Mixed Race Studies

Hanif Kureishi: ‘We’re all mixed-race now

The Independent
2011-10-23

James Kidd

Immigration, Islamism, multi-culturalism – as his new collected stories attests, the hottest topics of the day have long been the bedrock of Hanif Kureishi’s fiction. Just don’t get him started on the joys of ‘Big Brother’…

Hanif Kureishi is, by some accounts, a hard man to interview. In the days before our meeting, any number of people insist that the author of My Beautiful Laundrette, The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album is cantankerous, sarcastic and prone to lengthy lacunae in the middle of conversation. This portrait is corroborated by some of those closest to Kureishi: his sister and more than one ex-partner have complained of literary parasitism, that their lives have been exploited in the service of Kureishi’s art. It is a charge that he doesn’t exactly refute: “If [your writing] doesn’t upset your family, you must be doing it wrong.”

Perhaps the problem is that no one got him on to the subject of Celebrity Big Brother. This not only sparks his enthusiasm, it proves that Kureishi speaks like he writes – an entertaining mix of irreverent humour, personal revelation and social critique. So a relatively grave discussion about “the psychotic exhibitionism of our time” (or “the age of Jordan”) triggers a lengthy dissection of the recent reality series.

“My missus says Jordan chooses really nice men then destroys them. It seems a good way to pass the time. The cage-fighter [Alex Reid] is a nice bloke – thick, but nice. Unlike Vinnie [Jones]. He was quite hardcore – a naughty, tough daddy. I think Vinnie had an evil edge. People were afraid of him.”…

…What he does remember is the urgency to become a writer. Growing up in Bromley in the 1960s, surrounded by racist teachers, skinheads and the National Front, it was his means to self-expression and political empowerment. “Being a writer was a counter-force to people saying I was a half-caste, a Paki, a mongrel. It was a real thing in the world, an identity. I needed to call myself a writer back then because they were calling me a fucking Paki.” He pauses. “We are all mixed-race now – me, Obama, Tiger Woods, Lewis Hamilton.”

Kureishi says he was fortunate that the themes which distinguished his seminal works – race, immigration, Islam and multi-culturalism – have so profoundly defined 21st-century global culture. “You are lucky if you hit it for five years. I suddenly saw that the story of my father, a Muslim man coming to Britain, was not only his story, it was the story of the West. It was gold dust. No one else was writing about it, and people didn’t welcome it. ‘This is very good, Hanif, but do they have to be Indian in a cornershop?'”

Twenty years after The Buddha of Suburbia helped change the landscape of British fiction, and society, Kureishi continues to have plenty to say. He is certainly still politically engaged and enraged. “My dad’s family always thought that power rendered white people unsophisticated. Look at the stupidity of invading Iraq. Every Muslim would think that was hilarious stupidity. It has destroyed American power in the world. They aren’t going to invade anywhere else now. The Iranians aren’t afraid of them. The Koreans aren’t afraid. How stupid was that strategically, let alone morally? They have, as it were, shot their bolt.”…

Read the entire article here.

Marisa Franco

The Graduate School
University of Maryland
2015-05-21

“My graduate degree is shaping my life and career in a number of ways. The research skills I have gained at the University of Maryland have prepared me for a career in research in academia. An International Graduate Research Fellowship, in addition, gave me the opportunity to do research abroad, in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, and to develop skills in cross cultural research and its communication.”

Marisa Franco earned her PhD in counseling psychology in May 2015. She holds an MS in psychology from UMD, and a BS in applied psychology from New York University, where she graduated magna cum laude.

Franco’s research focuses on “racial identity invalidation,” with particular emphasis on its psychological impact on Black/White mixed-race individuals.

For her innovative work, Franco received a number of Graduate School awards, including the ALL S.T.A.R award, granted to 16 campus graduate students with outstanding records as both researchers and graduate assistants, as well as the International Graduate Research Fellowship. Franco is the only student who has been awarded both a Flagship Fellowship, granted to ten outstanding incoming graduate students, and a McNair Graduate Fellowship, granted to five outstanding incoming graduate students who are alumni of Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Programs.

Franco also has received numerous external awards for her research, including the Michael Sullivan Diversity Award and the Association of Black Psychologists Graduate Research Award.

Franco hopes to become a professor in psychology.

Learn more about her in the interview below:…

Read the entire interview here.

Privilege And Pressure: A Memoir Of Growing Up Black And Elite In ‘Negroland’

Code Switch: Fronties of Race, Culture and Ethnicity
National Public Radio
2015-09-08

Terry Gross, Host
Fresh Air

Growing up in the 1950s, Margo Jefferson was part of Chicago’s black upper class. The daughter of a prominent doctor and his socialite wife, Jefferson inhabited a world of ambition, education and sophistication — a place she calls “Negroland.”

That afforded her many opportunities, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural critic says. But life was also undercut by the fear that her errors and failures would reflect poorly on her family and, subsequently, her race.

“It was very important that you show yourself a bright, lively, well-spoken person,” Jefferson tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. “If you go back and read editorials in black magazines — even in white magazines — watch television, this attitude is everywhere: ‘Jackie Robinson, he’s advancing the race!’ ‘Marion Anderson, she’s advancing the race!’ This was the way America … [viewed] blacks: The individual was a collective symbol.”

In her memoir, Negroland, Jefferson describes the social pressures of her upbringing, as well as the sense of separation that it engendered. She writes that she and other members of the black elite thought of themselves as a “Third Race, poised between the masses of Negroes and all classes of Caucasians.”

Ultimately, it was the Black Power movement that led Jefferson to question some of the tenets that she had grown up with: “Black Power was really a major challenge to the social privileges and structures of the kind of privilege that I had grown up with,” she says. “That whole belief … that you will only be able to advance if you are perfectly behaved, if you present yourself as what white people would consider an ideal of whiteness … all of that just began to burst open.”…

Listen to the story (00:34:47) here. Download the story here. Read the transcript here.

An Interview with Celeste Ng, Author of Everything I Never Told You

The Toast
2015-09-02

Nicole S. Chung, Managing Editor

Celeste Ng is the author of the novel Everything I Never Told You, which was a New York Times bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book of 2014, Amazon’s #1 Best Book of 2014, and named a best book of the year by over a dozen publications. Everything I Never Told You was also the winner of the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature and the ALA’s Alex Award, and was a finalist for numerous awards, including the Ohioana Award, the John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger Award, the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the Massachusetts Book Award.

Celeste grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio, in a family of scientists. She attended Harvard University and earned an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she won the Hopwood Award. Her fiction and essays have appeared in One Story, TriQuarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, the Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere, and she is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize. Celeste and I first connected on Twitter after I read her book, and she graciously agreed to chat with me about the novel, her writing routine, being part of and writing about interracial families, how to address issues of race and representation without being pigeonholed, writing outside one’s own culture, what she’s working on now, and much more!…

…Apart from being caught up in the story and the beautifully drawn characters, your book was important to me personally because I’ve always been part of an interracial family — first through adoption and now through marriage as well. I so rarely read stories or see portrayals of families that look anything like mine. Why did you decide to make the family in your novel an interracial one, with biracial children? Was that always the plan for this story?

In the very early stages of the novel — when I was no more than about 15 or 20 pages in — I didn’t really think about the races of the characters at all. If anything, I thought of them as white because that’s so often the default mode for our culture. Then one of my advisors, Eileen Pollack, asked me about the characters’ ethnicity, and I started to realize that this was a racially mixed family: that tied into many of the issues they had to face and the concerns and misunderstandings they had with each other and with outsiders…

Read the entire interview here.

In Search of the Black Mozart

BBC Radio 4
2015-07-19 and 2015-07-26

Sarah Taylor, Producer

Historian Steve Martin and Double Bassist Chi-chi Nwanoku

Chi-chi Nwanoku has spent her career travelling and performing in concert halls the world over as the principal double bassist of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. More recently, she’s been on a personal journey seeking out the lives and careers of black classical musicians from the eighteenth century who like her, played and composed music at the highest levels. In some cases, slivers of their lives are on record but you have to be quite determined to find out.

Chi-chi puts the record straight and with the help of some of the finest musical researchers around, she brings to the fore the music and lives of musicians like violinist/composer Joseph Emidy, virtuoso violinist George Bridgetower and composer Joseph Bologne, aka Chevalier de St-George who not only met Mozart in his lifetime, but who was known by all those who heard his music as the ‘Black Mozart’.

In today’s programme she visits the British Library to find our more about Ignatius Sancho – someone who was born into slavery and ended up being the first person of colour in Britain to have the vote. Also of interest to Chi-chi are his musical compositions which are held at the British Library. Together with music curator, Nicolas Bell and Sancho expert Professor Brychhan Carey the three of them assess Sancho’s musical ability and life.

In a more sinister turn of events, Chi-chi talks to Handel scholar, Dr. David Hunter who shares his research which reveals that Handel, whilst composing some of the most beautiful music around was an investor in slavery.

She also hears about the violinist and composer Joseph Emidy who became a musical star of Cornwall’s music scene and meets up with one of his musical ancestors.

Also features commentary from:

• Jeanne Lamon
• Allan Donald Jeffryes Badley
• Rachel Barton Pine
• Simon McVeigh
• Dominique-René de Lerma
• Shirley J. Thompson
• Steve Martin

Listen to episode 1 here. Listen to episode 2 here.

In Conversation: Quentin Tarantino

Vulture
2015-08-23

Lane Brown, Culture Editor

Midway through postproduction on his eighth movie, the Western THE HATEFUL EIGHT — about a band of outlaws trapped in a saloon during a blizzard — the director discusses the country’s legacy of white supremacy, Obama, and why he doesn’t worry about a Transformers future.

We’re five months from the release of The Hateful Eight. How close to finishing are you?

We’ve got a little bit more than an hour finished right now. I just got back from seeing an hour of the movie cut together…

…Hateful Eight uses the Civil War as a backdrop, sort of like how The Good, the Bad and the Ugly does.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly doesn’t get into the racial conflicts of the Civil War; it’s just a thing that’s happening. My movie is about the country being torn apart by it, and the racial aftermath, six, seven, eight, ten years later.

That’s going to make this movie feel contemporary. Everybody’s talking about race right now.

I know. I’m very excited by that.

Excited?

Finally, the issue of white supremacy is being talked about and dealt with. And it’s what the movie’s about.

How did what’s happening in Baltimore and Ferguson find its way into The Hateful Eight?

It was already in the script. It was already in the footage we shot. It just happens to be timely right now. We’re not trying to make it timely. It is timely. I love the fact that people are talking and dealing with the institutional racism that has existed in this country and been ignored. I feel like it’s another ’60s moment, where the people themselves had to expose how ugly they were before things could change. I’m hopeful that that’s happening now.

You supported Obama. How do you think he’s done?

I think he’s fantastic. He’s my favorite president, hands down, of my lifetime. He’s been awesome this past year. Especially the rapid, one-after-another-after-another-after-another aspect of it. It’s almost like take no prisoners. His he-doesn’t-give-a-shit attitude has just been so cool. Everyone always talks about these lame-duck presidents. I’ve never seen anybody end with this kind of ending. All the people who supported him along the way that questioned this or that and the other? All of their questions are being answered now…

Read the entire interview here.

WorldLink: Racial identities and the politics of color

Deutsche Welle (DW)
2015-06-19

Bliss Broyard responds to the recent controversy surrounding Rachel Dolezal’s “passing” as black, and describes how racial identities have shaped her own life and career.

Download the interview (00:07:55) here.

Podcast #75: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Zadie Smith on Race, Writing, and Relationships

The NYPL Podcast
The New York Public Library
New York, New York
2015-08-25

Tracy O’Neill, Social Media Curator

There are few authors as smart, powerful, and visionary as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Zadie Smith. Adichie’s Americanah won the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award with its delicious satire, while Smith took the Orange Prize for her moving transatlantic novel On Beauty. This week, we’re proud to present Adichie and Smith discussing clear writing, race, and relationships on the New York Public Library Podcast.

For more details, click here.

Writer Jesmyn Ward reflects on survival since Katrina

PBS NewsHour
2015-08-24

Gwen Ifill, Co-Anchor & Managing Editor

Jesmyn Ward, Associate Professor of English
Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana

After writer and Tulane University professor Jesmyn Ward survived Hurricane Katrina while staying at her grandmother’s house, she wrote “Salvage the Bones,” an award-winning novel about a Mississippi family in the days leading up to the devastating storm. She joins Gwen Ifill to discuss how the storm affected the rural poor who could not escape, and now, who may not be able to return.

Read the transcript here.

Amandla Stenberg Is Ready to Be Your Role Model

Elle
2015-08-12

Chaedria LaBouvier

The actress and activist talks exclusively to ELLE.com about everything from box braids to Black Lives Matter to her ambitions in front of and behind the camera.

As one of Hollywood’s most exciting young faces and voices, Amandla Stenberg—whose first name means “power” in Zulu and was used as a rally cry against apartheid in South Africa—more than lives up to the name in her presence, commentary, and poise. I know because I got to talk to the 16-year-old last week, and our conversation, which ranged fluidly from box braids to Black Lives Matter, did not disappoint. (And let’s be honest, some of us can’t even have this range of conversation with twenty- and thirty-somethings.)…

Though she wasn’t born when some of her boho, curly-haired predecessors were gracing the big and small screen in the early ’90s—actresses like Lisa Bonet and Cree Summer, who I grew up adoring—I get the feeling that Amandla is definitely a worthy heir to the crown. Of curls, of course.

First things first: Let’s talk about your style and particularly your hair. I noticed on Instagram that you experiment with different styles. Is hair a form of expression for you?

When I was younger, I struggled with my hair a lot because it was too hard to deal with—it was too poofy, it was too big, and I just wanted it to go down, flat against my head. I put treatments in my hair to try to make it look straight, and in the past year, I realized that that’s so not necessary. I really love my natural hair texture and my curls and so I went totally natural and had to do the big chop…and the curls sprung back to life.

And all of the sudden, it gave me so much more confidence. I’m so much more comfortable with my hair, my body, and everything. So hair is super central to how I express myself because it’s just kind of part of the Black experience: Doing your hair is always an event. I really love my hair, I really embrace it, and I’m so glad that I made the decision to wear it natural…

Read the entire interview here.