Mixed Race Studies

Interview with Kym Ragusa: (Passing)

Reel New York: Season 2
thirteen: WNET New York
From Week Four (May 1997)

Kathy High, Series Curator

Series curator Kathy High conducted this telephone interview with Kym Ragusa in May, 1997.

Q: The first question I’d like to ask you, Kym, is what prompted you to make the piece? It’s really a beautiful and incredibly moving piece.

Kym Ragusa: Oh, thank you.

Q: I wondered if this had been a story you’d heard before, as a child, and that you asked your grandmother to tell. How did it come about?

KR: Actually, my grandmother had told me the story a bunch of times. But I noticed that every time she told me, it was a little different. It would be more or less detailed, or the year would change. There’d always be something that was different. And I thought it would be a good idea just to try to record the stories as she told me. Part of it was to see how she remembered the story because it was something really traumatic for her. And also really pivotal in her life. And I wanted to see at different times, how and why she remembered certain things and not others. And why, at certain times, she would not tell me certain things. She wouldn’t be explicit about certain things — like her relationship with the man she traveled with. Actually, I did it over a period of three years. Another reason was that she has cancer and she’s not well now, and so I felt like I wanted to do something for her, and to preserve this part of her life that’s really her own thing that she did.
 
Read the entire interview here.

Were the riots about race?

The Guardian
2011-12-08

Reading the Riots: Investigating England’s summer of disorder
In partnership with the London School of Economics
Supported by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Open Society Foundations

Hugh Muir, Diary Editor

Yemisi Adegoke, Freelance Journalist

Some commentators were quick to call them ‘race riots’, but the true picture was more complicated

Amid the chaos and confusion of this summer’s riots, a few commentators felt the benefit of certainty. “These riots were about race. Why ignore the fact?” chided the Telegraph columnist Katharine Birbalsingh. Abroad, there seemed no need for deeper reflection. “Over 150 arrested after London hit by huge race riots,” said one US business website. “Let’s talk about those race riots in London,” urged talkshow hosts in New Zealand. Those on the other side of the debate could appear just as certain. “This is not about race at all,” Max Wind-Cowie of the left-leaning thinktank Demos told the Huffington Post…

…Of the 270 rioters interviewed by the Guardian and the LSE, 50% were black, 27% were white, 18% of mixed race and 5% Asian…

Read the entire article here.

Talking Race w/ Social Critic/Legal Scholar Dorothy Roberts

Blogtalk Radio
Tuesday, 2011-10-11

Michelle McCrary, Host
Is That Your Child?

Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology; Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania

ITYC is honored to welcome leading legal scholar and social critic Dorothy Roberts to the podcast. Author of the over 75 articles and essays in books and scholarly journals, including Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, and Stanford Law Review, Robert’s latest work Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century, is an eye-opening look at the way race continues to be reproduced and legitimized in our society.

Roberts is the Kirkland & Ellis Professor at Northwestern University School of Law and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research. She is also the author of Killing the Black Body and Shattered Bonds and has received fellowships and grants from the National Science Foundation, Searle Fund, Fulbright Scholars Program, Harvard University Program in Ethics and the Professions, and Stanford Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.

..this was a book that really, completely, changed and challenged everything that I knew and I thought I knew about race. And I thank you for that, because it’s just one of those books that really, really kind of changes your life in a way because it sort of opens things up and makes you think about the world a completely different way, it’s a really powerful book.

Download the interview here (01:17:41).

TV Review: Mixed Race Britain – Mixed Britannia

BioNews
Number 630 (2011-10-24)

Anoushka Shepherd

Mixed Race Britain: Mixed Britannia, BBC2, 6-20 October 2011, Presented by George Alagiah

I am mixed race, and thereby a member the fastest growing ethnic minority in the UK. My British dad met my Sri Lankan mum while travelling in the 1970s. They married and settled in Manchester where I grew up. And although I was definitely alive to the fact that their marriage was a joining of two very different cultures, I had no idea of the deep and contentious history of mixed relationships in this country.

In this three-part documentary, George Alagiah recounts the largely untold story of mixed race Britain and the many love stories that overcame extreme social hardship to create it…

…In summary, all three programmes are packed with interviews and are rich in photographs and footage from the archives. This is a very real and intimate recollection of the history of this country told in the refreshingly honest words of those who were there. All the stories told are different, interesting and moving in their own ways…

Read the entire review here.

Post-Raciality or a Re-Imagining of Whiteness: an Interview with Clarence E. Walker

Platform: Journal of Media and Communication
Volume 3, Issue 1, Media and “Race” (April 2011)
pages 26-34
ISSN: 1836-5132

Sandy Watson, University of Melbourne, Australia

Clarence Walker is recognised as one of the leading historians of American race relations, and is noted for his advocacy of critical historical analysis of race relations and discourses as a way of understanding the present. Walker has written widely on issues relating to black American history, including five books covering variously race and politics (2009), race and the national imaginary (2010); Afrocentrism and discourses of black Africanism (2001, 1999) and the history of nineteenth century black religion (1982).

Introduction

Walker’s most recent work, with Gregory Smithers, explores the emergence of discourses of post-raciality during the 2008 United States election campaign (Walker and Smithers 2009) where Walker argued that the historical superficiality of journalism exacerbates racial tensions rather than creating greater cultural understanding on racial issues (2009, p. 39). In this interview, he discusses the applicability of what he describes as reactionary discourses (that of post-raciality, colour blindness and colour neutrality) in the context of shifting media usage and tensions arising from perceived challenges to the dominant, white-centred national imaginary.

The critique of white-centred accounts of history has been central to Walker’s recent work, and was the subject of his compelling book Mongrel Nation (2010), in which he argues for the need to recognise the interracial founding of the United States. The book contextualises the controversy surrounding 1990s claims that Thomas Jefferson, one of America’s Founding Fathers, had one or more children in an interracial relationship with a slave girl called Sally Heming. These accounts were refuted heatedly by segments of academia who pointed to Jefferson’s documented concern about the dangers of amalgamation as an indication of the unlikely nature of his having an interracial affair. Walker argues persuasively and with historical force that such refutations need to be contextualised as reactionary discourses within a history of white-centred historicising and imagining of the national identity in the United States…

PLATFORM: The idea that American society is post-racial gained renewed ascendancy with Barack Obama’s election as the first (self-identifying) black President of the United States. However, narratives of post-race have been circulating in the US since the Civil Rights Act (1964). Can you elaborate on the nuances between narratives such as post-raciality, colour-blindness and race neutrality as a basis for informing analysis of their presence in political and media debates over the past two years?

Clarence Walker: In my view these are all reactionary movements. They are constructed around an attempt to efface race as a site of conflict in the American past and present. To say that one is colour-blind rather than colour-conscious is to say that you see something in someone that you don’t want to see, that is their colour. It’s also to say that you think that these issues are somewhat superficial and that if we want to wish them away we can. You can see this in the whole construction of Asians as some kind of model minority here because they’re successful academically and economically, at least in some sectors of the population. You can also see it in the hysteria over immigration with the arrival of large numbers of Spanish-speaking people over recent years.

It is the case in America that most white people do not want to talk about race. They prefer to think that the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has effaced the racial problem, and that if there is a racial problem here it is because black people are basically angry or have refused to accept this new reality in which race is no longer a problem. But if race is no longer a problem, then why are there so many young black men between the ages of 18 and 25 including Mexicans also in American prisons? They constitute approximately one and a half million of two million people in American prisons.

Yet the Obama election was very much a racial election, despite these discourses of post-raciality. It was racial in the sense that it required white people to overcome their historical animosity towards the idea of a successful black candidate. I tend to think that up until the leaking to the media of the sermons of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, as Gregory Smithers and I discuss in The Preacher and The Politician, there was little attention to the fact on the part of many white Americans that Barack Obama was black. In the case of black Americans there was great suspicion of him because he was not associated with the two historically defining moments of black American history, one being of course the question of slavery and Jim Crow, the other being the Civil Rights Movement. It was only when Jeremiah Wright’s comments were leaked and it came out that Obama was associated with this Church which was part of a Christian black nationalist movement, a particular congregation that was Afro-centric and black nationalist, that attention started to be paid to the fact that Obama was black. This led to speculation about whether Obama therefore might have a subtext of black militancy that he wasn’t talking about. This was one of the signature moments in terms of race becoming part of the election debate.

The Obama presidency has if not reignited the other being the issues about race and colour then certainly shown that they haven’t gone away. In many ways the emergence of this black man as the President of the United States is comparable to the emergence of prominent Jews in France and Germany and the political and cultural life of those countries in the nineteenth century. There were elements in those societies who were opposed to Jewish civil and political equality just as there are elements in this country who feared the election of Obama or any black person as the President of the United States.

The discourse of post-racialism which emerged in relation to the 2008 campaign was itself really a product of the chattering classes, by that I mean the media commentators and academics who talked about the ‘Obama moment’ as the post-racial moment. For example, I teach a course called the History of Race in America here at the University of California and I have just finished teaching 80 undergraduates. I have talked about this subject in the way I have done for the 37 years of my career in that I don’t mince words and I am very direct about what I want to say. Many of my students find this very disturbing because their views have been shaped by the media and some of them were very resistant to the notion that this in fact was not a post-racial society because we had a black president and that because he was of mixed race nobody talked about the fact that he had a white mother. I said to my students, “How would his history have been different if his mother was black and his father white rather than the other way around?” It had never occurred to them that this would have created a different historical narrative and a different historical actor, and one whom many white people in this country would never have voted for because his cultural experience rather than being that of a white working class family would have been that of a black family…

PLATFORM: I’d like to return to a consistent theme in your work, that of the argument that a critical appraisal of historiography is vital in understanding contemporary debates and discourses on race. In Mongrel Nation you particularly emphasised the resistance of historians and others to the notion of an interracial founding of America rather than the dominant constructions of whiteness that have underpinned renderings of history in the US. This was in relation to claims that Thomas Jefferson fathered one or more children in an interracial relationship with Sally Hemings. How can this historical perspective inform our understanding of the role of discourses such as post-racialism?

CW: In the national imaginary up until recently the United States was historically imagined by historians as purely a white nation. This is changing with the work of the very distinguished historian Annette Gordon Reed and others, as well as in my work, where you see a rethinking of the American past that is more in line with what the country was like in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and what it is like today. The resistance to this arises out of the fact that it is very hard for some people, older people in particular, to think of the United States as anything other than ‘whiteland’ or ‘whitetopia’ and the fact that they refuse to come to grips with this. You see this most clearly in their hostility to Barack Obama. His election is something that is contrary to fact. If this is a white nation then what is it doing with a “coloured” president? And if this is a white nation, then what does it mean for the future? It means that we will have an Asian president, it means that we may even have a Muslim president, we may even have a woman president, and I hope we do. It’s not just that every generation writes history according to its own desires but that there has to be a recognition in the United States that although it was the product of white colonial settlers that the country did not remain white very long…

Read the entire interview here.

Rejoining the Parts: A Conversation with Jane Lazarre About Race, Fiction, American History and Her New Novel, Inheritance

Tenured Radical
The Chronicle of Higher Education
2011-11-15

Claire Potter, Professor of History and American Studies
Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut

Jane Lazarre is a writer of fiction, memoir and poetry who has published many books, beginning with her memoir, The Mother Knot (1976; reissued in 1997 by Duke University Press) and most recently,Inheritance, A Novel (Hamilton Stone Editions, 2011). She has taught writing and literature at New York’s City College and at Yale University; and for many years directed and taught in the undergraduate writing program at Eugene Lang College at the New School.

Tenured Radical: The title of the book — Inheritance — asks the reader to think about what is passed down, generation to generation.  But in the first chapter we are confronted with Sam’s frustration and anger that, as a young woman with a white and a black parent, she knows so little of her family history. We come to understand that our historical “inheritance” not only can’t be taken for granted and but also sometimes requires active recovery. How did you come to understand that this was the story you wanted to tell about America’s racial past?

Jane Lazarre: From my early experiences in the late 1960s as a new member, by marriage, of an African American family, and throughout the years of raising two Black sons, I became deeply aware of how much I, as an American and as a white American, did not know about African American history — which is a central, defining part of American history. At the same time, of course, I began to understand all I was unaware of about race, despite a deeply anti-racist upbringing. As a mother, a writer and teacher, I began to study the subject. I saw that I was part of a great majority of white Americans of all ethnic backgrounds, in my ignorance of the complex forces of American racism…

…TR: We’ve heard so much since 2008, and the election of Black president with a white mother, about the United States finally being “post-racial,” and a new kind of fantasy about the beneficial effects of race-mixing, or multiracialism, seems to play a big role in this. But several multiracial characters in Inheritance make the point strongly that they are not immune from racism and that not to be recognized as Black is to deprive them of an inheritance of struggle. Can you elaborate on this theme a bit?

JL: I wrote extensively about this subject in my memoir, Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness, a title that is a take on Ralph Ellison’s famous exploration, in Invisible Man (1952) of “the blackness of blackness.” I disagree strongly with the idea that the election of President Obama is the signal and sign of our “post-racialism.” I know that people of color, including people with one white parent, experience racism every day, even if there have been significant changes in our legal, and even social, attitudes. I believe that all of us, as Americans, are inheritors of the struggle of African Americans to both liberate and recreate themselves, and we deny this connection at our peril and to our great loss. Samantha Reed, the daughter of a (half) black father and a (Jewish) white mother, knows at a very early age that her identity, her history, her future, and even her unconscious (shown in the “white dream” she inherits in the Prologue of the novel,) are profoundly affected by, laced with, absorbed in, her heritage and her life as a Black woman in America. That does not mean she rejects or dismisses her other ethnic histories, nor that she does not love “the three white women whose histories flow into [her] own,” as she says in the early pages of the book. But I am saying, in this novel, as in other works, the lessons I have learned from my life as a mother, now a grandmother, as a teacher of African American literature and a writer about race: that so-called mixedness means little in American history. As I said above, many enslaved Americans, including the great Frederick Douglass, were “mixed” due to rape or forced sexual unions, and nevertheless remained enslaved. Racism in this country is not unchanged from previous centuries, or even previous decades, but as many cultural theorists have written, our educational and prison systems are evidence to the ongoing racism still permeating much of our lives…

Read the entire interview here.

There are Italians with black skin

Africa News
2010-05-28

Stephen Ogongo

Interview with Sabrina Jacobucci, President of Association of Afro-Italian Children

To be black and Italian at the same time is a new reality the Italian society is still struggling to accept.  Adoption and increase in the number of mixed marriages between Italians and Africans are gradually leading to an increase in the number of Black Italian children, the so-called Afro-Italians.  But the Italian society seems unprepared to cater for the social and educational needs of these children.  In this exclusive interview with Africa News, Ms. Sabrina Jacobucci, aka Flora NW, President of the Association of Afro-Italian Children, reveals the reasons that led to the foundation of the Association, the problems mixed heritage children face in the country, and suggests what should be done to make the education system more responsive to the needs of mixed heritage children.

Sabrina, please share with us the story behind the formation of the Association of Afro-Italian Children.

The Association was initiated by an Italian mother of two mixed-race children born abroad, who, when returning to Italy, started to express the need of meeting other black children since they were the only black children in school, in their block, whenever they went to the park or to after school activities. They started to ask: why aren’t there children like us on TV or on advertisements?  The Italian mother started to look for a group where children could meet other black children, but could only find associations of various migrant communities, or churches which catered for the Nigerian, or the Congolese or the Ghanaian and so forth.  The children could not, though, identify with any ethnic or migrant community in particular, being black Italians. So to answer the children’s need to see themselves represented, this woman started to look for other parents of black or mixed-race children to set up a group where the kids could, at least once a month, meet and feel stronger, in a society where to be black is often neither appreciated nor valued.

When was it founded?

A couple of years ago.

Who was involved?

I, the white Italian mum of Black Italian daughters (who also share an English, Nigerian and Jamaican mixed parentage), had the idea of setting up a group where my children could meet other Afro-Italian children. I thought gathering other parents of black children willing to meet would be easy.

Unfortunately, the number of black and mixed-race children is very low in Rome, especially in my area. So I started to “advertise” on the web, first of all on www.insenegal.org, a site which has a rich forum where a number of mothers of children having a Senegalese father write. But most of them weren’t from Rome. So I wrote to other parents’ forum, but they were attended mostly by parents of white children. And then, on one of these forums, I met the adoptive mum of a girl of Nigerian parentage, who shared the same need as mine. We were then joined by other adoptive and biological parents of black and mixed-race children, thanks to the website I manage http://afroitaliani.splinder.com, where I announce our meetings and other activities…

…From your experience, in Italy, are mixed heritage children facing different problems from those of other children?

Mixed race children often face the same issues black mono-heritage children face. No matter their skin tone, they are seen as black and therefore it is healthier and more empowering for them to identify as such, without denying their dual heritage at the same time. A racist is not going to ask them whether they are mixed-race. And yes, black and mixed race children definitely face different problems from those of white children…

…Do you think the education system in Italy fully caters for the needs of mixed heritage children?

I don’t think so. I don’t think the education system has even started to consider or understand the needs of mixed heritage children or of black children for that matter. They are invisible to the system because they are not even seen as a group. Also, mixed heritage is a concept that encompasses too broad a category. Our experience is that of parents of mixed-race children, black/white, and as such they face the same problems of institutional racism embedded in the education system black “mono-heritage” children face. I think that to separate mixed-race children from the black children amounts to “fractioning” the black community, and at this moment, when the community needs unity and strength, is not advisable…

Read the entire interview here.

Interview with Zara Paul: A Future Leader

London School of Economics
2011-10-26

Zara Paul recently graduated from LSE. She has been listed among the top 100 black graduates of the UK in the Future Leaders magazine 2011-12. In this interview she talks about her time at LSE, her passion for music, what being mixed race means to her and how she sees herself as being ‘massive’ in the next 10 years.

How did you feel when you heard that you had been selected among the top 100 black graduates of the country?

I felt absolutely brilliant! It didn’t sink in until I went to the actual Future Leaders event. I was surrounded by so many intellectuals and academics and politicians. I thought it was a great privilege. I couldn’t believe it…

…Tell us about your family history. Where do you trace your ‘roots’ to and are those ‘roots’ part of your identity?

My mum is Scottish-Irish and my dad is Jamaican. In my school, as a mixed race person coming from a council estate, I always stood out. I think that made me a bit stubborn, it made me think I am still going to be a little nightmare but I am also going to be smart and get my A levels and GCSEs behind me. I think being stubborn is a really good thing, to a degree. I did my dissertation on whether your identity changes dependent on your location. In a rural area, you may be black; in a multicultural area, you are who you are.

Do you believe in celebrating your mixed race status?

I love being mixed race. I can fit into so many social groups, most people can’t do that; so it’s something I think I should embrace. For example, when I did research into the riots, people found talking to me easier because of my mixed race status. In my heart however, I did think that when we are talking about equality why do we have to have separate awards for ‘black graduates’?…

Read the entire interview here.

Professor Daniel J. Sharfstein to be Featured Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

Mixed Chicks Chat (The only live weekly show about being racially and culturally mixed. Also, founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival) Hosted by Fanshen Cox, Heidi W. Durrow and Jennifer Frappier
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #230 – Professor Daniel Sharfstein
When: Wednesday, 2011-10-26, 21:00Z (17:00 EDT, 14:00 PDT)

Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law
Vanderbilt University

Daniel Sharfstein is the author of The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White.

Selected Bibliography:

• The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White. New York: Penguin Press, 2011. 415 pp. Hardcover ISBN: 9781594202827.
•  “Crossing the Color Line: Racial Migration and the One-Drop Rule, 1600–1860,” Minnesota Law Review, Volume 91, Number 3 (February 2007): 592-656.
• “The Secret History of Race in the United States,” The Yale Law Journal, Volume 112, Issue 6 (March 2003): 1473-1509.
• “Passing Fancy,” Legal Affairs – The Magazine at the Intersection of Law and Life (September/October 2003).

Listen to the interview here. Download the episode here.

Glenn Robinson to be Featured Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

Mixed Chicks Chat (The only live weekly show about being racially and culturally mixed. Also, founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival) Hosted by Fanshen Cox, Heidi W. Durrow and Jennifer Frappier
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #227? – Glenn Robinson
When: Wednesday, 2011-10-05, 21:00Z (17:00 EDT, 14:00 PDT)

Glenn Robinson, Lover of Human Rights, Social Justice, Dignity & Respect

Glenn is the creator of the blogs Community Village and Mixed American Life and is an Irish, German, Dutch, English & Austrian American married to a Spanish & Aztec Mexican-American. They have two children and encourage them to identify however they want. Glenn is interested in progressive immigration reform, universal health care and desegregation within schools and communities. He is a life long learner with interests in sociology, anthropology, psychology, history and politics.