Mixed Race Studies

Rachel Dolezal’s pick-your-race policy works brilliantly – as long as you’re white

The Guardian
2017-03-27

Claire Hynes, ‎Tutor in Literature and Creative Writing
University of East Anglia, Norwich, Norfolk, United Kingdom

‘Great for Dolezal that she got to realise her ambition to be black. But reverse the situation, and European-style hair extensions and a white parent would not facilitate the switch.’ Photograph: Colin Mulvany/AP

Dolezal’s idea that we all ‘write our own stories’ is easy for her to say. In reality, the racial fluidity she preaches is a one-way street

Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who for more than 10 years pretended she was black, promotes herself as transracial in her new memoir, published this week. How seriously are we expected to take this latest incarnation?

Dolezal, who recently changed her name to Nkechi Diallo, a mixture of Nigerian Igbo and Fula, claims that her book, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World, was written partly “to just encourage people to be exactly who they are”. This comes two years after she was found to have deceived the people of Spokane, Washington, where she was a race activist and branch president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People…

Read the entire article here.

Rachel Dolezal struggling after racial-identity scandal in Spokane

The Seattle Times
2017-03-24

Nicholas K. Geranios
The Associated Press

In this March 20, 2017 photo, Rachel Dolezal poses for a photo with her son, Langston in the bureau of the Associated Press in Spokane, Wash. Dolezal, who has legally changed her name to Nkechi Amare Diallo, rose to prominence as a black civil rights leader, but then lost her job when her parents exposed her as being white and is now struggling to make a living. (AP Photo/Nicholas K. Geranios)

“I was presented as a con and a fraud and a liar,” says Rachel Dolezal, who has been unable to find steady work since she was outed as a white woman in media reports. Dolezal had rose to prominence as a black civil-rights leader in Spokane.

SPOKANE — A woman who rose to prominence as a black civil-rights leader then lost her job when her parents exposed her as white is struggling to make a living these days.

Rachel Dolezal said she has been unable to find steady work in the nearly two years since she was outed as a white woman in media reports, and she is uncertain about her future.

“I was presented as a con and a fraud and a liar,” Dolezal, 40, told The Associated Press this week. “I think some of the treatment was pretty cruel.”

She still identifies as black, and looks black, despite being “Caucasian biologically.”

“People didn’t seem able to consider that maybe both were true,” she said. “OK, I was born to white parents, but maybe I had an authentic black identity.”…

…Dolezal has written a book about her ordeal titled “In Full Color.” It’s scheduled to be published next week.

Last year, Dolezal legally changed her name to Nkechi Amare Diallo, a West African moniker that means “gift from the gods.” She made the change in part to give herself a better chance of landing work from employers who might not be interested in hiring Rachel Dolezal, a name she still intends to use as her public persona…

Read the entire article here.

Identity Crisis

Washington Independent Review of Books
2017-03-10

Helene Meyers, Professor of English
Southwestern University, Georgetown, Texas

The “white Jewish” question posed in The Human Stain.

Emma Green of the Atlantic started a firestorm recently with the article “Are Jews White?” Taking for granted that Ashkenazi Jews have assimilated to whiteness, Green used the white Jewish question to wonder whether the rise of the so-called “alt-right” (read racist, misogynist white supremacists) is upending Jewish security in the U.S.

Green’s provocative title question caused quite a bit of tumult on Twitter. Predictably and understandably, Jews of color replied, with much amusement and some angst, “No.” Some white Jews responded, “No,” as well, citing anti-Semitism and/or Jewish distinctiveness. For once, this group agreed with the likes of David Duke, who tweeted in all caps “NO — JEWS ARE NOT WHITE.” Some white Jews and blacks unequivocally replied, “Yes,” citing white privilege as decisive.

While the answers to Green’s question from Jewish-American literature are all over the map, Philip Roth’s The Human Stain brilliantly depicts the continuing effects of “so arbitrary a designation as race” on those who choose or are assigned the off-whiteness of Jewishness…

Read the entire essay here.

Asian Am 251/Af Am 251: The Mixed Race Experience

Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois
Spring 2016

Nitasha Sharma, Associate Professor of African American Studies, Asian American Studies, and Performance Studies; Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence

Growing numbers of interracial marriages and children of mixed racial descent have contributed to the increasing diversity of 21st century America. In this course, we will evaluate the experiences of self-identified multiracials. This class will explore the interracial and inter-ethnic marriage trends in various Asian communities in the U.S. Additionally, we will compare the experiences of multiracials representing a range of backgrounds, including those of Asian/White and Asian/Black ancestry as well as Asian/Black heritage. Some of the specific topics that will be covered in this course include: racial and ethnic community membership and belonging; passing; the dynamics of interracial relationships; identity, authenticity, and choice; and the gender identities of the mixed race individuals.

A Tale Which Must Never Be Told: A New Biography of George Herriman

Los Angeles Review of Books
2017-03-18

Ben Schwartz

George Herriman, a Life in Black and White
By Michael Tisserand

Published 12.06.2016
Harper
560 Pages

ON MARCH 4, 1913, Woodrow Wilson took the oath of office and became our 28th president. While we remember Wilson for his internationalist foreign policy and progressive labor laws, he was also the first Southerner elected since the mid-19th century, and his racial policies reflected it. Wilson saw Jim Crow as the necessary remedy to the aftermath of the Civil War. As president, he normalized his revanchist views from the White House by expanding segregation of federal workers. Not surprisingly, 1913 also saw a rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan. An excerpt from Wilson’s revisionist writings proclaiming the Klan “a veritable empire of the South” even appears in D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, a box-office smash which Wilson personally screened at the White House, the first American film ever shown there.

In that reactionary atmosphere, on October 28, 1913, in the New York Evening Journal, William Randolph Hearst debuted a new comic strip, Krazy Kat, by one of his favorite cartoonists, George Herriman. It starred Krazy, an androgynous cat in love with Ignatz, a brick-throwing, cat-chasing mouse. They lived in Coconino County, Arizona, desert mesa country, and Herriman shifted their backgrounds panel-by-panel — night to day, day to night, mountain to desert to town to river — with no rhyme or reason. They spoke in a patois of slang, Elizabethan English, Yiddish, Spanish, French, and tossed off literary allusions. When asked once about his basic upending of the natural order of cats, mice, dogs, time, and space, Herriman summed up his Weltanschauung: “To me it’s just as sensible as the way it is.”.

Krazy Kat’s whimsy caught on quickly in the Age of Wilson, and its large and devoted fan base ranged from high society to poets to school children to the president himself. What none of them knew then was that George Herriman was black. He passed for white most of his life. And what we can only see now, thanks to an authoritative new biography of Herriman by New Orleans historian Michael Tisserand, is that, as far removed from social commentary as Krazy Kat may appear, race was as much on George Herriman’s mind as the president’s…

Read the entire review here.

Mind the Gap: Mixed-race mindset

The Tufts Daily
Medford, Massachusetts
2017-03-14

MJ Greigo

Most strangers who pass me on the street think I’m white. I don’t blame them for this, as I’m pale as hell. I got some sort of mid-point of my parents’ genes: my obviously brown father and my paper-white mom, his black hair and her light brown, her 5-foot-7-inches and his 6-foot-4-inches. Growing up, I got so tan in the summers, and I brought in Nana Griego’s homemade tortillas for show and tell. My friends joked about how I loved burritos and that I was like a maid. The confusion of childhood takes a lifetime to unpack, and I find myself looking back with terror on things that I couldn’t have understood at the time. Yet without fully knowing about their repercussions, these tiny moments come together to form a huge part of the way everyone sees the world…

Read the entire article here.

Passing Before ‘Passing’: The Ambivalent Identity of the Narrator in Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man

European Scientific Journal
Volume 13, Number 5 (2017)
DOI: 10.19044/esj.2017.v13n5p1

Bassam M. Al-Shraah, Teaching Associate
School of Linguistics and Language Studies
Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man is considered by many as an early seminal censure and commentary on the contested racial issue of African American in the United States of America. This paper argues that the ‘invisible’ protagonist of the Novel has passed for white as early as his childhood years. The narrator relinquishes his black identity for the conveniences and supremacy that the white identity entails. This paper brings to question the credibility of narrative in the novel; also, it proves that the narrator contradicts himself. The invisible narrator appears not to have a firm stance regarding the atrocities suffered by his own people—African Americans. People of color in the United States were caught between two cultures, identities, and lives. The un-named narrator has taken the least troubled road. He announces his passing for white at the end of the novel. This study contends that he has done so long time ago before he literally announces his passing.

Read the entire article here.

Apres Midi Afternoon Classics: March 7, 2017- “Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White”

Apres Midi/Afternoon Classics
KRVS 88.7 FM
Lafayette, Louisiana
2017-03-07

Judith Meriwether, Host

Interview with Michael Tisserand about his book Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White.

Listen to the interview (01:00:00) here.

‘Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White’: A life as unorthodox as his comic strip

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
2017-02-19

Wayne Wise

“Krazy: George Herriman, A Life in Black and White” by Michael Tisserand.

Ignatz Mouse: “Hey, this isn’t black coffee!!!”

Krazy Kat: “Sure it is. Look unda the milk.”

“Krazy Kat,” created by George Herriman, is one of the most influential comic strips of all time. Centered around the iconic love triangle of Krazy, Ignatz Mouse and Offisa Pupp, the feature ran as a syndicated newspaper strip from 1913 to 1944. To a modern audience the strip can be difficult to understand, if not impenetrable. The pacing and sense of humor of 100 years ago feel foreign to current trends. There are references that were common at the time that are lost to us now. The language used is an idiosyncratic patois of nonsense poetry.

The backgrounds, while beautifully rendered, are a constantly changing surreal backdrop. Characters frequently broke the fourth wall, commenting directly on their status as cartoons. The title character, Krazy Kat, was of indeterminate gender, referred to with shifting pronouns, sometimes within the same sentence. As a whole, Krazy Kat was an ongoing challenge to the reader’s perception of definitions and boundaries.

Creator George Herriman was born in New Orleans in 1880. In the latter part of the 19th century his family moved to Los Angeles where his father worked as a tailor and George began his art career, eventually becoming one of the most famous and celebrated cartoonists in history. This is a distinction that would not have been possible if the truth of his life had been known at the time.

In 1971, while researching Mr. Herriman for an entry in the Dictionary of American Biography, professor Arthur Berger discovered a previously unknown fact. On his birth certificate Mr. Herriman was listed as “colored.” It had always been assumed that he was a white man. Mr. Herriman, to use the terminology of the time, “passed for white” his entire life, at a time when his color would have prevented him from many, if not all, of the achievements he is known for…

Read the entire article here.

The Strange Career of William Ellis: Texas Slave to Mexican Millionaire

Columbia News: Office of Communications and Public Affairs
Columbia University, New York, New York
2016-06-28

Karl Jacoby

The odds were certainly against William Henry Ellis, who was born into slavery on a Texas cotton plantation near the Mexico border.

But a combination of sheer moxie, an ability to speak Spanish and an olive skin allowed Ellis to reinvent himself. By the turn of the 20th century, he was Guillermo Enrique Eliseo, a successful Mexican entrepreneur with an office on Wall Street, an apartment on Central Park West and business dealings with companies and corporations halfway around the world.

His unusual life story is told in a new book titled The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire by Karl Jacoby, a professor in the history department and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. Ellis “learned how to be what people wanted him to be, and how to be sure that people would see what they want to see,” Jacoby said…

Read the entire article here.