Mixed Race Studies

“The Day Beyoncé Turned Black” – SNL

Saturday Night Live (NBC)
2016-02-13

How “Mestizaje” in Puerto Rico Makes Room for Racism to Flourish

La Respuesta: A magazine to (Re)Imagine the Boricua Diaspora
2016-02-08

Dorothy Bell Ferrer

“Three Puerto Rican Girls”

“Somos de tres razas! La blanca, la india, y la negra!” is a cliched response you can almost always count on hearing anytime you bring up race or racism in Puerto Rico or Puerto Rican Diaspora communities. It’s cute, easy to remember, and also a lie.

Ironically the European root, which is most often mistaken as the backbone of Puerto Rican culture, is mentioned first. The indigenous, Taíno root, which is often recognized strategically (yes, strategically) in front of blackness is named second. Oh, and the third? African or Black! Last but not least, right? I’d like to think so, but I know better.

The blending of these three races or roots in Puerto Rico are what we refer to as “mestizaje”, or mixture (1). This “mestizaje” is what causes Puerto Ricans to believe that we all are racially mixed the exact same way therefore there can be no “true” difference. While mestizaje is a part of Puerto Rican society and even exists in the heritage of many Puerto Ricans, the way in which mestizaje is recognized in Puerto Rico makes room for racism and white supremacy to flourish because it gives us a false historical analysis on race…

Read the entire article here.

Yvonne Chouteau, Native American Ballerina, Dies at 86

The New York Times
2016-01-29

Jack Anderson

Yvonne Chouteau, one of the five celebrated Oklahoma ballerinas with an American Indian background, in a 1963 photo. Credit Jack Mitchell/Getty Images

Yvonne Chouteau, a former principal dancer of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo who emerged as one of a celebrated group of dancers known as the American Indian ballerinas of Oklahoma, died on Sunday at her home in Oklahoma City. She was 86.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said Mary Margaret Holt, director of the School of Dance and dean of the College of Fine Arts at the University of Oklahoma. Ms. Chouteau was a founder of the dance school, one of the leading institutions of its kind in the Southwest…

…Part French and part Shawnee–Cherokee, Myra Yvonne Chouteau was born into a pioneering Southwestern family in Fort Worth on March 7, 1929, the only child of Corbett Edward Chouteau and the former Lucy Annette Taylor. The family soon moved to Vinita, Okla., and her father, who was known as C. E. Chouteau, became a prominent American Indian figure in the state.

Ms. Chouteau was a direct descendant of Maj. Jean Pierre Chouteau (1758-1849), who established Oklahoma’s oldest white settlement in 1796…

Read the entire obituary here.

Review ‘A Ballerina’s Tale’ follows Misty Copeland’s incredible rise in the ballet world

The Los Angeles Times
2016-02-08

Mary McNamara, Contact Reporter

Misty Copeland in the documentary “A Ballerina’s Tale.” (Oskar Landi / Sundance Selects)

If you think #OscarsSoWhite, consider the world of elite ballet. And if you want to understand why the current conversation over the lack of diversity among this year’s film academy nominees is just one thread of a much larger tapestry, watch Nelson George’s documentary “A Ballerina’s Tale: The Incredible Rise of Misty Copeland” on PBS on Monday night.

Watch too if you are a dance aficionado or a woman, if you have a daughter or for that matter a son, if you are a Southern California resident or just a thinking member of a culture that is changing, with various degrees of resistance, in almost every area.

It won’t take long, just 90 minutes that include several exquisite dance scenes, Copeland’s now-signature friendly frankness and none of the crazy-girl “Black Swan” pathology we have come to expect from tales of the dance world…

…”I think that people think that sometimes I focus too much on the fact that I’m a black dancer,” Copeland says in the film’s opening moments. “There’s never been a black principal woman … in the top companies of the world. In New York City Ballet, in New York City. I don’t think people realize what a feat it is, being a black woman. But that’s so much of who I am, and I think it’s so much a part of my story.”…

Read the entire review here.

A Ballerina’s Tale

By Nelson George | in Dance
Independent Lens
Public Broadcasting Service
Premieres 2016-02-08

Few dancers reach the highest levels of classical ballet; of that few only a fraction are black women. Against the odds, Misty Copeland has made history by becoming the first African American principal dancer with the prestigious American Ballet Theatre, considered the pinnacle of ballet in the United States. A Ballerina’s Tale is an intimate look at this groundbreaking artist as she breaks through barriers and transcends her art.

For more information, click here.

Black in the USSR: The children of Soviet Africa search for their own identity

The Calvert Journal
2016-02-04

Photography by Liz Johnson Artur

Photograph by Liz Johnson Artur

“When people ask me about my background I usually start by explaining how my mum is Russian, my dad is Ghanaian and that I was born in Bulgaria,” says the photographer Liz Johnson Artur. “It often becomes a long explanation.”

The explanation goes something like this. Along with many African students in the 1960s, Johnson’s Ghanaian father was given the chance to study in Eastern Europe as part of the Soviet Union’s efforts to expand its influence across the African continent during the Cold War. His time in Bulgaria studying biochemistry was cut short after four years when all Ghanaian students were expelled from the country following a confrontation between African students and the police. By then he’d already met Johnson Artur’s mother, who gave birth to their daughter in 1964, a few months after his departure.

Johnson Artur spent her childhood in Bulgaria and then Germany and has been based in Britain since 1990. Her father was unable to return to Bulgaria and is now settled in Ghana. She only met him for the first time in 2010. After doing so, she felt moved to start documenting the stories of other Russians of African and Caribbean origin. “Most black Russians that I met in Moscow and St Petersburg had also grown up without their fathers. Some had been fostered or grown up in children’s homes and had never met their mothers. But we all agreed that we felt Russian as well as African.”…

Read the entire photo-essay here.

In “The Alexander Litany,” intersectionality collides with campus

North by Northwestern
2016-02-03

Lauren Sonnenberg

Roger Mason as Clarence, Eliott Sagay as Joseph, Grant Lewis as Jackson, Jeff Paschal as Max. Photo by Alexandria Woodson

“Look into my eyes and you’ll see that fear ain’t only skin deep, at least not for me,” implored Max Alexander, protagonist of The Alexander Litany, at an open mic reading on an unnamed college campus in Southern California.

Kori Alston, 20-year-old playwright and Communication sophomore, first spoke these words at a 2014 slam poetry competition. To follow, he wrote them into his new play, creating Max Alexander, a young man who contemplates his racial and sexual identity, as a means to express his frustration. The final product was performed as a staged reading in Shanley Pavilion January 15-16, 2016.

“In every good slam poem there is universal truth, there is personal truth, and then there is a kind of truth for the audience,” Alston said…

…Like Alston, Alexander grew up with a white mother and an absentee Black father. Both struggled with their relationship to a Black world. Both are college students far from home, angry with the racism they face every day. But the boys are different in how they confront their dissatisfaction.

“My relationship with Blackness was with my father. He was such a negative part of my life, and it was easy to associate Blackness with the bad parts of my father. I wanted to be white,” Alston said.

As someone with a white mother and Black father, Alston used to refuse to racially identify, partially because he began to dislike the Black parts of himself, he said. As he got older, Alston said he began to confront racism by a “Fuck you; I’m Black” attitude and growing his hair out to emphasize his Black identity.

He vacillates between wanting to disrupt spaces and make noise every time he hears a Black person was killed, to trying to find a safe space to challenge white audience members’ way of thinking…

Read the entire article here.

One Drop of Love: Presented by Mesa Arts Center as part of the Performing Live Series

Mesa Arts Center
Nesbitt/Elliott Playhouse
One East Main Street
Mesa, Arizona 85201
Telephone: 480.644.6500
Friday, 2016-02-05, 19:30 MST (Local Time)

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni

How does our belief in ‘race’ affect our most intimate relationships? One Drop of Love travels near and far, in the past and present to explore family, race, love and pain – and a path towards reconciliation. It is produced by Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon.

For more information, click here.

2015 IMPACT25 Influencer: Misty Copeland

ESPN W
2015-12-07

Dimity McDowell Davis, Special to espnW.com

From line sketches to pencils and final color, Marvel captured the essences of our IMPACT25 nominees and turned them into super versions of themselves. Behind Marvel’s IMPACT25 heroes »

“Every time I dance, I’m trying to prove myself to myself.” —Misty Copeland

Ballerina Misty Copeland’s year was, in all aspects, a grand jeté: the powerful ballet leap in which the dancer flies high above the stage in an impressive splits pose. Before this year, Copeland had already disrupted the classical world of ballet — she was the first African American to play the lead role in “Swan Lake” — and challenged millions to rethink their definition of an athlete through her Under Armour campaign. (Tutus and tiaras deserve as much respect as shoulder pads.)

In 2015, she continued to turn heads. Her muscular body landed on the cover of Time, and months later, she landed her biggest role to date. On June 30, the American Ballet Theatre promoted her to the role of principal dancer, making her the first African-American woman in the company’s 75-year history to hold that title…

Read the entire article here.

An Artist Stands Before Her Fun House Mirror

The New York Times
2016-01-06

Amanda Fortini

Genevieve Gaignard, “A Golden State of Mind” installation, 2015. Credit: Eric Minh Swenson, via The Cabin LA and Diane Rosenstein

LOS ANGELES — On a recent Friday afternoon, Genevieve Gaignard, a photographer, collagist and installation artist, was sitting on her bed in the room she rents in the Echo Park neighborhood. For the last year, Ms. Gaignard, who takes self-portraits costumed as various alter egos she imagines, then builds fictional domestic spaces for them, has lived in this nondescript, book-filled and thoroughly carpeted apartment with a professional couple in their late 20s, their chatty lime-green parrot and three cats.

Ms. Gaignard, who is 34, with strawberry-blond hair and long, acrylic nails painted the matte pastel colors of Jordan almonds, had decorated her bedroom with charmingly girlish touches, like a white net canopy befitting a fairy-tale princess and a Felix the Cat clock with a pendulum tail. On every surface were snowdrifts of stuff: piles of clothing, toiletries, plastic sunglasses. On her desk, a bra and a half-eaten granola bar shared space with an assortment of wigs. “This is what happens; this is how involved I get in the artmaking,” she said, waving a manicured hand around at the clutter. “Everything else sort of falls apart.”

A 2014 graduate of Yale’s photography M.F.A. program, Ms. Gaignard does work that reclaims everyday items: hair curlers, curling irons, plastic party favors, costume jewelry, towels. These she finds at thrift shops, dollar and beauty supply stores, or via her mother, who, she says with affection, “is kind of a hoarder.” A forest of Vanillaroma air fresheners dangles from a pair of yellow knee-high boots. A collage made to resemble the faux-wood paneling of a suburban basement is appended with miniature knickknacks. “It’s not like, ‘Hmm, can I make something out of nothing?’” Ms. Gaignard said. “It’s literally like, ‘What do I have access to?’”…

Her recent show, “Us Only,” at Shulamit Nazarian Gallery in the Venice neighborhood, featured a variety of pieces that blurred the lines between highbrow and vernacular, unraveling stereotypes of gender, race and class in the process. Her photos are often likened to those of Cindy Sherman, arguably our most famous costumed self-portraitist. But this comparison takes into account neither the animating impulses of her art — Ms. Gaignard is biracial, and her background forms an essential through line in her work — nor the decades of intervening culture since Ms. Sherman began taking pictures in the late 1970s. Third-wave feminism, online dating, even the ascent of the selfie: All are likely influences on a female artist photographing herself today. (Ms. Gaignard told me that Diane Arbus, not Ms. Sherman, was her seminal artistic inspiration, in part because she feels like “one of the people she photographed.”)…

…Sarah Lewis, a professor of history of art and architecture and African and African-American studies at Harvard, said that Ms. Gaignard’s art explores “the often undiscussed subject of racial indeterminacy.” It is, Professor Lewis notes, a topic well covered by 20th-century writers — Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Danzy Senna — but by few contemporary visual artists. Ms. Gaignard’s approach is not narrative, didactic or overtly political; she wittily employs symbols a viewer understands on a visceral level, even as a more explicit meaning remains elusive.

“Her work avoids any easy answers about race or identity,” said Gregory Crewdson, the director of graduate studies in photography at Yale. “I don’t think it’s in any conventional sense a critique. It’s more ambiguous than that. And that’s part of its power.”…

Read the entire article and view the photographs here.