Mixed Race Studies

Dream Big Dreams: Photographs from Barack Obama’s Inspiring and Historic Presidency (Young Readers)

Little, Brown and Company Young Readers (an imprint of Hachette Book Group)
2017-11-21
96 pages
Hardcover ISBN-13: 9780316514392
E-Book: ISBN-13: 9780316514118

Pete Souza

From former Chief Official White House Photographer Pete Souza comes a book for young readers that highlights Barack Obama’s historic presidency and the qualities and actions that make him so beloved.

Pete Souza served as Chief Official White House Photographer for President Obama’s full two terms. He was with the President during more crucial moments than anyone else – and he photographed them all, capturing scenes both classified and candid. Throughout his historic presidency, Obama engaged with young people as often as he could, encouraging them to be their best and do their best and to always “dream big dreams.” In this timeless and timely keepsake volume that features over seventy-five full-color photographs, Souza shows the qualities of President Obama that make him both a great leader and an extraordinary man. With behind-the-scenes anecdotes of some iconic photos alongside photos with his family, colleagues, and other world leaders, Souza tells the story of a president who made history and still made time to engage with even the youngest citizens of the country he served. By the author of Obama: An Intimate Portrait, the definitive visual biography of Barack Obama’s presidency, Dream Big Dreams was created especially for young readers and not only provides a beautiful portrait of a president but shows the true spirit of the man.

First Encounters: Chi-Chi Nwanoku and Keith Pascoe

The Irish Times
2017-05-03

Frances O’Rourke

Chi-Chi Nwanoku

‘Ireland brought us back together’

Chi-Chi Nwanoku is a double bassist and a founder member of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. The eldest of five children of a Nigerian father and an Irish mother, she pursued a career in music after injury ended a promising athletics career. She grew up in Kent and Berkshire and now lives in London

The first time I saw Keith was when we were college students in our early 20s. He seemed incredibly composed, confident, like a good fun guy – he had a mischievous twinkle in his eye which I liked. We weren’t in each other’s social circles but I registered Keith as a kindred spirit.

I’d only started playing the double bass when I was 18, after an athletics injury. When I came out of hospital, my A Levels music teacher said, you have music coursing through your veins – now that your sprinting career is over, if you pick an unpopular orchestral instrument, you could just possibly have a career. I’d played piano since I was seven but I’d never played in an orchestra before. A few years later I got into the Royal Academy of Music…

…I had been in Ireland just once before when I’d taken my mother there in 1986. She hadn’t been back to Ireland in 36 years, didn’t know how she’d be received: she was born in Cappamore in Limerick, grew up in Thurles, but was kind of abandoned by her family after she met and married my father, an Igbo from east Nigeria, in London. We grew up with lots of wonderful stories and memories that she gave us but she had a very very tough time. In London in the 1950s, it was “no blacks, no Irish, no dogs” – it was as much as my parents could do to find a roof over their heads…

Read the entire article here.

Turner Prize Goes to Lubaina Himid, Whose Work Depicts African Diaspora

The New York Times
2017-12-05

Anna Codrea-Rado

Lubaina Himid won Britain’s leading contemporary art prize for “her uncompromising tackling of issues” including colonial history and racism, the jury chairman said. Credit Edmund Blok for Modern Art Oxford

The visual artist Lubaina Himid, best known for her paintings, installations and drawings depicting the African diaspora, won the Turner Prize on Tuesday night, making her the first nonwhite woman to be given the leading British contemporary art award…

…Alex Farquharson, Tate Britain’s director and the chairman of the Turner Prize jury, said in a statement that the jury “praised the artist for her uncompromising tackling of issues including colonial history and how racism persists today.” Ms. Himid won for three of her shows this year, in Oxford, Bristol and Nottingham, he said.

Among the selection of Ms. Himid’s work on display at the Turner Prize exhibition in Hull was a collection of English ceramics painted with images of black slaves.

Ms. Himid, 63, is the oldest recipient in the prize’s history; a rule change made her eligible. This year’s award was the first since 1991 that was open to artists over 50…

…This year’s shortlist was also noted for being one of the most diverse. All of the nominees have connections abroad, either by birth or through parentage. Ms. Nashashibi, 44, was born in London to a Palestinian father and an Irish mother; Ms. Büttner, 46, is German-born; Mr. Anderson is the son of Jamaican immigrants; and Ms. Himid was born in Tanzania…

Read the entire article here.

Works Progress Austin (“Casta” by Adrienne Dawes)

Salvage Vanguard Theater
1110 Barton Springs Road
Austin, Texas 78704
Telephone: (512) 474-7886
2017-12-22, 20:00-21:30 CST (Local Time)

Casta a new play by Adrienne Dawes

Casta is inspired by a series of casta paintings by Miguel Cabrera, a mixed-race painter from Oaxaca. Casta paintings were a unique form of portraiture that organized racial mixtures of the New World according to a hierarchy defined by Spanish elites. How do Old World anxieties about ambiguous racial identity reflect contemporary biases?

This is the third WPA workshop for Casta. In this current draft of Casta, the creative team is incorporating puppetry, expanding music by composer Graham Reynolds and exploring bilingual text. After a week of developing these new elements, audiences are invited to witness the piece in its current form.

For more information, click here.

60th GRAMMY Awards: Full Nominees List

Grammys
Recording Academy
Santa Monica, California
2017-11-28

Find out who is nominated for the 60th GRAMMY Awards in New York on Jan. 28

The nominations for the 60th GRAMMY Awards are here! Find out who has been nominated in each of the 84 categories below (use the links to jump to a desired field).

…32. Best Jazz Vocal Album
(For albums containing at least 51% playing time of new vocal jazz recordings.)…

…Bad Ass And Blind
Raul Midón…

Read the entire article here.

Being Irish, mixed race and living abroad: it’s complicated

The Irish Times
2017-12-01

Conrad Bryan, Treasurer
Irish in Britain

A scene from Hashtag Lightie, playing at the Arcola Theatre in north London.

London play ‘Hashtag Lightie’ puts the spotlight on mixed-race identity

I live in London, a melting pot of cultures and ethnicities. It is a place where anything goes and where people of different ethnicities have always mixed, loved and married.

However, today the binary black and white notion of race is being challenged by the younger generation. They are choosing for themselves where they sit on the colour spectrum and how they self-identify. No longer will they accept other people labelling them.

Many are choosing to self-identify as mixed-race rather than black, which is causing a real debate in the black community here. This has many consequences for individuals struggling to determine where they fit in society, or what side to take…

Read the entire article here.

Why calling Elizabeth Warren ‘Pocahontas’ is a slur against all mixed-race Americans

The Washington Post
2017-11-29

Martha S. Jones, Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor of History
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland

Elizabeth Warren’s embrace of her mixed-race ancestry has become a political weapon in the hands of her opponents. (AP)

It’s part of the long history of erasing people of mixed heritage.

President Trump’s assault on Sen. Elizabeth Warren descended to a new low Monday. Calling the Massachusetts leader “Pocahontas” during a ceremony honoring Native American code-talker veterans, Trump not only slurred Warren — he slurred all American families whose histories include ancestors of differing races.

By now Warren’s story is familiar. When registering with the American Association of Law Schools between 1986 and 1995, she checked an “Indian” box to describe her ancestry. When pressed by critics who questioned her background, Warren explained that she was “proud” of her Native heritage as passed down to her by stories told by her parents and grandparents.

Critics accuse Warren of leveraging her “minority” status to snag a job at Harvard Law School in 1992. Others charge that Warren’s self-identification was strategic and, even worse, illegitimate. How, they ask, could a woman who is by her own telling no more than 1/32 Native American claim to be anything other than white?

The answer is that Warren, like millions of other Americans, is mixed-race, and percentages shouldn’t matter when we consider such ancestry…

Read the entire article here.

Everything You Need to Know About Meghan Markle’s ‘Level of Blackness,’ Explained

Very Smart Brothas
The Root
2017-11-27

Damon Young

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle (Chris Jackson/Getty Images)

Who is Meghan Markle?

She’s my second-favorite alum of USA Network’s Suits, the possessor of an alliterative name that kinda, sorta sounds like the name of a women’s hosiery brand sold only at Macy’s and the new fiancee of Prince Harry.

Your second-favorite alum of Suits? Who would be first?

Gina Torres, of course. I sincerely believe they actually called the show Suits because of a pitch meeting years ago where USA asked the pitch guy for the premise of the show, and the pitch guy was like, “Five words. Gina Torres in power suits.” And the USA people were like, “Sold! Let’s do it.” And then they built that whole lawyer-drama mess around that premise…

…There’s also been a conversation about whether Meghan Markle even deserves this type of specifically black-ass attention because she might not identify as black. Basically, she’s not black enough to get any love from black people.

Yeah, I know. And that’s fucking dumb. Meghan Markle was born black and is gonna die black. Her mom is from freakin’ Crenshaw, Calif., for Chrissake. If your mom is from the exact-same place where “I hate the back of Forest Whitaker’s neck” was said, any offspring she has will be blacker than a bottle of S-curl activator. It’s science…

Read the entire article here.

What it means to be a mixed-race model in Japan

CNN Style
Cable News Network (CNN)
2017-11-24

Writers:

Stephy Chung, CNN
Junko Ogura, CNN

Contributors:

Momo Moussa, CNN
Tomo Umewaka, CNN

For 18-year-old model Rina Fukushi, Tokyo is home. But growing up as a mixed-race child in Japan wasn’t always easy. With a Japanese-American father and a Filipina mother, Fukushi was one of a growing number of biracial individuals identifying as “hafu” — a phonetic play on the English word “half.”

“I was teased when I was in elementary and junior high school because I looked foreign,” she recalled in an interview with CNN.

The term hafu was first popularized in the 1970s as Japan loosened its approach towards foreign residents, giving them better access to public housing, insurance and job opportunities. An increased number of US soldiers in the country also contributed to an upsurge in mixed-race marriages and biracial children.

Despite increasingly progressive attitudes towards race in Japan, the country’s immigration numbers have remained comparatively low. Foreigners and their hafu children often live as outsiders, a topic explored in the 2011 documentary “Hafu: The Mixed Race Experience in Japan.”…

Read the entire article here.

Zendaya to produce, star in thriller on Anita Hemmings, first black woman Vassar grad, passing as white to attend

Shadow And Act
2017-11-14

Zendaya (left) and Anita Hemmings (right).

Zendaya has booked what Deadline calls a hot pitch package on the street right now.

The film is called ‘A White Lie’ and it is a film adaptation of the Karin Tanabe novel, The Gilded Years.

The novel, a psychological thriller, “built around the true story of Anita Hemmings, a light-skinned African American woman. She is the daughter of a janitor, who passed as white so she could attend Vassar at the turn of the century.” She is treated as a wealthy and educated white woman and sparks a romance with a rich Harvard student.

Zendaya will play Hemmings…

Read the entire article here.