Mixed Race Studies

How can I be Jewish when I am black?

The Jerusalem Post
2015-02-09

Ella Bennett

This is a hypothetical question that I’m always, almost asked by my many Jewish friends, associates and acquaintances. In my haste I’d assumed the answer to be obvious until I discovered the subtlety behind which the real dynamics of the question are hidden.  What follows is my hypothetical ‘answer’ to the question. There are many parts to be considered before this question can be answered fully.

There are enough parts to fill a book in fact, such is the volume and complexity of the rules that are visited on he or she born inter-racial black and Jewish who then approaches the gates of the shul in search of a refuge from a sometimes racially hostile and anti-Semitic world.  I am a mischlinge, and would have been murdered alongside the 6 million had I been alive in Germany in WW2, a war in which my Jamaican grandfather fought through his service in the Royal Air Force as a 15 year old boy where he helped defend the world from Hitler, and helped save the Jews, while stationed in Berlin.  A man with such courage, candor and grace, is it any wonder that my grandmother, a Jewess, should fall in love with him on his settling in 1950’s England?…

Read the entire article here.

Kamala Harris, California’s Attorney General, Leaps to Forefront of Senate Race

The New York Times
2015-03-27

Adam Nagourney, Los Angeles Bureau Chief

CASTAIC, Calif. — When Kamala D. Harris, a Democrat, was the newly elected district attorney of San Francisco in 2004, she walked into a firestorm after deciding not to pursue the death penalty for a man accused in the killing of a police officer — drawing attacks from law enforcement leaders and even Senator Dianne Feinstein, one of the most respected Democrats in the state.

Six years later, when Ms. Harris ran for state attorney general, national Republicans poured more than $1 million into the race, trying to defeat her with charged advertisements invoking the death penalty case. Ms. Harris barely defeated her Republican opponent, the district attorney of Los Angeles.

But now, at age 50 and after winning a second term, Ms. Harris has suddenly established herself as the dominant candidate in the race to replace Senator Barbara Boxer, a Democrat who announced in January that she would retire next year. With a speed and efficiency that startled many in her party, Ms. Harris has appeared, at least for now, to dispatch what most people had expected would be a sprawling generational battle with powerful ethnic overtones, given that Latinos now make up nearly 40 percent of California’s population…

She herself would be a pioneering figure, if elected — simultaneously the first black and the first South Asian senator from California…

Read the entire article here.

Trevor Noah to Succeed Jon Stewart on ‘The Daily Show’

The New York Times
2015-03-30

Dave Itzkoff, Culture Reporter

In December, Trevor Noah, a 31-year-old comedian, made his debut as an on-air contributor on “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” offering his outsider’s perspective, as a biracial South African, on the United States.

“I never thought I’d be more afraid of police in America than in South Africa,” he said with a smile. “It kind of makes me a little nostalgic for the old days, back home.”

Now, after only three appearances on that Comedy Central show, Mr. Noah has gotten a huge and unexpected promotion. On Monday, Comedy Central will announce that Mr. Noah has been chosen as the new host of “The Daily Show,” succeeding Mr. Stewart after he steps down later this year.

Read the entire article here.

Rivas awarded NEH Summer Stipends award to work on book

News From Marshall University
Huntington, West Virginia
2015-03-25

Dave Wellman, Director of Communications
Telephone: (304) 696-7153

HUNTINGTON, W.Va. – Dr. Zelideth Maria Rivas, an assistant professor of Japanese in Marshall University’s Department of Modern Languages, has been awarded a “very competitive” National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Stipends award, according to Dr. R.B. Bookwalter, dean of the university’s College of Liberal Arts.

Rivas is the only recipient of the Summer Stipend award in West Virginia. The award will help her work toward completion of a book she has titled “Caught In-Between: Competing Nationalisms of Japanese in Brazil.”

“Dr. Rivas is an energetic and imaginative teacher and scholar,” Bookwalter said. “We are very fortunate to have her here at Marshall and we are extremely pleased that the NEH has recognized and supported her project.”

Rivas said, “I am honored that this award will support the completion of my book through travel to Japan and time to revise existing chapters. More importantly, I am excited for the recognition this brings to the Department of Modern Languages, the College of Liberal Arts and Marshall University.”

Here is her abstract for the project:

“From the streets of Sao Paulo, Brazil, to Hamamatsu, Japan, a large diasporic population of Japanese Brazilians is ever present in media, politics and the economy as symbols of kinship and citizenship with singular national identities. And yet, these identities move beyond dualistic constructions of Japanese or Brazilian. As an NEH Summer Stipend Fellow, I will investigate these claims in my book, Caught In-Between: Competing Nationalisms of Japanese in Brazil while completing the final research needed in Japan during the summer of 2015.

Read the entire press release here.

Homestory Deutschland: Black Biographies in Historical and Present Times

Canisius College, Buffalo, New York
2015-03-04

Buffalo, NY – Canisius College will exhibit “Homestory Deutschland: Black Biographies in Historical and Present Times” from Tuesday, March 24 – Sunday, April 12. The exhibit will be on display in Alumni Hall, located between the Andrew L. Bouwhuis Library and Old Main. It is free and open to the public.

Founded by the Initiative of Black People in Germany, “Homeland Deutschland” is a collective self-portrait that gives voice to the complex and varied histories of Afro-German women and men from the past three centuries of German history. The exhibit features not only the biographies of prominent black figures but also those of unknown “ordinary” people who found themselves characterized by stereotypical racist perceptions and struggled to be acknowledged and respected in German society. The individuals represented in the exhibit come from diverse paths of German society and from distinguished backgrounds.

The “Homestory Deutschland” exhibit originated in Berlin, Germany. In February, the exhibit was acquired by Canisius College from where it will tour the United States…

For more information, click here.

Blood Work: Imagining Race in American Literature, 1890-1940

Louisiana State University Press
January 2015
240 pages
5.50 x 8.50 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780807157848

Shawn Salvant, Assistant Professor of English and African American
University of Connecticut

The invocation of blood—as both an image and a concept—has long been critical in the formation of American racism. In Blood Work, Shawn Salvant mines works from the American literary canon to explore the multitude of associations that race and blood held in the consciousness of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Americans.

Drawing upon race and metaphor theory, Salvant provides readings of four classic novels featuring themes of racial identity: Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894); Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood (1902); Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892); and William Faulkner’s Light in August (1932). His expansive analysis of blood imagery uncovers far more than the merely biological connotations that dominate many studies of blood rhetoric: the racial discourses of blood in these novels encompass the anthropological and the legal, the violent and the religious. Penetrating and insightful, Blood Work illuminates the broad-ranging power of the blood metaphor to script distinctly American plots—real and literary—of racial identity.

The Rock Obama Cold Open – SNL

Saturday Night Live
National Broadcasting Company (NBC)
2015-03-28

After the actions of Rep. John Boehner (Taran Killam), Sen. Ted Cruz (Bobby Moynihan) and Sen. Tom Cotton (Kyle Mooney) make him lose his cool, President Obama (Jay Pharoah) turns into The Rock Obama (Dwayne Johnson).

Lives of Afro-German men and women are focus of Canisius College exhibit

The Buffalo News
Buffalo, New York
2015-03-12

An exhibit that provides a look at the lives of Afro-German men and women living in Germany during the past three centuries will open March 24 in Alumni Hall, between the Andrew L. Bouwhuis Library and Old Main at Canisius College.

“Homestory Deutschland: Black Biographies in Historical and Present Times” features prominent Germans of mixed African and German ancestry as well as ordinary people struggling against racial stereotypes.

The exhibit, which originated in Berlin, continues through April 12. Canisius acquired the exhibit in February and will send it on tour in the U.S. It is free and open to the public.

Amherst Together asking for poems about identity, presenting 1-woman performance on notion of race

MassLive
2015-03-24

Diane Lederman, Reporter
The Springfield Republican

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni is bringing her one-woman show “One Drop of Love” to Amherst Middle School April 15 as part of the Amherst Together initiative. (Submitted)

AMHERST, [Massachusetts] – Since July, Carol Ross has been doing a lot of listening and a lot of information collecting.

But she said she is happy with the progress that Amherst Together is making.

She was hired by the town and the schools as the media and climate communications specialist to foster collaboration to help create a community in which people feel like they belong.

She met with the Select Board recently for a brief update and then Tuesday answered questions.

She expects that they will have finished collecting data on the community survey in April. The survey was developed with a public participation class in the Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning Department at the University of Massachusetts. She will get help from Amherst College in interpreting the data as well.

They need about 75 more to answer it from targeted neighborhoods. The survey is intended to find out what the community’s values are to get a sense of the kind of community people want to see. That will help lead to a larger conversation later.

And on April 15, they are bringing Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni to the Amherst Regional Middle School at 7 p.m. for a free one-woman performance called “One Drop of Love.”

Produced by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, the show incorporates “filmed images, photographs and animation to tell the story of how the notion of race came to be in the United Sates and how it affected her relationship with her father,” according to a press release

As Ross said in a press release describing the show as well as in her interview, her work is not just about race…

Read the entire article here.

“I was living in a racial closet”: Black filmmaker Lacey Schwartz on growing up white

Salon
Sunday, 2015-03-22

Marissa Charles

A photo of Lacey Schwartz and her mother, in “Little White Lie” (Credit: PBS)

Schwartz talks to Salon about race, privilege, family secrets and her new PBS documentary “Little White Lie”

For the first 18 years of her life Lacey Schwartz knew she was white. With her dark skin, curly hair and full lips, she was a nice Jewish girl from Woodstock, New York. And then — she wasn’t.

Twenty years ago, Schwartz applied to Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and — even though she didn’t tick a box giving her racial identity — she was admitted as a black student. “I know some people looked at that situation and they think, ‘Why weren’t you outraged? Why wouldn’t you protest it?’” Schwartz, 38, said. But for the filmmaker, it was an opportunity to open herself up to something that deep down had been niggling her for most of her life, a question that became the the heart of her documentary “Little White Lie,” which airs Monday on PBS.

Ever since she was 5 years old, when a classmate demanded that she show him her gums, Schwartz knew she looked a bit different from everyone else in her very white town. But her parents, Peggy and Robert Schwartz, had an answer for that — a photo in their family album of her paternal ancestor, a dark-skinned Sicilian Jew. The real answer was far less complicated, buried underneath a lifetime of secrets and lies that helped spell the end of her parents’ marriage. (Spoiler alert: Schwartz is the result of an affair her mom had with an African-American family friend. She demanded answers from her mother when she was 18, but didn’t talk to her father about it until her mid-30s when she made the film.)

In “Little White Lie,” Schwartz confronts her family, exposing the secret and revealing how she has spent her adult years straddling two racial identities. We talked to Schwartz about ditching law for filmmaking and what it’s like to be black and white in America.

What made you want to become a filmmaker?

When I was in law school I started thinking about the issues that I wanted to work on and how film was an effective way to speak about the issues I cared about…

…Your story is like “The Emperor’s New Clothes” because it seems so obvious that you’re black, and yet everyone was saying that you were white. Growing up, when you looked at yourself in the mirror, did you ever have an inkling?

Absolutely. I saw my difference. It’s so crazy for me to find a picture of me when I was a kid and remember that I was so insecure about my hair and my skin and all those things. I definitely felt self-conscious of not being like everybody else that was around me…

…For you, what does it mean to be black?

I think it’s twofold. Part of it is about my own consciousness about being a person of color and being of the world and seeing things. I lived so much of my life having the outlook and thinking that I was white and being somewhat oblivious to the rest of the world, and so I think for me, it’s about gaining that consciousness of difference and really actually recognizing how other people see me.

Part of it’s also being part of the community and the connection. It’s shared experiences on a variety of different levels. When I got to college, that connection, realizing that — even though I hadn’t grown up identifying as being black — there were ways in which I really felt connected to being part of a community…

Read the entire interview here.