Mixed Race Studies

Gordon Fox Pleads Guilty in Rhode Island Corruption Case

The New York Times
2015-03-03

Richard Pérez-Peña

The climb took decades, but the fall was swift. Less than a year removed from his reign as speaker of the Rhode Island House, Gordon D. Fox pleaded guilty on Tuesday to taking bribes, wire fraud and filing a false tax return.

Mr. Fox, 53, took $52,500 in bribes to help a bar and restaurant get a liquor license and illegally diverted $108,000 in campaign funds to pay for personal expenses. He made the admissions in Federal District Court in Providence as part of a plea agreement that calls for a three-year prison sentence — though a judge will ultimately decide the penalty — and will almost certainly cost him his law license.

Outside the courthouse, when asked by reporters whether he felt remorse, Mr. Fox said, “Absolutely, absolutely, without question.”…

…Mr. Fox, a Democrat, was the first openly gay person and the first mixed-race person to lead either of the state’s legislative chambers, and he led the drive to legalize same-sex marriage in 2013.

He grew up as one of six children in a blue-collar family, with a black mother and a white father, and he liked to recall how he had worked in an ice cream shop to help pay his way through law school. He became a lawyer and part owner of a nightclub, and in 1992 he was elected to the House. He became the majority leader in 2002 and the speaker in 2010…

Read the entire article here.

Interracial Intimacies: An Examination of Powerful Men and Their Relationships across the Color Line

Carolina Academic Press
2009
144 pages
Paper ISBN: 978-1-59460-496-6

Earl Smith, Professor Emeritus of Sociology
Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina

Angela J. Hattery, Professor and Director of Women and Gender Studies
George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia

Unique among books on interracial relationships, this book examines the lives of high profile men who have produced public discourses on race and interracial relationships and who themselves, often contradictory to their rhetoric, were or continue to be involved in love relationships across the color line. The book opens with a discussion of the history of interracial couplings in the United States, including an examination of the relationship of Richard and Mildren Loving which led to the landmark case Loving v. Virginia in which the U.S. Supreme Court, in 1967, rendered unconstitutional all state laws that prohibited interracial marriage. Each of the subsequent chapters is devoted to an individual man or couple; we explore the lives of men about whom their interracial relationships are relatively well known, including Thomas Jefferson, Strom Thurmond, Clarence Thomas, Frederick Douglass, and William Cohen. We also explore a few figures about whom less is known about their intimate lives including George Washington and Richard Mentor Johnson.

Rather than simply focusing on the relationships exclusively, this book examines specifically the role that power plays in shaping the negotiation of intimate relationships, family forms, racial identity, hegemonic ideology and public policy among public figures who not only contributed to the public discourses on race and interracial unions, but also contributed to the racial ideologies that gained hegemony and dominated Americans’ beliefs about race and the laws and public policies that established second class citizenship for those identified as “Black.”

This book offers the interested reader a glimpse into the personal lives of famous and not so famous American men who clandestinely or in open view loved women across the color line. In some cases, these loving relationships mirrored the men’s beliefs about race and interracial unions—Richard Mentor Johnson, William Cohen—and in others these relationships were in seeming contradiction to the beliefs these men held and in fact developed about racial purity and segregation—Thomas Jefferson, Clarence Thomas, Strom Thurmond. These contradictions between the public and private lives of our country’s public servants offers a rich arena for exploration of race in the United States. In light of the recent election of the first African American president, Barack Obama, this book could not be more timely.

Because of Our Success: The Changing Racial and Ethnic Ancestry of Blacks on Affirmative Action

Carolina Academic Press
December 2014
404 pages
Paper ISBN: 978-1-61163-444-0

Kevin Brown, Richard S. Melvin Professor of Law
Maurer School of Law
Indiana University

When selective colleges, universities, and graduate programs instituted affirmative action policies in the 1960s, 99.4 percent of Americans were either black or white. Not only were interracial marriages between blacks and whites illegal in over twenty states, but very few blacks were involved in interracial sexual relationships. A person’s race was determined by the application of the one-drop rule. Thus, mixed-race blacks were not allowed to self-identify their race. Rather, they were socially ascribed as black and, therefore, the concept of Black Multiracials did not exist. Also, less than one percent of blacks were foreign-born.

As a result, one of the core assumptions upon which affirmative action was based was that the predominant ancestries of the beneficiaries would be children of two American-born black parents (“Ascendant Blacks”). However, Black Multiracials and foreign-born blacks and their children (“Black Immigrants”) now constitute a growing majority of the black students at many selective higher education programs. Further, the percentages of Black Multiracials and Black Immigrants among those blacks approaching college age are rapidly increasing. Thus, in an ironic twist of fate, America is ethnically cleansing from the campuses of its selective higher education institutions Ascendant Blacks. Not only were they the primary group that affirmative action policies were intended to benefit, but their ascendency out of slavery and segregation made possible the increases in mixed-race sexual relationships, Black Multiracials, foreign-born blacks, and Black Immigrants. This book discusses this ethnic cleansing of Ascendant Blacks and its implications for American society, and suggests possible ways to address the problem.

Panel discusses effect of race in relationships in second interracial dating panel

The Daily Northwestern: Northwestern and Evanston’s Only Daily News Source Since 1881
Evanston, Illinois
2015-03-06

Emily Chin, Assistant Campus Editor

Jakara Hubbard said she has been told throughout her life that her race is a problem and must be difficult to deal with.

Hubbard, who identifies as mixed race, spoke Thursday about different perspectives about mixed-race people during a panel on interracial dating at Northwestern.

The panel, hosted by the Mixed Race Student Coalition, discussed how relationship dynamics differ in monoracial and interracial relationships before a room of more than 80 people. The panel was a celebration of Loving Days, a series of events that commemorate the Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia, which legalized interracial marriage.

Panelists included Hubbard, a couple and family counselor, Cristina Ortiz, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, and Kai Green, a postdoctoral fellow at NU…

Read the entire article here.

Tangled Roots: Celebrating mixed race people and families

Tangled Roots
2015-03-04

Tangled Roots publishes books, and stages events and performances which explore the mixed race experience in the UK

NOW ACCEPTING STORIES FOR OUR NEXT BOOK!

Submission Guidelines:

• Please send up to 2,000 words cut and pasted into an email to tangledroots@live.co.uk.
• Sorry, attachments will not be considered.
• If you have relevant photographs, please tell us about these too.
• Closing date for BOOK submissions is April 30 2015. However, website submissions are on-going and until further notice.
• If you have a story to tell, we would like to hear from you. Please don’t worry about your spelling, grammar, etc. We have editors who can take care of that. It is great stories we are after!
• YOU DO NOT HAVE TO BE MIXED-RACE YOURSELF TO SUBMIT YOUR STORY – Tangled Roots is open to EVERYONE who has experienced of a mixed family or household.
• We are aware that definitions of race and religion can sometimes overlap, therefore we welcome stories where religious tensions has/can form a significant barrier to personal relationships.
• For more information about Tangled Roots and the kind of stories we’re looking for please click on the ‘Stories about mixed lives’ tab above. However, regrettably, there will not be space for poetry in the new collection.

For more information, click here.

Two Worlds Walking: Short Stories, Essays, and Poetry by Writers of Mixed Heritages

New Rivers Press
January 1996
256 pages
ISBN-13: 978-0898231496

Edited by Diane Glaney & C. W. Truesdale

In this landmark collection, 42 writers — including Diane Glancy, Siv Cedering, and Lewis Turco — go beyond a simple idea of diversity to explore what it means to “walk in two worlds.” While many of the poems, short stories, essays, and memoirs in this anthology explore the tensions of being “mixed blood,” all of the pieces offer a surprising and resilient perspective on what it means to be “American” today.

The Men Who Left Were White

Gawker
2014-04-12

Josie Duffy

There are three things you should know.

First: I’m not biracial.

“What are you?” people ask, and they expect me to say something thrilling and tribal. I answer, but still they press. “Where are your ancestors from?” people ask, and they want answers that aren’t San Antonio and Wheeling, West Virginia. But that’s all I got. My story is both simple and untold.

The bones of it, of me: I’m black, despite the skin that goes virtually translucent in the winter. Despite the thin unpredictable curls. My mom and dad are black, as are my grandparents. That’s all she wrote. That’s all there is, even as I write this sentence. My parents, usually liberal employers of nuance, have always been militant-clear about drawing that line. We aren’t biracial.

When I tell people I’m black, they find it unsatisfying. “That’s no fun,” one girl joked to me recently. “I thought you were going to have a story.”

Second: I’m 44% European, 49% African. Not exactly an equal split, but pretty damn close.

I hear the same sentence twice…

Read the entire article here.

The Next Great Migration

The New York Times
2015-03-01

Thomas Chatterton Williams

PARIS — AT dinner last summer with my brother-in-law, a grandson of Jews who fled Algeria for France, the conversation turned to the rash of anti-Semitic incidents plaguing the country. At such times, the question inevitably arises in the minds of many Jews: “Where could we go?” He mentioned Tel Aviv, London and New York, but the location mattered less than the reassurance that departure remained an option. He’s not alone in this thinking: 7,000 French Jews emigrated in 2014.

Over the past year, as I watched with outrage at the dizzying spate of unpunished extrajudicial police killings of black men and women across America, I’ve wondered why more black Americans don’t think similarly. Why shouldn’t more of us weigh expatriation, even if only temporary, as a viable means of securing those lofty yet elusive ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

Blacks leaving America in search of equality is not new. The practice dates from at least antebellum Louisiana, when free mulattoes in New Orleans sent their children to France to live in accordance with their means and not their color. It continued after World War II, when a number of black G.I.s, artists and jazzmen shared Richard Wright’s sentiment that there is “more freedom in one square block of Paris than there is in the entire United States of America.”…

Read the entire article here.

Being Mixed Race

Women of the World Festival 2015
Blue Bar at Royal Festival Hall
Southbank Center
Belvedere Road, London
Saturday, 2015-03-07, 13:30-15:00Z

Building on the findings of the Being Mixed Race panel discussions during WOW 2013 and WOW 2014, this workshop expands on issues identified during the previous conversations and focuses specifically on issues of terminology, colourism, hair and parenting. Led by visual sociologist Emma Dabiri.

Emma Dabiri is researching a PhD in visual sociology at Goldsmiths, and works as a teaching fellow in the Africa Department at SOAS, University of London. As a commentator she is frequently invited to contribute to discussions relating to Africa and the African Diaspora on topics including futures, gender, feminism, identities, literature, film and the politics of beauty. She has published in a number of academic journals, as well as in the national press and is one of the BBC’s Expert Voices.

For more information, click here.

The Right Words to Say: On Being Read as White

The Toast
2015-03-05

Dahlia Grossman-Heinz

When you meet me for the first time, you read me as if I were a book. Every idea you have about me and every word I say is part of that book.

When you look at me, you will think I am white. I already know this. When you shake my hand and meet me for the first time, you always already read me as white. You will hear me speak English without an accent and think I am white. You will hear or read my last name and think I am white. You read me wrong.

We all have crowded bookshelves in our heads crammed with texts for every person we know. They knock about in our skulls, falling off the shelves. We refer to them again and again, wearing the pages thin. When you read me wrong, everything that follows is askew.

I have strategies I use to tell you who I am. They have different rates of success, but I will employ them all whenever the situation allows. I mention my quinceañera. I tell the story of the first time my parents heard me speak English. I say words deliberately correctly in Spanish like guerrilla. I talk about Mexican music I like. I note that I am a bilingual Spanish speaker on my resume. I talk about Mexican movies I like. When I am with people, I answer phone calls from my mom and tell her I can’t talk, but I do it in Spanish. I keep her on the phone a little longer than I have to. Whenever the topic of family comes up, I say that most of mine lives in Mexico. I am prepared with these tactics when I have to tell you who I am, ready to fit them in between the pauses so that you might reread me. I’m better at it now than I used to be—I’ve been practicing a long time, figuring out the right words to say…

Read the entire article here.