Mixed Race Studies

Word of Honour: Reclaiming Mandela’s Promise

Chace Studios
South Africa
2016
Color
Running Time: 01:13:00

Kiersten Dunbar Chace, Producer, Director, Editor

David Grant, Consultant/Writer

In 1997, just prior to his departure from politics, President Nelson Mandela delivered an informal speech to a predominately mixed-race Coloured community in the Western Cape. He reassured them they had nothing to fear from the ANC government once he left office… that his dream of a free and equal society for all South Africa’s citizens would continue in the hearts and minds of his successors. Now, twenty years later, with discriminatory practices affecting their economic, social and cultural rights, Word of Honour: Reclaiming Mandela’s Promise, illuminates the story of a people questioning the fate of their Coloured identity in the new South Africa.

From the Director of the award winning historical documentary, I’m Not Black, I’m Coloured: Identity Crisis at the Cape of Good Hope, Kiersten Dunbar Chace blends poetry, landscape imagery, and rare archive footage with a collection of powerful, indigenous voices who share their insight and experience regarding the issues facing their respective communities. Presented as regional vignettes, Word of Honour is an introspective look into South Africa’s young democracy as well as a meditation on what may be looming on the horizon. In order to weave this rich tapestry of post-apartheid conversations, Chace traveled 5,000 miles across South Africa with an all-South African crew to the townships of Cape Town, Durban, Port Elizabeth, Johannesburg and the rural desert village of Riemvasmaak. Cast members include retired High Court Judge Chris Greenland, photojournalist and HipHop promoter Rushay Booysen, former ANC freedom fighter Danny Brown, poet Khadijah Heeger, comedian and founder of Bruin-Ou.com Charles Ash, elder Anna Davids, community activist Jerome Lottering, and Elsie’s River resident Chantay Haynes.

Black or white?

The Globe and Mail
2016-12-12

Stephanie Nolen, Latin America Bureau Chief
Rio De Janiero, Brazil

Jacqueline Suellen Chaves poses for a photo on Belm Docs. She’s a black woman rejected as too white for a job as a social worker by a panel. Daniel Ramalho/For The Globe and Mail

It was a policy was born of good intentions but has stirred up perplexing, often painful, questions: What makes a person black, or white? Is it facial features? Hair? Family? Or an experience of racism? And who gets to decide?

Jacqueline Chaves checked the Internet every day, waiting to see test results posted – a pass would be the last step in her long road to a job as a social worker.

Ms. Chaves, 23, had worked hard to get through a degree program at the competitive federal university in Belem do Para, a port city on the Amazon forest’s Atlantic coast. There were many tough tests along the way but she wasn’t a bit worried about this final one. It was an exam to assess whether she qualified for a position being reserved for an affirmative-action candidate. Ms. Chaves knew she would sail through, because she is black.

Or thought she was…

…Commissions are vital to ensure that limited affirmative-action spaces are not used by cheating white students, said Iuri Nascimento, an activist with a racial-equality advocacy organization called Negrex. Any argument that it’s impossible to tell who is eligible in a country with a lot of mixed-raced people is simply aimed at undermining the system, he added.

There is no “purely objective scale” of blackness, he said, but it’s also not that hard to tell who is black and who isn’t: Police officers identify who is black just fine, argued Mr. Nascimento. (Black Brazilian men are killed by police three times more often than white.)…

…Yet there are many Brazilians – including other black activists – who think that the tribunals are a terrible idea. Petronio Domingues, a historian with the Federal University of Sergipe who studies the fight for racial equality in Brazil, said it’s absurd to think that there are characteristics that can be evaluated objectively to determine race.

“They’re looking only at a person’s appearance, and that doesn’t define race,” he said. “Any definition of what it is to be black cannot be external to the individual. … Race is a social construction, without scientific basis.” Nor is there any evidence that proves that black people with very dark skin suffer more prejudice than those who are called pardo, or brown, he added, so it makes no sense to give more “points” to someone whose skin is darker or hair curlier…

Read the entire article here.

The Color of American Genomics: Genetics in the Era of Racialized Medicine

University of California, Los Angeles
306 Royce Hall
340 Royce Drive
Los Angeles, California 90095
Friday, 2016-12-09, 13:30-16:30 PST (Local Time)

SPEAKERS:

Michael Montoya, Associate Professor
University of California, Irvine

Sandra Soo Jin Lee, Senior Research Scholar
Stanford University

Joan Donovan
University of California, Los Angeles

Élodie Grossi
University of California, Los Angeles/EPIDAPO

Since the 1960s, American ethno-racial categories have been increasingly used to respond to the inclusion of ethnic and racial minorities in biomedicine and genetics. It has been the researchers’ very dedication to the positive ideals of diversity and to the struggle against medical disparities that has paradoxically allowed racial categories to massively gain ground in science. This half-day symposium aims to shed light on the scope of racialized science and the political and ethical considerations raised by this new paradigm.

This workshop is free and open to the public

Presented by EPIDAPO.  Co-sponsored by the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics.

For more information, click here.

Guest Shot: Vancouver viaducts removal clears way to honour Hogan’s Alley

Vancouver Metro News
2016-11-10

Wayde Compton

Vancouver writer Wayde Compton (Ayelet Tsabari/Submitted)

Removal of the 1960s downtown infrastructure a chance to create a gathering space, an archive, for future black communities, argues Wayde Compton

Last year, Vancouver City Council voted to take the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts down.

This was the culmination of years of study, spearheaded by Coun. Geoff Meggs of Vision Vancouver. Before the vote, members of the public appeared before council to say a few words, to voice their hopes and concerns.

They were so numerous that two days were required to accommodate everyone. While a wide variety of opinions were aired, many of the people there insisted that in some way or other the new plans need to honour the history of Hogan’s Alley — the neighbourhood that existed for decades at the site where the viaducts were built in the late 1960s, and which included a sizeable population of black Vancouverites..

…The viaducts were part of an “urban renewal” scheme that fit a pattern of such plans all across North America during that era: freeways were slated to connect cities to their suburbs, and they were almost always run through black neighbourhoods — because black residents were considered expendable.

In the case of Vancouver, Chinatown was also targeted.

But as it turned out, Vancouver’s freeway plan was never realized, and the only portion built was the one that obliterated black centralization in the East End (or Strathcona, as it came to be called through this planning)…

Read the entire article here.

The Identity Politics of Whiteness

The New York Times Magazine
2016-11-27

Laila Lalami

Three years ago, I read “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” to my daughter. She smiled as she heard about Huck’s mischief, his jokes, his dress-up games, but it was his relationship with the runaway slave Jim that intrigued her most. Huck and Jim travel together as Jim seeks his freedom; at times, Huck wrestles with his decision to help. In the end, Tom Sawyer concocts an elaborate scheme for Jim’s release.

When we finished the book, my daughter had a question: Why didn’t Tom just tell Jim the truth — that Miss Watson had already freed him in her will? She is not alone in asking; scholars have long debated this issue. One answer lies in white identity, which needs black identity in order to define itself, and therefore cannot exist without it.

“Identity” is a vexing word. It is racial or sexual or national or religious or all those things at once. Sometimes it is proudly claimed, other times hidden or denied. But the word is almost never applied to whiteness. Racial identity is taken to be exclusive to people of color: When we speak about race, it is in connection with African-Americans or Latinos or Asians or Native People or some other group that has been designated a minority. “White” is seen as the default, the absence of race. In school curriculums, one month is reserved for the study of black history, while the rest of the year is just plain history; people will tell you they are fans of black or Latin music, but few will claim they love white music…

Read the entire article here.

Colorism And Privilege: An Afro-Cuban American In Havana

FEM: UCLA’s Feminist Newsmagazine Since 1973
2016-04-28

Graciela Barada

My father, born in Cuba at the end of Castro’s Revolution, migrated to the United States in 1980. He was a young, black, Spanish-speaking political refugee who left his wife and months-old daughter behind in hopes of building a better life for himself. A “Marielito,” my father braved the 115-mile stretch of the Caribbean sea to Florida under President Carter’s pardon of Cuban refugees. My mother is a white Spaniard who moved to Washington, D.C. in 1989 for graduate school at Georgetown University. An unlikely couple, my parents met at my father’s Cuban nightclub, a hub for Latino culture, music, and dance. Although my siblings and I were born and raised in the U.S., we have been fortunate enough to travel to our parents’ birth countries in order to familiarize ourselves with their respective cultures…

..In Cuba, the Communist Revolution is often portrayed as the “great equalizer,” not just economically but also in respect to race relations. In many ways, this has been true: people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds have access to education, jobs, transportation, healthcare, and other social services. Regardless, there are traces of racial hierarchy and a colonialist mentality which are deeply entrenched in Cuban society. As far as I know, all of my Cuban relatives are black. The majority of them are dark-skinned; when asked, two of my male cousins expressed that they do not feel hated because of their African ancestry and darker pigmentation. Still, they are well-aware that their roles within society are informed by Cuba’s history of racial hierarchy and discrimination…

Read the entire article here.

David Olusoga: ‘There’s a dark side to British history, and we saw a flash of it this summer’

The Guardian
2016-11-04

Arifa Akbar

‘People used to shout “Go back to Africa” at us’ … David Olusoga. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian

The writer and broadcaster on reassessing black history and the fallout from the Brexit vote

For as long as David Olusoga has been writing and broadcasting on black British history (almost two decades), he has received infuriated letters from the public. Nowadays, there are tweets too, which employ the same fulminating tone.

“The number of people who say, ‘I’m sick of hearing about slavery’, or ‘black people are always talking about slavery’. My response to them is ‘Name a British plantation. Name a slave trader. Name a British slave ship.’ Normally they can’t, because we don’t know that much about slavery. It’s not a central part of our national story.”

Olusoga’s new book, Black and British: A Forgotten History, is not about slavery as such, but it is a radical reappraisal of the parameters of history, exposing lacunae in the nation’s version of its past. Domestic history cannot be separated from the vast former empire building, he argues, which was inextricably bound to the economics of global slavery. Joining up history at home and abroad makes it harder to gloss over Britain’s part in the slave trade…

Read the entire article here.

Obama Reckons with a Trump Presidency

The New Yorker
2016-11-28

David Remnick, Editor

Inside a stunned White House, the President considers his legacy and America’s future.

The morning after Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, Barack Obama summoned staff members to the Oval Office. Some were fairly junior and had never been in the room before. They were sombre, hollowed out, some fighting tears, humiliated by the defeat, fearful of autocracy’s moving vans pulling up to the door. Although Obama and his people admit that the election results caught them completely by surprise—“We had no plan for this,” one told me—the President sought to be reassuring.

“This is not the apocalypse,” Obama said. History does not move in straight lines; sometimes it goes sideways, sometimes it goes backward. A couple of days later, when I asked the President about that consolation, he offered this: “I don’t believe in apocalyptic—until the apocalypse comes. I think nothing is the end of the world until the end of the world.”

Obama’s insistence on hope felt more willed than audacious. It spoke to the civic duty he felt to prevent despair not only among the young people in the West Wing but also among countless Americans across the country. At the White House, as elsewhere, dread and dejection were compounded by shock. Administration officials recalled the collective sense of confidence about the election that had persisted for many months, the sense of balloons and confetti waiting to be released. Last January, on the eve of his final State of the Union address, Obama submitted to a breezy walk-and-talk interview in the White House with the “Today” show. Wry and self-possessed, he told Matt Lauer that no matter what happened in the election he was sure that “the overwhelming majority” of Americans would never submit to Donald Trump’s appeals to their fears, that they would see through his “simplistic solutions and scapegoating.”

“So when you stand and deliver that State of the Union address,” Lauer said, “in no part of your mind and brain can you imagine Donald Trump standing up one day and delivering the State of the Union address?”…

Obama chuckled. “Well,” he said, “I can imagine it in a ‘Saturday Night’ skit.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Myth of a Post-Racial America

Literary Hub
2016-11-07

Pamela Newkirk, Professor of Journalism
New York University

Pamela Newkirk Wonders How Much Further Back We Can Go…

For the past eight years, many African-Americans instinctively presumed that the venom spewed at President Obama was on account of his race. More recently, we endured a steady stream of chilling videotaped killings of unarmed blacks by police, and the harsh realization that despite all our protests and all our tears, for much of white America, Black Lives Don’t Much Matter. In case after case, the police went unpunished and most whites, when polled, supported impunity.

By the time Donald Trump won the Republican presidential nomination, he vowed to ban Muslims, build a wall to keep out Mexicans, and had scapegoated blacks. We who are black, unlike many of our fellow Americans, were hardly surprised.

For years, Trump attempted to illegitimize Obama’s presidency by stoking the Birther movement and yet still managed to win the support of a cross-section of Republican leaders, including US senators and governors, from North and South. We hoped in vain for a chorus of condemnation, and instead watched a shameful parade of Republican leaders, including House Speaker Paul Ryan, pledge their support or remain silent. Rather than an aberration, Trump’s rise seems the inevitable undraping of a sizable portion of white America that has always lurked in the shadows, stubbornly refusing to sync their customs with national ideals…

…Trump’s nomination and strong appeal in the general election recalls a more candid period at the turn-of the 20th century when many of the nation’s most esteemed leaders proudly flaunted their anti-immigration and anti-Black rhetoric. It behooves us to recall that, in 1916, Madison Grant’s wildly popular book The Passing of the Great Race advocated the cleansing of America from “inferior races” through birth control, racial segregation, and anti-miscegenation and anti-immigration laws. Grant, a New York high-society lawyer and co-founder of the Bronx Zoo, infamously warned:

Whether we like to admit it or not, the result of the mixture of two races, in the long run, gives us a race reverting to the more ancient, generalized and lower type. The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a negro is a negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.

The book was hailed by President Roosevelt as “a capital book—in purpose, in vision, in grasp of the facts,” and was later praised by Hitler…

Read the entire article here.

The End of the Postracial Myth

The New York Times Magazine
2016-11-15

Nikole Hannah-Jones

Pundits are quick to say that it couldn’t be about prejudice in states like Iowa, where Obama voters went for Trump. But racial anxiety is always close to the surface — and can easily be stoked.

On a cold, clear night in January 2008, when Iowa Democrats selected Barack Obama over a white woman and a white man in the state’s first-in-the-nation caucus, the moment felt transformative. If voters in this overwhelmingly white, rural state could cast their ballots for a black man as president, then perhaps it was possible for the entire nation to do what had never been done; perhaps America had turned far enough away from its racist past that skin color was no longer a barrier to the highest office of the land. In the months that followed, as Obama racked up primary victories, not just in the expected cities but also in largely white Rust Belt towns and farming communities, it seemed evidence for many Americans that the nation had finally become “post-racial.”

Of course, that post-racial dream did not last long, and nothing epitomizes the naïveté of that belief more than the election last week of Donald J. Trump. As I watched my home state of Iowa join the red flood that overtook the electoral map last Tuesday, I asked myself the same questions that so many others did: What happened? Why had states that reliably backed Obama — states like Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — flipped Republican?

I was struck by how quickly white pundits sought to tamp down assertions that race had anything to do with it. It was, it seemed to me, almost a relief to many white Americans that Trump’s victory encompassed so many of the heavily white places that voted for a black man just years before. It was an absolution that let them reassure themselves that Donald Trump’s raucous campaign hadn’t revealed an ugly racist rift after all, that in the end, the discontent that propelled the reality-TV star into the White House was one of class and economic anxiety, not racism.

But this analysis reveals less about the electorate than it does about the consistent inability of many white Americans to think about and understand the complex and often contradictory workings of race in this country, and to discuss and elucidate race in a sophisticated, nuanced way.

While we tend to talk about racism in absolute terms — you’re either racist or you’re not — racism and racial anxiety have always existed on a spectrum. For historians who have studied race in the United States, the change from blue to red in heavily white areas is not surprising. In fact, it was entirely predictable. “There are times when working-class whites, whether rural or urban, will join an interracial alliance to get the short-term gains they want,” Robin Kelley, a history professor at U.C.L.A., told me. “They don’t ever do it without kicking and screaming.”…

Read the entire article here.