Mixed Race Studies

Ireland and African-America

Clinton Institute for American Studies
University College Dublin, Ireland
2012-03-09 through 2012-03-11

Report

On the 9 – 10 March 2012, The Clinton Institute for American Studies held a two day international conference entitled Ireland and African-America.  Unfortunately, the main keynote speaker Ishmael Reed had to withdraw from the conference on the 6 March due to the passing of his mother.  Reed passed along his sincere regrets and though he was much missed he was very much there in spirit.  However, other auspicious plenaries included Professor Luke Gibbons, Professor Eric Lott and Professor Diane Negra.  The conference drew together a community of international scholars and academics whose research interests speak towards the crossover between Ireland and African-America.

Friday afternoon kicked off with parallel sessions entitled ‘Identity and Belonging’ and ‘The Bod[ies] Politic’ respectively.  Papers included productive discussions on representations of Irish and Africa-American identity on film, stage and through the motif of music in literature, and on Isaac Nelson and Slavery, The African Blood Brotherhood and the Easter Rebellion and on Crosscurrents of the Green and Black Atlantics in New York City in 1920.  Friday afternoon was brought to a close with a rousing lecture by Professor Luke Gibbons on Slavish Representations in the work of controversial Cork artist James Barry.  Gibbons’ sweeping lecture drew together Barry’s largely eighteenth century body of work with twentieth century political theories regarding the power of the state and the rights of the citizen.

Saturday morning sessions began with panels on Irish national and ethnic attitudes on race and further papers on the Green and Black Atlantic (with a specific focus on black abolitionist Fredrick Douglass).  The latter panel was very kindly rounded out at the last minute by Ann Coughlan, a PhD student in University College Cork after the withdrawal of two planned speakers.  Following a catered lunch, Professor Diane Negra gave the conference’s second plenary on The Tragicomic Irish-America Personae of Denis Leary and Kathy Griffin which examined the manner in which Leary and Griffin access African-American tropes in order to communicate an analogous working class Irish identity which might otherwise be at odds with their celebrity status…

Read the entire report here.

Upfront (With Guests Mark Christian and Anna Rothery)

Upfront
BBC Radio: Merseyside
2012-06-02

Phina Oruche, Host

Guests

Mark Christian, Professor & Chair of African & African American Studies
Lehman College, City University of New York

Anna Rothery, Councillor
Liverpool City Council, Princes Park Ward

Host Phina Oruche discusses the current state of the African diaspora in the United States and Britain with Dr. Mark Christian and Liverpool Councilor Anna Rothery. Dr. Christian is author of the book Multiracial Identity: An International Perspective, the chapter “Mixing Up the Game: Social and Historical Contours of Black Mixed Heritage Players in British Football” in the anthology Race, Ethnicity and Football: Persisting Debates and Emergent Issues, and article “The Fletcher Report 1930: A Historical Case Study of Contested Black Mixed Heritage Britishness.”

Download the interview here (00:18:27/15.0 MB).

Portland Chapter Member: Dmae Roberts

Asian American Journalists Association
2012-05-28

Doris Truong

Dmae Roberts is a two-time Peabody Award-winning radio artist/writer whose work airs regularly on NPR. Her work is often autobiographical and cross-cultural and is informed by her biracial identity. Her Peabody award-winning documentary, “Mei Mei: A Daughter’s Song,” is a harrowing account of her mother’s childhood in Taiwan during World War II.  Dmae won a second Peabody for the documentary “Crossing East,” the first Asian American history series on public radio. She received the Dr. Suzanne Ahn Civil Rights and Social Justice Award from the Asian American Journalists Association and was selected as a United States Artists (USA) Fellow. Dmae is a regular columnist for the Asian Reporter and hosts a weekly arts show in Portland, Ore., called “Stage & Studio.” Her essay “Finding the Poetry” was published in a book of essays called “Reality Radio.” She is working on her memoir, “Lady Buddha and the Temple of Ma.” Dmae is on Twitter: @dmaeroberts.

Q&A

What’s your life’s motto?

I don’t know that I have one. I’ve worked since I was 14 years old during summers in farm fields and all through college in canneries and mills to support myself. My driving theme, though, has been to have work that means something and somehow make the world better in even a small way. … It was important to me have work I loved and not focus only on the financial aspects but find the passion

Why did you become a journalist? What inspired you?

I was a theater major in college and saved up money after the first two years of school to travel the world both to Asia and Europe. When I returned I decided to focus on my writing and get a degree in journalism at the University of Oregon so I could make a living doing something other than manual labor. That’s when I happened upon KLCC, a community radio station in Eugene. I fell in love with producing creative art pieces for public radio. I found that creating radio movies puts powerful images, emotions and scenes in your imagination in a way no other medium can do…

Read the entire interview here.

Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deavere Smith

Duke University Press
2011
328 pages
58 illus., including 18 color plates
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4799-6
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4782-8

Cherise Smith, Assistant Professor of Art and Art History
Univerity of Texas, Austin

The artists Adrian Piper, Eleanor Antin, Anna Deavere Smith, and Nikki S. Lee have all crossed racial, ethnic, gender, and class boundaries in works that they have conceived and performed. Cherise Smith analyzes their complex engagements with issues of identity through close readings of a significant performance, or series of performances, by each artist. She examines Piper’s public embodiment of the Mythic Being, a working-class black man, during the early 1970s; Antin’s full-time existence as the fictitious black ballerina Eleanora Antinova for several weeks in 1981; and Smith’s shifting among more than twenty characters of different ages and racial, ethnic, gender, and class backgrounds in Twilight: Los Angeles. She also considers Lee’s performances of membership in cultural groups—including swing dancers, hip-hop devotees, skateboarders, drag queens, and yuppies—in her Projects series (1997–2001). The author historicizes the politics of identity by exploring each performance in relation to the discourses prevalent in the United States at the time of its development. She is attentive to how the artists manipulated clothing, mannerisms, voice, and other signs to negotiate their assumed identities. Cherise Smith argues that by drawing on conventions such as passing, blackface, minstrelsy, cross-dressing, and drag, they highlighted the constructedness and fluidity of identity and identifications. Enacting Others provides a provocative account of how race informs contemporary art and feminist performance practices.

Afro Latinos: everywhere, yet invisible

Our Weekly
2011-10-06

Cynthia Griffin

Struggles with self-image, assimilation mirror Black American experience

Last year, during a discussion on increasing the number of African Americans in Major League Baseball, Angel’s centerfielder Torii Hunter in a USA Today interview called the dark-skinned Latino baseball players “imposters” and said they are not Black.

Hunter’s comments strike at the heart of an issue that is one reason scholar Miriam Jiménez Román is undertaking a three-day conference called “Afro Latinos Now! Strategies for Visibility and Action,” on Nov. 3-5 in New York that will be the biggest such effort her organization, The AfroLatin@ Forum, has undertaken.

“This is the first time we have done such a comprehensive event where we discuss Afro Latinos specifically. We’re going to look at the state of the field and where we want to be, and there is going to be a heavy emphasis on youth, especially those in middle school years.”

Jiménez Román says the confusion Hunter demonstrated about the connection between Africans born in Latin America and those born in the United States is particularly acute for U.S.-based 11- to 15-year-old Afro Latinos. In the context of a racist society like America, they are not only struggling to figure out how they feel about themselves, but also how they connect in relation to others, especially African Americans.

There are millions of Afro Latinos in America who live their lives in what is essentially a “Black” context but identify themselves as White, because of the perceived stigma of being African American, said Jiménez Román, who last year came to the West Coast promoting her newly released book “Afro-Latino Reader,” co-edited with Juan Flores. The 584-page publication, which grew out of the notes the two professors always pulled together for classes they taught, explores people of African descent from Latin America and the Caribbean…

…“There is the idea that Latino culture is Mestizo and European and Indian, and Black people don’t belong,” said the race and ethnicity professor about how many Latin American countries think about themselves. In fact, Latinos of African descent have been in many countries for at least 200 years.

If they do acknowledge their Black citizens, Jimenez Roman said officials will say “they all live on the coast.”

“This isolates them. Or in Bolivia, for example, there are Black communities in the mountains. They are totally isolated and ignored.”

But in reality, Afro Latinos are everywhere in Latin America as they are in the United States, says the head of the AfroLatin@ Forum…

Read the entire article here.

Racist Tendencies Common in Too Many Tribes

Indian Country Today Media Network
2012-05-23

Cedric Sunray, MOWA Band of Choctaw Indians
Alabama, USA

Last month’s racially motivated killings in Oklahoma, perpetrated by Cherokee Indian Jake England and his white roommate against members of North Tulsa’s black community, once again bring to light the prejudicial tendencies held by many in our Indian communities.
 
This reality is the literal “Negro Elephant in the Room,” which many tribal communities attempt to pass off as issues of sovereignty, enrollment decision making, “and, well we had it as bad as them” rhetoric. However, the real effect is that our children grow up in environments where tribal governments and tribal members broadcast their racist ideologies — such as in the more recent case of the Cherokee Freedmen—to an audience of young people who are not provided with the full histories and realities of their historical connections to the black community.
 
I have seen one too many times where the half-black grandchildren of Indian people are even marginalized by their own Indian families or are viewed as the “lone exception” to their prejudicial leanings due to their blood connection.

In 1978, Terry Anderson and Kirke Kickingbird were hired by the National Congress of American Indians to research the issue of federal recognition and present a paper on their findings to the National Conference on Federal Recognition which was being held in Nashville, Tennessee. Their paper, “An Historical Perspective on the Issue of Federal Recognition and Non-recognition” closed with the following statement:
 
“The reasons that are usually presented to withhold recognition from tribes are 1) that they are racially tainted with the blood of African tribes-men or 2) greed, for newly recognized tribes will share in the appropriations for services given to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The names of justice, mercy, sanity, common sense, fiscal responsibility, and rationality can be presented just as easily on the side of those advocating recognition.”…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Black Power, White Blood: The Life and Times of Johnny Spain (With a New Epilogue by the Author)

Temple University Press
December 1999
352 pages
5.5×8.25; 36 halftones
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-56639-750-6

Lori Andrews, Distinguished Professor of Law and Director of the Institute for Science, Law and Technology
IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law

A struggle to transcend race and find justice

Originally published in hardcover to much acclaim, this vividly written biographical drama will now be available in a paperback edition and includes a new epilogue by the author. Conceived within a clandestine relationship between a black man and a married white woman, Spain was born (as Larry Michael Armstrong) in Mississippi during the mid-1950s. Spain’s life story speaks to the destructive power of racial bias. Even if his mother’s husband were willing to accept the boy—which he was not—a mixed-race child inevitably would come to harm in that place and time.

At six years old, already the target of name-calling children and threatening adults, he could not attend school with his older brother. Only decades later would he be told why the Armstrongs sent him to live with a black family in Los Angeles. As Johnny came of age, he thought of himself as having been rejected by his white family as well as by his black peers. His erratic, destructive behavior put him on a collision course with the penal system; he was only seventeen when convicted of murder and sent to Soledad.

Drawn into the black power movement and the Black Panther Party by a fellow inmate, the charismatic George Jackson, Spain became a dynamic force for uniting prisoners once divided by racial hatred. He committed himself to the cause of prisoners’ rights, impressing inmates, prison officials, and politicians with his intelligence and passion. Nevertheless, among the San Quentin Six, only he was convicted of conspiracy after Jackson’s failed escape attempt.

Lori Andrews, a professor of law, vividly portrays the dehumanizing conditions in the prisons, the pervasive abuses in the criminal justice system, and the case for overturning Spain’s conspiracy conviction. Spain’s personal transformation is the heart of the book, but Andrews frames it within an indictment of intolerance and injustice that gives this individual’s story broad significance.

Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer

Harvard University Press
April 2012
352 pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches; 20 halftones
Hardcover ISBN: 9780674046870

Kenneth W. Mack, Professor of Law
Harvard University

”

Representing the Race tells the story of an enduring paradox of American race relations, through the prism of a collective biography of African American lawyers who worked in the era of segregation. Practicing the law and seeking justice for diverse clients, they confronted a tension between their racial identity as black men and women and their professional identity as lawyers. Both blacks and whites demanded that these attorneys stand apart from their racial community as members of the legal fraternity. Yet, at the same time, they were expected to be “authentic”—that is, in sympathy with the black masses. This conundrum, as Kenneth W. Mack shows, continues to reverberate through American politics today.

Mack reorients what we thought we knew about famous figures such as Thurgood Marshall, who rose to prominence by convincing local blacks and prominent whites that he was—as nearly as possible—one of them. But he also introduces a little-known cast of characters to the American racial narrative. These include Loren Miller, the biracial Los Angeles lawyer who, after learning in college that he was black, became a Marxist critic of his fellow black attorneys and ultimately a leading civil rights advocate; and Pauli Murray, a black woman who seemed neither black nor white, neither man nor woman, who helped invent sex discrimination as a category of law. The stories of these lawyers pose the unsettling question: what, ultimately, does it mean to “represent” a minority group in the give-and-take of American law and politics?

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. The Idea of the Representative Negro
• 2. Racial Identity and the Marketplace for Lawyers
• 3. The Role of the Courtroom in an Era of Segregation
• 4. A Shifting Racial Identity in a Southern Courtroom
• 5. Young Thurgood Marshall Joins the Brotherhood of the Bar
• 6. A Woman in a Fraternity of Lawyers
• 7. Things Fall Apart
• 8. The Strange Journey of Loren Miller
• 9. The Trials of Pauli Murray
• 10. A Lawyer as the Face of Integration in Postwar America
• Conclusion: Race and Representation in a New Century
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index

Feeling Is Believing: Why Obama’s Hair Matters

Racialicious
2012-05-30

Danielle Fuentes Morgan

It’s a question President Obama has undoubtedly been asked before. It’s almost a universal African American experience, except this time it was asked under different circumstances and for a different reason.

“Can I touch your hair?”

The photo of this moment, three-years-old at this point, is making the rounds again. You’ve seen it in your inbox and on social networking sites—President Obama, bent at his waist while a five-year-old African American boy wearing a tie and dress pants touches his hair. It seems innocuous enough—meriting a few awwws certainly—but leaving some to wonder what all the fuss is about. Cute, sure. But is this news? Absolutely…

…If a black man—indeed, a black man named Barack Hussein Obama—can become leader of the free world, then what can’t a child of color do? It’s this new belief in the possibility of limitlessness that matters so much. Perhaps Jacob couldn’t believe his eyes. But by touching the president’s hair, his own potential was affirmed.

Read the entire article here.

Jared Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism [Comer Review]

Black Diaspora Review
Volume 3, Number 1 (2012)
pages 52-53

Nandi Comer
Indiana University, Bloomington

Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism. By Jared Sexton. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. 345 pp.

“It’s proud to be able to say that… The first black president… That’s unless you screw up. And then it’s going to be what’s up with the half white guy?”
—Wanda Sykes, 2009 White House Correspondents Dinner

Shortly after the 2008 presidential election, Wanda Sykes stood in front of a banquet hall of the most prominent journalists in the United States and celebrated Barack Obama for being the “first black president.” During her comments she also acknowledged his biracial identity, but her emphasis on his Black identity represented the frame of mind of millions of Americans who acknowledge Obama as the first Black president. Still, Sykes’s remarks about Obama’s racial identity indicates the choice people of mixed race have—to accept traditional notions about race and hypodescent, which determines anyone with African blood Black, or to claim a multiracial identity. Although this choice is a personal one, since the 1980s multiracial communities have mobilized to construct a politicized identity in the pursuit of racial equality.

In Amalgamation Schemes, author Jared Sexton examines the political history and current discourse of multiracialism in order to uncover the negative ramifications of its political agenda. Through his critical analysis, Sexton argues that in its attempt to gain political recognition as a progressive movement committed to racial equality and the elimination of sexual racism, multiracialism has positioned itself in opposition to notions of hypodescent and antimiscegenation, while simultaneously adapting a morally conservative identity. For Sexton the multiracial political agenda are dangerous breeding grounds for antiblackness, heteronormativity, desexualization of race, and deracialization of sex. In other words, Jared Sexton argues that multiracialism is a mechanism for further reinforcement of “global white supremacy”.

In his work Sexton’s primary aim is to “address the problematic of multiracial discourse” (154). What was originally a movement dedicated to furthering the goals of the Civil Right Movement, seeking acknowledgement and representation in the census, Sexton argues, was actually a misinterpretation of the original policy meant to “track the progress towards racial equality.” Ironically, Sexton argues, the very Black civil rights leaders from whom multiracialism draws are the same individuals from whom multiracialism seeks to distance itself…

Read the entire review here.