Mixed Race Studies

“Race, It Would Appear, Complicates Things”: An Irish Immigration Story

Away
Travel Journal
2018-01-23

Emma Dabiri

Emma Dabiri is Irish, but when the inevitable “Where do you come from?” is asked, the answer rarely satisfies the inquisitor. Photo by @thediasporadiva.

In this series, we’re highlighting the stories of people who remain connected to their home countries—either those with immigrant parents or those who are immigrants themselves. With “We Are All Immigrants: Stories About the Places We’re From,” you’ll hear from those most acutely affected by changing policies and a shifting reality, those who exist as part of multiple cultures at once. Here, London-based professor and writer Emma Dabiri explores what being an immigrant means to her and to her family.

And although my parents were born and raised in countries not their own, I’m not sure that the term immigrant applies to them in the way it does to me.

I was born in Dublin and have lived in London for almost 20 years—since I finished school—which quite straightforwardly makes me an Irish immigrant. Ostensibly I am Irish, but when the inevitable “Where do you come from?” is asked, that answer, rarely, if ever, satisfies people. Race, it would appear, complicates things…

Read the entire article here.

Paintings Of Barack And Michelle Obama Unveiled At Portrait Gallery

National Public Radio
2018-02-12

Camila Domonoske

Former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama stand next to their newly unveiled portraits during a ceremony Monday at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Brand new portraits of former president Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama — wearing matching calm, strong expressions — were revealed on Monday at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Kehinde Wiley painted Barack Obama sitting in a chair, elbows in his knees, leaning forward with an intense expression. The background, typical of a Wiley painting, is a riotous pattern of intense greens.

“Pretty sharp,” Obama said with a grin.

Amy Sherald, a Baltimore-based artist, painted Michelle Obama sitting in a floor-length gown, chin on her hand, looking directly at the viewer with a calm, level gaze.

The paintings, like the presidency they honor, are a historic first. Wiley and Sherald — both already famous for their portraits of black Americans — are the first black painters to receive a presidential portrait commission from the museum…

Read the entire article here.

Inside the Biracial Advertising Boom

The Daily Beast
2018-02-05

Hallie Golden
Salt Lake City, Utah

State Farm

Biracial couples and families are becoming increasingly common. Companies are using them in advertisements to reflect that reality, and to sell to those who value diversity.

Infiniti USA recently released an advertisement featuring a dad repeatedly heading out to grab more food for a holiday meal with his wife and two daughters.

First it’s sweet potatoes, then shrimp, and finally the wife takes over to get a pecan pie. It’s a fairly straightforward 30-second advertisement riffing off of the idea that the husband and wife love to drive their cars so much they look forward to these types of trivial errands.

The unique part has to do with the actors who play this adoring family: The father is white, the mother is black, and their teenage daughters are biracial.

By casting the ad in such a way, Infiniti has joined a growing list of companies selling everything from breakfast cereal to cars to clothing that portray the American family in TV advertisements as more than a single race.

But why are all these companies jumping on the diversity bandwagon?…

Read the entire article here.

“I was born in the Dominican Republic,” he said. “My work, among many of the things that it wrestles with, wrestles with the kind of, the often invisible and vigorously disavowed, long shadow of enslavement. I’m very much interested in how people like me, who are part of the African Diasporic community, and how do we deal with the consequences of the fallout from the calamity that we call slavery. And most specifically, I’m kind of interested in how do bodies like mine that were raped into existence – our community doesn’t look the way it looks without systematic rape – and so how do communities like ours, with this long history of sexual violence and sexual predation, how do we as a consequence of that wrestle with the possibility of intimacy. In other words, where does love reside in bodies that spent centuries being told that they could not partake in love?” —Junot Diaz (University of Missouri, January 22, 2018)

Sara Shahriari, Abby Ivory-Ganja & Elena Rivera, “Intersection – Author Junot Díaz on Immigration, Empire and White Supremacy,” KBIA 91.3 FM, Columbia, Missouri, February 6, 2018. http://kbia.org/post/intersection-author-junot-d-az-immigration-empire-and-white-supremacy.

A Long Way from Home, Peter Carey’s 14th novel, uses the story of a light-skinned Indigenous Australian who has been brought up white to address the country’s brutal history of racism. It seems strange at first that Carey – surely Australia’s greatest living novelist, even if he hasn’t dwelled there for decades – has taken so long to get around to the subject. In a recent interview in the Australian, he said that he’d always felt that it was not the place of a white writer to tell this tale. Then something changed: “You can’t be a white Australian writer and spend your whole life ignoring the greatest, most important aspect of our history, and that is that we – I – have been the beneficiaries of a genocide.”

Alex Preston, “A Long Way from Home review – Peter Carey’s best novel in decades,” The Guardian, January 15, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/15/a-long-way-from-home-peter-carey-review.

Intersection – Author Junot Díaz on Immigration, Empire and White Supremacy

Intersection
KBIA 91.3 FM
Columbia, Missouri
2018-02-06

Sara Shahriari, Abby Ivory-Ganja & Elena Rivera

This week on Intersection, we bring you excerpts from author Junot Díaz’s Jan. 22 talk at MU [University of Missouri].

Díaz won the 2008 Pulitzer prize for his first novel, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” He received a MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellowship and co-founded the Voices of Our National Arts Foundation, which holds workshops for writers of color. He is a professor of writing at MIT.

Díaz immigrated from the Dominican Republic to the United State when he was six. In his literary work and activism, he tackles issues including immigration, assimilation and oppression.

His speech was part of the MU Celebrates Martin Luther King Jr. event. During the talk, Díaz spoke about white supremacy, the role of artists and the lasting effects of slavery…

Read the story here. Listen to the speech (00:28:27) here.

Kit de Waal: ‘Make room for working class writers’

The Guardian
2018-02-10

Kit de Waal

‘A writing career never entered my head.’ … Kit de Waal. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

When Kit de Waal was growing up in 1970s Birmingham, no one like her – poor, black and Irish – wrote books. Forty years on, the author asks, what has changed?

Reading at school was agony. A slow, child by child rotation around the class, six pages each. Great Expectations. Vanity Fair. The Mill on the bloody Floss. The boys with their flatline monotones. The girls, careful not to stumble and be humiliated. English was my best subject, so this process was painful. I wanted to race ahead and get to the end of the story. Yet the idea of taking that book home to read later and finish, that never occurred to me. Not when we owned the ultimate big novel: the Bible. We were Jehovah’s Witnesses and three times a week we’d sit in a draughty hall on the backstreets of Sparkbrook in Birmingham, wrapped around a paraffin heater discussing the 66 books that made up the Old and the New Testaments. I’ve read it cover to cover at least five times.

Leviticus and Numbers were hard going, all that counting and recounting, all those laws and exhortations, but there were very beautiful passages, too. The Song of Solomon, Psalms, Proverbs. The Gospels, too, four different takes on one big adventure. They had the ingredients of a good thriller with a hero, a call to arms, a savage tragedy. Without realising it, I was learning what you had to do to write well, how to characterise, how to keep your reader turning the page without the threat of eternal damnation as an incentive.

But writing as a career? That never entered my head. The only writers I knew were dead. And apart from Enid Blyton, they were dead men. And white. And posh. Even when I began to read widely in my 20s, it was still a case of: if you can’t see it, you can’t be it. No one from my background – poor, black and Irish – wrote books. It just wasn’t an option…

Read the entire article here.

Barack Obama [Recent Acquisition of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery]

National Portrait Gallery
Washington, D.C.

For more information, click here.

The Loving Generation: A Topic Original Documentary Series

Topic
February 2018

Directed and Produced by Lacey Schwartz and Mehret Mandefro
Executive Produced by Ezra Edelman and Anna Holmes

4 films | 10 min

In 1967, the Supreme Court decision Loving v. Virginia overturned all laws outlawing interracial marriage. The Loving Generation tells the story of a generation of Americans born to one black parent and one white parent. Their narratives provide a fascinating and unique window into the borderland between “blackness” and “whiteness”, and, in some cases, explode fixed ideas about race and identity.

View the films here.

Black With (Some) White Privilege

Sunday Review
The New York Times
2018-02-10

Anna Holmes, Editorial Director
Topic.com

Credit Illustration by Anthony Gerace; Photographs by SensorSpot, via Getty Images

When I was in my early 30s, I started making a list of every child I could think of who had a black parent and a white parent and was born between 1960 and the mid- to late 1980s. It was a collection of people like me, who grew up and came of age after the Supreme Court decision in 1967 that overturned the laws in more than a dozen states that outlawed interracial marriage.

I was thinking of people I knew or had heard of, so of course the list included actors like Tracee Ellis Ross (born 1972) and Rashida Jones (1976); athletes like Derek Jeter (1974) and Jason Kidd (1973); singers like Mariah Carey (1969) and Alicia Keys (1981); and, eventually, politicians and public servants like Adrian Fenty (1970) and Ben Jealous (1973).

It occurred to me, looking at the names I’d gathered, that what I was making was not just a snapshot of a particular generation but an accounting of some of the most notable, successful, widely recognized black people in American public life — cultural, political, intellectual, academic, athletic.

It made sense: The people I could think of were the people who were the most publicly visible. But what did it mean about race and opportunity in the United States that many of the most celebrated black people in American cultural life in the late 20th and early 21st centuries happened to have been born to one white parent? What if my and my cohort’s achievements as African-Americans, especially in fields to which we historically had little access, were more about how we benefited from having one white parent in a racist society than our hard work?…

…Of course, to be a black American is to be, by definition, mixed: According to a study released in 2014, 24 percent of the genetic makeup of self-identified African-Americans is of European origin. Colorism, which places black people in an uncodified but nevertheless very real hierarchy, with the lighter-skinned among us at the top, was a fact of American life long before Loving v. Virginia. Light-skinned black Americans, even those with two black parents, have, for centuries, been considered to be closer to white people, closer to white ideals about, well, most everything…

Read the entire article here.