Mixed Race Studies

Electronica With A Human Heart: Meet Little Dragon Lead Singer Yukimi Nagano

Phoenix Magazine
London, United Kingdom
July 2017

Interview: Muki Kulhan
Words: Hannah Kane
Photographer: Jamie Gray at Blood & Co.
Fashion Editor: Nini Khatiblou
Hair: Shukeel Murtaza at Frank
Makeup: Ammy Drammeh
Nail Technician: Jessica Thompson at Frank

The dynamic frontwoman talks production values, the ‘ugly beautiful’, and why being in ‘the band that almost made it’ is the best thing ever

Summer in the city, and the iconic Camden Jazz Café is packed. The crowd jostles towards the front of the stage as Swedish electro-synth band Little Dragon emerges to cheers and whistles. Band members take up their positions: Erik Bodin on drums, Fredrik Källgren Wallin on bass and Håkan Wirenstrand at the keyboards. The petite frame of lead vocalist Yukimi Nagano, decked in a crystal embellished baseball cap and tulle veil, moves forward and she takes the mic. A persistent electronic beat ripples through the hall and Yukimi’s voice joins to fill the humid air. She moves deliberately and with a dancer’s expression, leading her audience as if in a shamanic trance…

…Yukimi has always been drawn to boundary-pushing musicians, from the first Jimi Hendrix records she bought to her all-time musical heroes Kate Bush, Janet Jackson, Fleetwood Mac, Prince and Grace Jones. Born and raised in Gothenburg to a Japanese father, Yusuki Nagano, and her Swedish-American mother, Joanne Brown, Yukimi had a musical childhood alongside her sister Sumie, now a respected folk musician. “My mom played piano and I used to sit on her lap and destroy her playing,” she remembers. “That’s where my love of Fleetwood Mac comes from.”…

Read the entire article here.

‘Spider-Man: Homecoming’ Having A Biracial Love Interest For Peter Is Monumental

Bustle
2017-07-07

Olivia Truffaut-Wonga

Sony Pictures Releasing

Spider-Man: Homecoming isn’t just bringing Spider-Man back into the Marvel Cinematic Universe — it’s bringing diversity with it. Not only is a huge chunk of the movie’s supporting cast not white, but Homecoming provides the MCU with the universe’s first prominent women of color, Liz (Laura Harrier) and Michelle (Zendaya). Moreover, with Liz, Spider-Man: Homecoming introduces Marvel’s first biracial love interest. Yes, for the first time in the entire MCU, the white hero is involved in an interracial relationship, and this could not be more important when it comes to the representation of women of color on-screen.

You see, Homecoming marks the first MCU film with two prominent female characters of color and two prominent biracial characters. This distinction might sound unimportant, but to the many biracial fans out there, it actually means a lot, because it expands diversity in the MCU beyond easily defined ethnic boxes. In big studio movies, biracial characters are rare, and tend to appear only when being biracial is a part of the story. For the most part, major films stick to easily defined ethnic categories — black, white, Asian, Latinx, etc. The fact that Homecoming has two biracial female supporting characters and doesn’t make their race part of their storyline is monumental, not just for Marvel, but for Hollywood overall…

Read the entire article here.

Afro-Latino Fest NYC 2017-A Tribute to Women of the Diaspora

Afro-Latino Festival of New York
Brooklyn & Harlem
New York, New York
Friday, 2017-07-07, 19:00 through Sunday, 2017-07-09, 04:00 EDT (Local Time)

The Afrolatino Festival NYC enters its 5th year anniversary in 2017 with a Tribute to women of the diaspora. We just successfully completed a community-powered round of crowdfunding via Kickstarter.

Thanks to all who have supported and will support over the coming months.

For more information, click here.

Princess Nokia In Conversation at Brown University

Brown University
2017-04-27 (Published on 2017-05-16)

Facilitated by Sofia Robledo Rower ’18

Destiny Nicole Frasqueri, also known as Princess Nokia, is an Afro-Latina Boricua artist and musician based in New York City. Her music tackles the intersection of gender, race, class, urbanism, and age in captivating sonic and linguistic medleys. This public conversation will focus on spirituality, feminism, and race in her artistic process and performances.

Presented by Women’s History Series 2017

Watch the discussion here.

Princess Nokia Is Ready to Reign

The Village Voice
2017-03-29

Ivie Ani

ioulex

I meet up with Destiny Frasqueri — the 24-year-old Nuyorican alternative hip-hop artist known variously as Princess Nokia, Wavy Spice, or simply Destiny — in the East Village. I’m running late; she’s even later, so I get to the Astor Place cube first. Fifteen minutes later she walks up, dressed, as she’d indicated in a text apologizing for being behind schedule, in a beige duster coat and sweats to match, carrying a cherry-print Louis V bag. She’s wearing oversize shades, no makeup, just a touch of mascara. Her dark hair blows in the breeze, caressing a diamond-studded choker.

Frasqueri has appeared in Vogue, modeled for Calvin Klein, and had her song “Tomboy” used for an Alexander Wang runway show. But what makes her a figure of fascination for music aficionados in their teens and early twenties is the way she celebrates the beauty of imperfection, building a hero’s identity out of being a self-described “fucked-up kid.” She’s stunning yet still rough around the edges, rhyming about wearing dirty sneakers, smoking blunts in the stairwell, and proclaiming the power in her heritage. For her followers, her attractiveness lies in her contrasts. “Eczema so bad I’m bleeding,” she raps on “Bart Simpson,” the first track on 1992, the album she put up on SoundCloud last September. Sure enough, I look down and her irritated hands are bleeding slightly.

“I’m just ghetto as hell,” she says once we’ve settled in at San Loco for some chicken nachos. “That’s the only way that I know how to just be myself.”…

…Frasqueri’s mom passed by the time she was nine, and she grew up living in various homes across the Bronx, Harlem, and the Lower East Side. She experienced abusive foster care, life in the projects, and brief escapes to camp with wealthy kids from the Upper West Side. She’d skip class but bury herself in books, digging deep into the Black literary canon. (“I am Black Harlem Renaissance,” she says. “I am Walter Dean Myers and Langston Hughes, baby.”) She taught herself, studying Kemetic philosophy, practicing brujería and Santería, claiming her inheritance of Yoruba and Taíno cultures, and falling in love with New York City. Pissy project elevators and breezy summer barbecues in the street suffuse Frasqueri’s memories. She represents a specific kind of New York, what she describes as her own “urban realism.” “What makes life beautiful?” she muses at one point. “The ghetto makes life beautiful. Black people make life beautiful.”…

…“I’m a Brown Afro-indigenous woman. That makes people uncomfortable as it is. The folks that have a problem with me and say, ‘You still live with privilege. You not fully Black.’ I can’t win and I can’t lose, so I’ma just keep going.” She smiles. “Yes, I’m mixed-race. There’s girls who look like me and glorify being exotic. I have a responsibility to my Blackness.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Afro-Latino Festival NYC Celebrates A Culture That’s Ready To Be Heard

The Village Voice
2017-06-27

Siddhartha Mitter

Two revelers dance at last year’s festival Source: New Visual Collective

At 26, Amara La Negra, the Dominican-American singer, has a string of energetic tropical-funk hits in Spanish, fierce dance moves, a fashion line, hundreds of thousands of social media followers, and rising star power in her hometown of Miami and back in the Dominican Republic. But Amara is also Afro-Latina — a visibly, unapologetically Black woman making her career in worlds where colorism still runs rampant, among them the D.R. with its social hierarchy and the international Latin entertainment industry. With her dark skin, exuberant Afro, and in-your-face “La Negra” stage name, Amara is making a point.

“Change would be more Afro-Latinos in Hollywood, more on magazine covers,” Amara says. “It would be main roles in novelas, which we don’t yet have. They’ll cast you to be either a slave, a gangster, or a prostitute. They stereotype us.” Last year, a light-skinned beauty queen put on blackface and butt pads to parody Amara on Dominican TV. “We’re still a long way [from] seeing big change,” Amara says. “But we’re being more vocal.”…

…In New York City, the flagship venue for the new cultural reassertion is the Afro-Latino Festival, which holds its fifth edition on July 7 and 8. A grassroots project led by Mai-Elka Prado Gil and Amilcar Priestley, a Panamanian couple in Brooklyn, it has ballooned since 2013 from an outdoor afternoon party to a two-day international summit gathering musicians, filmmakers, activists, scholars, and partygoers….

Read the entire article here.

Angry in Omaha

Captured and Exposed: Vintage Photography & True Crime Stories
2017-06-08

Shayne Davidson

Minnie Bradley’s 1902 mugshot. Collection of the Nebraska State Historical Society.

Minnie Bradley was arrested on the evening of December 11, 1902, and charged with “larceny from the person” or pickpocketing. Someone from the Midway Saloon, a well-known dance hall and whorehouse owned by several notorious Omaha crime bosses, offered to pay her $25 bond. Before she was released, W. H. Breiter showed up at the police station and identified Minnie as the person who had robbed him earlier that evening. Minnie offered Breiter $5 to drop the charge, but he refused, so she spent the night in jail…

…Minnie returned to Omaha in 1904 and made two more appearances in police court before Judge Berka. The first, in March 1904, was as witness against a man named William Warwick, who was accused of assaulting her. The two had gotten into a heated argument when he bragged to her that, due to his light complexion, he often passed as a white man during his travels out west. He also mentioned that he had been in the company of two white women the previous evening. Minnie said William should show more respect for his race and reminded him that his mother was a black woman. His response was to punch her. Judge Berka sentenced him to 30 days in jail…

Read the entire article here.

Interracial marriage and Latino/a racial identity changing USA demographics

LatinasInBusiness.us
2017-06-06

Tanya K. Hernández, Guest Contributor and Professor of Law
Fordham University School of Law

A Pew Research Center report states that the largest amount of interracial marriage between opposite sex couples is that between what it terms “Whites and Hispanics.” Pew discovered that since 1967 intermarriage amongst newlyweds has increased fivefold from 3% to 17%.

The Pew Research Center released a report announcing the dramatic increase of intermarriage in the United States. Looking at data since the United States Supreme Court struck down interracial marriage bans with its 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision, Pew discovered that since 1967 intermarriage amongst newlyweds has increased fivefold from 3% to 17%. Examined in isolation the data point that one in six U.S. newlyweds are now married to someone of a different race, appears quite astounding. However the role of Latino/a racial identity is a missing piece of the picture that serves to question the real rate of intermarriage.

The largest driving factor in the apparent increase in U.S. intermarriage rates is the pattern of intermarriage between Latinos/as and White Anglos. Pew reports that the largest amount of intermarriage between opposite sex couples is that between what it terms “Whites and Hispanics.” The White/Hispanic combination represents 42% of intermarriage, while in comparison the White/Asian combination represents only 15%, the White/Black combination 11% , the Hispanic/Black combination 5%, and the Hispanic/Asian combination 3%. Notably, the Pew report neglects to discuss the role of “Hispanic” racial appearance and identity…

Read the entire article here.

A boy caught between love and race

Books
The Washington Post
2017-06-15

Ausma Zehanat Khan

Thrity Umrigar, the author (Robert Muller)

Thrity Umrigar, Everybody’s Son, A Novel (New York: HarperCollins, 2017)

The premise of Thrity Umrigar’s new novel, “Everybody’s Son,” is straightforward: a wealthy white family whose son has died adopts a black child from the projects. Through this disturbing yet evocative tale, Umrigar — best known for her books “The Space Between Us” and “The World We Found” — offers a troubling look at race and the conflicting desires of two families.

At the center of the story is Anton Vesper, a little boy whose mother, Juanita, is addicted to crack. She left Anton alone in a hot basement for days before he broke out and is rescued by the local police. Shortly thereafter, Anton meets a judge named David Coleman who happens to be struggling with the loss of his own child. In Anton, Coleman sees a charismatic child. He decides to bring Anton home, almost as a consolation prize for his grieving wife, Delores…

…Though Coleman is treated sympathetically throughout the novel, he is shadowed by his corrupt morality. There is no eluding it: Coleman destroyed a woman’s life by taking her child and using his wealth, power and whiteness against her. He has also robbed a child of his heritage, raising difficult questions for readers to ponder:

Would Coleman have wanted Anton if he were a dark-skinned black child, if he hadn’t been able to blend so effortlessly into his world? We later learn that Anton is bi-racial, perhaps explaining this. Would a black mother view blackness as a curse that a white man’s wealth and status could provide compensation for?…

Read the entire review here.

Malcolm Gladwell Polishes His Podcast in a Brooklyn Studio

Encounters
The New York Times
2017-06-10

Erin Geiger Smith

The New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell recording his podcast, “Revisionist History,” in Downtown Brooklyn. Credit Andrew White for The New York Times

It was a windy spring afternoon, though that’s not why Malcolm Gladwell’s hair was standing straight up as he hurried into a recording studio in Downtown Brooklyn.

Mr. Gladwell, known aesthetically for his finger-in-the-light-socket hair and otherwise as a longtime writer for The New Yorker and a best-selling author many times over, was recording his popular podcast, “Revisionist History.”

The podcast, which examines historical events he deems “overlooked and misunderstood,” and things he has personally obsessed with, like a forgotten Elvis Costello song, now take up half of Mr. Gladwell’s year…

Read the entire article here.