Mixed Race Studies

Trevor Noah Says He’s Not a Political Progressive. He’d Be Funnier If He Were.

The Nation
2015-10-09

Katie Halper

(The Daily Show with Trevor Noah / Brad Barket)

The new Daily Show host doesn’t have much to say, which leaves him making jokes about tramp stamps and body weight.

Unlike Jon Stewart, Trevor Noah doesn’t ground his comedy in a political ideology. This is of course politically disappointing to people who saw Jon Stewart as someone who not only raised awareness but influenced politics and sometimes even policy. But what’s less obvious is that the lack of political perspective makes the show less funny.

Like millions of viewers in the United States and across the globe, I depended upon Jon Stewart, night after night, to excoriate people in high places who had messed with ordinary people during the day. When Comedy Central announced that Trevor Noah would replace Stewart, I knew that the odds of someone doing as good a job were slim. But I defended Noah when he came under attack for a handful of tweets that ranged from offensive to not at all offensive (just critical of Israeli policy), and from unfunny to really, really unfunny. It seemed an unfair point of focus. I was hopeful that his background, so different from Stewart’s, would bring a fresh perspective. And I thought it went without saying that Noah would continue the show’s political focus and insight…

… In contrast, correspondents Roy Wood and Jordan Keppler brought an angle and some character to the show, which made them funnier. It wasn’t earth-shattering (no pun intended), but Roy Wood Jr.’s report on NASA’s discovery of liquid on Mars was the first time I laughed during the debut episode. It was also the first time racism (and not just race) was addressed on the show. When Noah asks Wood what he can tell us about the story, Wood responds, “I can tell you I don’t give a shit.” When an optimistic Noah says, “Doesn’t this raise the possibility that one day people can live on Mars?” Wood responds, “People like who? Me and you? How am I going to get there? Brother can’t catch a cab, you think we can catch a spaceship?… Black people ain’t going to Mars! And that includes you, Trevor.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Cost of Color: Skin Color, Discrimination, and Health among African-Americans

American Journal of Sociology
Volume 121, Number 2 (September 2015)
pages 396-444
DOI: 10.1086/682162

Ellis P. Monk Jr., Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Chicago

In this study, the author uses a nationally representative survey to examine the relationship(s) between skin tone, discrimination, and health among African-Americans. He finds that skin tone is a significant predictor of multiple forms of perceived discrimination (including perceived skin color discrimination from whites and blacks) and, in turn, these forms of perceived discrimination are significant predictors of key health outcomes, such as depression and self-rated mental and physical health. Intraracial health differences related to skin tone (and discrimination) often rival or even exceed disparities between blacks and whites as a whole. The author also finds that self-reported skin tone, conceptualized as a form of embodied social status, is a stronger predictor of perceived discrimination than interviewer-rated skin tone. He discusses the implications of these findings for the study of ethnoracial health disparities and highlights the utility of cognitive and multidimensional approaches to ethnoracial and social inequality.

Read or purchase the article here.

My First Event at the Schomburg – “Resisting Limitations: AfroLatinos and Radical Identity”

the colored boy
2015-10-01

Alexander Hardy

So, I’m doing a thing at the Schomburg Center For Research In Black Culture for Hispanic Heritage Month. But unlike the majority of the celebrations, lists of notable Latinos and mainstream media representations of people in and from Latin America, this will be a thoroughly Blackety Black affair.

Shoutout to melanin.

Here’s the what/why/who/when/how:

The history of America cannot be appropriately surveyed without considering the presence, influence, hardships, victories and contributions of people of African descent. Our bodies, our lives and our genius reflect and inspire greatness, yet textbooks, media depictions and cultural celebrations routinely minimize and erase our integral role in both society and art.

To commemorate National Hispanic Heritage Month, AfroPanamanian writer and educator Alexander Hardy of TheColoredBoy.com has invited a diverse cast of AfroLatino storytellers to share stories of struggles, tragedies and progress towards/while affirming, celebrating, exploring, representing and growing to love and accept our wonderful Black and Brown selves in a world (and media environment) that studies and exploits our cultures and essence while ignoring and minimizing our presence and influence.

Resisting Limitation: AfroLatin@s and Radical Identities will showcase transformative, hilarious, tragic and insight-filled tales from powerful voices of the diaspora expressed through prose, poetry, song and art. This event aims to center and share Black and Brown narratives in a climate where such stories aren’t prominent or valued. Join us for a night of celebration, affirmation and exploration of the many iterations of AfroLatin@ identity and pride…

For more information, click here. To purchase tickets, click here.

The Terrible Things People Say to Interracial Couples

Slate
2015-10-01

David Rosenberg

Donna Pinckley

For the past couple of decades, most of Donna Pinckley’s photographs have focused on children and the objects that have personal significance for them. A few years ago, though, the University of Central Arkansas photography teacher noticed a post on Facebook of a girl she had photographed who was in an interracial relationship. The girl’s mother later told Pinckley that her daughter and her boyfriend had been the target of many cruel, racist comments. It brought back memories of another similar conversation Pinckley had many years earlier with a different mother.

“What struck me was the resilience of both couples in the face of derision, their refusal to let others define them,” Pinckley wrote on her artist statement.

“They are disgusting,” one couple wrote. Another couple wrote that they once heard, “If she can’t use your comb, don’t bring her home!”…

View the photo-essay here.

How the Hawaiian word ‘hapa’ came to be used by people of mixed heritage

Public Radio International (PRI)
2015-09-15

Nina Porzucki, Producer

Recently, an old friend of mine, Julie Jimenez had a language question she wanted me to investigate: Where does the word “hapa” come from?

Julie considers herself hapa. Her father is from Chile, her mom is Japanese American. And she calls herself “hapa,” that is, half Asian, half something else. Julie had never questioned this definition before until one day she was at the market and she met a women who she thought was hapa like herself.

“She looked half Chinese and half white and I said, ‘Oh, you’re hapa!’ and she said ‘that’s a Hawaiian word, you’re not supposed to use it.’ And I had never heard anyone say that before. I was kind of shocked because I had never thought it was offensive,” she said…

Listen to the story (00:38:09) here. Download the story here.

Something Old, Something New

BBC Radio 4
2015-10-06

Johny Pitts, Host

Peter Meanwell, Producer

Recorded & mixed! Finished @BBCRadio4 (Engineer Steve Hellier with Johny Pitts) Source: Peter Meanwell

From Sheffield to South Carolina, Johny Pitts explores alternative Black British identity.

What happens when your Dad’s an African-American soul star [Richie Pitts] and your Mum’s a music-loving girl from working class Sheffield? Are your roots on the terraces at a Sheffield United match, or in the stylings of a Spike Lee film? For writer and photographer Johny Pitts, whose parents met in the heyday of Northern Soul, on the dance floor of the legendary King Mojo club, how he navigates his black roots has always been an issue. Not being directly connected to the Caribbean or West African diaspora culture, all he was told at school was that his ancestors were slaves, so for BBC Radio 4, he heads off to the USA, to trace his father’s musical migration, and tell an alternative story of Black British identity.

From Pitsmore in Sheffield, to Bedford Stuyvesant in New York, and all the way down to South Carolina, where his grandmother picked cotton, Johny Pitts heads off on a journey of self-discovery. On the way he meets author Caryl Phillips, Kadija, a half sister he never knew, and historian Bernard Powers. He visits the Concorde Baptist Church in Brooklyn, New York, and the Bush River Missionary Baptist Church, in Newberry, South Carolina. He tracks down a whole host of long-lost cousins, and talks to Pulitzer winning writer Isabel Wilkerson. On the way he shines a light on the shadows of his ancestry, and finds stories and culture that deliver him to a new understanding of his own mixed race identity and history.

Listen to the story here.

The most famous ‘Indian’ on 1950s American TV

The Times of India
2015-10-04

Malini Nair

Korla Pandit was the first African American to have a TV show to himself – by pretending to be an exotic Indian musician

The story is almost unbelievable. In the US of the 1940s, a light-skinned African American youth discovers his prodigious talent at playing the electric organ. The mystical Orient and all its clichés are in vogue at the time and radio shows like Chandu the Magician and films like Midnight Shadow are the rage, featuring fakirs and assorted Indian exotica. The ambitious African American, John Roland Redd, decides to reinvent himself for the TV music market – as Korla Pandit, the mysterious Indian musician.

Deeply kohled eyes fixed in a hypnotic gaze, a bejewelled turban on his head, Pandit would play the Hammond B2 organ and piano with both virtuosity and theatricality on TV shows. Around him, a stagey exotic east played out – smoky haze, play of light and shade, Oriental dancers undulating in shimmery lehengas and short dhotis.

“I was born in New Delhi, India,” he announced silkily in a TV interview with an anchor seeking the backstory to Pandit (pronounced ‘panned-it’). He was, he claimed, the son of a Brahmin priest and a French opera singer who was sent to the US to study. Pandit reached the peak of his popularity with the ’50s TV show ‘Adventures in Music with Korla Pandit’, where he appeared as some kind of Indian musician-maharaja–swami. What he played on the organ and the piano was called exotica music – the closest it comes to contemporary music is trance or lounge. Before long, he came to be known as the Godfather of Exotica…

Read the entire article here.

How art can disrupt our ideas and identities

news@Northeastern
Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts
2015-09-23

Thea Singer

Artist Favianna Rodriguez makes bold, sparkling works that light up a room even as they reveal dark cul­tural inequities.

She is known for her activism and political posters addressing issues such as racism, women’s rights, displacement, and climate change. Now, for the first time, her abstract prints—multilayered col­lages of vibrant colors and rever­ber­ating shapes—are on dis­play: 27 of them line the walls in Northeastern’s Gallery 360 in an exhibit called “The Multiverse of Identity” as she begins her week­long stint at North­eastern as artist in res­i­dence. The exhibit opened ealier this month and runs through mid-December.

Rodriguez will be talking about her vision of art as both an agent of social change and individual narrative on Wednesday, Sept. 23, at 6 p.m., in Blackman Auditorium…

…Her process

Rodriguez’s process for making her abstract works—intaglio printing, using an etching plate—is “very, very elaborate.” Each piece takes months. To start, she applies ink to create tex­ture on mul­tiple sheets of Japanese paper, pro­ducing a “library of colors.” “I think of the prac­tice as creating the container in which I’m going to play,” she says. She then cuts the paper into shapes—now spikey, now undulating—and arranges them in a “playful way.” “The arranging—repeating shapes, refining them—is what gives each piece its own char­acter,” she says.

The colors smack you in the face. “For me, color is about possibility,” she says. It characterizes both her art and her com­mit­ment to breaking apart assumptions—for herself, for all of us. “I don’t like when people put me in the woman box or the Latina box or the political artist box,” she says. “That limits who I am as an individual. I want to instead embrace the possibility of who I can be. That’s where ulti­mate freedom is.”…

Read the entire article here.

Chi-chi Nwanoku: ‘I want black musicians to walk on to the stage and know they belong’

The Guardian
2015-06-02

Chi-chi Nwanoku

Chi-chi Nwanoku: ‘I feel sure that bringing a group of people together to play incredible music is a creatively powerful and positive thing.’ Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi

For 30 years, double bassist Chi-chi Nwanoku has enjoyed a successful career and as a classical musician and never felt the colour of her skin has held her back. So why is she now embarking on and ambitious plan to form Europe’s first professional black orchestra? She explains all

Perhaps I was one of the lucky ones? I somehow slipped through the net. I’m a classical musician, an all too rare black face on concert platforms among what are usually all-white orchestras. My Nigerian father and Irish mother brought me up believing that I could do anything I wanted. They never doubted me for a second, and I was surrounded by people who supported and encouraged me.

We were the only black family at my primary and secondary schools, and I didn’t think at all about being the only black student at the Royal Academy of Music…

Read the entire article here.

NEW TO YOUTUBE | Chineke! – Europe’s First Black Orchestra Concert Debut [VIDEO]

The Violin Channel
2015-09-15

Debut concert performance of the Chineke! Orchestra – Europe’s first professional orchestra made up entirely of musicians of colour.

The 60-piece ensemble, founded by British double bassist Chichi Nwanoku, was established with the objective of making a conscious effort to redress the racial balance in classical music.

Programme includes: Beethoven’s 7th Symphony, Brahms ‘Variations on a theme by Haydn’, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s ‘Ballade for Orchestra’ and Philip Herbert’s ‘Elegy’ [a memorial to Stephen Lawrence].

Recorded live at London’s Southbank Centre, 13th September 2015 – as part of the ‘Africa Utopia Festival’.