Mixed Race Studies

WorldLink: Racial identities and the politics of color

Deutsche Welle (DW)
2015-06-19

Bliss Broyard responds to the recent controversy surrounding Rachel Dolezal’s “passing” as black, and describes how racial identities have shaped her own life and career.

Download the interview (00:07:55) 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.

One woman’s quest to uncover her heritage

The Today Show
2007-11-12

Bliss Broyard writes about her journey to discover her hidden black roots

Bliss Broyard grew up a “Wasp” in Connecticut with her mother, father and brother. For 23 years she was white, but it wasn’t until her father was on his deathbed that she found out he was “part-black.” After her father died, Broyard began a quest to learn more about her hidden heritage and adopt it in her life. She wrote about it in “One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life.” Here’s an excerpt:..

Read the excerpt here.

The White Girl

Grosset & Dunlap
1929
305 pages

Vera Caspary

An African-American woman who moves north to Chicago where she passes as white.

Read the entire book here.

“These narratives of racial passing have risen from the dead”

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
May 2015
275 pages
DOI: 10.7282/T38G8NJG

Donavan L. Ramon

Ph.D. Dissertation

Instead of concurring with most critics that racial passing literature reached its apex during the Harlem Renaissance, this project highlights its persistence, as evidenced in the texts examined from 1900 to 2014. Using psychoanalysis, this dissertation recovers non-canonical and white-authored narratives that critics overlook, thus reconceptualizing the genre of passing literature to forge a new genealogy for this tradition. This new genealogy includes novels, life writings, and short stories. In arguing for the genre’s continued relevance and production, this project offers a rejoinder to critics who contend that racial passing literature is obsolete. Part one of this dissertation complicates the notion that characters pass only in response to witnessing a lynching or to improve their socioeconomic status, by asserting that racial passing begins in the classroom for male characters and at home for their female counterparts. It thus precedes the threat of violence or middle class aspirations. Whereas the first half of this project is preoccupied with the gendered beginnings of racial passing, the second half examines its effects, on both writing and death. This project explores racial passing in Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars (1900), James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun (1929), Vera Caspary’s The White Girl (1929), Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s The Stones of the Village (1988), Danzy Senna’s Caucasia (1999), Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000), Bliss Broyard’s One Drop (2003) and Anita Reynolds’ American Cocktail (2014).

Why Right-Wing Bloggers Are Desperate To Prove Biracial People Aren’t Black

Think Progress
2015-08-21

Aviva Shen, Senior Editor

Shaun King, right, addresses the controversy over his racial identity.

Right-wing media has been abuzz over the past few weeks with rumors that Black Lives Matter activist and writer Shaun King is not actually black. Breitbart and other more mainstream outlets like the Daily Beast compared King to Rachel Dolezal, the Spokane NAACP leader whose parents revealed she was white earlier this year. The harassment escalated so much that King finally published an emotional personal account Thursday evening, explaining that his biological father is an unknown black man who had an affair with his mother.

Some of the same bloggers have apparently also “investigated” the parentage of Wesley Lowery, a biracial Washington Post reporter who covers the Black Lives Matter movement.

The harassment of King recalls a long American tradition of telling multiracial people what their identities can and cannot contain. The notorious “one drop rule” — which legally declared anyone with black ancestry, no matter how light-skinned or blue-eyed they were, as mulatto or colored — was central to maintaining a white supremacist hierarchy in the South well into the 20th century. Many people who could get away with it “passed” as white so as to enjoy the privileges of segregated services closed off to black people…

Read the entire article here.

In Questions Over Shaun King’s Race, Activists See Challenge to Black Lives Matter Movement

The New York Times
2015-08-21

Katie Rogers, Senior Staff Editor

A prominent Black Lives Matter activist who has been accused of lying about his race was forced to discuss deeply personal issues after reporters pointed out that the father named on his birth certificate is white.

The controversy surrounding the activist, Shaun King, has become a proxy for a wider culture war over race and policing.

Supporters of Mr. King say that conservative bloggers who first questioned his race are using it to undermine the Black Lives Matter movement.

His critics compare him to Rachel Dolezal, a civil rights activist who was discredited after her parents said she was lying about being black.

Mr. King declined on Wednesday to discuss the accusations against him with The New York Times, referring a reporter to his response on social media.

But after conservative bloggers and journalists at The Daily Beast reported that a white man was listed on his birth certificate, Mr. King wrote an extraordinary blog post admitting that he doesn’t know who his father is.

“Until this past week, never has anyone asked me who my father was during these 35 years of mine,” he wrote on the website Daily Kos. “It occurs to me now that I’ve never asked anyone that question either.”

Mr. King, who has long identified as black, said that he had been told for most of his life that his father was a light-skinned black man…

Read the entire article here.

Race, love, hate, and me: A distinctly American story

Daily Kos
2015-08-20

Shaun King

[Shaun King] 14 years old. Sophomore in high school

Over the past 72 hours I have been attacked with lies by the conservative media, lies that have been picked up by the traditional media and spread further. I have kept silent at the advice of friends and mentors, but I will do so no longer.

The reports about my race, about my past, and about the pain I’ve endured are all lies. My mother is a senior citizen. I refuse to speak in detail about the nature of my mother’s past, or her sexual partners, and I am gravely embarrassed to even be saying this now, but I have been told for most of my life that the white man on my birth certificate is not my biological father and that my actual biological father is a light-skinned black man. My mother and I have discussed her affair. She was a young woman in a bad relationship and I have no judgment. This has been my lived reality for nearly 30 of my 35 years on earth. I am not ashamed of it, or of who I am—never that—but I was advised by my pastor nearly 20 years ago that this was not a mess of my doing and it was not my responsibility to fix it. All of my siblings and I have different parents. I’m actually not even sure how many siblings I have. It is horrifying to me that my most personal information, for the most nefarious reasons, has been forced out into the open and that my private past and pain have been used as jokes and fodder to discredit me and the greater movement for justice in America. I resent that lies have been reported as truth and that the obviously racist intentions of these attacks have been consistently downplayed at my expense and that of my family…

Read the entire article here.

Lacey Schwartz didn’t know she was black, but her black friends did

Fusion
2015-08-19

Collier Meyerson

With two white parents and no black family members (save for a dark Sicilian uncle a couple generations removed), Lacey Schwartz was raised thinking she was white. Growing up, Schwartz’s community was predominantly white: her friends, her classes, her summer camp.

But the few black people in Schwartz’s life struck a nerve—and poked holes in the story she told herself and in the story her family told her.

I worked on Schwartz’s documentary Little White Lie, which details her journey from white to black, of being the product of a family secret overloaded with an extramarital affair, love, and betrayal.

During that time, it wasn’t the salacious stuff I was interested in. I wanted to know about how Schwartz came into blackness and who ushered her in. When you don’t grow up with a black parent or in a black community, or even consciously knowing you are black, how do you become black?

I came to learn that the black people in her life made lasting impressions on her—from near and far—even before she had the language or knowledge of her blackness. They pushed her, listened to her, taught and accepted her.

It was black people who always knew Lacey Schwartz was black. No one had the wool over their eyes. So I asked her about it…

Read the entire interview here.

The Shaun King controversy, explained

Vox
2015-08-20

German Lopez, Staff writer

Shaun King (Source: Twitter)

Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King is currently at the center of a controversy that has nothing to do with a police shooting or brutality — it’s, instead, about his personal life and racial identity.

Over the past several weeks, conservative media outlets have published multiple pieces disputing different claims King has made about his life over the years. And the latest accusations — which caused the story to trend on Twitter — have called into question whether King is biracial, as he claims.

There’s a bit of history to this conflict. But the fact that a self-identified biracial man is being chastised by conservative media outlets as part of an attempt to discredit him shows just how fluid the entire concept of race can be, and that makes it difficult to know who’s right and wrong when questions about race come up…

Read the entire article here.