alliance, via Getty Images

Dante de Blasio, whose giant Afro was featured in his father’s bid for New York City mayor, is playing a role in his presidential campaign.

The first frame in the now-famous 33-second ad is taken up almost entirely by Dante de Blasio’s giant Afro.

He was only 15 then, an unlikely star of his father’s equally unlikely victory in the 2013 mayor’s race in New York City.

Through Dante, his father, Bill de Blasio, was able to highlight his biracial family, offer a personal perspective on his policies on affordable housing and early childhood education and signal his intention to end the police practice, known as stop and frisk, that Dante said in the ad “unfairly targets” minorities.

Now, deep into his second and final term as mayor and in the midst of another long-shot candidacy, this time for president, Mr. de Blasio is once again leaning on his son for a boost…

Read the entire article here.

Social media trolls try but fail to give Kamala Harris the Obama-birther treatment

Think Progress
2019-07-01

Sam Fulwood III

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA – JUNE 30: Democratic presidential candidate U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) greets attendees during the SF Pride Parade on June 30, 2019 in San Francisco, California. An online smear campaign targeted Harris over the weekend, arguing she’s not a black American and raising fears of birtherism and racism intruding into the 2020 campaign. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Birtherism raises its ugly head, only to be lopped off by Harris supporters and rivals

A birther-style attack against Sen. Kamala Harris’ campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination failed to take hold after legions of her online supporters — including most of her political opponents — rushed to denounce social media postings challenging her legitimacy to speak as a black American.

Harris spoke passionately about racial issues during last week’s Democratic debate, and since then a misguided series of social media posts began sprouting on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter suggesting that her parentage — Harris’ mother was Tamil Indian and her father is Jamaican — disqualified her from the community of black people in the United States.

At one point in last week’s debate, Harris interrupted crosstalk on stage, demanding to be heard as “the only black person on this stage” during a heated discussion of racial justice policy.

At another point, Harris described her feelings confronting racism as a child. “Growing up, my sister and I had to deal with the neighbor who told us her parents said she couldn’t play with us because … we were black.”…

Read the entire article here.

Interracial Marriages among Asian Americans in the U.S. West, 1880-1954

University of Florida
2011
257 pages

Eunhye Kwon

A dissertation presented to the graduate school of the University of Florida in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

My work is about the first two generations of Chinese and Japanese Americans who married whites in the U.S. West between 1880 and 1954. It was a time when interracial marriage was illegal in most of the states. From two major archival sources—the Survey of Race Relations, 1924–1927, and records about Japanese American internees during World War II—, my work finds that more than two hundred Chinese and Japanese Americans and their white spouses could circumvent miscegenation laws and lived as legally married couples in the U.S. West before the 1950s.

Existing scholarship on the history of miscegenation laws has revealed the role of the laws in making racial categories and stigmatizing interracial intimacy between non-white men and white women. My work shows that marriages between white women and Chinese and/or Japanese men were major targets of racist and misogynist assumptions about interracial intimacy in the U.S. West. Such marriages were further marginalized by federal government’s policies on Asian exclusion and on the mixed marriage families during the World War II internment of Japanese Americans. Government policies upheld a white male citizen’s ability to assimilate his Asian wife and his patriarchal prerogative to his interracial family. The same government policies persistently denied the claims of white women married to Chinese and/or Japanese men that they, as wives and mothers, were assimilating agents in their interracial families.

My work uncovers the history of a small but significant number of interracial couples consisting of Chinese and/or Japanese husbands and white wives, who argued against the negative construction of their interracial marriages. My work also notes the emergence of a cultural pluralist defense of interracial marriage between non-white men and white women by progressive intellectuals such as Franz Boas, W.E.B. Du Bois, Sidney Gulick, and Robert Park in the early twentieth century. White women married to Chinese and/or Japanese men claimed that their interracial families were legitimate American families decades before postwar American liberals began to openly support interracial marriage.

Read the entire dissertation here.

Lunchtime Lecture: Eleanor Kipping

SVA MFA Art Practice
335 West 16th Street
New York, New York 10011
Telephone: 212.592.2781
Tuesday, 2019-07-02, 12:30-14:00 EDT (Local Time)

Without Borders Festival IV: Between You and Me, Lord Gallery (1200 Afro picks, gold leaf, rocking chair, book of poetry)

Eleanor Kipping is a socially engaged artist and educator. Her interdisciplinary creative practice is concerned with the Black female experience as Other in the United States regarding hair politics, colorism, and racial passing and how these topics may be explored at the intersection(s) of installation, performance, and social practice. She holds a BS from the New England School of Communications, an MFA from the University of Maine and has participated in residencies at Skowhegan and Gakko in Japan. Kipping is the 2019 Art Practice Artist-in-Residence.

For more information, click here.

[Natasha] Cloud was just “Tash” at home, but she couldn’t find her place at school.

“You’re not white enough; you’re not black enough. You’re kind of that gray-area kid, and I think that’s one of the hardest spots to be in,” Cloud said. “Kids are brutal, and if you don’t fit in, where do you go?”

Basketball helped. Cloud eventually started thinking of herself as a black woman, helped along by the realization that when the outside world looks at her, they don’t see a woman raised by two white parents or even a biracial person.

Ava Wallace, “‘Why am I different?’ Behind this WNBA player’s activism was a search for the answer.” The Washington Post, June 22, 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2019/06/19/wnba-player-natasha-cloud-speaks-out-gun-violence-after-finding-her-voice.

Long Read | Refusing race and salvaging the human

New Frame
2019-06-20

Paul Gilroy, Professor of American and English Literature
King’s College, London, United Kingdom

Illustrator: Anastasya Eliseeva

In his Holberg Lecture, Paul Gilroy, winner of the Holberg Prize for 2019, advocates turning away from the defaulted racial ordering of life in pursuit of a new humanism.

It is commonplace to observe that democracy in Europe has reached a dangerous point. As ailing capitalism emancipates itself from democratic regulation, ultra-nationalism, populism, xenophobia and varieties of neo-fascism have become more visible, more assertive and more corrosive of political culture.

The widespread appeal of racialised group identity and racism, often conveyed obliquely with a knowing wink, has been instrumental in delivering us to a situation in which our conceptions of truth, law and government have been placed in jeopardy. In many places, pathological hunger for national rebirth and the restoration of an earlier political time have combined with resentful, authoritarian and belligerent responses to alterity and the expectation of hospitality.

Those reactions underscore the timeliness and importance of analysing racism, nationalism and xenology, which are nowadays frequently disseminated online. Intensified by evasive and dubious techno-political forces, they have begun to correspond to the anxieties of lived experience in precarious and austere conditions.

The effects of that shift are augmented by the uptake of generic conceptions of racial identity sourced from the United States. They have gained significant international currency, even in places barely touched by the signature racial habits of the north Atlantic, which would project the world only in black and white…

Read the entire lecture here.

‘Why am I different?’ Behind this WNBA player’s activism was a search for the answer.

The Washington Post
2019-06-22

Ava Wallace

Natasha Cloud in the Mystics’ locker room Friday, when she followed through on a “media blackout” to discuss only gun violence. (Doug Kapustin for The Washington Post)

Some 30 minutes after the Washington Mystics lost to the Seattle Storm on June 14 in Southeast D.C., starting guard Natasha Cloud moved from her seat along the back wall of the Mystics’ locker room to stand at the front, pausing twice to maneuver around various reporters pointing TV cameras and cellphones at her face.

She was not among the Mystics’ leading scorers that night, but she would be their only player to address the media.

Her voice quavering but strong, Cloud, 27, read a prepared statement on behalf of the team rather than answer questions about the game. She followed through on plans she announced the day before on Instagram to hold a “media blackout” to address only gun violence in Washington.

Cloud’s public action came together over little more than 24 hours. But it was the culmination of a long journey, the result of maturation, her increased status with the Mystics since the start of last season and, most importantly, a level of comfort in her own skin that took years to achieve.

“This is my fifth year in the league, and it took me five years to be like, I know something’s wrong, but how do I use my voice? What is my voice? Who am I to speak on the situation?” Cloud said. “You know, I didn’t grow up that way. I grew up in a privileged, white family. How do I correlate that?”…

Read the entire article here.

The Legible Citizen: Race Making and Classification in Jim Crow Louisiana, 1955-1965

Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee
May 2013
34 pages

Michell Chresfield

Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in History

This study examines three legal contests during the high tide of black freedom agitation, 1955-1965, in which citizens of Louisiana challenged the state Bureau of Health’s authority to make racial classifications. Through these cases, I argue that state bureaucrats rather than the judiciary and legislature emerged as a new arbiter of race by the mid-twentieth century; by making racial categorization part of vital information recording, Bureau administrators could gain a better understand of citizens while also helping to shape the very meaning of citizenship in a racialized sense; and that this latter development was obscured by the ubiquitous and seemingly race neutral methods of vital statistic collection. Together these cases enrich general narratives of the Jim Crow era which have tended to focus on the role of the judiciary and the legislature exclusively. Through the inclusion of state bureaucrats, this study illustrates how racial categorization has persisted in a climate that is both more fluid and more obscure than generally acknowledged.

Read the entire thesis here.

Jamaica gets first Taino chief in over 500 years

The Gleaner
Kingston, Jamaica
2019-06-19

Paul H. Williams, Gleaner Writer

Paul H. Williams

When the Europeans came to what is now known as Jamaica (Yamaye), the Tainos had established themselves in several villages all over the island. They had functional social, commercial, religious and political systems.

The cacique (also spelt kasike/cacike) was the paramount chief of the cacicazgo (chiefdom), which consisted of several villages. The cacique’s power was vast, and he was highly respected. The power that he wielded and the respect he commanded were obliterated after the Spaniards arrived.

The history books are explicit in their narratives about the total genocide of the Tainos in Jamaica. Yet, it is a fact that the Taino DNA had survived through interbreeding, and there are many Jamaicans, some of whom are academics, who have laid claim to their Taino ancestry and preserving Taino heritage.

Robert Pairman is one of the people who are active in preserving the Taino heritage in Jamaica, and recently he was enstooled in an elaborate ritualistic ceremony as kasike (cacique) of the Taino Tribe, Jamaican Hummingbird (YukayekeYamayeGuani), inside the Asafu Yard at Charles Town Maroon village in Portland.

For more than two hours, people watched as history unfolded in front of their eyes. They listened to the impassioned voice of Boriken (Puerto Rico) Taino elder Bibi Vanessa Inarunikia Pastrana as she guided the participants and informed onlookers about their Taino and Africa heritage, and the need to embrace them. It was she who handed Pairman the mayana (Jamaican Taino ceremonial axe) that was used by a Jamaican cacique…

Read the entire article here.

Seven essential facts about multiracial youth

CYF News
American Psychological Association
August 2013

Astrea Greig

A psychology grad student shares what she’s learned from her research on multiracial adolescents and adults.

I have learned a vast amount of information about the multiracial population while completing my dissertation on multiracial adolescents and young adults. Some of these things I did not previously know even though I am multiracial myself. The following are seven vital topics that may interest all who work with this population…

Read the entire article here.