Mixed Race Studies

Blended Families

Mixed Roots Stories
2015-09-02

Tru Leverette, Associate Professor of English
University of North Florida, Jacksonville, Florida

What does it mean to call a family blended? The term still refers to families formed after divorce and remarriage—step-parents and step-children and step-siblings pieced together in new patterns. The term can also encompass families that are interracial; in these families, blending takes on additional permutations that certainly have puzzled some throughout history.

Like other interracial families, those that are also blended through remarriage contend with external assumptions and judgments—the confused looks and questioning glances, the “ah-ha” moments or oblivious denial. When I was married to my daughter’s father—who, like me, has both a black and a white parent—I slipped into the ease of relative inconspicuousness for the first time in my life…

Read the entire article here.

Privilege And Pressure: A Memoir Of Growing Up Black And Elite In ‘Negroland’

Code Switch: Fronties of Race, Culture and Ethnicity
National Public Radio
2015-09-08

Terry Gross, Host
Fresh Air

Growing up in the 1950s, Margo Jefferson was part of Chicago’s black upper class. The daughter of a prominent doctor and his socialite wife, Jefferson inhabited a world of ambition, education and sophistication — a place she calls “Negroland.”

That afforded her many opportunities, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural critic says. But life was also undercut by the fear that her errors and failures would reflect poorly on her family and, subsequently, her race.

“It was very important that you show yourself a bright, lively, well-spoken person,” Jefferson tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. “If you go back and read editorials in black magazines — even in white magazines — watch television, this attitude is everywhere: ‘Jackie Robinson, he’s advancing the race!’ ‘Marion Anderson, she’s advancing the race!’ This was the way America … [viewed] blacks: The individual was a collective symbol.”

In her memoir, Negroland, Jefferson describes the social pressures of her upbringing, as well as the sense of separation that it engendered. She writes that she and other members of the black elite thought of themselves as a “Third Race, poised between the masses of Negroes and all classes of Caucasians.”

Ultimately, it was the Black Power movement that led Jefferson to question some of the tenets that she had grown up with: “Black Power was really a major challenge to the social privileges and structures of the kind of privilege that I had grown up with,” she says. “That whole belief … that you will only be able to advance if you are perfectly behaved, if you present yourself as what white people would consider an ideal of whiteness … all of that just began to burst open.”…

Listen to the story (00:34:47) here. Download the story here. Read the transcript here.

‘Negroland’ by Margo Jefferson

The Boston Globe
2015-09-05

Donna Bailey Nurse

While a student at University High in Chicago in the early 1960s, Margo Jefferson was introduced to the essays of James Baldwin. The future New York Times drama critic and Pulitzer Prize winner was struck by passages in “Notes of a Native Son’’:

“‘One must say that the Negro in America does not really exist except in the darkness of our minds.’

‘One’: a pronoun even more adroitly insidious than ‘we.’ An ‘I’ made ubiquitous. ‘Our’: say it slowly, voluptuously. Baldwin has coupled and merged us in syntactical miscegenation.’’

Jefferson devotes the first chapters of her memoir to explaining the secret of that group’s success, which has a lot to do with the privileges their light skin bestowed. Like Betsey Keating, for example, who was freed by her master before giving birth to his five children. He died leaving money to educate his black sons, setting them up for the future.

She also tells of a biracial slave named Frances Jackson Coppin whose aunt purchased her freedom. Eventually Frances was able to work, save money, and attend Oberlin College. These mostly mixed-race blacks became teachers, writers, artisans, and abolitionists. They were careful to intermarry, establishing a color line between themselves and darker members of the race.

Jefferson herself is a descendant of slaves and slave masters from Kentucky, Virginia, and Mississippi, individuals who clawed their way into the elite milieu she calls Negroland…

Read the entire book review here.

The top 13 Jewish newsmakers of 5775

JTA: Jewish Telegraphic Agency
2015-08-26

Julie Wiener

(JTA) — With the Jewish year winding down, here’s a look back at 13 Jews who repeatedly made the news in 5775. Whether you love them or hate them — or your feelings are purely pareve — it’s hard to deny they had an impact…

…Lacey Schwartz, 38, grew up believing she was a white Ashkenazi Jew, only to discover that her biological father was an African-American man with whom her mother had an affair. In “Little White Lie,” a documentary that screened in major U.S. cities and aired on PBS in March, Schwartz explored her shifting racial identity and what it means to be black — and Jewish — in America. Designated a New York Times Critics’ Pick, the film received favorable reviews overall. Plus, in a year in which high-profile police brutality cases involving black youth and a massacre at a black church have captured the public’s attention, “Little White Lie” has contributed to the larger discussion about race in America…

Read the entire article here.

Negroland: A Memoir

Pantheon
2015-09-08
256 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0307378453
eBook ISBN:

Margo Jefferson

At once incendiary and icy, mischievous and provocative, celebratory and elegiac—here is a deeply felt meditation on race, sex, and American culture through the prism of the author’s rarefied upbringing and education among a black elite concerned with distancing itself from whites and the black generality while tirelessly measuring itself against both.

Born in upper-crust black Chicago—her father was for years head of pediatrics at Provident, at the time the nation’s oldest black hospital; her mother was a socialite—Margo Jefferson has spent most of her life among (call them what you will) the colored aristocracy, the colored elite, the blue-vein society. Since the nineteenth century they have stood apart, these inhabitants of Negroland, “a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty.”

Reckoning with the strictures and demands of Negroland at crucial historical moments—the civil rights movement, the dawn of feminism, the fallacy of postracial America—Jefferson brilliantly charts the twists and turns of a life informed by psychological and moral contradictions. Aware as it is of heart-wrenching despair and depression, this book is a triumphant paean to the grace of perseverance.

(With 8 pages of black-and-white photographs.)

What Are You? A Personal Poetry Reading

Slide Share
2013-10-18

Gerry Yokota, Professor
Osaka University, Osaka, Japan

My reading of the 1971 poem by Nobuko JoAnne Miyamoto

when I was young
kids used to ask me
what are you?
I’d tell them
what my mom told me
I’m an American
Chin Chin Chinaman
you’re a Jap!
flashing hot inside
I’d go home
my mom would say
don’t worry
he who walks alone
walks faster…

Read the entire poem here.

Does ‘Half Chinese, Half Jewish’ Condemn Me To Being Neither?

Forward
2015-08-21

Rachel E. Gross

When I was four years old, my father introduced me to his colleague, Jing. “Are you Chinese?” I asked, eyeing her shrewdly. “Yes,” she replied. “So am I,” I said. “And shoe-ish, too!”

My father likes to tell this story, I think, because it illustrates my self-assurance: Even at that young age, I knew exactly who I was.

What I didn’t anticipate was that others might have opinions, too. That hit home recently when I wrote a NPR column on being “half-Chinese, half-Jewish.” Suddenly, people on the Internet were dictating my identity to me. “The author is not half Jewish,” one wrote in the comments, citing Orthodox halacha that deems you Jewish only if your mother is. “She is not Jewish at all.” How did he know which of my parents was Jewish? “I Googled her,” he wrote…

Read the entire article here.

My baby will be mixed race. So why did I automatically think of him as ‘black’?

The Guardian
2014-10-14

Victoria Bond

I picked a black baby to represent my unborn child on a cake because of my own adherence to the ‘one-drop rule’

My 87-year-old grandmother has a very specific way of saying the word black: she drags out the a and makes the k extra hard for an effect that drowns the c. “Blaaaak” out of my grandmother’s mouth is an admonishment, not a color. “Blaaaak” out of my grandmother’s mouth travels a step beyond being a pejorative to having the hair-raising resonance of a word that damns as well as describes damnation itself.

“Blaaaak” out of my grandmother’s mouth is a curse…

Read the entire article here.

From Okinawa to Hawaii and Back Again

What It Means to Be American: Hosted by The Smithsonian and Zócalo Public Square
2015-08-31

Laua Kina, Vincent de Paul Professor of Art, Media, & Design
DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois

Kibei Nisei, 30 x 45 inches Oil on canvas (2012)

A Painter Follows the Currents of Her Family History

I am a hapa, yonsei Uchinanchu (a mixed-race, 4th-generation Okinawan-American) who was born in Riverside, California, in 1973 and raised in the shadow of the Cascade Mountains in Washington state. My mom’s roots stem from Spanish-Basque migrants in California and white southerners in Tennessee. My father is Okinawan from Hawaii. Because I don’t look quite white, people frequently ask, “What are you?” From an early age, even though Hawaii and Japan were enigmas to me, I have had to explain my relationship to these “exotic” places.

Growing up, we lived by my mother’s family and visited her parents weekly at their road-side motel near a Puget Sound ferry landing, but I knew little about my father’s childhood, an ocean away, on a Piihonua sugarcane plantation near Hilo. I got a glimpse on occasional vacations to visit family on the Big Island of Hawaii or my aunties in Los Angeles. The only other traces were evident in the Spam in our sushi, the fact that we called instant ramen noodles saimin, and in the echoes of Pidgin English in Dad’s accent that refused to be erased.

I am a painter, and at the heart of my paintings is the journey I’ve been on to understand how these different currents have formed my American experience. I’ve followed their flow back in time to the canefields of Territorial Hawaii and early 20th-century Okinawa, Japan…

Read the entire article here.

That’s What She Said: Red-face

Eagle Feather News
Saskatchewan, Canada
2015-08-02

Dawn Dumont

Rachel Dolezal is a white woman who decided one day that she was African-American. This crazy white lady braided in some fake hair, darkened her skin with tanning sessions and then became the leader of Spokane’s NAACP (the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People).

I had no idea that we could switch races whenever we felt like it. I’ve stupidly been Cree just because I emerged from a Cree v-jay-jay. So, for the rest of the month, I’m choosing to be Tibetan. Since this morning, I’ve already sherpa’d six people up Diefenbaker Hill. (I really should have chosen a less hardy race.)

When I look in the mirror, I see a round-cheeked First Nation female looking back at me, but the world begs to disagree. I’ve been mistaken for Vietnamese, Spanish, Hawaiian, and Mexican-Japanese (which seemed oddly specific.) But I don’t have any identity issues. Probably because I lived on a reserve for the first 18 years of my life where I consumed enough deer meat, bologna steak and KFC family meals to keep me real for a lifetime.

It wasn’t until I got to university that I discovered people struggling with their identity. In my first year, friends would point out First Nations people in the hallways who were passing as white. They would casually say: “That’s Jason, he’s from Kawacatoose but he’s white now,” as if he had just switched banks…

Read the entire article here.