Mixed Race Studies

“I’ve never been ashamed to say, nor do I shy away from that fact that I am black. I’ve grown up black, black is the only existence I’ve ever known. But it’s strange when you live in a world where people go ‘OK but biracial—then which piece of this, which piece of that?’” —Trevor Noah

Amber Payne, “Trevor Noah Brings ‘A Different Perspective’ as Daily Show Host”, NBC News, September 23, 2015. (00:00:19-00:00:35). http://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/trevor-noah-talks-diversity-new-daily-show-n432236.

The few old schoolmates who ran into him had to pretend they’d never met. He was often seen around town with one of his best friends. the Indian-born actor Sabu, an alliance that brings to mind the “arranged” Hollywood marriage of a closeted gay actor.

Black novelist Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars, about a man who passes for white, has a sentence that could apply to Korla: “Our customs grip us in bands of steel.  We become the creatures of our creations.”

From slavery right down to this morning, countless African Americans have passed as white because they were evading the lynch mob or wishing for an equal opportunity. The subject has been taboo: Crossing over means denying who you are, means banishing friends and family from your life. You live in a gray zone, and it is the loneliest of places.

Passing for Asian was a little different, because you did not blend into white society. The practice went on long before Korla Pandit first appeared. In the late 1930s, Harlem’s Amsterdam News reported that a Syracuse University football star named Wilmeth Sidat-Singh was, as a columnist put it, “about as much Hindu as flatfoot floogie.” In 1947, around the time that Juan Rolondo was turning into Korla Pandit, the Los Angeles Tribune, a lively black newspaper, heralded a stunt pulled by a brown-skinned New York minister. He prepared for a visit through the Deep South by donning a purple turban, affecting “a slightly Swedish accent,” and concocting a tale about being a visiting Eastern dignitary. He was doted on and able to eat at white-only restaurants. In Mobile, Alabama, he impishly asked a waiter what would happen if a Negro came to eat. The Negro wouldn’t be served, he was told. “I just stroked my chin and ordered my dessert.” said the pastor.

When John Redd crossed over, he didn’t sever all ties with the world he had known. “It was not top secret,” says Ernest. “Among the family we knew what he was doing and very little was said about it. There was times when he would come by, and it was kind of like a sneak visit. He might come at night sometime and be gone before we got up. He had to separate himself from the family to a certain extent. They would go to see him play, but they wouldnt speak to him. They would go to his show and then they would leave, and the family would greet him at a later time.”

The situation became even more complicated once Korla’s Father, Ernest Sr., moved to Los Angeles, by the early ’50s. Reverend Redd became the pastor of Trinity Baptist Church, a prominent institution in the community. Any night he wanted to, Reverend Redd could come home from the church, switch on the television, and watch his son play the organ, with that strange look in his eyes and that turban on his head. Korla kept in touch with his family, and on occasion he and Beryl scheduled a covert mission to the parents’ West Adams home. But even then, detection could not be discounted. Even then, Korla wore the turban. He didn’t bring Shari or Koram, his and Beryl’s sons.

RJ Smith, “The Many Faces of Korla Pandit,” Los Angeles Magazine, June 2001, 148-149. https://books.google.com/books?id=aF8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA73#v=onepage&q&f=false.

To consider the life of Korla Pandit—and that’s what I will call him because that is who he became—is to consider the weight of wearing a mask for 50 years. It is to grasp the fear of exposure, of a revelation that would have killed his career. One slip and he would have gone from being a mirror of white America’s mania for things “exotic” to somebody white America didn’t want to face. He would have been revealed as a fraud, and his fans would have never forgiven him. It is to recognize how he had to cut himself off from a black community that he’d grown up in, from a culture that had shaped the musical skills, and the survival skills, that he drew on for the rest of his life.

RJ Smith, “The Many Faces of Korla Pandit,” Los Angeles Magazine, June 2001, 76. https://books.google.com/books?id=aF8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA73#v=onepage&q&f=false.

Unlike the continental United States, Hawaii has no group that is the racial majority, and people can identify with multiple races and ethnicities over several generations. This is the norm, rather than an anomaly.

Early social scientists, the tourist industry, and visitors credit this long history of mixing to the “aloha spirit,” or culture of tolerance and inclusivity, that is the hallmark of living in Hawaii. True, Hawaii is a place where a mixed-race person like myself can blend in, and where people of color are not seen as a curiosity. And yes, people generally get along here.

But even the aloha spirit has its limits. We must be mindful that the present multicultural society grew from the collapse of the Native Hawaiian population and the dispossession of their land.

Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr., “Is Hawaii a Racial Paradise?,” Zócalo Public Square, September 15, 2015. http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2015/09/15/is-hawaii-a-racial-paradise/ideas/up-for-discussion/.

The most unique disadvantage of formal identities, relative to ascriptive and elective ones, is that they are confounded by dynamic identities: identities that change over time or depend on context. Formalities leave documentary traces that “inhibit forgetting.” The idea that a past formality might estop an individual from claiming a different identity is based on an understanding of identity as impervious to change or reformulation depending on context. But people do not always experience identity in this static and acontextual way. Researchers have found that many multiracial individuals change their racial identifications in different situations and over their lifetimes. For example, consider a multiracial woman who is only willing to identify as such if she believes her employer’s diversity program is genuine as opposed to tokenizing. The effects can be passed down through the generations, as one whose ancestors did not sign the Dawes Rolls may not have a claim to tribal membership. Or a person whose parents brought her to the United States without pursuing immigration formalities may find herself estopped from claiming U.S. citizenship. This estoppel problem is a growing risk as technology facilitates better collection and retention of records.

Jessica A. Clarke, “Identity and Form,” California Law Review, Volume 103, Number 4 (August 2015), 882. http://www.californialawreview.org/1identity_form/.

We have not moved beyond race.

St. Louis does not have a proud history on this topic, and we are still suffering the consequences of decisions made by our predecessors.

However, it’s important to understand that racial inequity in our region is not the same as individual racism. We are not pointing fingers and calling individual people racist. We are not even suggesting that institutions or existing systems intend to be racist.

What we are pointing out is that the data suggests, time and again, that our institutions and existing systems are not equal, and that this has racial repercussions. Black people in the region feel those repercussions when it comes to law enforcement, the justice system, housing, health, education, and income.

Rev. Starsky Wilson, Rich McClure, et. al., “Forward Through Ferguson: A Path Toward Racial Equity,” The Ferguson Commission, September 14, 2015. 7. http://forwardthroughferguson.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/FergusonCommissionReport_091415.pdf.

More than that, The Sneetches taps into one of the fears that segregationists held, and which was represented as an ever-present danger in the Northern as well as the Southern states: the fear of “passing.” In a country where “one drop of African blood” made a person black and not white, worries about being able to place people in the racial hierarchy if they could “pass” for white emerged through various forms of cultural production. Mark Twain, Charles Chestnutt, and Nella Larsen all wrote novels about African-Americans passing for white. The 1930s musical “Showboat,” twice made into a film (in the 1930s and the 1950s), has a tragic plot involving passing. Another film, based on a Fannie Hurst novel, was made twice by Hollywood (again in the 1930s and the 1950s). “Imitation of Life,” in its second incarnation became the fourth-most successful movie of 1959—just two years before The Sneetches was published.

Karen Sands-O’Connor, “Dr. Seuss and Racial Passing,” theracetoread: Children’s Literature and Issues of Race, February 11, 2015. https://theracetoread.wordpress.com/2015/02/11/dr-seuss-and-racial-passing.

In this book we set the “post-racial” claims into relief against a background of pre- and post-election racial animus directed at Barack Obama, his administration, and African Americans in general. In specific, we examine how racial fears, coded language, and explicit as well as implicit (automatic/subconscious) racism are drawn upon and manipulated by the political Right. Racial meanings are reservoirs rich in political currency, and the Right’s replaying of the “race card” still serves as a potent resource for “othering” the first black president in a context rife with nativism, xenophobia, racial fatigue, and white backlash.

Matthew W. Hughey and Gregory S. Parks, The Wrongs of the Right: Language, Race, and the Republican Party in the Age of Obama. (New York: New York University Press, 2015) 2.

“Race” is man-made, and much of the scientific enterprise has traditionally supported the myth that racial differences accurately represent real, biological differences among humans. These beliefs limit how scientists, policymakers, and everyday citizens can work together to tackle the real racial inequality of today. By increasing the dialogue of how we can tackle racial inequality regardless of whether we work in a laboratory or not, we can continue to deconstruct the myth that race is found in our genes, and begin to search in earnest for the legal, policy, economic, political, and social forces that make the effects of race all too real.

Matthew W. Hughey, “The Risks of Turning Races Into Genes,” The Huffington Post, August 20, 2015. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matthew-w-hughey/the-risks-of-turning-race_b_8010956.html.

Outside of my mother’s home, as a kid I lived a deeply black experience. Black families invited me to attend vacation Bible school. I attended black family reunions where old people would come up and pinch my cheeks and tell me who I looked like in their family. I went to black skate parties, black block parties/festivals, and did so not as a white intruder, but as a Karl Kani wearing, widely welcomed, light-skinned black kid. I soaked up every moment I had as I was fully, unabashedly loved, even doted upon, by black families throughout central Kentucky. It was a refuge for me and also a rite of passage of sorts. In high school I joined exclusively black achievers groups. With scholars I love and respect to this day at the University of Kentucky, I attended and helped plan King Day events, and just lived my life.

Shaun King, “Race, love, hate, and me: A distinctly American story,” Daily Kos, August 20, 2015. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/08/20/1413881/-Race-love-hate-and-me-A-distinctly-American-story.