Mixed Race Studies

Obituaries: Fredi Washington, 90, Actress; Broke Ground for Black Artists

The New York Times
1994-06-30

Sheila Rule

Fredi Washington, one of the first black actresses to gain recognition for her work on stage and in film, died on Tuesday at St. Joseph Medical Center in Stamford, Conn., where she lived. She was 90.

The cause was pneumonia, which developed after a stroke, said her sister, Isabel Powell.

Miss Washington’s best-known performance was as the young mulatto who passes for white in the 1934 film “Imitation of Life.” Her performance was so convincing that she was accused of denying her heritage in her private life.

“She did pass for white when she was traveling in the South with Duke Ellington and his band,” said Jean-Claude Baker, a restaurateur and author and a friend of Ms. Washington’s. “They could not go into ice-cream parlors, so she would go in and buy the ice cream, then go outside and give it to Ellington and the band. Whites screamed at her, ‘Nigger lover!’ “…

Read the entire obituary here.

The man behind the legend

Edmonton Journal
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
2012-02-14

Jay Stone, Postmedia News

BERLIN – He was a musician, a spiritual leader, a ladies’ man, a smoker of heroic amounts of ganja, a political force and a religious icon. And, 31 years after his death, Bob Marley is still a chart-topper: His Legend album sells 250,000 copies a year, even now.

“Everywhere in the world people look at Bob as some kind of leader, philosopher, prophet, someone who speaks to their lives and in whom they find wisdom,” says Scottish filmmaker Kevin Macdonald. “It’s fascinating: Why is that? Nobody else has had that effect in music.”

Macdonald directed the documentary, Marley. It’s a definitive—not to say encyclopedic—biopic of a musician who was a mystery, despite his popularity as the first poet of reggae. Almost 2 and a half hours long, it includes concert footage and interviews with friends and family. It is having its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival…

…The Scottish director took over the project from Jonathan Demme, who dropped out because of the lack of historical documents with which to put together a full picture. Macdonald said he became committed to it while in Uganda shooting The King of Scotland, his film about Idi Amin.

“I went into the Kampala slums with some of my actors, and people had Bob Marley pictures, graffiti, pictures,” Macdonald said. “Twenty-five years after he died, he still had a huge impact. There’s no other musician I can think of who has that position in culture, so long after he’s dead, and so far away, in a poor part of a central African city.”

He looked at the film as a kind of detective story. Much of Marley’s identity came from the fact that he was of mixed race—his mother was black, his father white—so that, in some ways, he was an outsider in his own country. Despite Macdonald’s research, however, Marley’s father, Norval, remains a mystery: There is a photograph of him in the movie, but not much information…

Read the entire article here.

‘Town Secret’: Race of Famous Carthaginian Embraced

The Pilot
Southern Pines, North Carolina
2012-02-11

John Chappell

Every year with its Buggy Festival, Carthage celebrates the achievements of a former slave, though until recently few knew it.

William T. Jones — born a slave, and the son of a slave and her owner — ran the famed Tyson & Jones Buggy Co., the biggest business around.

Though he was an African-American described in census records as “a mulatto gentleman” and a former slave, Jones nevertheless became a leading businessman and industrialist, recognized and honored, his color the best kept secret in Carthage history.

His elaborate 1880s Queen Anne Victorian mansion stands at the entrance to the town’s historic district. Now a bed-and-breakfast inn lovingly restored with wraparound porch and fanciful gingerbread trimmed in elegant Painted Lady fashion, the Jones house evokes the lavishness of a bygone era.

Few in Carthage today realize its builder and former owner was a black man of mixed race who lived openly with his white wife, operated one of the biggest factories in the South, taught Sunday School in the Methodist Church, served on national and local boards, and was admired and loved without any mention of race.

Today, the fact that Jones was an African-American is something the town history committee’s present Chairwoman Carol Steed thinks the town can take pride in — though for years nobody spoke of it…

Read the entire article here.

José Vasconcelos: The Prophet of Race

Rutgers University Press
2011-05-07
142 pages
5.5 x 8.5
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-5063-3
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-5064
Web PDF ISBN: 978-0-8135-5104-3

Ilan Stavans, Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture
Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts

Mexican educator and thinker José Vasconcelos is to Latinos what W.E.B. Du Bois is to African Americans—a controversial scholar who fostered an alternative view of the future. In José Vasconcelos: The Prophet of Race, his influential 1925 essay, “Mestizaje”—key to understanding the role he played in the shaping of multiethnic America—is for the first time showcased and properly analyzed. Freshly translated here by John H. R. Polt, “Mestizaje” suggested that the Brown Race from Latin America was called to dominate the world, a thesis embraced by activists and scholars north and south of the Rio Grande. Ilan Stavans insightfully and comprehensively examines the essay in biographical and historical context, and considers how many in the United States, especially Chicanos during the civil rights era, used it as a platform for their political agenda. The volume also includes Vasconcelos’s long-forgotten 1926 Harris Foundation Lecture at the University of Chicago, “The Race Problem in Latin America,” where he cautioned the United States that rejecting mestizaje in our own midst will ultimately bankrupt the nation.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Ilan Stavans
  • The Prophet of Race
• Jose Vasconcelos
  • Mestizaje
  • The Race Problem in Latin America
• Chronology
• Acknowledgments

Sui Sin Far / Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography

University of Illinois Press
1995
288 pages
ISBN-10: 0252021134; ISBN-13: 978-0252021138

Annette White-Parks, Professor Emeritus of English
University of Wisconsin, LaCrosse

Foreword by Roger Daniels

Winner of the Association for Asian American Studies Outstanding Book Award in Cultural Studies.

This first full-length biography of the first published Asian North American fiction writer portrays both the woman and her times.

The eldest daughter of a Chinese mother and British father, Edith Maude Eaton was born in England in 1865. Her family moved to Quebec, where she was removed from school at age ten to help support her parents and twelve siblings. In the 1880s and 1890s she worked as a stenographer, journalist, and fiction writer in Montreal, often writing under the name Sui Sin Far (Water Lily). She lived briefly in Jamaica and then, from 1898 to 1912, in the United States. Her one book, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, has been out of print since 1914.

Today Sui Sin Far is being rediscovered as part of American literature and history. She presented portraits of turn-of-the-century Chinatowns, not in the mode of the “yellow peril” literature in vogue at the time but with an insider’s sympathy. She gave voice to Chinese American women and children, and she responded to the social divisions and discrimination that confronted her by experimenting with trickster characters and tools of irony, sharing the coping mechanisms used by other writers who struggled to overcome the marginalization to which their race, class, or gender consigned them in that era.

Table of Contents

• Foreword by Roger Daniels
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. A Bird on the Wing
• 2. Montreal: The Early Writings
• 3. Pacific Coast Chinatown Stories
• 4. Boston: The Mature Voice and Its Art
• 5. Mrs. Spring Fragrance
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index

For Obama, Estranged in a Strange Land, Aloha Had Its Limits

The New York Times
2007-04-09

Lawrence Downes

Reporters have been shuttling across the Pacific lately in search of the early chapters of Senator Barack Obama’s life story. Their guidebook is his memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” in which he describes his adolescence in Honolulu—where he was born and lived through high school, except for a few years in Indonesia—as a difficult time marked by drug use, disaffection and a painful search for identity.

The New York Times listed the ingredients of his young psyche as “racial confusion,” “feelings of alienation” and “disquietude.” The Los Angeles Times suggested that it was not just angst, but boiling angst.

Sounds oddly bleak, doesn’t it? Angst boils up in most people at some point in life, but if there were any place the son of a Kansan and a Kenyan could have fit in, wouldn’t it have been Hawaii? If there is a heaven, it probably looks a lot like Oahu, and the happy souls in it probably go around talking like our national spokesman for racial relaxation, Senator Obama.

So who was this brooding Barry, taking lessons in African-American swagger from a black high-school buddy, Ray, studying black nationalism and going to black parties on Army bases?

His struggle may seem strange in that setting, but the setting itself was strange. Hawaii, where I also grew up in the 1970’s, is famously mellow about race and ethnicity. It’s what you would expect from an ocean crossroads populated by Polynesians and early-20th-century plantation immigrants from across the globe. But tolerant is not the same as oblivious. Hawaii is acutely conscious of—you could say hung up on—racial, ethnic and cultural differences…

…Beyond that, his parents—University of Hawaii graduate students—and his Kansas grandparents, who helped raise him after his father returned to Africa, had no roots in the local culture. He lived in a state that, then as now, had a minuscule African-American population. He seems to have been surrounded by people who knew just enough about black America to be stupidly insensitive, and his family couldn’t help him.

“I was engaged in a fitful interior struggle,” he wrote. “I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant.”

In one sense, he wasn’t alone. Being black isn’t common in Hawaii, but being biracial is. There’s a Hawaiian word for it—hapa, or half—that traditionally refers to combinations of white with Hawaiian or Asian, though many use it for any racial blend. Being hapa is hardly cause for discrimination in mixed-up Hawaii, but it can be problematic. Dwelling on it can tie a person in knots. It can be disorienting to feel forced to choose between identities when you are both and neither. It can be infuriating to be stared at by people trying to puzzle out what you are…

Read the entire article here.

Spring 2008 Feature: Acting on a Dream

Farmington First: Alumni Magazine
University of Maine, Farmington
Spring 2008

Marc Glass

The stages of H’Nette DeTroy’s dramatic life include theater, dance and even commercial casting

Looking at H’Nette DeTroy’s resume, you might think she suffers from career wanderlust. Since graduating from UMF in 2006, she’s been a nurse, a cheerleader and a bus-commuting business executive—not to mention a disgruntled gas-station patron, a terminally ill hospital patient and a drunk-driving fatality. A southern Maine-based actor, DeTroy takes pride in her many professional personas—whether that means extolling the virtues of an alternative-fuel Mercedes Benz in a television commercial, playing a nurse in a hospital training video, dramatizing the perils of operating under the influence in an MTV-aired public service announcement or taking to the stage in a community theater production of Disney’s High School Musical.

“It’s a lot of fun to lose yourself in a role, creatively making it whatever you want it to be,” said DeTroy on a rare day of downtime away from auditions, teaching children’s dance lessons and rehearsing with the Portland-based hip-hop dance company Rhythm Factor. “When I’m acting, dancing or singing, I lose all concept of time and the trivial stuff in life. This is something I love. It’s what life is about for me.”…

…With what she calls her “multiracial” background (courtesy of a German father and Vietnamese mother), DeTroy has been slating of sorts for most of her life.

“People have always asked me ‘What are you?’ or ‘Are you Latina?’ My mom is as third-world as you can get. Growing up in as unforgiving and wealthy a place as Fairfield County makes you aware of your identity. I’m used to defining myself in the first three seconds,” she said. “I remember growing up and thinking ‘there’s no one on TV who looks like me.’ Seeing Jennifer Lopez in the film Selena, a minority actress actually making it, was very motivational.”…

Read the entire article here.

Louis Riel and the Creation of Modern Canada: Mythic Discourse and the Postcolonial State

University of Manitoba Press
November 2008
314 pages
6 × 9
Paper, ISBN: 978-0-88755-734-7

Jennifer Reid, Professor of Religion
University of Maine, Farmington

Politician, founder of Manitoba, and leader of the Métis, Louis Riel led two resistance movements against the Canadian government: the Red River Uprising of 1869–70, and the North-West Rebellion of 1885, in defense of Métis and other minority rights.

Against the backdrop of these legendary uprisings, Jennifer Reid examines Riel’s religious background, the mythic significance that has consciously been ascribed to him, and how these elements combined to influence Canada’s search for a national identity. Reid’s study provides a framework for rethinking the geopolitical significance of the modern Canadian state, the historic role of Confederation in establishing the country’s collective self-image, and the narrative space through which Riel’s voice speaks to these issues.

Table of Contents

• Foreword
• Chapter 1: Setting the Stage: The North-West to 1885
• Chapter 2: Canadian Myths and Canadian Identity
• Chapter 3: Nation-states and National Discourses
• Chapter 4: Violence and State Creation
• Chapter 5: Revolution, Identity, and Canada
• Chapter 6: Riel and the Canadian State
• Chapter 7: Heterogeneity and the Postcolonial State
• Conclusion
• Notes

Mulatto Machiavelli, Jean Pierre Boyer, and The Haiti of His Day

John Edward Baur

The Journal of Negro History
Volume 32, Number 3 (July, 1947)
pages 307-353

Toussaint Louverture opened the gate of Haitian liberty, but Jean Pierre Boyer kept it open. Toussaint, ” First of the Blacks,” may be called the Washington of Haiti, but Boyer was neither ”First of the Mulattoes” nor a Haitian Lincoln. He was a colored Machiavelli. Only a Machiavelli would have been ready, willing, and able to lead his country against the greatest obstacles any new nation hadfaced in modern times.

Hated by the Great Powers because she had been born of a slave revolt against France, Haiti was an outcast, almost an outlaw state. The new nation had been the battlefield of French Revolutionary commissioners, sent to stir up the slaves and the mulattoes against their royalist dominators. Santo Domingo had been devastated by a British invasion in the 1790’s and, later, by the brother-in-law of Napoleon, General Leclerc, who attempted to restore French control in the island in 1802. Added to these troubles was the racial war of mulattoes and Negroes for supremacy and, finally, a division of the new nation itself into two hostile states. The land was ruined agriculturally, commercially, politically, and spiritually. So it was from 1804 to 1818 when Boyer gained power. Even a Machiavelli, endowed with the best of human learning and wisdom, would have been befuddled on facing the bitter harvest of this, the New World’s bloodiest and most nearly complete revolution…

Purchase the article here. Read pages 307-349 article here.

President Alexandre Pétion: Founder of Agrarian Democracy in Haiti and Pioneer of Pan-Americanism

Phylon (1940-1956)
Volume 2, Number 3 (Third Quarter, 1941)
pages 205-213

Dantès Bellegarde (1877-1966) [Biography in French]

The history of Haiti is dominated by four great men who fought and worked for its independence: Toussaint Louverture, Dessalines, Christophe and Pétion. Toussaint is the best known of them all because his extraordinary genius and spectacular career have engaged the attention of numerous authors. From a variety of angles they have related the story of this one-time slave who became the governor-general of the French colony of Santo Domingo only to die a captive in a dungeon of the Jura Mountains.

The career of Dessalines was scarcely less dramatic than that of Toussaint, for it was he who led to decisive victory the Negroes and mulattoes, united in the sacred struggle for freedom. Christophe, who became King of Haiti and revealed great administrative powers, is principally known in the United States by the public works which he constructed in the Northern Kingdom. The most remarkable of these is the Citadelle Laferrière, which has justly been called one of the wonders of America.

Of these four remarkable men Alexandre Pétion is the least known in the United States, but his name is revered in Latin America. In fact, he has played a role of first importance in the history of the New World, as I hope to demonstrate in this short biography, which I am writing for Phylon.

Alexandre Pétion was born at Port-au-Prince, April 2, 1770, the son of a mulatto woman and a white man, Pascal Sabès, who, considering his son too dark of skin, refused to recognize him. His elementary education was very inadequate because the whites had not established schools in the colony of Saint Domingue. He learned the trade of silversmith from one of his father’s old friends, M. Guiole, a native of Bordeaux, whose wife showed much solicitude for the young boy. She called him Pichoun, which in her southern patois meant mon petit, “my little one,” whence the name Pétion, by which he continued to be known and which he finally adopted as his own…

Read the entire article here.