Mixed Race Studies

Cultural Identities: Mixed Blood

Mitchell Museum of the American Indian
3001 Central Street
Evanston, Illinois 60201
847.475.1030
September 2013

With the influx of immigrants from throughout the world, the United States has been called the great melting pot. But how has this played out for the original people in America? Explore how American Indian peoples from multiple cultures and races identify themselves, pre-European contact and today in our new exhibit Cultural Identities: Mixed Blood, opening September 28th 2013.

In the exhibit, curator Melissa Halverson highlights how American Indian history from pre-European contact to the present shaped the current debates over tribal membership and cultural appropriation and discusses the many way in which a mixed race or mixed culture person can identify themselves. The exhibit reviews historical family unit structures, including slavery and adoption, the impact of treaties, assimilation campaigns, and the U.S. government’s introduction of blood quantum. Finally hear about today’s controversies from tribal members, as well as those no longer qualified for membership.

Consider the many facets of identity from government allegiance, religious beliefs, living on or off reservations to legal rights and genealogy. The exhibit includes unique pieces from the museum’s collection including a U.S. government ration card from 1886, a Cochiti nativity scene, a Navajo beaded Chicago Bulls hat, and a beaded pipe bag pictured above. Come learn about the importance of self-identification and how history and culture affects the way you identify yourself.

For more information, click here.

12 Beautiful Portraits Of Black Identity Challenging the “One-Drop” Rule

PolicyMic
New York, New York
2014-02-06

Amirah Mercer

What are you?” they’d ask, head tilted and eyes squinted.

“Black,” I’d reply.

“No … but like, what else are you? I know it’s not all black.”

So went a typical interrogation by my peers as a kid. With skin lighter than even some who identify as White, and hair that streaks blond in the sun, I’ve never been offended by the question, although I have since changed my response. To the more politically correct question that I’m asked in adulthood — “Where are you from?” — I would recite my ethnic makeup, followed by a definitive, “But I identify as Black.” (If I feel like being a wise ass, I’ll simply reply with “New Jersey.”)

How do you define a racial identity? Can “blackness” be defined simply by a person’s skin tone, hair texture and facial features? Can we define it by the way someone walks or the way they talk? Can it be a product of someone’s cultural affinities, regardless of what she looks like?

These are the questions that Dr. Yaba Blay and photographer Noelle Théard encourage us to wrestle with in (1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race. Featuring the perspectives of 58 people who identify as part of the larger “racial, cultural, and social group generally referred to and known as Black,” the book combines candid memoirs and striking portraits to explore the complexities of Black identity and celebrate an individual’s right to self-identify.

(1)ne Drop’s title derives from the “one-drop rule” — a (successful) attempt to define blackness in America as one drop, or at least 1/32, of Black ancestry for the economic, social, and political purposes of distinguishing a Black person from a White person. I say “successful,” because the one-drop rule still holds cultural weight today, especially with regard to how we value light and dark skin. For this reason, Dr. Blay aims to “challenge narrow yet popular perceptions of what Blackness is and what Blackness looks like.”

“I think the context that we live in shapes the way you identify yourself, and the way others identify you,” says Dr. Blay. And therein lies the power of (1)ne Drop. From Zun Lee, a man who has always identified as Black despite being phenotypically Asian, to Sembene McFarland, a woman whose vitiligo bizarrely blurs other people’s perception of her race, to James Bartlett, a man who is mistaken for Italian, Arab or Hispanic depending on what U.S. city he’s in, (1)ne Drop narrates a story of blackness that is not bound by looks, but that is fluid and empowered by the act of self-identification.

Below are 12 portraits of participants, including their self-identification and a piece of their personal story from (1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race:…

Read the entire article and view the portraits here.

Why did the BBC cast a mixed-race Porthos in The Musketeers?

The Guardian
2014-01-28

Stuart Jeffries, Feature Writer and Columnist

Certain viewers are non-plussed by the casting of a musketeer of colour, but surely blind casting is preferable to an historical whitewash

Studs in leather? Check. Swordplay? Check. Buckled swash? Check. Medieval cleavages? Check. Over-complicated facial hair? Check. Dead-eyed Peter Capaldi as Louis XIII’s enforcer Cardinal Richelieu, that 17th-century prototype of Capaldi’s Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It? Check.

There’s so much diverting stuff in BBC1’s current adaptation of The Musketeers that you might have missed perhaps its most intriguing aspect. One Telegraph reader didn’t during their below-the-line rant against what they called a “dumbed down romp”. “And,” they sighed, mid-tirade, “there is the one obligatory part-black character to prove that multiculti [sic] political correctness outweighs historical accuracy.”…

Read the entire article here.

Getting Race-y in the PMAC

The News: The official student newspaper of Choate Rosemary Hall
Wallingford, Connecticut
Saturday, 2014-01-25

Alexandra Brunjes ’16, News Staff Reporter

“How does our belief in ‘race’ affect our most intimate relationships?” This is the question that Ms. Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni sought to answer during her one-woman performance, One Drop of Love, last Friday night, January 17th, on the Paul Mellon Arts Center [(PMAC)] mainstage, employing her relationship with her father as the primary example.

Using a collection of images and voice recordings and the astonishing ability to seamlessly shift personas in order to represent members of her family, Ms. DiGiovanni told the story of her experience with race. 

Ms. DiGiovanni originally meant for One Drop of Love to be a documentary for her Masters of Fine Arts thesis at California State University. “I always knew I wanted to look at race,” she stated. “I wanted to figure out why race was so important in my family, and why it was getting in the way of my relationship with my dad. It took me a long time to realize that the entire reason for my show was to have that final confrontation with my dad.”

Celebrity Ben Affleck, a childhood friend, attended Ms. DiGiovanni’s first show. He then consulted with co-producers from Argo and friend Matt Damon. They ultimately decided to produce her show. She said about this development, “[The show] gained this new trajectory that I never had imagined.”

“This is the largest crowd I have ever performed for, as well as the youngest,” Ms. DiGiovanni said of her Choate performance. “At the end, the response was beautiful. I’m so glad that it can have an impact on people.”

“The performance was hands-down the best Choate performance I have ever seen. I’ve seen a lot of white struggle stories, and a lot of black struggle stories, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a mixed struggle story.” Zemia Edmondson ’16 described…

Read the entire review here.

“Purple Cloud” by Jessica Huang

Mu Preforming Arts presents: New Eyes Festival
Staged readings of the newest script from the Asian American theater canon
2014-01-23 through 2014-01-26

The Playwrights’ Center
2301 East Franklin Avenue
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55406

“Purple Cloud” by Jessica Huang
Friday, 2014-01-24, 19:30 CST (Local Time)

Weaving together the stories of Lee, a Shanghai-born man who immigrates to America during World War II, his son, a first generation Asian American, and his granddaughter whose mixed-race identity strains her relationship with her conformist father. The three family members’ stories are accompanied by a quartet of Chinese Stones, brought to America in pockets and soles of shoes, who transform slowly as the Huang family acculturates over generations.

Jessica Huang (Elysium Blues) is a multi-racial, Minneapolis-based playwright, co-founder, producer and core writer of the Unit Collective, and a 2012 recipient of a Many Voices Fellowship at the Playwrights’ Center. Various stages of her work have been produced locally at the Minnesota Fringe Festival, Pillsbury House Theatre, RedEye, and Pangea World Theater, and nationally at 2nd Generation in New York City, the University of Missouri-Columbia, the Kennedy Center and the Source Festival in Washington DC.

Choate Celebrates MLK Day

Choate Rosemary Hall
333 Christian Street
Wallingford, Connecticut 06492
(203) 697-2000
Friday, 2014-01-17, 19:30 EST (Local Time)

Photo: Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni

“One Drop of Love,” a multimedia solo performance by Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni, will be presented on Friday, January 17, at 7:30 p.m. in the Arts Center. This performance tells the story of how the notion of race came to be in the U.S. and will begin our diversity conversations leading up to MLK Day. On Monday morning, January 20, the Anti-Defamation League will present, “The Truth About Hate,” in the Worthington Johnson Athletic Center.

For more information, click here.

10 Most Amazingly Bizarre Paintings of Obama on Etsy

Houston Press
Houston, Texas
2013-05-09

Jef With One F

As Houston Press’ bizarre Etsy art expert, I thought I’d see how a nation of crafty lunatics would portray our commander-in-chief. The answer is somewhere between “awesomely” and “needs medication badly.”

Mike and Mollie took the title commander-in-chief a little too literally, and here we have Barack Obama looking like a cross between a Bjork dress and Turok: Dinosaur Hunter. The weirdest part is he sports a hammer and sickle button, and if anyone can explain to me where the Soviet Union and Native American heritage intersect then kindly let me know in the comments which mental health facility is offering the free wifi you’re using to view this…

…This piece is described by Psychic Unicorns as imagining our president as the cult cinema anti-hero John Shaft. I choose to describe it as, “President Obama’s purple rage will leave thugs riddled with bullets as he rings the bell of liberty.” Seriously, this is a lot of freakin’ purple. Are we sure Prince didn’t do this…

Read the entire article here.

2 Hapa Parents and 19 Hapa artists: Our Visit to War Baby / Love Child at the Wing Luke

Multiracial Asian Families: Parenting around race, ethnicity and what it means to be mixed Asian
Sunday, 2014-01-12

Sharon H Chang

Cold, rain. Gray-stained morning. Husband and I are sitting in the car at 5 till, draining coffee dregs, waiting for Seattle’s Wing Luke Museum of the Asian American Experience to open. We’re about to visit War Baby / Love Child: Mixed Race Asian Art before it closes in a week. We just dropped the kid off at preschool. It’s taken us a full month to get here and many thwarted attempts. And now we finally made it, we’re thrilled and stunned-awkward-silent at the same time. This is the unique challenge I think parents face in trying to raise their race-consciousness and by association, the race-savvy of their parenting (something our children desperately need). How in the world do you find: time to read books, childcare to get to places/events, opportunities to meet and converse with like-minded people/parents?? The truth is so often — you just don’t. Your kid is sick, abort mission. The babysitter cancelled or you can’t find one at all, abort mission. You feel like you’re gonna die from exhaustion, abort mission. The roof is leaking and your basement flooded, abort mission. So needless to say, this was a glorious triumphant morning for me and my partner. 2 Hapas with a Hapa son about to experience the art of 19 Hapa artists. That’s a whole lot of kickbutt Hapa-ness…

Read the entire article here.

The Bots Are Taking Over

The New York Times Magazine
2013-12-20

Julie Bosman

Photographs by Rebecca Smeyne

Mikaiah and Anaiah Lei, the brothers from Los Angeles who make up the band the Bots, have been writing and playing rock songs together for seven years. Now 20 and 17, they are on the cusp of stardom as they ride a wave of praise from critics and prepare for the release of a full-length album early in 2014. When asked to describe their music, Mikaiah says: “People have said we sound like the Black Keys and Bad Brains and Black Flag. . . . ‘Dude, you’re like a little Jimi Hendrix’ — I find that very flattering.” Still, he questions such comparisons. “We show up at so many venues — ‘Are you guys rappers or something?’ That’s racist. Because I’m wearing a baseball cap and I’m a little bit brown. It’s frustrating. Jeez, I’m half Asian, but that doesn’t declare any specific genre of music.”

View the photographs here.

The Mixed Marriage

The New York Times
2014-01-11

Interview by Lise Funderburg

Lise Funderburg, a journalist, interviewed Yael Ben-Zion, a photographer raised in Israel, about her new book, “Intermarried,” published by Kehrer, which features families from the Washington Heights neighborhood where she lives with her French husband and 5-year-old twins.

Q. What inspired this project?

A. I saw an Israeli television campaign that showed faces on trees and bus stops, like missing children ads. A voice-over said, “Have you seen these people? Fifty percent of young Jewish people outside of Israel marry non-Jews. We are losing them.” I happen to be married to a person who is not Jewish. And, so for me it was, “Aah, they’re losing me.” I’m not religious, but this campaign made me wonder more generally why people choose to live with someone who is not from their immediate social group, and what challenges they face.

Q. How did you establish your taxonomy for what qualified as mixed?

A. I wasn’t going to go in the street and ask couples if they were mixed. I didn’t grow up here; I didn’t even know what terminology to use. But I live in a very diverse Manhattan community that has an online parent list with more than 2,000 families on it. I put up an ad saying I was looking for couples that define themselves as mixed. I said it could be different religion, ethnicity or social background. I didn’t use the word race, because I wasn’t sure how politically correct that was. All the couples who responded are either interfaith or interracial or both, but my goal from the beginning wasn’t to create some statistical visual document. For example, I have hardly any Asian people, and I don’t think there are any Muslims, and the reason is that they didn’t approach me…

Read the entire interview and view the slide shows here.