Mixed Race Studies

Walsh says race backlash in part led to Trump win

The Boston Globe
2016-12-20

Meghan E. Irons, Reporter

Mayor Martin J. Walsh, taking on a contentious issue rippling across the country, said Tuesday that he believes the election of Donald Trump was in part due to a backlash against the nation’s first black president.

“I would hope [that] as a country we have gone beyond that,’’ the mayor said, adding that the election exposed economic and racial divisions. “But I’m afraid that is not the case.”

Walsh took on race and other thorny issues during an hourlong interview, vowing to continue the city’s [Boston’s] race dialogues to heal “deep wounds.” The mayor discussed the cloud of federal indictments looming over his administration, laid out the posture the city aims to take with the incoming Trump administration, and made his case for his reelection, saying Boston is much better off than when he took office three years ago…

Read the entire article here.

How Obama’s unique background shaped his outlook on race

PBS NewsHour
2016-12-21

Judy Woodruff, Co-Anchor & Managing Editor

The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates has criticized President Obama’s policies toward black Americans. Perhaps for that reason, he was invited to discuss such issues with Mr. Obama several times throughout the president’s second term. As part of a collaboration with The Atlantic, Coates speaks with Judy Woodruff about his latest Atlantic cover story, which considers Mr. Obama’s legacy and rare optimism through a racial lens.

JUDY WOODRUFF: As President Obama winds down his time in the White House, we will be looking back at the legacy of his presidency in the coming weeks. Tonight, as part of our partnership with “The Atlantic” magazine, my conversation with writer Ta-Nehisi Coates about his cover story, “My President was Black.”

TA-NEHISI COATES, The Atlantic: I think so many African-Americans got so much joy out of the image of Barack and Michelle and Malia and Sasha, the first family, and that was going away, and there was a kind of sadness.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Can you put into words how much his election meant in the first place?

TA-NEHISI COATES: The notion of an African-American president for black people was perceived as being so impossible that most of the great sort of representations of it are in comedy. It’s just a moment that seemed so impossible and so far off that actually it came to be, it actually happened…

View the story here.

The Problem With Obama’s Faith in White America

The Atlantic
2016-12-13

Tressie McMillan Cottom, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Virginia Commonwealth University

The president’s optimism about race blinded him to the pervasiveness and stubborn persistence of racism.

I screamed a lot while reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s My President Was Black. When I was done reading and screaming, I cried.

The last time I felt this far removed from this president was when I first worked so hard to elect him.

In 2007, the very idea of a President Barack Obama was ridiculous to me. I was and am southern, god bless. I am black. I come from black people who are southerners even when they were New Yorkers for a spell. We are the black American story of enslavement, rural migration, urban displacement, resistance, boostrapping, mobility, and class fragility. In this milieu we, as a friend once described it, know our whites. To know our whites is to understand the psychology of white people and the elasticity of whiteness. It is to be intimate with some white persons but to critically withhold faith in white people categorically. It is to anticipate white people’s emotions and fears and grievances because their issues are singularly our problem. To know our whites is to survive without letting bitterness rot your soul…

Read the entire article here.

The Monoracial Millennium (a parody): Rethinking Mixed Race in the Age of Obama

Medium
2016-12-18

Gino M. Pellegrini

“The Four Races” from Le Tour de la France par duex enfants (1877) by G. Bruno

It sucks to wake up and realize that you’re back out of style — viewed as a promising development in one decade, viewed as an impediment to racial justice in the next.

It was the 1990s. Racial pure breeds were fading to beige, and ethnic ambiguity was starting to matter. The public was interested in topics like the biracial baby boom, the browning of America, and Tiger “Cablinasian” Woods. Time magazine issued its “New Face of America.” Maria Root published her “Bill of Rights for People of Mixed Heritage.” And multiracial grassroots activists were lobbying the state to account for the growing multiracial population via a new multiracial identifier for Census 2000.

Many in the old vanguard of the US Civil Rights Movement were troubled by this development. They responded by propagating new sayings about the new mixed people: “I’m mixed is another way of saying that you want to be white” and “the multiracial movement is anti-black.”…

Read the entire parody here or here.

The One They’ve Been Waiting for: White Fear and the Rise of Donald Trump

Politics of Color: commentary & reflections on race, ethnicity, and politics
2016-11-27

Linda Alvarez, Assistant Professor
California State University, Northridge

Ivy A. Melgar Cargile, Assistant Professor
California State University, Bakersfield

Natasha Altema McNeely, Assistant Professor
University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley

Lisa Pringle, Ph.D. Candidate
Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California

Patricia Posey, Ph.D. Candidate
University of Pennsylvania

Andrea Silva, Assistant Professor
University of North Texas

Carrie Skulley, Assistant Professor
Albright College, Reading, Pennsylvania

On November 8th, 2016, Donald Trump was elected the 45th President of the United States. Many, including members of the Republican party were shocked that a man openly propagating racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia would now be the leader of the most powerful country in the world. How did this happen? While several factors contributed to Donald Trump’s alarming success, there is no doubt that tapping into American racism and sexism were integral to his victory. However, Trump’s election rhetoric alone was not enough to ignite an entire sector of the U.S. population. Instead, Trump built his campaign on a historical culture of white fear of “the other.” Through this rhetoric, The Trump campaign united white America in particular, under a banner of fear. Trump’s campaign was based on igniting a “moral panic—an upwelling of intense emotion and feeling over conditions that challenge people’s deep seated values and threatens the established social order.” Yet, this panic was not created by the Trump campaign. Instead, his campaign was able to capitalize on an already salient white fear in the United States- a white fear present since the founding, that resurfaced in a post 9/11 context, and was fed by the rhetoric of “uncontrollable other,” set on destroying the “American” way of life. The extreme nationalism, fear, and xenophobia ignited by 9/11, the challenge to entrenched white privilege posed by the election of Barak Obama, the adoption of relatively liberal immigration policy, and the emergence of the #BlackLivesMatter movement all threatened the status quo that white Americans have enjoyed in this country since its founding. Trump’s rallying cry to “Make America Great Again,” was about more than an economic policy, it was a literal call to regain and reinstate white supremacy. Here, we argue against suggestions that the Trump campaign and subsequent win has created backlash and erased our post-racial America. We argue that this backlash was decades in the making and that a “post-racial America” has never existed. Further, our policymakers and institutions have been continuously changed and challenged to preserve white supremacy structures in America   Fear and hatred of the “other” has been codified since the founding of this country like the Pogroms against First Nations, slavery and later Jim Crow laws, Women as Property, the Chinese Exclusion Act, and Japanese internment camps. These are examples of white supremacy systemized into law, and entrenched in our culture to create and maintain a status quo that upholds white power. This article delves deeper into the continuous effort by white nationalist to marginalize vulnerable groups and the Trumps campaign’s ability to exploit these institutional changes into a victory. The façade of a “post-racial” society was created and reified after the election of the first mixed race president and congealed among sectors of white America. we begin this discussion with the break in our “post-racial” façade after the attacks on September 11, 2001…

Read the entire article here.

I couldn’t cope with seeing Sinn Fein’s new MLA on TV or radio… I’d be thinking all the time: your father killed my father

The Belfast Telegraph
2016-12-16

Stephanie Bell

Harrowing life: Jayne Olorunda whose father Max Olorunda was killed in an IRA train bomb during the Troubles

Jayne Olorunda’s dad was killed by an IRA bomber whose daughter has been made a Sinn Fein MLA. Jayne tells Stephanie Bell this is the last straw and her family is now set to quit Northern Ireland

News that the daughter of the IRA man who killed her father is to take a seat for Sinn Fein in Stormont has left Belfast author and community worker Jayne Olorunda and her family determined to leave Northern Ireland. The distraught 38-year-old says she couldn’t bear to see new MLA Orlaithi Flynn in the news now that she had been appointed by Sinn Fein to replace Jennifer McCann in the Colin area of west Belfast.

Jayne was only two when her Nigerian-born father Max Olorunda was killed by an IRA incendiary bomb which detonated prematurely in Dunmurry on a train travelling from Ballymena to Belfast in January 1980.

She says her mother Gabrielle (66) has never got over it and to this day suffers from post traumatic stress syndrome.

Orlaithi Flynn

Orlaithi Flynn’s father Patrick Flynn was convicted of double manslaughter and possession of explosives for the attack.

In a heartbreaking interview, Jayne revealed how her family has also suffered years of racial hatred and had planned to leave Northern Ireland last month to try and escape the abuse…

…She has spent most of her life working in the community and has also written a powerful book called Legacy which tells the story of how her family were plagued by racism, poverty and grief after the death of her father.

Her father Max (35), an accountant, had been visiting a client in Ballymena and was on the train when the IRA prematurely detonated a device on January 17, 1980.

The blast engulfed a carriage of the train killing her father, as well as 17-year-old Protestant student Mark Cochrane and one of the bombers, Kevin Delaney (26)…

Gabrielle and Max Olorunda

Read the entire article here.

Obama Leaves Office on High Note, But Public Has Mixed Views of Accomplishments

Pew Research Center
2016-12-14

72% have favorable opinion of Michelle Obama

With just a few weeks left in Barack Obama’s presidency, Americans’ early judgments of his place in history are more positive than negative. Obama is poised to leave office on a high note: Current assessments of both the president and the first lady are among the most favorable since they arrived in the White House.

At the same time, many express skepticism about whether Obama has been able to make progress on the major problems facing the nation, and whether his accomplishments will outweigh his failures. Democrats and Republicans have distinctly different views on Obama’s legacy, and these partisan divides are greater today than they have been for other recent presidents.

And when asked in an open-ended question what Obama will be most remembered for, more cite the Affordable Care Act – which faces an uncertain future in the Republican-controlled Congress – than anything else…

…In the public’s view, Obama will be remembered more for the Affordable Care Act than other aspects of his presidency — including his election as the nation’s first black president. When asked what Obama will be most remembered for, 35% volunteer the 2010 health care law (or mention health care more generally) while 17% say it will be Obama’s election as the first black president.

Notably, mentions of Obama’s domestic policies, including health care and the economy, account for nearly half (49%) of all responses. By comparison, only 9% point to foreign policy, including just 2% who specifically mention the killing of Osama bin Laden and just 1% who cite U.S. military action against ISIS…

Read the entire report in PDF or HTML format.

The Intercept Brasil Welcomes Ana Maria Gonçalves As A Columnist On Race, Politics, And Culture

The Intercept
2016-12-02

Glenn Greenwald, Co-founding Editor

THE CREATION OF The Intercept, and then the Intercept Brasil, was motivated by a core purpose: to provide crucial journalism and commentary that, for whatever reasons, is not being adequately provided to the public. We are especially thrilled to announce the arrival of Ana Maria Gonçalves as our new columnist because her work so powerfully advances that objective.

By virtue of “Um Defeito de Cor” (A Color Defect), her 952-page 2006 novel about the life of an African woman enslaved and brought to Brazil who buys her freedom and sets out in search of her lost son, Gonçalves has become an important voice in global debates on race and culture. The book, which spans eight decades, powerfully connects modern Brazil with its long history of slavery, and — like the main character herself — confronts some of the most difficult, entrenched, and complex interactions between politics, race, culture, and power. The book is now being made into a Roots-like miniseries, to be broadcast next year…

…The role of race in Brazil is fascinating and relevant both in the ways it is unique to Brazil and the ways it is universal. Brazil was the last country in the Western world to abolish slavery (1888), and — just as in the U.S. — that historic sin continues to shape institutions and identities in ways society would rather not acknowledge…

Read the entire article here.

While Trump Won York County, Pa., Republican Cal Weary Backed Clinton

Morning Edition
National Public Radio
2016-12-15

Steve Inskeep catches up with Cal Weary, an ex-art teacher from York, who spoke about race and politics as part of the York Project in 2008. Weary, an African-American, is a registered Republican.

Download the story (00:05:34) here.

My President Was Black

The Atlantic
January/February 2017

Ta-Nehisi Coates, National Correspondent

Ian Allen

A history of the first African American White House—and of what came next

“They’re a rotten crowd,” I shouted across the lawn. “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

I. “Love Will Make You Do Wrong”

In the waning days of President Barack Obama’s administration, he and his wife, Michelle, hosted a farewell party, the full import of which no one could then grasp. It was late October, Friday the 21st, and the president had spent many of the previous weeks, as he would spend the two subsequent weeks, campaigning for the Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton. Things were looking up. Polls in the crucial states of Virginia and Pennsylvania showed Clinton with solid advantages. The formidable GOP strongholds of Georgia and Texas were said to be under threat. The moment seemed to buoy Obama. He had been light on his feet in these last few weeks, cracking jokes at the expense of Republican opponents and laughing off hecklers. At a rally in Orlando on October 28, he greeted a student who would be introducing him by dancing toward her and then noting that the song playing over the loudspeakers—the Gap Band’s “Outstanding”—was older than she was. “This is classic!” he said. Then he flashed the smile that had launched America’s first black presidency, and started dancing again. Three months still remained before Inauguration Day, but staffers had already begun to count down the days. They did this with a mix of pride and longing—like college seniors in early May. They had no sense of the world they were graduating into. None of us did…

…This would not happen again, and everyone knew it. It was not just that there might never be another African American president of the United States. It was the feeling that this particular black family, the Obamas, represented the best of black people, the ultimate credit to the race, incomparable in elegance and bearing. “There are no more,” the comedian Sinbad joked back in 2010. “There are no black men raised in Kansas and Hawaii. That’s the last one. Y’all better treat this one right. The next one gonna be from Cleveland. He gonna wear a perm. Then you gonna see what it’s really like.” Throughout their residency, the Obamas had refrained from showing America “what it’s really like,” and had instead followed the first lady’s motto, “When they go low, we go high.” This was the ideal—black and graceful under fire—saluted that evening. The president was lionized as “our crown jewel.” The first lady was praised as the woman “who put the O in Obama.”

Barack Obama’s victories in 2008 and 2012 were dismissed by some of his critics as merely symbolic for African Americans. But there is nothing “mere” about symbols. The power embedded in the word nigger is also symbolic. Burning crosses do not literally raise the black poverty rate, and the Confederate flag does not directly expand the wealth gap…

Read the entire article here.