Mixed Race Studies

Zun Lee’s Polaroid Archive Preserves African-American Self-Representation

Photo District News
2015-08-26

Holly Hughes

Photographer Zun Lee is dedicated to countering stereotypical, often negative views of the African-American family. While he was working on Father Figure, his book about African-American fathers, he stumbled on some old Polaroids that appeared to have fallen from a family photo album. He was intrigued to see how the Polaroids —”the Instagrams of their day,” he calls them — reflected “the way black people saw themselves in private spaces and in ways not intended to be seen, or judged, by others.” By searching yard sales and e-Bay, Lee has amassed 3,000 of these now “orphaned” mementoes and recently began posting them on a Tumbler and an Instagram feed named “Fade Resistance.” After winning a Magnum Foundation Fellowship last week, Lee now plans to develop his Fade Resistance collection into an interactive digital archive that will allow the public and collaborators from other disciplines to add their own stories, videos and images. His long-term goal, he says, is “to encourage new ways of understanding black identity and representation in today’s world.”…

Read the entire article here.

Ronnie: Tasmanian Songman

Magabala Books
January 2009
164 pages
240 x 165
Paperback ISBN: 9781921248108

Helen Gee and Ronnie Summers

Musician, storyteller and craftsman, Ronnie Summers recalls the freedom of growing up on Cape Barren Island and how the island’s music shaped his life. He draws on a childhood working the muttonbird islands, a ‘kangaroo court’ prison term as a bewildered teenager, and then turning to alcohol after the death of his baby son. Born an ‘Islander’—not Aboriginal, not white—Ronnie Summers was without race. This story documents his struggle for a place in his own country and echoes that of the Tasmanian Aboriginal community. Includes a CD featuring Cape Barren Island music—a unique blend of Cajun, blues, country and folk.

How To Resist White Supremacy In Your Love Life: A 5-Step Guide

Black Girl Dangerous
2015-09-25

Cathy Chen, Co-Founder and Outreach Director
Fab Lab El Paso, El Paso, Texas

“We’re never gonna get anywhere as long as our economies of attraction continue to resemble more or less the economies of attraction of white supremacy.” –Junot Diaz, Keynote Speech at Facing Race 2012

Over the years, I have had many friends, both hetero and LGBTQIA (lesbian, gay, trans, queer, intersex, and asexual) people of color, who practiced radical politics in their lifestyle and work but I’ve noticed a curious pattern—that they almost exclusively formed romantic relationships with socially privileged—in other words, mostly white—partners…

Read the entire article here.

Being Biracial: Where Our Secret Worlds Collide

Heritage Press Publications
2015-09-06
192 pages
9 x 6 x 0.4 inches
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1937660666

Sarah Ratliff

Bryony Sutherland

Good, bad, ugly and illuminating-everyone has an opinion on race. As biracial people continue trending, the discussion is no longer about a singular topic, but is more like playing a game of multi-level chess. The anthology, Being Biracial: Where Our Secret Worlds Collide, cites the experiences of twenty-four mixed-race authors and those in interracial partnerships of all ages and backgrounds, from all over the world. It blends positivity, negativity, humor, pathos and realism in an enlightening exploration of what it means to be more than one ethnicity.

Jews in America struggled for decades to become white. Now we must give up whiteness to fight racism.

The Washington Post
2015-09-22

Gil Steinlauf, Senior Rabbi
Adas Israel Congregation, Washington, D.C.

Let’s teach our children that we are, in fact, not white, but simply Jewish.

Adapted from a Rosh Hashanah sermon delivered at Adas Israel Congregation.

This summer, I had a conversation with a young woman about her Jewish identity. She told me how she grew up in a family that was very involved in her synagogue. She went to Jewish day school. She had been to Israel multiple times. But she felt very far from her Jewishness. She simply couldn’t find the relevance of Judaism as she was making her way on her own in the world. I asked her what she did feel passionate about. She told me she has been reading and thinking a lot about racial justice. What moved her was the #BlackLivesMatter movement — how, in light of Ferguson, Charleston and seemingly endless incidents of injustice against black people in our society, she felt a need to grapple with the racism that is so pervasive in this country and how it affects her identity.

“As a white woman,” she said, “as the product of so much white privilege, it makes me all the more angry to see how other white people so blindly and carelessly feed into the racial climate of our society.” “So the fact that you are white makes this issue all the more painful, all the more personal for you?” I asked. “Yes,” she said.

I certainly identified with her angst. I find the reality of American racism unbearable: the legacy of slavery; the institutional discrimination that is so pervasive; the scourge of mass incarceration of black Americans, with its collateral damage on families; the ongoing blight of housing segregation; the role of law enforcement in furthering racist systems and hierarchies; all this, and so much more. My answer to her, and my answer for all American Jews during these Days of Awe, is that finding our true Jewish identity can begin by questioning our whiteness…

Read the entire article here.

Identity and Acceptance in Danzy Senna’s Caucasia

Uncovered Classics
2015-09-16

Melanie McFarland

“Race is a complete illusion, make-believe,” observes a central character in Danzy Senna’s debut novel Caucasia. “It’s a costume. We all wear one.”

Or, many. Over the course of our lives, those costumes change as we add and subtract details in reaction to other people’s gaze. To see the idea of race through sugar-coated Coke bottle glasses, racial and cultural differences are to be explored and celebrated. But one can just as accurately say that illusion of race creates unnecessary absurdity in our lives. It challenges our sense of acceptance.

Senna’s Caucasia doesn’t quite blast apart the fallacy of race, but it does use our culture’s obsession with it to highlight the ways in which a person creates and morphs her identity…

Read the entire review here.

Racism as a Determinant of Health: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

PLOS ONE
2015-09-23
48 pages
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0138511

Yin Paradies, Professor
Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalization, Faculty of Arts and Education
Deakin University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Jehonathan Ben
Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalization, Faculty of Arts and Education
Deakin University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Amanuel Elias
Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalization, Faculty of Arts and Education
Deakin University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Nida Denson
School of Social Sciences and Psychology
University of Western Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

Naomi Priest, Senior Research Fellow in child public health and health inequalities
Australian Centre for Applied Social Research Methods
Australian National University, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia

Alex Pieterse
Division of Counseling Psychology
University at Albany, State University of New York

Arpana Gupta
Oppenheimer Center for Neurobiology of Stress, David Geffen School of Medicine
University of California, Los Angeles

Margaret Kelaher
Centre for Health Policy Programs and Economics, Melbourne School of Population and Global Health
University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Gilbert Gee
Department of Community Health Sciences
University of California, Los Angeles, Fielding School of Public Health, Los Angeles, California

Despite a growing body of epidemiological evidence in recent years documenting the health impacts of racism, the cumulative evidence base has yet to be synthesized in a comprehensive meta-analysis focused specifically on racism as a determinant of health. This meta-analysis reviewed the literature focusing on the relationship between reported racism and mental and physical health outcomes. Data from 293 studies reported in 333 articles published between 1983 and 2013, and conducted predominately in the U.S., were analysed using random effects models and mean weighted effect sizes. Racism was associated with poorer mental health (negative mental health: r = -.23, 95% CI [-.24,-.21], k = 227; positive mental health: r = -.13, 95% CI [-.16,-.10], k = 113), including depression, anxiety, psychological stress and various other outcomes. Racism was also associated with poorer general health (r = -.13 (95% CI [-.18,-.09], k = 30), and poorer physical health (r = -.09, 95% CI [-.12,-.06], k = 50). Moderation effects were found for some outcomes with regard to study and exposure characteristics. Effect sizes of racism on mental health were stronger in cross-sectional compared with longitudinal data and in non-representative samples compared with representative samples. Age, sex, birthplace and education level did not moderate the effects of racism on health. Ethnicity significantly moderated the effect of racism on negative mental health and physical health: the association between racism and negative mental health was significantly stronger for Asian American and Latino(a) American participants compared with African American participants, and the association between racism and physical health was significantly stronger for Latino(a) American participants compared with African American participants. Protocol PROSPERO registration number: CRD42013005464.

Read the entire article here.

Too Latina To Be Black, Too Black To Be Latina

The Huffington Post
2015-09-15

Aleichia Williams, Writer, Student, Advocate

I can remember the first time I had a ‘race crisis.’

I was probably twelve or thirteen and I had just moved to the quiet state of North Carolina from my home state and city of New York. North Carolina was a lot different than New York. For one, there wasn’t an enormous variety of culture and people. I didn’t have class with any Russians. My professors weren’t Puerto Rican and there wasn’t a whole lot of mixing between kids of one race with kids of another. In fact, at my middle school you had three groups you could classify as; black, “Mexican”, or white.

Unaware of this fact I walked into my second class on my first day of school and decided to sit next to a group of friendly looking Hispanic girls. As soon as I sat down the table was quiet. Then one girl snickered to another in Spanish “Why is she sitting here? I don’t want her to sit here.” Her friend, who had been in my previous class and had heard my class introduction, blushed and replied to her friend in English “She speaks Spanish.”

That was the first time I could remember being aware of my skin color and the overwhelming implications it held. This was also my first ‘race crisis’…

Read the entire article here.

Trevor Noah Brings ‘A Different Perspective’ as Daily Show Host

NBC News
2015-09-23

Amber Payne, Managing Editor of @NBCBLK

Trevor Noah is poised to take The Daily Show throne next week and the South African comedian says his biracial and cultural background will impact and inform his perspective as host.

“It just gives me a different perspective. I feel everyone has their perspective because of where they’ve come from,” Noah told NBCBLK. “I’ve never been ashamed to say, nor do I shy away from that fact that I am black. I’ve grown up black, black is the only existence I’ve ever known. But it’s strange when you live in a world where people go ‘OK but biracial—then which piece of this, which piece of that?'”

Noah grew up under Apartheid in South Africa to a white Swiss father and a black South African mother. While his comedy is often unapologetically about race and racism, he is careful not to equate the racial tensions in the United States to the divisions and tensions in South Africa…

Read the entire article here.

The few old schoolmates who ran into him had to pretend they’d never met. He was often seen around town with one of his best friends. the Indian-born actor Sabu, an alliance that brings to mind the “arranged” Hollywood marriage of a closeted gay actor.

Black novelist Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars, about a man who passes for white, has a sentence that could apply to Korla: “Our customs grip us in bands of steel.  We become the creatures of our creations.”

From slavery right down to this morning, countless African Americans have passed as white because they were evading the lynch mob or wishing for an equal opportunity. The subject has been taboo: Crossing over means denying who you are, means banishing friends and family from your life. You live in a gray zone, and it is the loneliest of places.

Passing for Asian was a little different, because you did not blend into white society. The practice went on long before Korla Pandit first appeared. In the late 1930s, Harlem’s Amsterdam News reported that a Syracuse University football star named Wilmeth Sidat-Singh was, as a columnist put it, “about as much Hindu as flatfoot floogie.” In 1947, around the time that Juan Rolondo was turning into Korla Pandit, the Los Angeles Tribune, a lively black newspaper, heralded a stunt pulled by a brown-skinned New York minister. He prepared for a visit through the Deep South by donning a purple turban, affecting “a slightly Swedish accent,” and concocting a tale about being a visiting Eastern dignitary. He was doted on and able to eat at white-only restaurants. In Mobile, Alabama, he impishly asked a waiter what would happen if a Negro came to eat. The Negro wouldn’t be served, he was told. “I just stroked my chin and ordered my dessert.” said the pastor.

When John Redd crossed over, he didn’t sever all ties with the world he had known. “It was not top secret,” says Ernest. “Among the family we knew what he was doing and very little was said about it. There was times when he would come by, and it was kind of like a sneak visit. He might come at night sometime and be gone before we got up. He had to separate himself from the family to a certain extent. They would go to see him play, but they wouldnt speak to him. They would go to his show and then they would leave, and the family would greet him at a later time.”

The situation became even more complicated once Korla’s Father, Ernest Sr., moved to Los Angeles, by the early ’50s. Reverend Redd became the pastor of Trinity Baptist Church, a prominent institution in the community. Any night he wanted to, Reverend Redd could come home from the church, switch on the television, and watch his son play the organ, with that strange look in his eyes and that turban on his head. Korla kept in touch with his family, and on occasion he and Beryl scheduled a covert mission to the parents’ West Adams home. But even then, detection could not be discounted. Even then, Korla wore the turban. He didn’t bring Shari or Koram, his and Beryl’s sons.

RJ Smith, “The Many Faces of Korla Pandit,” Los Angeles Magazine, June 2001, 148-149. https://books.google.com/books?id=aF8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA73#v=onepage&q&f=false.