Mixed Race Studies

Why I Created #ObamaAndKids

Medium
2016-02-21

Michael Skolnik

(Pete Souza/White House)

THURSDAY, February 18, 2016. The White House. Washington, DC. President Barack Obama was about to enter the room, when I noticed a young boy standing next to me, dressed in a jacket and tie, looking to get to the front of the crowd. This would be the last Black History Month celebration at The White House during the presidency of the first African-American in the history of The United States to hold the highest office in the land. When I asked the young boy if he needed help, he turned to me, and with a smile, he kept it moving, with his mother behind him, he led her around the various adults in his way, ultimately disappearing into the crowd in front.

Historical, this event would become. Not because of any major announcement the President or The First Lady would make from the podium, but because of a photo of that young boy, dressed in a jacket and tie, that would capture the attention of the world. They ultimately got to the front, standing against the rope that separated, by only a few feet, the audience from Barack and Michelle.

When the President finished his speech, he came down to the rope-line to greet the invited guests, and eventually arrived at the feet of the young boy. The President reached out to touch the boy’s face, and the remarkable White House photographer Pete Souza, did what he does best; snapped another iconic photograph of President Obama and a child who innocently knows nothing of the importance of that moment…

Read the entire article here.

“Look, a [picture]!”: Visuality, race, and what we do not see

Quarterly Journal of Speech
Volume 102, Issue 1, 2016
pages 62-78
DOI: 10.1080/00335630.2015.1136074

Elizabeth Kaszynski
Department of Communication and Culture
Indiana University

This article argues that understanding vision and visuality as associated but distinct terms has significant implications for the ways in which we engage with racial constructions of identity. Expanding the ways in which we visualize race beyond simply the visual offers us a more comprehensive approach to understanding the construction of and response to race in the twenty-first-century United States. This article moves from theoretical implications of non-visual visualizations like tactile visuality and audial visuality through photographs taken by blind photographers to ask how race and racial identity are implicated in conversations about both vision and visuality.

Read or purchase the article here.

Photo Series Celebrates The ‘Black Girl Power’ Of Brazilian Women

The Huffington Post
2016-03-02

Zeba Blay, Voices Culture Writer

It highlights women who are Afro-Brazilian and proud.

For the past two years, Brazilian journalist Weudson Ribeiro has been documenting the beauty of Afro-Brazilian women by photographing spontaneous portraits of them in an ongoing project. The result was released this month in a photo essay called “Superafro: O poder da mulher negra” or “Superafro: BLACK GIRL POWER.”

The project, which features candid portraits of black women from Brazil, seeks to highlight women who proudly stand in their own blackness as a political statement.

Ribeiro, a 24-year-old journalist and political scientist based in Brasília, has been taking photos for nearly a decade. He is the only son of mixed-race parents, and says that for a long time he struggled with “understanding and accepting my own blackness.”

“It’s a problem that affects the vast majority of Brazilians as a result of our highly mixed ethnic backgrounds,” Ribeiro told The Huffington Post…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed-Race Korean Adoptees Use DNA to Search For Roots

NBC News
2016-03-02

Young Jin Kim

Sarah Savidakis, 55, lived in South Korea until she was nine years old, at which time she was adopted by a Connecticut family.

For Savidakis, who says she has grappled with the effects of early childhood trauma, memories of her life in Korea — including those of her birth mother — vanished around the time she arrived in the United States in 1970.

“I have some flashbacks here and there,” Savidakis, who lives in Tarpon Springs, Florida, told NBC News. “But to this day, my mother is [like] a ghost or a silhouette.”

Savidakis is among the thousands of mixed-race children born in the aftermath of the Korean War to American or U.N. soldier fathers and Korean mothers — many of whom were adopted into American families.

Seeking information about her birth parents, Savidakis in September tested her DNA through a commercial genealogy service and identified a first cousin, once removed. The relative helped her identify and connect with a half-brother and half-sister. She learned that her father — who was of Scottish and Irish descent — had passed away in 2014…

Read the entire here.

As Dear White People receives much deserved praise for its “diverse” representations of Black characters, the conversation on mixed race identity fails to be fully engaged with and must continue. The hypervisibility of mixed race women as video vixens, eroticized Others, or Tragic Mulattas flattens the complexities of negotiating a mixed-race identity within a Black-White binary. Rather than reinforcing this problematic binary with movies and TV shows in which characters have to “pick a side” or are placed within “colorblind” settings, we must demand that characters choose not to remain fixed within a singular identity performance. The tired tropes of mixed race women’s sexuality are not harmless entertainment, but have devastating consequences off-screen because they are translated to interpersonal relationships.

Jazlyn Andrews, “EMERGING FEMINISMS, (F)Act of Blackness: The Politics of Mixed Race Identity,” The Feminist Wire, February 25, 2016. http://www.thefeministwire.com/2016/02/30379/.

For Artur Santoro, 21, identifying as black is about being honest with himself—a process similar to coming out as gay.

“I had to come out of the closet twice—once as gay, and once as black,” Artur tells me. He says growing up with a white dad and a “light-skinned black” mom made it difficult to recognize his own blackness for most of his youth. But once Artur got involved in the LGBT community, it helped him identify other forms of discrimination in his life.

“I was suffering from situations of racism and didn’t realize it before,” he said. “If you’re black, you suffer racism—it’s not a choice; black is a consequence of what I live.”

Tim Rogers, “That moment you look in the mirror and realize you’re black,” Fusion, February 28, 2016. http://fusion.net/story/274184/that-moment-you-look-in-the-mirror-and-realize-youre-black/.

“The Free State of Jones” on Film: A Q&A with Victoria Bynum

The Society of Civil War Historians
2016-03-01

Megan Kate Nelson

This May, STX Entertainment will release the film Free State of Jones, which tells the story of the Knight Company and the Jones County rebellion, a Civil War history first told by Victoria Bynum in her 2001 book The Free State of Jones. A few weeks ago, Bynum and I discussed her experiences working as a consultant on the film, and seeing her book come alive on the screen.

MKN: Did you know at the time you were writing “The Free State of Jones” that it had cinematic potential? And what is it about this story that makes it compelling for filmmakers?

VB: As I researched and wrote The Free State of Jones, I grew increasingly aware of its historical importance as an insurrection that combined elements of class, race, gender, and kinship that, for this story, had long been underestimated, misunderstood, distorted, or simply ignored.

Although I did not write the book with a movie in mind, the story’s vivid real-life characters, its oral and written first-hand accounts of fierce confrontations between Confederates and deserters, the interracial romance between the band’s leader, Newt Knight, and his slave accomplice, Rachel Knight, and the Unionist core of the band itself, convinced me of the story’s cinematic potential.

On the standard author’s questionnaire that I completed for the University of North Carolina Press, I advised the press to consider presenting the book “to television and film companies as a potential docudrama or miniseries.” At that point, however, I did not anticipate Hollywood’s interest in the story…

Read the entire interview here.

‘Blaxicans’ photos explore Angelenos straddling two worlds

Cable News Network (CNN)
2016-03-01

Emanuella Grinberg, Writer/Producer CNN Digital

Blaxicans of L.A. is an Instagram account that grew into a show at Los Angeles’ Avenue 50 Studio during Black History Month. The exhibit includes portraits with captions detailing personal histories and experiences with colorism and self-identity. Ken and Alejandra, pictured here, say they tell their daughter she is black and Mexican. “We will explicitly teach her to be proud of the fact that she is Mexican and to be proud of the fact that she is black,” Alejandra said.

Los Angeles (CNN)—As the biggest names in entertainment converged Sunday on the Oscars red carpet at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, about 10 miles to the east, artists, academics and community leaders gathered in Los Angeles’ historically Chicano community for a different sort of cultural event.

“Duality: Blaxicans of L.A.” is a photo exhibit that explores multiracial identity among the city’s two largest minority groups. The show is a Humans of New York-esque portrait series of Angelenos of African and Latino backgrounds accompanied by captions detailing family history, experiences with colorism and self-identity.

The exhibit grew from an Instagram account of the same name started by Walter Thompson-Hernandez, who has a Mexican mother and an African-American father. He launched Blaxicans of L.A. while researching the topic as a graduate student at Stanford University’s Center for Latin American Studies in response to what he saw as a gap in multiracial studies.

“Most multiracial scholarship has been on the black and white binary. I felt it didn’t cover the range of ways that multiracial people identify,” he said…

Read the entire article here.

Afro-Latino: A deeply rooted identity among U.S. Hispanics

Pew Research Center
Washington, D.C.
2016-03-01

Gustavo López, Research Assistant

Ana Gonzalez-Barrera, Research Associate

Identity for U.S. Hispanics is multidimensional and multifaceted. For example, many Hispanics tie their identity to their ancestral countries of origin – Mexico, Cuba, Peru or the Dominican Republic. They may also look to their indigenous roots. Among the many ways Hispanics see their identity is their racial background.

Afro-Latinos are one of these Latino identity groups. They are characterized by their diverse views of racial identity, reflecting the complex and varied nature of race and identity among Latinos. A Pew Research Center survey of Latino adults shows that one-quarter of all U.S. Latinos self-identify as Afro-Latino, Afro-Caribbean or of African descent with roots in Latin America. This is the first time a nationally representative survey in the U.S. has asked the Latino population directly whether they considered themselves Afro-Latino…

Read the entire article here…

EMERGING FEMINISMS, (F)Act of Blackness: The Politics of Mixed Race Identity

The Feminist Wire
2016-02-25

Jazlyn Andrews, Guest Contributor
Colorado College, Colorado Springs, Colorado

Jazlyn Andrews

That girl doesn’t have an ass.” The words hurled through the thick, humid air as if lobbed by a knife-thrower and struck me for reasons I couldn’t quite place at the time, reasons deeply rooted in my struggle to navigate my identity and subjectivity. My journey of self-definition has been a long and painful one that is nowhere near finished, fraught with fear of not belonging and comments made by peers negating my existence, dissecting me by claiming that I “don’t count,” their focus on my parts rather than my whole.

I was never “Black enough” to sing, “Asian enough” to get As in math classes, or “White enough” to be shielded from accusations of acceptance based on affirmative action. Hence, I find myself challenging controlling images but relying on them to validate my identity. My story is not unique considering the many mixed race women who have asked themselves time and time again: “Am I __________ enough?” or who have been on the receiving end of “What are you?” too many times to count. In fact, these experiences are so common—yet so under-analyzed—that Justin Simien created the Twitter hashtag #DearWhitePeople in order to examine the intricacies of being Black in predominantly White spaces.

Through an examination of the 2014 film Dear White People based loosely on Simien’s experiences at Chapman University, I examine how the Tragic Mulatta construction makes it acceptable for mixed race women to become sites for White men to explore their fears of, and fascinations with, an eroticized Other. Such a practice perpetuates an investment in a black-white binary that essentializes mixed race people to “either/or” rather than “both/and,” which maintains the property value of, and investment in, Whiteness. Importantly, the construction of, and reliance upon, a black-white binary erases mixed-race identities and functions to mitigate the threat we pose to blending the color line…

Read the entire article here.