Mixed Race Studies

A Conversation With Adele Logan Alexander

Yale University Press
Fall/Winter 2019
page 18

Photo by Jossyan Musumeci.

What was your inspiration for writing this book [Princess of the Hither Isles: A Black Suffragist’s Story from the Jim Crow South]?

Since I was named for her, Adella Hunt Logan has intrigued and inspired me for decades, but she was always a mystery presence in my life. I only learned as an adult that she’d been a fierce suffrage advocate. Admirable, I thought, since my mother, my aunts, and I were also African American feminists.

How do you perceive Adella’s racial heritage?

Adella was a black woman who looked white, but I don’t believe that she felt ambiguous or hesitant about her identity as an African American. Virtually all of Adella’s male progenitors were white. Sometimes those relationships were coercive, but not always. Her maternal grandmother, whom I portray as the most important influence on her early life, was black, white, and Cherokee.

How did Adella’s racial ambiguity impact her life in the Jim Crow South?

She deliberately or inadvertently “passed” as white on many occasions, primarily to obtain medical care or to attend all-white, segregated suffrage conventions. Mostly her goal in “passing” was to learn and to bring back what she learned to her own African American community.

What sources did you use to reconstruct Adella’s story?

Years ago, I wrote about some of the rare free women of color in the Old South. At that time, I accessed myriad traditional sources—maps; school, church, and census records; letters; previous scholarship, and the like—but for this book, I’ve also tapped into the passions, lore, traditions, and memorabilia that I inherited, especially through oral history.

Q&A | Genevieve Gaignard

Flaunt
2019-05-02

Morgan Vickery, Contributing Editor

Black Swan

Early this April, Chicago welcomed artist Genevieve Gaignard for a solo exhibition with Monique Meloche gallery. The exhibition entitled “Black White and Red All Over” features Gaignard’s newest body of mixed media works on panel as well as a domestic installation.

The Los Angeles-based artist received an MFA in Photography from Yale University. However, Gaignard’s work spans across several mediums including mixed-media, sculpture, and installations. Her work has been showcased across the nation and has found permanent homes at such places as the Studio Museum in Harlem, the California African American Museum, the FLAG Art Foundation, New York, and the San Jose Museum of Art. Gaignard’s work examines issues of race, class, femininity and their various intersections. As the daughter of an interracial couple, identity has informed a large part of Gaignard’s work, in which she invites the viewer to examine their own assumptions on identity…

…Many of the collage works touch on the topics of beauty and femininity. Each of them were composed with vintage wallpaper and vintage magazine cutouts in many variations. The pieces A Shout Out To My Fan Girls and In Full Bloom depict the many-faces of black beauty, especially as it relates to hair. Gaignard connected these works to her own identity as a biracial woman saying, “These are all pictures from wig advertisements. So, talking about how as black women we are told tame our hair and fit into the norm which is presented to us as white. That’s what you’re supposed to strive for, even for me. My hair is straightened right now, so I totally pass in a different way. I think about this constantly.”…

Read the entire interview here.

Republican, Fear, Love, Blood: The Many Meanings of Red

Elephant
2019-04-29

In Full Bloom, 2019. Courtesy the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago

Genevieve Gaignard is invested in examining the cultural divide between being black and white in the US, navigating a place for all the incremental shades that exist in between. Her latest work brings identities, experiences, appearances and materials together in symbolic shades of black, white and red. Words by Charlotte Jansen

When I first saw Genevieve Gaignard‘s work, staged photographs she shot of herself in 2017, fresh out of Yale, I immediately identified. As biracial woman like Gaignard, my experiences growing up, too white within my family, too brown in my majority white school, I could relate to the pain of being projected onto, and never quite fitting in. Yet my experiences are quite different to hers, growing up in the south of the US, half black, half white, with red hair; listening to Billy Stewart and watching John Waters films. Music and drag have been major influences on her work, as well as her sense of family and femininity. America has always been louder, brasher and more confident than the UK when it comes to exploring race, for the good and the bad…

…Can you tell me what your own relationship with magazines like Jet and Ebony has been?

I remember we had Jet and Ebony delivered to our house when I was growing up. My mother also held onto a lot of those magazines and had her own archive from years prior. Although I work with other magazines as well, such as Life, Women’s Day and McCall’s, it should be acknowledged that in those magazines, especially from the sixties and earlier, black people were not represented at all! It’s quite shocking to flip through an entire magazine from the forties or fifties and not see a single person of colour. It’s disturbing how white America refused to acknowledge an entire race of people. If black folks were present in all the magazines marketed to “Americans”, then I wouldn’t have had to make a point that I also source cut-outs from Jet and Ebony. My works aim to reflect a more inclusive view because that’s more like real life…

Read the entire interview here.

Discovering the Illusion: An Interview with T Kira Madden

Asian American Writers’ Workshop
2019-03-18

Pik-Shuen Fung

T Kira Madden, Photo by Jac Martinez

“Magic and writing, it’s all misdirection, defamiliarization, and at its best, the ahhhhh moment of surprise.”

Nothing is steadfast in the childhood of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, only a slow unraveling. An only child born out of an affair between her wealthy white shoe-brand father and her Chinese-Hawaiian model mother, [T Kira] Madden went back and forth between the chaos of her home, where her parents struggled with drug and alcohol addiction, to the misery of her Boca Raton private school, where she faced ostracism as a queer biracial girl.

Madden writes, “I wanted love the size of a fist. Something I could hold, something hot and knuckled and alive.” To contain, to hold, to be vulnerable—these intense desires both shape and propel her exploration of grief, trauma, pain, and forgiveness. Composed as a kaleidoscope of darkly shimmering fragments, this courageous debut memoir is the documentation of one woman’s attempt to write down and rewrite her own history, so as to make space for more love.

I had the chance to speak with T Kira on a freezing afternoon in January. She welcomed me into her cozy home, where there were glowing candles, a pot of roasted buckwheat tea, and two energetic poodles who insisted on sitting around for the conversation…

Read the entire interview here.

Illustrating the Messy Reality of Life as an Interracial Family

The Atlantic
2019-04-12

Amal Ahmed

Mira Jacob / Courtesy of Penguin Random House

In her new graphic memoir, the author Mira Jacob documents conversations about love and race with multiple generations of her family.

When the novelist Mira Jacob’s son was 6, he started asking her a lot of questions about race and identity. It started with Michael Jackson: Was he brown or black or white, and what did he like best? Then his questions took a more serious turn: Was it bad to be brown in America? Though he was only 6, Jacob’s son, who is biracial, was old enough to understand the news at the time, which was fixated on the riots in Ferguson, Missouri, after a white cop shot a black teenager. He wanted to know whether white people were afraid of brown people. And what about his own father, who was white? Was he ever scared of brown people?

Jacob didn’t always know how to answer him in the moment. She remembered the confusing conversations about race and identity that she’d had as a child herself, growing up in one of the few South Asian families in New Mexico. But having those conversations with her son in the years leading up to Donald Trump’s presidency made her realize that there weren’t any easy answers to the question of what it means to grow up as a person of color in the United States.

Even though she’s a writer by trade, Jacob couldn’t find the words to describe what she was feeling. She often felt paralyzed thinking about the hurtful comments she might receive online if she did write openly about those tricky conversations. But she still felt the urge to record them somehow, and that led her to producing a memoir in the form of a graphic novel. The book, Good Talk, spans from her childhood in New Mexico to her more recent arguments with in-laws who wanted to vote for Trump and who she felt weren’t listening to her concerns about his racist rhetoric on the campaign trail…

Read the entire interview here.

Collapsing the Ethno-State: A Conversation with Keri Leigh Merritt

It’s Going Down
2019-03-27

Keri Leigh Merritt
Atlanta, Georgia

On this episode of the It’s Going Down podcast, we caught up with historian and author Keri Leigh Merritt out of Atlanta, Georgia. Merritt is the author of both the 2017 book, Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South as well as the new essay, “War Happens in Dark Places, Too.” Merritt’s work focuses on labor history, slavery, and class tensions in the South, both before and after the civil war and the research work that she is producing, a long with a new wave of historians, is reshaping how we view the Confederacy, its collapse, and also whites supremacy within the United States.

Listen to the podcast (01:06:58) here. Download the podcast here.

‘Fresh Prince’ Star and First-Time Author Karyn Parsons Is Not Here for Your Labels

Shondaland
2019-03-12

Rebecca Carroll, Editor of Special Projects
WNYC New York Public Radio, New York, New York

Little, Brown, and Company

A conversation about her debut novel, “How High the Moon” dives into issues of identity and her focus on telling little-known stories of African Americans.

There is no shame in having loved Hilary Banks from The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Sure, she was vapid and flighty and occasionally obnoxious, but she was also admirably ambitious, charmingly naive, and genuinely loyal to her very black family. So it’s a kind of poetic justice that the actress who played her, Karyn Parsons, has evolved out of that hallmark role into something of a black public intellectual, activist, and author — even if she wouldn’t call herself any of those things. Her first novel, How High the Moon, was published last week, and we sat down to talk about it, her nonprofit organization, Sweet Blackberry, race, and labels, and how she feels about acting today.

Rebecca Carroll: You founded Sweet Blackberry as a way to preserve and lift and amplify the achievements of black Americans throughout history, and now you’ve written a young adult novel about a light-skinned black girl coming of age in the Jim Crow South. How do you feel these two projects speak to each other?

Karyn Parsons: I think what Sweet Blackberry has to offer is knowing about these stories from the past, and how they serve us moving forward, especially young people. It shows children what they’re capable of — it teaches them so much about themselves and who they are and can be…

…RC: We’re both the product of one biological black parent and one biological white parent. I black identify, and actually think of it in part as a denouncement of white supremacy. And of whiteness in general. Do you identify as black or biracial?

KP: Biracial. I get what you mean, but I don’t want to feel in any way that I’m denouncing my father, who’s white. If it’s basically ‘What are you?’ I feel like I’m miscommunicating with people and these labels. I don’t do labels.

RC: But whiteness is not a label. It’s an identity.

KP: Well, it depends on who you’re talking to.

RC: Well, I’m talking to you.

KP: I think a lot of people are saying it as literally a physical category, not an experience, not cultural.

RC: You mean a phenotype?

KP: Yes.

RC: I would argue otherwise that only white people categorize blackness that way.

KP: Mmmmm, maybe.

RC: When you talk about not wanting to denounce your father, do you think he would be offended if you called yourself a black woman?

KP: Oh, no. It’s not about him. It’s just about me. What I’m saying when I say I’m mixed — I guess I’m not thinking that heavily into white culture…

Read the entire interview here.

Mamp Podcast Episode #8: The Challenges of Traveling as a Multiracial Family

My American Melting Pot
2019-03-01

Lori L. Tharps, Host, Head Chef and Chief Content Creator; Associate Professor of journalism
Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

On episode #8 of the podcast, we’re discussing the challenges of traveling as a multiracial family. Thanks to Cindy McCain, the widow of Senator John McCain, this issue recently made headlines when Mrs. McCain believed she was witnessing a case of child trafficking at an Arizona airport. What McCain really saw was a mother traveling with her mixed-race child, but because the two didn’t “match” she thought they looked suspicious so she alerted the police. I’m joined by travel blogger and interracial justice worker, Carmen Sognonvi to talk about what it’s really like to travel with a family that “doesn’t match,” and to discuss the benefits and joys of family travel.

Listen to the episode here. Download the episode here.

Chi-Chi tells Tubridy about her Mum’s heartbreaking story

The Ryan Tubridy Show
RTÉ Radio 1
2018-03-12

Chi-Chi Nwanoku

Acclaimed double bass player and professor at the Royal Academy of Music in London, Chi-Chi Nwanoku OBE spoke to Ryan Tubridy about the extraordinary and poignant story of how her Irish mother met her Nigerian father in the 1950’s.

“Theirs was an unconventional coupling… My mother was white, my father was black. Society was not in favour of this kind of union.

“As soon as my mother let her parents know that she’d met the man of her dreams, they said never darken our doorstep again.”

Chi-Chi’s mum did as she was told but received a surprise visit when her own mother showed up on their doorstep in London three months after Chi-Chi’s birth. She secretly stayed for a week and that was the last the family ever saw of her…

Listen to the interview (00:21:11) here.

Episode 4

Shade Podcast: UK culture and news podcast focused on the mixed race experience
2019-02-15

Laura Hesketh, Co-Host
Liverpool, England

Lou Mensah, Co-Host
London, England

With special guest, Steven F. Riley, founder of MixedRaceStudies.org!

Neneh Cherry on being mixed race in the music industry, controversial new Netflix Show ‘Always a Witch’, Viola Davis and the Liam Neeson controversy, Queen Ifrica on colourism, Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America by IbI Zoboi, Grace Wales Bonner, plus more.

Listen to the episode (00:36:55) here. Download the episode here.