Mixed Race Studies

Suburban Gothic, or Being a White Passing Person of Color in a Rich, White Town

Affinity Magazine
2017-02-16

Karina Belotserkovskiy

Sooner or later, the phrase is uttered to you. It can be (it almost always is) a discussion in class. Something involving race relations in society or an overused metaphor for racism in the novel you’re reading. Someone says a very iffy comment – either borderline or blatantly racist and you get angry. Everyone else starts looking at each other, “What the hell is this white kid getting so worked up about?” (You will never see a white person as near passionate about casual racism as a person of color.) You look back at them and say “Well, I’m actually half… [South Asian in my case, but fill in the blank]. Then it comes.

“Wait? You’re not white?” Followed by eye rolls, side comments, and scoffs. Such is the negative side of a white passing experience…

…White passing people face a strange double whammy, best described in a quote from Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, Passing.

“The trouble with Clare was, not only that she wanted to have her cake and eat it too, but that she wanted to nibble at the cakes of other folks at well.”…

Read the entire article here.

Rachel Dolezal: Can you be black without actually being biologically black?

The Los Angeles Times
2017-03-08

Patt Morrison

LA Times columnist Patt Morrison sits down with Rachel Dolezal to discuss race and identity.

In June 2015, a few days before Donald Trump declared that he was running for president, the news cycle was dominated by a different person: Rachel Dolezal. She was the head of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP, an artist, a teacher of black-themed subjects – and, as it turned out, the daughter of white parents. She said she identified as black, and was living the life she felt was authentically her own. Her critics, and there were many, believed she had been living a lie, letting people assume she was black, when years before she had filed a lawsuit as a Howard University graduate student, alleging that the university had discriminated against her because she was a white woman.

Long divorced from her African American husband, Dolezal is bringing up three black sons, the youngest a year old. And she is still living as she was when she decided to “be black without any explanations, reservations, apologies or room for negotiation.” Her new autobiography, “In Full Color,” strikes the same tone: the wrongs in her story belong to a race-obsessed society that doesn’t permit people like her to be who they really feel themselves to be…

Listen to the interview here.

WPGM Commentary: I’m Mixed Race, Can I Speak On Black Issues?

We Plug Good Music
2017-02-24

Sophia Thakur

Photo Credit: Nikki Marie

My best friend turned to me, over seven years into our friendship and said “omg, you’re actually half black”. You would think that after seven years of putting up with my face, she would have realised this sooner. I wasn’t surprised however.

With both of my parents spending their early years adventuring the plains of West Africa (Gambia and Sierra Leone), my whole life has been a testament to Gambian culture. From the weekly family parties growing up, to the food and music that have become my most dominant discourse over the years and to anyone who blindly spends time with me; I am an entirely Gambian child. A small country, Kora loving, Benachin eating lady of the west. This is how I saw myself.

This overwhelming, unspoken of, sense of belonging had always felt like one of the biggest contributors to my creative work from the ages of 16-19. I’d spend months at a time writing and performing across the country at black history month events, black lives matter events and even the occasional pan-African event.

Throughout this part of my youth, I had never stopped to smell the roses. The roses, in this case, being an obvious reality to the untrained eye. I am not actually 100% Gambian, or black for that matter.

In a Love Jones type bar, during the winter of 2014, I found myself sharing a stage with a painter who’s role was to illustrate my words, live. Not only was this a cool spin on conventional poetry readings, but I was ecstatic about performing my new poem ‘Kermit’.

This excitement quickly turned into anxiety following my set…

Read the entire article here.

Black German: An Afro-German Life in the Twentieth Century

Liverpool University Press
2017-03-01
216 Pages
210 x 147 mm
29 B&W illustrations
Paperback ISBN: 9781781383117

Theodor Michael

Translated by:

Eve Rosenhaft, Professor of German Historical Studies
University of Liverpool

This is the first English translation of an important document in the history of the black presence in Germany and Europe: the autobiography of Theodor Michael. Theodor Michael is the last surviving member of the first generation of ‘Afro-Germans’: Born in Germany in 1925 to a Cameroonian father and a German mother, he grew up in Berlin in the last days of the Weimar Republic. As a child and teenager he worked in circuses and films and experienced the tightening knot of racial discrimination under the Nazis in the years before the Second World War. He survived the war as a forced labourer, founding a family and making a career as a journalist and actor in post-war West Germany. Since the 1980s he has become an important spokesman for the black German consciousness movement, acting as a human link between the first black German community of the inter-war period, the pan-Africanism of the 1950s and 1960s, and new generations of Germans of African descent.

Theodor Michael’s life story is a classic account of coming to consciousness of a man who understands himself as both black and German; accordingly, it illuminates key aspects of modern German social history as well as of the post-war history of the African diaspora. The text has been translated by Eve Rosenhaft, Professor of German Historical Studies at the University of Liverpool and an internationally acknowledged expert in black German studies. It is accompanied by a translator’s preface, explanatory notes, a chronology of historical events and a guide to further reading, so that the book will be accessible and useful both for general readers and for undergraduate students.

ARMOR: Biracial in the Deep South – a documentary about biracial life in the American South with filmmaker Sarah Gambles, Ep. 107

Multiracial Family Man
2017-03-05

Alex Barnett, Host

Ep. 107: Sarah Gambles is a Hawaiian-born, Biracial (Black-White), filmmaker with family ties in her current home state of Alabama.  After years of teaching, Sarah returned to her creative roots, launching her own production company, SarahFinah Films.  Under the umbrella of that production company, she has now created a new film ARMOR: Biracial in the Deep South – a look at the Biracial population in America’s South, the fastest growing, yet most underrepresented demographic in that region.

Listen as Sarah speaks with Alex about her own life and experience.  Her journey from creative pursuits into teaching and back to filmmaking.  And, her hopes and expectations about the role her film can play in educating people about the Multiracial experience.  Don’t miss it!

Listen to the episode here. Download the episode here.

Dispatch from the Floor of the Model Minority Factory

The Offing
2015-09-08

Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis, Founder
The Asian American Literary Review

for Mimi

Hard work is a glue, and he worked longer hours than anybody I’d ever known, from doors opening to doors closing, 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. every summer day the Center was open, six and sometimes seven days a week, year after year after year. I liked him immediately. I used to call him the best boss I’d ever had. He was, for a long time. Frequently I’d close with him, and we’d sit around on top of those little kid-sized desks like two off-duty cops, exhausted and a little punchy, drinking cheap canned coffees he’d brought back from Taiwan for the staff. For reasons I wouldn’t figure out until much later, I saw in him someone I needed badly to be a good boss, a good person, someone I could be friends with, someone who could see a friend in me. I guess he saw a friend in me because I was always there, because he prized hard work over all else, because he prized my PhD-in-progress, and maybe too because he was lonely, even with his wife working beside him all those long hours. The immigrant work ethic fundamentally renders you lonely, even in the midst of fellow immigrants.

The work was private education, primarily prep classes for the Scholastic Aptitude Test, commonly known as the SAT, still the standard ticket for high school students of every race and region and class to gain access to American college education. The business was called Straight A Learning Center — owned and operated by Danny and his wife Ellen, who’d emigrated together from Taiwan in the early ‘90s. Straight A first opened its doors in 1998; I joined the Center in 2007, teaching a few classes that first summer, going full-time the next few summers, eventually going part-time bordering on full-time year-round.

Straight A came to offer a real future for me, money, security, and possibility of growth, as well as the opportunity to help young people from Asian American communities throughout Maryland’s Montgomery County and nearby northern Virginia. The Center promised a new kind of educational culture, and perhaps most importantly to me, because I’m Asian American myself, a way to support and give back to my communities.

But it all went wrong…

Read the entire article here.

Angela Rye: I always knew I was black

Cable News Network (CNN)
2017-02-24

Angela T. Rye

Angela Rye is a CNN political commentator, NPR political analyst and CEO of IMPACT Strategies, a political advocacy firm in Washington. She is also a former Congressional Black Caucus executive director and general counsel. You can follow her on Twitter @angela_rye and on Instagram @angelarye. This is part of the “First time I realized I was black” series. The views expressed are her own.

(CNN)I never had a moment of realization about my blackness — I just was. Blackness was a central thread of my experience as a child and as an adolescent, as it is now that I’m an adult.

It seemed like my father knew everybody in Seattle, where I was raised. When he and I would walk down the street I remember people would regularly ask him how he was doing. He would respond without missing a beat: “You know, just out here fighting this racism, man.”

My mother worked really hard to ensure that I had black dolls (of all hues), black books by black authors, and my personal favorite: a poster from the 1975 Anheuser-Busch Great Kings and Queens of Africa collection (of course, she removed the beer logo). She would regularly have me name family members and friends who looked like each of the queens and kings on the poster…

…Indeed, with every instance of systemic oppression, black people have demonstrated an uncanny ability to succeed and excel — from Black Wall Street (a name given to a economically thriving black neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, during the early 1900s, which helped the black dollar circulate 36 to 100 times before leaving the community) to working diligently to elect the first black president. …

Read the entire article here.

Race Beyond Appearance

The Daily Iowan
2017-02-27

Isaac Hamlet

Since 2000, the U.S. Census has allowed people to identify themselves under numerous ethnicities. When this practice was instituted, 6.8 million Americans identified as being of mixed race; in 2010, the number reached 9 million. That was a 32 percent increase, making it one of the fastest growing racial categories in the U.S.

“I was probably 5 years old,” my dad said. “Probably started going out to the cotton field with my grandmother, she would say, ‘Pick some,’ and I’d just put it in her cotton sack.”

My dad, Larry Hamlet, was born on March 22, 1954, in Itta Bena, Mississippi, and raised by grandparents Annie and LeRoy Hamlet. His parents separated when he was about a year old and shortly after, his mother, Joyce, died in childbirth with what would have been her third son.

He was born “Larry Smith” but took his grandparents’ last name because “the world doesn’t need another Smith family in it.”

In 1960, around the time he was 5, mixed-race marriages accounted for roughly 0.04 percent of marriages, according to the U.S. Census…

Read the entire article here.

Student reflects on mixed-race background

The Times-Delphic
Des Moines, Iowa
2017-02-22

Jessica Spangler, Opinions Editor

As someone who comes from a blend of different cultures, it can sometimes seem like there isn’t really anywhere I belong. There are no neat boxes that I fit into.

I love that I am able to have a unique perspective and have the opportunity to grow up knowing different cultures. I’m proud of who I am and where my family is from. I am Cuban, Mexican and white and I will always consider myself lucky that I am able to have the experiences I do.

But there is also a lot of frustration that comes along with being mixed race.

People have dismissed my Latina side completely (“Please, you’re just white.”) and people have called me racial slurs or have said racist jokes to me (“Want to mow my lawn?”)…

Read the entire article here.

In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World

BenBella Books
2017-03-28
256 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1944648169

Rachel Doležal (with Storms Reback)

A lot of people think they know what Rachel Doležal is.

Race faker. Liar. Opportunist. Crazy bitch.

But they don’t get to decide who Rachel Doležal is.

What determines your race? Is it your DNA? The community in which you were raised? The way others see you, or the way you see yourself?

On June 11, 2015, the media “outed” Rachel Doležal as a white woman who had knowingly been “passing” as black. When asked if she were African American during an interview about the hate crimes directed at her and her family, she hesitated before ending the interview and walking away. Some interpreted her reluctance to respond and hasty departure as dishonesty, while others assumed she lacked a reasonable explanation for the almost unprecedented way she identified herself.

With In Full Color, Rachael Doležal describes the path that led her from being a child of white evangelical parents to an NAACP chapter president and respected educator and activist who identified as black. Along the way, she’ll discuss the deep emotional bond she formed with her four adopted black siblings, the sense of belonging she felt while living in black communities in Jackson, Mississippi and Washington, D.C., and the discrimination she’s suffered while living as a black woman.

Her story is nuanced and complex, and in the process of telling it, she forces us to consider race in an entirely new light—not as a biological imperative, but as a function of the experiences we have, the culture we embrace, and, ultimately, the identity we choose.