Mixed Race Studies

Paul Gilroy: Race and ‘Useful Violence’

Public Seminar
2016-07-08

McKenzie Wark, Professor of Culture and Media in Liberal Studies
The New School for Social Research

#BLM passes The New School.

Aimé Césaire called it: the so-called west is a decaying civilization. In both the United States and Europe, where institutions are receding, a base level of race-talk and racial solidarity is revealed as metastasizing beneath them. In such dim times, I turn to the writings of Paul Gilroy as offering an anti-racist vision that is transnational and cosmopolitan, but which draws on popular and vernacular forms of hybridity rather than elite ones.

In Darker than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture (Harvard 2010), Gilroy offers a series of essays on the culture of what he has famously called the Black Atlantic (Verso 1993) as an alternative to race-talk but which is also outside of the various alternative nationalisms that flourish as a response. It is not reducible to liberalism, and it also attempts to fend off incorporation into the culture industry. That might be an urgent project for this “age of rendition.” (87) One in which in Judith Butler’s terms that which is grievable, or in Donna Haraway’s that which is killable, are respectively diminishing and expanding categories.

Gilroy is wary of responses to racism that borrow from it. He would probably strongly reject Chantal Mouffe’s understanding of all politics as necessarily based on a tangible equality of participation in a shared substance, which the necessarily excludes the other as unequal to us. Hence he is not any more inclined towards Black nationalism than towards any other. Instead, he builds upon the moral economies of the Black Atlantic, in which the struggle against slavery and racism pose the question of a trans-national belonging, or what I would call he problem of species-being. Just as EP Thompson saw the English working class as self-making, Gilroy is interested in the coming in to being of a people in struggle, but beyond Thompson’s rather provincial national frame. Along with others influenced by the cultural studies tradition such as Andrew Ross and Angela McRobbie, he is interested more in vernacular than elite cultural forms…

…Gilroy: “What answers does the mixed-race person give to the apostles of purity, who can be found in all communities?” (103) Marley borrowed from Jamaican rude boys, from Curtis Mayfield, but also from Black Power: ‘I Shot the Sheriff’ as a famous Marley song has it – but not the deputy. For Gilroy, Marley is a version of Blackness that can include, but is not reducible to, African-American culture. It borrows from the diasporic cult of Ethiopia but makes it more a symbolic than an actual homeland. From the Rastafarians it also takes a view of wage-work not as self-mastery but as an extension of slavery. From the discovery of swinging London it evolves into the ‘Kinky Reggae’ of the ‘Midnight Ravers’.

Where Marley had been an itinerant worker, Hendrix was a former soldier, who swapped the ‘Machine gun’ for the electric guitar, itself also bound up in curious ways with military technology. He produced an Afro-futurist sound that was, as Caetano Veloso put it, “half blues, half Stockhausen” (130) Gilroy: “Hendrix’s career tells us that by this point, black music could produce its own public world: a social corona that could nourish or host an alternative sensibility, a structure of feeling that might function to make wrongs and injustices more bearable in the short term but could also promote a sense of different possibilities, providing healing glimpses of an alternative moral, artistic, and political order.” (147)…

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White people, don’t tell me what Martin Luther King would think of Black Lives Matter

Vox
2016-07-08

Jon Crowley
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

I woke up Thursday morning and accidentally watched a video of Alton Sterling being killed by the police. In a world of social feeds and autoplaying video, I’m far from the only person who had this experience. Within 10 minutes I was reading descriptions of how Philando Castile had been killed, again by the police.

Like many people of color, I’ve been warned about interactions with the police since I was a little kid. Despite being a light-skinned, mixed-race black person, despite growing up in a safe suburban area, this warning was a part of my childhood.

And seeing, very explicitly, how easily two black men met violent deaths at the hands of people who are supposed to serve their communities, pushed me past my hard-earned emotional distance from the subject and made me feel scared. Scared and alone, even as I saw the reactions pouring out from people of every race, nationality, and culture, looking to express the same fear and outrage.

There are a lot of people from other communities or racial groups who want to express support, and a lot of people who want to explain why these men had it coming.

If you’ve made it this far, I’m going to assume you’re trying to find something positive to do or say, beyond offering hopes or prayers or condolences.

If you want to know what I’d consider the bare minimum of support you could offer to the people of color in your life, here’s a starting point:…

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MSU faculty contribute to book on white privilege

Mississippi State University
2016-07-01

Contact: Allison Matthews

STARKVILLE, Miss.—Two Mississippi State faculty members helped lead a literary effort examining the basis and scope of racial identity as an American social structure.

Stephen Middleton, professor of history and director for African American Studies at MSU, along with associate professor of English and African American Studies Donald Shaffer, served on the editing team for “The Construction of Whiteness: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Race Formation and the Meaning of a White Identity.” A University Press of Mississippi publication, the collection of essays specifically looks at the origins of white privilege and the various social, cultural, political and economic practices that underwrite its ideological influence in American society. David Roediger of the University of Kansas also was co-editor.

“This book explores an old story in American culture,” said Middleton, the project’s lead editor. “It reviews a time when we thought about ourselves in certain ways, and the two categories that defined us more than any other were ‘white’ and ‘black.’ It’s an old story of what we’ve learned about our history and what we tell ourselves.”

“Whiteness” is a socially and legally constructed category, Middleton said, woven into the American psyche over time based on the need for cheap labor. This established a power and economic structure favorable to whites that socially and legally denied access to non-whites…

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#BlackLivesMatter

The Cairo Review of Global Affairs
Spring 2015

Reverend Charles Williams II, Senior Pastor
King Solomon Baptist Church, Detroit, Michigan

Demonstrator protesting the police killing of teenager Michael Brown, Ferguson, Aug. 18, 2014. Charlie Riedel/Associated Press.

Conservative backlash against Barack Obama and continuing police brutality against blacks indicates the country’s legacy of slavery has not been overcome.

In 2008, the United States electorate chose the first African American president since the inception of the Republic more than two centuries earlier. Barack Obama, the Democratic Party candidate, received 69.5 million votes out of the total 131.4 million total votes cast—the highest number in presidential election history. The more than 60 percent turnout of eligible voters was put at the highest in nearly fifty years. More than fifteen million ballots were cast by first-time voters who heavily favored Obama—comprising nearly 15.2 percent of all votes cast for him, compared to 7.5 percent of all votes cast for Republican John McCain.

Many Americans were dazzled by the energy created in a campaign of hope and change. Understandably, many hoped and perhaps even assumed that the change would further improve race relations in America. Anti-establishment youth had embraced a man who aspired to lead the American establishment, with hip-hop artists such as Nas and Young Jeezy producing tracks like “Black President” and “My President.” This newfound political energy was promoted through political paraphernalia that carried pictures of candidate Obama in a red, white, and blue filter. The music, the bumper stickers, the mood, and the candidate did not represent blackness or whiteness; they represented humanity, patriotism, and coming change. They evoked the spirit of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech of 1963, and even of Obama’s 2004 Democratic National Convention speech in Boston, when he intoned, “There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America—there’s the United States of America.”

The election of an African American man as president of the Republic led many to conclude that the nation had reached a historic turning point. The high turnout for Obama, including among white voters, seemed to demonstrate that change had truly come. Some dared to believe that the United States was becoming a “colorblind society.” After the 2008 election, college classrooms across the country were bursting in conversations debating “are we now a post-racial society?” Statistics showing greater numbers of black doctors, lawyers, and CEOs helped quantify the argument…

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Those Discriminated Against Are Now the Discriminators

Indian Country Today Media Network
2015-12-31

Juilanne Jennings

For some odd and stupid reason many of us continue to be color struck. I really think most of us are ignorant or at the very least forgetful. Black people who look “white” is not a new phenomenon. In the United States, anyone with a trace of African blood, no matter how remote, has been considered black. Following the centuries-long evolution of Eurocentrism, a concept geared to protecting white racial purity and social privilege, race has been constructed and regulated by the “one-drop” rule (i.e., hypodescent), which obligated individuals to identify as black or white, in effect erasing mixed-race individuals from the social landscape. Walter Plecker, first registrar of Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics, serving from 1912 to 1946, had brought racial policies to blood and bone level.

Now, deep into the 21st century, the socially constructed racial ladder continues to keep people of color, including individuals of mixed race, from enjoying the same privileges as Euro-Americans. Moreover, as we try to march forward with new members of a new multiracial movement pointing the way toward equality, those who have been discriminated against are now becoming the discriminators…

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Prize-winning Hong Kong-born poet Sarah Howe makes verse of city’s Basic Law

South China Morning Post
2016-07-07

Clare Tyrrell-Morin

Having played down her Chinese side while growing up and studying in the UK, Howe, now at Harvard, has turned to it again as she makes an ‘erasure poem’ out of Hong Kong’s mini-constitution

We meet in a small office on the second floor of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, overlooking a tranquil garden unseen from Harvard University’s main thoroughfares. It’s freezing outside, but the view is spectacular: the bare branches of an ancient tree, contemplated by scholars for generations, silhouetted against a wintry sky. It’s a good view for a poet.

The office belongs to a Radcliffe Fellow, Sarah Howe, who is spending the year here with 50 other artists and scholars. You may not know her name yet, but Howe could become one of Hong Kong’s most celebrated writers.

In December, the 32-year-old won the Sunday Times/Peters Fraser & Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award for authors under the age of 35. The previous month, scientist Stephen Hawking read out a poem, titled “Relativity”, that she had written for him for Britain’s National Poetry Day. And, in January, Howe was presented with the £20,000 (HK$204,000) T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry at a lavish ceremony at the Victoria and Albert Museum, in London.

Her winning collection was “Loop of Jade”, which weaves around her identity as a British-Chinese poet born in Hong Kong. The dualistic, hybrid work dances between the search for her mother’s Chinese roots and subjects as varied as censorship, 14th-century Flemish paintings, evenings in Arizona and the rain in London. The book captures a quest for identity, dislocation and the crossing of waters – themes familiar to many a Hongkonger – yet, equally, it is an exploration of the Western literary canon and the impact Chinese poetry has had on it…

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La Esclava Blanca: The New Telenovela Rewriting Colombia’s History of Slavery

AAIHS: African American Intellectual History Society
2016-07-06

Yesenia Barragan
Columbia University, New York, New York

This is a guest post by Yesenia Barragan, a historian of race, slavery, and emancipation in Colombia, Afro-Latin America, and the Atlantic/Pacific worlds. She recently received her Ph.D. in Latin American and Caribbean History at Columbia University and will be a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Dartmouth College in the Fall 2016. She is currently revising her book manuscript, tentatively titled The Darkest Place: Slavery and Emancipation on the Colombian Pacific, which is the first detailed study of the gradual abolition of slavery (1821-1852) and the immediate aftermath of emancipation in the Pacific lowlands of Colombia. Yesenia is also a longtime activist and has published several pieces for the Latin American news agency Telesur on the historical memory of slavery in the Americas, Black Lives Matter, and Colombian politics.

Between Underground and Roots, the past year has witnessed a boom in the cinematic portrayal of the ugly business of and resistance to slavery in the U.S. South. Little known to American audiences, however, is the recent debut of a television series from the Latin American country of Colombia titled La Esclava Blanca (The White Slave), which depicts the slaveholding world of post-colonial Colombia, currently the country with the third largest Afro-descendent population in the Western Hemisphere (after the United States and Brazil). Produced by Caracol TV (Colombia’s largest television network) and first aired in late January 2016 in Colombia, La Esclava Blanca was transmitted to a larger Spanish-language audience in the United States via Telemundo in April. In contrast to Brazil’s longer history of telenovelas (soap operas) set during the time of slavery (see, for example, Greg Childs’s AAIHS piece on A Escrava Isaura), La Esclava Blanca is actually the first telenovela about slavery in the history of Colombia. Yet, as reflected in the title of the telenovela (The White Slave), the show engages in a violent historical revisionism by centering the fantastical travails of a white woman who ostensibly holds the key of freedom for the region’s enslaved…

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Will Precision Medicine Move Us beyond Race?

The New England Journal of Medicine
2016-05-26 (Volume 374, Number 21)
DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp1511294

Vence L. Bonham, J.D., Senior Advisor to the NHGRI Director on Genomics and Health Disparities
National Human Genome Research Institute, Bethesda, Maryland

Shawneequa L. Callier, J.D., Professorial Lecturer in Law
Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.

Charmaine D. Royal, Ph.D., Associate Professor of African and African American Studies and Genome Sciences
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

Although self-identified race may correlate with geographical ancestry, it does not predict an individual patient’s genotype or drug response. Precision medicine may eventually replace the use of race in treatment decisions, but several hurdles will have to be overcome.

Read or purchase the article here.

A DNA Test Won’t Explain Elizabeth Warren’s Ancestry

Slate
2016-06-29

Matt Miller

You’re not 28 percent Finnish, either.

Our genes dictate certain things about us, but ethnicity is not derived from a single gene.

Scott Brown, the former Massachusetts senator who lost to Elizabeth Warren in the 2012 election, has decided to dredge up old accusations that may have ultimately cost him that race.

“As you know, she’s not Native American,” Brown told reporters this week. “She’s not 1/32 Cherokee.” He then called on Harvard University, where Warren was a law professor, to release records that allegedly indicate Warren benefited from affirmative action (there’s no reason to believe this is true), before suggesting that “she can take a DNA test” if she wants to prove her roots.

But here’s the thing: DNA testing cannot definitively prove whether a person is Cherokee. Or a member of any community, at least not reliably. To assume it can is to assume that there’s something inherently different in the genetic makeup of tribal members and that this thing is universal within that community. That’s not true.

Our genes dictate certain things about us—there’s a gene that programs the color of your eyes, for example. But ethnicity is not a trait derived from a single gene, because ethnicity is mostly our perception of a collection of traits, rather than a trait itself. So a genetic test that looks at our genes and comes back with an assessment of our ethnic roots isn’t honing in on a specific gene and reading what it says because there’s no such gene to read. Instead, the test is comparing snippets of our DNA to snippets of DNA of people of known origin and looking for similarities…

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Efún: “White Love” and Modernity in Guinea

Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies
Volume 19, 2015
pages 33-54
DOI: 10.1353/hcs.2016.0026

Kathleen Connolly, Assistant Professor of Spanish
Western Oregon University, Monmouth, Oregon

This paper analyzes the award-winning novel Efún (1955), by Liberata Masoliver. The novel, a romance-adventure set in Equatorial Guinea, stages a cosmopolitan, white identity in the form of the Catalan protagonists Ana Ribera and Carlos Isart. The narrative harnesses racial discourse, as well as the signs of technological advancement and modernity, to portray Spaniards as ideal colonizers in Guinea. Significantly, Efún while in line with much of the ideological values espoused by National Catholicism, contains subtle counter discourses that construct upper-class Catalans as ideal national subjects. The novel’s preoccupation with transgressive sex and miscegenation demonstrates an anxiety regarding the “racial consequences” of the colonial project: the destruction of European, white, identity. Efún’s unease about mixed race, dangerous mestizos, and insinuations of Catalan racial purity all form an integral part of Masoliver’s education of desire.