Mixed Race Studies

My Wife Is Black. My Son Is Biracial. But White Supremacy Lives Inside Me

Cognoscenti
WBUR
Boston, Massachusetts
2020-06-22

Calvin Hennick

The author and his son (Courtesy)

My son is 9 years old. He’s big and beautiful and biracial, and although my wife and I have always known we would need to prepare him to face racism, we’ve never talked to him or his little sister about police violence against Black people. Not until now.

He wept when we told him about George Floyd. His voice shaking, he asked whether the same thing would one day happen to him.

My wife and I told him to draw about his feelings, and what he brought back to us broke both our hearts. In pen, he’d drawn a white police officer standing in front of a cruiser, holding up a smoking gun and looking down at an unseen corpse. My son had written the words “Killed Me,” with an arrow pointing down at his own body, lying lifeless just outside the frame of the page.

There’s nothing my son can do to prevent this nightmare from becoming a reality. There’s nothing he can do to change the way the world will see him when he grows into a tall, broad-shouldered Black man.

To protect my son, and every other Black boy and girl in America, white people must change the way our own eyes see the world. We must do the work of stamping out white supremacy where it lives: in our systems, and in ourselves…

Read the entire article here.

The Confederate Flag Didn’t Bother Bubba Wallace. Until It Did.

The New York Times
2020-06-19

Juliet Macur

Barry Cantrell

The only black driver in NASCAR’s top tier, he has emerged as an impassioned activist who got the flag banned at races in the largely white sport after years of putting up with it.

Darrell “Bubba” Wallace Jr., the only black driver in NASCAR’s top racing series, has drawn widespread attention and acclaim for his principled stand that got the Confederate flag banned from races in a largely white sport.

Yet, after years of often quiet acceptance of the sport’s “racist label,” as he put it, nobody was more surprised than his mother that he had become a central figure in the sports world’s upheaval regarding race.

“I was shocked,” his mother, Desiree Wallace, said in a telephone interview. “I said, ‘Wait a minute, is this my son? The one who doesn’t really care about anything but getting in the car and driving?’ I’m tripping that he’s gone from being a racecar driver to becoming a daggone activist. Who does that? Not Bubba.”

Yet a series of events, particularly the killing of a black man, Ahmaud Arbery, while he was jogging in a predominantly white neighborhood in Georgia, flipped a switch in Wallace, he and those who know him said…

Read the entire article here.

I’m a black man with white privilege. I see how it distorts America.

The Washington Post
2020-06-11

Steve Majors
Takoma Park, Maryland

A demonstrator speaks to the crowd on a bullhorn during a protest against racial inequality. (Kevin Mohatt/Reuters)

I walk a racial tightrope. It’s one I’ve struggled to balance on for my entire life. But over the past several weeks, I’ve felt myself teetering. I’m black and outraged that racism continues to kill black people like George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor while burdening the lives of so many others in our country. But I know that I am not one of those people. I know the freedom of moving through a world that magically removes many barriers from my life and shields me from harm — all because of my ability to pass as white.

My skin tone has given me white privilege. For more than five decades of the journey across my tightrope, I’ve had what feminist researcher Peggy McIntosh calls an “invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks.” These are the tools of white privilege, unwanted and conferred on me at birth by a white father who had a fleeting relationship with my divorced black mother. I was the youngest of five and grew up with older siblings in a large, extended black family. They were quick to remind me that what they jokingly called my “light, bright, almost-white skin” did not grant me any special advantage in our family. But they and I could see that wasn’t going to be the case in the outside world.

I want to assure my white friends that white privilege is real, because I benefit from it every day. And I want to explain to my black family that even though this knapsack that whites carry is invisible, weightless and present from birth, it’s possible to teach yourself that it’s there. I say that not so I can seek forgiveness for myself or offer absolution for any others. It’s to explain why so many claim to be blind and unfeeling to something that has been present throughout the history of this country. Even as I continue to reap its benefits, I am ashamed of the white privilege I carry around because I know it comes at the expense of others who have every right to the same opportunities, advantages and freedoms…

Read the entire article here.

Who Is Bubba Wallace?

The New York Times
2020-06-12

Victor Mather

Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images

He is the only African-American driver in NASCAR’s top-flight racing series, and this week got the organization to bar the Confederate flag at its events.

Bubba Wallace, who instigated NASCAR’s banning of the Confederate flag, is the racing series’ only black driver. That has put him in the spotlight in a sport whose owners, drivers, crews and fans have historically been predominantly white.

What is the history of black drivers in NASCAR?

Wendell Scott was the pioneer, driving on the circuit from 1961 to 1973. Despite regularly facing discrimination, he won a race in 1963 in Jacksonville, Fla., that remains the only one at NASCAR’s top level to be won by an African-American driver. Scott died in 1990.

Although a handful of African-American drivers got into a race or two over the years since, no other black driver had a full-time ride in NASCAR’s top series until Wallace…

Read the entire article here.

‘Believe us’: Black Jews respond to the George Floyd protests, in their own words

Jewish Telegraphic Agency
2020-05-31

Josefin Dolsten, Staff Writer

Top left, clockwise, April Baskin, Anthony Russell, Yitz Jordan and Tema Smith. (Baskin: Jill Peltzman; Russell: Courtesy of Russell; Jordan: Courtesy of Jordan; Smith: Courtesy of Smith)

(JTA) — As Enzi Tanner participated in an online havdalah ceremony marking the end of Shabbat Saturday night, his city — Minneapolis — was being torn apart during a fifth night of unrest following the death of George Floyd, a black man, in police custody there last week.

Tanner, a social worker who supports LGBT families experiencing homelessness, said the ceremony — hosted by Jewish Community Action, a local social justice group, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, a national organization and Edot Midwest Regional Jewish Diversity Collaborative — conveyed a powerful message for black Jews like him.

“As the Jewish community reaches in and says how do we support their cause and how do we support the black community, it’s really important that people reach in to black Jews and other Jews of color and realize that we’re here,” Tanner said. “And we need our community.”

We reached out to black Jews like Tanner to understand their feelings at this wrenching moment and what their message is for the broader Jewish community. Here’s what they told us…

Read the entire article here.

My dad was in prison throughout my childhood. I navigated a white world alone

The Guardian
2020-06-10

Whitney Bradshaw
Portland, Oregon

Collage of family photos from Whitney Bradshaw. Photograph: Courtesy Whitney Bradshaw

Three days after my third birthday, my father was arrested for armed robbery and sentenced to 25 years in prison.

Starting around age five, whenever I saw a shooting star, I’d make a wish that my dad could come home. Eventually, that wish became “I wish he could be released for just one day”. As I grew, I stopped wishing.

Fast-forward to last week. More than 20 years later, for the first time in my life, I was happy my dad is in prison. Because he’s safer as an inmate than as a free black body walking the streets…

Read the entire article here.

Skimmed: Breastfeeding, Race, and Injustice

Stanford University Press
December 2019
304 pages
Cloth ISBN: 9781503601123
Digital ISBN: 9781503610811

Andrea Freeman, Associate Professor of Law
William S. Richardson School of Law
University of Hawai’i, Mānoa

Born into a tenant farming family in North Carolina in 1946, Mary Louise, Mary Ann, Mary Alice, and Mary Catherine were medical miracles. Annie Mae Fultz, a Black-Cherokee woman who lost her ability to hear and speak in childhood, became the mother of America’s first surviving set of identical quadruplets. They were instant celebrities. Their White doctor named them after his own family members. He sold the rights to use the sisters for marketing purposes to the highest-bidding formula company. The girls lived in poverty, while Pet Milk’s profits from a previously untapped market of Black families skyrocketed.

Over half a century later, baby formula is a seventy-billion-dollar industry and Black mothers have the lowest breastfeeding rates in the country. Since slavery, legal, political, and societal factors have routinely denied Black women the ability to choose how to feed their babies. In Skimmed, Andrea Freeman tells the riveting story of the Fultz quadruplets while uncovering how feeding America’s youngest citizens is awash in social, legal, and cultural inequalities. This book highlights the making of a modern public health crisis, the four extraordinary girls whose stories encapsulate a nationwide injustice, and how we can fight for a healthier future.

President John F. Kennedy visits with Mary Alice Fultz, Mary Louise Fultz, Mary Anne Fultz, and Mary Catherine Fultz, a set of quadruplets from Milton, North Carolina, 2 August 1962. Robert Knudsen. White House Photographs. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston, 1962-08-02.

Contents

• 1. Introduction: A Formula for Discrimination
• 2. The Famous Fultz Quads
• 3. Black Breastfeeding in America
• 4. The Bad Black Mother
• 5. When Formula Rules
• 6. Legalizing Breast Milk
• 7. The Fultz Quads after Pet Milk
• Conclusion: “First Food” Freedom

Soledad O’Brien Isn’t Holding Back Anymore

Rolling Stone
2020-03-03

EJ Dickson, Reporter

After leaving CNN, the veteran journalist started Soledad O’Brien Productions. Leeor Wild for Rolling Stone

After a new executive pushed her out at CNN, the veteran journalist became one of mainstream media’s most fiery critics

Soledad O’Brien likes to tell a story: Eleven years ago, a senior employee at CNN — “my boss’s boss’s boss” — called her into his office to upbraid her about a comment she had made while promoting her multipart series Black in America. At a panel, O’Brien had said she had interviewed black parents from various socioeconomic backgrounds, all of whom said they had conversations with their sons about how to navigate interactions with police. The superior, who was white, told her this experience was not specific to people of color, and that white parents had this discussion with their sons too. He requested that she stop publicly speaking about young black men and police brutality.

O’Brien was stunned. “I’d spent 18 months working on that doc,” the veteran journalist recalls in the office of her company, Soledad O’Brien Productions. “But the idea that I would come back with something that challenged his belief was just not acceptable.” Nonetheless, she wanted to keep her job, and she knew that speaking out would be career suicide. “I didn’t tell that story,” she says. “Until I was telling it on Twitter.” And once she started telling stories, she found she couldn’t stop.

Read the entire article here.

Keepin’ It Real: Essays on Race in Contemporary America

University of Chicago Press
2019-10-25
140 pages
6 x 0.7 x 9 inches
Paperback ISBN: 9781789380507

Elwood David Watson, Professor of History, African American Studies, and Gender Studies
East Tennessee State University, Johnson City, Tennessee

The past decade has been one of the most racially turbulent periods in the modern era, as the complicated breakthrough of the Obama presidency gave way to the racially charged campaigning and eventual governing of Donald Trump. Keepin’ It Real presents a wide-ranging group of essays that take on key aspects of the current landscape surrounding racial issues in America, including the place of the Obamas, the rise of the alt-right and White nationalism, Donald Trump, Colin Kaepernick and the backlash against his protests, Black Lives Matter, sexual politics in the black community, and much more.

America’s racial problems aren’t going away any time soon. Keepin’ It Real will serve as a marker of the arguments we’re having right now, and an argument for the changes we need to make to become the better nation we’ve long imagined ourselves to be.

How to Argue With a Racist: History, Science, Race and Reality

Weidenfeld & Nicolson an (imprint of The Orion Publishing Group)
2020-02-06
224 pages
Hardcover ISBN-13: 9781474611244
eBook ISBN-13: 9781474611268

Adam Rutherford

Race is real because we perceive it. Racism is real because we enact it. But the appeal to science to strengthen racist ideologies is on the rise – and increasingly part of the public discourse on politics, migration, education, sport and intelligence. Stereotypes and myths about race are expressed not just by overt racists, but also by well-intentioned people whose experience and cultural baggage steers them towards views that are not supported by the modern study of human genetics. Even some scientists are uncomfortable expressing opinions deriving from their research where it relates to race. Yet, if understood correctly, science and history can be powerful allies against racism, granting the clearest view of how people actually are, rather than how we judge them to be.

How to Argue With a Racist is a vital manifesto for a twenty-first century understanding of human evolution and variation, and a timely weapon against the misuse of science to justify bigotry.