Mixed Race Studies

Morgan Freeman: No Black President For U.S. Yet

Tell Me More
National Public Radio
2012-07-06

Michel Martin, Host

Oscar-winning actor Morgan Freeman joined Tell Me More host Michel Martin to discuss his new movie, The Magic of Belle Isle. But the prolific actor, famous for his roles in films such as The Shawshank Redemption, Million Dollar Baby and The Dark Knight, also had a lot to say about politics. He was especially interested in talking about President Obama, and why Freeman thinks he should not be called America’s first black president.

“First thing that always pops into my head regarding our president is that all of the people who are setting up this barrier for him … they just conveniently forget that Barack had a mama, and she was white — very white American, Kansas, middle of America,” Freeman said. “There was no argument about who he is or what he is. America’s first black president hasn’t arisen yet. He’s not America’s first black president — he’s America’s first mixed-race president.”

Many of Freeman’s films explore important chapters of African-American history: Amistad was about the trans-Atlantic slave trade; Driving Miss Daisy was set in the civil rights era; and Glory centered on an all-black regiment in the Civil War.

Freeman says he has been disappointed by what he considers unfair treatment of Obama by his political opponents.

“He is being purposely, purposely thwarted by the Republican Party, who started out at the beginning of his tenure by saying, ‘We are going to do whatever is necessary to make sure that he’s only going to serve one term,’ ” he said. “That means they will not cooperate with him on anything. So to say he’s ineffective is a misappropriation of the facts.”…

Listen to the interview here. Download the interview here.

Half-Polish, Half-Italian, All-Black

2nd Story
Chicago, Illinois
2012-04-21

James Anthony Zoccoli

Little Jimmy is a half-Italian, half-Polish kid. When his parents divorce, he watches his family dynamic change when his mom gets remarried to an African-American man. Sometimes funny, sometimes complicated, the hard parts of growing up are easier to talk about from a grown-up point-of-view.

Listen to the podcast here.

The Impersonator

2nd Story
Chicago, Illinois
2012-03-24

Chris Terry, Writer, Editor, Educator

A biracial man who is often told that he looks like certain celebrities goes to a Brooklyn bar, where he has an encounter with a guy whose strange profession makes him really good at The “You Look Like” Game.

Listen to the podcast here (00:12:36).  Read an earlier draft of “The Impersonator” here.

Upfront (With Guests Mark Christian and Anna Rothery)

Upfront
BBC Radio: Merseyside
2012-06-02

Phina Oruche, Host

Guests

Mark Christian, Professor & Chair of African & African American Studies
Lehman College, City University of New York

Anna Rothery, Councillor
Liverpool City Council, Princes Park Ward

Host Phina Oruche discusses the current state of the African diaspora in the United States and Britain with Dr. Mark Christian and Liverpool Councilor Anna Rothery. Dr. Christian is author of the book Multiracial Identity: An International Perspective, the chapter “Mixing Up the Game: Social and Historical Contours of Black Mixed Heritage Players in British Football” in the anthology Race, Ethnicity and Football: Persisting Debates and Emergent Issues, and article “The Fletcher Report 1930: A Historical Case Study of Contested Black Mixed Heritage Britishness.”

Download the interview here (00:18:27/15.0 MB).

Does The Heritage Controversy Tell Us More About Warren Or The Media?

Radio Boston
WBUR
2012-05-22

Dan Mauzy, Associate Producer

Hosts

Meghna Chakrabarti, Co-Host

Anthony Brooks, Co-Host

Guests

Kevin Noble Maillard, Associate Professor of Law (member of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma)
Syracuse University

David Catanese, National Political Reporter
Politico

Here’s a bit of a problem that political reporters have to contend with: How should we handle those stories that appear to distract from what most regard as the big, important issues of the day? When a particular campaign or a political party fans the flames of one of these sidebar stories in an effort to keep a controversy alive, what should the media do?
 
The story about Elizabeth Warren’s claims of Native American ancestry presents one of those challenges.
 
The Harvard law professor who’s challenging Sen. Scott Brown has talked proudly about her Native American heritage, and we’ve learned that she listed herself as a “minority” for nearly a decade back in the late 1980s and early 90s. Warren has tried to explain why and there’s no evidence that Harvard, or any other university, hired her because of her claim…

Read the entire article here. Listen to the interview (00:25:32) here. Download it here.

Lecturer Hettie V. Williams to be Featured Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

Mixed Chicks Chat (Founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival)
Hosted by Fanshen Cox, Heidi W. Durrow and Jennifer Frappier
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #257: Hettie V. Williams
When: Wednesday, 2012-05-23, 21:00Z (17:00 EDT, 14:00 PDT)

Hettie V. Williams, Lecturer of African American History
Monmouth University, West Long Branch, New Jersey

Hettie Williams’ research and teaching interests include: recent American history; the 1960s; the history of African Americans; race; identity; studies in the African Diaspora; and gender. She has taught survey courses in U.S. history, world history, western civilization, and upper division courses on the history of African Americans. She has published various entries and essays for several volumes and a text on the American civil rights movement titled We Shall Overcome to We Shall Overrun: The Collapse of the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Revolt (1962-1968). Currently, she teaches as a lecturer of African American history in the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University. She has recently completed an edited volume titled Color Struck: Essays on Race and Ethnicity in Global Perspective and is currently working on an edited volume titled, Race and the Obama Phenomenon: toward a More Perfect Union? (University of Mississippi Press) with the renown race scholar G. Reginald Daniel.

Professor Mary Beltrán to be Featured Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

Mixed Chicks Chat (Founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival)
Hosted by Fanshen Cox, Heidi W. Durrow and Jennifer Frappier
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #255 Professor Mary Beltrán
When: Wednesday, 2012-05-09, 21:00Z (17:00 EDT, 14:00 PDT)

Mary C. Beltrán, Associate Professor of Media Studies
University of Texas, Austin

Mary Beltrán an Assistant Professor of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin, is of Mexican and German, English, and Scotch Irish heritage. Her research is focused on the production and narration of race, ethnicity, gender and class in U.S. television, film, and celebrity culture, with an emphasis on Latina/o and mixed race representation. She is the co-editor (with Camilla Fojas) of Mixed Race Hollywood (NYU Press 2008), an anthology of scholarship on mixed-race representation in film, television, and new media. She also is the author of Latina/o Stars in U.S. Eyes: The Making and Meanings of Film and TV Stardom (University of Illinois Press, 2009), which explores the construction and marketing of Latina and Latino stars in the U.S. in relation to the evolving status of Mexican Americans and other Latinos since the 1920s. Mary is a former journalist and social worker; her experiences working in San Francisco with Latina and African American teens and interest in the complexities of popular culture and its impact on young people of color spurred her to pursue a career that would allow her to combine her various interests and conduct research at the intersections of race, class, and gender and entertainment media studies. Since becoming a faculty member of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and now the University of Texas, Beltrán has taught a variety of classes on race and entertainment meida, including first-ever courses at both universities on Mixed Race and U.S. Media Culture. Aside from her books, she has published on such topics as mixed-race actors and characters in U.S. media culture, racial representation in millennial television, ethnic media activism targeting the television networks, and the racial politics of beauty and body ideals as reinforced in Hollywood media productions. She has been conducting research for a new book, Post-Race Pop: Interrogating Racelessness in Millennial Media Culture. Post-Race Pop explores the emphasis on racial ambiguity and utopic presentations of racial and ethnic diversity in contemporary television and other millennial media culture, particularly in light of the imperatives of the media industries to appeal to an increasingly diverse audience and popular political rhetoric that has utilized notions of post-racial America to widely divergent ends.

Selected Bibliography:

• Mixed Race Hollywood, New York University Press, 2008.
• “Everywhere and Nowhere: Mediated Mixed Race and Mixed Race Critical Studies,” Keynote address video at the 2010 Critical Mixed Race Conference (Requires Apple’s iTunes application).
• “The New Hollywood Racelessness: Only the Fast, Furious, (and Multiracial) Will Survive,” 2005.

Marcia Dawkins, Author of “Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing” on Mixed Race Radio

Mixed Race Radio
Blogtalkradio
2012-05-02, 16:00Z (12:00 EDT)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

Marcia Dawkins’ book, Clearly Invisible and the Color of Cultural Identity (Baylor University Press, 2012), is the first to connect racial passing and classical rhetoric to issues of disability, gender-neutral parenting, human trafficking, hacktivism, identity theft, racial privacy, media typecasting and violent extremism.

By applying fresh eyes to landmark historical cases and benchmark popular culture moments in the history of passing Dawkins also rethinks the representational character and civic purpose of multiracial identities. In the process she provides powerful insights called “passwords” that help readers tackle the tough questions of who we are and how we can relate to one another and the world.

For more information, click here.

Brian Bantum Featured Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

Mixed Chicks Chat (Founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival)
Hosted by Fanshen Cox, Heidi W. Durrow and Jennifer Frappier
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode 254: Brian Bantum
When: Wednesday, 2012-05-02, 21:00Z (17:00 EDT, 14:00 PDT)

Brian Bantum, Associate Professor of Theology
Seattle Pacific University

Brian Bantum is Assistant Professor of Theology at Seattle Pacific University and author of Redeeming Mulatto: A Theology of Race and Christian Hybridity.

Listen to the episode here.

Redeeming Mulatto: Race, Culture, and Ethnic Plurality from Quest Church on Vimeo.

The Winton Triangle

The State of Things
WUNC 91.5
North Carolina Public Radio
2011-06-17

Frank Stasio, Host

Susan Davis, Senior Producer

Marvin Jones, Historian
Chowan Discovery Group

More Americans marked at least two boxes for “race” on the 2010 Census than ever before. The country may not be increasingly multiracial but it certainly is increasingly conscious of its multiracial identity. In Northeastern North Carolina there is a community that is historically mixed race. Landowning free people of color have lived together in The Winton Triangle for 260 years. Their ancestors include people who moved from the Chesapeake Bay area as well as Chowanoke, Meherrin, and Tuscarora Indians, Africans and East Indians. As part of WUNC’s series “North Carolina Voices: The Civil War,” Winton Triangle historian Marvin Jones, a photographer and the Executive Director of the Chowan Discovery Group, joins host Frank Stasio with the story of this unique North Carolina communnity.

Download the audio here.