Mixed Race Studies

“Am I White” by Adrienne Dawes

Salvage Vanguard Theater Presents the Word Premiere of Am I White by Adrienne Dawes

Performances run October 1- 18, 2014
VIP Opening Night Performance: October 4, 2014

Salvage Vanguard Theater
2803 Manor Road
Austin, Texas 78722
Telephone: (512) 474-SVT-6 (474-7886)

Salvage Vanguard Theater announces the third and final MADE IN THE SVT production of its 20th anniversary season: the world premiere of Am I White by local playwright Adrienne Dawes, directed by Jenny Larson.

When Neo-Nazi terrorist Wesley Connor returns to prison after a failed bomb plot, he is confronted with the two identities that threaten his position within the White Order of Thule most: fatherhood and his own mixed race heritage.

Wesley Connor first entered the prison system at age 19. He became a member of the White Order of Thule, quickly rising the ranks of the “esoteric brotherhood working toward the revitalization of the Culture-Soul of the European people.” Within months of his release from prison, Wesley and teenage girlfriend Polly were arrested exchanging counterfeit bills at an ice cream shop. The subsequent search of their apartment found bomb-making materials, illegal weapons and plans that targeted the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

Inspired by the true story of Leo Felton and Erica Chase, Am I White travels between recurring dream and minstrel show nightmare to discover if a singular self exists in an alleged “post-racial” America…

For more information, click here.

Monica Pearson Show with Fanshen Cox

Monica Pearson Show
KISS 104FM, Atlanta
Atlanta, Georgia
2014-09-14

Monica Pearson, Host

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni, Award-Winning Actress, Producer and Educator
“One Drop of Love”

Listen Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni’s radio interview with Emmy Winner Monica Pearson on KISS 104 FM in Atlanta here (00:34:47). Download the interview here.

Join the Greatest Minds Society of Georgia State University for a Discussion on Racial Identity with Playwright Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni of “One Drop of Love“

Georgia State University Speaker’s Auditorium
44 Courtland Street, SE
Atlanta, Georgia 30303
Thursday, 2014-09-18, 13:30-15:30 EDT (Local Time)

Who are you? What’s your identity? Where do you come from? What’s your story? What’s your history?

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni, Award-Winning Actress, Producer and Educator
“One Drop of Love”

Ashley Uzamere, Undergraduate Student, EVP
Student Goverment Association

George R. Greenidge, Jr., Ph.D. Student
Department of Sociology
President, Greatest Minds Society

Lauren Sudeall Lucas, J.D., Assistant Professor of Law
Georgia State University College of Law

Kyael Moss, Undergraduate Student, Student Senator
Student Goverment Association

Laschonda Pituk, Undergraduate Student
Member, Greatest Minds Society

Filmmaker in Focus: Lacey Schwartz

Trinidad+Tobago Film Festival 2014
2014-09-11

Aurora Herrera

Throughout history and for various reasons, many people who are not white have passed for white. But how many people have passed without knowing they were doing so?

That is precisely what the documentary Little White Lie, a deeply personal film by Lacey Schwartz, is about. It is also a film about family secrets, deception, denial and a courageous search for identity.

Lacey Schwartz grew up in a Jewish family in upstate New York, and always believed that she was white. She was told that her relatively dark skin and curly hair were the result of a certain Sicilian ancestor. As a young woman, however, she began ask deeper questions about her identity and talk about matters of race and identity.

The CEO of the production company Truth Aid, Lacey is a director/producer who has worked with a variety of production companies and networks, including MTV and BET. Little White Lie (2014) is the first film that Lacey has directed. She also executive produced the narrative film Difret (2014, and also a selection of ttff/14), which won audience awards at the Sundance and Berlin Film Festivals. Lacey has a BA from Georgetown University and a JD from Harvard Law School.

Lacey will bet at the ttff/14 for the screenings of her film on 17 and 19 September. Ahead of the screenings, Festival blogger Aurora Herrera discussed the film with her and heard first-hand about her journey to finding out who she is, and about her need to redefine her identity.

Aurora Herrera: Tell me about the title of the film. Usually a little white lie is something that doesn’t hurt anybody. However, this lie hurt many people.

Lacey Schwartz: The title is meant to be ironic in the sense that people can use the term little white lie to describe things that are harmless and to spare everybody pain, but in fact part of the point is that these little white lies can actually build up and affect people a lot. The lies can pile upon each other. Also, there is kind of a double entendre in the sense that it implies that I am the little white lie so there is also a racial connotation to it, like when something is white it’s considered good and when something is black it’s considered bad…

Read the entire interview here.

Footprints of my other

2012
52 minutes

Claude Haffner

Born to a mixed race couple in the DRC, then Zaire, in the 1970s, Claude Haffner is part Congolese, part French.

From her family home in France, Claude Haffner embarks on a journey in search of her African identity. She is of mixed race, born in 1976 to a French father and a Congolese mother in Zaïre (today’s Democratic Republic of the Congo). Pierre Haffner, her father, passed away in 2000, and having become a specialist on African art and cinema, he left behind a collection of African art together with photos and taped accounts about Congo and Africa. This is the starting point of Claude’s investigation. She delves into their shared material, intellectual and psychological heritage. She interviews her mother who still lives in France about her country, her family and her history. In the search of answers to her questions she returns, alone this time, to Mbuji-Mayi, the capital of Kasaï and the centre of the diamond trade. Michou, her cousin travels with her to the heart of the diamond fields. Despite unemployment, poverty and lack of activity the inhabitants of Mbuji-Mayi remain hopeful owing to the new governor’s development policies.

One drop or two: Mixed-race identity and politics in America with Sharon H. Chang

Rabble Podcast Network
2014-09-09

Charlene Sayo, Co-host

Andrew Sayo, Co-host

Eirene Cloma, Co-host

When Seattle-based researcher and writer Sharon H. Chang wrote an essay that detailed why she tells her mixed-race son that he’s Asian and not white, many readers were surprised —some were downright offended—that she would deny him his “whiteness.” These reactions led Sharon—who herself is mixed-race—to write a follow-up essay aptly titled “Why Mixed with White isn’t White.” Naturally, I had to feature her on MsRepresent: Behind the Face, a Fierce Woman. For this episode, Sharon tackles race, racism, mixed-race identity and the dangers of assuming white privilege when you look anything but.

Listen to interview (00:31:07) here. Download the interview here.

I am not Pocahontas

The Weeklings (also in Salon)
2014-09-04

Elissa Washuta

AS A COWLITZ Indian child, white-skinned and New Jersey-born, I grew up fielding the question, “How much Indian are you?” without any sense of its meaning. Once I was old enough to know that my mother was Indian and my father wasn’t, I began responding “Half.” It wasn’t until my teenage years that I would ask my mother for the details of my ethnic breakdown. She pulled an index card out of her desk drawer. I knew that I was Cowlitz, Polish, Irish, and Ukrainian, but the card was full of surprising facts as well. What did it mean to be Welch? French?

The truly shocking information the card carried was my Indian blood quantum. I didn’t know that was the term for the sum of the fractions next to Cowlitz and Cascade. This was the “How much?” people had prodded me about, and it wasn’t the half I’d assumed. “What are you, a quarter?” people would toss out at times. It wasn’t that. The sum of the Cascade and Cowlitz fractions made an awkward hybrid. I decided it would be nobody’s business.

I grew up in the time of Native American proverb posters and mass-produced dream catchers. Disney’s Pocahontas was released in 1995, when I was ten. I had outgrown my Barbies then, but I still added a Pocahontas doll to my retired collection. I knew that she was a fullblood. She communicated with animals and never wore a jacket. She painted with all the colors of the wind. If someone had asked me to explain the difference between my plastic doll and me, I might have said that she was the real Indian and I was the fake one…

…Although my tribe doesn’t require me to demonstrate a minimum degree of ancestry, acquaintances’ innocent questions of “How much?” seem to gesture toward a desire to get at the truth about how far I am from ancestor plucked from Kevin Costner’s friendly and doomed band: a real Indian.

“How much Indian are you?”, however well-intentioned, implies that alive within me is only a tiny piece of the free, noble Indian that passed on long ago, a remnant from which I am far removed. The questions, individually, are borne from a place of curiosity, but the questions have embedded in a time when blood quantum was used to rob indigenous peoples of rights and, ultimately, lead to our being defined out of existence. Pocahontas, in the final scene of the Disney re-creation, sends John Smith back to England and tells him, “No matter what happens, I’ll always be with you. Forever.” What happens: the viewer is spared the discomfort of a mixed-race happy ending. What happens, historically: Pocahontas is captured by the English, marries John Rolfe, has a son, travels to England to serve as the Crown’s symbol of the civilization and Christianization of the “heathens,” and dies there from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-two. The Disney version, in which Pocahontas never fit her feet into heeled shoes and refused to leave the woods (until the afterthought of a straight-to-video sequel), persists…

Read the entire article here.

Chinese culture fails to make the grade for today’s mixed-race children

South China Morning Post
Hong Kong, China
2014-09-08

Lijia Zhang, Writer, Journalist, Social Commentator

Lijia Zhang recounts her struggle to instill pride and love of all things Chinese in her daughters

May, my 17-year-old elder daughter, told me the results of her school exams by phone. When there was a pause, she asked: “Are you disappointed?” I shouldn’t have been. Three As and a B were good results.

But the problem was that she got the B in Chinese. And she is half Chinese.

I see it partly as my fault in failing to speak Chinese consistently at home, at least for the time May and her younger sister, Kirsty, spend at my house. The truth is that she’s really interested in the language and, indeed, the Chinese part of her cultural heritage.

A few years back, I took the girls to Bangladesh for a holiday. As soon as we were out of my friend’s guarded complex, we were surrounded by curious locals.

“Where are you from?” they asked the girls. May, the spokeswoman of the two, replied without hesitation: “We are from England.”

After we had settled down in a rickshaw, I said to May: “You were born in Beijing. Save for four years in London, you grew up in China. How does it qualify you as ‘English’?” May blinked her big round eyes. “Well, if I tell people I am Chinese, they wouldn’t believe me.”

True, May doesn’t look very Chinese, with her fair skin and brown hair, especially the way she carries herself. Kirsty, who has a darker complexion and more delicate facial features, looks a little more oriental.

Yet they both fundamentally identify themselves as British, even though they do sometimes describe themselves as “half Chinese and half British”…

Read the entire article here.

“What Are You?”: Racial Ambiguity, Stigma, and the Racial Formation Project

Deviant Behavior
Volume 35, Issue 12, 2014
pages 1006-1022
DOI: 10.1080/01639625.2014.901081

Tiffanie Grier, Career Placement Director & Garden to Groceries Project Director
Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Memphis, Memphis Tennessee

Carol Rambo, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Memphis, Memphis Tennessee

Marshall A. Taylor
University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana

Using interview data from individuals who were frequently asked some version of the question “What are you?” in regards to their race, we apply a deviance perspective to frame these encounters as micro level racial formation projects. Racial formation projects are problematized when one’s race is not readily classifiable. These data suggest that when race is perceptibly ambiguous, stigma is assigned and normativity is enforced through discursive constraint and other means. Racially ambiguous individuals use many forms of resistance to navigate these encounters and make identity claims that either affirm or endanger the normative racial formation order.

Read or purchase the article here.

Collaboration is Key to Psychology Professor Sam Sommers’ Research on Race and Ethnicity

Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts
School of Arts And Sciences
August 2013

Anna Burgess

Doctoral Student Sarah Gaither and a Team of Undergraduates Focus on Biracial Perceptions and Identity Flexibility

“As a society, the way we think about questions of race and ethnicity tends to be over-simplified,” Professor Sam Sommers explains. “We like to be able to put people into categories. But what about the people who don’t fit into these categories?”

For Sommers, a Tufts professor and social psychologist, and director of  Tufts’ Diversity & Intergroup Relations Lab, this is not a rhetorical question–it’s a research question. He and 5th-year Ph.D. candidate Sarah Gaither, along with an undergraduate student research team, are trying to find some answers within this topic. Sommers has been studying diversity and its effect on group interactions for ten years, and he started working with Gaither a few years ago. “She’s interested in these same kinds of issues,” he says, “but from the perspective of multiracial people.”

Gaither explains that the projects she and Sommers are working on right now all focus on biracial perceptions and identity flexibility. “Growing up in a biracial family has made me extremely interested in interracial and intergroup relations more generally,” she says, “but in particular it has made me want to learn more about how biracial individuals are perceived and treated by others.” Gaither, who is the recipient of a prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, is working with Sommers on several different studies, some focusing on biracial children and others on biracial college students. In terms of how student researchers factor in, Gaither says, “All of these studies involve training undergraduate research assistants on how to run the studies, since without them, I would not be able to be nearly as productive as I am.”…

Read the entire article here.